“Remember what I am telling you, neighbour,” said an old man, the village oracle.  “I watched Colomba’s face to-day.  She had some idea in her head.  I smell powder in the air.  Before long, butcher’s meat will be cheap in Pietranera!”

CHAPTER X

Orso had been parted from his father at so early an age that he had scarcely had time to know him.  He had left Pietranera to pursue his studies at Pisa when he was only fifteen.  Thence he had passed into the military school, and Ghilfuccio, meanwhile, was bearing the Imperial Eagles all over Europe.  On the mainland, Orso only saw his father at rare intervals, and it was not until 1815 that he found himself in the regiment he commanded.  But the colonel, who was an inflexible disciplinarian, treated his son just like any other sub-lieutenant—­in other words, with great severity.  Orso’s memories of him were of two kinds:  He recollected him, at Pietranera, as the father who would trust him with his sword, and would let him fire off his gun when he came in from a shooting expedition, or who made him sit down, for the first time, tiny urchin as he was, at the family dinner-table.  Then he remembered the Colonel della Rebbia who would put him under arrest for some blunder, and who never called him anything but Lieutenant della Rebbia.

“Lieutenant della Rebbia, you are not in your right place on parade.  You will be confined to barracks three days.”

“Your skirmishers are five yards too far from your main body—­five days in barracks.”

“It is five minutes past noon, and you are still in your forage-cap—­a week in barracks.”

Only once, at Quatre-Bras, he had said to him, “Well done, Orso!  But be cautious!”

But, after all, these later memories were not connected in his mind with Pietranera.  The sight of the places so familiar to him in his childish days, of the furniture he had seen used by his mother, to whom he had been fondly attached, filled his soul with a host of tender and painful emotions.  Then the gloomy future that lay before him, the vague anxiety he felt about his sister, and, above all other things, the thought that Miss Nevil was coming to his house, which now struck him as being so small, so poor, so unsuited to a person accustomed to luxury—­the idea that she might possibly despise it—­all these feelings made his brain a chaos, and filled him with a sense of deep discouragement.

At supper he sat in the great oaken chair, blackened with age, in which his father had always presided at the head of the family table, and he smiled when he saw that Colomba hesitated to sit down with him.  But he was grateful to her for her silence during the meal, and for her speedy retirement afterward.  For he felt he was too deeply moved to be able to resist the attack she was no doubt preparing to make upon him.  Colomba, however, was dealing warily with him, and meant to give him time to collect himself.