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 Fè; but this in itself seemed to her unfitting in one of his sacred calling. A mere light-o'-love and saucebox, as she had always herself called the miller's wife, was wholly unworthy to occupy, even in pity, the thoughts of so holy a man.
There could not be a doubt that she had given that knife-stroke 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 formulæ of it to be safe within it; conduct outside it was of no consequence. Nothing on earth can equal in confusion and indistinctness the views of the Italian rustic as regards his religion. The priest is to him as the medicine-man to the savage; but he has ceased to respect his 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.
When the dawn came it brought nothing to him except the knowledge that the real murderer was there, within a quarter of a mile of him, and yet could not be denounced by him to justice even to save the guiltless. The usual occupations of a week-day claimed his time, and he went through them all with mechanical precision, but he spoke all his words as in a dream, and the red sanded bricks of his house, the deal table, with the black coffee and the round loaf set out on it, the stone sink at which Candida was washing endive and cutting lettuces, the old men and women who came and went telling their troubles garrulously and begging for pence, the sunshine which streamed in over the threshold, the poultry which picked up the crumbs off the floor, all these homely and familiar things seemed unreal to him, and were seen as through a mist.
This little narrow dwelling with the black cypress shadows falling athwart it, which had once seemed to him the abode of perfect peace, now seemed to imprison him, till his heart failed and died within him.
In the dead of night, at the end of the week, moved by an unconquerable impulse which had haunted him the whole seven days, he rose, and lit a lantern and let himself out of his own door noiselessly, stealthily, as though he were on some guilty errand, and took the sexton's spade from the tool-house, and went across the black shadows which stretched over the grass, towards the place where the body of Tasso Tassilo had lain dead. In the moonlight there stood tall and straight a column of green leaves: it was the stately Lombardy poplar, which was spared by the hatchet, because Marca was, so far as it understood anything, loyal in its regret for the days that were gone. Many birds which had been for hours sound asleep in its boughs flew out with a great whirr of wings and with chirps of terror as the footfall of Gesualdo awakened and alarmed them. He set his lantern down on the ground, for the rays of the moon did not penetrate as far as the deep gloom the poplars threw around them, and began to dig. He dug some little time without success: then his spade struck against something which shone amidst the dry clay soil; it was the knife. He took it up with a shudder. There were dark red spots on the steel blade. It was a narrow, slightly-curved knife about six inches long, such a knife as every Italian of the lower classes carries every day, and with which most Italian murders are committed.
He looked at it long. If the inanimate thing could but have spoken, could but have told, the act which it had done!
He, kneeling on the ground, gazed at it with a sickening fascination; then he replaced it deeper down in the ground, and with his spade smoothed the earth with which he covered it. The soil was so dry that it did not show much trace of having been disturbed. Gravely he returned homeward, convinced now of the truth of the confession made to him. Some men met him on the road, country lads driving cattle early to a distant fair: they saluted him with respect, but laughed when they had passed him.
What had his reverence, they wondered, been doing with a spade at this time of night? Did he dig for treasure? There was a tradition in the country-side of sacks of ducats which had been buried by the river to save them from the French troops in the time of the invasion by the First Consul.
Gesualdo, unconscious of their comments, went home, put the spade back in the tool-house, unlocked his church, entered, and prayed long; then, waking his sleepycapellano, he bade him rise and set the bell ringing for the first mass. The man got up, grumbling because it was still quite dark, and next day talked to his neighbors about the queer ways of his vicar,—how he would walk all night about his room, sometimes get up and go out in the dead of night even. He complained that his own health and patience would soon give way. An uneasy feeling grew up in the village: some gossips even suggested that the bishop should be spoken to in the town; but every one was fearful of being the first to take such a step, and no one was sure how so great a person could be approached, and the matter remained in abeyance. But the disquietude and the antagonism which the manner and appearance of their priest had created grew with the growth of the year, and with it also the impression that he knew more of the miller's assassination than he would ever say.
A horrible sense of being this man's accomplice grew also upon himself: the bond of silence which he kept perforce with this wretch seemed to him to make him so. His slender strength and sensitive nerves ill fitted him to sustain so heavy a burden, so horrible a knowledge.
"It has come to chastise me because I have thought of her too often, have been moved by her too warmly," he told himself; and his soul shrank within him at what appeared the greatness of his own guilt.
Since receiving the confession of the carter he did not dare to seek an interview with Generosa. He did not dare to look on her agonized eyes and feel that he knew what could set her free and yet must never tell it. He trembled lest in sight of the suffering of this woman, who possessed such power to move and weaken him, he should be untrue to his holy office, should let the secret he had to keep escape him. Like all timid and vacillating tempers, he sought refuge in procrastination.
All unconscious of the growth of public feeling against him, and wrapped in that absorption which comes from one dominant idea, he pursued the routine of his parochial life, and went through all the ceremonials of his office, hardly more conscious of what he did than the candles which his sacristan lighted. The confession made to him haunted him night and day. He saw it, as it were, written in letters of blood on the blank white walls of his bedchamber, of his sacristy, of his church itself. The murderer was there, at large, unknown to all,—at work like any other man in the clear, sweet sunshine, talking and laughing, eating and drinking, waking and sleeping, yet as unsuspected as a child unborn. And all the while Generosa was in prison. There was only one chance left; if she should be acquitted by her judges. But even then the slur and stain of an imputed, though unproved, crime would always rest upon her and make her future dark, her name a by-word in her birthplace. Yes, after what her lover had said, no mere acquittal, leaving doubt and suspicion behind it, would give her back to the light and joy of life. Every man's hand would be against her; every child would point at her as the woman who had been accused of the assassination of her husband.
One day he sought Falko Melegari when the latter was making up the accounts of his stewardship at an old bureau in a deep window-embrasure of the villa.
"You know that the date of the trial is fixed for the 10th of next month?" he said, in a low, stifled voice.
The young man, leaning back in his wooden chair, gave a sign of assent.
"And you," said Gesualdo, with a curious expression in his eyes,—"if they absolve her, will you have the courage to prove your own belief in her innocence? Will you marry her when she is set free?"
The question was abrupt and unlooked for. Falko changed color: he hesitated.
"You will not!" said Gesualdo.
"I have not said so," answered the young man, evasively. "I do not know that she would exact it."
Exact it! Gesualdo did not know much of human nature, but he knew what the use of that cold word implied.
"I thought you loved her! I mistook," he said, bitterly. A rosy flush came for a moment on the wax-like pallor of his face.
Falko Melegari looked at him insolently.
"A churchman should not meddle with these things! Love her! I love her,—yes. It ruins my life to think of her yonder. I would cut off my right arm to save her; but to marry her if she come out absolved,—that is another thing; one's name a by-word, one's credulity laughed at, one's neighbors shy of one,—that is another thing, I say. It will not be enough for her judges to acquit her; that will not prove her innocence to all the people here, or to my people at home in my own country."
He rose and pushed his heavy chair away impatiently: he was ashamed of his own words, but in the most impetuous Italian natures prudence and self-love are always the strongest instincts. Gesualdo looked at him with a great scorn in the depths of his dark, deep, luminous eyes. This handsome and virile lover seemed to him a very poor creature, a coward and faithless.
"In the depths of your soul you doubt her yourself!" he said, with severity and contempt, as he turned away from the writing-table and went out through the windows into the garden beyond.
"No, as God lives, I do not doubt her," cried Falko Melegari. "Not for an hour, not for a moment. But to make others believe,—that is more difficult. I will maintain her and befriend her always if they set her free; but marry her,—take her to my people,—have every one say that my wife had been in jail on suspicion of murder,—that I could not do: no man would do it who had a reputation to lose. One loves for love's sake, but one marries for the world's."
He spoke to empty air: there was no one to hear him but the little green lizards who had slid out of their holes in the stone under the window-step. Gesualdo had gone across the rough grass of the garden, and had passed out of sight beyond the tall hedge of rose-laurel.
The young man resumed his writing, but he was restless and uneasy, and could not continue his calculations of debit and audit of loss and profit. He took his gun, whistled his dog, and went up towards the hills, where hares were to be found in the heather and snipes under the gorse. His temper was ruffled, and his mind in great irritation against his late companion: he felt angrily that he must have appeared a poltroon and a poor and unmanly lover in the eyes of the churchman. Yet he had only spoken, he felt sure, as any other man would have done in his place.
In the sympathy of their common affliction, his heart had warmed for a while to Gesualdo, as to the only one who like himself cared for the fate of Tasso Tassilo's wife; but now that suspicion had entered into him, there returned with it all his detestation of the Church and all the secular hatred which the gentle character of the priest of Marca had for a time lulled in him.
"Of course he is a liar and a hypocrite," he thought savagely. "Perhaps he is a murderer as well!"
He knew that the idea was a kind of madness. Gesualdo had never been known to hurt a fly; indeed, his aversion even to see pain inflicted had made him often the laughing-stock of the children of Marca when he had rescued birds or locusts or frogs from their tormenting fingers, and forbidden them to throw stones at the lambs or kids they drove to pasture. "They are not baptized," the children had often said, with a grin; and Gesualdo had as often answered, "The good God baptized them himself."
It was utter madness to suppose that such a man, tender as a woman, timid as a sheep, gentle as a spaniel, could possibly have stabbed Tasso Tassilo to the death within a few roods of his own church, almost on holy ground itself. And yet the idea grew and grew in the mind of Generosa's lover until it acquired all the force of an actual conviction. We welcome no supposition so eagerly as one which accords with and intensifies our own prejudices. He neglected his duties and occupations to brood over this one suspicion and put together all the trifles which he could remember in confirmation of it. It haunted him wherever he was,—at wine-fair, at horse-market, at cattle-sale, in the corn-field, among the vines, surrounded by his peasantry at noonday, or alone in the wild deserted garden of the villa by moonlight.
In his pain and fury, it was a solace to him to turn his hatred on to some living creature. As he sat alone and thought over all which had passed (as he did think of it night and day always), many a trifle rose to his mind which seemed to him to confirm his wild and vague suspicions of the vicar of San Bartolo. Himself a free-thinker, it appeared natural to suspect any kind of crime in a member of the priesthood. The Italian sceptic is as narrow and as arrogant in his free-thought as the Italian believer in his bigotry. Melegari was a good-hearted young man, and kind and gay and generous by nature; but he had the prejudices of his time and of his school. These prejudices made him ready to believe that a priest was always fit food at heart for the galleys or the scaffold,—a mass of concealed iniquity covered by his cloth.
"I believe you know more of it than any one," he said, roughly, one day when he passed the priest on a narrow field-path, while his eyes flashed suspiciously over the downcast face of Gesualdo, who shrank a little, as if he had received a blow, and was silent. He had spoken on an unconsidered impulse, and would have been unable to say what his own meaning really was; but, as he saw the embarrassment and observed the silence of his companion, what he had uttered at hazard seemed to him curiously confirmed and strengthened.
"If you know anything which could save her and you do not speak," he said, passionately, "may all the devils you believe in torture you through all eternity!"
Gesualdo still kept silent. He made the sign of the cross nervously, and went on his way.
"Curse all these priests!" said the young man, bitterly, looking after him. "If one could only deal with them as one does with other men!—but in their vileness and their feebleness they are covered by their frock like women."
He was beside himself with rage and misery and the chafing sense of his own impotence; he was young and strong and ardently enamoured, and yet he could do no more to save the woman he loved from eternal separation from him than if he had been an idiot or an infant, than if he had had no heart in his breast and no blood in his veins.
Whenever he met the vicar afterwards he did not even touch his hat, and ceased those outward observances of respect to the Church which he had always given before to please his master, who liked such example to be set by the steward to the peasantry.
"If Ser Baldo send me away for it, so he must do," he thought. "I will never set foot in the church again. I should choke that accursed parocco with his own wafer."
For suspicion is a poisonous weed which, if left to grow unchecked, soon reaches maturity, and Falko Melegari soon persuaded himself that his own suspicion was a truth, which only lacked time and testimony to become as clear to all eyes as it was to his.
Meantime, Gesualdo was striving with the utmost force that was in him to persuade the real criminal to confess publicly what he had told under the seal of confession. He saw the man secretly, and used every argument with which the doctrines of his Church and his own intense desires could supply him. But there is no obstinacy so dogged, no egotism so impenetrable, no shield against persuasion so absolute, as the stolid ignorance and self-love of a low mind. The Girellone turned a deaf ear to all censure as to all entreaty: he was stolidly indifferent to all the woe that he had caused and would cause if he remained silent. What was all that to him? The thought of the miller's widow shut up in prison pleased him; he had hated her as he had seen her in what he called her finery, going by him in the sunshine, with all her bravery of pearl necklace, of silver hair-pins, of gold watch and chain. Many and many a time he had thirsted to snatch at them and pull them off her. What right had she to them, she, a daughter of naked hungry folks, who dug and carted sea- and river-sand for a living? She was no better than himself! Now and then, Generosa had called him, in her careless, imperious fashion, to draw water or carry wood for her, and when she had done so she never had taken the trouble to bid him good-day or to say a good-natured word. His pride was hurt, and he had had much ado to restrain himself from calling her a daughter of beggars, a worm of the sand. Like her own people, he was pleased that she should now find her fine clothes and her jewelled trinkets of no avail to her, and that she should weep the light out of her big eyes, and the rose-bloom off her peach-like cheeks, in the squalor and nausea of a town prison.
Gesualdo, with all the force which a profound conviction that he speaks the truth lends to any speaker, wrestled for the soul of this dogged brute, and warned him of the punishment everlasting which would await him if he persisted in his refusal to surrender himself to justice. But he might as well have spoken to the great millstones at rest in the river-water. Why then had this wretch cast the burden of his vile secret on innocent shoulders? It was the most poignant anguish to him that he could awaken no sense of guilt in the conscience of the criminal. The man had come to him partly from a vague superstitious impulse, remnant of a credulity instilled into him in childhood, and partly from the want tosfogarehimself, as he called it,—to tell his story to some one,—which is characteristic of all weak minds in times of trouble and peril. It had relieved him to drag the priest into sharing his own guilty consciousness; he was half proud and half afraid of the manner in which he had slain his master, and bitterly incensed that he had done the deed for nothing; but beyond this he had no other emotion, except that he was glad that Generosa should suffer through and for it.
"You will burn forever if you persist in such hideous wickedness," said Gesualdo again and again to him.
"I will take my chance of that," said the man. "Hell is far off, and the galleys are near."
"But if you do not believe in my power to absolve you or leave you accursed, why did you ever confess to me?" cried Gesualdo.
"Because one must clear one's breast to somebody when one has a thing like that on one's mind," answered the Girellone, "and I know you cannot tell of it again."
And from that position nothing moved him. No entreaties, threats, arguments, denunciations, stirred him a hair's-breadth. He had confessedper sfogarsi: that was all.
But one night after Gesualdo had thus spoken to him, vague fears assailed him,—terrors material, not spiritual: he had parted with his secret: who could tell that it might not come out like a sleuth-hound and find him and denounce him? He had told it to be at peace, but he was not at peace. He feared every instant to have the hand of the law upon him. Whenever he heard the trot of the carabineers' horses going through the village, or saw the white belts and cocked hats of gendarmes in the sunlight of the fields, a cold tremor of terror seized him lest the priest should, after all, have told. He knew that it was impossible, and yet he was afraid.
He counted up the money he had saved, a little roll of filthy and crumpled bank-notes for very small amounts, and wondered if they would be enough to take him across to America. They were very few, but his fear compelled him to trust to them. He invented a story of remittances which he had received from his brother, and told his fellow-laborers and his employer that he was invited to join that brother; and then he packed up his few clothes and went. At the mill and in the village they talked a little of it, saying that the Girellone was in luck, but that they for their parts would not care to go so far.
Gesualdo heard of his flight in the course of the day.
"My God!—gone away!—out of the country?" he cried, involuntarily, with white lips.
The people who heard him wondered. "What could it matter to him that a carter had gone to seek his fortunes over the seas?"
The Girellone had not been either such a good worker or such a good boon companion that any one at the mill or in the village should greatly regret him.
"America gets all our rubbish," said the people. "Much good may it do her!"
Meantime, the man took his way across the country, and, sometimes by walking, sometimes by lifts in wagons, sometimes by helping charcoal-burners on the road, made his way, without spending much, to the sea-coast, and in the port of Leghorn took his passage in an emigrant-ship then loading there. The green canebrakes and peaceful millet-fields of Marca saw him no more.
But he had left the burden of his blood-guiltiness behind him, and it lay on the guiltless soul with the weight of the world.
So long as the man had remained in Marca there had been always a hope present with Gesualdo that he would persuade him to confess in a court of justice what he had confessed to the Church, or that some sequence of accidents would lead up to the discovery of his guilt. But with the ruffian gone across the seas, lost in that utter darkness which swallows up the lives of the poor and obscure when once they have left the hamlet in which their names mean something to their neighbors, this one hope was quenched; and Gesualdo in agony reproached himself with not having prevailed in his struggle for the wretch's soul,—with not having been eloquent enough, or wise enough, or stern enough, to awe him into declaration of his ghastly secret to the law.
His failure seemed to him a sign of heaven's wrath against himself.
"How dare I," he thought, "how dare I, feeble and timid and useless as I am, call myself a servant of God, or attempt to minister to other souls?"
He had thought, like an imbecile, as he told himself, to be able to awaken the conscience and compel the public confession of this man, and the possibility of flight had never presented itself to his mind, natural and simple as had been such a course to a creature without remorse, continually haunted by personal fears of punishment. He, he alone on earth, knew the man's guilt; he, he alone, had the power to save Generosa, and could not use the power because the secrecy of his holy office was fastened on him like an iron padlock on his lips.
The days passed him like nightmares; he did his duties mechanically, scarcely consciously; the frightful alternative which was set before him seemed to parch up the very springs of life itself. He knew that he must look strange in the eyes of the people; his voice sounded strangely in his own ears; he began to feel that he was unworthy to administer the blessed bread to the living, to give the last unction to the dying: he knew that he was not at fault, and yet he felt that he was accursed. Choose what he would, he must commit some hateful sin.
The day appointed for the trial came: it was the 10th of May. A hot day, with the bees booming among the acacia-flowers, and the green tree-frogs shouting joyously above in the ilex-tops, and the lizards running in and out of the china-rose hedges on the highways. Many people of Marca were summoned as witnesses, and these went to the town in mule-carts or crazy chaises, with the farm-horse put in the shafts, and grumbled because they would lose their day's labor in their fields, and yet were pleasurably excited at the idea of seeing Generosa in the prisoner's dock, and being able themselves to tell all they knew, and a great deal that they did not know.
Falko Melegari rode over at dawn by himself, and Gesualdo with his housekeeper and sacristan, who were all summoned to give testimony, went, as they had no choice but to do, by the diligence, which started from Sant' Arturo, and rolled through the dusty roads, and over the bridges, and past the wayside shrines and shops and forges, across the country to the town.
The vicar never spoke throughout the four weary hours during which the rickety and crowded vehicle, with its poor, starved, bruised beasts, rumbled on its road through the lovely shadows and cool sunlight of the early morning. He held his breviary in his hand for form's sake, and, seeing him thus absorbed in holy meditation, as they thought, his garrulous neighbors did not disturb him, but chattered among themselves, filling the honeysuckle-scented air with the odors of garlic and wine and coarse tobacco.
Candida glanced at him anxiously from time to time, haunted by she could not have said what,—a vague presentiment of ill. His face looked very strange, she thought, and his closely-locked lips were white as the lips of a corpse. When the diligence was driven over the stones of the town, all the passengers by it descended at the first wine-house which they saw on the piazza, to eat and drink; but he, with never a word, motioned his housekeeper aside when she would have pressed food on him, and went into the great church of the place to pray alone.
The town was hot and dusty and sparsely peopled. It had brown walls and large brick palaces untenanted, and ancient towers, also of brick, pointing high to heaven. It was a place dear to the memory of lovers of art for the sake of some fine paintings of the Sienese school which hung in its churches, and was occasionally visited by strangers for sake of these; but for the most part it was utterly forgotten by the world; and its bridge of many arches, said to have been built by Augustus, seldom resounded to any other echoes than those of the heavy wheels of the hay- or corn-wagons coming in from the pastoral country around.
The court-house, where all great trials took place, stood in one of the bare, silent, dusty squares of the town. It had once been the ancient palace of the podestà, and had the machicolated walls, the turreted towers, and the vast stairways and frescoed chambers of a larger and statelier time than ours. The hall of justice was a vast chamber pillared with marble, vaulted and painted, sombre and grand: it was closely thronged with country-folks; there was a scent of hay, of garlic, of smoking pipes hastily thrust into trouser-pockets, of unwashed flesh steaming hotly in the crowd and the close air. The judge was there with his officers, a Renaissance figure in black square cap and black gown. The accused was behind the cage assigned to such prisoners, guarded by carabineers and by the jailers. Gesualdo looked in once from a distant door-way; then, with a noise in his ears like the sound of the sea, and a deadly sickness on him, he stayed without in the audience-chamber, where a breath of air came to him up one of the staircases, there waiting until his name was called.
The trial began. Everything was the same as it had been in the preliminary examination which had preceded her committal on the charge of murder. The same depositions were made now that had then been made. In the interval, the people of Marca had forgotten a good deal, so added somewhat of their own invention to make up for the deficiency; but, on the whole, the testimony was the same, given with that large looseness of statement and absolute indifference to fact so characteristic of the Italian mind, the judge, from habit, sifting the chaff from the wheat in the evidence with unerring skill, and following with admirable patience the tortuous windings and the hazy imagination of the peasants he examined.
The examination of Gesualdo did not come on until the third day. These seventy or eighty hours of suspense were terrible to him. He scarcely broke his fast, or was conscious of what he did. The whole of the time was passed by him listening in the court of justice or praying in the churches. When at last he was summoned, a cold sweat bathed his face and hair; his hands trembled; he answered the interrogations of the judge and of the advocates almost at random; his replies seemed scarcely to be those of a rational being; he passionately affirmed her innocence with delirious repetition and emphasis, which produced on the minds of the examiners the contrary effect to that which he endeavored to create.
"This priest knows that she is guilty," thought the president. "He knows it. Perhaps he knows even more: perhaps he was her accomplice."
His evidence, his aspect, his wild and contradictory words, did as much harm to her cause as he ignorantly strove to do good. From other witnesses of Marca the judge had learned that a great friendship had always been seen to exist between the vicar of San Bartolo and Generosa Fè, and that on the morning when the murder was discovered the priest had removed the body of the dead man to the sacristy, forestalling the officers of justice, and disturbing the scene of the murder. A strong impression against him was created beforehand in the audience and on the bench; and his pallid, agitated countenance, his incoherent words, his wild eyes, which incessantly sought the face of the prisoner, all gave him the appearance of a man conscious of some guilt himself, and driven out of his mind by fear. The president cross-examined him without mercy, censured him, railed at him, and did his uttermost to extract the truth which he believed that Gesualdo concealed; but to no avail: incoherent and half insane as he seemed, he said no syllable which could betray that which he really knew. Only when his eyes rested on Generosa there was such an agony in them that she herself was startled by it.
"Who would ever have dreamt that he would care so much?" she thought. "But he was always a tender soul; he always pitied the birds in the traps, and the oxen that went to the slaughter."
Reproved and censured without stint, for the president knew that to insult a priest was to merit promotion in high quarters, Gesualdo was at last permitted to escape from his place of torture. Blind and sick he got away through the crowd, past the officials, down the stairs, and out into the hot air. The piazza was thronged with people who could not find standing-room in the court-house. The murmur of their rapid and loud voices was like the noise of a sea on his ears; they had all the same burden. They all repeated like one man the same words, "They will condemn her," and then wondered what sentence she would receive,—whether a score of years of seclusion, or a lifetime.
Gesualdo went through the chattering, curious, cruel throng, barbarous with that barbarity of the populace which in all countries sees with glee a bull die, a wrestler drop, a malefactor ascend the scaffold, or a rat scour the streets soaked in petroleum and burning alive. The dead man had been nothing to them, and his wife had done none of them any harm, yet there was not a man or a woman, a youth or a girl, in the crowd, who would not have felt that he or she was defrauded of his entertainment if she were acquitted by her judges, although yet there was a general sense among them that she had done no more than had been natural, and no more than had been her right.
The dark, slender, emaciated figure of the priest glided through their excited and boisterous groups; the air had the heat of summer, the sky above was blue and cloudless, the brown brick walls of the church and palace seemed baking in the light of the sun. In the corner of the square was a fountain, relic of the old times when the town had been a place of pageantry and power,—beautiful pale-green water, cold and fresh, leaping and flowing around marble dolphins. Gesualdo stooped and drank thirstily, as though he would never cease to drink, then went on his way and pushed aside the leathern curtain of the church door and entered into the coolness and solitude of that place of refuge.
There he stretched himself before the cross in prayer, and wept bitter, burning, unavailing tears for the burden which he bore of another's sin, and for his own helplessness beneath it, which seemed to him like a greater crime.
But even at the very altar of his God peace was denied him. Hurried, loud, impetuous steps from heavy boots fell on the old, worn, marble floor of the church, and Falko Melegari strode up behind him and laid a heavy hand upon his shoulders. The young man's face was deeply flushed, his eyes were savage, his breath was quick and uneven: he had no heed for the sanctity of the place or of his companion.
"Get up and hear me," he said, roughly. "They all say the verdict will be against her: you heard them."
Gesualdo made a gesture of assent.
"Very well, then," said the steward, through his clinched teeth. "If it be so indeed, I swear, as you and I live, that I will denounce you to the judges in her stead."
Gesualdo did not speak. He stood in a meditative attitude, with his arms folded on his chest. He did not express either surprise or indignation.
"I will denounce you," repeated Melegari, made more furious by his silence. "What did you do at night under the Grand Duke's poplars? Why did you carry in and screen the corpse? Does not the whole village talk of your strange ways and your altered habits? There is more than enough against you to send to the galleys a score of better men than you. Anyhow, I will denounce you if you do not make a clean breast of all you know to the president to-morrow. You are either the assasin or the accomplice, you accursed, black-coated hypocrite!"
A slight flush rose on the waxen pallor of Gesualdo's face, but he still kept silence.
The young man watching him with eyes of hatred, saw guilt in that obstinate and mulish dumbness.
"You dare not deny it, trained liar though you be!" he said, with passionate scorn. "Oh, wretched cur, who venture to call yourself a servitor of heaven, you would let her drag all her years out in misery to save your own miserable, puling, sexless, worthless life! Well, hear me, and understand. No one can say that I do not keep my word, and here, by the cross which hangs above us, I take my oath that if you do not tell all you know to-morrow, should she be condemned I will denounce you to the law, and if the law fail to do justice I will kill you as Tasso Tassilo was killed. May I die childless, penniless, and accursed if my hand fail!"
Then, with no other word, he strode from the church, the golden afternoon sunshine streaming through the stained windows above and falling on his fair hair, his flushed face, his flaming eyes, till his common humanity seemed as if transfigured. He looked like the avenging angel of Tintoretto's Paradise.
Gesualdo stood immovable in the deserted church, his arms crossed on his breast, his head bent. A great resolve, a mighty inspiration, had descended on him with the furious words of his foe. Light had come to him as from heaven itself. He could not give up the secret which had been confided to him in the confessional, but he could give up himself. His brain was filled with legends of sacrifice and martyrdom. Why might he not become one of that holy band of martyrs?
Nay, he was too humble to place himself beside them even in thought. The utmost he could do, he knew, would be only expiation for what seemed to him his ineffaceable sin in letting any human affection, however harmless, unselfish, and distant, stain the singleness and purity of his devotion to his vows. He had been but a peasant-boy until he had taken his tender heart and his ignorant mind to the seminary, and he had been born with the soul of a St. Francis, of a San Rocco, of a St. John, out of place, out of time, in the world he lived in, and in which the passions of faith and of sacrifice were as strong as are the passions of lust and of selfishness in other natures. The spiritual world was to him a reality, and the earth, with its merciless and greedy peoples, its plague of lusts, its suffering hearts, its endless injustice, an unreal and hideous dream.
To his temper, the sacrifice which suddenly rose before him as his duty appeared one which would reconcile him at once to the Deity he had offended and the humanity he was tempted to betray. To his mind, enfeebled and exhausted by long fasting of the body and denial of every natural indulgence, such sacrifice of self seemed an imperious command from heaven. He would drag out his own life in misery and obloquy, indeed; but what of that? Had not the great martyrs and founders of his Church endured as much or more? Was it not by such torture voluntarily accepted and endured on earth that the grace of God was won?
He would tell a lie, indeed; he would draw down ignominy on the name of the Church; he would make men believe that an anointed priest was a common murderer, swayed by low and jealous hatreds; but of this he did not think. In the tension and perplexity of his tortured soul, the vision of a sacrifice in which he would be the only sufferer, in which the woman would be saved and the secret told to him be preserved, appeared as a heaven-sent solution of the doubts and difficulties in his path. Stretched in agonized prayer before one of the side altars of the church, he imagined the afternoon sunbeams streaming through the high window on his face to be the light of a celestial world, and in the hush and heat of the incense-scented air he believed that he heard a voice which cried to him, "By suffering all things are made pure."
He was not a wise, or strong, or educated man. He had the heart of a poet and the mind of a child. There was a courage in him to which sacrifice was welcome, and there was a credulity in him which made all exaggeration of simple faith possible. He was young and ignorant and weak; yet at the core of his heart there was a dim heroism: he could suffer and be mute: and in the depths of his heart he loved this woman better than himself,—with a love which in his belief made him accursed for all time.
When he at last arose and went out of the church doors his mind was made up to the course that he would take: an immense calm had descended upon the unrest of his soul.
The day was done, the sun had set, the scarlet flame of its after-glow bathed all the rusty walls and dusty ground with colors of glory. The crowd had dispersed; there was no sound in the deserted square except the ripple of the water as it fell from the dolphins' mouths into the marble basin. As he heard that sweet familiar murmur of the falling stream, the tears rose in his eyes and blotted out the flame-like pomp and beauty of the skies. Never again would he hear the water of the Marca river rushing in cool autumn days past the poplar-stems and the primrose-roots upon its mossy banks; never again would he hear in the place of his birth the gray-green waves of Arno sweeping through the canebrakes to the sea.
At three of the clock on the following day the judgment was given in the court.
Generosa Fè was decreed guilty of the murder of her husband, and sentenced to twenty years of solitary confinement. She dropped like a stone when she heard the sentence, and was carried out from the court insensible. Her lover, when he heard it, gave a roar of anguish like that of some great beast in torment and dashed his head against the wall, and struggled like a mad bull in the hands of the men who tried to hold him. Gesualdo, waiting without on the head of the great staircase, did not even change countenance: to him this bitterness, as of the bitterness of death, had been long past; he had been long certain what the verdict would be; and he had many hours before resolved on his own part.
A great calm had come upon his soul, and his face had that tranquillity which comes alone from a soul which is at peace within itself.
The sultry afternoon shed its yellow light on the brown and gray and dusty town; the crowd poured out of the court-house, excited, contrite, voluble, pushing and bawling at one another, ready to take the side of the condemned creature now that she was the victim of the law. The priest alone of them all did not move: he remained sitting on the upright chair under a sculptured allegory of Justice and Equity which was on the arch above his head, and with the golden light of sunset falling down on him through the high casement above. He paid no heed to the hurrying of the crowd, to the tramp of guards, to the haste of clerks and officials eager to finish their day's work and get away to their wine and dominoes at the taverns. His hands mechanically held his breviary; his lips mechanically repeated a Latin formula of prayer. When all the people were gone, one of the custodians of the place touched his arm, telling him that they were about to close the doors. He raised his eyes like one who is wakened from a trance, and to the man said, quietly,—
"I would see the president of the court for a moment quite alone. Is it possible?"
After many demurs and much delay, they brought him into the presence of the judge in a small chamber of the great palace.
"What do you want with me?" asked the judge, looking nervously at the white face and the wild eyes of his unbidden visitant.
Gesualdo answered, "I am come to tell you that you have condemned an innocent woman."
The judge looked at him with sardonic derision and contempt.
"What more?" he asked. "If she be innocent, will you tell me who is guilty?"
"I am," replied the priest.
At his trial he never spoke.
With his head bowed and his hands clasped, he stood in the cage where she had stood, and never replied by any single word to the repeated interrogations of his judges. Many witnesses were called, and all they said testified to the apparent truth of his self-accusation. Those who had always vaguely suspected him, all those who had seen him close the door of the sacristy on the crowd when he had borne the murdered man within, the mule-drivers who had seen him digging at night under the great poplars, the sacristan who had been awakened by him that same night so early, even his old housekeeper, though she swore that he was a lamb, a saint, an angel, a creature too good for earth, a holy man whose mind was distraught by fasting, by visions,—these all, either wilfully or ignorantly, bore witness which confirmed his own confession. The men of law had the mould and grass dug up under the Grand Duke's poplar, and when the blood-stained knife was found therein, the very earth, it seemed, yielded up testimony against him.
In the end, after many weeks of investigation, Generosa was released, and he was sentenced in her place.
Her lover married her, and they went to live in his own country in the Lombard plains, and were happy and prosperous, and the village of Marca and the waters of its cane-shadowed stream knew them no more.
Sometimes she would say to her husband, "I cannot think that he was guilty: there was some mystery in it." And her husband always laughed, and said in answer, "He was guilty, be sure: it was I that frightened him into confession. Those black rats of the Church have livers as white as their coats are black."
Generosa did not wholly believe, but she thrust the grain of doubt away from her and played with her handsome children. And, after all, she mused, what doubt could there be? Did not Don Gesualdo himself reveal his guilt? and had he not always cared for her? and was not the whole population of Marca willing to bear witness that they had always suspected him and had only held their peace out of respect for the Church?
He himself lived two long years among the galley-slaves of the western coast: all that time he never spoke; and he was considered by the authorities to be insane. Then, in the damp and cold of the third winter, his lungs decayed, his frail strength gave way; he died of what they called consumption in the spring of the year. In his last moments there was seen a light of unspeakable ecstasy upon his face, a smile of unspeakable rapture on his mouth.
"Laus Deus libera me!" he murmured, as he died.
A bird came and sang at the narrow casement of his prison-cell as his spirit passed away. It was a nightingale,—perchance one of those who had once sung to him in the summer nights from the wild-rose hedge at Marca.
From the Prince di San Zenone, Claridge's, London, to the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Monterone, near Milano, Italy.
Carissima Teresa,—
I received your letter, which is delightful to me because it is yours, and terrible to me because it scolds me, abuses me, flies at me, makes me feel like a schoolboy who has had asaponata. Yes, it is quite true. I cannot help it She has bewitched me. She is a lily made into a woman. I feared you would be angry, especially angry because she is a foreigner; but the hour of fate has struck. You will not wonder when you see her. She is as blonde as the dawn and as pure as a pearl. It seems to me that I have never loved any woman at all in my life before. To love her is like plunging one's hand in cool spring-water on a midsummer noon. She is such repose; such innocence; such holiness! In the midst of this crowded, over-colored, vulgar London life—for it is very vulgar at its highest—she seems like some angel of purity. I saw her first standing with a knot of roses in her hand under a cedar-tree, at one of their afternoon clubs on the river. She was drinking a cup of tea: they are always drinking tea. And she is so white. I never saw anything so white except the snow on the Leonessa. She is not in the least like the fast young ladies of England of whom one sees so much in the winter at Rome. I do not like their fast young women. If you want a woman who is fast, a Parisienne is best, or even an American. Englishwomen overdo it. She is just like a primrose; like a piece of porcelain; like a soft, pale star shining in the morning. I write all kinds of poetry when I think of her. And then there is somethingSainte-Nitoucheabout her which is delicious because it is so real. The only thing which was wanting in her was that she ought to have been shut up in a convent, and I ought to have had to imperil my soul for all eternity by getting her over a stone wall with a silken ladder. But it is a prosaic age, and this is a very prosaic country. London amuses me; but it is such a crowd, and it is frightfully ugly. I cannot think how people who are so enormously rich as the English can put up with such ugliness. The houses are all too small, even the big ones. I have not seen a good ball-room. They say there are good ones in the country houses. The clubs are admirable; but life in general seems to me hurried, costly, ungraceful, very noisy, and almost entirely consecrated to eating. It is made up of a scramble and a mass of food. People engage themselves for dinners a month in advance. Everybody's engagement-book is so full that it is the burden of their days. They accept everything, and, at the eleventh hour, pick out what they prefer, and, to use their own language, "throw over" the rest. I do not think it is pretty behavior; but nobody seems to object to it. I wonder that the women do not do so; but they seem to be afraid of losing their men altogether if they exact good manners from them. People here are not at all well-mannered, to my taste,—neither the men nor the women. They are brusque and negligent, and have fewpetite soins. You should have come over for my marriage to show them all what an exquisite creature a Venetian patrician beauty can be. Whywouldyou marry that Piedmontese? Only two things seem to be of any importance in England: they are eating and politics. They eat all day long, and are always talking of Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstonem'embête! Half of them say he is the destruction of England, the other half say he is the salvation of England. Myself, I don't care the least which he is; only I know they cannot keep him out of their conversation, one way or another, for five minutes, which, to an unprejudiced foreigner, is aseccatura. But to-morrow I go down into the country with my primrose,—all alone; to-morrow she will be mine altogether and unalterably, and I shall hear nothing about Mr. Gladstone or anything that is tiresome. Of course you are wondering that I should marry. I wonder myself; but, then, if I did not marry I should be compelled to say an eternaladdioto the Lenten Lily. She has such a spiked wall around her of male relatives and family greatness. It is not the convent wall; there is no ladder that will go over it; one must enter at the big front door, or not at all. Felicitate me, and yet compassionate me! I am going to Paradise, no doubt; but I have the uncomfortable doubt as to whether it will suit me, which all people who are going to Paradise always do feel. Why? Because we are mortal or because we are sinners?A rivederci, cara mia Teresina!Write to me at my future Eden: it is called Coombe-Bysset, near Luton, Bedfordshire. We are to be there a month. It is the choice of my primrose.
From the Lady Mary Bruton, Belgrave Square, London, to Mrs. D'Arcy, British Embassy, Berlin.
The season has been horribly dull; quantities of marriages. People always will marry, however dull it is. The one most talked about is that of the Cowes's second daughter, Lady Gladys, with the Prince of San Zenone. She is one of the beauties, but a very simple girl, quite old-fashioned, indeed. She has refused Lord Hampshire, and a good many other people, and then fallen in love in a week with this Roman, who is certainly as handsome as a picture. But Cowes didn't like it at all; he gave in because he couldn't help it; but he was dreadfully vexed that the Hampshire affair did not come off instead. Hampshire is such a good creature, and his estates are close to theirs. It is certainly very provoking for them that this Italian must take it into his head to spend a season in London, and lead the cotillon so beautifully that all the young women talked of nothing else but his charms.
From the Lady Mona St. Clair, Grosvenor Square, London, to Miss Burns, Schooner-yacht Persephone, off Cherbourg.
The wedding was very pretty yesterday. We had frocks of tussore silk, with bouquets of orchids and Penelope Boothby caps. She looked very pretty, but as white as her gown,—such a goose!—it was ivory satin, withpoint de Venise. He is quite too handsome, and I cannot think what he could see in her. He gave us each a locket withherportrait inside. I wished it had beenhis. I dare say Hampshire would have been better for her, and worn longer, than Romeo. Lord Cowes is furious about Romeo. He detests the religion and all that, and he could hardly make himself look pleasant even at church. Of course they were two ceremonies. The Cardinal had consented at last, though I believe he had made all kinds of fuss first. Lady Gladys, you know, is very,veryHigh Church, and I suppose that reconciled a little the very irreconcilable Cardinal. She thinks of nothing but the Church, and her missions, and her poor people. I am afraid the Roman prince will get dreadfully bored. And they are going down into Bedfordshire, of all places, to be shut up for a month! It is very stupid of her, and such a wet season as it is! They are going to Coombe-Bysset, her aunt Lady Caroline's place. I fancy Romeo will soon be bored, and I don't think Coombe-Bysset at all judicious. I would have gone to Homburg, or Deauville, or Japan.
From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfordshire, to the Countess of Cowes, London.
Dearest Mother,—
I am too, too, too happy. It is no use writing about it. I would if I could, but Ican't. He is delighted with Coombe, and says the verdure is something wonderful. We got here just as the sun was setting. There were all Aunt Carrie's school-children out to meet us with baskets of roses. Piero said they looked like bigger roses themselves. He is enchanted with England. It is very fine to-day, and I do so hope it won't rain; but the glass is falling. Forgive a hurried word like this. I am going to take Piero on the lake. I know you haven't liked it, dear; but, I am sure, when you see how happy I am you will say there was never any one like him on earth.
From the Countess of Cowes, Cowes House, London, to the Duchess of Dunne, Wavernake, Worcestershire.
No, I confess I do not approve of the marriage: it will take her away from us, and I am afraid she won't be happy. She has always had such veryexaltéideas. She is not in the least the girl of the period. Of course she was taken by his picturesque face and his admirable manners. His manners are really wonderful in these days, when our men have none at all; and he has charmingly caressing and deferential ways, which win even me. I cannot wonder at her, poor child, but I am afraid: candidly, I am afraid! He makes all our men look like ploughboys. And it was all done in such tremendous haste that she had no time to reason or reflect; and I don't think they have said two serious words to each other. If only it had been dear, good Hampshire, whom we have known all our lives, and whose lands march with ours! But that was too good to be, I suppose, and there was no positive objection we could raise to San Zenone. We could not refuse his proposals because he is too good-looking, isn't an Englishman, and has a mother who is reputedmaitresse femme. Gladys writes from Coombe as from the seventh heaven. They have been married three days! But I fear she will have trouble before her. I fear he is weak and unstable, and will not back her up among his own people when she goes among them; and though, nowadays, a man and woman, once wedded, see so little of each other, Gladys is not quite of the time in her notions. She will take it all very seriously, poor child, and expect the idyl to be prolonged over the honeymoon. And she is very English in her tastes, and has been so very little out of England. However, every girl in London is envying her. It is only her father and I who see these little black specks on the fruit she has plucked. They are gone to Coombe by her wish. I think it would have been wiser not to subject an Italian to such an ordeal as a wet English June in an utterly lonely country house. You know, even Englishmen, who can always find such refuge and comfort in prize pigs and straw-yards and unusually big mangolds, get bored if they are in the country when there is nothing to shoot; and Englishmen are used to being drenched to the skin every time they move out. He is not. Lord Cowes says love is like a cotton frock,—very pretty as long as the sun shines, but it won't stand a wetting. I wish you had been here: Gladys looked quite lovely. Cardinal Manning most kindly relented, and the whole thing went off very well. Of the San Zenone family, there was only present Don Fabrizio, the younger son, a very good-looking young man. The terrible duchess didn't come, on account, I think, of her sulks. She hates the marriage on her side as much as we do on ours, I am sure. Really, one must believe a little bit in fate. I do think that Gladys would soon have resigned herself to accepting Hampshire out of sheer fatigue at saying "No;" and, besides, she knew that we are so fond of him, and to live in the same county was such an attraction. But this irresistible young Roman must take it into his head that he wished to see a London season, and when once they had met (it was one afternoon at Ranelagh) there was no more chance for our poor, dear, good, stupid neighbor. Well, we must hope for the best!