“There is no breeze,” said this Porto Vecchian, jovially; “it will come with the night. In waiting, this is wine of Balagna.”
And he drank perdition to the Peruccas.
With nightfall they set sail; the great lateen swinging lazily under the pressure of those light airs that flit to and fro over the islands at evening and sunrise. All the arts of civilization have as yet failed to approach the easiest of all modes of progression and conveyance—sailing on a light breeze. For here is speed without friction, passage through the air without opposition, for it is the air that urges. Afloat, Casabianda was a silent man. His seafaring was of a surreptitious nature, perhaps. For companion, he had one with no roof to his mouth, whose speech was incomprehensible—an excellent thing in law-breakers.
De Vasselot was soon asleep, and slept all through that quiet night. He awoke to find the dawn spreading its pearly light over the sea. The great plain of Biguglia lay to the left under a soft blanket of mist, as deadly they say, as any African miasma, above which the distant mountains raised summits already tinged with rose. Ahead and close at hand, the old town of Bastia jutted out into the sea, the bluff Genoese bastion concealing the harbour from view. De Vasselot had never been to Bastia, which Casabianda described as a great and bewildering city, where the unwary might soon lose himself. The man of incomprehensible speech was, therefore, sent ashore to conduct Lory to the Hotel Clément. Casabianda, himself, would not land. The place reeked, he said, of the gendarmerie, and was offensive to his nostrils.
Clément had not opened his hospitable door. The street door, of course, always stood open, and the donkey that lived in the entrance-hall was astir. Lory dismissed his guide, and after ringing a bell which tinkled rather disappointingly just within the door, sat down patiently on the stairs to wait. At length the ancient chambermaid (who is no servant, but just a woman, in the strictly domestic sense of that fashionable word) reluctantly opened the door. French and Italian were alike incomprehensible to this lady, and de Vasselot was still explaining with much volubility, and a wealth of gesture, that the man he sought wore a tonsure, when Clément himself, affable and supremely indifferent to the scantiness of his own attire, appeared.
“Take the gentleman to number eleven,” he commanded; “the Abbé Susini expects him.”
The last statement appeared to be made with that breadth of veracity which is the special privilege of hotel-keepers all the world over; for the abbé was asleep when Lory entered his apartment. He awoke, however, with a characteristic haste, and his first conscious movement was suggestive of a readiness to defend himself against attack.
“Ah!” he cried, with a laugh, “it is you. You see me asleep.”
“Asleep, but ready,” answered de Vasselot, with a laugh. He liked a quick man.
Without speaking, he unbuttoned his tunic and threw his bundle of papers on the abbé's counterpane.