“Perhaps,” said the guide, “your brother took the higher path; we came by the lower one.”
But Colomba only shook her head and asked more questions. In spite of her natural firmness of character, increased as it was by her proud desire to conceal any sign of weakness before strangers, she could not hide her anxiety, and as soon as she had informed them of the attempted reconciliation, and of its unfortunate issue, this was shared by the colonel and Miss Lydia. Miss Nevil became very uneasy, and wanted to have messengers sent off in every direction, and her father offered to remount at once and set out with the guide in search of Orso. Her guests’ alarm recalled Colomba to a sense of her duties as a hostess. She strove to force a smile as she pressed the colonel to come to table, and suggested twenty plausible reasons, which she herself demolished within an instant, to account for her brother’s delay. The colonel, feeling it to be his duty, as a man, to reassure the ladies, put forward his own explanation.
“I’ll wager,” he said, “that della Rebbia has come across some game or other. He has not been able to stand out against that temptation, and we shall soon see him come in with a heavy bag. ‘Pon my soul,” he went on, “we did hear four shots fired on the road. Two of them were louder than the others, and I said to my girl, ‘I’ll bet anything that’s della Rebbia out shooting! My gun is the only one that would make that noise.’”
Colomba turned pale, and Lydia, who was watching her closely, had no difficulty in guessing the suspicions with which the colonel’s conjecture had inspired her. After a few minutes’ silence, Colomba eagerly inquired whether the two louder reports had been heard before or after the others. But neither the colonel, his daughter, nor the guide had paid much attention to this all-important detail.
Toward one o’clock, as none of Colomba’s messengers had yet returned, she gathered all her courage, and insisted that her guests should sit down to table with her. But, except the colonel, none of them could eat. At the slightest sound in the square, Colomba ran to the window. Then drearily she returned to her place, and struggled yet more drearily to carry on a trivial conversation, to which nobody paid the slightest attention, and which was broken by long intervals of silence. All at once they heard a horse’s gallop.
“Ah! That must be my brother at last!” said Colomba, rising from her chair. But when she saw Chilina astride on Orso’s horse—“My brother is dead!” she cried, in a heart-rending voice.
The colonel dropped his glass. Miss Lydia screamed. They all rushed to the door of the house. Before Chilina could jump off her steed, she was snatched up like a feather by Colomba, who held her so tight that she almost choked her. The child understood her agonized look, and her first words were those of the chorus in Othello: “He lives!” Colomba’s grasp relaxed, and nimbly as a kitten Chilina dropped upon the ground.
“The others?” queried Colomba hoarsely. Chilina crossed herself with her first and middle finger. A deep flush instantly replaced the deadly pallor of Colomba’s face. She cast one fierce look at the Barricini dwelling, and then, with a smile, she turned to her guests.
“Let us go in and drink our coffee,” she said.
The story the bandit’s Iris had to tell was a long one. Her narrative, translated literally into Italian by Colomba, and then into English by Miss Nevil, wrung more than one oath from the colonel, more than one sigh from the fair Lydia. But Colomba heard it all unmoved. Only she twisted her damask napkin till it seemed as if she must tear it in pieces. She interrupted the child, five or six times over, to make her repeat again that Brandolaccio had said the wound was not dangerous, and that he had seen many worse. When she had finished her tale, Chilina announced that Orso earnestly begged he might be sent writing materials, and that he desired his sister would beseech a lady who might be staying in his house not to depart from it, until she had received a letter from him.
“That is what was worrying him most,” the child added; “and even after I had started he called me back, to bid me not forget the message. It was the third time he had given it to me.” When Colomba heard of her brother’s injunction she smiled faintly, and squeezed the fair Englishwoman’s hand. That young lady burst into tears, and did not seem to think it advisable to translate that particular part of the story to her father.
“Yes, my dear,” cried Colomba, kissing Miss Nevil. “You shall stay with me, and you shall help us.”
Then, taking a pile of old linen out of a cupboard, she began to cut it up, to make lint and bandages. Any one who saw her flashing eyes, her heightened colour, her alternate fits of anxiety and composure, would have found it hard to say whether distress at her brother’s wound, or delight at the extinction of her foes, were most affecting her. One moment she was pouring out the colonel’s coffee, and telling him how well she made it, the next she was setting Miss Lydia and Chilina to work, exhorting them to sew bandages, and roll them up. Then, for the twentieth time, she would ask whether Orso’s wound was very painful. She constantly broke off her own work to exclaim to the coloneclass="underline"
“Two such cunning men, such dangerous fellows! And he alone, wounded, with only one arm! He killed the two of them! What courage, colonel! Isn’t he a hero? Ah, Miss Nevil! How good it is to live in a peaceful country like yours! I’m sure you did not really know my brother till now! I said it—‘The falcon will spread his wings!’ You were deceived by his gentle look! That’s because with you, Miss Nevil—Ah! if he could see you working for him now! My poor Orso!”
Miss Lydia was doing hardly any work, and could not find a single word to say. Her father kept asking why nobody went to lay a complaint before a magistrate. He talked about a coroner’s inquest, and all sorts of other proceedings quite unknown to Corsican economy. And then he begged to be told whether the country house owned by that worthy Signor Brandolaccio, who had brought succour to the wounded man, was very far away from Pietranera, and whether he could not go there himself, to see his friend.
And Colomba replied, with her usual composure, that Orso was in the maquis; that he was being taken care of by a bandit; that it would be a great risk for him to show himself until he was sure of the line the prefect and the judges were likely to take; and, finally, that she would manage to have him secretly attended by a skilful surgeon.
“Above all things, colonel,” she added, “remember that you heard the four shots, and that you told me Orso fired last.”
The colonel could make neither head nor tail of the business, and his daughter did nothing but heave sighs and dry her eyes.
The day was far advanced, when a gloomy procession wended its way into the village. The bodies of his two sons were brought home to Lawyer Barricini, each corpse thrown across a mule, which was led by a peasant. A crowd of dependents and idlers followed the dreary cortege. With it appeared the gendarmes, who always came in too late, and the deputy-mayor, throwing up his hands, and incessantly repeating, “What will Signor Prefetto say!” Some of the women, among them Orlanduccio’s foster-mother, were tearing their hair and shrieking wildly. But their clamorous grief was less impressive than the dumb despair of one man, on whom all eyes were fixed. This was the wretched father, who passed from one corpse to the other, lifting up the earth-soiled heads, kissing the blackened lips, supporting the limbs that were stiff already, as if he would save them from the jolting of the road. Now and then he opened his mouth as though about to speak, but not a cry came, not a word. His eyes never left the dead bodies, and as he walked, he knocked himself against the stones, against the trees, against every obstacle that chanced to lie in his path.