his creed and his sympathy could suggest to him as having any possible
force in it to sway this wayward and sin-bound soul; but he knew that
his words were poured on her ear as uselessly as water on a stone
floor. She was in a manner grateful to him as her friend, in a manner
afraid of that vague majesty of some unknown power which he represented
to her; but she hated her husband, she adored her lover;--he could
not stir her from those two extremes of passion. He left her with
apprehension and a pained sense of his own impotence. She promised
him that she would provoke Tassilo no more that night, and this poor
promise was all that he could wring from her. It was late when he left
the mill-house. He feared Candida would be alarmed at his unusual
absence; and hastened, with trouble on his soul, towards the village,
lying white and lonely underneath the midsummer moon. He had so little
influence, so slender a power to persuade or warn, to counsel or
command; he felt afraid that he was unworthy of his calling.
'I should have been better in the cloister,' he thought sadly; 'I have
not the key to human hearts.'
He went on through a starry world of fire-flies, making luminous
the cut corn, the long grass, the high hedges, and, entering his
presbytery, crept noiselessly up the stairs to his chamber, thankful
that the voice of his housekeeper did not cry to him out of the
darkness to know why he had so long tarried. He slept little that
night, and was up, as was his wont, by daybreak.
It was still dark when the church bell was clanging above his head for
the first office.
It was the day of Peter and of Paul. Few people came to the early mass;
some peasants who wanted to have the rest of the day clear; some women,
thrifty housewives who were up betimes; Candida herself; no others.
The lovely morning light streamed in, cool and roseate; there were a
few lilies and roses on the altar; some red draperies floated in the
doorway; the nightingales in the wild-rose hedge sang all the while,
their sweet voices crossing the monotonous Latin recitatives. The mass
was just over, when into the church from without there arose a strange
sound, shrill and yet hoarse, inarticulate and yet uproarious; it
came from the throats of many people, all screaming, and shouting, and
talking, and swearing together. The peasants and the women, who were on
their knees, scrambled to their feet, and rushed to the door, thinking
the earth had opened and the houses were falling. Gesualdo came down
from the altar and strove to calm them, but they did not heed him, and
he followed them despite himself. The whole village seemed out--man,
woman, and child--the nightingales grew dumb under their outcry.
'What is it?' asked Gesualdo.
Several voices shouted back to him, 'Tasso Tassilo has been murdered!'
'Ah!'
Gesualdo gave a low cry, and leaned against the stem of a cypress tree
to save himself from falling. What use had been his words that night?
The murdered man had been found lying under the canes on the wayside
not a rood from the church. A dog smelling at it had caused the body
to be sought out and discovered. He had been dead but a few hours;
apparently killed by a knife, thrust under his left shoulder, which
had struck straight under his heart. The agitation in the people was
great; the uproar deafening. Someone had sent for the carabineers, but
their nearest picket was two miles off, and they had not yet arrived.
The dead man still lay where he had fallen; everyone was afraid to
touch him.
'Does his wife know?' said Don Gesualdo, in a strange, hoarse voice.
'His wife will not grieve,' said a man in the crowd, and there was a
laugh, subdued by awe, and the presence of death and of the priest.
The vicar, with a strong shudder of disgust, held up his hand in horror
and reproof, then bent over the dead body where it lay amongst the
reeds.
'Bring him to the sacristy,' he said, to the men nearest him. 'He must
not lie there like a beast, unclean, by the roadside; go, fetch a
hurdle, a sheet, anything.'
But no one of them would stir.
'If we touch him they will take us up for murdering him,' they muttered
as one man.
'Cowards! Stand off; I will carry him indoors,' said the priest.
'You are in full canonicals!' cried Candida, twitching at his sleeve.
But Don Gesualdo did not heed her. He was brushing off with a tender
hand the flies which had begun to buzz about the dead man's mouth.
The flies might have stung and eaten him all the day through for what
anyone of the little crowd would have cared; they would not have
stretched a hand even to drag him into the shade.
Don Gesualdo was a weakly man; he had always fasted long and often, and
had never been strong from his birth; but indignation, compassion, and
horror for the moment lent him a strength not his own. He stooped down
and raised the dead body in his arms, and, staggering under his burden,
he bore it the few roods which separated the place where it had fallen
from the church and the vicar's house.
The people looked on open-mouthed with wonder and awe. 'It is against
the law,' they muttered, but they did not offer active opposition. The
priest, unmolested, save for the cries of the old housekeeper, carried
his load into his own house and laid it reverently down on the couch
which stood in the sacristy. He was exhausted with the great strain and
effort; his limbs shook under him, the sweat poured off his face, the
white silk and golden embroideries of his cope and stole were stained
with the clotted blood which had fallen from the wound in the dead
man's back. He did not heed it, nor did he hear the cries of Candida
mourning the disfigured vestments, nor the loud chattering of the crowd
thrusting itself into the sacristy. He stood looking down on the poor,
dusty, stiffening corpse before him with blind eyes and thinking in
silent terror, 'Is it her work?'
In his own soul he had no doubt.
Candida plucked once more at his robes.
'The vestments, the vestments! You will ruin them; take them off--'
He put her from him with a gesture of dignity which she had never seen
in him, and motioned the throng back towards the open door.
'I will watch with him till the guards come,' he said; 'go, send his
wife hither.'
Then he scattered holy water on the dead body, and kneeled down beside
it and prayed.
The crowd thought that he acted strangely. Why was he so still and
cold, and why did he seem so stunned and stricken? If he had screamed
and raved, and run hither and thither purposelessly, and let the corpse
lie where it was in the canes, he would have acted naturally in their
estimation. They hung about the doorways, half afraid, half angered;
some of them went to the mill-house, eager to have the honour of being
the first bearer of such news.
No one was sorry for the dead man, except some few who were in his
debt, and knew that now they would be obliged to pay, with heavy
interest, what they owed to his successors.
With the grim pathos and dignity which death imparts to the commonest
creature, the murdered man lay on the bench of the sacristy, amidst the
hubbub and the uproar of the crowding people; he and the priest the
only mute creatures in the place.
Don Gesualdo kneeled by the dead man in his blood-stained, sand-stained
canonicals; he was praying with all the soul there was in him, not for
the dead man, but the living woman.
The morning broadened into the warmth of day. He rose from his knees,
and bade his sacristan bring linen, and spread it over the corpse to
cheat the flies and the gnats of their ghastly repast. No men of law
came. The messengers returned. The picket-house had been closed at dawn
and the carabineers were away. There was nothing to be done but to
wait. The villagers stood or sat about in the paved court, and in the
road under the cypresses. They seldom had such an event as this in the
dulness of their lives. They brought hunches of bread and ate as they
discoursed of it.
'Will you not break your fast?' said Candida to Don Gesualdo. 'You will
not bring him to life by starving yourself.'
He made a sign of refusal.
His mouth was parched, his throat felt closed; he was straining his
eyes for the first sight of Generosa on the white road. 'If she were
guilty she would never come,' he thought, 'to look on the dead man.'
Soon he saw her coming, with swift feet and flying skirts and bare
head, through the boles of the cypresses. She was livid; her unbound
hair was streaming behind her.
She had passed a feverish night, locking her door against her husband,
and spending the whole weary hours at the casement where she could
see the old grey villa where her lover dwelt, standing out against the
moonlight amongst its ilex and olive trees. She had had no sense of the
beauty of the night; she had been only concerned by the fret and fever
of a first love and of a guilty passion.
She was not callous at heart, though wholly untrained and undisciplined
in character, and her conscience told her that she gave a bad return
to a man who had honestly and generously adored her, who had been
lavish to her poverty out of his riches, and had never been unkind
until a natural and justified jealousy had embittered the whole
current of his life. She held the offence of infidelity lightly, yet
her candour compelled her to feel that she was returning evil for
good, and repaying in a base manner an old man's unwise but generous
affection. She would have hesitated at nothing that could have united
her life to her lover; yet, in the corner of her soul she was vaguely
conscious that there was a degree of unfairness and baseness in
setting their youth and their ardour to hoodwink and betray a feeble
and aged creature like Tasso Tassilo. She hated him fiercely; he was
her jailer, her tyrant, her keeper. She detested the sound of his
slow step, of his croaking voice, of his harsh calls to his men and
his horses and mules; the sight of his withered features, flushed and
hot with restless, jealous pains, was at once absurd and loathsome
to her. Youth has no pity for such woes of age, and she often mocked
him openly and cruelly to his face. Still, she knew that she did him
wrong, and her conscience had been more stirred by the vicar's reproof
than she had acknowledged. She was in that wavering mood when a woman
may be saved from an unwise course by change, travel, movement, and
the distractions of the world; but there were none of these for the
miller's young wife. So long as her husband lived, so long would she
be doomed to live here, with the roar of the mill-wheels and the
foaming of the weir water in her ear, and before her eyes the same
thickets of cane, the same fields with their maples and vines, the same
white, dusty road winding away beyond the poplars, and with nothing to
distract her thoughts, or lull her mind away from its idolatry of her
fair-haired lover at the old grey palace on the hill above her home.
She had spent the whole night gazing at the place where he lived. He
was not even there at that moment; he had gone away for two days to a
grain fair in the town of Vendramino, but she recalled with ecstasy
their meetings by the side of the low green river, their hours in the
wild flowering gardens of the palace, the lovely evenings when she had
stolen out to see him come through the maize and canes, the fire-flies
all alight about his footsteps. Sleepless but languid, weary and yet
restless, she had thrown herself on her bed without taking off her
clothes, and in the dark, as the bells for the first mass had rung over
the shadowy fields, she had, for the first time, fallen into a heavy
sleep, haunted by dreams of her lover, which made her stretch her arms
to him in the empty air, and murmur sleeping wild and tender words.
She had been still on her bed, when the men of the mill had roused her,
beating at the chamber door and crying to her:
'Generosa, Generosa, get up! The master is murdered, and lying dead at
the church!'
She had been lying dreaming of Falko, and feeling in memory his kisses
on her mouth, when those screams had come through the stillness of the
early day, breaking through the music of the blackbirds piping in the
cherry boughs outside her windows.
She had sprung from off her bed; she had huddled on some decenter
clothing, and, bursting through the detaining hands of the henchmen and
neighbours, had fled as fast as her trembling limbs could bear her to
the church.
'Is it true? Is it true?' she cried, with white lips, to Gesualdo.
He looked at her with a long, inquiring regard; then, without a word,
he drew the linen off the dead face of her husband and pointed to it.
She, strong as a colt, and full of life as a young tree, fell headlong
on the stone floor in a dead swoon.
The people gathered about the doorway and watched her suspiciously and
without compassion. There was no one there who did not believe her to
be the murderess. No one except Don Gesualdo. In that one moment when
he had looked into her eyes, he had felt that she was guiltless. He
called Candida to her and left her, and closed the door on the curious,
cruel, staring eyes of the throng without.
The people murmured. What title had he more than they to command and
direct in this matter? The murder was a precious feast to them; why
should he defraud them of their rights?
'He knows she is guilty,' they muttered, 'and he wants to screen her
and give her time to recover herself and to arrange what story she
shall tell.'
In a later time they remembered against the young vicar all this which
he did now.
Soon there came the sound of horses' feet on the road, and the jingling
of chains and scabbards stirred the morning air; the carabineers had
arrived. Then came also the syndic and petty officers of the larger
village of Sant' Arturo, where the Communal Municipality in which Marca
was enrolled had its seat of justice, its tax offices and its schools.
There were a great noise and stir, grinding of wheels and shouting
of orders, vast clouds of dust and ceaseless din of voices, loud
bickerings of conflicting authorities at war with one another, and
rabid inquisitiveness and greedy excitement on all sides.
The feast of SS. Peter and Paul had been a day of disaster and
disorder, but to the good people of Marca both these were sweet. They
had something to talk of from dawn till dark, and the blacker the
tragedy the merrier wagged the tongues. The soul of their vicar alone
was sick within him. Since he had seen the astonished, horrified eyes
of the woman Generosa, he had never once doubted her, but he felt that
her guilt must seem clear as the noonday to all others. Her disputes
with her husband, and her passion for Falko Melegari, were facts known
to all the village, and who else had any interest in his death? The
whole of Marca pronounced as with one voice against her; the women had
always hated her for her superior beauty, and the men had always borne
her a grudge for her saucy disdain of them, and that way of bearing
herself as though a beggar from Bocca d'Arno were a queen.
'Neighbours put up with her pride while she was on the sunny side of
the street,' said Candida, with grim satisfaction, 'but now she is in
the shade they'll fling the stones fast enough,' and she was ready to
fling her own stone. Generosa had always seemed an impudent jade to
her, coming and talking with Don Gesualdo, as she did, at all hours,
and as though the church and the sacristy were open bazaars!
How that day passed, and how he bore himself through all its functions,
he never knew. It was the dead of night, when he, still dressed, and
unable even to think calmly, clasping his crucifix in his hands, and
pacing to and fro his narrow chamber with restless and uneven steps,
heard his name called by the voice of a man in great agitation, and,
looking out of his casement, saw Falko Melegari on his grey horse,
which was covered with foam and sweating as from a hard gallop.
'Is it true?' he cried, a score of times.
'Yes, it is all true,' said Gesualdo. His voice was stern and cold; he
could not tell what share this man might not have had in the crime.
'But she is innocent as that bird in the air,' screamed her lover,
pointing to a scops owl which was sailing above the cypresses.
Don Gesualdo bowed his head and spread out his hands, palm downwards,
in a gesture, meaning hopeless doubt.
'I was away at dark into the town to buy cattle,' said the steward,
with sobs in his throat. 'I rode out by the opposite road; I knew
nought of it. Oh, my God, why was I not here? They should not have
taken her without it costing them hard.'
'You would have done her no good,' said Don Gesualdo, coldly. 'You have
done her harm enough already,' he added, after a pause.
Falko did not resent the words; the tears were falling like rain down
his cheeks, his hands were clenched on his saddle-bow, the horse
stretched its foam-flecked neck unheeded.
'Who did it? Who could do it? He had many enemies. He was a hard man,'
he muttered.
Don Gesualdo gave a gesture of hopeless doubt and ignorance. He looked
down on the lover's handsome face and head in the moonlight. There was
a strange expression in his own eyes.
'Curse you for a cold-hearted priest,' thought the young steward, with
bitterness. Then he wheeled his horse sharply round, and, without any
other word, rode off towards his home in the glistening white light, to
stable his weary horse, and to saddle another to ride into the larger
village of Sant' Arturo. It was past midnight; he could do no good; he
could see no one; but it was a relief to him to be in movement. He felt
that it would choke him to sit and sup, and sleep, and smoke as usual
in his quiet house amongst the magnolias and the myrtles, whilst the
love of his life lay alone in her misery.
All gladness, which would at any natural death of Tasso Tassilo's
have filled his soul, was quenched in the darkness of horror in which
her fate was snatched from him and plunged into the mystery and the
blackness of imputed crime.
He never actually suspected her for a moment; but he knew that others
would, no doubt, do more than suspect.
'Perhaps the brute killed himself,' he thought, 'that the blame of the
crime might lie on her and part her from me.'
Then he knew that such a thought was absurd. Tasso Tassilo had loved
his life, loved his mill, and his money, and his petty power, and
his possession of his beautiful wife; and besides, what man could
stab himself from behind between the shoulders? It was just the blow
that a strong yet timid woman would give. As he walked to and fro
on the old terrace, whilst they saddled the fresh horse, he felt a
sickening shudder run through him. He did not suspect her. No, not for
an instant. And yet there was a dim, unutterable horror upon him which
veiled the remembered beauty of her face.
The passing of the days which came after this feast of the two apostles
was full of an unspeakable horror to him, and in the brief space of
them he grew haggard, hollow-cheeked, almost aged, despite his youth.
The dread formalities and tyrannies of law seized on the quiet village,
and tortured every soul in it; everyone who had seen or heard or known
aught of the dead man was questioned, tormented, harangued, examined,
suspected. Don Gesualdo himself was made subject to a searching and
oft-repeated interrogation, and severely reproved that he had not let
the body lie untouched until the arrival of the officers of justice.
He told the exact truth as far as he knew it, but when questioned
as to the relations of the murdered man and his wife, he hesitated,
prevaricated, contradicted himself, and gave the impression to the
judicial authorities that he knew much more against the wife than
he would say. What he tried to do was to convey to others his own
passionate conviction of the innocence of Generosa, but he utterly
failed in doing this, and his very anxiety to defend her only created
an additional suspicion against her.
The issue of the preliminary investigation was, that the wife of Tasso
Tassilo, murdered on the morning of the day of SS. Peter and Paul, was
consigned to prison, to be 'detained as a precaution' under the lock
and key of the law, circumstantial evidence being held to be strongly
against her as the primary cause, if not the actual executant, of the
murder of her lord.
Everyone called from the village to speak of her, spoke against her,
with the exception of Falko Melegari, who was known to be her lover,
and whose testimony weighed not a straw; and Don Gesualdo, himself
a priest, indeed, but the examining judge was no friend of priests,
and would not have believed them on their oaths, whilst the strong
friendship for her and the nervous anxiety to shield her, displayed so
unwisely, though so sincerely by him, did her more harm than good, and
made his bias so visible, that his declarations were held valueless.
'You know I am innocent!' she cried to him, the day of her arrest; and
he answered her with the tears falling down his cheeks: 'I am sure of
it; I would die to prove it! For one moment I did doubt you--pardon
me--but only one. I am sure you are innocent as I am sure that the sun
hangs in the skies.'
But his unsupported belief availed nothing to secure that of others;
the dominant feeling amongst the people of Marca was against her, and
in face of that feeling and of the known jealousy of her which had
consumed the latter days of the dead man, the authorities deemed that
they could do no less than order her provisional arrest. Her very
beauty was a weapon turned against her. It seemed so natural to her
accusers that so lovely and so young a woman should have desired to
rid herself of a husband, old, ill-favoured, exacting and unloved.
In vain--utterly in vain--did Falko Melegari, black with rage and
beside himself with misery, swear by every saint in the calendar that
his relations with her had been hitherto absolutely innocent. No one
believed him.
'You are obliged to say that,' said the judge, with good-humoured
impatience.
'But, God in Heaven, why not, when it is true?' shouted Falko.
'It is always true when the _damo_ is a man of honour,' said the
ironical judge, with an incredulous, amused smile.
So, her only defenders utterly discredited, she paid the penalty of
being handsomer and grander than her neighbours, and was taken to the
town of Vendramino, and there left to lie in prison until such time as
the majesty of the law should be pleased to decide whether or no it
deemed her guilty of causing the death of her husband. The people of
Marca were content. They only could not see why the law should take
such a time to doubt and puzzle over a fact which to them all was as
clear as the weather-vane on their church tower.
'Who should have killed him if not she or her _damo_?' they asked, and
no one could answer.
So she was taken away by the men of justice, and Marca no more saw
her handsome head, with the silver pins in its coiled hair, leaning
out from the square mill windows, or her bright-coloured skirts going
light as the wind up the brown sides of the hills, and through the
yellow-blossomed gorse in the warm autumn air, to some trysting-place
under the topmost pines, where the wild pigeons dwelt in the boughs
above, and the black stoat ran through the bracken below.
The work of the mill went on the same, being directed by the brother of
Tassilo, who had always had a share in it, both of labour and profit.
The murder still served for food for people's tongues through vintage
and onward until the maize harvest and the olive-gathering. As the
nights grew long, and the days cold, it ceased to be the supreme theme
of interest in Marca; no one ever dreamed that there could be a doubt
of the absent woman's guilt, or said a good word for her; and no one
gave her any pity for wasting her youth and fretting her soul out in a
prison cell, though they were disposed to grant that what she had done
had been, after all, perhaps only natural, considering all things.
Her own family were too poor to travel to her help, indeed, only heard
of her misfortunes after many days, and then only by chance, through
a travelling hawker. They could do nothing for her, and did not try.
She had never sent them as much of her husband's money as they had
expected her to do, and now that she was in trouble she might get out
of it as she could, so they said. She had always cared for her earrings
and breastpins, never for them; she would see if her jewels would help
her now. When any member of a poor family marries into riches, the
desire to profit by her marriage is, if ungratified, quickly turned
into hatred of herself. Why should she have gone to eat stewed kid, and
fried lamb, and hare baked with fennel, when they had only a bit of
salt fish and an onion now and then?