Colomba - Prosper Mérimée (management books to read txt) 📗

suggestion evidently caused her considerable perplexity. At last she said:

“How can we leave this poor young creature, just when she is so much in need of consolation? Don’t you think that would be cruel, father?”

“I only spoke on your account, child,” said the colonel. “And I assure you that if I once felt you were safe in the hotel at Ajaccio, I should be very sorry to leave this cursed island myself, without shaking that plucky fellow della Rebbia’s hand again.”

“Well then, father, let us wait a while, and before we start let us make quite sure we can not be of any use to them.”

“Kind soul!” said the colonel, as he kissed his daughter’s forehead. “It is a pleasure to see you sacrifice yourself for the sake of softening other people’s suffering. Let us stay on. We shall never have to repent having done right.”

Miss Lydia tossed sleeplessly to and fro in her bed. Sometimes she took the vague night sounds for preparations for an attack on the house. Sometimes, less alarmed on her own account, she thought of poor wounded Orso, who was probably lying on the cold earth, with no help beyond what she might expect from a bandit’s charity. She fancied him covered with blood, and writhing in hideous suffering; and the extraordinary thing was that whenever Orso’s image rose up before her mind’s eye, she always beheld him as she had seen him when he rode away, pressing the talisman she had bestowed upon him to his lips. Then she mused over his courage. She told herself he had exposed himself to the frightful danger he had just escaped on her account, just for the sake of seeing her a little sooner. A very little more, and she would have persuaded herself that Orso had earned his broken arm in her defence! She reproached herself with being the cause of his wound. But she admired him for it all the more, and if that celebrated right and left was not so splendid a feat in her sight as in Brandolaccio’s or Colomba’s, still she was convinced few heroes of romance could ever had behaved with such intrepidity and coolness, in so dangerous a pinch.

Her room was that usually occupied by Colomba. Above a kind of oaken prie-dieu, and beside a sprig of blessed palm, a little miniature of Orso, in his sub-lieutenant’s uniform, hung on the wall. Miss Nevil took the portrait down, looked at it for a long time, and laid it at last on the table by her bed, instead of hanging it up again in its place. She did not fall asleep till daybreak, and when she woke the sun had travelled high above the horizon. In front of her bed she beheld Colomba, waiting, motionless, till she should open her eyes.

“Well, dear lady, are you not very uncomfortable in this poor house of ours?” said Colomba to her. “I fear you have hardly slept at all.”

“Have you any news, dear friend?” cried Miss Nevil, sitting up in bed.

Her eye fell on Orso’s picture, and she hastily tossed her handkerchief upon it.

“Yes, I have news,” said Colomba, with a smile.

Then she took up the picture.

“Do you think it like him? He is better looking than that!”

“Really,” stammered Miss Nevil, quite confused, “I took down that picture in a fit of absence! I have a horrid habit of touching everything and never putting anything back! How is your brother?”

“Fairly well. Giocanto came here before four o’clock this morning. He brought me a letter for you, Miss Lydia. Orso hasn’t written anything to me! It is addressed to Colomba, indeed, but underneath that he has written ‘For Miss N.’ But sisters are never jealous! Giocanto says it hurt him dreadfully to write. Giocanto, who writes a splendid hand, offered to do it at his dictation. But he would not let him. He wrote it with a pencil, lying on his back. Brandolaccio held the paper for him. My brother kept trying to raise himself, and then the very slightest movement gave him the most dreadful agony in his arm. Giocanto says it was pitiful. Here is his letter.”

Miss Nevil read the letter, which, as an extra precaution, no doubt, was written in English. Its contents were as follows:

“MADEMOISELLE: An unhappy fate has driven me on. I know not what my enemies will say, what slanders they will invent. I care little, so long as you, mademoiselle, give them no credence! Ever since I first saw you I have been nursing wild dreams. I needed this catastrophe to show me my own folly.

“I have come back to my senses now. I know the future that lies before me, and I shall face it with resignation. I dare not keep this ring you gave me, and which I believed to be a lucky talisman. I fear, Miss Nevil, you may regret your gift has been so ill-bestowed. Or rather, I fear it may remind me of the days of my own madness. Colomba will give it to you. Farewell, mademoiselle! You are about to leave Corsica, and I shall never see you again. But tell my sister, at least, that I still possess your esteem—and I tell you, confidently, that I am still worthy of it.

“O.D.R.”

Miss Lydia had turned away while she read the letter, and Colomba, who was watching her closely, gave her the Egyptian ring, with an inquiring glance as to what it all meant. But Miss Lydia dared not raise her head, and looked dejectedly at the ring, alternately putting it on her finger and pulling it off again.

“Dear Miss Nevil,” said Colomba, “may I not know what my brother says to you? Does he say anything about his health?”

“Indeed,” said Miss Lydia, colouring, “he doesn’t mention it. His letter is in English. He desires me to tell my father—He hopes the prefect will be able to arrange——”

With a mischievous smile, Colomba sat down on the bed, took hold of both Miss Nevil’s hands, and, looking at her with her piercing eyes—

“Will you be kind?” she said. “Won’t you answer my brother’s letter? You would do him so much good! For a moment I thought of waking you when his letter came, and then I didn’t dare!”

“You did very wrong,” replied Miss Nevil. “If a word from me could—”

“I can’t send him any letter now. The prefect has arrived, and Pietranera is full of his policemen. Later on, we’ll see what we can do. Oh, Miss Nevil, if you only knew my brother, you would love him as dearly as I do. He’s so good! He’s so brave! Just think of what he has done! One man against two, and wounded as well!”

The prefect had returned. Warned by an express messenger sent by the deputy-mayor, he had brought over the public prosecutor, the registrar, and all their myrmidons, to investigate the fresh and terrible catastrophe which had just complicated, or it may be ended, the warfare between the chief families of Pietranera. Shortly after his arrival, he saw the colonel and his daughter, and did not conceal his fear that the business might take on an ugly aspect.

“You know,” he said, “that the fight took place without witnesses, and the reputation of these two unhappy men stood so high, both for bravery and cunning, that nobody will believe Signor della Rebbia can have killed them without the help of the bandits with whom he is now supposed to have taken refuge.”

“It’s not possible,” said the colonel. “Orso della Rebbia is a most honourable fellow. I’ll stake my life on that.”

“I believe you,” said the prefect. “But the public prosecutor (those gentry always are suspicious) does not strike me as being particularly well disposed toward him. He holds one bit of evidence which goes rather against our friend—a threatening letter to Orlanduccio, in which he suggests a meeting, and is inclined to think that meeting was a trap.”

“That fellow Orlanduccio refused to fight it out like a gentleman.”

“That is not the custom here. In this country, people lie in ambush, and kill each other from behind. There is one deposition in his favour—that of a child, who declares she heard four reports, two of which were louder than the others, and produced by a heavy weapon, such as Signor della Rebbia’s gun. Unluckily, the child is the niece of one of the bandits suspected of being his accomplices, and has probably been taught her lesson.”

“Sir,” broke in Miss Lydia, reddening to the roots of her hair, “we were on the road when those shots were fired, and we heard the same thing.”

“Really? That’s most important! And you, colonel, no doubt you remarked the very same thing?”

“Yes,” responded Miss Lydia quickly. “It was my father, who is so accustomed to firearms, who said to me, ‘There’s Signor della Rebbia shooting with my gun!’”

“And you are sure those shots you recognised were the last?”

“The two last, weren’t they, papa?”

Memory was not the colonel’s strong point, but as a standing rule, he knew better than to contradict his daughter.

“I must mention this to the public prosecutor at once, colonel. And besides, we expect a surgeon this evening, who will make an examination of the two bodies, and find out whether the wounds were caused by that particular weapon.”

“I gave it to Orso,” said the colonel, “and I wish I knew it was at the bottom of the sea. At least——Plucky boy! I’m heartily glad he had it with him, for I don’t quite know how he would have got off if it hadn’t been for my Manton.”