“I? Heaven forbid! No, my friend; I require too little. It is only the discontented who get on in the world. But, mind you, I would not mind trying on a small scale. I have often thought I should like to buy a little property on this side of the island, and cultivate it as they do up in Cap Corse. It would be an amusement for my exile, and one could perhaps make the butter for one's bread—green Chartreuse instead of yellow—eh?”
He paused, and seeing that the other made no reply, continued in the same careless strain.
“If you or one of the other proprietors on this side of the mountains would sell—perhaps.”
But Perucca shook his head resolutely.
“No; we should not do that. You, who have had to do with the railway, must know that. We will let our land go to rack and ruin, we will starve it and not cultivate it, we will let the terraces fall away after the rains, we will live miserably on the finest soil in Europe—we may starve, but we won't sell.”
Gilbert did not seem to be listening very intently. He was watching the young bamboos now bursting into their feathery new green, as they waved to and fro against the blue sky. His head was slightly inclined to one side, his eyes were contemplative.
“It is a pity,” he said, after a pause, “that Andrei did not have a better knowledge of the insular character. He need not have been in Olmeta churchyard now.”
“It is a pity,” rapped out Perucca, with an emphatic stick on the wooden floor, “that Andrei was so gentle with them. He drove the cattle off the land. I should have driven them into my own sheds, and told the owners to come and take them. He was too easy-going, too mild in his manners. Look at me—they don't send me their threatening letters. You do not find any crosses chalked on my door—eh?”
And indeed, as he stood there, with his square shoulders, his erect bearing and fiery, dark eyes, Mattei Perucca seemed worthy of the name of his untamed ancestors, and was not a man to be trifled with.
“Eh—what?” he asked of the servant who had approached timorously, bearing a letter on a tray. “For me? Something about Andrei,
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