CHAPTER XIII.

"The Babe is a better courtier than gardener," says Xenia Sabaroff, as

she shakes a green aphis out of her rose: her tone is careless, but her

voice is not quite under her command, and has a little tremor in it.

Brandolin looks at her with impassioned eyes: he has grown very pale.

"It is no jest with me," he says, under his breath. "I would give you my

life if you would take it?"

The last words have the accent of an interrogation, of an appeal.

"That is to say a great deal," replies Xenia Sabaroff: she is startled,

astonished, troubled; she was not expecting any such entire avowal.

"Many men must have said as much to you who have more to recommend them

than I. Say something to me: what will you say?"

She does not immediately reply; she looks on the ground, and absently

traces patterns on the path with the end of her long walking-stick.

"Do you know," she says, at last, after a silence which seems to him

endless, "do you know that there are people who believe that I have been

the _delaissee_ of Lord Gervase? They do not phrase it so roughly, but

that is what they say."

Brandolin's very lips are white, but his voice does not falter for one

moment as he answers, "They will not say it in my hearing."

"And, knowing that they say it, you would still offer me your name?"

"I do so."

"And you would ask me nothing save what I choose to tell you?"

The sunny air seems to turn round with him for an instant: his brain

grows dizzy; his heart contracts with a sickening pain; but in the next

moment a great wave of strong and perfect faith in the woman he cares

for lifts his soul up on it, as a sea-wave lifts a drowning man to land.

"You shall tell me nothing save what you choose," he says, clearly and

very tenderly. "I have perfect faith in you. Had I less than that, I

would not ask you to be my wife."

She looks at him with astonishment and with wondering admiration.

"Yet you know so little of me!" she murmurs, in amaze.

"I love you," says Brandolin; then he kisses her hand with great

reverence.

The tears which she had thought driven from her eyes forever, rise in

them now.

"You are very noble," she replies, and leaves her hand for an instant

within his.

The Babe, who has been watching from behind a tuft of laurel, can

control his impatience no longer, but comes out of his ambush and runs

towards them, regardless of how undesired he may be.

"Dodo says that women never marry anybody they love," he says,

breathlessly; "but that is not true, is it, and you will let me carry

your train?"

"Hush, my dear," says Xenia Sabaroff, laying her hand on the child's

shoulder, while there is a sound in her voice which subdues to silence

even the audacious spirit of the Babe.

"Give me time to think," she says, in a low tone to Brandolin; and then,

with her hand still on the little boy's shoulder, she turns away from

him and walks slowly towards the house.

The child walks silently and shyly beside her, his happy vanity troubled

for once by the sense that he has made some mistake, and that there are

some few things still in the universe which he does not quite entirely

understand.

"You are not angry?" he asks her, at last, with a vague terror in his

gay and impudent little soul.

"Angry with you?" says Xenia Sabaroff. "My dear child, no. I am perhaps

angry with myself,--myself of many years ago."

The Babe is silent: he does not venture to ask any more, and he has a

humiliating feeling that he is not first in the thoughts of Madame

Sabaroff,--nay, that, though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon

his shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten him.

Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her great charm for him

consists in the power she possesses of compelling him to control his

impulses. He walks away by himself through the green shadows of the

boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. He is fully aware that

he has done a rash, perhaps an utterly unwise, thing in putting his

future into the hands of a woman of whom he knows so little, and has,

perhaps, the right to suspect so much. Yet he does not repent.

He does not see her again before dinner. She does not come into the

library at the tea-hour; there is a large dinner that night; county

people are there, as well as the house-party. He has to take in a stupid

woman, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, who thinks him the most

absent-minded and unpleasant person she has ever known, and wonders how

he has got his reputation as a wit. He is so seated that he cannot even

see Xenia Sabaroff, and he chafes and frets throughout the dinner, from

the bisque soup to the caviare biscuit, and thinks what an idiotic thing

the habits of society have made of human life.

When he is fairly at rare intervals goaded into speech, he utters

paradoxes, and suggests views so startling that the wife of the

Lord-Lieutenant is scandalized, and thinks the lunacy laws are defective

if they cannot include and incarcerate him. She feels sure that the

rumor about the Hindoo women at St. Hubert's Lea is entirely true.

After dinner he is free to approach the lady of his thoughts, but he

endeavors in vain to tell from her face what answer he will receive,

what time and meditation may have done or undone for him. She avoids the

interrogation of his eyes, and is surrounded by other men as usual.

The evening seems to him intolerably long and intolerably tedious. It

is, however, for others very gay. There is an improvised dance, ending

in an impromptu cotillion, and following on an act of a comic opera

given with admirable spirit by Lady Dawlish, Mrs. Curzon, and some of

the younger men. Every one is amused, but the hours seem very slow to

him: Gervase scarcely leaves her side at all, and Brandolin, with all

his chivalrous refusal and unchanging resolution to allow no shadow of

doubt to steal over him, feels the odious whispers he has heard and the

outspoken words of Litroff recur to his memory and weigh on him like the

incubus of a nightmare. With a sensation of dread, he realizes that it

is possible, do what he may, that they may haunt him so all his life. A

man may be always master of his acts, but scarcely always of his

thoughts.

"But I will never ask her one syllable," he thinks, "and I will marry

her to-morrow if she chooses."

But will she choose?

He is far from sure. He pleases her intelligence; he possesses her

friendship; but whether he has the slightest power to touch her heart he

does not know. If he loved her less than he does he would be more

confident.

As the interminable hours wear away, and the noise and absurdities of

the cotillion are at their height, she, who never dances anywhere, drops

her fan, and he is before the others in restoring it to her. As she

takes it, she says, in a low voice, "Be in the small library at eleven

to-morrow."

Soon after she leaves the ball-room altogether, and goes to her

bedchamber.

Brandolin goes to his before the cotillion is over, but he sleeps very

little. He longs for the morrow, and yet he dreads it. "_Quand meme_,"

he murmurs, as from his bed he sees the white dawn over the dark masses

of the Surrenden woods. Tell him what she may, he thinks, he will give

her his life if she will take it. He is madly in love, no doubt; but

there is something nobler and purer than the madness of love, than the

mere violent instincts of passion, in his loyalty to her. Before

anything he cherishes the honor of his name and race, and he is willing,

blindfold, to trust her with it.

That morning it seems to him as if the hours would never pass, though

they are few until the clocks strike eleven. The house is still, almost

every one is asleep, for the cotillion, successful as only

unpremeditated things ever are, had lasted till the sun was high and the

dew on the grass of the garden was dry.

With a thickly-beating heart, nervous and eager as though he were a boy

of sixteen seeking his first love-tryst, he enters the small library far

before the hour, and waits for her there, pacing to and fro the floor.

The room is full of memories of her: here they have talked on rainy days

and have strolled out on to the lawns on fine ones; there is the chair

which she likes best, and there the volume she had taken down yesterday;

could it be only ten days since standing here he had seen her first in

the distance with the children? Only ten days! It seems to him ten

years, ten centuries.

The morning is very still, a fine soft rain is falling, wet

jessamine-flowers tap against the panes of the closed windows, a great

apprehension seems to make his very heart stand still.

As the clock points to the hour she enters the room.

She is very pale, and wears a morning gown of white plush, which trails

behind her in a silver shadow. He kisses her hands passionately, but she

draws them away.

"Wait a little," she says, gently. "Wait till you know--whatever there

is to know."

"I want to know but one thing."

She smiles a little sadly.

"Oh, you think so now because you are in love with me. But in time to

come, when that is passed, you will not be so easily content. If"--she

hesitates a moment--"if there is to be any community between our lives,

you must be quite satisfied as to my past. It is your right to be so

satisfied; and were you not so, some time or other we should both be

wretched."

His eyes flash with joy.

"Then----" he begins breathlessly.

"Oh! how like a man that is!" she says, sadly. "To think but of the one

thing, of the one present moment, and to be ready to give all the future

in pawn for it! Wait to hear everything. And first of all I must tell

you that Lord Gervase also last night asked me to marry him."

"And you!"

"I shall not marry Lord Gervase. But I will not disguise from you that

once I would have done so gladly, had I been free to do it."

Brandolin is silent: he changes color.

"I bade him come here for my answer," she continues. "He will be here in

a few minutes. I wish you to remain in the large library, so that you

may hear all that I say to him."

"I cannot do that. I cannot play the part of eavesdropper."

"You will play that part, or any other that I ask you, if you love me,"

she says, with a touch of imperiousness.

"Do you not see," she goes on, with more gentleness, "that if our lives

are to be passed near each other (I do not say that they are, but you

seem to wish it), you must first of all be convinced of the truth of all

I tell you? If one doubt, one suspicion, remain, you will, in time,

become unable to banish it. It would grow and grow until you were

mastered by it. You believe in what I tell you now; but how long would

you believe after marriage?"

"I want no proof: I only want your word. Nay, I do not even want that. I

will ask you nothing. I swear that I will never ask you anything."

"That is very beautiful; and I am sure that you mean it now. But it

could not last. You are a very proud man; you are _gentilhomme de race_.

It would in time become intolerable to you if you believed that any one

living man had any title to point a finger of scorn at you. You have a

right to know what my relations were with Lord Gervase: it is necessary

for all the peace of our future that you should know everything,--know

that there is nothing more left for you to know. You can only be

convinced of that if you yourself hear what I say to him. Go; and wait

there."

Brandolin hesitates. To listen unseen is a part which seems very

cowardly to him, and yet she is right, no doubt; all the peace of the

future may depend on it. He is ready to pledge himself blindly in the

dark in all ways, but he knows that she, in forbidding him to do so,

speaks the word of wisdom, of foresight, and of truth.

"Go," she repeats. "Men have a thousand ways of proving the truth of

whatever they say; we have none, or next to none. If you refuse me this,

the sole poor evidence that I can produce, I will never be to you

anything that you now wish. Never; that I swear to you."

He hesitates, and looks at her with a long inquiring regard. Then he

bows, and goes.

After all, she is within her rights. She has no other means to show him

with any proof what this man whose name is so odiously entangled with

her own has, or has not, been to her.

The house is still quite silent, and no one is likely to come into those

rooms until much later. Every syllable said in the small library can be

heard in any part of the larger one. He stands in the embrasure of one

of the windows, the velvet curtains making a screen behind him. He seems

to wait for hours; in reality only five minutes have passed when he

hears the door of the great library open, and Gervase passes quickly

through the apartment without seeing him, and goes on into the one where

she awaits his coming.

"Are you really risen so early?" she says, with a sarcastic coldness in

her voice. "I remembered afterwards that it was too cruel to name to you

any hour before noon."

"You are unkind," he answers. "To hear what I hope to hear, you may be

sure that I would have gone through much greater trials than even rising

with the lark, had you commanded it."

His words are light, but his accent is tender and appealing.

"What do you hope to hear?" she asks, abruptly. The question embarrasses

him and sounds cold.

"I hope to hear that you pardon me the past and will deign to crown my

future."

"I pardon you the past, certainly. With neither your present nor your

future have I anything to do."

"You say that very cruelly,--so cruelly that it makes your forgiveness

more unkind than your hatred would be."

"I intend no unkindness. I merely wish to express indifference. Perhaps

I am even mistaken in saying that I entirely forgive you. When I

remember that you once possessed any influence over me, I scarcely do

forgive you, for I am forced to despise myself."

"Those are very hard words! Perhaps in the past I was unworthy of having

known and loved you; but if you will believe in my regret, and allow me

occasion to atone, you shall never repent of your indulgence. Pray hear

me out, Xenia----"

"You cannot call me by that name. It is for my friends: you are not

numbered among them."

"I would be much more than your friend. If you will be my wife."

"It is too late," she replies, and her voice is as cold as ice.

"Why too late? We have all the best of our lives unspent before us."

"When I say too late, I mean that if you had said as much to me after

the death of Prince Sabaroff I should have accepted your hand, and I

should have spent the whole remainder of my existence in repenting that

I had done so; for I should soon have fathomed the shallowness of your

character, the artificiality and poverty of your sentiments, the

falseness of your mind, and I should speedily have hated both myself and

you."

"You are not merciful, madame!"

He is bitterly humbled and passionately incensed.

"Were you merciful?" she asks him, with the sound of a great anger,

carefully controlled, vibrating in her voice. "I was a child, taken out

of a country convent, and married as ignorantly as a bird is trapped. I

had rank, and I was burdened by it. I was in a great world, a great

court, and I was terrified by them. The man I had been given to was a

gambler, a drunkard, and a brute. He treated me in private as he had

treated the women captured in Turkestan or sold as slaves in Persia. You

knew that: you were his intimate associate. You used your opportunities

to interest me and win your way into my confidence. I had no one in the

whole world that I could trust. I did trust you."

She pauses a moment.

Gervase does not dare reply.

"You were so gentle, so considerate, so full of sympathy; I thought you

a very angel. A girl of sixteen or seventeen sees the face of St. John

in the first Faust who finds his way into her shut soul! You made me

care for you; I do not deny it. But why did I care? Because I saw in you

the image of a thousand things you were not. Because I imagined that my

own fanciful ideal existed in you, and you had the ability to foster the

illusion."

"But why recall all this?" he says, entreatingly. "Perhaps I was

unworthy of your innocent attachment, of your exalted imaginations; I

dare not say that I was not; but now that I meet you again, now that I

care for you ten thousand--ten million times more----"

"What is that to me?" she says, with almost insolent coldness. "It was

not I who loved you, but a child who knew no better, and whose heart was

so bleeding from the tortures of another man that the first hand which

soothed it could take it as one takes a wounded bird! But when my eyes

opened to your drift and your desires, when I saw that you were no

better than other men, that you tried to tempt me to the lowest forms of

intrigue under cover of your friendship with my husband, then, child

though I was, I saw you as you were, and I hid myself from you! You

thought that Sabaroff exiled me from his jealousy of you to the northern

estates; but it was not so. I entreated him to let me leave Petersburg,

and he had grown tired of torturing me and let me go."

"You blame me for being merely human. I loved you not better but not

worse than men do love."

"I blame you for having been insincere, treacherous, dishonest. You

approached me under cover of the most delicate and forbearing sympathy

and reverence, and you only wore those masks to cover the vulgar designs

of a most commonplace Lothario. Of course, now I know that one must not

play with fire unless one is willing to be burned. I did not know it

then. I was a stupid, unhappy, trembling child, full of poetic fancies,

and alone in a dissolute crowd. When you could not make me what you

wished to make me, I seemed very tame and useless to you. You turned to

more facile women, no doubt, and you left Russia."

"I left Russia under orders; and I wrote to you. I wrote to you

repeatedly. You never answered."

"No; I had no wish to answer you. I had seen you as you were, and the

veil had fallen from my eyes. I burnt your letters as they came to me.

But after the death of Prince Sabaroff you were careful to write no

more."

Gervase colors hotly; there is an accent in the words which makes them

strike him like whips.

"If you had written to me after that," she continues, "perhaps I should

have answered you; perhaps not: I cannot tell. When you knew that I was

set free you were silent; you stayed away, I know not where. I never saw

you again; I never heard from you again. Now I thank you for your

neglect and oblivion, but at the time I confess that it made me suffer.

I was very young still, and romantic. For a while I expected every month

which melted the snow would bring you back. So much I admit, though it

will flatter you."

It does not flatter him as she says it; rather it wounds him. He has a

hateful sense of his own impotency to stir her one hand's breadth, to

breathe one spark of warmth into those ashes gone cold forever.

"I do not think," she continues, "that I ever loved you in the sense

that women can love; but you had the power to make me suffer, to feel

your oblivion, to remember you when you had forgotten me. When I went

into the world again I heard of your successes with others, and

gradually I came to see you in your true light, and, almost, the drunken

brutality of Prince Sabaroff seemed to me a manlier thing than your

half-hearted and shallow erotics had been. Now, when we meet again by

pure hazard in the same country house, you do me the honor to offer me

your hand after eight years. I can only say, as I have said before, that

it is seven years too late!"

"Too late, only because Lord Brandolin now is everything to you."

"Lord Brandolin may possibly be something to me in the future. But, if

Lord Brandolin did not exist, if no other living man existed, be sure

that it would make no difference to me--or to you."

"Is that your last word?"

"Yes."

Pale and agitated as no other woman had ever seen him, Gervase bows low

and leaves her abruptly, pushing open one of the glass doors on to the

garden and closing it with a clash behind him.

Xenia Sabaroff goes towards the large library, her silvery train

catching the lights and shadows as she goes.

Brandolin meets her with his hands outstretched.

"You are content, then?" she asks.

"I am more than content,--if I may be allowed to atone to you for all

that you have suffered."

His own eyes are dim as he speaks.

"But you know that the world will always say that he was my lover?"

"I do not think that the world will say it--of my wife; but, if it do,

I, at least, shall not be troubled."

"You have a great nature," she says, with deep emotion.

Brandolin smiles. "Oh, I cannot claim so much as that; but I have a

great love."

* * * * *

"I'm awfully glad that prig's got spun," says George Usk, as Gervase

receives a telegram from the Foreign Office which requires his departure

from Surrenden at four o'clock that afternoon.

"Spun! What imagination!" says his wife, very angrily. "Who should have

spun him, pray will you tell me?"

"We shall never hear it in so many words," says Usk, with a grim

complacency, "but I'll swear, if I die for it, that he's asked your

Russian friend to marry him and that she's said she won't. Very wise of

her, too. Especially if, as you imply, they carried on together years

ago: he'd be eternally throwing it in her teeth: he's what the Yanks

call a 'tarnation mean cuss.'"

"I never implied anything of the sort," answers the lady of Surrenden,

with great decorum and dignity. "I never suppose that all my friends are

all they ought to be, whatever _yours_ may leave to be desired. If he

were attached long ago to Madame Sabaroff, it is neither your affair nor

mine. It may possibly concern Lord Brandolin, if he have the intentions

which you attribute to him."

"Brandolin can take care of himself," says Usk, carelessly. "He knows

the time of day as well as anybody, and I don't know why you should be

rough on it, my lady: it will be positively refreshing if anybody

marries after one of your house-parties; they generally only get

divorced after them."

"The Waverleys are very good friends still, I believe," says Dorothy

Usk, coldly.

The reply seems irrelevant, but to the ear of George Usk it carries

considerable relevancy.

He laughs a little nervously. "Oh, yes: so are we, aren't we?"

"Certainly," says the mistress of Surrenden.

* * * * *

At the first Drawing-room this year, the admired of all eyes, and the

centre of all comment, is the Lady Brandolin.

DON GESUALDO.

CHAPTER I.

It was a day in June.

The crickets were chirping, the lizards were gliding, the butterflies

were flying above the ripe corn, the reapers were out among the wheat,

and the tall stalks were swaying and falling under the sickle. Through

the little windows of his sacristy Don Gesualdo, the young vicar of San

Bartolo, in the village of Marca, looked with wistful eyes at the

hill-side which rose up in front of him, seen through a frame of

cherry-boughs in full fruit. The hill-side was covered with corn, with

vines, with mulberry-trees; the men and women were at work among the

trees, it was the first day of harvest; there was a blue, happy sky

above them all; their voices chattering and calling to one another over

the sea of grain came to his ears gayly and softened by air and

distance. He sighed as he looked and as he heard. Yet, interrogated, he

would have said that he was happy and wanted for nothing.

He was a slight, pale man, still almost a youth, with a delicate face

without color and beardless; his eyes were brown and tender and serious,

his mouth was sensitive and sweet. He was the son of a fisherman away by

Bocca d'Arno, where the river meets the sea, amidst the cane- and

cactus-brakes which Costa loves to paint. But who could say what fine,

time-filtered, pure Etruscan or Latin blood might not run in his veins?

There is so much of the classic features and the classic form among the

peasants of Tyrrhene sea-shores, of Cimbrian oak woods, of Roman

grass-plains, of Maremma marshes.

It was the last day of peace which he was destined to know in Marca.

He turned from the window with reluctance and regret, as the old woman

who served him as housekeeper and church-cleaner in one summoned him to

his frugal supper. He could have supped at any hour he had chosen, there

were none to say him nay, but it was the custom at Marca to sup at the

twenty-third hour, and he was not a person to violate custom: he would

as soon have thought of spitting on the blessed bread itself. Habit is a

masterful ruler in all Italian communities; it has always been so; it is

a formula which excuses all things and sanctifies all things, and to

none did it do so more than to Gesualdo. Often he was not in the least

hungry at sunset, often he grudged sorely the hours spent in breaking

black bread and in eating poor soup when Nature was at her sweetest and

the skies giving their finest spectacle to a thankless earth. Yet never

did he fail to meekly answer old Candida's summons to the humble repast.

To have altered the hour of eating would have seemed to him irreligious,

revolutionary, altogether impossible.

Candida was a little old woman, burnt black by the sun, with a wisp of

gray hair fastened on the crown of her head, and a neater look about her

kerchief and her gown than was usual in Marca, for she was a woman

originally from a Northern city. She had always been a servant in

priests' houses, and, if the sacristan were ill or away, knew as well as

he where every book, bell, and candle were kept, and could have said the

offices herself had her sex allowed her. In tongue she was very sharp,

and in secret was proud of the power she possessed in making the

vicegerent of God afraid of her. The priest was the first man in this

parish of poor folks, and the priest would shrink like a chidden child

if she found out that he had given his best shirt to a beggar, or had

inadvertently come in with wet boots over the brick floor which she had

just washed and sanded. It was the old story of so many sovereignties.

He had power, no doubt, to bind and loose, to bless and curse, to

cleanse or refuse to cleanse the sinful souls of men; but for all that

he was only a stupid, forgetful baby of a man in his servant's eyes, and

she made him feel the scorn she had for him, mixed up with a

half-motherly, half-scolding admiration, which saw in him half a child,

half a fool, and, maybe she would add in her own thoughts, a kind of

angel.

Don Gesualdo was not wise or learned in any way: he had barely been able

to acquire enough knowledge to pass through the examinations necessary

for entrance into the priesthood. That slender amount of scholarship was

his all; but he was clever enough for Marca, which had very little

brains of its own, and he did his duty most faithfully, as far as he saw

it, at all times. As for doubts of any sort as to what that duty was,

such scepticism never could possibly assail him. His creed appeared as

plain and sure to him as the sun which shone in the heavens, and his

faith was as single-hearted and unswerving as the devoted soul of a

docile sheep-dog.

He was of a poetic and retiring nature; religion had taken entire

possession of his soul, and he was as unworldly, as visionary, and as

simple as any one of the _peccarelle di Dio_ who dwelt around Francesco

d'Assisci. His mother had been a German servant-girl, married out of a

small inn in Pisa, and some qualities of the dreamy, slow, and serious

Teutonic temperament were in him, all Italian of the western coast as he

was. On such a dual mind the spiritual side of his creed had obtained

intense power; and the office he filled was to him a heaven-given

mission, which compelled him to incessant sacrifice of every earthly

appetite and every selfish thought.

"He is too good to live," said his old housekeeper.

It was a very simple and monotonous life which was led by him in his

charge. There was no kind of change in it for anybody, unless they went

away, and few people born in Marca ever did that. They were not forced

by climate to be nomads, like the mountaineers of the Apennines, nor

like the men of the sea-coast and ague-haunted plains. Marca was a

healthy, homely place on the slope of a hill in the wilderness, where

its sons and daughters could stay and work all the year round, if they

chose, without risk of fever worse than such as might be brought on by

too much new wine at close of autumn. Marca was not pretty, nor

historical, nor picturesque, nor uncommon in any way: there are five

hundred, five thousand, villages like it, standing among corn-lands and

maize-fields and mulberry-trees, with its little dark church, and its

whitewashed presbytery, and its dusky red-tiled houses, and its great

silent empty villa, that used to be a fortified and stately palace and

now is given over to the rats and the spiders and the scorpions. A very

quiet little place, far away from cities and railways, dusty and

uncomely in itself, but blessed in the abundant light and the divine

landscape which are around it, and of which no one in it ever thought,

except this simple young priest, Gesualdo Brasailo.

Of all natural gifts, a love of natural beauty surely brings most

happiness to the possessor of it,--happiness altogether unalloyed and

unpurchasable, and created by the mere rustle of green leaves, the mere

ripple of brown waters. It is not an Italian gift at all, nor an Italian

feeling; to an Italian, gas is more beautiful than sunshine, and a

cambric flower more beautiful than a real one; he usually thinks the

mountains hateful and a city divine, he detests trees and adores crowds.

But there are exceptions to all rules: there are poetic natures

everywhere, though everywhere rare: Gesualdo was the exception in Marca

and its neighborhood, and evening after evening saw him in the summer

weather strolling through the fields, his breviary in his hand, but his

heart with the dancing fire-flies, the quivering poplar leaves, the tall

green cane, the little silvery fish darting over the white stones of the

shallow river-waters. He could not have told why he loved to watch these

things: he thought it was because they reminded him of Bocca d'Arno and

the sand-beach and the canebrakes; but he did love them, and they filled

him with that vague emotion, half pleasure, half pain, known to all who

love Nature for herself alone.

His supper over, he went into his church: a little, red-bricked,

whitewashed passage connected it with his parlor. The church was small,

and dark, and old; it had an altar-piece said to be old, and by a

Sienese master, and of some value, but Gesualdo knew nothing of these

matters: a Raphael might have hung there and he would have been none the

wiser. He loved the church, ugly and simple as it was, as a mother loves

a plain child or a dull one because it is hers; and now and then he

preached strange, passionate, pathetic sermons in it, which none of his

people understood, and which he barely understood himself. He had a

sweet, full, far-reaching voice, with an accent of singular melancholy

in it, and as his mystical, romantic, involved phrases passed far over

the heads of his hearers, like a flight of birds flying high up against

the clouds, the pathos and music in his tones stirred their hearts

vaguely. He was certainly, they thought, a man whom the saints loved.

Candida, sitting near the altar with her head bowed and her hands

feeling her rosary, would think, as she heard the unintelligible

eloquence, "Dear Lord, all that power of words, all that skill of the

tongue, and he would put his shirt on bottom upward were it not for me!"

There was no office in his church that evening, but he lingered about

it, touching this thing and the other with tender fingers. There was

always a sweet scent in the little place: its door usually stood open to

the fields amidst which it was planted, and the smell of the incense

which century after century had been burned in it blended with the

fragrance from primroses, or dog-roses, or new-mown hay, or crushed ripe

grapes, which, according to the season, came in it from without. Candida

kept it very clean, and the scorpions and spiders were left so little

peace there by her everactive broom that they betook themselves

elsewhere, dear as the wooden benches and the crannied stones had been

to them for ages.

Since he had come to Marca nothing of any kind had happened in it. There

had been some marriages, a great many births, not a few burials; but

that was all. The people who came to confession at Easter confessed very

common sins: they had stolen this or that, cheated here, there, and

everywhere, got drunk and quarrelled, nothing more: he would give them

clean bills of spiritual health, and bid them go in peace and sin no

more, quite sure, as they were sure themselves, that they would have the

self-same sins to tell off next time they came there.

Everybody in Marca thought a great deal of their religion; that is, they

trusted to it in a helpless but confident kind of way as a fetich which,

being duly and carefully propitiated, would make things all right for

them after death. They would not have missed a mass to save their lives:

that they dozed through it, and cracked nuts or took a suck at their

pipe-stems when they woke, did not affect their awed and unchangeable

belief in its miraculous and saving powers. If they had been asked what

they believed, or why they believed, they would have scratched their

heads and felt puzzled. Their minds dwelt in a twilight in which nothing

had any distinct form. The clearest idea ever presented to them was that

of the Madonna: they thought of her as of some universal mother who

wanted to do them good in present and future if they only observed her

ceremonials: just as in the ages gone by upon these same hill-sides the

Latin peasant had thought of the great Demeter.

Gesualdo himself, despite all the doctrine which had been instilled into

him in his novitiate, did not know much more than they: he repeated the

words of his offices without any distinct notion of all that they meant;

he had a vague feeling that all self-denial and self-sacrifice were

thrice blessed, and he tried his best to save his own soul and the souls

of others; but there he ceased to think: outside that speculation lay,

and speculation was a thrice-damnable offence. Yet he, being imaginative

and intelligent in a humble and dog-like way, was at times infinitely

distressed to see how little effect this religion which he taught and

which they professed had upon the lives of his people. His own life was

altogether guided by it: why could not theirs be the same? Why did they

go on all through the year swearing, cursing, drinking, quarrelling,

lying, stealing? He could not but perceive that they came to him to

confess their peccadilloes only that they might pursue them more

completely at their ease. He could not flatter himself that his

ministrations in Marca, which were now of six years' duration, had made

the village a whit different from what it had been when he had entered

it.

Thinking of this, as he did think of it continually night and day, being

a man of singularly sensitive conscience, he sat down on a marble bench

near the door and opened his breviary. The sun was setting behind the

pines on the crest of the hills; the warm orange light poured across the

paved way in front of the church, through the stems of the cypresses

which stood before the door, and found its way over the uneven slates of

the stone floor to his feet. A nightingale was singing somewhere in the

dog-rose hedge beyond the cypress-trees. Lizards ran from crack to crack

in the pavement. A tendril of honeysuckle came through a hole in the

wall, thrusting its delicate curled horns of perfume towards him. The

whole entrance was bathed in golden warmth and light; the body of the

church behind him was quite dark.

He had opened his breviary from habit, but he did not read: he sat and

gazed at the evening clouds, at the blue hills, at the radiant air, and

listened to the song of the nightingales in that dreamy trance which

made him look so stupid in the eyes of his housekeeper and his

parishioners, but which was only the meditation of a poetic temper,

cramped and cooped up in a narrow and uncongenial existence, and not

educated or free enough to be able even to analyze what it felt.

"The nightingale's song in June is altogether unlike its songs of April

and May," thought this poor priest, whom Nature had made a poet, and to

whom she had given the eyes which see and the ears which hear. "The very

phrases are wholly different; the very accent is not the same: in spring

it is all a canticle like the Song of Solomon, in midsummer--what is it

he is singing? Is he lamenting the summer? or is he only teaching his

young ones how they should sing next year?"

And he fell again to listening to the sweetest bird that gladdens earth.

The nightingale was patiently repeating his song, again and again,

sometimes more slowly, sometimes more quickly, seeming to lay stress on

some phrases more than on others; and another voice, fainter and feebler

than his own, repeated the trills and roulades after him fitfully, and

often breaking down altogether. It was plain that there in the wild-rose

hedge he was teaching his son. Any one who will may hear these sweet

lessons given under bays and myrtle, under arbutus and pomegranate,

through all the month of June.

Nightingales in Marca were only regarded as creatures to be trapped,

shot, caged, eaten, sold for a centime like any other small bird; but

about the church no one touched them: the people knew that their

_parocco_ cared to hear their songs coming sweetly through the pauses in

the recitatives of the office. Absorbed as he was now in hearkening to

the music-lesson among the white dog-roses, he started violently as a

shadow fell across the threshold and a voice called to him,

"Good-evening, Don Gesualdo."

He looked up and saw a woman whom he knew well,--a young woman, scarcely

indeed eighteen years old, very handsome, with a face full of warmth and

color and fire and tenderness, great flashing eyes which could at times

be as soft as a dog's, and a beautiful ruddy mouth with teeth as white

as a dog's are also. She was by name Generosa Fe: she was the wife of

Tasso Tassilo, the miller. In Marca, most of the women by toil and sun

were black as berries by the time they were twenty, and looked old

almost before they were young, with rough hair and loose forms and

wrinkled skins, and children dragging at their breasts all the year

through. Generosa was not like them: she did little work; she had the

form of a goddess; she took care of her beauty, and she had no children,

though she had married at fifteen. She was friends with Gesualdo; they

had both come from the Bocca d'Arno, and it was a link of common memory

and mutual attachment. They liked to recall how they had each run

through the tall canes and cactus, and waded in the surf, and slept in

the hot sand, and hidden themselves for fright when the king's camels

had come towards them, throwing their huge misshapen shadows over the

seas of flowering reeds and rushes.

He remembered her a small child, jumping about on the sand and laughing

at him, a youth, when he was going to college to study for entrance into

the Church. "Gesualdo! che Gesualdo!" she had cried. "A fine priest he

will make for us all to confess to!" And she had screamed with mirth,

her handsome little face rippling all over with gayety like the waves of

the sea with the sunshine.

He had remembered her, and had been glad when Tasso Tassilo, the miller,

had gone sixty miles away for a wife, and had brought her from the Bocca

d'Arno to live at the mill on the small river which was the sole water

that ran through the village of Marca.

Tasso Tassilo, going on business once to the sea-coast, had chanced to

see that handsome face of hers, and had wooed and won her without great

difficulty, for her people were poor folk, living by carting sand, and

she herself was tired of her bare legs and face, her robust hunger,

which made her glad to eat the fruit off the cactus-plants, and her

great beauty, which nobody ever saw except the sea-gulls and carters and

fishers and cane-cutters, who were all as poor as she was herself.

Tasso Tassilo, in his own person, she hated, an ugly, dry, elderly man,

with his soul wrapped up in his flour-bags and his money-bags; but he

adored her, and let her spend as she chose on her attire and her

ornaments; and the mill-house was a pleasant place enough with its walls

painted on the outside _in tempora_, and the willows drooping over its

eaves, and the young men and the mules loitering about on the land-side

of it, and the peasants coming up with corn to be ground whenever there

had been rain in summer and so water enough in the river-bed to turn the

mill-wheels. In drought the stream was low and its stones dry and no

work could be done by the grindstones. There was then only water enough

for the ducks to paddle in, and the pretty teal to float in, which they

would always do at sunrise unless the miller let fly a a charge of small

shot among them from the windows under the roof.

"Good-evening, Don Gesualdo," said the miller's wife now, in the midst

of the nightingale's song and the orange glow from the sunset.

Gesualdo rose with a smile. He was always glad to see her. She had

something about her for him of boyhood, of home, of the sea, and of the

careless days before he became a seminarist: he did not positively

regret that he had entered the priesthood, but he remembered the earlier

life wistfully, and with wonder that he could ever have been that

light-hearted lad who had run through the canebrakes to plunge into the

rolling waters with all the wide gay sunlit world of sea and sky and

river and shore before him, behind him, and above him.

"What is wrong, Generosa?" he asked her, seeing as he looked up that her

handsome face was clouded. Her days were not often tranquil; her husband

was jealous, and she gave him cause for jealousy: the mill was a

favorite resort of all the young men for thirty miles around, and unless

Tasso Tassilo had ceased to grind corn he could not have shut his doors

to them.

"It is the old story, Don Gesualdo," she answered, leaning against the

church porch. "You know what Tasso, is and what a dog's life he leads

me." "You are not always prudent, my daughter," said Gesualdo, with a

faint smile.

"Who could be always prudent at my years?" said the miller's young wife.

"Tasso is a brute, and a fool too. One day he will drive me out of

myself: I tell him so."

"That is not the way to make him better," said Gesualdo. "I am sorry you

do not see it. The man loves you, and he feels he is old, and he knows

that you do not care: that is always like a thorn in his flesh: he feels

you do not care."

"How should he suppose that I care?" said Generosa, passionately. "I

hated him always; he is as old as my father; he expects me to be shut up

like a nun; if he had his own way I should never stir out of the house:

does one marry for that?"

"One should marry to do one's duty," said Gesualdo, timidly, for he felt

the feebleness of his counsels and arguments against the force and the

warmth and the self-will of a woman, conscious of her beauty and her

power and her lovers, and moved by all the instincts of vanity and

passion.

"We had a terrible scene an hour ago," said Generosa, passing over what

she did not choose to answer. "It cost me much not to put a knife into

him. It was about Falko. There was nothing new, but he thought there

was. I fear he will do Falko mischief one day: he threatened it: it is

not the first time."

"That is very grave," said Gesualdo, growing paler as he heard. "My

daughter, you are more in error than Tassilo. After all, he has his

rights. Why do you not send the young man away? He would obey you."

"He would obey me in anything else, not in that," said the woman, with

the little conscious smile of one who knows her own power. "He would not

go away. Indeed, why should he go away? He has his employment here. Why

should he go away because Tasso is a jealous fool?"

"Is he such a fool?" said Gesualdo, and he raised his eyes suddenly and

looked straight into hers. Generosa colored through her warm, paleless

skin. She was silent.

"It has not gone as far as you think," she muttered, after a pause.

"But I will not be accused for nothing," she added. "Tasso shall have

what he thinks he has had. Why would he marry me? He knew I hated him.

We were all very poor down there by Bocca d'Arno, but we were gay and

happy. Why did he take me away?"

The tears started to her eyes and rolled down her hot cheeks. It was the

hundredth time that she had told her sorrows to Gesualdo, in the

confessional and out of it: it was an old story, of which she never

tired of the telling. Her own people were far away by the sea-shore, and

she had no friends in Marca, for she was thought a "foreigner," not

being of that country-side, and the women were jealous of her beauty,

and of the idle life which she led in comparison to theirs, and of the

cared-for look of her person. Gesualdo seemed a countryman, and a

relative, and a friend. She took all her woes to him. A priest was like

a woman, she thought; only a still safer confidant.

"You are ungrateful, my daughter," he said, now, with an effort to be

severe in reprimand. "You know that you were glad to marry so rich a man

as Tassilo. You know that you father and mother were glad, and you

yourself likewise. No doubt the man is not all that you could wish, but

you owe him something; indeed, you owe him much. I speak to you now out

of my office, only as a friend. I would entreat you to send your lover

away. If not, there will be crime, perhaps bloodshed, and the fault of

all that may happen will be yours."

She gave a gesture which said that she cared nothing, whatever might

happen. She was in a headstrong and desperate mood; she had had a

violent quarrel with her husband, and she loved Falko Melegari, the

steward of the absent noble who owned the empty, half-ruined palace

which stood on the banks of the river; he was a fair and handsome young

man, with Lombard blood in him, tall, slender, vigorous, amorous and

light-hearted,--the strongest of contrasts in all ways to Tasso Tassilo,

taciturn, feeble, sullen, and unlovely, and twice the years of his wife.

There was not more than a mile between the mill-house and the deserted

villa; Tassilo might as well have tried to arrest the sirocco or the

mariner's winds, when they blew, as prevent an intercourse so favored

and so facilitated by circumstances. The steward had a million reasons

in a year to visit the mill, and when the miller insulted him and

forbade him his doors he had no power to prevent him from fishing in the

waters, from walking on the bank, from making signals from the villa

terraces and appointments in the canebrakes and the vine-fields. Nothing

could have broken off the intrigue except the departure of one or the

other of the lovers from Marca. But Falko Melegari would not go away

from a place where his interests and his passions both combined to hold

him; and it never entered the mind of the miller to take his wife

elsewhere. He had dwelt at the mill all the years of his life, and his

forefathers for five generations before him. To change their residence

never occurs to such people as these: they are fixed, like the

cypress-trees, in the ground, and dream no more than they of new homes.

Like the tree, they never change till death fells them. Generosa

continued to pour out her woes, leaning against the pillar of the porch,

and playing with a twig of pomegranate, whose buds were not more scarlet

than her own lips; and Gesualdo continued to press on her his good

counsels, knowing all the while that he might as well speak to the

swallows under the church eaves, for any benefit that he could effect.

In sole answer to the arguments of Gesualdo she retorted in scornful

words.

"You may find duty enough for you because you are a saint," she added,

with less of reverence than of disdain; "but I am no saint, and I will

not spend all my best days tied to the side of a sickly and sullen old

man."

"You are wrong, my daughter," said Gesualdo, sternly. He colored; he

knew not why. "I know nothing of these passions," he added, with some

embarrassment; "but I know what duty is, and yours is clear."

He did not know much of human nature, and of woman nature nothing, yet

he dimly comprehended that Generosa was now at that crisis of her life

when all the ardors of her youth and all the delight in her own power

made her passionately rebellious against the cruelties of her fate; when

it was impossible to make duty look other than hateful to her, and when

the very peril and difficulty which surrounded her love-story made it

the sweeter and more irresistible to her. She was of a passionate,

ardent, careless, daring temperament; and the dangers of the intrigue

which she pursued had no terrors for her, whilst the indifference which

she had felt for years for her husband had deepened of late into hatred.

"One is not a stick, nor a stone, nor a beam of timber, nor a block of

granite, that one should be able to live without love all one's days!"

she cried, with passion and contempt.

She threw the branches of pomegranate over the hedge, gave him a glance

half contemptuous and half compassionate, and left the church door.

"After all, what should he understand!" she thought. "He is a saint, but

he is not a man."

Gesualdo looked after her a moment as she went over the court-yard and

between the stems of the cypresses out towards the open hill-side. The

sun had set; there was a rosy after-glow which bathed her elastic figure

in a carmine light; she had that beautiful walk which some Italian women

have who have never worn shoes in the first fifteen years of their

lives. The light shone on her dusky auburn hair, her gold ear-rings, the

slender column of her throat, her vigorous and voluptuous form. Gesualdo

looked after her, and a subtile warmth and pain passed through him,

bringing with it a sharp sense of guilt. He looked away from her and

went within his church and prayed.

That night Falko Melegari had just alighted from the saddle of his good

gray horse, when he was told that the parocco of San Bartolo was waiting

to see him.

The villa had been famous and splendid in other days; but it formed now

only one of the many neglected possessions of a gay young noble, called

Ser Baldo by his dependents, who spent what little money he had in

pleasure-places out of Italy, seldom or never came near his estates, and

accepted without investigation all such statements of accounts as his

various men of business were disposed to send to him.

His steward lived on the ground-floor of the great villa, in the vast

frescoed chambers with their domed and gilded ceilings, their sculptured

cornices, their carved doors, their stately couches with the satin

dropping in shreds, and the pale tapestries with the moths and the mice

at work in them. His narrow camp-bed, his deal table and chairs, were

sadly out of place in those once splendid halls; but he did not think

about it: he vaguely liked the space and the ruined grandeur about him,

and all the thoughts he had were given to his love, Generosa, the wife

of Tasso Tassilo. From the terraces of the villa he could see the mill a

mile farther down the stream, and he would pass half the short nights of

the summer looking at the distant lights in it.

He was only five-and-twenty, and he was passionately in love with all

the increased ardor of a forbidden passion.

He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, was well-made and very tall; in

character he was neither better nor worse than most men of his age, but

as a steward he was tolerably honest, and as a lover he was thoroughly

sincere. He went with a quick step into the central hall to meet his

visitor: he supposed that the vicar had come about flowers for the feast

of St. Peter and St. Paul, which was on the morrow. Though the villa

gardens were wholly neglected, they were still rich in flowers which

wanted no care, lilies, lavender, old-fashioned roses, oleanders red and

white, and magnolia-trees.

"Good-evening, reverend Father. You do me honor," he said, as he saw

Gesualdo. "Is there anything that I can do for you? I am your humble

servant."

Gesualdo looked at him curiously. He had never noticed the young man

before: he had seen him ride past, he had seen him at mass, he had

spoken to him of the feasts of the Church, but he had never noticed him.

Now he looked at him curiously as he answered, without any preface

whatever,--

"I am come to speak to you of Generosa Fe, the wife of Tasso Tassilo."

The young steward colored violently. He was astonished and silent.

"She loves you," said Gesualdo, simply.

Falko Melegari made a gesture as though he implied that it was his place

neither to deny nor to affirm.

"She loves you," said Gesualdo, again.

The young man had that fatuous smile which unconsciously expresses the

consciousness of conquest. But he was honest in his passion and ardent

in it.

"Not so much as I love her," he said, rapturously, forgetful of his

hearer.

Gesualdo frowned.

"She is the wife of another man," he said, with reproof. Falko Melegari

shrugged his shoulders: that did not seem any reason against it to him.

"How will it end?" said the priest.

The lover smiled. "These things always end in one way."

Gesualdo winced, as though some one had wounded him.

"I am come to bid you go out of Marca," he said, simply.

The young man stared at him; then he laughed angrily.

"Good Ser Vicario," he said, impatiently, "you are the keeper of our

souls, no doubt, but not quite to such a point as that. Has Tassilo sent

you to me, or she?" he added, with a gleam of suspicion in his eyes.

"No one has sent me."

"Why, then----"

"Because, if you do not go, there will be tragedy and misery. Tasso

Tassilo is not a man to make you welcome to his couch. I have known

Generosa since she was a little child: we were both born on the Bocca

d'Arno. She is of a warm nature, but not a deep one; and if you go away

she will forget. Tassilo is a rude man and a hard one; he gives her all

she has; he has many claims on her, for in his way he has been generous

and tender. You are a stranger; you can only ruin her life; you can with

ease find another _gattaria_ far away in another province: why will you

not go? If you really loved her you would go."

Falko laughed. "Dear Don Gesualdo, you are a holy man, but you know

nothing of love."

Gesualdo winced a little again. It was the second time this had been

said to him this evening.

"Is it love," he said, after a pause, "to risk her murder by her

husband? I tell you Tassilo is not a man to take his dishonor quietly."

"Who cares what Tassilo does?" said the young steward, petulantly. "If

he touches a hair of her head I will make him die a thousand deaths."

"All those are words," said Gesualdo. "You cannot mend one crime by

another, and you cannot protect a woman from her husband's just

vengeance. There is only one way by which to save her from the danger

you have dragged her into. It is for you to go away."

"I will go away when this house walks a mile," said Falko. "Not before.

Go away!" he echoed, in wrath. "What! run like a mongrel dog before

Tassilo's anger? What! leave her all alone to curse me as a faithless

coward? What! go away, when all my life and my soul, and all the light

of my eyes, is in Marca? Don Gesualdo, you are a good man, but you are

mad. You must pardon me if I speak roughly. Your words make me beside

myself."

"Do you believe in no duty, then?"

"I believe in the duty of every honest lover," said Falko, with

vehemence, "and that duty is to do everything that the loved one wishes.

She is bound to a cur; she is unhappy; she has not even any children to

comfort her; she is like a beautiful flower shut up in a cellar, and she

loves me--me!--and you bid me go away! Don Gesualdo, keep to your church

offices, and leave the loves of others alone. What should you know of

them? Forgive me if I am rude. You are a holy man, but you know nothing

at all of men and women."

"I do not know much," said Gesualdo, meekly.

He was depressed and intimidated. He was sensible of his own utter

ignorance of the passions of life. This man, nigh his own age, but so

full of vigor, of ardor, of indignation, of pride in his consciousness

that he was beloved, and of resolve to stay where that love was, be the

cost what it would, daunted him with a sense of power and of triumph

such as he himself could not even comprehend, and yet wistfully envied.

It was sin, no doubt, he said to himself; and yet it was life, it was

strength, it was virility.

He had come to reprove, to censure, and to persuade into repentance this

headstrong lover, and he could only stand before him feeble and

oppressed with a sense of his own ignorance and childishness. All the

stock, trite arguments which his religious belief supplied him seemed to

fall away and to be of no more use than empty husks of rotten nuts

before the urgency, the fervor, and the self-will of real life. This man

and woman loved each other, and they cared for no other fact than this

on earth or in heaven. He left the villa-grounds in silence, with only a

gesture of farewell salutation.

CHAPTER II.

"Poor innocent, he meant well!" thought the steward, as he watched the

dark, slender form of the priest pass away through the vines and

mulberry-trees. The young man did not greatly venerate the Church

himself, though he showed himself at mass and sent flowers for the

feast-days because it was the custom to do so. He was like most young

Italians who have had a smattering of education, very indifferent on

such matters, and inclined to ridicule. He left them for women and old

men. But there was something about his visitant which touched him,--a

simplicity, an unworldliness, a sincerity, which moved his respect; and

he knew in his secret heart that the parocco, as he called him, was

right enough in everything that he had said.

Gesualdo himself went on his solitary way, his buckled shoes dragging

wearily over the dusty grass of the wayside. He had done no good, and he

did not see what good he could do. He felt helpless before the force and

speed of an unknown and guilty passion, as he once felt before a forest

fire which he had seen in the Marche. All his Church books gave him

homilies enough on the sins of the flesh and the temptings of the devil;

but none of these helped him before the facts of this lawless and

godless love, which seemed to pass high above his head like a whirlwind.

He went on slowly and dully along the edge of the river-bed: a sense of

something which he had always missed, which he would miss eternally, was

with him.

It was now quite night. Gesualdo liked to walk late at night. All things

were so peaceful, or at the least seemed so. You did not see the gashes

in the lopped trees, the scars in the burned hill-side, the wounds in

the mule's loins, the blood-shot eyes of the working ox, the goitred

throat of the child rolling in the dust. Night, kindly friend of dreams,

cast her soft veil over all woes, and made the very dust seem as a

silvered highway to a throne for God.

He went now through the balmy air, the rustling canes, the low-hanging

boughs of the fruit-laden peach-trees, and the sheaves of cut corn

leaning one up against another under the hives. He followed the course

of the water, a shallow thread at this season, glistening under the moon

in its bed of shingle and sand. He passed the mill-house perforce on his

homeward way, he saw the place of the weir made visible even in the dark

by the lanterns which swung on a cord stretched from one bank to

another, to entice any such fish as there might still be in the

shallows. The mill stood down into the water, a strong place, built in

olden days; the great black wheels were perforce at rest; the mules

champed and chafed in their stalls, inactive, like the mill; for the

next three months there would be nothing to do unless a storm came and

brought a freshet from the hills. The miller would have the more leisure

to nurse his wrongs, thought Gesualdo; and his heart was troubled: he

had never met with these woes of the passions; they oppressed and

alarmed him.

As he passed the low mill windows, protected from thieves by their iron

gratings, he could see the interior, lighted as it was by the flame of

oil lamps, and through the open lattices the voices, raised high in

stormy quarrel, seemed to smite the holy stillness of the night like a

blow. The figure of Generosa stood out against the light which shone

behind her; she was in a paroxysm of rage; her eyes flashed like the

lightnings of the hills, and her beautiful arms were tossed above her

head in impassioned imprecation. Tasso Tassilo seemed for the moment to

crouch beneath this rain of flame-like words; his face, on which the

light shone full, was deformed with malignant and impotent fury, with

covetous and jealous desire: there was no need to hear her words to know

that she was taunting him with her love for Falko Melegari. Gesualdo was

a weak man and physically timid; but here he hesitated but one instant.

He lifted the latch of the house door and walked straightway into the

mill kitchen.

"In the name of Christ, be silent!" he said to them, and made the sign

of the cross.

The torrent of words stopped on the lips of the young woman; the miller

scowled, and shrank from the light, and was mute.

"Is this how you keep your vows to heaven and to each other?" said

Gesualdo.

A flush of shame came over the face of the woman; the man drew his hat

farther over his eyes and went out of the kitchen silently. The victory

had been easier than their monitor had expected. And yet of what use was

it? he thought; they were silent out of respect for him. As soon as the

restraint of his presence should be removed they would begin afresh.

Unless he could change their souls, it was of little avail to bridle

their lips for an hour.

There was a wild chafing hatred on one side and a tyrannical, covetous,

dissatisfied love on the other: out of such discordant elements what

peace could come?

Gesualdo shut the wooden shutters of the windows, that others should not

see, as he had seen, into the interior; then he strove to pacify his old

playmate, whose heaving breast, and burning cheeks, and eyes which

scorched up in fire their own tears, spoke of a tempest lulled, not

spent. He spoke with all the wisdom with which study and the counsels of

the Fathers had supplied him, and with what was sweeter and more likely

to be efficacious, a true and yearning wish to save her from herself.

She was altogether wrong, and he strove to make her see the danger and

the error of her ways. But he strove in vain. She had one of those

temperaments, reckless, vehement, pleasure-loving, ardent, and

profoundly selfish, which see only their own immediate gain, their own

immediate desires. When he tried to stir her conscience by speaking of

the danger she drew down on the head of the man she professed to love,

she almost laughed.

"He would be a poor creature," she said, proudly, "if all danger would

not be dear to him for me!"

Gesualdo looked her full in the eyes.

"You know that this matter must end in the death of one man or of the

other. Do you mean that this troubles you not one whit?"

"It will not be my fault," said Generosa; and he saw in her the woman's

lust of vanity, which finds food for its pride in the blood shed for

her, as the tigress does, and even the gentle hind.

He remained an hour or more with her, exhausting every argument which

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

still-uncut corn, 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 St. Peter and of St. 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 door-way; 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 the 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 through the heart.

The agitation in the people was unimaginable, the uproar deafening. Some

one with a grain of sense remaining had sent for the carabineers, but

their picket was two miles off, and they had not yet arrived. The dead

man still lay where he had fallen: every one was afraid to touch him.

"Does his wife know?" said 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.

Gesualdo, with a strong shudder of disgust, held up his hand in horror

and reproof, then bent over the dead body where it lay among 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 in-doors," said the priest.

"You are in full canonicals!" cried Candida, twitching at his sleeve.

But 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 any one of

the little crowd would have cared: they would not have stretched a hand

even to drag him into the shade.

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.

Gesualdo, 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

breast. 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 door-ways half afraid, half angered:

some of them went to the mill-house, eager to have the honor 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 up 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.

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 for 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 Gesualdo. "You will not

bring him to life by starving yourself."

Gesualdo 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 gray villa where her lover dwelt, standing out against the

moonlight among 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 candor 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 a corner of

her soul she was vaguely conscious that there was a degree of unfairness

and baseness in setting their youth and their ardor 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 reproof of

Gesualdo 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 on 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 gray 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, Padrona! 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 daybreak, 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 neighbors, 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 door-way and watched her suspiciously and

without compassion. There was no one there who did not believe her to be

the murderess. No one except 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."

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 was 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.

In a later time they remembered against him all this which he did now.

The feast of St. Peter and St. 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.

"Neighbors 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 gray 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.

Gesualdo bowed his head and spread out his hands, palm downward, in a

gesture which meant hopeless doubt.

"I went 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 naught

of it. Oh, my God, why was I not here? They should not have taken her

without its costing them hard."

"You would have done her no good," said 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 clinched 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.

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 among 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 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 the law seized on the quiet village

and tortured every soul in it: every one 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 St. Peter and St. 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.

Every one 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 among 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-favored, 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-humored

impatience.

"But, God in heaven, why not when it is true?" shouted Falko.

"It is always true when the _damo_ is a man of honor?" 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 neighbors, 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 not 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-colored 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 labor 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 ear-rings 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?

They had admitted the vicar of San Bartolo, 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

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.

CHAPTER 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 way for the wind-flowers, 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 gayety natural

to it are things forever 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

parocco 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 ear of God 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 and

saints 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,

forever; it would make 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 canebrakes of the 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 forever denied to her.

Even if they acquitted her in the house of law yonder, she would be

dishonored for life. Even her lover, who loved her with all the hot

coarse ardor 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 unproved, crime were on her. 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 noticed the change in him. Pale he had always been,

but now he was the color 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 Fe;

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 among

the canes in the dusk of the dawn of St. Peter and St. Paul, thought

Candida, among 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 so much interest in a sinner.

"The people of Marca say you think too much about that foul business;

they 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 out about that which they cannot help."

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."

Gesualdo 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

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 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.

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 any one

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

favorite 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 broad 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--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 neighbors 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 foreign blood in

him, and that he had always been more friendly with the wife of Tasso

Tassilo than was 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 the 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 Gesualdo had held in abeyance, revived in its pristine

force.

In Easter-time 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 seems 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 formulae 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 counsels, 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. 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. Recognizing 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, wine-sodden 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 of what he did: 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 that killed him!"

"Whom?" asked 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 dawn I was

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 said he

was going to 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 crossroads 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 back 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, 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 realized

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 moment 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 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 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.