The Isle of Unrest Part 30

"Of your estates?" inquired Denise.

"No. I never cared for the estate; I do not care for it now."

"Then it is of ... some one?"

Lory did not answer at once.

"I shall have to go back to Corsica," he said at length, "as soon as I can move--in a few days."

Denise glanced at him with angry eyes.

"I was told that story," she said, "but did not believe it."

De Va.s.selot turned and looked at her, but could not see her averted face.

His eyes were suddenly fierce. He was a fighter--of a fighting stock--and he instantly perceived that he was called upon at this moment to fight for the happiness of his whole life. He put out his hand and deliberately took hold of the skirt of her dress. She should not run away at all events. He twisted the soft material round his half-disabled fingers.

"What story?" he asked quietly.

Denise's eyes flashed, and then suddenly grew gentle. She did not quite know whether she was furious or afraid.

"That there was some one in the Chateau de Va.s.selot to whom--whom you loved."

"It is you that I love, mademoiselle," he answered sharply, with a ring in his voice, which came as a surprise to both of them, and which she never forgot all her life. "No. Do not go. You are pulling on my injured arm and I shall not let go."

Denise sat still, silent and at bay.

"Then who was in the chateau?" she asked at last.

"I cannot tell you."

"If it is as you say--about me--and--I ask you not to go to Corsica?"

"I must go."

"Why?" asked Denise, with a dangerous quiet in her voice.

"I cannot tell you."

"Then you expect a great deal."

De Va.s.selot slowly untwined his fingers and drew in his arm.

"True," he said reflectively. "I must ask nothing or too much. I asked more than you can give, mademoiselle."

A faint smile flickered across Denise's eyes. Who was he, to say how much a woman can give? She was free to go now, but did not move.

"With Corsica and--" she paused and glanced at his helpless att.i.tude in the long chair,--"and the war, your life is surely sufficiently occupied as it is," she said coldly.

"But these evil times will pa.s.s. The war will cease, and then one may think of being happy. So long as there is war, I must of course fight--fight--fight, while there is a France to fight for."

Denise laughed.

"That is your scheme of life?" she asked bitterly.

"Yes, mademoiselle."

She rose and turned angrily away.

"Then it is France you care for--if it is no one in Corsica.

France--nothing and n.o.body--but France."

And she left him.

CHAPTER XXII.

IN THE MACQUIS

"Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men."

The Abbe Susini had no money, but he was a charitable man in a hasty and impulsive way. Even the very poor may be charitable: they can think kindly of the rich. It was not the rich of whom the abbe had a friendly thought, but the foolish and the stubborn. For this fiery little priest knew more of the unwritten history of the macquis than any in Corsica--infinitely more than those whose business it was.

It is the custom at Ajaccio, and in a smaller way at Bastia, to ignore the darker side of Corsican politics, and the French officials are content with the endeavour to get through their term of office with a whole skin. It is not, as in other islands of the Mediterranean, the gospel of "manana" which holds good here, but rather the gospel of "So I found it--it will last my time." So, from the prefet to the humblest gendarme, they come, they serve, and they go back rejoicing to France.

They strike when absolutely forced to do so, but they commit the most fatal of all administrative errors--they strike gently.

The faults are not all on one side; for the islanders are at once turbulent and sullen. There are many who "keep the country," as the local saying is, and wander year after year in the mountain fastnesses, far above road or pathway, beyond the feeble reach of the law, rather than pay a trifling fine or bend their pride to face a week's imprisonment.

In the macquis, as in better society, there are grades of evil. Some are hiding from their own pride, others are evading a lifelong sentence, while many know that if the gendarme sees them he will shoot at sight--running, standing, sleeping, as a keeper kills vermin. Only a few months ago, on a road over which many tourists must have travelled, a young man of twenty-three was "destroyed" (the official term) by the gendarmes who wanted him for eleven murders. It is commonly a.s.serted that these bandits are not dangerous, that they have no grievance against travellers. A starving man has a grievance against the whole world, and a condemned fratricide is not likely to pick and choose his next victim if tempted by a little money and the chance of escape therewith from the island.

It is, moreover, usual for a man to take to the macquis the moment that he finds himself involved in some trouble, or, it may be, merely under suspicion. From his retreat in the mountains he enters into negotiations with his lawyer, with the local magistrate, with his witnesses, even with the police. He distrusts justice itself, and only gives himself up or faces the tribunal when he has made sure of acquittal or such a sentence as his pride may swallow. Which details of justice as understood in a province of France at the beginning of the century may be read at the a.s.size terms in those great newspapers, _Le Pet.i.t Bastiais_ or _Le Paoli Pascal_, by any who have a halfpenny to spend on literature.

It would appear easy enough to exterminate the bandits as one would exterminate wolves or other large game; but in such a country as Corsica, almost devoid of roads, thinly populated, heavily wooded, the expense would be greater than the administration is prepared to incur. It would mean putting an army into the field, prepared and equipped for a long campaign which might ultimately reach the dignity of a civil war. The bandits are not worth it. The whole country is not worth exploiting.

Corsica is a small open wound on the great back of France, carefully concealed and only tended spasmodically from time to time at such periods as the health of the whole frame is sufficiently good to permit of serious attention being given to so small a sore. And such times, as the wondering world knows, are few and far between in the history of France.

The law-abiding natives, or such natives as the law has not found out, regard the denizens of the macquis with a tender pity not unmixed with respect. As often as not the bandit is a man with a real grievance, and the poor have a soft place in their hearts for a man with a grievance.

And all Corsicans are poor. So all are for the bandits, and every man's hand is secretly or openly against the gendarme. Even in enmity, there is a certain sense of honour among these nave people. A man will shoot his foe in the back, but he will not betray him to the gendarme. Among a primitive people a man commands respect who has had the courage to take the law into his own hands. Amidst a subject population, he who rebels is not without honour.

It was among these and such as these that the Abbe Susini sought from time to time his lost sheep. He took a certain pleasure in donning the peasant clothes that his father had worn, and in going to the mountains as his forefathers had doubtless done before him. For every man worthy of the name has lurking in his being a remnant of the barbarian which makes him revolt occasionally against the life of the city and the crowded struggle of the streets, which sends him out to the waste places of the world where G.o.d's air is at all events untainted, where he may return to the primitive way of living, to kill and gather with his own hands that which must satisfy his own hunger.

The abbe had never known a very highly refined state of civilization. The barbarian was not buried very deep. To him the voice of the wind through the trees, the roar of the river, the fine, free air of the mountains had a charm which he could not put into words. He hungered for them as the exile hungers for the sight of his own home. The air of houses choked him, as sooner or later it seems to choke sailors and wanderers who have known what it is to be in the open all night, sleeping or waking beneath the stars, not by accident as an adventure, but by habit. Then the abbe would disappear for days together from Olmeta, and vanish into that mystic, silent, prowling world of the macquis. The sights he saw there, the men he met there, were among those things which the villagers said the abbe knew, but of which he never spoke.

During the stirring events of August and September the priest at Olmeta, and Colonel Gilbert at Bastia, watched each, in his individual way, the effect of the news upon a very sensitive populace. The abbe stood on the high-road one night within a stone's throw of Perucca, and, looking down into the great valley, watched the flickering flames consume all that remained of the old Chateau de Va.s.selot. Colonel Gilbert, in his little rooms in the bastion at Bastia, knew almost as soon that the chateau was burning, and only evinced his usual easy-going surprise. The colonel always seemed to be wondering that any should have the energy to do active wrong; for virtue is more often pa.s.sive, and therefore less trouble.

The abbe was puzzled.