once or twice, to visit her, the jailer standing by, but he had been
unable to do more than to weep with her and assure her of his own
perfect belief in her innocence. The change he found in her shocked him
so greatly that he could scarcely speak; and he thought to himself,
as he saw how aged and wasted and altered she was, 'If she lose her
beauty and grow old before her time, what avail will it be to her even
if they declare her innocent? Her gay lover will look at her no more.'
Falko Melegari loved her wildly, ardently, vehemently indeed; but Don
Gesualdo, with that acute penetration which sometimes supplies in
delicate natures that knowledge of the world which they lack, felt that
it was not a love which had any qualities in it to withstand the trials
of time or the loss of physical charms. Perchance, Generosa herself
felt as much, and the cruel consciousness of it hurt her more than her
prison bars.
III
The winter passed away, and with February the corn spread a green
carpet everywhere; the almond trees blossomed on the hill-sides, the
violets opened the ways for the anemones, and the willows budded beside
the water-mill. There were braying of bugles, twanging of lutes,
cracking of shots, drinking of wines on the farms and in the village as
a rustic celebration of carnival. Not much of it, for times are hard
and men's hearts heavy in these days, and the sunlit grace and airy
gaiety natural to it are things for ever dead in Italy, like the ilex
forests and the great gardens that have perished for ever and aye.
Lent came, with its church bells sounding in melancholy iteration over
the March fields, where the daffodils were blowing by millions and the
young priest of San Bartolo fasted and prayed and mortified his flesh
in every way that his creed allowed, and hoped by such miseries, pains
and penances to attain grace in heaven, if not on earth, for Generosa
in her misery. All through Lent he wearied the saints with incessant
supplication for her.
Day and night he racked his brain to discover any evidence as to who
the assassin had been. He never once doubted her; if the very apostles
of his Church had all descended on earth to witness against her, he
would have cried to them that she was innocent.
The sickening suspicions, the haunting, irrepressible doubts, which now
and then came over the mind of her lover as he walked to and fro by the
edge of the river at night, looking up at what had been the casement
of her chamber, did not assail for an instant the stronger faith of
Gesualdo, weak as he was in body, and, in some ways, weak in character.
The truth might remain in horrid mystery, in impenetrable darkness, for
ever; it would made no difference to him; he would be always convinced
that she had been innocent. Had he not known her when she was a little
barefooted child, coming flying through the shallow green pools and the
great yellow grasses and the sunny cane-brakes of Bocca d'Arno?
Most innocent, indeed, had been his relations with the wife of Tassilo,
but to him it seemed that the interest he had taken in her, the
pleasure he had felt in converse with her, had been criminal. There had
been times when his eyes, which should have only seen in her a soul to
save, had become aware of her mere bodily beauty, had dwelt on her with
an awakening of carnal admiration. It sufficed to make him guilty in
his own sight. This agony, which he felt for her, was the sympathy of a
personal affection. He knew it, and his consciousness of it flung him
at the feet of his crucifix in tortures of conscience.
He knew, too, that he had done her harm by the incoherence and the
reticence of his testimony, by the mere vehemence with which he had
unwisely striven to affirm an innocence which he had no power to
prove; even by that natural impulse of humanity which had moved him
to bring her husband's corpse under the roof of the church and close
the door upon the clamorous and staring throng who saw in the tragedy
but a pastime. He, more than any other, had helped to cast on her the
darkness of suspicion; he, more than any other, had helped to make
earthly peace and happiness for ever denied to her.
Even if they acquitted her in the house of law yonder, she would be
dishonoured for life. Even her lover, who loved her with all the
sensual, coarse ardour of a young man's uncontrolled desires, had
declared that he would be ashamed to walk beside her in broad day so
long as this slur of possible, if unproven, crime were on her. Don
Gesualdo mused on all these things until his sensitive soul began to
take alarm lest it were not a kind of sin to be so occupied with the
fate of one to the neglect and detriment of others. Candida saw him
growing thinner and more shadow-like every day with ever-increasing
anxiety. To fast, she knew, was needful above all for a priest in Lent,
but he did not touch what he might lawfully have eaten; the new-laid
eggs and the crisp lettuces of her providing failed to tempt him, and
no mortal man, she told him, could live on air and water as he did.
'There should be reason in all piety,' she said to him, and he assented.
But he did not change his ways, which were rather those of a monk of
the Thebaid than of a vicar of a parish. He had the soul in him of a
St Anthony, of a St Francis, and he had been born too late; the world
as it is was too coarse, and too incredulous, for him, even in a little
rustic primitive village hidden away from the eyes of men under its
millet and its fig trees.
The people of Marca, like his old servant, noticed the great change
in him. Pale he had always been, but now he was the colour of his
own ivory Christ; taciturn, too, he had always been, yet he had ever
had playful words for the children, kind words for the aged; these
were silent now. The listless and mechanical manner with which he
went through the offices of the Church contrasted with the passionate
and despairing cries which seemed to come from his very soul when he
preached, and which vaguely frightened a rural congregation who were
wholly unable to understand them.
'One would think the good _parocco_ had some awful sin on his soul,'
said a woman to Candida one evening.
'Nay, nay; he is as pure as a lamb,' said Candida, twirling her
distaff, 'but he was always helpless and childlike, and too much taken
up with heavenly things--may the saints forgive me for saying so. He
should be in a monastery along with St Romolo and St Francis.'
But yet, the housekeeper, though loyalty itself, was, in her own secret
thoughts, not a little troubled at the change she saw in her master.
She put it down to the score of his agitation at the peril of Generosa
Fè; but this in itself seemed to her unfitting in one of his sacred
calling. A mere light-o'-love and saucebox, as she had always herself
called the miller's wife, was wholly unworthy to occupy, even in pity,
the thoughts of so holy a man.
'There could not be a doubt that she had given that knife-stroke
amongst the canes in the dusk of the dawn of SS. Peter and Paul,'
thought Candida, amongst whose virtues charity had small place; 'but
what had the _parocco_ to do with it?'
In her rough way, motherly and unmannerly, she ventured to take her
master to task for taking so much interest in a sinner.
'The people of Marca say you think too much about that foul business;
they do even whisper that you neglect your holy duties,' she said to
him, as she served the frugal supper of cabbage soaked in oil. 'There
will always be crimes as long as the world wags on, but that is no
reason why good souls should put themselves about over that which they
cannot help.'
Don Gesualdo said nothing, but she saw the nerves of his mouth quiver.
'I have no business to lecture your reverence on your duties,' she
added, tartly; 'but they do say that so much anxiety for a guilty woman
is a manner of injustice to innocent souls.'
He struck his closed hand on the table with concentrated expression of
passion.
'How dare you say that she is guilty?' he cried. 'Who has proved her to
be so?'
Candida looked at him with shrewd, suspicious eyes as she set down the
bottle of vinegar.
'I have met with nobody who doubts it,' she said, cruelly, 'except your
reverence and her lover up yonder at the villa.'
'You are all far too ready to believe evil,' said Don Gesualdo, with
nervous haste; and he arose and pushed aside the untasted dish and went
out of the house.
'He is beside himself for that jade's sake,' thought Candida, and after
waiting a little while to see if he returned, she sat down and ate the
cabbage herself.
Whether there were as many crimes in the world as flies on the pavement
in summer, she saw no reason why that good food should be wasted.
After her supper, she took her distaff and went and sat on the low
wall which divided the church ground from the road, and gossiped with
anyone of the villagers who chanced to come by. No one was ever too
much occupied not to have leisure to talk in Marca, and the church
wall was a favourite gathering place for the sunburnt women with faces
like leather under their broad summer hats, or their woollen winter
kerchiefs, who came and went to and from the fields or the well or the
washing reservoir, with its moss-grown stone tanks brimming with brown
water under a vine-covered pergola, where the hapless linen was wont
to be beaten and banged as though it were so many sheets of cast-iron.
And here with her gossips and friends, Candida could not help letting
fall little words and stray sentences which revealed the trouble her
mind was in as to the change in her master. She was devoted to him,
but her devotion was not so strong as her love of mystery and her
impatience of anything which opposed a barrier to her curiosity. She
was not conscious that she said a syllable which could have affected
his reputation, yet her neighbours all went away from her with the idea
that there was something wrong in the presbytery, and that, if she had
chosen, the priest's housekeeper could have told some very strange
tales.
Since the days of the miller's murder, a vague feeling against Don
Gesualdo had been growing up in Marca. A man who does not cackle, and
scream, and roar, till he is hoarse, at the slightest thing which
happens, is always unnatural and suspicious in the eyes of an Italian
community. The people of Marca began to remember that he had some
fishermen's blood in him, and that he had always been more friendly
with the wife of Tasso Tassilo than had been meet in one of his calling.
Falko Melegari had been denied admittance to her by the authorities.
They were not sure that he, as her lover, had not some complicity in
the crime committed; and, moreover, his impetuous and inconsiderate
language to the Judge of Instruction at the preliminary investigation
had been so fierce and so unwise that it had prejudiced against him all
officers of the law. This exclusion of him heightened the misery he
felt, and moved him also to a querulous impatience with the vicar of
San Bartolo for being allowed to see her.
'Those black snakes slip and slide in anywhere,' he thought, savagely;
and his contempt for and dislike of ecclesiastics, which the manner and
character of Don Gesualdo had held in abeyance, revived in its pristine
force.
In Easter-time, Don Gesualdo was always greatly fatigued, and, when
Easter came round this year, and the sins of Marca were poured into
his ear--little, sordid, mean sins of which the narration wearied and
sickened him--they seemed more loathsome to him than they had ever
done. There was such likeness and such repetition in the confessions of
all of them--greed, avarice, dishonesty, fornication; the scale never
varied, and the story told kept always at the same low level of petty
and coarse things. Their confessor heard, with a tired mind, and a sick
heart, and, as he gave them absolution, shuddered at the doubts of the
infallibility of his Church, which for the first time passed with dread
terror through his thoughts. The whole world seemed to him changing. He
felt as though the solid earth itself were giving way beneath his feet.
His large eyes had a startled and frightened look in them, and his face
grew thinner every day.
It was after the last office in this Easter week, when a man came
through the evening shadows towards the church. His name was Emilio
Raffagiolo, but he was always known as the _girellone_, the rover. Such
nicknames replace the baptismal names of the country people till the
latter are almost forgotten, whilst the family name is scarcely ever
employed at all in rural communities. The _girellone_ was a carter,
who had been in service at the water-mill for some few months. He was
a man of thirty or thereabouts, with a dusky face and a shock head of
hair, and hazel eyes, dull and yet cunning. He was dressed now in his
festal attire, and he had a round hat set on one side of his head; he
doffed it as he entered the church. He could not read or write, and his
ideas of his creed were hazy and curious. The Church represented to
him a thing with virtue in it, like a charm or a bunch of herbs; it was
only necessary, he thought, to observe certain formulæ of it to be safe
within it; conduct outside it was of no consequence. Nothing on earth
can equal in confusion and indistinctness the views of the Italian
rustic as regards his religion. The priest is to him as the medicine
man to the savage; but he has ceased to respect his councils whilst
retaining a superstitious feeling about his office.
This man, doffing his hat, entered the church and approached the
confessional, crossing himself as he did so. Don Gesualdo, with a sigh,
prepared to receive his confession, although the hour was unusual, and
the many services of the day had fatigued him, until his head swam and
his vision was clouded. But at no time had he ever availed himself of
any excuse of time or physical weakness to avoid the duties of his
office. Recognising the carter, he wearily awaited the usual tale of
low vice and petty sins, some drunkenness, or theft, or lust, gratified
in some unholy way, and resigned himself wearily to follow the confused
repetitions with which the rustic of every country answers questions
or narrates circumstances. His conscience smote him for his apathy.
Ought not the soul of this clumsy and wine-soddened boor to be as dear
to him as that of lovelier creatures?
The man answered the usual priestly interrogations sullenly and at
random; he could not help doing what he did, because superstition drove
him to it, and was stronger for the time than any other thing; but he
was angered at his own conscience, and afraid; his limbs trembled, and
his tongue seemed to him to swell and grow larger than his mouth, and
refused to move as he said at length in a thick, choked voice:
'It was I who killed him!'
'Who?' asked Don Gesualdo, whilst his own heart stood still. Without
hearing the answer he knew what it would be.
'Tasso, the miller; my master,' said the carter; and, having confessed
thus far, he recovered confidence and courage, and, in the rude,
involved, garrulous utterances common to his kind, he leaned his mouth
closer to Gesualdo's ear, and told, with a curious sort of pride in the
accomplishment of it, why and how it had been done.
'I wanted to go to South America,' he muttered. 'I have a cousin there,
and he says one makes money fast and works little. I had often wished
to take Tassilo's money, but I was always afraid. He locked it up as
soon as he took any, were it ever so little, and it never saw light
again till it went to the bank, or was paid away for her finery. He
wasted many a good fifty franc note on her back. Look you, the night
before the feast of Peter and Paul, he had received seven hundred
francs in the day for wheat, and I saw him lock it up in his bureau,
and say to his wife that he should take it to the town next day.
That was in the forenoon. At eventide they had a worse quarrel than
usual. She taunted him and he threatened her. In the late night I lay
listening to hear him astir. He was up before dawn, and he unbarred
and opened the mill-house himself, and called to the foreman, and he
said he was going to the town, and told us what we were to do. 'I shall
be away all day,' he said. It was still dusky. I stole out after him
without the men seeing. I said to myself I would take this money from
him as he went along the cross roads to take the diligence at Sant'
Arturo. I did not say to myself I would kill him, but I resolved to
get the money. It was enough to take one out to America, and keep one
awhile when one got out there. So I made up my mind. Money is at the
bottom of most things. I followed him half a mile before I could get
my courage up. He did not see me because of the canes. He was crossing
that grass where the trees are so thick, when I said to myself, 'Now
or never!' Then I sprang on him and stabbed him under the shoulder. He
fell like a stone. I searched him, but there was nothing in his pockets
except a revolver loaded. I think he had only made a feint of going to
the town, thinking to come back and find the lovers together. I buried
the knife under a poplar a few yards off where he fell. I could have
thrown it in the river, but they say things which have killed people
always float. You will find it if you dig for it under the big poplar
tree that they call the Grand Duke's, because they say Pietro Leopoldo
sat under it once on a time. There was a little blood on the blade,
but there was none anywhere else, for he bled inwardly. They do, if
you strike right. I was a butcher's lad once, and I used to kill the
oxen, and I know. That is all. When I found the old rogue had no money
with him, I could have killed him a score of times over. I cannot think
how it was that he left home without it, unless it was, as I say, that
he meant to go back unknown and unawares, and surprise his wife with
Melegari. That must have been it, I think. For, greedy as he was over
his money, he was greedier still over his wife. I turned him over on
his back, and left him lying there, and I went home to the mill and
began my day's work, till the people came and wakened her and told the
tale; then I left off work and came and looked on like the rest of
them. That is all.'
The man who made the confession was calm and unmoved; the priest who
heard it was sick with horror, pale to the lips with agitation and
anguish.
'But his wife is accused! She may be condemned!' he cried, in agony.
'I know that,' said the man, stolidly. 'But you cannot tell of me. I
have told you under the seal of confession.'
It was quite true; come what would, Don Gesualdo could never reveal
what he had heard. His eyes swam, his head reeled, a deadly sickness
came upon him; all his short life simple and harmless things had been
around him; he had been told of the crimes of men, but he had never
been touched by them; he had known of the sins of the world, but he had
never realised them. The sense that the murderer of Tasso Tassilo was
within a hand's breadth of him, that these eyes which stared at him,
this voice which spoke to him, were those of the actual assassin, that
it was possible, and yet utterly impossible, for him to help justice
and save innocence--all this overcame him with its overwhelming burden
of horror and of divided duty. He lost all consciousness as he knelt
there and fell heavily forward on the wood-work of the confessional.
His teachers had said aright in the days of his novitiate, that he
would never be of stern enough stuff to deal with the realities of life.
When he recovered his senses, sight and sound and sensibility all
returning to him slowly and with a strange, numb pricking pain in his
limbs, and his body and his brain, the church was quite dark, and the
man who had confessed his crime to him was gone.
Gesualdo gathered himself up with effort, and sat down on the wooden
seat and tried to think. He was bitterly ashamed of his own weakness.
What was he worth, he, shepherd and leader of men, if at the first word
of horror which affrighted him, he fainted as women faint, and failed
to speak in answer the condemnation which should have been spoken? Was
it for such cowardice as this that they had anointed him and received
him as a servitor of the Church?
His first impulse was to go and relate his feebleness and failure
to his bishop; the next he remembered that even so much support as
this he must not seek; to no living being must he tell this wretched
blood-secret.
The law which respects nothing would not respect the secrets of the
confessional; but he knew that all the human law in the world could not
alter his own bondage to the duty he had with his own will accepted.
It was past midnight when, with trembling limbs, he groped his way out
of the porch of his church and found the entrance of the presbytery,
and climbed the stone stairs to his own chamber.
Candida opened her door, and thrust her head through the aperture, and
cried to him:
'Where have you been mooning, reverend sir, all this while, and the
lamp burning to waste and your good bed yawning for you? You are not a
strong man enough to keep these hours, and for a priest they are not
decent ones.'
'Peace, woman,' said Don Gesualdo in a tone which she had never heard
from him. He went within and closed the door. He longed for the light
of dawn, and yet he dreaded it.
When the dawn came, it brought nothing to him except the knowledge that
the real murderer was there, within a quarter of a mile of him, and yet
could not be denounced by him to justice even to save the guiltless.
The usual occupations of a week-day claimed his time, and he went
through them all with mechanical precision, but he spoke all his words
as in a dream, and the red sanded bricks of his house, the deal table,
with the black coffee and the round loaf set out on it, the stone
sink at which Candida was washing endive and cutting lettuces, the old
men and women who came and went telling their troubles garrulously and
begging for pence, the sunshine which streamed in over the threshold,
the poultry which picked up the crumbs off the floor, all these homely
and familiar things seemed unreal to him, and were seen as through a
mist.
This little narrow dwelling, with the black cypress shadows falling
athwart it, which had once seemed to him the abode of perfect peace,
now seemed to imprison him, till his heart failed and died within him.
In the dead of night, at the end of the week, moved by an unconquerable
impulse which had haunted him the whole seven days, he rose and lit a
lanthorn and let himself out of his own door noiselessly, stealthily,
as though he were on some guilty errand, and took the sexton's spade
from the tool-house and went across the black shadows which stretched
over the grass, towards the place where the body of Tasso Tassilo had
lain dead. In the moonlight there stood, tall and straight, a column of
green leaves, it was the stately Lombardy poplar, which was spared by
the hatchet because Marca was, so far as it understood anything, loyal
in its regret for the days that were gone. Many birds which had been
for hours sound asleep in its boughs flew out with a great whirr of
wings, and with chirps of terror, as the footfall of the vicar awakened
and alarmed them. He set his lanthorn down on the ground, for the rays
of the moon did not penetrate as far as the deep gloom the poplars
threw around them, and began to dig. He dug some little time without
success, then his spade struck against something which shone amidst
the dry clay soil: it was the knife. He took it up with a shudder.
There were dark red spots on the steel blade. It was a narrow, slightly
curved, knife, about six inches long, such a knife as every Italian of
the lower classes carries every day, in despite of the law, and with
which most Italian murders are committed.
He looked at it long. If the inanimate thing could but have spoken,
could but have told the act which it had done!
He, kneeling on the ground, gazed at it with a sickening fascination,
then he replaced it deeper down in the ground, and with his spade
smoothed the earth with which he covered it. The soil was so dry that
it did not show much trace of having been disturbed. Then he returned
homeward, convinced now of the truth of the confession made to him.
Some men met him on the road, country lads driving cattle early to a
distant fair; they saluted him with respect, but laughed when they had
passed him.