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Updated: June 16, 2025
"I met the Abbe Susini at Olmeta," she said to Mademoiselle Brun, a few minutes later in the great bare drawing-room of the Casa Perucca. "And he transmitted the Count de Vasselot's command that we should leave the Casa Perucca to-night for France. I suggested that the order should be given to the Chateau de Vasselot instead of the Casa Perucca, and the abbe took me at my word.
He drove their cattle from the fields because they were Perucca's fields, and he was paid to watch his master's interests. But Perucca they dare not touch, because his clan is large, and would hunt the murderer down. If he was caught, the Peruccas would make sure of the jury ay! And of the judge at Bastia but Pietro is not of Corsica; he has no friends and no clan, so justice is not for him."
With sunrise, however, the clouds broke on the western side of the island, and from the summit of the great Perucca rock the blue and distant sea was visible through the grey confusion of mist and cloud.
Mademoiselle gave an odd laugh. "It is the boundary-line between Perucca and Vasselot," she said, "that has fallen into the valley." Denise was thinking the same thought, and made no answer. The footpath from the chateau up to the Casa by which Gilbert had come on the day of Mattei Perucca's death, by which he had also ridden to the chateau one day, was completely obliterated.
Stefano, where the Bastia road comes through the Lancone defile the road by which Colonel Gilbert had ridden to the Casa Perucca not so very long before. At the base of the fan runs the Aliso, without haste, bordered on either bank by oleanders growing like rushes.
Beneath the Casa Perucca, on the northern slope of the shoulder, the ground falls away rapidly in a series of stony chutes, and to the south and west there are evidences of the land having once been laid out in terraces in the distant days when Corsicans were content to till the most fertile soil in Europe always excepting the Island of Majorca but now in the wane of the third empire, when every Corsican of any worth had found employment in France, there were none to grow vines or cultivate the olive.
She was dull, down there in that great chateau; and when a woman is dull she must either go to church or to the devil. She cannot content herself with tobacco or the drink, like a man. De Vasselot heard of it. He was a quiet man, and he waited. One day he began to carry a gun, like you and me a bad example, eh? Then Andrei Perucca was seen to carry a gun also.
Where it had crept along the face of the slope, there now rose a bare red rock. There was no longer a short cut from the one house to the other. It made Perucca all the more inaccessible. "Curious," whispered Mademoiselle Brun to herself, as she turned towards the house. She went indoors to get a hat, for the autumn sun was now glaring down upon them.
With an odd laugh Colonel Gilbert climbed into the saddle again, and although he looked carefully up at the Casa Perucca, he failed to see Mademoiselle Brun's grey face amid the grey shadows of an olive tree. The horse limped at first, but presently forgot his grievance against the big stone that had lain in his path.
"Listen," said Mademoiselle Brun, holding up one steady, yellow finger; but the silence was such as will make itself felt. "And the neighbours do not call much," added mademoiselle, in completion of her own thoughts. Denise laughed. She had been up early, for they were almost alone in the Casa Perucca now.
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