The Isle of Unrest | Page 3

was a comparatively young man. He was
looking through the olives towards the south.
"It is the women," he said, and his face suddenly hardened. He was
impulsive, it appeared--quick to feel for others, fiery in his anger, hasty
in his judgment.
From the direction in which he and the bystanders looked, came the
hum of many voices, and the high, incessant shrieks of one who
seemed demented. Presently a confused procession appeared from the
direction of the south, hurrying through the narrow street now called

the Rue Carnot. It was headed by a woman, who led a little child,
running and stumbling as he ran. At her heels a number of women
hurried, confusedly shouting, moaning, and wailing. The men stood
waiting for them in dead silence--a characteristic scene. The leading
woman seemed to be superior to her neighbours, for she wore a black
silk handkerchief on her head instead of a white or coloured cotton. It is
almost a mantilla, and marks as clear a social distinction in Corsica as
does that head-dress in Spain. She dragged at the child, and scarce
turned her head when he fell and scrambled as best he could to his feet.
He laughed and crowed with delight, remembering last year's carnival
with that startling, photographic memory of early childhood which
never forgets.
At every few steps the woman gave a shriek as if she were suffering
some intermittent agony which caught her at regular intervals. At the
sight of the crowd she gave a quick cry of despair, and ran forward,
leaving her child sprawling on the road. She knelt by the dead man's
side with shriek after shriek, and seemed to lose all control over herself,
for she gave way to those strange gestures of despair of which many
read in novels and a few in the Scriptures, and which come by instinct
to those who have no reading at all. She dragged the handkerchief from
her head, and threw it over her face. She beat her breast. She beat the
very ground with her clenched hands. Her little boy, having gathered
his belongings together and dusted his cotton frock, now came forward,
and stood watching her with his fingers at his mouth. He took it to be a
game which he did not understand; as indeed it was--the game of life.
The priest scratched his chin with his forefinger, which was probably a
habit with him when puzzled, and stood looking down out of the corner
of his eyes at the ground.
It was he, however, who moved first, and, stooping, loosed the
clenched fingers round the gun. It was a double-barrelled gun, at full
cock, and every man in the little crowd assembled carried one like it.
To this day, if one meets a man, even in the streets of Corte or Ajaccio,
who carries no gun, it may be presumed that it is only because he pins
greater faith on a revolver.

Neither hammer had fallen, and the abbé gave a little nod. It was, it
seemed, the usual thing to make quite sure before shooting, so that
there might be no unnecessary waste of powder or risk of reprisal. The
woman looked at the gun, too, and knew the meaning of the raised
hammers.
She leapt to her feet, and looked round at the sullen faces.
"And some of you know who did it," she said; "and you will help the
murderer when he goes to the macquis, and take him food, and tell him
when the gendarmes are hunting him."
She waved her hand fiercely towards the mountains, which loomed,
range behind range, dark and forbidding to the south, towards Calvi
and Corte. But the men only shrugged their shoulders; for the forest
and the mountain brushwood were no longer the refuge they used to be
in this the last year of the iron rule of Napoleon III, who, whether he
possessed or not the Corsican blood that his foes deny him, knew, at all
events, how to rule Corsica better than any man before or since.
"No, no," said the priest, soothingly. "Those days are gone. He will be
taken, and justice will be done."
But he spoke without conviction, almost as if he had no faith in this
vaunted regeneration of a people whose history is a story of endless
strife--as if he could see with a prophetic eye thirty years into the future,
down to the present day, when the last state of that land is worse than
the first.
"Justice!" cried the woman. "There is no justice in Corsica! What had
Pietro done that he should lie there? Only his duty--only that for which
he was paid. He was the Perucca's agent, and because he made the
idlers pay their rent, they threatened him.