had gone sixty miles away for a wife, and had brought her from Bocca
d'Arno to live at the mill on the small river, which was the sole water
which ran through the village of Marca.
Tasso Tassilo, going on business once to the sea coast, had chanced to
see that handsome face of hers, and had wooed and won her without great
difficulty; for her people were poor folk, living by carting sand, and
she herself was tired of her bare legs and face, her robust hunger,
which made her glad to eat the fruit off the cactus plants, and her
great beauty, which nobody ever saw except the seagulls, and carters,
and fishers, and cane-cutters, who were all as poor as she was herself.
Tasso Tassilo, in his own person, she hated; an ugly, dry, elderly man,
with his soul wrapped up in his flour-bags and his money-bags; but
he adored her, and let her spend as she chose on her attire and her
ornaments; and the mill-house was a pleasant place enough, with its
walls painted on the outside with scriptural subjects, and the willows
drooping over its eaves, and the young men and the mules loitering
about on the land side of it, and the peasants coming up with corn to
be ground whenever there had been rain in summer, and so water enough
in the river bed to turn the mill wheels. In drought, the stream was
low and its stones dry, and no work could be done by the grindstones.
There was then only water enough for the ducks to paddle in, and the
pretty teal to float in, which they would always do at sunrise unless
the miller let fly a charge of small shot amongst them from the
windows under the roof.
'Good evening, Don Gesualdo,' said the miller's wife now, in the midst
of the nightingale's song and the orange glow from the sunset.
Gesualdo rose with a smile. He was always glad to see her; she had
something about her for him of boyhood, of home, of the sea, and of
the careless days before he became a seminarist. He did not positively
regret that he had entered the priesthood, but he remembered the
earlier life wistfully, and with wonder that he could ever have been
that light-hearted lad who had run through the cane-brakes to plunge
into the rolling waters, with all the wide, gay, sunlit world of sea
and sky and river and shore before him, behind him, and above him.
'What is wrong, Generosa?' he asked her, seeing as he looked up that
her handsome face was clouded. Her days were not often tranquil; her
husband was jealous, and she gave him cause for jealousy. The mill
was a favourite resort of all young men for thirty miles around, and
unless Tasso Tassilo had ceased to grind corn he could not have shut
his doors to them.
'It is the old story, Don Gesualdo,' she answered, leaning against the
church porch. 'You know what Tasso is, and what a dog's life he leads
me.'
'You are not always prudent, my daughter,' said Gesualdo, with a faint
smile.
'Who could be always prudent at my years?' said the miller's young
wife. 'Tasso is a brute, and a fool too. One day he will drive me out
of myself; I tell him so.'
'That is not the way to make him better,' said Gesualdo. 'I am sorry
you do not see it. The man loves you, and he feels he is old, and he
knows that you do not care; that knowledge is always like a thorn in
his flesh; he feels you do not care.'
'How should he suppose that I care?' said Generosa, passionately. 'I
hated him always; he is as old as my father; he expects me to be shut
up like a nun; if he had his own way I should never stir out of the
house. Does one marry for that?'
'One should marry to do one's duty,' said Gesualdo, timidly; for he
felt the feebleness of his counsels and arguments against the force and
the warmth and the self-will of a woman, conscious of her beauty, and
her power, and her lovers, and moved by all the instincts of vanity and
passion.
'We had a terrible scene an hour ago,' said Generosa, passing over what
she did not choose to answer. 'It cost me much not to put a knife into
him. It was about Falko. There was nothing new, but he thought there
was. I fear he will do Falko mischief one day; he threatened it; it is
not the first time.'
'That is very grave,' said Gesualdo, growing paler as he heard. 'My
daughter, you are more in error than Tassilo. After all, he has his
rights. Why do you not send the young man away? He would obey you.'
'He would obey me in anything else, not in that,' said the woman, with
the little conscious smile of one who knows her own power. 'He would
not go away. Indeed, why should he go away? He has his employment here.
Why should he go away because Tasso is a jealous fool?'
'Is he such a fool?' said Gesualdo, and he raised his eyes suddenly and
looked straight into hers.
Generosa coloured through her warm, tanned skin. She was silent.
'It has not gone as far as you think,' she muttered, after a pause.
'But I will not be accused for nothing,' she added. 'Tasso shall have
what he thinks he has had. Why would he marry me? He knew I hated him.
We were all very poor down there by Bocca d'Arno, but we were gay and
happy. Why did he take me away?'
The tears started to her eyes and rolled down her hot cheeks. It was
the hundredth time that she had told her sorrows to Gesualdo, in the
confessional and out of it; it was an old story of which she never
tired of the telling. Her own people were far away by the seashore, and
she had no friends in Marca, for she was thought a 'foreigner,' not
being of that countryside, and the women were jealous of her beauty,
and of the idle life which she led in comparison to theirs, and of the
cared-for look of her person. Gesualdo seemed a countryman, and a
relative and a friend. She took all her woes to him. A priest was like
a woman, she thought; only a far safer confidant.
'You are ungrateful, my daughter,' he said, now, with an effort to be
severe in reprimand. 'You know that you were glad to marry so rich a
man as Tassilo. You know that your father and mother were glad, and you
yourself likewise. No doubt, the man is not all that you could wish,
but you owe him something; indeed, you owe him much. I speak to you now
out of my office, only as a friend. I would entreat you to send your
lover away. If not, there will be crime, perhaps bloodshed, and the
fault of all that may happen will be yours.'
She gave a gesture, which said that she cared nothing, whatever might
happen. She was in a headstrong and desperate mood. She had had a
violent quarrel with her husband, and she loved Falko Melegari, the
steward of the absent noble who owned the empty, half-ruined palace
which stood on the banks of the river. He was a fair and handsome young
man, with Lombard blood in him; tall, slender, vigorous, amorous and
light-hearted; the strongest of contrasts in all ways to Tasso Tassilo,
taciturn, feeble, sullen, and unlovely, and thrice the years of his
wife.
There was not more than a mile between the mill-house and the deserted
villa. Tassilo might as well have tried to arrest the sirocco, or the
sea winds when they blew, as prevent an intercourse so favoured and so
facilitated by circumstances. The steward had a million reasons in the
year to visit the mill, and when the miller insulted him and forbade
him his doors, the jealous husband had no power to prevent him from
fishing in the waters, from walking on the bank, from making signals
from the villa terraces, and appointments in the cane-brakes and the
vine-fields. Nothing could have broken off the intrigue except the
departure of one or other of the lovers from Marca.
But Falko Melegari would not go away from a place where his interests
and his passions both combined to hold him; and it never entered the
mind of the miller to take his wife elsewhere. He had dwelt at the mill
all the years of his life, and his forefathers for five generations
before him. To change their residence never occurs to such people as
these; they are fixed, like the cypress trees, in the ground, and dream
no more than they of new homes. Like the tree, they never change till
the heeder, Death, fells them.
Generosa continued to pour out her woes, leaning against the pillar of
the porch, and playing with a twig of pomegranate, whose buds were not
more scarlet than her own lips; and Gesualdo continued to press on her
his good counsels, knowing all the while that he might as well speak
to the swallows under the church eaves for any benefit that he could
effect. In sole answer to the arguments of Gesualdo, she retorted in
scornful words.
'You may find that duty is enough for you, because you are a saint,'
she added with less of reverence than of disdain, 'but I am no saint,
and I will not spend all my best days tied to the side of a sickly and
sullen old man.'
'You are wrong, my daughter,' said Gesualdo, sternly.
He coloured; he knew not why.
'I know nothing of these passions,' he added, with some embarrassment,
'but I know what duty is, and yours is clear.'
He did not know much of human nature, and of woman nature nothing;
yet he dimly comprehended that Generosa was now at that crisis of her
life when all the ardours of her youth, and all the delight in her
own power, combined to render her passionately rebellious against the
cruelties of her fate; when it was impossible to make duty look other
than hateful to her, and when the very peril and difficulty which
surrounded her love-story made it the sweeter and more irresistible to
her. She was of a passionate, ardent, careless, daring temperament, and
the dangers of the intrigue which she pursued had no terrors for her,
whilst the indifference which she had felt for years for her husband
had deepened of late into hatred.
'One is not a stick nor a stone, nor a beam of timber nor a block of
granite, that one should be able to live without love all one's days!'
she cried, with passion and contempt.
She threw the blossoms of pomegranate over the hedge; she gave him a
glance half-contemptuous and half-compassionate, and left the church
door.
'After all, what should he understand!' she thought. 'He is a saint,
but he is not a man.'
Gesualdo looked after her a moment as she went over the court-yard,
and between the stems of the cypresses out towards the open hill-side.
The sun had set; there was a rosy after-glow which bathed her elastic
figure in a carmine light; she had that beautiful walk which some
Italian women have who have never worn shoes in the first fifteen years
of their lives. The light shone on her dusky auburn hair, her gold
earrings, the slender column of her throat, her vigorous and voluptuous
form. Gesualdo looked after her, and a subtle warmth and pain passed
through him, bringing with it a sharp sense of guilt. He looked away
from her, and went within his church and prayed.
That night Falko Melegari had just alighted from the saddle of his good
grey horse, when he was told that the _Parocco_ of San Bartolo was
waiting to see him.
The villa had been famous and splendid in other days, but it formed
now only one of the many neglected possessions of a gay young noble,
called Ser Baldo by his dependants, who spent what little money he had
in pleasure-places out of Italy, seldom or never came near his estates,
and accepted, without investigation, all such statements of accounts as
his various men of business were disposed to send to him.
His steward lived on the ground floor of the great villa, in the
vast frescoed chambers, with their domed and gilded ceilings, their
sculptured cornices, their carved doors, their stately couches, with
the satin dropping in shreds, and the pale tapestries wearing away
with the moths and the mice at work in them. His narrow camp-bed, his
deal table and chairs, were sadly out of place in those once splendid
halls, but he did not think about it; he vaguely liked the space and
the ruined grandeur about him, and all the thoughts he had were given
to his love, Generosa, the wife of Tasso Tassilo. From the terraces of
the villa he could see the mill a mile further down the stream, and he
would pass half the short nights of the summer looking at the distant
lights in it.
He was only five-and-twenty, and he was passionately in love, with all
the increased ardour of a forbidden passion.
He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, was well made, and very tall. In
character he was neither better nor worse than most men of his age; but
as a steward he was tolerably honest, and as a lover he was thoroughly
sincere. He went with a quick step into the central hall to meet his
visitor. He supposed that the vicar had come about flowers for the
feast of SS. Peter and Paul, which was on the morrow. Though the villa
gardens were wholly neglected, they were still rich in flowers which
wanted no care--lilies, lavender, old-fashioned roses, oleanders red
and white, and magnolia trees.
'Good evening, Reverend Father, you do me honour,' he said, as he saw
Gesualdo. 'Is there anything that I can do for you? I am your humble
servant.'
Gesualdo looked at him curiously. He had never noticed the young man
before. He had seen him ride past; he had seen him at mass; he had
spoken to him of the feasts of the Church; but he had never noticed
him. Now he looked at him curiously as he answered, without any
preface whatever,----
'I am come to speak to you of Generosa Fè, the wife of Tasso Tassilo.'
The young steward coloured violently. He was astonished and silent.
'She loves you,' said Gesualdo, simply.
Falko Melegari made a gesture as though he implied that it was not his
place either to deny or to affirm.
'She loves you,' said Gesualdo again.
The young man had that fatuous smile which unconsciously expresses the
consciousness of conquest. But he was honest in his passion and ardent
in it.
'Not so much as I love her,' he said, rapturously, forgetful of his
hearer.
Gesualdo frowned.
'She is the wife of another man,' he said with reproof.
Falko Melegari shrugged his shoulders; that did not seem any reason
against it to him.
'How will it end?' said the priest. The lover smiled.
'These things always end in one way.'
Gesualdo winced, as though someone had wounded him.
'I am come to bid you go out of Marca,' he said simply.
The young man stared at him; then he laughed angrily.
'Reverend Vicar,' he said impatiently; 'you are the keeper of our
souls, no doubt; but not quite to such a point as that. Has Tassilo
sent you to me, or she?' he added, with a gleam of suspicion in his
eyes.
'No one has sent me.'
'Why then--'
'Because, if you do not go, there will be tragedy and misery. Tasso
Tassilo is not a man to make you welcome to his couch. I have known
Generosa since she was a little child; we were both born on the Bocca
d'Arno. She is of a warm nature, but not a deep one; and if you go away
she will forget. Tassilo is a rude man and a hard one; he gives her all
she has; he has many claims on her, for in his way he has been generous
and tender. You are a stranger; you can only ruin her life; you can
with ease find another stewardship far away in another province; why
will you not go? If you really loved her you would go.'
Falko laughed.
'Dear Don Gesualdo, you are a holy man, but you know nothing of love.'
Gesualdo winced a little again. It was the second time this had been
said to him this evening.
'Is it love,' he said, after a pause, 'to risk her murder by her
husband? I tell you Tassilo is not a man to take his dishonour quietly.'
'Who cares what Tassilo does?' said the young steward, petulantly. 'If
he touch a hair of her head I will make him die a thousand deaths.'
'All those are mere words,' said Gesualdo. 'You cannot mend one
crime by another, and you cannot protect a woman from her husband's
vengeance. There is only one way by which to save her from the danger
you have dragged her into. It is for you to go away.'
'I will go away when this house walks a mile,' said Falko, 'not before.
Go away!' he echoed, in wrath. 'What! run like a mongrel dog before
Tassilo's anger? What! leave her all alone to curse me as a faithless
coward? What! go away when all my life and my soul, and all the light
of my eyes is in Marca? Don Gesualdo, you are a good man, but you are
mad. You must pardon me if I speak roughly. Your words make me beside
myself.'
'Do you believe in no duty, then?'
'I believe in the duty of every honest lover!' said Falko, with
vehemence, 'and that duty is to do everything that the loved one
wishes. She is bound to a cur; she is unhappy; she has not even any
children to comfort her; she is like a beautiful flower shut up in a
cellar, and she loves me--me!--and you bid me go away! Don Gesualdo,
keep to your Church offices, and leave the loves of others alone. What
should you know of them? Forgive me, if I am rude. You are a holy man,
but you know nothing at all of men and women.'
'I do not know much,' said Gesualdo, meekly.
He was depressed and intimidated. He was sensible of his own utter
ignorance of the passions of life. This man, nigh his own age,
but so full of vigour, of ardour, of indignation, of pride in his
consciousness that he was beloved, and of resolve to stay where that
love was, be the cost what it would, daunted him with a sense of power
and of triumph such as he himself could not even comprehend, and yet
wistfully envied. It was sin, no doubt, he said to himself; and yet it
was life, it was strength, it was virility.
He had come to reprove, to censure, and to persuade into repentance
this headstrong lover, and he could only stand before him feeble and
oppressed, with a sense of his own ignorance and childishness. All the
stock, trite arguments which his religious belief supplied him seemed
to fall away and to be of no more use than empty husks of rotten nuts
before the urgency, the fervour, and the self-will of real life. This
man and woman loved each other, and they cared for no other fact than
this on earth or in heaven. He left the villa grounds in silence, with
only a gesture of salutation in farewell.
II
'Poor innocent, he meant well!' thought the steward, as he watched
the dark, slender form of the priest pass away through the vines and
mulberry trees. The young man did not greatly venerate the Church
himself, though he showed himself at mass and sent flowers for the
feast days because it was the custom to do so. He was, like most young
Italians who have had a smattering of education, very indifferent on
such matters, and inclined to ridicule. He left them for women and old
men. But there was something about his visitant which touched him; a
simplicity, an unworldliness, a sincerity which moved his respect; and
he knew in his secret heart that the _parocco_, as he called him, was
right enough in everything that he had said.
Don Gesualdo himself went on his solitary way, his buckled shoes
dragging wearily over the dusty grass of the wayside. He had done no
good, and he did not see what good he could do. He felt helpless
before the force and speed of an unknown and guilty passion, as he once
felt before a forest fire which he had seen in the Marches. All his
Church books gave him homilies enough on the sins of the flesh and the
temptings of the devil, but none of these helped him before the facts
of this lawless and godless love, which seemed to pass high above his
head like a whirlwind. He went on slowly and dully along the edge of
the river-bed; a sense of something which he had always missed, which
he would miss eternally, was with him.
It was now quite night. He liked to walk late at night. All things were
so peaceful, or at the least seemed so. You did not see the gashes in
the lopped trees, the scars in the burned hill-side, the wounds in the
mule's loins, the bloodshot eyes of the working ox, the goitered throat
of the child rolling in the dust. Night, kindly friend of dreams, cast
her soft veil over all woes, and made the very dust seem as a silvered
highway to the throne of a beneficent God.
He went now through the balmy air, the rustling canes, the low-hanging
boughs of the fruit-laden peach trees, and the sheaves of cut corn
leaning one up against another under the maples, or the walnut trunks.
He followed the course of the water, a shallow thread at this season,
glistening under the moon in its bed of shingle and sand. He passed the
mill-house perforce on his homeward way; he saw the place of the weir,
made visible even in the dark by the lanterns which swung on a cord
stretched from one bank to another, to entice any such fish as there
might still be in the shallows. The mill-walls stood down into the
water, a strong place built in olden days; the great black wheels were
now perforce at rest; the mules champed and chafed in their stalls,
inactive, like the mill; for the next three months there would be
nothing to do unless a storm came and brought a freshet from the hills.
The miller would have the more leisure to nurse his wrongs, thought Don
Gesualdo; and his heart was troubled. He had never met with these woes
of the passions; they oppressed and alarmed him.
As he passed the low mill windows, protected from thieves by their iron
gratings, he could see the interior, lighted as it was by the flame
of oil lamps, and through the open lattices he heard voices, raised
high in stormy quarrel, which seemed to smite the holy stillness of the
night like a blow. The figure of Generosa stood out against the light
which shone behind her. She was in a paroxysm of rage; her eyes flashed
like the lightnings of the hills, and her beautiful arms were tossed
above her head in impassioned imprecation. Tasso Tassilo seemed for the
moment to crouch beneath this rain of flame-like words; his face, on
which the light shone full, was deformed with malignant and impotent
fury, with covetous and jealous desire; there was no need to hear
her words to know that she was taunting him with her love for Falko
Melegari. Don Gesualdo was a weak man and physically timid, but here he
hesitated not one instant. He lifted the latch of the house door and
walked straightway into the mill kitchen.
'In the name of Christ, be silent!' he said to them, and made the sign
of the cross.
The torrent of words stopped on the lips of the young woman; the miller
scowled and shrank from the light, and was mute.
'Is this how you keep your vows to Heaven and to each other?' said
Gesualdo.
A flush of shame came over the face of the woman; the man drew his
hat farther over his eyes, and went out of the kitchen silently. The
victory had been easier than their monitor had expected. 'And yet of
what use was it?' he thought. They were silent out of respect for him.
As soon as the restraint of his presence should be removed they would
begin afresh. Unless he could change their souls it was of little avail
to bridle their lips for an hour.
There was a wild, chafing hatred on one side, and a tyrannical,
covetous, dissatisfied love on the other. Out of such discordant
elements what peace could come?
Gesualdo shut the wooden shutters of the windows that others should not
see, as he had seen, into the interior; then he strove to pacify his
old playmate, whose heaving breast and burning cheeks, and eyes which
scorched up in fire their own tears, spoke of a tempest lulled, not
spent. He spoke with all the wisdom with which study and the counsels
of the Fathers had supplied him, and with what was sweeter, and more
likely to be efficacious, a true and yearning wish to save her from
herself. She was altogether wrong, and he strove to make her see the
danger and the error of her ways. But he strove in vain. She had one of
those temperaments--reckless, vehement, pleasure-loving, ardent, and
profoundly selfish--which see only their own immediate gain, their own
immediate desires. When he tried to stir her conscience by speaking of
the danger she drew down on the head of the man she professed to love,
she almost laughed.
'He would be a poor creature,' she said proudly, 'if all danger would
not be dear to him for me!'
Don Gesualdo looked her full in the eyes.
'You know that this matter must end in the death of one man or of the
other. Do you mean that this troubles you not one whit?'
'It will not be my fault,' said Generosa, and he saw in her the woman's
lust of vanity which finds food for its pride in the blood shed for
her, as the tigress does, and even the gentle hind.