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 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.
Don 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 the living woman.
The morning broadened into the warmth of day. He rose from his knees, and bade hissacristan 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 Don Gesualdo. 'You will not bring him to life by starving yourself.'
He 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 thewhole weary hours at the casement where she could see the old grey villa where her lover dwelt, standing out against the moonlight amongst 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 candour 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 the corner of her soul she was vaguely conscious that there was a degree of unfairness and baseness in setting their youth and their ardour 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 vicar's reproof 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 in 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-hairedlover at the old grey 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, 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 day, breaking 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 neighbours, 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 doorway and watched her suspiciously and without compassion. There was no one there who did not believe her to be the murderess. No one except Don Gesualdo. In that one moment when he had looked into her eyes, he had feltthat 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.'
In a later time they remembered against the young vicar all this which he did now.
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 were a great noise and stir, grinding of wheels and shouting of orders, vast clouds of dust and ceaseless din of voices, loud bickeringsof conflicting authorities at war with one another, and rabid inquisitiveness and greedy excitement on all sides.
The feast of SS. Peter and 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.
'Neighbours put up with her pride while she was on the sunny side of the street,' said Candida, with grim satisfaction, 'but now sheis 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 grey 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.
Don Gesualdo bowed his head and spread out his hands, palm downwards, in a gesture, meaning hopeless doubt.
'I was 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 nought of it. Oh, my God, why was I not here? They should not have taken her without it costing them hard.'
'You would have done her no good,' said Don 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 clenched 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.
Don 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 hewheeled 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 amongst 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 fresh 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 law seized on the quiet village, and tortured every soul in it; everyone 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 questionedas 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 SS. Peter and 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.
Everyone 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 herand 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 amongst 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-favoured, 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 hisrelations with her had been hitherto absolutely innocent. No one believed him.
'You are obliged to say that,' said the judge, with good-humoured impatience.
'But, God in Heaven, why not, when it is true?' shouted Falko.
'It is always true when thedamois a man of honour,' 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 neighbours, 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 no 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 herdamo?' 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-coloured 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 labour 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 misfortunesafter 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 earrings 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?
The authorities at Vendramino 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, 'Ifshe lose her beauty and grow old before her time, what avail will it be to her even if they declare her innocent? Her gay lover will look at her no more.'
Falko Melegari loved her wildly, ardently, vehemently indeed; but Don Gesualdo, with that acute penetration which sometimes supplies in delicate natures that knowledge of the world which they lack, felt that it was not a love which had any qualities in it to withstand the trials of time or the loss of physical charms. Perchance, Generosa herself felt as much, and the cruel consciousness of it hurt her more than her prison bars.
The winter passed away, and with February the corn spread a green carpet everywhere; the almond trees blossomed on the hill-sides, the violets opened the ways for the anemones, and the willows budded beside the water-mill. There were braying of bugles, twanging of lutes, cracking of shots, drinking of wines on the farms and in the village as a rustic celebration of carnival. Not much of it, for times are hard and men's hearts heavy in these days, and the sunlit grace and airy gaiety natural to it are things for ever dead in Italy, like the ilex forests and the great gardens that have perished for ever and aye.
Lent came, with its church bells sounding in melancholy iteration over the March fields, where the daffodils were blowing by millions and the young priest of San Bartolo fasted and prayed and mortified his flesh in every way that his creed allowed, and hoped by suchmiseries, pains and penances to attain grace in heaven, if not on earth, for Generosa in her misery. All through Lent he wearied the saints with incessant supplication for her.
Day and night he racked his brain to discover any evidence as to who the assassin had been. He never once doubted her; if the very apostles of his Church had all descended on earth to witness against her, he would have cried to them that she was innocent.
The sickening suspicions, the haunting, irrepressible doubts, which now and then came over the mind of her lover as he walked to and fro by the edge of the river at night, looking up at what had been the casement of her chamber, did not assail for an instant the stronger faith of Gesualdo, weak as he was in body, and, in some ways, weak in character.
The truth might remain in horrid mystery, in impenetrable darkness, for ever; it would made no difference to him; he would be always convinced that she had been innocent. Had he not known her when she was a little barefooted child, coming flying through the shallow green pools and the great yellow grasses and the sunny cane-brakes of Bocca d'Arno?
Most innocent, indeed, had been his relations with the wife of Tassilo, but to him it seemed that the interest he had taken in her, the pleasure he had felt in converse with her, had been criminal. There had been times when his eyes, which should have only seen in her a soul to save, had become aware of her mere bodily beauty, had dwelt on her with an awakening of carnal admiration. It sufficed to make him guilty in his own sight. This agony, which he felt for her, was the sympathy of a personal affection. He knew it, and his consciousness of it flung him at the feet of his crucifix in tortures of conscience.
He knew, too, that he had done her harm by the incoherence and the reticence of his testimony, by the mere vehemence with which he had unwisely striven to affirm an innocence which he had no power to prove; even by that natural impulse of humanity which had moved him to bring her husband's corpse under the roof of the church and close the door upon the clamorous and staring throng who saw in the tragedy but a pastime. He, more than any other, had helped to cast on her the darkness of suspicion; he, more than any other, hadhelped to make earthly peace and happiness for ever denied to her.
Even if they acquitted her in the house of law yonder, she would be dishonoured for life. Even her lover, who loved her with all the sensual, coarse ardour of a young man's uncontrolled desires, had declared that he would be ashamed to walk beside her in broad day so long as this slur of possible, if unproven, crime were on her. Don Gesualdo mused on all these things until his sensitive soul began to take alarm lest it were not a kind of sin to be so occupied with the fate of one to the neglect and detriment of others. Candida saw him growing thinner and more shadow-like every day with ever-increasing anxiety. To fast, she knew, was needful above all for a priest in Lent, but he did not touch what he might lawfully have eaten; the new-laid eggs and the crisp lettuces of her providing failed to tempt him, and no mortal man, she told him, could live on air and water as he did.
'There should be reason in all piety,' she said to him, and he assented.
But he did not change his ways, which were rather those of a monk of the Thebaid than ofa vicar of a parish. He had the soul in him of a St Anthony, of a St Francis, and he had been born too late; the world as it is was too coarse, and too incredulous, for him, even in a little rustic primitive village hidden away from the eyes of men under its millet and its fig trees.
The people of Marca, like his old servant, noticed the great change in him. Pale he had always been, but now he was the colour of his own ivory Christ; taciturn, too, he had always been, yet he had ever had playful words for the children, kind words for the aged; these were silent now. The listless and mechanical manner with which he went through the offices of the Church contrasted with the passionate and despairing cries which seemed to come from his very soul when he preached, and which vaguely frightened a rural congregation who were wholly unable to understand them.
'One would think the goodparoccohad 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 saintsforgive me for saying so. He should be in a monastery along with St Romolo and St Francis.'
But yet, the housekeeper, though loyalty itself, was, in her own secret thoughts, not a little troubled at the change she saw in her master. She put it down to the score of his agitation at the peril of Generosa Fè; but this in itself seemed to her unfitting in one of his sacred calling. A mere light-o'-love and saucebox, as she had always herself called the miller's wife, was wholly unworthy to occupy, even in pity, the thoughts of so holy a man.
'There could not be a doubt that she had given that knife-stroke amongst the canes in the dusk of the dawn of SS. Peter and Paul,' thought Candida, amongst whose virtues charity had small place; 'but what had theparoccoto do with it?'
In her rough way, motherly and unmannerly, she ventured to take her master to task for taking so much interest in a sinner.
'The people of Marca say you think too much about that foul business; they do even whisper that you neglect your holy duties,' she said to him, as she served the frugal supper ofcabbage soaked in oil. 'There will always be crimes as long as the world wags on, but that is no reason why good souls should put themselves about over that which they cannot help.'
Don Gesualdo said nothing, but she saw the nerves of his mouth quiver.
'I have no business to lecture your reverence on your duties,' she added, tartly; 'but they do say that so much anxiety for a guilty woman is a manner of injustice to innocent souls.'
He struck his closed hand on the table with concentrated expression of passion.
'How dare you say that she is guilty?' he cried. 'Who has proved her to be so?'
Candida looked at him with shrewd, suspicious eyes as she set down the bottle of vinegar.
'I have met with nobody who doubts it,' she said, cruelly, 'except your reverence and her lover up yonder at the villa.'
'You are all far too ready to believe evil,' said Don Gesualdo, with nervous haste; and he arose and pushed aside the untasted dish and went out of the house.
'He is beside himself for that jade's sake,' thought Candida, and after waiting a little whileto see if he returned, she sat down and ate the cabbage herself.
Whether there were as many crimes in the world as flies on the pavement in summer, she saw no reason why that good food should be wasted.
After her supper, she took her distaff and went and sat on the low wall which divided the church ground from the road, and gossiped with anyone of the villagers who chanced to come by. No one was ever too much occupied not to have leisure to talk in Marca, and the church wall was a favourite gathering place for the sunburnt women with faces like leather under their broad summer hats, or their woollen winter kerchiefs, who came and went to and from the fields or the well or the washing reservoir, with its moss-grown stone tanks brimming with brown water under a vine-covered pergola, where the hapless linen was wont to be beaten and banged as though it were so many sheets of cast-iron. And here with her gossips and friends, Candida could not help letting fall little words and stray sentences which revealed the trouble her mind was in as to the change in her master. She was devotedto him, but her devotion was not so strong as her love of mystery and her impatience of anything which opposed a barrier to her curiosity. She was not conscious that she said a syllable which could have affected his reputation, yet her neighbours all went away from her with the idea that there was something wrong in the presbytery, and that, if she had chosen, the priest's housekeeper could have told some very strange tales.
Since the days of the miller's murder, a vague feeling against Don Gesualdo had been growing up in Marca. A man who does not cackle, and scream, and roar, till he is hoarse, at the slightest thing which happens, is always unnatural and suspicious in the eyes of an Italian community. The people of Marca began to remember that he had some fishermen's blood in him, and that he had always been more friendly with the wife of Tasso Tassilo than had been meet in one of his calling.
Falko Melegari had been denied admittance to her by the authorities. They were not sure that he, as her lover, had not some complicity in the crime committed; and, moreover, hisimpetuous and inconsiderate language to the Judge of Instruction at the preliminary investigation had been so fierce and so unwise that it had prejudiced against him all officers of the law. This exclusion of him heightened the misery he felt, and moved him also to a querulous impatience with the vicar of San Bartolo for being allowed to see her.
'Those black snakes slip and slide in anywhere,' he thought, savagely; and his contempt for and dislike of ecclesiastics, which the manner and character of Don Gesualdo had held in abeyance, revived in its pristine force.
In Easter-time, Don Gesualdo was always greatly fatigued, and, when Easter came round this year, and the sins of Marca were poured into his ear—little, sordid, mean sins of which the narration wearied and sickened him—they seemed more loathsome to him than they had ever done. There was such likeness and such repetition in the confessions of all of them—greed, avarice, dishonesty, fornication; the scale never varied, and the story told kept always at the same low level of petty and coarse things. Their confessor heard, with a tired mind, and a sick heart, and, as he gavethem absolution, shuddered at the doubts of the infallibility of his Church, which for the first time passed with dread terror through his thoughts. The whole world seemed to him changing. He felt as though the solid earth itself were giving way beneath his feet. His large eyes had a startled and frightened look in them, and his face grew thinner every day.
It was after the last office in this Easter week, when a man came through the evening shadows towards the church. His name was Emilio Raffagiolo, but he was always known as thegirellone, 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. Thegirellonewas 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. TheChurch represented to him a thing with virtue in it, like a charm or a bunch of herbs; it was only necessary, he thought, to observe certain formulæ of it to be safe within it; conduct outside it was of no consequence. Nothing on earth can equal in confusion and indistinctness the views of the Italian rustic as regards his religion. The priest is to him as the medicine man to the savage; but he has ceased to respect his councils whilst retaining a superstitious feeling about his office.
This man, doffing his hat, entered the church and approached the confessional, crossing himself as he did so. Don Gesualdo, with a sigh, prepared to receive his confession, although the hour was unusual, and the many services of the day had fatigued him, until his head swam and his vision was clouded. But at no time had he ever availed himself of any excuse of time or physical weakness to avoid the duties of his office. Recognising the carter, he wearily awaited the usual tale of low vice and petty sins, some drunkenness, or theft, or lust, gratified in some unholy way, and resigned himself wearily to follow the confused repetitions with which the rustic of every country answers questions ornarrates circumstances. His conscience smote him for his apathy. Ought not the soul of this clumsy and wine-soddened boor to be as dear to him as that of lovelier creatures?
The man answered the usual priestly interrogations sullenly and at random; he could not help doing what he did, because superstition drove him to it, and was stronger for the time than any other thing; but he was angered at his own conscience, and afraid; his limbs trembled, and his tongue seemed to him to swell and grow larger than his mouth, and refused to move as he said at length in a thick, choked voice:
'It was I who killed him!'
'Who?' asked Don Gesualdo, whilst his own heart stood still. Without hearing the answer he knew what it would be.
'Tasso, the miller; my master,' said the carter; and, having confessed thus far, he recovered confidence and courage, and, in the rude, involved, garrulous utterances common to his kind, he leaned his mouth closer to Gesualdo's ear, and told, with a curious sort of pride in the accomplishment of it, why and how it had been done.
'I wanted to go to South America,' he muttered. 'I have a cousin there, and he says one makes money fast and works little. I had often wished to take Tassilo's money, but I was always afraid. He locked it up as soon as he took any, were it ever so little, and it never saw light again till it went to the bank, or was paid away for her finery. He wasted many a good fifty franc note on her back. Look you, the night before the feast of Peter and Paul, he had received seven hundred francs in the day for wheat, and I saw him lock it up in his bureau, and say to his wife that he should take it to the town next day. That was in the forenoon. At eventide they had a worse quarrel than usual. She taunted him and he threatened her. In the late night I lay listening to hear him astir. He was up before dawn, and he unbarred and opened the mill-house himself, and called to the foreman, and he said he was going to the town, and told us what we were to do. 'I shall be away all day,' he said. It was still dusky. I stole out after him without the men seeing. I said to myself I would take this money from him as he went along the cross roads to take thediligence 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 youstrike right. I was a butcher's lad once, and I used to kill the oxen, and I know. That is all. When I found the old rogue had no money with him, I could have killed him a score of times over. I cannot think how it was that he left home without it, unless it was, as I say, that he meant to go back unknown and unawares, and surprise his wife with Melegari. That must have been it, I think. For, greedy as he was over his money, he was greedier still over his wife. I turned him over on his back, and left him lying there, and I went home to the mill and began my day's work, till the people came and wakened her and told the tale; then I left off work and came and looked on like the rest of them. That is all.'
The man who made the confession was calm and unmoved; the priest who heard it was sick with horror, pale to the lips with agitation and anguish.
'But his wife is accused! She may be condemned!' he cried, in agony.
'I know that,' said the man, stolidly. 'But you cannot tell of me. I have told you under the seal of confession.'
It was quite true; come what would, Don Gesualdo could never reveal what he had heard. His eyes swam, his head reeled, a deadly sickness came upon him; all his short life simple and harmless things had been around him; he had been told of the crimes of men, but he had never been touched by them; he had known of the sins of the world, but he had never realised them. The sense that the murderer of Tasso Tassilo was within a hand's breadth of him, that these eyes which stared at him, this voice which spoke to him, were those of the actual assassin, that it was possible, and yet utterly impossible, for him to help justice and save innocence—all this overcame him with its overwhelming burden of horror and of divided duty. He lost all consciousness as he knelt there and fell heavily forward on the wood-work of the confessional.
His teachers had said aright in the days of his novitiate, that he would never be of stern enough stuff to deal with the realities of life.
When he recovered his senses, sight and sound and sensibility all returning to him slowly and with a strange, numb prickingpain in his limbs, and his body and his brain, the church was quite dark, and the man who had confessed his crime to him was gone.
Gesualdo gathered himself up with effort, and sat down on the wooden seat and tried to think. He was bitterly ashamed of his own weakness. What was he worth, he, shepherd and leader of men, if at the first word of horror which affrighted him, he fainted as women faint, and failed to speak in answer the condemnation which should have been spoken? Was it for such cowardice as this that they had anointed him and received him as a servitor of the Church?
His first impulse was to go and relate his feebleness and failure to his bishop; the next he remembered that even so much support as this he must not seek; to no living being must he tell this wretched blood-secret.
The law which respects nothing would not respect the secrets of the confessional; but he knew that all the human law in the world could not alter his own bondage to the duty he had with his own will accepted.
It was past midnight when, with trembling limbs, he groped his way out of the porch ofhis church and found the entrance of the presbytery, and climbed the stone stairs to his own chamber.
Candida opened her door, and thrust her head through the aperture, and cried to him:
'Where have you been mooning, reverend sir, all this while, and the lamp burning to waste and your good bed yawning for you? You are not a strong man enough to keep these hours, and for a priest they are not decent ones.'
'Peace, woman,' said Don Gesualdo in a tone which she had never heard from him. He went within and closed the door. He longed for the light of dawn, and yet he dreaded it.
When the dawn came, it brought nothing to him except the knowledge that the real murderer was there, within a quarter of a mile of him, and yet could not be denounced by him to justice even to save the guiltless.
The usual occupations of a week-day claimed his time, and he went through them all with mechanical precision, but he spoke all his words as in a dream, and the red sanded bricks of his house, the deal table, withthe black coffee and the round loaf set out on it, the stone sink at which Candida was washing endive and cutting lettuces, the old men and women who came and went telling their troubles garrulously and begging for pence, the sunshine which streamed in over the threshold, the poultry which picked up the crumbs off the floor, all these homely and familiar things seemed unreal to him, and were seen as through a mist.
This little narrow dwelling, with the black cypress shadows falling athwart it, which had once seemed to him the abode of perfect peace, now seemed to imprison him, till his heart failed and died within him.
In the dead of night, at the end of the week, moved by an unconquerable impulse which had haunted him the whole seven days, he rose and lit a lanthorn and let himself out of his own door noiselessly, stealthily, as though he were on some guilty errand, and took the sexton's spade from the tool-house and went across the black shadows which stretched over the grass, towards the place where the body of Tasso Tassilo had lain dead. In the moonlight there stood, tall and straight, a column of green leaves,it was the stately Lombardy poplar, which was spared by the hatchet because Marca was, so far as it understood anything, loyal in its regret for the days that were gone. Many birds which had been for hours sound asleep in its boughs flew out with a great whirr of wings, and with chirps of terror, as the footfall of the vicar awakened and alarmed them. He set his lanthorn down on the ground, for the rays of the moon did not penetrate as far as the deep gloom the poplars threw around them, and began to dig. He dug some little time without success, then his spade struck against something which shone amidst the dry clay soil: it was the knife. He took it up with a shudder. There were dark red spots on the steel blade. It was a narrow, slightly curved, knife, about six inches long, such a knife as every Italian of the lower classes carries every day, in despite of the law, and with which most Italian murders are committed.
He looked at it long. If the inanimate thing could but have spoken, could but have told the act which it had done!
He, kneeling on the ground, gazed at it with a sickening fascination, then he replaced itdeeper down in the ground, and with his spade smoothed the earth with which he covered it. The soil was so dry that it did not show much trace of having been disturbed. Then he returned homeward, convinced now of the truth of the confession made to him. Some men met him on the road, country lads driving cattle early to a distant fair; they saluted him with respect, but laughed when they had passed him.
What had his reverence, they wondered, been doing with a spade this time of night? Did he dig for treasure? There was a tradition in the country side, of sacks of ducal gold which had been buried by the river to save them from the French troops in the time of the invasion by the First Consul.
Don Gesualdo, unconscious of their comments, went home, put the spade back in the tool-house, unlocked his church, entered and prayed long; then waking his sleepy sexton, bade him rise, and set the bell ringing for the first mass. The man got up grumbling because it was still quite dark, and next day talked to his neighbours about the queer ways of his vicar; how he would walk all night about hisroom, sometimes get up and go out in the dead of night even; he complained that his own health and patience would soon give way. An uneasy feeling grew up in the village, some gossips even suggested that the bishop should be spoken to in the town; but everyone was fearful of being the first to take such a step, and no one was sure how so great a person could be approached, and the matter remained in abeyance. But the disquietude, and the antagonism, which the manner and appearance of their priest had created, grew with the growth of the year, and with it also the impression that he knew more of the miller's assassination than he would ever say.
A horrible sense of being this man's accomplice grew also upon himself; the bond of silence which he kept perforce with this wretch seemed to him to make him so. His slender strength and sensitive nerves ill fitted him to sustain so heavy a burden, so horrible a knowledge.
'It has come to chastise me because I have thought of her too often, have been moved by her too warmly,' he told himself; and his soulshrank within him at what appeared the greatness of his own guilt.
Since receiving the confession of the carter, he did not dare to seek an interview with Generosa. He did not dare to look on her agonised eyes and feel that he knew what could set her free and yet must never tell it. He trembled, lest in sight of the suffering of this woman, who possessed such power to move and weaken him, he should be untrue to his holy office, should let the secret he had to keep escape him. Like all timid and vacillating tempers, he sought refuge in procrastination.
All unconscious of the growth of public feeling against him, and wrapped in that absorption which comes from one dominant idea, he pursued the routine of his parochial life, and went through all the ceremonials of his office, hardly more conscious of what he did than the candles which his sacristan lighted. The confession made to him haunted him night and day. He saw it, as it were, written in letters of blood on the blank, white walls of his bed-chamber, of his sacristy, of his church itself. The murderer was there, at large, unknown to all; at work like any other man in the clear,sweet sunshine, talking and laughing, eating and drinking, walking and sleeping, yet as unsuspected as a child unborn. And all the while Generosa was in prison. There was only one chance left, that she should be acquitted by her judges. But even then the slur and stain of an imputed, though unproven, crime would always rest upon her and make her future dark, her name a by-word in her birth-place. No mere acquittal, leaving doubt and suspicion behind it, would give her back to the light and joy of life. Every man's hand would be against her; every child would point at her as the woman who had been accused of the assassination of her husband.
One day he sought Falko Melegari, when the latter was making up the accounts of his stewardship at an old bureau in a deep window-embrasure of the villa.
'You know that the date of the trial is fixed for the tenth of next month?' he said, in a low, stifled voice.
The young man, leaning back in his wooden chair, gave a sign of assent.
'And you?' said Don Gesualdo, with a curious expression in his eyes, 'if they absolveher, will you have the courage to prove your own belief in her innocence? Will you marry her when she is set free?'
The question was abrupt and unlooked for; Falko changed colour; he hesitated.
'You will not!' said Don Gesualdo.
'I have not said so,' answered the young man, evasively. 'I do not know that she would exact it.'
Exact it! Don Gesualdo did not know much of human nature, but he knew what the use of that cold word implied.
'I thought you loved her! I mistook,' he said, bitterly. A rosy flush came for a moment on the wax-like pallor of his face.
Falko Melegari looked at him insolently.
'A churchman should not meddle with these things! Love her! I love her—yes. It ruins my life to think of her yonder. I would cut off my right arm to save her; but to marry her if she come out absolved—that is another thing; one's name a by-word, one's credulity laughed at, one's neighbours shy of one—that is another thing, I say. It will not be enough for her judges to acquit her; that will not prove her innocence to all the people here,or to my people at home in my own country.'
He rose and pushed his heavy chair away impatiently; he was ashamed of his own words, but in the most impetuous Italian natures, prudence and self-love are oftentimes the strongest instincts. The priest looked at him with a great scorn in the depths of his dark, deep, luminous eyes. This handsome and virile lover seemed to him a very poor creature; a coward and faithless.
'In the depths of your soul you doubt her yourself!' he said, with severity and contempt, as he turned away from the writing table, and went out through the windows into the garden beyond.
'No, as God lives, I do not doubt her,' cried Falko Melegari. 'Not for an hour, not for a moment. But to make others believe—that is more difficult. I will maintain her and befriend her always if they set her free; but marry her—take her to my people—have everyone say that my wife had been in gaol on suspicion of murder—that I could not do; no man would do it who had a reputation to lose. One loves for love's sake, but one marries for the world's.'
He spoke to empty air; there was no one to hear him but the little green lizards who had slid out of their holes in the stone under the window-step. Don Gesualdo had gone across the rough grass of the garden, and had passed out of sight beyond the tall hedge of rose-laurel.
The young man resumed his writing, but he was restless and uneasy, and could not continue his calculations of debit and credit, of loss and profit. He took his gun, whistled his dog, and went up towards the hills, where hares were to be found in the heather and snipe under the gorse, for close time was unrecognised in the province. His temper was ruffled, and his mind in great irritation against his late companion; he felt angrily that he must have appeared a poltroon, and a poor and unmanly lover in the eyes of the churchman. Yet he had only spoken, he felt sure, as any other man would have done in his place.
In the sympathy of their common affliction, his heart had warmed for awhile to Gesualdo, as to the only one who, like himself, cared for the fate of Tasso Tassilo's wife; but now that suspicion had entered into him, there returned with it all his detestation of the Churchand all the secular hatreds which the gentle character of the priest of Marca had for a time lulled in him.
'Of course he is a liar and a hypocrite,' he thought, savagely. 'Perhaps he was a murderer as well!'
He knew that the idea was a kind of madness. Don Gesualdo had never been known to hurt a fly; indeed, his aversion to even see pain inflicted had made him often the laughing-stock of the children of Marca when he had rescued birds, or locusts, or frogs, from their tormenting fingers, and forbade them to throw stones at the lambs or kids they drove to pasture. 'They are not baptised,' the children had often said, with a grin, and Gesualdo had often answered: 'The good God baptised them Himself.'
It was utter madness to suppose that such a man, tender as a woman, timid as a sheep, gentle as a spaniel, could possibly have stabbed Tasso Tassilo to the death within a few roods of his own church, almost on holy ground itself. And yet, the idea grew and grew in the mind of Generosa's lover until it acquired all the force of an actual conviction. We welcome no suppositionso eagerly as we do one which accords with and intensifies our own prejudices. He neglected his duties and occupations to brood over this one suspicion, and put together all the trifles which he could remember in confirmation of it. It haunted him wherever he was; at wine fair, at horse market, at cattle sale, in the corn-field, amongst the vines, surrounded by his peasantry at noonday, or alone in the wild, deserted garden of the villa by moonlight.
In his pain and fury, it was a solace to him to turn his hatred on to some living creature. As he sat alone and thought over all which had passed (as he did think of it night and day always), many a trifle rose to his mind which seemed to him to confirm his wild and vague suspicions of the vicar of San Bartolo. Himself a free-thinker, it appeared natural to suspect any kind of crime in a member of the priesthood. The sceptic is sometimes as narrow and as arrogant in his free-thought as the believer in his bigotry. Falko Melegari was a good-hearted young man, and kind, and gay, and generous by nature; but he had the prejudices of his time and of his school. These prejudices made him ready tobelieve that a priest was always fit food for the galleys, or the scaffold, a mass of concealed iniquity covered by his cloth.
'I believe you know more than anyone,' he said, roughly, one day when he passed the vicar on a narrow field-path, while his eyes flashed suspiciously over the downcast face of Don Gesualdo, who shrank a little as if he had received a blow, and was silent.
He had spoken on an unconsidered impulse, and would have been unable to say what his own meaning really was; but as he saw the embarrassment, and observed the silence, of his companion, what he had uttered at hazard seemed to him curiously confirmed and strengthened.
'If you know anything which could save her, and you do not speak,' he said, passionately, 'may all the devils you believe in torture you through all eternity!'
Don Gesualdo still kept silent. He made the sign of the cross nervously, and went on his way.
'Curse all these priests,' said the young man, bitterly, looking after him. 'If one could only deal with them as one does withother men!—but, in their vileness and their feebleness, they are covered by their frock like women.'
He was beside himself with rage and misery, and the chafing sense of his own impotence; he was young, and strong, and ardently enamoured, and yet he could do no more to save the woman he loved from eternal separation from him than if he had been an idiot or an infant, than if he had had no heart in his breast, and no blood in his veins.
Whenever he met the vicar afterwards, he did not even touch his hat, but scowled at him in scorn, and ceased those outward observances of respect to the Church which he had always given before to please his master, who liked such example to be set by the steward to the peasantry.
'If Ser Baldo send me away for it, so he must do,' he thought. 'I will never set foot in the church again. I should choke that accursedparoccowith his own wafer.'
For suspicion is a poisonous weed which, if left to grow unchecked, soon reachesmaturity, 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 Don Gesualdo was striving with the utmost force that was in him to persuade the real criminal to confess publicly what he had told under the seal of confession. He saw the man secretly, and used every argument with which the doctrines of his Church and his own intense desires could supply him. But there is no obstinacy so dogged, no egotism so impenetrable, no shield against persuasion so absolute, as the stolid ignorance and self-love of a low mind. The carter turned a deaf ear to all censure as to all entreaty; he was stolidly indifferent to all the woe that he had caused and would cause if he remained silent. What was all that to him? The thought of the miller's widow shut up in prison pleased him. He had always hated her as he had seen her in what he called her finery, going by him in the sunshine, with all her bravery of pearl necklace, of silver hairpins, of gold breast chains. Manyand many a time he had thirsted to snatch at them and pull them off her. What right had she to them, she, a daughter of naked, hungry folks, who dug and carted sea and river sand for a living even as he carted sacks of flour. She was no better than himself! Now and then, Generosa had called him, in her careless, imperious fashion, to draw water or carry wood for her, and when he had done so she never had taken the trouble to bid him good day or to say a good-natured word. His pride had been hurt, and he had had much ado to restrain himself from calling her a daughter of beggars, a worm of the sand. Like her own people, he was pleased that she should now find her fine clothes and her jewelled trinkets of no avail to her, and that she should weep the light out of her big eyes, and the rose-bloom off her peach-like cheeks in the squalor and nausea of a town prison.
Don Gesualdo, with all the force which a profound conviction that he speaks the truth lends to any speaker, wrestled for the soul of this dogged brute, and warned him of the punishment everlasting which would await him if he persisted in his refusal to surrender himselfto justice. But he might as well have spoken to the great millstones that rest in the river water. Why, then, had this wretch cast the burden of his vile secret on innocent shoulders? It was the most poignant anguish to him that he could awaken no sense of guilt in the conscience of the criminal. The man had come to him partly from a vague superstitious impulse, remnant of a credulity instilled into him in childhood, and partly from the want to unburden his mind, to tell his story to someone, which is characteristic of all weak minds in times of trouble and peril. It had relieved him to drag the priest into sharing his own guilty consciousness; he was half proud and half afraid of the manner in which he had slain his master, and bitterly incensed that he had done the deed for nothing; but, beyond this, he had no other emotion except that he was glad that Generosa should suffer through and for it.
'You will burn for ever if you persist in such hideous wickedness,' said Don Gesualdo again and again to him.
'I will take my chance of that,' said the man. 'Hell is far off, and the galleys are near.'
'But if you do not believe in my power to absolve you or leave you accursed, why did you ever confess to me?' cried Don Gesualdo.
'Because one must clear one's breast to somebody when one has a thing like that on one's mind,' answered the carter, 'and I know you cannot tell of it again.'
From that position nothing moved him. No entreaties, threats, arguments, denunciations, stirred him a hair's-breadth. He had confessedper sfogarsi(to relieve himself): that was all.
But one night after Gesualdo had thus spoken to him, vague fears assailed him, terrors material, not spiritual; he had parted with his secret; who could tell that it might not come out like a sleuth hound, and find him and denounce him? He had told it to be at peace, but he was not at peace. He feared every instant to have the hand of the law upon him. Whenever he heard the trot of the carabineers' horses going through the village, or saw their white belts and cocked hats in the sunlight of the fields, a cold tremor of terror seized him lest the priest should after all have told. He knew that it was impossible, and yet he was afraid.
He counted up the money he had saved, a little roll of filthy and crumpled bank notes for very small amounts, and wondered if they would be enough to take him across to America. They were very few, but his fear compelled him to trust to them. He invented a story of remittances which he had received from his brother, and told his fellow-labourers and his employer that he was invited to join that brother, and then he packed up his few clothes and went. At the mill and in the village they talked a little of it, saying that the fellow was in luck, but that they for their parts would not care to go so far. Don Gesualdo heard of his flight in the course of the day.
'Gone away! Out of the country?' he cried involuntarily, with white lips.
The people who heard him wondered what it could matter to him that a carter had gone to seek his fortunes over the seas.
The carter had not been either such a good worker, or such a good boon companion, that anyone at the mill or in the village should greatly regret him.
'America gets all our rubbish,' said the people, 'much good may it do her.'
Meantime, the man took his way across the country, and, sometimes by walking, sometimes by lifts in waggons, sometimes by helping charcoal burners on the road, made his way, first to Vendramino to have his papers put in order, and then to the sea coast, and in the port of Leghorn took his passage in an emigrant ship then loading there. The green cane-brakes and peaceful millet fields of Marca saw him no more.
But he had left the burden of his blood-guiltiness behind him, and it lay on the guiltless soul with the weight of the world.
So long as the man had remained in Marca, there had been always a hope present with Don Gesualdo that he would persuade him to confess in a court of justice what he had confessed to the church, or that some sequence of accidents would lead up to the discovery of his guilt. But with the ruffian gone across the seas, lost in that utter darkness which swallows up the lives of the poor and obscure when once they have left the hamlet in which their names mean something to their neighbours, this one hope was quenched, and the vicar, in agony, reproached himself with not having prevailed inhis struggle for the wretch's soul; with not having been eloquent enough, or wise enough, or stern enough to awe him into declaration of his ghastly secret to the law.
His failure seemed to him a sign of Heaven's wrath against himself.
'How dare I,' he thought, 'how dare I, feeble and timid and useless as I am, call myself a servant of God, or attempt to minister to other souls?'
He had thought, like an imbecile, as he told himself, to be able to awaken the conscience and compel the public confession of this man, and the possibility of flight had never presented itself to his mind, natural and simple as had been such a course to a creature without remorse, continually haunted by personal fears of punishment. He, he alone on earth, knew the man's guilt; he, he alone had the power to save Generosa, and he could not use the power because the secrecy of his holy office was fastened on him like an iron padlock on his lips.
The days passed him like nightmares; he did his duties mechanically, scarcely consciously; the frightful alternative which was set beforehim seemed to parch up the very springs of life itself. He knew that he must look strangely in the eyes of the people; his voice sounded strangely in his own ears; he began to feel that he was unworthy to administer the blessed bread to the living, to give the last unction to the dying; he knew that he was not at fault, and yet he felt that he was accursed. Choose what he would, he must, he thought, commit some hateful sin.
The day appointed for the trial came; it was the tenth of May. A hot day, with the bees booming amongst the acacia flowers, and the green tree-frogs shouting joyously above in the ilex tops, and the lizards running in and out of the china-rose hedges on the highways. Many people of Marca were summoned as witnesses, and these went to the town in mule carts or crazy chaises, with the farm-horse put in the shafts, and grumbled because they would lose their day's labour in their fields, and yet were pleasurably excited at the idea of seeing Generosa in the prisoner's dock, and being able themselves to tell all they knew, and a great deal that they did not know.
Falko Melegari rode over at dawn by himself,and Don Gesualdo, with his housekeeper and sacristan, who were all summoned to give testimony, went by the diligence, which started from Sant' Arturo, and rolled through the dusty roads and over the bridges, and past the wayside shrines, and shops, and forges, across the country to the town.
The vicar never spoke throughout the four weary hours during which the rickety and crowded vehicle, with its poor, starved, bruised beasts, rumbled on its road through the lovely shadows and cool sunlight of the early morning. He held his breviary in his hand for form's sake, and, seeing him thus absorbed in holy meditation as they thought, his garrulous neighbours did not disturb him, but chattered amongst themselves, filling the honeysuckle-scented air with the odours of garlic and wine and coarse tobacco.
Candida glanced at him anxiously from time to time, haunted by a vague presentiment of ill. His face looked very strange, she thought, and his closely-locked lips were white as the lips of a corpse. When the diligence was driven over the stones of the town, all the passengers by it descended at the first wine-house which they saw on the piazza to eat and drink, but he, with never a word, motioned his housekeeper aside when she would have pressed food on him, and went into the cathedral of the place to pray alone.
The town was hot and dusty and sparsely peopled. It had brown walls and large brick palaces untenanted, and ancient towers, also of brick, pointing high to heaven. It was a place dear to the memory of lovers of art for the sake of some fine paintings of the Sienese school which hung in its churches, and was occasionally visited by strangers for sake of these; but, for the most part, it was utterly forgotten by the world, and its bridge of many arches, said to have been built by Augustus, seldom resounded to any other echoes than those of the heavy wheels of the hay or corn waggons coming in from the pastoral country around.
The Court-house, where all great trials took place, stood in one of the bare, silent, dusty squares of the town. It had once been the ancient palace of the Podesta, and had the machicolated walls, the turreted towers, and the vast stairways and frescoed chambers of a larger and statelier time than ours. The hall of justice was a vastchamber pillared with marble, vaulted and painted, sombre and grand. It was closely thronged with country folks; there was a scent of hay, of garlic, of smoking pipes hastily thrust into trouser pockets, of unwashed flesh steaming hotly in the crowd, and the close air. The judge was there with his officers, a mediæval figure in black square cap and black gown. The accused was behind the cage assigned to such prisoners, guarded by carabineers and by the jailers. Don Gesualdo looked in once from a distant doorway; then with a noise in his ears like the sound of the sea, and a deadly sickness on him, he stayed without in the audience-chamber, where a breath of air came to him up one of the staircases, there waiting until his name was called.
The trial began. Everything was the same as it had been in the preliminary examination which had preceded her committal on the charge of murder. The same depositions were made now that had then been made. In the interval, the people of Marca had forgotten a good deal, so added somewhat of their own invention to make up for the deficiency; but, on the whole, the testimony was the samegiven 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 the vicar 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 endeavoured to create.
'This priest knows that she is guilty,' thought the president. 'He knows it—perhapshe knows even more—perhaps he was her accomplice.'