The Isle of Unrest | Page 4

Because he put up fences,
they raised their guns to him. Because he stopped their thieving and
their lawlessness, they shoot him. He drove their cattle from the fields
because they were Perucca's fields, and he was paid to watch his
master's interests. But Perucca they dare not touch, because his clan is
large, and would hunt the murderer down. If he was caught, the

Peruccas would make sure of the jury--ay! And of the judge at
Bastia--but Pietro is not of Corsica; he has no friends and no clan, so
justice is not for him."
She knelt down again as she spoke and laid her hand on her dead
husband's back, but she made no attempt to move him. For although
Pietro Andrei was an Italian, his wife was Corsican--a woman of
Bonifacio, that grim town on a rock so often besieged and never yet
taken by a fair fight. She had been brought up in, as it were, an
atmosphere of conventional lawlessness, and knew that it is well not to
touch a dead man till the gendarmes have seen him, but to send a child
or an old woman to the gendarmerie, and then to stand aloof and know
nothing; and feign stupidity; so that the officials, when they arrive, may
find the whole village at work in the fields or sitting in their homes,
while the dead, who can tell no tales, has suddenly few friends and no
enemies.
Then Andrei's widow rose slowly to her feet. Her face was composed
now and set. She arranged the black silk handkerchief on her head, and
set her dress in order. She was suddenly calm and quiet. "But see," she
said, looking round into eyes that failed to meet her own, "in this
country each man must execute his own justice. It has always been so,
and it will be so, so long as there are any Corsicans left. And if there is
no man left, then the women must do it."
She tied her apron tighter, as if about to undertake some hard domestic
duty, and brushed the dust from her black dress.
"Come here," she said, turning to the child, and lapsing into the soft
dialect of the south and east--"come here, thou child of Pietro Andrei."
The child came forward. He was probably two years old, and
understood nothing that was passing.
"See here, you of Olmeta," she said composedly; and, stooping down,
she dipped her finger in the pool of blood that had collected in the dust.
"See here--and here."

As she spoke she hastily smeared the blood over the child's face and
dragged him away from the priest, who had stepped forward.
"No, no," he protested. "Those times are past."
"Past!" said the woman, with a flash of fury. "All the country knows
that your own mother did it to you at Sartene, where you come from."
The abbé made no answer, but, taking the child by the arm, dragged
him gently away from his mother. With his other hand he sought in his
pocket for a handkerchief. But he was a lone man, without a
housekeeper, and the handkerchief was missing. The child looked from
one to the other, laughing uncertainly, with his grimly decorated face.
Then the priest stooped, and with the skirt of his cassock wiped the
child's face.
"There," he said to the woman, "take him home, for I hear the
gendarmes coming."
Indeed, the trotting of horses and the clank of the long swinging sabres
could be heard on the road below the village, and one by one the
onlookers dropped away, leaving the Abbé Susini alone at the foot of
the church steps.
CHAPTER II.
CHEZ CLÉMENT.
"Comme on est heureux quand on sait ce qu'on veut!"
It was the dinner hour at the Hotel Clément at Bastia; and the event was
of greater importance than the outward appearance of the house would
seem to promise. For there is no promise at all about the house on the
left-hand side of Bastia's one street, the Boulevard du Palais, which
bears, as its only sign, a battered lamp with the word "Clément" printed
across it. The ground floor is merely a rope and hemp warehouse. A
small Corsican donkey, no bigger than a Newfoundland dog, lives in

the basement, and passes many of his waking hours in what may be
termed the entrance hall of the hotel, appearing to consider himself in
some sort a concierge. The upper floors of the huge Genoese house are
let out in large or small apartments to mysterious families, of which the
younger members are always to be met carrying jugs carefully up and
down the greasy, common staircase.
The first floor is the Hotel Clément, or, to be more correct, one is "chez
Clément"