Denise was thinking the same thought, and made no answer. The footpath from the château 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 château one day, was completely obliterated. 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.
When she came out again, Denise was sitting looking thoughtfully down into the valley where had once stood the old château, now gone, to which had led this pathway, now wiped off the face of the earth.
“There is assuredly,” she said, without looking round, “a curse upon this country.”
Which Seneca had thought eighteen hundred years before, and which the history of the islands steadily confirms.
Mademoiselle was drawing on her gloves, and carried her umbrella.
“I am going down the pathway to look at it all,” she said.
There was nothing to be done. When Nature takes things into her own hands, men can only stand by and look. Denise was perhaps more shaken than the smaller, tougher woman. She made no attempt to accompany mademoiselle, but sat in the shade of a mimosa tree, and watched her descend into the valley, now appearing, now hidden, in the brushwood.
Mademoiselle Brun made her way to the spot where the pathway was suddenly cut short by the avalanche of rock and rubble and soil. It happened to be the exact spot where Colonel Gilbert's heavy horse had stumbled months before, where the footpath crossed the bed of a small mountain torrent. A few loosened stones had come bowling down the slope, set free by the landslip. These had fallen on to the pathway, and there shattered themselves into a thousand pieces. Mademoiselle stood among the débris. She looked down in order to make sure of her foothold, and something caught her eye. She knelt down eagerly, and then, looking up, glanced round surreptitiously like a thief. She could not see the Casa Perucca. She was alone on this solitary mountain-side. Slowly she collected the débris of the broken rock, which was mixed with a red powdery soil.
“Ciel!” she whispered, “Ciel! what fools we have all been!”