Duty had been his guiding light, though he himself would have laughed the gayest denial to such an accusation. Duty had brought him to Corsica. And—for there is no human happiness that is not spiced by duty—he had the hope of seeing Denise.
He rode up the valley of the Guadelle blithely enough, despite the fact that his leg pained him and his left arm ached abominably. Of course, he would find his father—he knew that; and the peace and quiet of some rural home in France would restore the wandering reason. And all was for the best in the best possible world! For Lory was a Frenchman, and into the French nature there has assuredly filtered some of the light of that sunny land.
At more than one turn of the road he looked up towards Perucca. Once he saw a light in one of the windows of the old house. Slowly he climbed to the level of the tableland; and Denise, sitting at the open window, heard the sound of his horse's feet, and wondered who might be abroad at that hour. He glanced at the ruined chapel that towers above the Château de Vasselot on its rocky promontory, and peered curiously down into the black valley, where the charred remains of his ancestral home are to be found to this day. Murato was asleep—a silent group of stone-roofed houses, one of which, however, had seen the birth of a man notorious enough in his day—Fieschi, the would-be assassin of Louis Philippe. Every village in this island has, it would seem, the odour of blood.
The road now mounted steadily, and presently led through the rocky defile where Susini had turned back on a similar errand scarce a week earlier. The rider now emerged into the open, and made his careful way along the face of a mountain. The chill air bespoke a great altitude, which was confirmed by that waiting, throbbing silence which is of the summits. Far down on the right, across rolling ranges of lower hills, a steady pin-point of light twinkled like a star. It was the lighthouse of Punta-Revellata, by Calvi, twenty miles away.
The night was clear and dark. A few clouds lay on the horizon to the south, and all the dome of heaven was a glittering field of stars. De Vasselot's horse was small and wiry—part Arab, part mountain pony—and attended to his own affairs with the careful and surprising intelligence possessed by horses, mules, and donkeys that are born and bred to mountain roads. After Murato the track had descended sharply, only to mount again to the heights dividing the watersheds of the Bevinco and the Golo. And now de Vasselot could hear the Golo roaring in its rocky bed in the valley below. He knew that he was safe now, for he had merely to follow the river till it led him to the high-road at Ponte Alle Leccia. The country here was more fertile, and the track led through the thickest macquis. The subtle scent of flowering bushes filled the air with a cool, soft flavour, almost to be tasted on the lips, of arbutus, myrtle, cistus, oleander, tamarisk, and a score of flowering heaths. The silence here was broken incessantly by the stirring of the birds, which swarm in these berry-bearing coppices.
The track crossed the narrow, flat valley, where, a hundred years earlier, had been fought the last great fight that finally subjugated Corsica to France. Here de Vasselot passed through some patches of cultivated ground—rare enough in this fertile land—noted the shadowy shape of a couple of houses, and suddenly found himself on the high-road. He had spared his horse hitherto, but now urged the willing beast to a better pace. This took the form of an uneven, fatiguing trot, which, however, made good account of the kilometres, and de Vasselot noted mechanically the recurrence of the little square stones every five or six minutes.
It was during that darkest hour which precedes the dawn that he skirted the old capital, Corte, straggling up the hillside to the towering citadel standing out grey and solemn against its background of great mountains. The rider could now see dimly a snow-clad height here and there. Halfway between Corte and Vivario, where the road climbs through bare heights, he paused, and then hurried on again. He had heard in this desert stillness the beat of a horse's feet on the road in front of him. He was not mistaken, for when he drew up to listen a second time there was no sound. The rider had stopped, and was waiting for him. The outline of his form could be seen against the starry sky at a turn in the road further up the mountain-side.
“Is that you, Jean?” cried Lory.
“Yes,” answered the voice of the man who rarely spoke.
The two horses exchanged a low, gurgled greeting.