time of night? Did he dig for treasure? There was a tradition in the
country side, of sacks of ducal gold which had been buried by the river
to save them from the French troops in the time of the invasion by the
First Consul.
Don Gesualdo, unconscious of their comments, went home, put the spade
back in the tool-house, unlocked his church, entered and prayed long;
then waking his sleepy sexton, bade him rise, and set the bell ringing
for the first mass. The man got up grumbling because it was still quite
dark, and next day talked to his neighbours about the queer ways of
his vicar; how he would walk all night about his room, sometimes get
up and go out in the dead of night even; he complained that his own
health and patience would soon give way. An uneasy feeling grew up in
the village, some gossips even suggested that the bishop should be
spoken to in the town; but everyone was fearful of being the first to
take such a step, and no one was sure how so great a person could be
approached, and the matter remained in abeyance. But the disquietude,
and the antagonism, which the manner and appearance of their priest
had created, grew with the growth of the year, and with it also the
impression that he knew more of the miller's assassination than he
would ever say.
A horrible sense of being this man's accomplice grew also upon himself;
the bond of silence which he kept perforce with this wretch seemed
to him to make him so. His slender strength and sensitive nerves ill
fitted him to sustain so heavy a burden, so horrible a knowledge.
'It has come to chastise me because I have thought of her too often,
have been moved by her too warmly,' he told himself; and his soul
shrank within him at what appeared the greatness of his own guilt.
Since receiving the confession of the carter, he did not dare to seek
an interview with Generosa. He did not dare to look on her agonised
eyes and feel that he knew what could set her free and yet must never
tell it. He trembled, lest in sight of the suffering of this woman, who
possessed such power to move and weaken him, he should be untrue to his
holy office, should let the secret he had to keep escape him. Like all
timid and vacillating tempers, he sought refuge in procrastination.
All unconscious of the growth of public feeling against him, and
wrapped in that absorption which comes from one dominant idea, he
pursued the routine of his parochial life, and went through all the
ceremonials of his office, hardly more conscious of what he did than
the candles which his sacristan lighted. The confession made to him
haunted him night and day. He saw it, as it were, written in letters of
blood on the blank, white walls of his bed-chamber, of his sacristy, of
his church itself. The murderer was there, at large, unknown to all;
at work like any other man in the clear, sweet sunshine, talking and
laughing, eating and drinking, walking and sleeping, yet as unsuspected
as a child unborn. And all the while Generosa was in prison. There was
only one chance left, that she should be acquitted by her judges. But
even then the slur and stain of an imputed, though unproven, crime
would always rest upon her and make her future dark, her name a by-word
in her birth-place. No mere acquittal, leaving doubt and suspicion
behind it, would give her back to the light and joy of life. Every
man's hand would be against her; every child would point at her as the
woman who had been accused of the assassination of her husband.
One day he sought Falko Melegari, when the latter was making up the
accounts of his stewardship at an old bureau in a deep window-embrasure
of the villa.
'You know that the date of the trial is fixed for the tenth of next
month?' he said, in a low, stifled voice.
The young man, leaning back in his wooden chair, gave a sign of assent.
'And you?' said Don Gesualdo, with a curious expression in his eyes,
'if they absolve her, will you have the courage to prove your own
belief in her innocence? Will you marry her when she is set free?'
The question was abrupt and unlooked for; Falko changed colour; he
hesitated.
'You will not!' said Don Gesualdo.
'I have not said so,' answered the young man, evasively. 'I do not know
that she would exact it.'
Exact it! Don Gesualdo did not know much of human nature, but he knew
what the use of that cold word implied.
'I thought you loved her! I mistook,' he said, bitterly. A rosy flush
came for a moment on the wax-like pallor of his face.
Falko Melegari looked at him insolently.
'A churchman should not meddle with these things! Love her! I love
her--yes. It ruins my life to think of her yonder. I would cut off my
right arm to save her; but to marry her if she come out absolved--that
is another thing; one's name a by-word, one's credulity laughed at,
one's neighbours shy of one--that is another thing, I say. It will
not be enough for her judges to acquit her; that will not prove her
innocence to all the people here, or to my people at home in my own
country.'
He rose and pushed his heavy chair away impatiently; he was ashamed of
his own words, but in the most impetuous Italian natures, prudence and
self-love are oftentimes the strongest instincts. The priest looked at
him with a great scorn in the depths of his dark, deep, luminous eyes.
This handsome and virile lover seemed to him a very poor creature; a
coward and faithless.
'In the depths of your soul you doubt her yourself!' he said, with
severity and contempt, as he turned away from the writing table, and
went out through the windows into the garden beyond.
'No, as God lives, I do not doubt her,' cried Falko Melegari. 'Not for
an hour, not for a moment. But to make others believe--that is more
difficult. I will maintain her and befriend her always if they set her
free; but marry her--take her to my people--have everyone say that my
wife had been in gaol on suspicion of murder--that I could not do; no
man would do it who had a reputation to lose. One loves for love's
sake, but one marries for the world's.'
He spoke to empty air; there was no one to hear him but the little
green lizards who had slid out of their holes in the stone under
the window-step. Don Gesualdo had gone across the rough grass of
the garden, and had passed out of sight beyond the tall hedge of
rose-laurel.
The young man resumed his writing, but he was restless and uneasy, and
could not continue his calculations of debit and credit, of loss and
profit. He took his gun, whistled his dog, and went up towards the
hills, where hares were to be found in the heather and snipe under the
gorse, for close time was unrecognised in the province. His temper was
ruffled, and his mind in great irritation against his late companion;
he felt angrily that he must have appeared a poltroon, and a poor and
unmanly lover in the eyes of the churchman. Yet he had only spoken, he
felt sure, as any other man would have done in his place.
In the sympathy of their common affliction, his heart had warmed for
awhile to Gesualdo, as to the only one who, like himself, cared for the
fate of Tasso Tassilo's wife; but now that suspicion had entered into
him, there returned with it all his detestation of the Church and all
the secular hatreds which the gentle character of the priest of Marca
had for a time lulled in him.
'Of course he is a liar and a hypocrite,' he thought, savagely.
'Perhaps he was a murderer as well!'
He knew that the idea was a kind of madness. Don Gesualdo had never
been known to hurt a fly; indeed, his aversion to even see pain
inflicted had made him often the laughing-stock of the children of
Marca when he had rescued birds, or locusts, or frogs, from their
tormenting fingers, and forbade them to throw stones at the lambs or
kids they drove to pasture. 'They are not baptised,' the children had
often said, with a grin, and Gesualdo had often answered: 'The good God
baptised them Himself.'
It was utter madness to suppose that such a man, tender as a woman,
timid as a sheep, gentle as a spaniel, could possibly have stabbed
Tasso Tassilo to the death within a few roods of his own church,
almost on holy ground itself. And yet, the idea grew and grew in
the mind of Generosa's lover until it acquired all the force of an
actual conviction. We welcome no supposition so eagerly as we do one
which accords with and intensifies our own prejudices. He neglected
his duties and occupations to brood over this one suspicion, and put
together all the trifles which he could remember in confirmation of
it. It haunted him wherever he was; at wine fair, at horse market, at
cattle sale, in the corn-field, amongst the vines, surrounded by his
peasantry at noonday, or alone in the wild, deserted garden of the
villa by moonlight.
In his pain and fury, it was a solace to him to turn his hatred on to
some living creature. As he sat alone and thought over all which had
passed (as he did think of it night and day always), many a trifle
rose to his mind which seemed to him to confirm his wild and vague
suspicions of the vicar of San Bartolo. Himself a free-thinker, it
appeared natural to suspect any kind of crime in a member of the
priesthood. The sceptic is sometimes as narrow and as arrogant in his
free-thought as the believer in his bigotry. Falko Melegari was a
good-hearted young man, and kind, and gay, and generous by nature; but
he had the prejudices of his time and of his school. These prejudices
made him ready to believe that a priest was always fit food for the
galleys, or the scaffold, a mass of concealed iniquity covered by his
cloth.
'I believe you know more than anyone,' he said, roughly, one day when
he passed the vicar on a narrow field-path, while his eyes flashed
suspiciously over the downcast face of Don Gesualdo, who shrank a
little as if he had received a blow, and was silent.
He had spoken on an unconsidered impulse, and would have been unable to
say what his own meaning really was; but as he saw the embarrassment,
and observed the silence, of his companion, what he had uttered at
hazard seemed to him curiously confirmed and strengthened.
'If you know anything which could save her, and you do not speak,' he
said, passionately, 'may all the devils you believe in torture you
through all eternity!'
Don Gesualdo still kept silent. He made the sign of the cross
nervously, and went on his way.
'Curse all these priests,' said the young man, bitterly, looking
after him. 'If one could only deal with them as one does with other
men!--but, in their vileness and their feebleness, they are covered by
their frock like women.'
He was beside himself with rage and misery, and the chafing sense of
his own impotence; he was young, and strong, and ardently enamoured,
and yet he could do no more to save the woman he loved from eternal
separation from him than if he had been an idiot or an infant, than if
he had had no heart in his breast, and no blood in his veins.
Whenever he met the vicar afterwards, he did not even touch his hat,
but scowled at him in scorn, and ceased those outward observances
of respect to the Church which he had always given before to please
his master, who liked such example to be set by the steward to the
peasantry.
'If Ser Baldo send me away for it, so he must do,' he thought. 'I
will never set foot in the church again. I should choke that accursed
_parocco_ with his own wafer.'
For suspicion is a poisonous weed which, if left to grow unchecked,
soon reaches maturity, and Falko Melegari soon persuaded himself that
his own suspicion was a truth, which only lacked time, and testimony,
to become as clear to all eyes as it was to his.
IV
Meantime Don Gesualdo was striving with the utmost force that was in
him to persuade the real criminal to confess publicly what he had told
under the seal of confession. He saw the man secretly, and used every
argument with which the doctrines of his Church and his own intense
desires could supply him. But there is no obstinacy so dogged, no
egotism so impenetrable, no shield against persuasion so absolute, as
the stolid ignorance and self-love of a low mind. The carter turned a
deaf ear to all censure as to all entreaty; he was stolidly indifferent
to all the woe that he had caused and would cause if he remained
silent. What was all that to him? The thought of the miller's widow
shut up in prison pleased him. He had always hated her as he had seen
her in what he called her finery, going by him in the sunshine, with
all her bravery of pearl necklace, of silver hairpins, of gold breast
chains. Many and many a time he had thirsted to snatch at them and
pull them off her. What right had she to them, she, a daughter of
naked, hungry folks, who dug and carted sea and river sand for a living
even as he carted sacks of flour. She was no better than himself! Now
and then, Generosa had called him, in her careless, imperious fashion,
to draw water or carry wood for her, and when he had done so she never
had taken the trouble to bid him good day or to say a good-natured
word. His pride had been hurt, and he had had much ado to restrain
himself from calling her a daughter of beggars, a worm of the sand.
Like her own people, he was pleased that she should now find her fine
clothes and her jewelled trinkets of no avail to her, and that she
should weep the light out of her big eyes, and the rose-bloom off her
peach-like cheeks in the squalor and nausea of a town prison.
Don Gesualdo, with all the force which a profound conviction that he
speaks the truth lends to any speaker, wrestled for the soul of this
dogged brute, and warned him of the punishment everlasting which would
await him if he persisted in his refusal to surrender himself to
justice. But he might as well have spoken to the great millstones that
rest in the river water. Why, then, had this wretch cast the burden of
his vile secret on innocent shoulders? It was the most poignant anguish
to him that he could awaken no sense of guilt in the conscience of the
criminal. The man had come to him partly from a vague superstitious
impulse, remnant of a credulity instilled into him in childhood,
and partly from the want to unburden his mind, to tell his story to
someone, which is characteristic of all weak minds in times of trouble
and peril. It had relieved him to drag the priest into sharing his own
guilty consciousness; he was half proud and half afraid of the manner
in which he had slain his master, and bitterly incensed that he had
done the deed for nothing; but, beyond this, he had no other emotion
except that he was glad that Generosa should suffer through and for it.
'You will burn for ever if you persist in such hideous wickedness,'
said Don Gesualdo again and again to him.
'I will take my chance of that,' said the man. 'Hell is far off, and
the galleys are near.'
'But if you do not believe in my power to absolve you or leave you
accursed, why did you ever confess to me?' cried Don Gesualdo.
'Because one must clear one's breast to somebody when one has a thing
like that on one's mind,' answered the carter, 'and I know you cannot
tell of it again.'
From that position nothing moved him. No entreaties, threats,
arguments, denunciations, stirred him a hair's-breadth. He had
confessed _per sfogarsi_ (to relieve himself): that was all.
But one night after Gesualdo had thus spoken to him, vague fears
assailed him, terrors material, not spiritual; he had parted with his
secret; who could tell that it might not come out like a sleuth hound,
and find him and denounce him? He had told it to be at peace, but he
was not at peace. He feared every instant to have the hand of the law
upon him. Whenever he heard the trot of the carabineers' horses going
through the village, or saw their white belts and cocked hats in the
sunlight of the fields, a cold tremor of terror seized him lest the
priest should after all have told. He knew that it was impossible, and
yet he was afraid.
He counted up the money he had saved, a little roll of filthy and
crumpled bank notes for very small amounts, and wondered if they would
be enough to take him across to America. They were very few, but his
fear compelled him to trust to them. He invented a story of remittances
which he had received from his brother, and told his fellow-labourers
and his employer that he was invited to join that brother, and then he
packed up his few clothes and went. At the mill and in the village they
talked a little of it, saying that the fellow was in luck, but that
they for their parts would not care to go so far. Don Gesualdo heard of
his flight in the course of the day.
'Gone away! Out of the country?' he cried involuntarily, with white
lips.
The people who heard him wondered what it could matter to him that a
carter had gone to seek his fortunes over the seas.
The carter had not been either such a good worker, or such a good boon
companion, that anyone at the mill or in the village should greatly
regret him.
'America gets all our rubbish,' said the people, 'much good may it do
her.'
Meantime, the man took his way across the country, and, sometimes by
walking, sometimes by lifts in waggons, sometimes by helping charcoal
burners on the road, made his way, first to Vendramino to have his
papers put in order, and then to the sea coast, and in the port of
Leghorn took his passage in an emigrant ship then loading there. The
green cane-brakes and peaceful millet fields of Marca saw him no more.
But he had left the burden of his blood-guiltiness behind him, and it
lay on the guiltless soul with the weight of the world.
So long as the man had remained in Marca, there had been always a
hope present with Don Gesualdo that he would persuade him to confess
in a court of justice what he had confessed to the church, or that
some sequence of accidents would lead up to the discovery of his
guilt. But with the ruffian gone across the seas, lost in that utter
darkness which swallows up the lives of the poor and obscure when
once they have left the hamlet in which their names mean something to
their neighbours, this one hope was quenched, and the vicar, in agony,
reproached himself with not having prevailed in his struggle for the
wretch's soul; with not having been eloquent enough, or wise enough, or
stern enough to awe him into declaration of his ghastly secret to the
law.
His failure seemed to him a sign of Heaven's wrath against himself.
'How dare I,' he thought, 'how dare I, feeble and timid and useless as
I am, call myself a servant of God, or attempt to minister to other
souls?'
He had thought, like an imbecile, as he told himself, to be able to
awaken the conscience and compel the public confession of this man,
and the possibility of flight had never presented itself to his mind,
natural and simple as had been such a course to a creature without
remorse, continually haunted by personal fears of punishment. He, he
alone on earth, knew the man's guilt; he, he alone had the power to
save Generosa, and he could not use the power because the secrecy of
his holy office was fastened on him like an iron padlock on his lips.
The days passed him like nightmares; he did his duties mechanically,
scarcely consciously; the frightful alternative which was set before
him seemed to parch up the very springs of life itself. He knew that
he must look strangely in the eyes of the people; his voice sounded
strangely in his own ears; he began to feel that he was unworthy to
administer the blessed bread to the living, to give the last unction to
the dying; he knew that he was not at fault, and yet he felt that he
was accursed. Choose what he would, he must, he thought, commit some
hateful sin.
The day appointed for the trial came; it was the tenth of May. A hot
day, with the bees booming amongst the acacia flowers, and the green
tree-frogs shouting joyously above in the ilex tops, and the lizards
running in and out of the china-rose hedges on the highways. Many
people of Marca were summoned as witnesses, and these went to the town
in mule carts or crazy chaises, with the farm-horse put in the shafts,
and grumbled because they would lose their day's labour in their
fields, and yet were pleasurably excited at the idea of seeing Generosa
in the prisoner's dock, and being able themselves to tell all they
knew, and a great deal that they did not know.
Falko Melegari rode over at dawn by himself, and Don Gesualdo, with
his housekeeper and sacristan, who were all summoned to give testimony,
went by the diligence, which started from Sant' Arturo, and rolled
through the dusty roads and over the bridges, and past the wayside
shrines, and shops, and forges, across the country to the town.
The vicar never spoke throughout the four weary hours during which the
rickety and crowded vehicle, with its poor, starved, bruised beasts,
rumbled on its road through the lovely shadows and cool sunlight of
the early morning. He held his breviary in his hand for form's sake,
and, seeing him thus absorbed in holy meditation as they thought,
his garrulous neighbours did not disturb him, but chattered amongst
themselves, filling the honeysuckle-scented air with the odours of
garlic and wine and coarse tobacco.
Candida glanced at him anxiously from time to time, haunted by a vague
presentiment of ill. His face looked very strange, she thought, and
his closely-locked lips were white as the lips of a corpse. When the
diligence was driven over the stones of the town, all the passengers
by it descended at the first wine-house which they saw on the piazza
to eat and drink, but he, with never a word, motioned his housekeeper
aside when she would have pressed food on him, and went into the
cathedral of the place to pray alone.
The town was hot and dusty and sparsely peopled. It had brown walls
and large brick palaces untenanted, and ancient towers, also of brick,
pointing high to heaven. It was a place dear to the memory of lovers
of art for the sake of some fine paintings of the Sienese school which
hung in its churches, and was occasionally visited by strangers for
sake of these; but, for the most part, it was utterly forgotten by
the world, and its bridge of many arches, said to have been built by
Augustus, seldom resounded to any other echoes than those of the heavy
wheels of the hay or corn waggons coming in from the pastoral country
around.
The Court-house, where all great trials took place, stood in one of
the bare, silent, dusty squares of the town. It had once been the
ancient palace of the Podesta, and had the machicolated walls, the
turreted towers, and the vast stairways and frescoed chambers of a
larger and statelier time than ours. The hall of justice was a vast
chamber pillared with marble, vaulted and painted, sombre and grand.
It was closely thronged with country folks; there was a scent of hay,
of garlic, of smoking pipes hastily thrust into trouser pockets, of
unwashed flesh steaming hotly in the crowd, and the close air. The
judge was there with his officers, a mediæval figure in black square
cap and black gown. The accused was behind the cage assigned to such
prisoners, guarded by carabineers and by the jailers. Don Gesualdo
looked in once from a distant doorway; then with a noise in his ears
like the sound of the sea, and a deadly sickness on him, he stayed
without in the audience-chamber, where a breath of air came to him up
one of the staircases, there waiting until his name was called.
The trial began. Everything was the same as it had been in the
preliminary examination which had preceded her committal on the charge
of murder. The same depositions were made now that had then been made.
In the interval, the people of Marca had forgotten a good deal, so
added somewhat of their own invention to make up for the deficiency;
but, on the whole, the testimony was the same given with that
large looseness of statement, and absolute indifference to fact, so
characteristic of the Italian mind, the judge, from habit, sifting the
chaff from the wheat in the evidence with unerring skill, and following
with admirable patience the tortuous windings and the hazy imagination
of the peasants he examined.