A House-Party Part 28

CHAPTER III.

The winter pa.s.sed 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, tw.a.n.ging 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 G.o.d with incessant supplication for her.

Day and night he racked his brain to discover any evidence as to who the a.s.sa.s.sin 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 cas.e.m.e.nt of her chamber, did not a.s.sail 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 gra.s.ses and the sunny canebrakes of the Bocca d'Arno?

Most innocent, indeed, had been his relations with the wife of Ta.s.silo, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sented.

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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sionate and despairing cries which seemed to come from his very soul when he preached, and which vaguely frightened a rural congregation who were wholly unable to understand them.

"One would think the good parocco had some awful sin on his soul," said a woman to Candida one evening.

"Nay, nay; he is as pure as a lamb," said Candida, twirling her distaff.

"But he was always helpless and childlike, and too much taken up with heavenly things--may the saints forgive me for saying so! He should be in a monastery along with St. Romolo and St. Francis."

But yet the housekeeper, though loyalty itself, was, in her own secret thoughts, not a little troubled at the change she saw in her master. She put it down to the score of his agitation at the peril of Generosa Fe; but this in itself seemed to her unfitting in one of his sacred calling.

A mere light-o'-love and saucebox, as she had always herself called the miller's wife, was wholly unworthy to occupy, even in pity, the thoughts of so holy a man.

There could not be a doubt that she had given that knife-stroke among the canes in the dusk of the dawn of St. Peter and St. Paul, thought Candida, among whose virtues charity had small place; but what had the parocco to do with it?

In her rough way, motherly and unmannerly, she ventured to take her master to task for so much interest in a sinner.

"The people of Marca say you think too much about that foul business; they even whisper that you neglect your holy duties," she said to him, as she served the frugal supper of cabbage soaked in oil. "There will always be crimes as long as the world wags on, but that is no reason why good souls should put themselves out about that which they cannot help."

Gesualdo said nothing, but she saw the nerves of his mouth quiver.

"I have no business to lecture your reverence on your duties," she added, tartly; "but they do say that so much anxiety for a guilty woman is a manner of injustice to innocent souls."

Gesualdo struck his closed hand on the table with concentrated expression of pa.s.sion.

"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 n.o.body 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 was.h.i.+ng-reservoir, with its broad stone tanks br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo 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 repet.i.tion 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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sed 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 Raff.a.giolo, but he was always known as the Girellone,--the rover. Such nicknames replace the baptismal names of the country-people till the latter are almost forgotten, whilst the family name is scarcely ever employed at all in rural communities. The Girellone was a carter, who had been in service at the water-mill for some few months. He was a man of thirty or thereabouts, with a dusky face and a shock head of hair, and hazel eyes, dull and yet cunning. He was dressed now in his festal attire, and he had a round hat set on one side of his head: he doffed it as he entered the church. He could not read or write, and his ideas of his creed were hazy and curious: the Church represented to him a thing with virtue in it, like a charm or a bunch of herbs; it was only necessary, he thought, to observe certain formulae of it to be safe within it; conduct outside it was of no consequence. Nothing on earth can equal in confusion and indistinctness the views of the Italian rustic as regards his religion. The priest is to him as the medicine-man to the savage; but he has ceased to respect his counsels, whilst retaining a superst.i.tious 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 l.u.s.t gratified in some unholy way, and resigned himself wearily to follow the confused repet.i.tions with which the rustic of every country answers questions or narrates circ.u.mstances.

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 superst.i.tion 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.

"Ta.s.so, 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 Ta.s.silo'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 gra.s.s 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 Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo 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 a.s.sa.s.sin, 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.