“Her coffin was covered with flowers, the church
was hung in white. There was a large crowd at
the funeral ceremony.
“Ah! well, if I had known—but you
never can know—I would have married that
girl, for she was infernally pretty.”
“And what became of the mother?”
“Oh! she shed a lot of tears over it. She
has only begun to receive visits again for the past
week.”
“And what explanation is given of the girl’s
death?”
“Oh! they pretended that it was an accident
caused by a new stove, the mechanism of which got
out of order. As a good many such accidents have
occurred, the thing seemed probable enough.”
The widow of Paolo Saverini lived alone with her son
in a poor little house on the outskirts of Bonifacio.
The town, built on an outjutting part of the mountain,
in places even overhanging the sea, looks across the
straits, full of sandbanks, towards the southernmost
coast of Sardinia. Beneath it, on the other side
and almost surrounding it, is a cleft in the cliff
like an immense corridor which serves as a harbor,
and along it the little Italian and Sardinian fishing
boats come by a circuitous route between precipitous
cliffs as far as the first houses, and every two weeks
the old, wheezy steamer which makes the trip to Ajaccio.
On the white mountain the houses, massed together,
makes an even whiter spot. They look like the
nests of wild birds, clinging to this peak, overlooking
this terrible passage, where vessels rarely venture.
The wind, which blows uninterruptedly, has swept bare
the forbidding coast; it drives through the narrow
straits and lays waste both sides. The pale streaks
of foam, clinging to the black rocks, whose countless
peaks rise up out of the water, look like bits of
rag floating and drifting on the surface of the sea.
The house of widow Saverini, clinging to the very
edge of the precipice, looks out, through its three
windows, over this wild and desolate picture.
She lived there alone, with her son Antonia and their
dog “Semillante,” a big, thin beast, with
a long rough coat, of the sheep-dog breed. The
young man took her with him when out hunting.
One night, after some kind of a quarrel, Antoine Saverini
was treacherously stabbed by Nicolas Ravolati, who
escaped the same evening to Sardinia.
When the old mother received the body of her child,
which the neighbors had brought back to her, she did
not cry, but she stayed there for a long time motionless,
watching him. Then, stretching her wrinkled hand
over the body, she promised him a vendetta. She
did not wish anybody near her, and she shut herself
up beside the body with the dog, which howled continuously,
standing at the foot of the bed, her head stretched
towards her master and her tail between her legs.
She did not move any more than did the mother, who,
now leaning over the body with a blank stare, was
weeping silently and watching it.
