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Updated: June 5, 2025
The sights he saw there, the men he met there, were among those things which the villagers said the abbe knew, but of which he never spoke. During the stirring events of August and September the priest at Olmeta, and Colonel Gilbert at Bastia, watched each, in his individual way, the effect of the news upon a very sensitive populace.
"You have seen me on the road often enough," said the man, "and I have seen you, Monsieur le Colonel, riding over to the Casa Perucca." "Of course." "You know Perucca's agent, Pietro Andrei?" "Yes." "He was shot in the back on the Olmeta road this afternoon." Colonel Gilbert gave a slight start. "Is that so?" he said at length, quietly, after a pause.
The empire is tottering to its fall, and the news that I have in secret will be known all over Corsica to-morrow. Who knows? the island may flare up like a heap of bracken, and no one bearing a French name, or known to have French sympathies, will be safe. You know how you yourself are regarded in Olmeta. It is foolhardy to venture here this evening." Denise shrugged her shoulders.
It is the Abbe Susini of Olmeta who has told me this. He it was who told me of your well, I can only call it your misfortune, mademoiselle. For there is assuredly a curse upon Corsica as there is upon Ireland. It cannot govern itself, and no other can govern it.
"As I remember, there is a track below which branches off to the right, towards Nonza. It will take us wide of Olmeta and we can strike down into the lowland somewhere between the two.
Even the tops of the great pines were hidden in a thin mist. Denise got down and rang the bell. After a long pause the door was opened by a woman in black, with a black silk handkerchief over her head, who looked gravely at them. "I am Denise Lange," said the girl. "And I," said the woman, stepping back to admit them, "am the widow of Pietro Andrei, who was shot at Olmeta."
The air of houses choked him, as sooner or later it seems to choke sailors and wanderers who have known what it is to be in the open all night, sleeping or waking beneath the stars, not by accident as an adventure, but by habit. Then the abbe would disappear for days together from Olmeta, and vanish into that mystic, silent, prowling world of the macquis.
"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.
The elections were conducted more honestly than had ever been before, and the Continental newspapers spoke hopefully of the dawn of civilization showing itself among a people who have ever been lawless, have ever loved war better than peace. "But it is a false dawn," said the Abbe Susini of Olmeta, himself an insatiable reader of newspapers, a keen and ardent politician.
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.
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