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THE ISLE OF UNREST
By Henry Seton Merriman
TO LUCASTA
GOING TO THE WARS
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast, and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.
True: a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much
Lov'd I not honour more.
RICHARD LOVELACE.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE MOVING FINGER
II. CHEZ CLÉMENT
III. A BY-PATH
IV. A TOSS-UP
V. IN THE RUE DU CHERCHE-MIDI
VI. NEIGHBOURS
VII. JOURNEY'S END
VIII. AT VASSELOT
IX. THE PROMISED LAND
X. THUS FAR
XI. BY SURPRISE
XII. A SUMMONS
XIII. WAR
XIV. GOSSIP
XV. WAR
XVI. A MASTERFUL MAN
XVII. WITHOUT DRUM OR TRUMPET
XVIII. A WOMAN OF ACTION
XIX. THE SEARCH
XX. WOUNDED
XXI. FOR FRANCE
XXII. IN THE MACQUIS
XXIII. AN UNDERSTANDING
XXIV. “CE QUE FEMME VEUT”
XXV. ON THE GREAT ROAD
XXVI. THE END OF THE JOURNEY
XXVII. THE ABBÉ'S SALAD
XXVIII. GOLD
XXIX. A BALANCED ACCOUNT
XXX. THE BEGINNING AND THE END
THE ISLE OF UNREST
CHAPTER I.
THE MOVING FINGER.
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
The afternoon sun was lowering towards a heavy bank of clouds hanging
still and sullen over the Mediterranean. A mistral was blowing. The last
yellow rays shone fiercely upon the towering coast of Corsica, and the
windows of the village of Olmeta glittered like gold.
There are two Olmetas in Corsica, both in the north, both on the west
coast, both perched high like an eagle's nest, both looking down upon
those lashed waters of the Mediterranean, which are not the waters that
poets sing of, for they are as often white as they are blue; they are
seldom glassy except in the height of summer and sailors tell that they
are as treacherous as any waters of the earth. Neither aneroid nor
weather-wisdom may, as a matter of fact, tell when a mistral will arise,
how it will blow, how veer, how drop and rise, and drop again. For it
will blow one day beneath a cloudless sky, lashing the whole sea white
like milk, and blow harder to-morrow under racing clouds.
The great chestnut trees in and around Olmeta groaned and strained in the
grip of their lifelong foe. The small door, the tiny windows, of every
house were rigorously closed. The whole place had a wind-swept air
despite the heavy foliage. Even the roads, and notably the broad “Place,”
had been swept clean and dustless. And in the middle of the “Place,”
between the fountain and the church steps, a man lay dead upon his face.
It is as well to state here, once for all, that we are dealing with
Olmeta-di-Tuda, and not that other Olmeta--the virtuous, di Capocorso, in
fact, which would shudder at the thought of a dead man lying on its
“Place,” before the windows of the very Mairie, under the shadow of the
church. For Cap Corse is the good boy of Corsica, where men think
sorrowfully of the wilder communes to the south, and raise their eyebrows
at the very mention of Corte and Sartene--where, at all events, the women
have for husbands, men--and not degenerate Pisan vine-snippers.
It was not so long ago either. For the man might have been alive to-day,
though he would have been old and bent no doubt; for he was a thick-set
man, and must have been strong. He had, indeed, carried his lead up from
the road that runs by the Guadelle river. Was he not to be traced all the
way up the short cut through the olive terraces by one bloody footprint
at regular intervals? You could track his passage across the “Place,”
towards the fountain of which he had fallen short like a poisoned rat
that tries to reach water and fails.
He lay quite alone, still grasping the gun which he had never laid aside
since boyhood. No one went to him; no one had attempted to help him. He
lay as he had fallen, with a thin stream of blood running slowly from one
trouser-leg. For this was Corsican work--that is to say, dirty work--from
behind a rock, in the back, at close range, without warning or mercy, as
honest men would be ashamed to shoot the merest beast of the forest. It
was as likely as not a charge of buck-shot low down in the body, leaving
the rest to hemorrhage or gangrene.
All Olmeta knew of it, and every man took care that it should be no
business of his. Several had approached, pipe in mouth, and looked at the
dead man without comment; but all had gone away again, idly,
indifferently. For in this the most beautiful of the islands, human life
is held cheaper than in any land of Europe.
Some one, it was understood, had gone to tell the gendarmes down at St.
Florent. There was no need to send and tell his wife--half a dozen women
were racing through the olive groves to get the first taste of that.
Perhaps some one had gone towards Oletta to meet the Abbé Susini, whose
business in a measure this must be.
The sun suddenly dipped behind the heavy bank of clouds and the mountains
darkened. Although it lies in the very centre of the Mediterranean,
Corsica is a gloomy land, and the summits of her high mountains are more
often covered than clear. It is a land of silence and brooding quiet. The
women are seldom gay; the men, in their heavy clothes of dark corduroy,
have little to say for themselves. Some of them were standing now in the
shadow of the great trees, smoking their pipes in silence, and looking
with a studied indifference at nothing. Each was prepared to swear before
a jury at the Bastia assizes that he knew nothing of the “accident,” as
it is here called, to Pietro Andrei, and had not seen him crawl up to
Olmeta to die. Indeed, Pietro Andrei's death seemed to be nobody's
business, though we are told that not so much as a sparrow may fall
unheeded.
The Abbé Susini was coming now--a little fiery man, with the walk of one
who was slightly bow-legged, though his cassock naturally concealed this
defect. He was small and not too broad, with a narrow face and clean,
straight features--something of the Spaniard, something of the Greek,
nothing Italian, nothing French. In a word, this was a Corsican, which is
to say that he was different from any other European race, and would, as
sure as there is corn in Egypt, be overbearing, masterful, impossible. He
was, of course, clean shaven, as brown as old oak, with little flashing
black eyes. His cassock was a good one, and his hat, though dusty,
shapely and new. But his whole bearing threw, as it were, into the
observer's face the suggestion that the habit does not make the priest.
He came forward without undue haste, and displayed little surprise and no
horror.
“Quite like old times,” he said to himself, remembering the days of Louis
Philippe. He knelt down beside the dead man, and perhaps the attitude
reminded him of his calling; for he fell to praying, and made the gesture
of the cross over Andrei's head. Then suddenly he leapt to his feet, and
shook his lean fist out towards the valley and St. Florent, as if he knew
whence this trouble came.
“Provided they would keep their work in their own commune,” he cried,
“instead of bringing disgrace on a parish that has not had the gendarmes
this--this--”
“Three days,” added one of the bystanders, who had drawn near. And he
said it with a certain pride, as of one well pleased to belong to a
virtuous community.
But the priest was not listening. He had already turned aside in his
quick, jerky way; for he 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. 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.