The Isle of Unrest | Page 4

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 abb�� 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 Abb�� Susini alone at the foot of the church steps.
CHAPTER II.
CHEZ CL��MENT.
"Comme on est heureux quand on sait ce qu'on veut!"
It was the dinner hour at the Hotel Cl��ment 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 "Cl��ment" 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 Cl��ment, or, to be more correct, one is "chez Cl��ment" on the first floor.
"You stay with Cl��ment," will be the natural remark of any on board the Marseilles or Leghorn steamer, on being told that the traveller disembarks at Bastia.
"We shall meet to-night chez Cl��ment," the officers say to each other on leaving the parade ground at four o'clock.
"D��jeuner chez Cl��ment," is the usual ending to a notice of a marriage, or a first communion, in the Petit Bastiais, that greatest