Colomba

“Go with them,” said young Pietri to some of his friends. “Take care no harm comes to them!”

Hastily two or three young men slipped their stilettos up the left sleeves of their jackets and escorted Orso and his sister to their own door.

CHAPTER XIII

Panting, exhausted, Colomba was utterly incapable of uttering a single word. Her head rested on her brother’s shoulder, and she clasped one of his hands tightly between her own. Orso, though secretly somewhat annoyed by her peroration, was too much alarmed to reprove her, even in the mildest fashion. He was silently waiting till the nervous attack from which she seemed to be suffering should have passed, when there was a knock at the door, and Saveria, very much flustered, announced the prefect. At the words, Colomba rose, as though ashamed of her weakness, and stood leaning on a chair, which shook visibly beneath her hand.

The prefect began with some commonplace apology for the unseasonable hour of his visit, condoled with Mademoiselle Colomba, touched on the danger connected with strong emotions, blamed the custom of composing funeral dirges, which the very talent of the voceratrice rendered the more harrowing to her auditors, skilfully slipped in a mild reproof concerning the tendency of the improvisation just concluded, and then, changing his tone—

“M. della Rebbia,” he said, “I have many messages for you from your English friends. Miss Nevil sends her affectionate regards to your sister. I have a letter for you from her.”

“A letter from Miss Nevil!” cried Orso.

“Unluckily I have not got it with me. But you shall have it within five minutes. Her father has not been well. For a little while we were afraid he had caught one of our terrible fevers. Luckily he is all right again, as you will observe for yourself, for I fancy you will see him very soon.”

“Miss Nevil must have been very much alarmed!”

“Fortunately she did not become aware of the danger till it was quite gone by. M. della Rebbia, Miss Nevil has talked to me a great deal about you and about your sister.”

Orso bowed.

“She has a great affection for you both. Under her charming appearance, and her apparent frivolity, a fund of good sense lies hidden.”

“She is a very fascinating person,” said Orso.

“I have come here, monsieur, almost at her prayer. Nobody is better acquainted than I with a fatal story which I would fain not have to recall to you. As M. Barricini is still the mayor of Pietranera, and as I am prefect of the department, I need hardly tell you what weight I attach to certain suspicions which, if I am rightly informed, some incautious individuals have communicated to you, and which you, I know, have spurned with the indignation your position and your character would have led me to expect.”

“Colomba,” said Orso, moving uneasily to his chair. “You are very tired. You had better go to bed.”

Colomba shook her head. She had recovered all her usual composure, and her burning eyes were fixed on the prefect.

“M. Barricini,” the prefect continued, “is exceedingly anxious to put an end to the sort of enmity . . . or rather, the condition of uncertainty, existing between yourself and him. . . . On my part, I should be delighted to see you both in those relations of friendly intercourse appropriate to people who certainly ought to esteem each other.”

“Monsieur,” replied Orso in a shaking voice, “I have never charged Barricini with my father’s murder. But he committed an act which must always prevent me from having anything to do with him. He forged a threatening letter, in the name of a certain bandit, or at least he hinted in an underhand sort of way that it was forged by my father. That letter, monsieur, was probably the indirect cause of my father’s death.”

The prefect sat thinking for a moment.

“That your father should have believed that, when his own hasty nature led him into a lawsuit with Signor Barricini, is excusable. But such blindness on your part really can not be admitted. Pray consider that Barricini could have served no interest of his own by forging the letter. I will not talk to you about his character, for you are not acquainted with it, and are prejudiced against it; but you can not suppose that a man conversant with the law–”

“But, monsieur,” said Orso, rising to his feet, “be good enough to recollect that when you tell me the letter was not Barricini’s work, you ascribe it to my father. And my father’s honour, monsieur, is mine!”

“No man on earth, sir, is more convinced of Colonel della Rebbia’s honour than myself! But the writer of the letter is now known.”

“Who wrote it?” exclaimed Colomba, making a step toward the prefect.

“A villain, guilty of several crimes—such crimes as you Corsicans never pardon—a thief, one Tomaso Bianchi, at present confined in the prison at Bastia, has acknowledged that he wrote the fatal letter.”

“I know nothing of the man,” said Orso. “What can have been his object?”

“He belongs to this neighbourhood,” said Colomba. “He is brother to a man who was our miller—a scamp and a liar, unworthy of belief.”

“You will soon see what his interest in the matter was,” continued the prefect. “The miller of whom your sister speaks—I think his name was Teodoro—was the tenant of a mill belonging to the colonel, standing on the very stream the ownership of which M. Barricini was disputing with your father. The colonel, always a generous man, made very little profit out of the mill. Now Tomaso thought that if Barricini got possession of the stream there would be a heavy rent to pay, for it is well known that Barricini is rather fond of money. In short, to oblige his brother, Tomaso forged the letter from the bandit—and there’s the whole story. You know that in Corsica the strength of the family tie is so great that it does sometimes lead to crime. Please read over this letter to me from the attorney-general. It confirms what I have just told you.”

Orso looked through the letter, which gave a detailed relation of Tomaso’s confession, and Colomba read it over his shoulder.

When she had come to the end of it she exclaimed:

“Orlanduccio Barricini went down to Bastia a month ago, when it became known that my brother was coming home. He must have seen Tomaso, and bought this lie of him!”

“Signorina,” said the prefect, out of patience, “you explain everything by odious imputations! Is that the way to find out the truth? You, sir, can judge more coolly. Tell me what you think of the business now? Do you believe, like this young lady, that a man who has only a slight sentence to fear would deliberately charge himself with forgery, just to oblige a person he doesn’t know?”

Orso read the attorney-general’s letter again, weighing every word with the greatest care—for now that he had seen the old lawyer, he felt it more difficult to convince himself than it would have been a few days previously. At last he found himself obliged to admit that the explanation seemed to him to be satisfactory. But Colomba cried out vehemently:

“Tomaso Bianchi is a knave! He’ll not be convicted, or he’ll escape from prison! I am certain of it!”

The prefect shrugged his shoulders.

“I have laid the information I have received before you, monsieur. I will now depart, and leave you to your own reflections. I shall wait till your own reason has enlightened you, and I trust it may prove stronger than your sister’s suppositions.”

Orso, after saying a few words of excuse for Colomba, repeated that he now believed Tomaso to be the sole culprit.

The prefect had risen to take his leave.

“If it were not so late,” said he, “I would suggest your coming over with me to fetch Miss Nevil’s letter. At the same time you might repeat to M. Barricini what you have just said to me, and the whole thing would be settled.”

“Orso della Rebbia will never set his foot inside the house of a Barricini!” exclaimed Colomba impetuously.

“This young lady appears to be the tintinajo6 of the family!” remarked the prefect, with a touch of irony.

“Monsieur,” replied Colomba resolutely, “you are deceived. You do not know the lawyer. He is the most cunning and knavish of men. I beseech you not to make Orso do a thing that would overwhelm him with dishonour!”

“Colomba!” exclaimed Orso, “your passion has driven you out of your senses!”

“Orso! Orso! By the casket I gave you, I beseech you to listen to me! There is blood between you and the Barricini. You shall not go into their house!”

“Sister!”

“No, brother, you shall not go! Or I will leave this house, and you will never see me again! Have pity on me, Orso!” and she fell on her knees.

“I am grieved,” said the prefect, “to find Mademoiselle Colomba so unreasonable. You will convince her, I am sure.”

He opened the door and paused, seeming to expect Orso to follow him.

“I can not leave her now,” said Orso. “To-morrow, if–”

“I shall be starting very early,” said the prefect.

“Brother,” cried Colomba, clasping her hands, “wait till to-morrow morning, in any case. Let me look over my father’s papers. You can not refuse me that!”

“Well, you shall look them over to-night. But at all events you shall not torment me afterward with your violent hatreds. A thousand pardons, monsieur! I am so upset myself to-night—it had better be to-morrow.”

“The night brings counsel,” said the prefect, as he went out. “I hope all your uncertainty will have disappeared by to-morrow.”

“Saveria,” Colomba called, “take the lantern and attend the Signor Prefetto. He will give you a letter to bring back to my brother.”

She added a few words which reached Saveria’s ear alone.

“Colomba,” said Orso, when the prefect was gone, “you have distressed me very much. Will no evidence convince you?”

“You have given me till to-morrow,” she replied. “I have very little time; but I still have some hope.”

Then she took a bunch of keys and ran up to a room on the upper story. There he could hear her pulling open drawers, and rummaging in the writing-desk in which Colonel della Rebbia had kept his business papers.

CHAPTER XIV

Saveria was a long time away, and when she at last reappeared, carrying a letter, and followed by little Chilina, rubbing her eyes, and evidently just waked out of her beauty sleep, Orso was wound up to the highest possible pitch of impatience.

“Chili,” said Orso, “what are you doing here at this hour?”

“The signorina sent for me,” replied Chilina.

“What the devil does she want with her?” thought Orso to himself. But he was in a hurry to open Miss Lydia’s letter, and while he was reading it Chilina went upstairs to his sister’s room.

“My father, dear sir, has not been well,” Miss Nevil wrote, “and he is so indolent, besides, that I am obliged to act as his secretary. You remember that, instead of admiring the landscape with you and me the other day, he got his feet wet on the sea-shore—and in your delightful island, that is quite enough to give one a fever! I can see the face you are making! No doubt you are feeling for your dagger. But I will hope you have none now. Well, my father had a little fever, and I had a great fright. The prefect, whom I persist in thinking very pleasant, sent us a doctor, also a very pleasant man, who got us over our trouble in two days. There has been no return of the attack, and my father would like to begin to shoot again. But I have forbidden that. How did you find matters in your mountain home? Is your North Tower still in its old place? Are there any ghosts about it? I ask all these questions because my father remembers you have promised him buck and boar and moufflon—is that the right name for those strange creatures? We intend to crave your hospitality on our way to Bastia, where we are to embark, and I trust the della Rebbia Castle, which you declare is so old and tumble-down, will not fall in upon our heads! Though the prefect is so pleasant that subjects of conversation are never lacking to us—I flatter myself, by the way, that I have turned his head—we have been talking about your worshipful self. The legal people at Bastia have sent him certain confessions, made by a rascal they have under lock and key, which are calculated to destroy your last remaining suspicions. The enmity which sometimes alarmed me for you must therefore end at once. You have no idea what a pleasure this has been to me! When you started hence with the fair voceratrice, with your gun in hand, and your brow lowering, you struck me as being more Corsican than ever—too Corsican indeed! Basta! I write you this long letter because I am dull. The prefect, alas! is going away. We will send you a message when we start for your mountains, and I shall take the liberty of writing to Signorina Colomba to ask her to give me a bruccio, ma solenne! Meanwhile, give her my love. I use her dagger a great deal to cut the leaves of a novel I brought with me. But the doughty steel revolts against such usage, and tears my book for me, after a most pitiful fashion. Farewell, sir! My father sends you ‘his best love.’ Listen to what the prefect says. He is a sensible man, and is turning out of his way, I believe, on your account. He is going to lay a foundation-stone at Corte. I should fancy the ceremony will be very imposing, and I am very sorry not to see it. A gentleman in an embroidered coat and silk stockings and a white scarf, wielding a trowel—and a speech! And at the end of the performance manifold and reiterated shouts of ‘God save the King.’ I say again, sir, it will make you very vain to think I have written you four whole pages, and on that account I give you leave to write me a very long letter. By the way, I think it very odd of you not to have let me hear of your safe arrival at the Castle of Pietranera!

“LYDIA.

“P.S.—I beg you will listen to the prefect, and do as he bids you. We have agreed that this is the course you should pursue, and I shall be very glad if you do it.”

Orso read the letter three or four times over, making endless mental comments each time as he read. Then he wrote a long answer, which he sent by Saveria’s hand to a man in the village, who was to go down to Ajaccio the very next day. Already he had almost dismissed the idea of discussing his grievance, true or false, against the Barricini, with his sister. Miss Lydia’s letter had cast a rose-coloured tint over everything about him. He felt neither hatred nor suspicion now. He waited some time for his sister to come down, and finding she did not reappear, he went to bed, with a lighter heart than he had carried for many a day. Colomba, having dismissed Chilina with some secret instructions, spent the greater part of the night in reading old papers. A little before daybreak a few tiny pebbles rattled against the window-pane. At the signal, she went down to the garden, opened a back door, and conducted two very rough men into her house. Her first care was to bring them into the kitchen and give them food. My readers will shortly learn who these men were.

CHAPTER XV

Toward six o’clock next morning one of the prefect’s servants came and knocked at the door of Orso’s house. He was received by Colomba, and informed her the prefect was about to start, and was expecting her brother. Without a moment’s hesitation Colomba replied that her brother had just had a fall on the stairs, and sprained his foot; and he was unable to walk a single step, that he begged the prefect to excuse him, and would be very grateful if he would condescend to take the trouble of coming over to him. A few minutes after this message had been despatched, Orso came downstairs, and asked his sister whether the prefect had not sent for him.

With the most perfect assurance she rejoined:

“He begs you’ll wait for him here.”

Half an hour went by without the slightest perceptible stir in the Barricini dwelling. Meanwhile Orso asked Colomba whether she had discovered anything. She replied that she proposed to make her statement when the prefect came. She affected an extreme composure. But her colour and her eyes betrayed her state of feverish excitement.

At last the door of the Barricini mansion was seen to open. The prefect came out first, in travelling garb; he was followed by the mayor and his two sons. What was the stupefaction of the inhabitants of the village of Pietranera, who had been on the watch since sunrise for the departure of the chief magistrate of their department, when they saw him go straight across the square and enter the della Rebbia dwelling, accompanied by the three Barricini. “They are going to make peace!” exclaimed the village politicians.

“Just as I told you,” one old man went on. “Ors’ Anton’ has lived too much on the mainland to carry things through like a man of mettle.”

“Yet,” responded a Rebbianite, “you may notice it is the Barricini who have gone across to him. They are suing for mercy.”

“It’s the prefect who had wheedled them all round,” answered the old fellow. “There is no such thing as courage nowadays, and the young chaps make no more fuss about their father’s blood than if they were all bastards.”

The prefect was not a little astounded to find Orso up and walking about with perfect ease. In the briefest fashion Colomba avowed her own lie, and begged him to forgive it.

“If you had been staying anywhere else, monsieur, my brother would have gone to pay his respects to you yesterday.”

Orso made endless apologies, vowing he had nothing to do with his sister’s absurd stratagem, by which he appeared deeply mortified. The prefect and the elder Barricini appeared to believe in the sincerity of his regret, and indeed this belief was justified by his evident confusion and the reproaches he addressed to his sister. But the mayor’s two sons did not seem satisfied.

“We are being made to look like fools,” said Orlanduccio audibly.

“If my sister were to play me such tricks,” said Vincentello, “I’d soon cure her fancy for beginning them again.”

The words, and the tone in which they were uttered, offended Orso, and diminished his good-will. Glances that were anything but friendly were exchanged between him and the two young men.

Meanwhile, everybody being seated save Colomba, who remained standing close to the kitchen door, the prefect took up his parable, and after a few common-places as to local prejudices, he recalled the fact that the most inveterate enmities generally have their root in some mere misunderstanding. Next, turning to the mayor, he told him that Signor della Rebbia had never believed the Barricini family had played any part, direct or indirect, in the deplorable event which had bereft him of his father; that he had, indeed, nursed some doubts as to one detail in the lawsuit between the two families; that Signor Orso’s long absence, and the nature of the information sent him, excused the doubt in question; that in the light of recent revelations he felt completely satisfied, and desired to re-open friendly and neighbourly relations with Signor Barricini and his sons.

Orso bowed stiffly. Signor Barricini stammered a few words that nobody could hear, and his sons stared steadily at the ceiling rafters. The prefect was about to continue his speech, and address the counterpart of the remarks he had made to Signor Barricini, to Orso, when Colomba stepped gravely forward between the contracting parties, at the same time drawing some papers from beneath her neckerchief.

“I should be happy indeed,” she said, “to see the quarrel between our two families brought to an end. But if the reconciliation is to be sincere, there must be a full explanation, and nothing must be left in doubt. Signor Prefetto, Tomaso Bianchi’s declaration, coming from a man of such vile report, seemed to me justly open to doubt. I said your sons had possibly seen this man in the prison at Bastia.”

“It’s false!” interrupted Orlanduccio; “I didn’t see him!”

Colomba cast a scornful glance at him, and proceeded with great apparent composure.

“You explained Tomaso’s probable interest in threatening Signor Barricini, in the name of a dreaded bandit, by his desire to keep his brother Teodoro in possession of the mill which my father allowed him to hire at a very low rent.”

“That’s quite clear,” assented the prefect.

“Where was Tomaso Bianchi’s interest?” exclaimed Colomba triumphantly. “His brother’s lease had run out. My father had given him notice on the 1st of July. Here is my father’s account-book; here is his note of warning given to Teodoro, and the letter from a business man at Ajaccio suggesting a new tenant.”

As she spoke she gave the prefect the papers she had been holding in her hand.

There was an astonished pause. The mayor turned visibly pale. Orso, knitting his brows, leaned forward to look at the papers, which the prefect was perusing most attentively.

“We are being made to look like fools!” cried Orlanduccio again, springing angrily to his feet. “Let us be off, father! We ought never to have come here!”

One instant’s delay gave Signor Barricini time to recover his composure. He asked leave to see the papers. Without a word the prefect handed them over to him. Pushing his green spectacles up to his forehead, he looked through them with a somewhat indifferent air, while Colomba watched him with the eyes of a tigress who sees a buck drawing near to the lair where she had hidden her cubs.

“Well,” said Signor Barricini, as he pulled down his spectacles and returned the documents, “knowing the late colonel’s kind heart, Tomaso thought—most likely he thought—that the colonel would change his mind about the notice. As a matter of fact, Bianchi is still at the mill, so—”

“It was I,” said Colomba, and there was scorn in her voice, “who left him there. My father was dead, and situated as I was, I was obliged to treat my brother’s dependents with consideration.”

“Yet,” quoth the prefect, “this man Tomaso acknowledges that he wrote the letter. That much is clear.”

“The thing that is clear to me,” broke in Orso, “is that there is some vile infamy underneath this whole business.”

“I have to contradict another assertion made by these gentlemen,” said Colomba.

She threw open the door into the kitchen and instantly Brandolaccio, the licentiate in theology, and Brusco, the dog, marched into the room. The two bandits were unarmed—apparently, at all events; they wore their cartridge belts, but the pistols, which are their necessary complement, were absent. As they entered the room they doffed their caps respectfully.

The effect produced by their sudden appearance may be conceived. The mayor almost fell backward. His sons threw themselves boldly in front of him, each one feeling for his dagger in his coat pocket. The prefect made a step toward the door, and Orso, seizing Brandolaccio by the collar, shouted:

“What have you come here for, you villain?”

“This is a trap!” cried the mayor, trying to get the door open. But, by the bandits’ orders, as was afterward discovered, Saveria had locked it on the outside.

“Good people,” said Brandolaccio, “don’t be afraid of me. I’m not such a devil as I look. We mean no harm at all. Signor Prefetto, I’m your very humble servant. Gently, lieutenant! You’re strangling me! We’re here as witnesses! Now then, Padre, speak up! Your tongue’s glib enough!”

“Signor Prefetto,” quoth the licentiate, “I have not the honour of being known to you. My name is Giocanto Castriconi, better known as the Padre. Aha, it’s coming back to you! The signorina here, whom I have not the pleasure of knowing either, has sent to ask me to supply some information about a fellow of the name of Tomaso Bianchi, with whom I chanced to be shut up, about three weeks ago, in the prison at Bastia. This is what I have to tell you.”

“Spare yourself the trouble,” said the prefect. “I can not listen to anything from such a man as you. Signor della Rebbia, I am willing to believe you have had nothing to do with this detestable plot. But are you master in your own house? Will you have the door opened? Your sister may have to give an account of the strange relations in which she lives with a set of bandits.”

“Signor Prefetto!” cried Colomba, “I beseech you to listen to what this man has to say! You are here to do justice to everybody, and it is your duty to search out the truth. Speak, Giocanto Castriconi!”

“Don’t listen to him,” chorused the three Barricini.

“If everybody talks at once,” remarked the bandit, with a smile, “nobody can contrive to hear what anybody says. Well, in the prison at Bastia I had as my companion—not as my friend—this very man, Tomaso. He received frequent visits from Signor Orlanduccio.”