For want of more exalted adversaries Dominic turned his audacity fertile in impious stratagems against the powers of the earth, as represented by the institution of Custom-houses and every mortal belonging thereto—­scribes, officers, and guardacostas afloat and ashore.  He was the very man for us, this modern and unlawful wanderer with his own legend of loves, dangers, and bloodshed.  He told us bits of it sometimes in measured, ironic tones.  He spoke Catalonian, the Italian of Corsica and the French of Provence with the same easy naturalness.  Dressed in shore-togs, a white starched shirt, black jacket, and round hat, as I took him once to see Dona Rita, he was extremely presentable.  He could make himself interesting by a tactful and rugged reserve set off by a grim, almost imperceptible, playfulness of tone and manner.

He had the physical assurance of strong-hearted men.  After half an hour’s interview in the dining-room, during which they got in touch with each other in an amazing way, Rita told us in her best grande dame manner:  “Mais il esi parfait, cet homme.”  He was perfect.  On board the Tremolino, wrapped up in a black caban, the picturesque cloak of Mediterranean seamen, with those massive moustaches and his remorseless eyes set off by the shadow of the deep hood, he looked piratical and monkish and darkly initiated into the most awful mysteries of the sea.

XLIII.

Anyway, he was perfect, as Dona Rita had declared.  The only thing unsatisfactory (and even inexplicable) about our Dominic was his nephew, Cesar.  It was startling to see a desolate expression of shame veil the remorseless audacity in the eyes of that man superior to all scruples and terrors.

“I would never have dared to bring him on board your balancelle,” he once apologized to me.  “But what am I to do?  His mother is dead, and my brother has gone into the bush.”

In this way I learned that our Dominic had a brother.  As to “going into the bush,” this only means that a man has done his duty successfully in the pursuit of a hereditary vendetta.  The feud which had existed for ages between the families of Cervoni and Brunaschi was so old that it seemed to have smouldered out at last.  One evening Pietro Brunaschi, after a laborious day amongst his olive-trees, sat on a chair against the wall of his house with a bowl of broth on his knees and a piece of bread in his hand.  Dominic’s brother, going home with a gun on his shoulder, found a sudden offence in this picture of content and rest so obviously calculated to awaken the feelings of hatred and revenge.  He and Pietro had never had any personal quarrel; but, as Dominic explained, “all our dead cried out to him.”  He shouted from behind a wall of stones, “O Pietro!  Behold what is coming!” And as the other looked up innocently he took aim at the forehead and squared the old vendetta account so neatly that, according to Dominic, the dead man continued to sit with the bowl of broth on his knees and the piece of bread in his hand.