seventy or eighty hours of suspense were terrible to him. He scarcely
broke his fast, or was conscious of what he did. The whole of the time
was passed by him listening in the court of justice, or praying in
the churches. When at last he was summoned, a cold sweat bathed his
face and hair; his hands trembled; he answered the interrogations of
the judge and of the advocates almost at random; his replies seemed
scarcely to be those of a rational being; he passionately affirmed her
innocence with delirious repetition and emphasis, which produced on the
minds of the examiners the contrary effect to that which he endeavoured
to create.
'This priest knows that she is guilty,' thought the president. 'He
knows it--perhaps he knows even more--perhaps he was her accomplice.'
His evidence, his aspect, his wild and contradictory words, did as
much harm to her cause as he ignorantly strove to do good. From other
witnesses of Marca, the Court had learned that a great friendship had
always been seen to exist between the vicar of San Bartolo and Generosa
Fè, and that on the morning when the murder was discovered, the priest
had removed the body of the dead man to the sacristy, forestalling the
officers of justice and disturbing the scene of the murder. A strong
impression against him was created beforehand in the audience and on
the bench, and his pallid, agitated countenance, his incoherent words,
his wild eyes, which incessantly sought the face of the prisoner,
all gave him the appearance of a man conscious of some guilt himself
and driven out of his mind by fear. The president cross-examined him
without mercy, censured him, railed at him, and did his uttermost to
extract the truth which he believed that Don Gesualdo concealed, but to
no avail; incoherent and half-insane as he seemed, he said no syllable
which could betray that which he really knew. Only when his eyes
rested on Generosa, there was such an agony in them that she herself
was startled by it.
'Who would ever have dreamt that he would have cared so much?' she
thought. 'But he was always a tender soul; he always pitied the birds
in the traps, and the oxen that went to the slaughter.'
Reproved, and censured without stint, for the president knew that to
insult a priest was to merit promotion in high quarters, Don Gesualdo
was at last permitted to escape from his place of torture. Blind and
sick he got away through the crowd, past the officials, down the
stairs, and out into the hot air. The piazza was thronged with people
who could not find standing room in the Court-house. The murmur of
their rapid and loud voices was like the noise of a sea on his ears;
they had all the same burden. They all repeated like one man the same
words: 'They will condemn her,' and then wondered what sentence she
would receive; whether a score of years of seclusion or a lifetime.
He went through the chattering, curious cruel throng, barbarous with
that barbarity of the populace, which in all countries sees with glee a
bull die, a wrestler drop, a malefactor ascend the scaffold, or a rat
scour the streets soaked in petroleum and burning alive. The dead man
had been nothing to them, and his wife had done none of them any harm,
yet there was not a man or a woman, a youth or a girl in the crowd, who
would not have felt that he or she was defrauded of his entertainment
if she were acquitted by her judges, although there was a general sense
amongst them that she had done no more than had been natural, and no
more than had been her right.
The dark, slender, emaciated figure of the priest glided through the
excited and boisterous groups; the air had the heat of summer; the
sky above was blue and cloudless; the brown brick walls of church and
palace seemed baking in the light of the sun. In the corner of the
square was a fountain relic of the old times when the town had been
a place of pageantry and power; beautiful pale green water, cold and
fresh, leaping and flowing around marble dolphins. Don Gesualdo stooped
and drank thirstily, as though he would never cease to drink, then
went on his way and pushed aside the leathern curtain of the cathedral
door and entered into the coolness and solitude of that place of refuge.
There he stretched himself before the cross in prayer, and wept bitter,
burning, unavailing tears for the burden which he bore of another's sin
and his own helplessness beneath it, which seemed to him like a greater
crime.
But even at the very altar of his God, peace was denied him. Hurried,
loud, impetuous steps from heavy boots fell on the old, worn, marble
floor of the church, and Falko Melegari strode up behind him and laid a
heavy hand upon his shoulders. The young man's face was deeply flushed,
his eyes were savage, his breath was quick and uneven; he had no heed
for the sanctity of the place or of his companion.
'Get up and hear me,' he said, roughly. 'They all say the verdict will
be against her; you heard them.'
Don Gesualdo made a gesture of assent.
'Very well, then,' said the steward, through his clenched teeth, 'if it
be so, indeed, I swear, as you and I live, that I will denounce you to
the judges in her stead.'
Don Gesualdo did not speak. He stood in a meditative attitude with
his arms folded on his chest. He did not express either surprise or
indignation.
'I will denounce you,' repeated Melegari, made more furious by his
silence. 'What did you do at night with your spade under the Grand
Duke's poplars? Why did you carry in and screen the corpse? Does not
the whole village talk of your strange ways and your altered habits?
There is more than enough against you to send to the galleys a score of
better men than you. Anyhow, I will denounce you if you do not make a
clean breast of all you know to the president to-morrow. You are either
the assassin or the accomplice, you accursed, black-coated hypocrite!'
A slight flush rose on the waxen pallor of Don Gesualdo's face, but he
still kept silence.
The young man, watching him with eyes of hatred, saw guilt in that
obstinate and mulish dumbness.
'You dare not deny it, trained liar though you be!' he said, with
passionate scorn. 'Oh, wretched cur, who ventures to call yourself a
servitor of heaven, you would let her drag all her years out in misery
to save your own miserable, puling, sexless, worthless life! Well! hear
me and understand. No one can say that I do not keep my word, and here,
by the cross which hangs above us, I take my oath that if you do not
tell all you know to-morrow, should she be condemned, I will denounce
you to the law, and if the law fail to do justice, I will kill you as
Tasso Tassilo was killed. May I die childless, penniless, and accursed
if my hand fail!'
Then, with no other word, he strode from the church, the golden
afternoon sunshine streaming through the stained windows above and
falling on his fair hair, his flushed face, his flaming eyes, till his
common humanity seemed all transfigured. He looked like the avenging
angel of Tintoretto's Paradise.
Don Gesualdo stood immovable in the deserted church; his arms crossed
on his breast, his head bent. A great resolve, a mighty inspiration,
had descended on him with the furious words of his foe. Light had come
to him as from heaven itself. He could not give up the secret which
had been confided to him in the confessional, but he could give up
himself. His brain was filled with legends of sacrifice and martyrdom.
Why might he not become one of that holy band of martyrs?
Nay, he was too humble to place himself beside them even in thought.
The utmost he could do, he knew, would be only expiation for what
seemed to him his ineffaceable sin in letting any human affection,
however harmless, unselfish, and distant, stain the singleness and
purity of his devotion to his vows. He had been but a fisher-boy, until
he had taken his tender heart and his ignorant mind to the seminary,
and he had been born with the soul of a San Rocco, of a S. John, out
of place, out of time, in the world he lived in; a soul in which the
passions of faith and of sacrifice were as strong as are the passions
of lust and of selfishness in other natures. The spiritual world was to
him a reality, and the earth, with its merciless and greedy peoples,
its plague of lusts, its suffering hearts, its endless injustice, an
unreal and hideous dream.
To his temper, the sacrifice which suddenly rose before him as his
duty, appeared one which would reconcile him at once to the Deity he
had offended, and the humanity he was tempted to betray. To his mind,
enfeebled and exhausted by long fasting of the body and denial of every
natural indulgence, such sacrifice of self seemed an imperious command
from heaven. He would drag out his own life in misery, and obloquy,
indeed, but what of that? Had not the great martyrs and founders of his
Church endured as much or more? Was it not by such torture, voluntarily
accepted and endured on earth, that the grace of God was won?
He would tell a lie, indeed; he would draw down ignominy on the name
of the Church; he would make men believe that an anointed priest was
a common murderer, swayed by low and jealous hatreds; but of this he
did not think. In the tension and perplexity of his tortured soul, the
vision of a sacrifice in which he would be the only sufferer, in which
the woman would be saved, and the secret told to him be preserved,
appeared as a heaven-sent solution of the doubts and difficulties in
his path. Stretched in agonised prayer before one of the side altars of
the cathedral, he imagined the afternoon sunbeams streaming through
the high window on his face to be the light of a celestial world, and
in the hush and heat of the incense-scented air, he believed that he
heard a voice which cried to him, 'By suffering all things are made
pure.'
He was not a wise, or strong, or educated man. He had the heart of a
poet, and the mind of a child. There was a courage in him to which
sacrifice was welcome, and there was a credulity in him which made all
exaggeration of simple faith possible. He was young and ignorant and
weak; yet at the core of his heart there was a dim heroism: he could
suffer and be mute, and in the depths of his heart he loved this woman
better than himself, with a love which in his belief made him accursed
for all time.
When he at last arose and went out of the church doors, his mind was
made up to the course that he would take; an immense calm had descended
upon the unrest of his soul.
The day was done, the sun had set, the scarlet flame of its afterglow
bathed all the rusty walls and dusty ground with colours of glory. The
crowd had dispersed; there was no sound in the deserted square except
the ripple of the water as it fell from the dolphins' mouths into the
marble basin. As he heard that sweet, familiar murmur of the falling
stream, the tears rose in his eyes and blotted out the flame-like pomp
and beauty of the skies. Never again would he hear the water of the
Marca river rushing, in cool autumn days, past the poplar stems and the
primrose roots upon its mossy banks; never again would he hear in the
place of his birth the grey-green waves of Arno sweeping through the
cane-brakes to the sea.
At three of the clock on the following day the judgment was given in
the court.
Generosa Fè was decreed guilty of the murder of her husband, and
sentenced to twenty years of solitary confinement. She dropped like a
stone when she heard the sentence, and was carried out from the court
insensible. Her lover, when he heard it, gave a roar of anguish like
that of some great beast in torment, and dashed his head against the
wall and struggled like a mad bull in the hands of the men who tried to
hold him. Don Gesualdo, waiting without, on the head of the staircase,
did not even change countenance; to him this bitterness, as of the
bitterness of death, had been long past; he had been long certain what
the verdict would be, and he had, many hours before, resolved on his
own part.
A great calm had come upon his soul, and his face had that tranquillity
which comes alone from a soul which is at peace within itself.
The sultry afternoon shed its yellow light on the brown and grey and
dusty town; the crowd poured out of the Court-house, excited, contrite,
voluble, pushing and bawling at one another, ready to take the side
of the condemned creature now that she was the victim of the law. The
priest alone of them all did not move; he remained sitting on the
upright chair under a sculptured allegory of Justice and Equity which
was on the arch above his head, and with the golden light of sunset
falling down on him through the high casement above. He paid no heed
to the hurrying of the crowd, to the tramp of guards, to the haste of
clerks and officials eager to finish their day's work and get away
to their wine and dominoes at the taverns. His hands mechanically
held his breviary; his lips mechanically repeated a Latin formula of
prayer. When all the people were gone, one of the custodians of the
place touched his arm, telling him that they were about to close the
doors; he raised his eyes like one who is wakened from a trance, and to
the man said quietly:
'I would see the president of the court for a moment, quite alone. Is
it possible?'
After many demurs and much delay, they brought him into the presence of
the judge, in a small chamber of the great palace.
'What do you want with me?' asked the judge, looking nervously at the
white face and the wild eyes of his unbidden visitant.
Don Gesualdo answered: 'I am come to tell you that you have condemned
an innocent woman.'
The judge looked at him with sardonic derision and contempt.
'What more?' he asked. 'If she be innocent, will you tell me who is
guilty?'
'I am,' replied the priest.
At his trial he never spoke.
With his head bowed and his hands clasped, he stood in the cage where
she had stood, and never replied by any single word to the repeated
interrogations of his judges. Many witnesses were called, and all they
said testified to the apparent truth of his self-accusation. Those who
had always vaguely suspected him, all those who had seen him close
the door of the sacristy on the crowd when he had borne the murdered
man within, the mule drivers who had seen him digging at night under
the great poplars, the sacristan who had been awakened by him that
same night so early, even his old housekeeper, though she swore that
he was a lamb, a saint, an angel, a creature too good for earth, a
holy man whose mind was distraught by fasting, by visions, these
all, either wilfully or ignorantly, bore witness which confirmed his
own confession. The men of law had the mould and grass dug up under
the Grand Duke's poplar, and when the blood-stained knife was found
therein, the very earth, it seemed, yielded up testimony against him.
In the end, after many weeks of investigation, Generosa was released
and Don Gesualdo was sentenced in her place.
Falko Melegari married her, and they went to live in his own country in
the Lombard plains, and were happy and prosperous, and the village of
Marca and the waters of its cane-shadowed stream knew them no more.
Sometimes she would say to her husband: 'I cannot think that he was
guilty; there was some mystery in it.'
Her husband always laughed, and said in answer: 'He was guilty, be
sure; it was I who frightened him into confession; those black rats of
the Church have livers as white as their coats are black.'
Generosa did not wholly believe, but she thrust the grain of doubt and
of remorse away from her and played with her handsome children. After
all, she mused, what doubt could there be? Did not Don Gesualdo himself
reveal his guilt, and had he not always cared for her, and was not the
whole population of Marca willing to bear witness that they had always
suspected him and had only held their peace out of respect for the
Church?
He himself lived two long years amongst the galley-slaves of the
western coast; all that time he never spoke, and he was considered by
the authorities to be insane. Then, in the damp and cold of the third
winter, his lungs decayed, his frail strength gave way, he died of
what they called tuberculosis, in the spring of the year. In his last
moments there was seen a light of unspeakable ecstasy upon his face, a
smile of unspeakable rapture on his mouth.
'Domine Deus libera me!' he murmured, as he died.
A bird came and sang at the narrow casement of his prison cell as his
spirit passed away. It was a nightingale: perchance one of those who
had once sung to him in the summer nights from the wild-rose hedge at
Marca.
THE SILVER CHRIST
THE SILVER CHRIST
I
Genistrello is a wild place in the Pistoiese hills.
Its name is derived from the genista or broom which covers many an acre
of the soil, and shares with the stone pine and the sweet chestnut the
scanty earth which covers its granite and sandstone. It is beautiful
exceedingly; but its beauty is only seen by those to whom it is a dead
letter which they have no eyes to read. It is one of the many spurs
of the Apennines which here lie overlapping one another in curve upon
curve of wooded slopes with the higher mountains rising behind them;
palaces, which once were fortresses, hidden in their valleys, and
ruined castles, or deserted monasteries, crowning their crests.
From some of these green hills the sea is visible, and when the sun
sets where the sea is and the red evening glows behind the distant
peaks, it is lovely as a poet's dream.
On the side of this lonely hill, known as Genistrello, there dwelt
a man of the name of Castruccio Lascarisi. He was called 'Caris' by
the whole countryside; indeed, scarcely any knew that he had another
patronymic, so entirely amongst these people does the nickname
extinguish, by its perpetual use, the longer appellative.
His family name was of Greek extraction undoubtedly; learned Greeks
made it familiar in the Italian Renaissance, at the courts of Lorenzo
and of Ludovico; but how it had travelled to the Pistoiese hills to be
borne by unlearned hinds none knew, any more than any know who first
made the red tulip blossom as a wild flower amidst the wheat, or who
first sowed the bulb of the narcissus amongst the wayside grass.
He lived miles away from the chapel and the hamlet. He had a little
cabin in the heart of the chestnut woods, which his forefathers had
lived in before him; they had no title which they could have shown
for it except usage, but that had been title enough for them, and was
enough for Caris.
It had been always so. It would be always so. His ideas went no
further. The autumnal migration was as natural and inevitable to him
as to the storks and herons and wild duck which used to sail over his
head, going southward like himself as he walked through the Tuscan to
the Roman Maremma. But his dislike to the Maremma winters was great,
and had never changed in him since he had trotted by his father's
side, a curly-pated baby in a little goatskin shirt looking like a
Correggio's St. John.
What he longed for, and what he loved, were the cool heights of
Genistrello and the stone hut with the little rivulet of water gushing
at its threshold. No one had ever disturbed his people there. It was
a square little place built of big unmortared stones in old Etruscan
fashion; the smoke from the hearth went out by a hole in the roof, and
a shutter and door of unplaned wood closed its only apertures.
The lichen and weeds and mosses had welded the stones together, and
climbed up over its conical rush roof. No better home could be needed
in summer-time; and when the cold weather came, he locked the door and
went down with his pack on his back and a goatshair belt round his
loins to take the familiar way to the Roman Maremma.
Caris was six-and-twenty years old; he worked amongst the chestnut
woods in summer and went to the Maremma for field labour in the winter,
as so many of these husbandmen do; walking the many leagues which
separate the provinces, and living hardly in both seasons. The songs
they sing are full of allusions to this semi-nomadic life, and the
annual migration has been a custom ever since the world was young--when
the great Roman fleets anchored where now are sand and marsh, and
stately classic villas lifted their marble to the sun where now the
only habitation seen is the charcoal-burner's rush-roofed, moss-lined
hut.
Caris was a well-built, lithe, slender son of the soil, brown from
sun and wind, with the straight features and the broad low brows of
the classic type, and great brown eyes like those of the oxen which
he drove over the vast plains down in the Maremma solitudes. He knew
nothing except his work.
He was not very wise, and he was wholly unlearned, but he had a love
of nature in his breast, and he would sit at the door of his hut at
evening time, with his bowl of bean-soup between his knees, and often
forget to eat in his absorbed delight as the roseate glow from the
vanished sunrays overspread all the slopes of the Pistoiese Apennines
and the snow-crowned crests of the Carara mountains.
'What do you see there, goose?' said a charcoal-burner, once passing
him as he sat thus upon his threshold with the dog at his feet.
Caris shrugged his shoulders stupidly and half-ashamed. He could not
read the great book outspread upon the knees of the mountains, yet he
imperfectly felt the beauty of its emblazoned pages.
The only furniture in the cabin was a table made of a plank, two rude
benches, and one small cupboard; the bed was only dried leaves and
moss. There were a pipkin, two platters, and a big iron pot which swung
by a cord and a hook over the stones where the fire, when lighted,
burned. They were enough; he would not have known what to do with more
if he had had more. He was only there from May to October; and in the
fragrant summers of Italian chestnut woods, privation is easily borne.
The winter life was harder and more hateful; yet it never occurred to
him to do else than to go to Maremma; his father and grandfather had
always gone thither, and as naturally as the chestnuts ripen and fall,
so do the men in autumn join the long lines of shepherds and drovers
and women and children and flocks and herds which wind their way down
the mountain slopes and across the level wastes of plain and marsh to
seek herbage and work for the winter-time.
It never entered the head of Caris, or of the few who knew him or
worked with him, to wonder how he and his had come thither. They were
there as the chestnut-trees were, as the broom was, as the goats and
squirrels and wood-birds were there. The peasant no more wonders
about his own existence than a stone does. For generations a Lascaris
had lived in that old stone hut which might itself be a relic of an
Etruscan tomb or temple. No one was concerned to know further.
The peasant does not look back; he only sees the road to gain his daily
meal of bread or chestnuts. The past has no meaning to him, and to
the future he never looks. That is the reason why those who want to
cultivate or convince him fail utterly. If a man cannot see the horizon
itself, it is of no use to point out to him spires or trees or towers
which stand out against it.
The world has never understood that the moment the labourer is made
to see, he is made unhappy, being ill at ease and morbidly envious
and ashamed, and wholly useless. Left alone, he is content in his own
ruminant manner, as the buffalo is when left untormented amidst the
marshes, grazing at peace and slumbering amidst the rushes and the
canes.
Caris was thus content. He had health and strength, though sometimes
he had a fever-chill from new-turned soil and sometimes a frost-chill
from going out on an empty stomach before the sun had broken the deep
shadows of the night. But from these maladies all outdoor labourers
suffer, and he was young, and they soon passed. He had been the only
son of his mother; and this fact had saved him from conscription. As
if she had lived long enough when she had rendered him this service,
she died just as he had fulfilled his twenty-third year; and without
her the stone hut seemed for awhile lonely; he had to make his fire,
and boil or roast his chestnuts, and mend holes in his shirts, and make
his own rye loaves; but he soon got used to this, and when in Maremma
he always worked with a gang, and was fed and lodged--badly, indeed,
but regularly--at the huge stone burn which served such purposes on
the vast tenuta where the long lines of husbandmen toiled from dusk of
dawn to dusk of eve under the eye and lash of their overseer; and when
on his native slopes of Genistrello he was always welcome to join the
charcoal-burners' rough company or the woodsmen's scanty supper, and
seldom passed, or had need to pass, his leisure hours alone. And these
were very few.