A Rainy June, and Other Stories
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Title: A Rainy June, and Other Stories
Author: Ouida
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A RAINY JUNE, AND OTHER STORIES ***
A RAINY JUNE
ETC.
OUIDA'S NOVELS
Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 3_s._ 6_d._ each; post 8vo, illustrated
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_Held in Bondage._
_Tricotrin._
_Strathmore._
_Chandos._
_Cecil Castlemaine's Gage._
_Under Two Flags._
_Puck._
_Idalia._
_Folle-Favine._
_A Dog of Flanders._
_Pascarel._
_Signa._
_Two Little Wooden Shoes._
_In a Winter City_.
_Ariadne._
_Friendship._
_Moths._
_Pipistrello._
_A Village Commune._
_In Maremma._
_Bimbi._
_Syrlin._
_Wanda._
_Frescoes._
_Othmar._
_Princess Napraxine._
_Guilderoy._
_Ruffino._
_Santa Barbara._
_Two Offenders._
POPULAR EDITIONS, medium 8vo, 6_d._ each.
_Under Two Flags._
_Held in Bondage._
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_Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos_, selected from the Works of OUIDA by
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London: CHATTO & WINDUS, 111 St. Martin's Lane, W.C.
A RAINY JUNE
AND OTHER STORIES
BY
OUIDA
AUTHOR OF 'PUCK,' 'TRICOTRIN,' 'THE MASSARENES,' ETC.
[Illustration]
A NEW EDITION
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1905
CONTENTS
PAGE
A RAINY JUNE 1
DON GESUALDO 89
THE SILVER CHRIST 215
A LEMON-TREE 305
A RAINY JUNE
A RAINY JUNE
_From the Principe di San Zenone, Claridge's, London, to the
Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Monterone, near Val d'Aosta, 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 a scolding.
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-coloured, 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
something _Sainte Nitouche_ about 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 ballroom; 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 behaviour, 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 few _petits
soins_. You should have come over for my marriage to show them all
what an exquisite creature a Venetian patrician beauty can be. Why
_would_ you 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 their politics. Half of them say
some person I never heard of is the destruction of England, the other
half say the same person 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 a _seccatura_. 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 their
detestable politics or anything that is tiresome. Of course, you are
wondering that I should take this momentous step. I wonder myself,
but then if I did not marry I should be compelled to say an eternal
farewell to 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 by 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 reverderci, 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' 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 as
white as her gown--such a goose!--it was ivory satin, with _point de
Venise_. He is quite too handsome, and I cannot think what he could
see in her! He gave us each a locket with _her_ portrait inside. I
wished it had been _his_! I daresay 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, there 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, _very_ High Church, and
I suppose that reconciled a little the very irreconcilable Prelate. 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 Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton,
Beds., 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 I _can'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 our rural 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 anyone like him on earth.
'He is an angel. We ride in the morning, we sing and play in the
evening. We adore each other all the twenty-four hours through. I
wonder however I could have lived without him. I am longing to see all
he tells me about his great marble palaces, and his immense dreamlike
villas, and his gardens with their multitude of statues, and the
wonderful light that is over it all. He protests it is always twilight
with us in England. It seems so absurd, when nowadays everybody knows
everything about everywhere, that I should never have been to Italy.
But we were such country mice down at dear, old, dull, green, muddy
Ditchworth. Lanciano, the biggest of all their big places, must be like
a poem. It is a great house, all of different coloured marbles, set
amidst ilex groves on the mountain side, with cascades like Terni, and
gardens that were planned by Giulio Romano, and temples that were there
in the days of Horace. I long to see it all, and yet I hope he will not
want to leave Coombe yet. There is no place like the place where one
is _first_ happy. And somehow, I fancy I look better in these homely,
low rooms of Aunt Carrie's, with their Chippendale furniture and their
smell of dry rose leaves, than I shall do in those enormous palaces
which want a Semiramis or a Cleopatra. They were kind enough to make a
fuss about me in London, but I never thought much of myself, and I am
afraid I must feel rather dull to Piero, who is so brilliant himself,
and has all kinds of talents.'
_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
very exaggerated ideas. 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 even win 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 old 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 merely because he is
too good-looking, isn't an Englishman, and has a mother who is reputed
_maîtresse 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 amongst his own people when she goes amongst them; and though,
now-a-days, 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 strawyards, 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. The Cardinal 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
neighbour. Well, we must hope for the best!'
_From the Principe Piero di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the
Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Rome._
'CARISSIMA MIA,--There are quantities of birds in little green nests
at this season. I am in a green nest. I never saw anything so green as
this Paradise of mine. It is certainly Paradise. If I feel a little
like a fish out of water instead of a happy bird in it, it is only
because I have been such a sinner. No doubt it is only that. Paradise
is chilly; this is its only fault. It is the sixth of June and we have
fires. Fires in the dressing-rooms, fires in the drawing-rooms, fires
at both ends of the library, fires on both sides of the hall, fires
everywhere; and with all of them I shiver. I cannot help shivering,
and I feel convinced that in my rapture I have mistaken the month--it
must be December! It is all extraordinarily trim and neat here; the
whole place looks in such perfect order that it might have been taken
out of a box of German toys last night. I have a little the sensation
of being always at church. That, no doubt, is the effect of the first
step towards virtue that I have ever made. Pray do not think that I
am not perfectly happy. I should be more sensible of my happiness, no
doubt, if I had not quite such a feeling, due to the dampness of the
air, of having been put into an aquarium, like a jelly-fish. But Gladys
is adorable in every way; and if she were not quite so easily scared,
would be perfection. It was that little air of hers, like that of some
irresistible Alpine flower, which bewitched me. But when one has got
the Alpine flower, one cannot live for ever on it!--however _ma basta_!
I was curious to know what a northern woman was like; I know now. She
is exquisite, but a little monotonous, and a little prudish. Certainly
she will never compromise me; but then, perhaps, she will never let
me compromise myself, and that will be terrible! I am ungrateful; all
men are ungrateful; but, then, is it not a little the women's fault?
They do keep so very close to one. Now, an angel, you know, becomes
tiresome if one never gets out of the shadow of its wings--here, at
Coombe Bysset, the angel fills the horizon, and one's distance is a
Botticelli picture!'
_From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Rome, to
the Principe Piero di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton, Beds.,
England._
'CARO MIO PIERINO,--Are you sure you have an angel? People have a trick
of always calling very commonplace women angels. "She is an angel" is
a polite way of saying "she is a bore." I am not sure either that I
should care to live with a veritable angel. One would see too much of
the wings, as you say; and even a guardian angel must be the _terzo
incommodo_ sometimes. Why _would_ you marry an English girl? I daresay
she is so good-tempered that she never contradicts you, and you grow
peevish out of sheer weariness at having everything your own way. If
you had married Nicoletta, as I wanted you to do, she would have flown
at you, like a little tigress, a dozen times a week, and kept you on
the _qui vive_ to please her. We know what our own men want. I have
half a mind to write to your wife and tell her that no Italian is
comfortable unless he has his ears boxed twice a day. If your wife
would be a little disagreeable, probably you would adore her. But it
is a great mistake, _Pierino mio_, to confuse marriage and love. In
reality, they have no more to do with one another than a horse chestnut
and a chestnut horse; than the _zuccone_ that means a vegetable, and
the _zuccone_ that means a simpleton. I should imagine that your
wet English bird's-nest will force you to realise this truth with
lamentable rapidity.'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton,
Beds., to Lady Gwendoline Dormer, British Embassy, Vienna._
'DEAREST GWEN,--I did promise, I know, to write to you at once, and
tell you everything; and a whole week is gone and I couldn't do it, I
really couldn't; and even now I don't know where to begin. I suppose
I am dreadfully _vieux jeu_. I suppose you will only laugh at me, and
say "spoons." How glad I am Piero cannot say a word of English, and
so I never hear that dreadful jargon which I do think so ugly and so
vulgar, though you are all so fond of it. I ought not to have come to
Coombe Bysset; at least, they all said it was silly. Nessie Fitzgerald
was back in London before the week was out, and doing a play. To be
sure she was married in October, and she didn't care a bit about him,
and I suppose that made all the difference. To me, it seems so much
more natural to shut one's self up, and Piero thought so too; but I
am half afraid he finds it a little dull now. You see, we knew very
little of one another. He came for a month of the London season, and he
met me at Ranelagh, and he danced the cotillon with me at a good many
houses, and we cared for one another in a week, and were married in a
month, as you know. Papa hated it because it wasn't Lord Burlington or
Lord Hampshire. But he couldn't really object, because the San Zenone
are such a great Roman family, and all the world knows them; and they
are Spanish dukes as well as Italian princes. And Piero is such a
grand gentleman, and made quite superb settlements; much more, Papa
said, than he could have expected, so poor as we are. But what I meant
was, meeting like that in the rush of the season, at balls and dinners
and garden parties, and luncheons at Hurlingham, and being married to
one another just before Ascot, we really knew nothing at all of each
other's tastes or habits or character. And when, on the first morning
at Coombe, we realised that we were together for life, I think we both
felt very odd. We adored one another, but we didn't know what to
talk about; we never had talked to each other; we never had time. And
I am afraid there is something of this feeling with him. I am afraid
he is dreadfully bored, and I told him so, and he answered, "My dear
little angel, your admirable countrymen are not bored in the country
because they are always eating. They eat a big breakfast, they eat a
big luncheon, they eat a big dinner, they are always eating. Myself, I
have not that resource. Give me a little coffee and a little wine, and
let me eat only once a day. You never told me I was expected to absorb
continually food like the crocodiles." What would he say if he saw a
hunting breakfast in the shires? I suppose life _is_ very material in
England. I think it is why there is so much typhoid fever. Do you know,
he wasn't going to dress for dinner because we were alone. As if that
was any reason! I told him it would look so odd to the servants if he
didn't dress, so he has done so since. But he says it was a _seccatura_
(this means, I believe, a bore), and he told me we English sacrifice
our whole lives to fuss, form and the outside of things. There is a
good deal of truth in this. What numbers of people one knows who are
ever so poor, and who yet, for the sake of the look of the thing, get
into debt over their ears! And then, quantities of them go to church
for the form of the thing, when they don't _believe_ one atom; they
will tell you at luncheon that they don't. I fancy Italians are much
more honest than we are in this sort of way. Piero says if they are
poor, they don't mind saying so, and if they have no religion, they
don't pretend to have any. He declares we English spoil all our lives
because we fancy it is our duty to pretend to be something we are
not. Now, isn't that really very true? I am sure you would delight in
all he says. He is so original, so unconventional; our people think
him ignorant, because he doesn't read, and doesn't care a straw about
politics. But I assure you he is as clever as anything can be; and he
doesn't get his ideas out of newspapers; nor repeat like a parrot what
his chief of party tells him. I do wish you could have come over and
could have seen him. It was so unkind of you to be ill just at the
very time of my marriage. You know that it is only to you that I ever
say quite what I feel about things. The girls are too young, and Mamma
doesn't understand. She never could see why I would not marry poor
Hampshire. She always said that I should care for him in time. I don't
think Mamma can ever have been in love with anybody. I wonder what
_she_ married for--don't you?'
_From the Principe Piero di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the
Count Zazzari, Italian Legation, London._
'CARO GIGI,--Pray send me all the French novels you can find, and a
case of Turkish cigarettes. I am in Paradise, but Paradise is a little
dull, and exceedingly damp, at least in England. Does it always rain in
this country? It has rained here without stopping for seventeen days
and a half. I produce upon myself the impression of being one of those
larks who sit behind wires on a little square of wet grass. I should
like to run up to London. I see you have Sarah and Coquelin and the
others; but I suppose it would be against all the unwritten canons of a
honeymoon. What a strange institution. A honeymoon! Who first invented
it?'
_From the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton, Beds.,
to the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Milano._
'CARA TERESINA,--I ought to have written to you long since, but you
know I am not fond of writing. I really, also, have nothing to say.
Happy the people who have no history! I am like that people. I was
made happy two weeks ago; I have been happy ever since. It is slightly
monotonous. How can you vary happiness, except by quarrelling a little?
And then it would not be happiness any longer. It seems to me that
happiness is like an omelette, best impromptu.
'Do not think that I am ungrateful, however, either to fate or to the
charming innocent who has become my companion. We have not two ideas
in common. She is lovely to look at, to caress, to adore; but what to
say to her I confess I have no notion. Love ought never to have to find
dinner-table conversation. He ought to climb up by a ladder, and get
over a balcony, and, when his ecstasies are ended, he ought to go the
same way. I fancy she is much better educated than I am, but, as that
would be a discovery fatal to our comfort, I endeavour not to make
it. She is extraordinarily sweet-tempered: indeed, so much so, that
it makes me angry; it gives one no excuse for being impatient. She is
divine, exquisite, nymph-like; but, alas, she is a prude!
'Never was any creature on earth so exquisitely sensitive, so easily
shocked. To live with her is to walk upon eggshells. Of course, it is
very nice in a wife; very "proper," as the English say; but it is not
amusing. It amused me at first, but now it seems to me a defect. She
has brought me down to this terribly damp and very green place, where
it rains every day and night. There is a library without novels; there
is a cellar without absinthe; there is a _cuisine_ without tomatoes, or
garlic, or any oil at all; there is an admirably-ordered establishment,
so quiet that I fancy I am in a penitentiary. There are some adorably
fine horses, and there are acres of glasshouses used to grow fruits
that we throw in Italy to the pigs. By the way, there are also several
of our field flowers in the conservatories. We eat pretty nearly all
day; there is nothing else to do. Outside, the scenery is oppressively
green, the green of spinach; there is no variety, there are no ilexes
and there are no olives. I understand now why the English painters give
such staring colours; unless the colours scream, you don't see them in
this aqueous, dim atmosphere. That is why a benign Providence has made
the landscape a _purée aux epinards_.
'I think the air here, inside and out, must weigh heavily; it lies on
one's lungs like a sponge. I once went down in a diving-bell when I
was a boy; I have the sensation in this country of being always down
in a diving-bell. The scamp Toniello, whom you may remember as having
played Leporello to my Don Giovanno ever since we were lads, amuses
himself with making love to all the pretty maidens in the village; but,
then, I must not do that--now. They are not very pretty either. They
have very big teeth, and very long upper lips. Their skins, however,
are admirable. For a horse's skin and a woman's, there is no land
comparable to England. It is the country of grooming.'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to Lady
Gwendolen Chichester, British Embassy, Petersburg._
'He laughed at me because I went to church yesterday, and really I only
went because I thought it _right_. We have been here a fortnight, and
I have never been to church at all till yesterday, and you know how
very serious dear Aunt Carrie is. To-day, as it is the second Sunday
I have been here, I thought I ought to go just once, and I did go;
but it was dreadfully pompous and lonely in the big red pew, and the
villagers stared so, and all the little girls of the village giggled,
and looked at me from under their sun-bonnets. Dear Mr Coate preached a
sermon on Marriage. It was very kind of him; but, oh, how I wished he
hadn't! When I got back, Piero was playing billiards with his servant.
I wondered what Mr Coate would have thought of him. To be sure, English
clergymen have to get used to fast Sundays now, when the country houses
are full. It is such a dear little yew walk to the church from the
house here, not twenty yards long, and all lined with fuchsia. Do you
remember it? Even Piero admits that it is very pretty, only he says it
is a vignette prettiness, which, I suppose, is true. "You can see no
horizon, only a green wall," he keeps complaining; and his beautiful,
lustrous eyes look as if they were made to gaze through endless
fields of light. When I asked him yesterday what he really thought of
England, what do you suppose he said? He said, "_Mia cara_, I think
it would be a most delightful country if it had one-fifth of its
population, one-half of its houses, a tithe of its dinners, a quarter
of its machinery, none of its factories, none of its tramways, and a
wholly different atmosphere!" I suppose this means that he dislikes
it. I think him handsomer than ever. I sent you his photograph, but
that can give you no idea of him. He is like one of his own marble
statues. We came to Coombe Bysset directly after the ceremony, and we
are here still. I could stay on for ever. It is so lovely in these
Bedfordshire woods in mid-June. But I am afraid--just the very least
bit afraid--that Piero may get bored with me--me--me--nothing but me.
'You know I never was clever, and really--really--I haven't an idea
what to talk to him about when we don't talk about ourselves. And
then the weather provokes him. We have hardly had one fine day since
we came; and no doubt it seems very grey and chilly to an Italian.
"It cannot be June!" he says a dozen times a week. And when the whole
day is rainy, as it is very often, for our Junes are such wet ones
nowadays, I can see he gets impatient. He doesn't care for reading;
he is fond of billiards, but I don't play a good enough game to be
any amusement to him. And though he sings divinely, as I told you, he
sings as the birds do; only just when the mood is on him. He does not
care about music as a science in the least. He laughed when I said
so. He declared it was no more a science than love is. Perhaps love
ought to be a science too, in a way, or else it won't last? There has
been a scandal in the village, caused by his servant, Toniello. An
infuriated father came up to the house this morning about it. He is
named John Best; he has one of Aunt Carrie's biggest farms. He was in
such a dreadful rage, and I had to talk to him, because, of course,
Piero couldn't understand him. Only when I translated what he said,
Piero laughed till he cried, and offered him a cigarette, and called
him "_figlio mio_," which only made Mr John Best purple with fury,
and he went away in a greater rage than he had been in when he came,
swearing he "would do for the Papist." I have sent for the steward.
I am afraid Aunt Carrie will be terribly annoyed. It has always been
such a model village. Not a public-house near for six miles, and all
the girls such demure, quiet little maidens. This terrible Roman
valet, with his starry eyes and his mandoline, and his audacities, has
been like Mephistopheles in the opera to this secluded and innocent
little hamlet. I beg Piero to send him away, but he looks unutterably
reproachful, and declares he really cannot live without Toniello; and
what can I say?'
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
'You are quite in the wrong, my poor pet. If you were only a little
older, and ever so much wiser, you would have telegraphed to the
libraries yourself for the French books; you would have laughed at them
when he laughed, and instead of taking Mr John Best as a tragedy, you
would have made him into a little burlesque, which would have amused
your husband for five minutes, as much as Gyp or Jean Richepin. I begin
to think I should have married your Roman prince, and you should have
married my good, dull George, whom a perverse destiny has shoved into
diplomacy. Your Roman scandalises you, and my George bores me. Such is
marriage, my dear, all the world over. What is the old story? That Jove
split all the walnuts in two, and each half is always uselessly seeking
its fellow.'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton,
Beds., to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, British Embassy, S.
Petersburg._
'But, surely, if he loved me, he would be as perfectly happy with me
alone as I am with him alone? I want no other companion--no other
interest--no other thought.'
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, British Embassy S.
Petersburg, to the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset,
Luton, Beds._
'Of course you do not, because you are a woman. San Zenone is your
god, your idol, your ideal, your universe. But _you_ are only one out
of the many women who have pleased him, and attached to the pleasure
you afford him is the very uncomfortable conviction that he will never
be able to get away from you. My dear child, I have no patience with
any woman when she says, "He does not love me." If he does not, it is
probably the woman's fault. Probably she has worried him. Love dies
directly it is worried, quite naturally. Poor Gladys! You were always
such a good child; you were always devoted to your old women, and
your queer little orphans, and your pet cripples, and your East-End
missions. It certainly is hard that you should have fallen into the
hands of a soulless Italian, who reads naughty novels all day long and
sighs for the flesh-pots of Egypt! But, my child, in reason's name,
what did you expect? Did you think that all in a moment he would sigh
to hear Canon Farrar; the excellent vicar's sermons; take his guitar to
a village concert, and teach Italian to the lodge-keeper's children?
Be reasonable, and let your poor caged bird fly out of Coombe Bysset;
which will certainly be your worst enemy if you shut him up in it much
longer.'
_From the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the
Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Monterone, Val d'Aosta._
'I am still in my box of wet moss. I have been in it two weeks, four
days, and eleven hours, by the calendar and the clocks. I have read all
my novels. I have spelled through my _Figaro_, from the title to the
printer's address, every morning. I have smoked twenty cigarettes every
twenty minutes, and I have yawned as many times. This is Paradise, I
know it; I tell myself so; but still I cannot help it--I yawn. There
is a pale, watery sun, which shines fitfully. There is a quantity of
soaked hay, which they are going to dry by machinery. There is a great
variety of muddy lanes in which to ride. There is a post-office seven
miles off, and a telegraph station fifteen miles further off. The
_ensemble_ is not animated. When you go out you see very sleek cattle,
very white sheep, very fat children. You may meet, at intervals,
labouring people, very round shouldered and very sulky. You also
meet, if you are in luck's way, with a traction engine; and wherever
you look you perceive a church steeple. It is all very harmless,
except the traction engine; but it is not animated or enlivening. You
will not wonder that I soon came to the end of my French novels. The
French novels have enabled me to discover that my angel is very easily
ruffled. In fact, she is that touchy thing--a saint. I had no idea that
she was a saint when I saw her drinking her cup of tea in that garden
on the Thames. True, she had her lovely little serene, holy, _noli me
tangere_ air, but I thought that would pass; it does not pass. And
when I wanted her to laugh with me at Gyp's '_Autour du Mariage_', she
blushed up to the eyes, and was offended. What am I to do? I am no
saint. I cannot pretend to be one. I am not worse than other men, but
I like to amuse myself. I cannot go through life singing a _miserere_.
I am afraid we shall quarrel. You think that very wholesome. But there
are quarrels and quarrels. Some clear the air like thunderstorms. Ours
are little irritating differences which end in her bursting into tears,
and in myself looking ridiculous and feeling a brute. She has cried
quite a number of times in the last fortnight. I daresay if she went
into a rage, as you justly say Nicoletta would do, and you might have
added you have done, it would rouse me, and I should be ready to strike
her, and should end in covering her with kisses. But she only turns
her eyes on me like a dying fawn, bursts into tears, and goes out of
the room. Then she comes in again--to dinner, perhaps, or to that odd
ceremony, five o'clock tea--with her little sad, stiff, reproachful
air as of a martyr; answers meekly, and makes me again feel a brute.
The English sulk a long time, I think. We are at daggers drawn one
moment, but then we kiss and forget the next. We are more passionate,
but we are more amiable. I want to get away, to go to Paris, Homburg,
Trouville, anywhere; but I dare not propose it. I only drop adroit
hints. If I should die of _ennui_, and be buried under the wet moss for
ever, weep for me.'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to Lady
Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
'Coombe is quite too lovely now. It does rain sometimes, certainly,
but between the showers it is so delicious. I asked Piero to come out
and hear the nightingale; there really is one in the home wood, and
he laughed at the idea. He said, "We have hundreds of nightingales
shouting all day and all night at Lanciano. We don't think about
them, we eat them in _pasta_; they are very good." Fancy eating a
nightingale! You might as well eat Romeo and Juliet. Piero has got a
number of French books from London, and he lies about on the couches
and reads them. He wants me to listen to naughty bits of fun out of
them, but I will not, and then he calls me a prude, and gets angry. I
don't see why he shouldn't laugh as much as he likes himself without
telling me why he laughed. I dislike that sort of thing. I am horribly
afraid I shall care for nothing but him all my life, while he--he
yawned yesterday! Papa said to me, before we were married, "My dear
little girl, San Zenone put on such a lot of steam at first, he'll
be obliged to ease his pace after a bit. Don't be vexed if you find
the thing cooling!" Now, Papa speaks so oddly; always that sort of
floundering, bald metaphor, you remember it; but I knew what he meant.
Nobody could _go on_ being such a lover as Piero was. Ah, dear, is it
in the past already? No, I don't quite mean that. He is Romeo still
very often, and he sings me the divinest love songs, lying at my feet
on cushions in the moonlight. But it is not quite the same thing as it
was at first. He found fault with one of my gowns this morning, and
said I don't know how _de me faire valoir_. I am terribly frightened
lest Coombe has bored him too much. I would come here. I wanted to be
utterly out of the world, and so did he; and I'm sure there isn't a
lover's nest anywhere comparable to Coombe in midsummer. You remember
the rose garden, and the lime avenues, and the chapel ruins by the
little lake? When Aunt Carrie offered it to us for this June I was so
delighted, but now I am half afraid the choice of it was a mistake,
and that he does not know what to do with himself. He is _dépaysé_.
I cried a little yesterday; it was too silly, but I couldn't help it.
He laughed at me, but he got a little angry. "_Enfin que veux tu?_" he
said impatiently; "_je suis à toi, bien à toi, beaucoup trop à toi!_"
He seemed to me to regret being mine. I told him so; he was more angry.
It was, I suppose, what you would call a scene. In five minutes he was
penitent, and caressed me as only he can do; and the sun came out, and
we went into the woods and heard the nightingale; but the remembrance
of it alarms me. If he can say as much as this in a month, what can he
say in a year? I do not think I am silly. I had two London seasons,
and all those country houses show one the world. I know people, when
they are married, are always glad to get away from one another--they
are always flirting with other people. But I should be miserable if I
thought it would ever be like that with Piero and me. I worship his
very shadow, and he does--or he did--worship mine. Why should that
change? Why should it not go on for ever, as it does in poems? If it
can't, why doesn't one die?'
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
'What a goose you are, you dearest Gladys! You were always like that.
To all you have said I can only reply, _connu_. When girls are romantic
(and you always were, though it was quite gone out ages before our
time), they always expect husbands to remain lovers. Now, my pet, you
might just as well expect hay to remain grass. Papa was quite right.
When there is such a lot of steam on, it must go off by degrees. I am
afraid, too, you have begun with the passion, and the rapture, and the
mutual adoration, and all the rest of it, which is _quite, quite gone
out_. People don't feel in that sort of way nowadays. Nobody cares
much; a sort of good-humoured liking is the utmost one sees. But you
were always such a goose! And now you must marry an Italian, and expect
it all to be balconies and guitars and moonlight for ever and ever.
I think it quite natural he should want to get to Paris. You should
never have taken him to Coombe. I do remember the rose gardens, and
the lime avenues, and the ruins; and I remember being sent down there
when I had too strong a flirtation with Philip Rous, who was in F. O.,
and had nothing a year. You were a baby then, and I remember that I was
bored to the very brink of suicide; that I have detested the smell of a
lime tree ever since. I can sympathise with the Prince, if he longs to
get away. There can't be anything for him to do, all day long, except
smoke. The photo of him is wonderfully handsome, but can you live all
your life, my dear, on a profile?'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady
Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
'Because almost all Englishmen have snub noses, Englishwomen always
think there is something immoral and delusive about a good profile.
At all events, you will admit that the latter is the more agreeable
object of contemplation. It still rains, rains dreadfully. The meadows
are soaked, and they can't get the hay in, and we can't get out of the
house. Piero does smoke, and he does yawn. He has been looking in the
library for a French novel, but there is nothing except Mrs Craven's
goody-goody books, and a boy's tale by Jules Verne. I am afraid you and
Mamma are right. Coombe, in a wet June, is not the place for a Roman
who knows his Paris by heart, and doesn't like the country anywhere.
We seem to do nothing but eat. I put on an ulster and high boots,
and I don't mind the rain a bit; but he screams when he sees me in
an ulster. "You have no more figure in that thing than if you were a
Bologna sausage," he says to me; and certainly ulsters are very ugly.
But I had a delicious fortnight with the Duchess in a driving tour in
Westmeath. We only took our ulsters with us, and it poured all the
time, and we stayed in bed in the little inns while our things dried,
and it was immense fun; the Duke drove us. But Piero would not like
that sort of thing. He is like a cat about rain. He likes to shut the
house up early, and have the electric light lit, and forget that it
is all slop and mist outside. He declares that we have made a mistake
in the calendar, and that it is November, not June. I change my gowns
three times a day, just as if there were a large house party, but I
feel I look awfully monotonous to him. I am afraid I never was amusing.
I always envy those women who are all _chic_ and "go," who can make
men laugh so at rubbish. They seem to carry about with them a sort of
exhilarating ether. I don't think they are the best sort of women, but
they do so amuse the men. I would give twenty years of my life if I
could amuse Piero. He adores me, but that is another thing. That does
not prevent him shaking the barometer and yawning. He seems happiest
when he is talking Italian with his servant, Toniello. Toniello is
allowed to play billiards with him sometimes. He is a very gay, merry,
saucy, brown-eyed Roman. He has made all the maids in the house, and
all the farmers' daughters round Coombe, in love with him, and I told
you how he had scandalised one of the best tenants, Mr John Best.
The Bedford rustics all vow vengeance against him, but he twangs his
mandoline, and sings away at the top of his voice, and doesn't care
a straw that the butler loathes him, the house steward abhors him,
the grooms would horsewhip him if they dare, and the young farmers
audibly threaten to duck him in the pond. Toniello is very fond of his
master, but he does not extend his allegiance to me. Do you remember
Mrs Stevens, Aunt Caroline's model housekeeper? You should see her face
when she chances to hear Piero laughing and talking with Toniello. I
think she believes that the end of the world has come. Piero calls
Toniello "_figliolo mio_" and "_caro mio_," just as if they were
cousins or brothers. It appears this is the Italian way. They are very
proud in their own fashion, but it isn't our fashion. However, I am
glad the man is there when I hear the click of the billiard balls, and
the splash of the raindrops on the window panes. "We have been here
just three weeks. _Dio!_ It seems three years," Piero said, when I
reminded him of it this morning. For me, I don't know whether it is
like a single day's dream or a whole eternity. You know what I mean.
But I wish--I wish--it seemed either the day's dream or the eternity
of Paradise to him! I daresay it is all my fault in coming to these
quiet, bay-windowed, Queen Anne rooms, and the old-fashioned servants,
and the dreary look-out over the drenched hay-fields. But the sun does
come out sometimes, and then the wet roses smell so sweet, and the wet
lime blossoms glisten in the light, and the larks sing overhead, and
the woods are so green and so fresh. Still, I don't think he likes it
even then, it is all too moist, too windy, too dim for him. When I
put a rose in his button-hole this morning, it shook the drops over
him, and he said, "_Mais quel pays!--même une fleur c'est une douche
d'eau froide!_" Last month, if I had put a dandelion in his coat, he
would have sworn it had the odour of the magnolia and the beauty of
the orchid! It is just twenty-two days ago since we came here, and
for the first four or five days, he never cared whether it rained or
not; he only cared to lie at my feet, really, literally. We were all in
all to each other, just like Cupid and Psyche. And now--he will play
billiards with Toniello to pass the time, and he is longing for his
_petits théâtres_! Is it my fault? I torment myself with a thousand
self-accusations. Is it possible I can have been tiresome, dull,
over-exacting? Is it possible he can be disappointed in me?'
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
'No, it isn't your fault, you dear little donkey; it is only the
natural sequence of things. Men are always like that when the woman
loves them; when she don't, they behave much better. My dear, this is
just what is so annoying about love; the man's is always going slower
and slower towards a dead stop, as the woman's is "coaling" and getting
steam up. I borrow Papa's admirably accurate metaphor, nothing can be
truer. It is a great pity, but I suppose the fault is Nature's. _Entre
nous_, I don't think Nature ever contemplated marriage, any more than
she did crinolettes, pearl powder, or the electric light. There is
no doubt that Nature intended to adjust the thing on the butterfly
and buttercup system; on the _je reste, tu t'en vas_, principle. And
nothing would be easier or nicer, only there are children and poverty.
So the butterfly has to be pinned down by the buttercup. That is why
the Communists and Anarchists always abolish Property and Marriage
together. The one is evolved out of the other, just as the dear
scientists say the horse was evolved out of a bird, which I never can
see makes the matter any easier of comprehension; but, still--what
was I saying? Oh, I meant to say this: you are only lamenting, as a
special defalcation and disloyalty in San Zenone, what is merely his
unconscious and involuntary and perfectly natural alteration from a
lover into a husband. The butterfly is beginning to feel the pin, which
has been run through him to stick him down. It is not your fault, my
sweet little girl; it is the fault, if at all, of the world, which has
decreed that the butterfly, to flirt legitimately with the buttercup,
must suffer the corking pin. Now, take my advice: the pin is in, don't
worry if he writhe on it a little bit! It is only what the beloved
scientists again call automatic action. And do try and beat into your
little head the fact that a man may love you very dearly, and yet yearn
a little for the _petits théâtres_ in the silent recesses of his manly
breast. Of course, I know this sort of rough awakening from delightful
dreams is harder for you than it is for most, because you began at
such tremendous altitudes. You had your Ruy Blas and Petrarca, and
the mandoline and the moonlight, and the love-philtres, all mixed
up in an intoxicating draught. You have naturally a great deal more
disillusion to go through than if you had married a country squire, or
a Scotch laird, who would never have suggested any romantic delights.
One cannot go near Heaven without coming down with a crash, like the
poor men in the balloons. You have been up in your balloon, and you
are now coming down. Ah, my dear, everything depends on _how_ you come
down. You will think me a monster for saying so, but it will rest so
much in your own hands. You won't believe it, but it will. If you come
down with tact and good-humour, it will all be right afterwards; but
if you show temper, as men say of their horses, why, then, the balloon
will lie prone, a torn, empty, useless bag, that will never again
get off the ground. To speak plainly, dear, if you will receive with
resignation and sweetness the unpleasant discovery that San Zenone is
mortal, you won't be unhappy, and you will soon get used to it; but if
you perpetually fret about it, you won't alter him, and you will both
be miserable; or, if not miserable, you will do something worse; you
will each find your amusement in somebody else. I know you so well,
my poor, pretty Gladys; you want such an immense quantity of sympathy
and affection, but you won't get it, my dear child. I quite understand
that the Prince looks like a picture, and he has made life an erotic
poem for you for a month, and the inevitable reaction which follows
seems dull as ditch water, you would even say as cruel as the grave.
But it is _nothing new_. Do try and get that well in your mind. Try,
too, and be as light-hearted as you can. Men hate an unamusable woman.
Make believe to laugh at the French novels, if you can't really do it;
if you don't, dear, he will go to somebody else who will. Why do those
_demi-monde_ women get such preference over us? Only because they don't
bore their men. A man would sooner we flung a champagne glass at his
head than cried for five minutes. We can't fling champagne glasses;
the prejudices of our education are against it. It is an immense loss
to us; we must make up for it as much as we can by being as agreeable
as we know how to be. We shall always be a dozen lengths behind those
others who _do_ fling the glasses. By the way, you said in one of
your earliest notes that you wondered why our mother ever married. I
am not sufficiently _au courant_ with pre-historic times to be able
to tell you why, but I can see what she has done since she did marry.
She has always effaced herself in the very wisest and most prudent
manner. She has never begrudged Papa his Norway fishing, or his August
yachting, though she knew he could ill afford them. She has never bored
him _with_ herself, or _about_ us. She has constantly urged him to go
away and enjoy himself, and when he is down with her in the country
she always takes care that all the women he admires, and all the men
who best amuse him, shall be invited in relays, to prevent his being
dull or feeling teased for a moment. I am quite sure she has never
cared the least about her own wishes, but has only studied his. This
is what I call being a clever woman and a good woman. But I fear such
women are as rare as blue roses. Try and be like her, my dear. She was
quite as young as you are now when she married. But unfortunately,
in truth, you are a terrible little egotist. You want to shut up this
beautiful Roman all alone with you in a kind of attitude of perpetual
adoration--of yourself. That is what women call affection; you are
not alone in your ideas. Some men submit to this sort of demand, and
go about for ever held tight in a leash, like unslipped pointers. The
majority--well, the majority bolt. And I am sure I should if I were one
of them. I do not think you could complain if your beautiful Romeo did.
I can see you so exactly, with your pretty, little, grave face, and
your eyes that have such a fatal aptitude for tears, and your solemn
little views about matrimony and its responsibilities, making yourself
quite odious to this mirthful Apollo of yours, and innocently believing
all the while that you are pleasing Heaven and saving your own dignity
by being so remarkably unpleasant! Are you _very_ angry with me? I am
afraid so. Myself, I would much sooner have an unfaithful man than a
dull one; the one may be bored _by_ you, but the other bores _you_,
which is immeasurably worse.'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady
Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
"DEAR GWEN,--How can you _possibly_ tell what Mamma did when she was
young? I daresay she fretted dreadfully. Now, of course, she has got
used to it--like all other miserable women. If people marry only to
long to be with other people, what is the use of being married at all?
I said so to Piero, and he answered, very insolently, "_Il n'y a point!
Si on le savait!_" He sent for some more dreadful French books, Gyp's
and Richepin's and Gui de Maupassant's, and he lies about reading them
all day long when he isn't asleep. He is very often asleep in the
daytime. He apologises when he is found out, but he yawns as he does
so. You say I should amuse him, but I _can't_ amuse him. He doesn't
care for any English news, and he is beginning to get irritable because
I cannot talk to him in Italian, and he declares my French detestable,
and there is always something dreadful happening. There has been such
a terrible scene in the village. Four of the Coombe Bysset men, two
blacksmiths, a carpenter, and a labourer, have ducked Toniello in
the village pond on account of his attention to their womenkind; and
Toniello, when he staggered out of the weeds and the slime, drew his
knife on them and stabbed two very badly. Of course, he has been taken
up by the constables, and the men he hurt moved to the county hospital.
The magistrates are furious and scandalised; and Piero!--Piero has
nobody to play billiards with him. When the magistrates interrogated
him about Toniello, as, of course, they were obliged to do, he got into
a dreadful passion because one of them said that it was just like a
cowardly Italian to carry a knife and make use of it. Piero absolutely
_hissed_ at the solemn old gentleman who mumbled this. "And your
people," he cried, "are they so very courageous? Is it better to beat
a man into a jelly, or kick a woman with nailed boots, as your English
mob does? Where is there anything cowardly? He was one against four.
In my country there is not a night that goes by without a _rissa_ of
that sort, but nobody takes any notice. The jealous persons are left to
fight it out as best they may; after all, it is the women's fault."
And then he said some things that really I cannot repeat, and it was
a mercy that, as he spoke in the most rapid and furious French, the
old gentleman did not, I think, understand a syllable. But they saw
he was in a passion, and that scandalised them, because, you know,
English people always think that you should keep your bad temper for
your own people at home. Meantime, of course, Toniello is in prison,
and I am afraid they won't let us take him out on bail, because he has
hurt one of the blacksmiths dreadfully. Aunt Carrie's solicitors are
doing what they can for him, to please me, but I can see they consider
it all _peines perdues_ for a rogue who ought to be hanged. "And to
think," cries Toniello, "that in my own country I should have all the
populace with me. The very carabineers themselves would have been
with me! _Accidente a tutti quei grulli_," which means, "may apoplexy
seize these fools." "They were only the women's husbands," he adds,
with scorn; "they are well worth making a fuss about, certainly!" Then
Piero consoles him, and gives him cigarettes, and is obliged to leave
him sobbing and tearing his hair, and lying face downward on his bed
of sacking. I thought Piero would not leave the poor fellow alone in
prison, and so I supposed he would give up all idea of going from here,
and so I began to say to myself, "_A quelque chose malheur est bon._"
But to-day, at luncheon, Piero said "_Sai carina!_ It was bad enough
with Toniello, but without him, I tell you frankly, I cannot stand
any more of it. With Toniello one could laugh and forget a little.
But now--_anima mia_, if you do not wish me to kill somebody, and be
lodged beside Toniello by your worthy law-givers, you must really let
me go to Trouville." "Alone!" I said; and I believe it is what he did
mean, only the horror in my voice frightened him from confessing it.
He sighed and got up. "I suppose I shall never be alone any more," he
said impatiently. "If only men knew what they do when they marry--_on
ne nous prendrait jamais_. No--no. Of course, I meant that you will, I
hope, consent to come away with me somewhere out of this intolerable
place, which is made up of fog and green leaves. Let us go to Paris
to begin with; there is not a soul there, and the theatres are _en
rélache_, but it is always delightful, and then in a week or so we will
go down to Trouville, all the world is there." I couldn't answer him
for crying. Perhaps that was best, for I am sure I should have said
something wicked, which might have divided us for ever. And then what
would people have thought?'
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
'MY POOR LITTLE DEAR,--Are you already beginning to be miserable about
what people will think? Then, indeed, your days of joy are numbered.
If I were to write to you fifty times I could only repeat what I have
always written. You are not wise, and you are doing everything you
ought not to do. _Of two people who are married, there is always one
who has the delusion that he or she is necessary and delightful to
the life of the other. The other generally thinks just the contrary._
The result is not peace. This gay, charming, handsome son of Rome has
become your entire world, but don't suppose for a moment, my child,
that you will ever be his. It is not in reason, not in Nature, that
you should be. _If_ you have the intelligence, the tact, and the
forbearance required, you _may_ become his friend and counsellor,
but I fear you never will have these. You fret, you weep, and you
understand nothing of the masculine temperament. "I see snakes," as
the Americans observe; and you will not have either the coolness or the
wisdom required to scotch a snake, much less to kill it. Once for all,
my poor pet, go cheerfully to Paris, Trouville, and all the pleasure
places in the world. Affect enjoyment if you feel it not, and try to
remember, beyond everything, that affection is not to be retained or
revived by either coercion or lamentation. Once dead, it is not to be
awakened by all the "crooning" of its mourner. It is a corpse, for ever
and aye. Myself, I fail to see how you could expect a young Italian,
who has all the habits of the great world, and the memories of his _vie
de garçon_, to be cheerful or contented in a wet June in an isolated
English country house, with nobody to look at but yourself. Believe
me, my dear child, it is the inordinate vanity of a woman which makes
her imagine that she can be sufficient for her husband. Nothing but
vanity. The cleverer a woman is, the more fully she recognises her own
insufficiency for the amusement of a man, and the more carefully (if
she be wise) does she take care that this deficiency in her shall never
be forced upon his observation. Now, if you shut a man up with you in
a country house, with the rain raining every day, as in Longfellow's
poem, you do force it upon him most conspicuously. If you were not his
wife, I daresay he would not tire of you, and he might even prefer a
grey sky to a blue one. But as his wife!--oh, my dear, why, why don't
you try and understand what a terrible penalty-weight you carry in
the race? Write and tell me all about it. I shall be anxious. I am so
afraid, my sweet little sister, that you think love is all moonlight
and kisses, and forget that there are clouds in the sky and quarrels
on earth. May Heaven save you from both. _P.S._--Do remember that this
same love requires just as delicate handling as a cobweb does. If a
rough touch break the cobweb, all the artists in the world can't mend
it. There is a wholesome truth for you. If you prevent his going to
Paris now, he will go in six months' time, and perhaps, then, he will
go without you. You are not wise, my poor pet; you should make him feel
that you sympathise with his pleasures, not that you and his pleasures
are enemies. But it is no use to instil wisdom into you; you are very
young, and very much in love. You look on all the natural distractions
which he inclines to, as on so many rivals. So they may be, but _we
don't beat our rivals by abusing them_. The really wise way is to
tacitly show that we can be more attractive than they; if we cannot be
so, we may sulk or sigh as we will, we shall be vanquished by them. You
will think me very preachy-preachy, and, perhaps, you will throw me in
the fire unread; but I must say just one word more. Dear, you are in
love with Love, but underneath Love there is a real man, and real men
are far from ideal creatures. Now, it is the real man that you want to
consider, to humour, to study. If the real man be pleased, Love will
take care of himself; whereas if you bore the real man, Love will fly
away. If you had been wise, my poor pet, I repeat, you would have found
nothing so delightful as Gyp and Octave de Mirbeau, and you would have
declared that the Paris asphalte excelled all the English lawns in the
world. He does not love you the less because he wants to be _dans le
mouvement_, to hear what other men are saying, and to smoke his cigar
amongst his fellow-creatures.'
_From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Hotel des Roches Noires,
Trouville, France, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe
Bysset, Luton, Beds., England._
'Poor flower, in your box of wet moss, what has become of you? Are you
dead, and dried in your wife's _hortus siccus_? She would be quite
sure of you _then_, and I daresay much happier than if you were set
forth in anybody else's bouquet. I try in vain to imagine you in that
"perfectly proper" atmosphere (is not that correct English, "perfectly
proper"?) Will you be dreadfully changed when one sees you again? There
is a French proverb which says that "the years of joy count double."
The days of _ennui_ certainly count for years, and give us grey hairs
before we are five-and-twenty. But you know I cannot pity you. You
_would_ marry an English girl because she looked pretty sipping her
tea. I told you beforehand that you would be miserable with her, once
shut up in the country. The episode of Toniello is enchanting. What
people!--to put him in prison for a little bit of _chiasso_ like that!
You should never have taken his bright eyes and his mandoline to that
doleful and damp land of precisians. What will they do with him? And
what can you do without him? The weather here is admirable. There are
numbers of people one knows. It is really very amusing. I go and dance
every night, and then we play--usually "bac" or roulette. Everybody is
very merry. We all talk often of you, and say the _De Profundis_ over
you, my poor Piero. Why did your cruel destiny make you see a _Sainte
Nitouche_ drinking tea under a lime tree? I suppose _Sainte Nitouche_
would not permit it, else, why not exchange the humid greenness of your
matrimonial prison for the Rue des Planches and the Casino?'
_From the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the
Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Trouville._
'CARISSIMA MIA,--I have set light to the fuse! I have frankly declared
that if I do not get out of this damp and verdant Bastile, I shall
perish of sheer inanition and exhaustion. The effect of the declaration
was for the moment such, that I hoped, actually hoped, that she was
going to get into a passion! It would have been so refreshing! After
twenty-six days of dumb acquiescence and silent tears, it would have
been positively delightful to have had a storm. But, no! For an instant
she looked at me with unspeakable reproach; the next her dove's eyes
filled, she sighed, she left the room! Do they not say that feather
beds offer an admirable defence against bullets? I feel like the
bullet which has been fired into the feather bed. The feather bed is
victorious. I see the Rue des Planches through the perspective of the
watery atmosphere; the Casino seems to smile at me from the end of the
interminable lime tree avenue, which is one of the chief beauties of
this house; but, alas! they are both as far off as if Trouville were in
the moon. What could they do to me if I came alone? Do you know what
they could do? I have not the remotest idea, but I imagine something
frightful. They shut up their public-houses by force, and their
dancing places. Perhaps they would shut up me. In England, they have a
great belief in creating virtue by Act of Parliament. In myself, this
enforced virtue creates such a revolt that I shall _tirer sur le mors_,
and fly before very long. The admired excellence of this beautiful
estate is that it lies in a ring-fence. I feel that I shall take a leap
over that ring-fence. Do not mistake me, _cara mia Teresina_, I am
exceedingly fond of my wife. I think her quite lovely, simple, saintly,
and truly womanlike. She is exquisitely pretty, and entirely without
vanity, and I am certain she is immeasurably my superior morally, and
possibly mentally too. But--there is always such a long and melancholy
"but" attached to marriage--she does not amuse me in the least. She is
always the same. She is shocked at nearly everything that is natural
or diverting. She thinks me unmanly because I dislike rain. She buttons
about her a hideous, straight, waterproof garment, and walks out in a
deluge. She blushes if I try to make her laugh at _Figaro_, and she
goes out of the room when I mention Trouville. What am I to do with a
woman like this? It is an admirable type, no doubt. Possibly if she had
not shut me up in a country-house in a wet June, with the thermometer
at 10 R., and the barometer fixedly at the word _Rainy_, I might have
been always charmed with this S. Dorothea-like attitude, and never have
found out the monotony of it. But, as it is--I yawn till I dislocate my
neck. She thinks me a heathen already. I am convinced that very soon
she will think me a brute. And I am neither. I only want to get out,
like the bird in the cage. It is a worn simile, but it is such a true
one!'
_From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Roches Noires, Trouville,
to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
'PIERO MIO,--In marriage, the male bird is always wanting to get out
when the female bird does not want him to get out; also, she is for
ever tightening the wires over his head, and declaring that nothing
can be more delightful than the perch which she sits on herself. Come
to us here. There are any quantities of birds here who ought to be
in their cages, but are not, and manage to enjoy themselves _quand
même_. If only you had married Nicoletta! She might have torn your
hair occasionally, but she would never have bored you. There is only
one supreme art necessary for a woman: it is to thoroughly understand
that she must never be a _seccatura_. A woman may be beautiful,
admirable, a paragon of virtue, a marvel of intellect, but if she be
a _seccatura--addio_! Whereas, she may be plain, small, nothing to
look at in any way, and a very monster of sins, big and little, but if
she know how to amuse your dull sex, she is mistress of you all. It is
evident that this great art is not studied at Coombe Bysset.'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady
Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
'OH, MY DEAR GWEN,--It is too dreadful, and I am so utterly wretched. I
cannot tell you what I feel. He is quite determined to go to Trouville
by Paris at once, and just now it is such exquisite weather. It has
only rained three times this week, and the whole place is literally
a bower of roses of every kind. He has been very restless the last
few days, and at last, yesterday, after dinner, he said straight out,
that he had had enough of Coombe, and he thought we might be seen at
Homburg or Trouville next week. And he pretended to want every kind of
thing that is to be bought at Paris and nowhere else. Paris--when we
have been together just twenty-nine days to-day! Paris--I don't know
why, but I feel as if it would be the end of everything! Paris--we
shall dine at restaurants; we shall stay at the Bristol; we shall go
to theatres; he will be at his club, he belongs to the Petit Cercle
and the Mirliton; we shall be just like anybody else; just like all
the million and one married people who are always in a crowd! To take
one's new-born happiness to an hotel! It is as profane as it would be
to say your prayers on the top of a drag. To me, it is quite horrible.
And it will be put in _Galignani_ directly, of course, that the "Prince
and Princess San Zenone have arrived at the Hotel Bristol." And then,
all the pretty women who tried to flirt with him before will laugh, and
say: "There, you see, she has bored him already." Everybody will say
so, for they all know I wished to spend the whole summer at Coombe.
If he would only go to his own country I would not say a word. I am
really longing to see his people, and his palaces, and the wonderful
gardens with their statues and their ilex woods, and the temples
that are as old as the days of Augustus, and the fire-flies and the
magnolia groves, and the peasants who are always singing. But he won't
go there. He says it is a _seccatura_. Everything is a _seccatura_. He
only likes places where he can meet all the world. "Paris will be a
solitude, too, never fear," he said, very petulantly; "but there will
be all the _petits théâtres_ and the open-air concerts, and we can
dine in the Bois and down the river, and we can run to Trouville. It
will be better than rain, rain, rain, and nothing to look at except
your amiable aunt's big horses and big trees. I adore horses, and
trees are not bad if they are planted away from the house, but, viewed
as eternal companions, one may have too much of them." And I am his
eternal companion, but it seems already I don't count! I have not said
anything. I know one oughtn't. But Piero saw how it vexed me, and it
made him cross. "_Cara mia_," he said, "why did you not tell me before
we married that you intended me to be buried for ever in a box under
wet leaves like a rose that is being sent to the market? I should
have known what to expect, and I do not like wet leaves." I could not
help reminding him that he had been ever, ever so anxious to come to
Coombe. Then he laughed, but he was very cross too. "Could I tell,
_anima mia_," he cried, "that Coombe was situated in a succession of
lagoons, contains not one single French novel, is seven miles asunder
from its own railway station, and is blessed with a population of sulky
labourers? What man have I seen since I have been here except your
parish priest, who mumbles, wears spectacles, and tries to give me a
tract against the Holy Father? In this country you do not know what
it is to be warm. You do not know what sunshine is like. You take an
umbrella when you go in the garden. You put on a waterproof to go and
hear one little, shivering nightingale sing in a wet elder bush. I tell
you I am tired of your country, absolutely tired. You are an angel. No
doubt you are an angel; but you cannot console me for the intolerable
emptiness of this intolerable life, where there is nothing on earth to
do but to eat, drink, and sleep, and drive in a dog-cart." All this he
said in one breath, in a flash of forked lightning, as it were. Now
that I write it down, it does not seem so very dreadful; but as he,
with the most fiery scorn, the most contemptuous passion, said it, I
assure you it was terrible. It revealed, just as the flash of lightning
would show a gravel pit, how fearfully bored he has been all the time I
thought he was happy!'
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
'Men are very easily bored, my dear, if they have any brains. It is
only the dull ones who are not.'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone to the Lady Gwendolen
Chichester._
'If I believed what your cynical letter says, I should leave him
to-morrow. I would never live through a succession of disillusions and
of insults.'
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester to the Principessa di San
Zenone._
'Where are your principles? Where are your duties? My dear little
girl, you have married him; you must submit to him as he is. Marriages
wouldn't last two days if, just because the man yawned, the woman ran
away. Men always yawn when they are alone with their wives. Hitherto,
all San Zenone's faults appear to consist in the very pardonable fact
that, being an Italian, he is not alive to the charms of bucolic
England in rainy weather, and that, being a young man, he wants to
see his Paris again. Neither of these seem to me irreparable crimes.
Go to Paris and try to enjoy yourself. After all, if his profile be
so beautiful, you ought to be sufficiently happy in gazing at it
from the back of a _baignoir_. I grant that it is not the highest
amatory ideal--to rush about the boulevards in a daument, and eat
delicious little dinners in the cafés, and laugh at naughty little
plays afterwards; but _l'amour peut se nicher_ anywhere. And Love
won't be any the worse for having his digestion studied by good
cooks, and his possible _ennui_ exorcised by good players. You see
for yourself that the great passion yawns after a time. Turn back to
what you call my cynical letter, and re-read my remarks upon Nature.
By the way, I entirely deny that they are cynical. On the contrary,
I inculcate on you patience, sweetness of temper, and adaptability
to circumstances; three most amiable qualities. If I were a cynic, I
should say to you that Marriage is a Mistake, and two capital letters
could hardly emphasise this melancholy truth sufficiently. But, as
there are men and women, and, as I before observed, property in the
world, nothing better for the consolidation of rents and freeholds has,
as yet, been discovered. I daresay some Anarchist in his prison could
devise something better, but they are afraid of trying Anarchism. So
we all jog on in the old routine, vaguely conscious that we are all
blunderers, but indisposed for such a drastic remedy as would alone
cure us. Just you remark to any lawyer that marriage is a mistake, as I
have said before, and see what answer you will get. He will certainly
reply to you that there is no other way of securing the transmission
of property safely. I confess that this view of wealth makes me, for
one, a most desperate Radical. Only think, if there were no property we
should all be frisking about in our happy valleys as free and as merry
as little kids. I shouldn't now be obliged to put on all my war-paint
and beads, like a savage, and go out to a dreadful Court dinner, four
hours long, because George has a "career," and thinks my suffering
advances it. Oh, you happy child, to have nothing worse to do than to
rattle down the Bois in a _milord_, and sup off a _matelote_ by the
lake with your Romeo!'
_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady
Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
'We are to leave for Paris and Trouville to-morrow. I have yielded--as
you and Mamma seemed to think it was my _duty_ to do. But my life is
over. I shall say farewell to all happiness when the gates of Coombe
Bysset close upon me. Henceforth we shall be like everybody else.
However, you cannot reproach me any longer with being selfish, nor can
he. There is a great friend of his, the Duchess of Aquila Fulva, at
Trouville. She writes to him very often, I know. He never offers to
show me her letters. _I believe the choice of Trouville is her doing._
Write to me at Paris, at the Windsor.'
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
Principessa di San Zenone, Hotel Windsor, Paris._
'MY POOR CHILD,--Has the green-eyed monster already invaded your
gentle soul because he doesn't show you his own letters? My dear, no
man who was not born a _cur_ would show a woman's letters to his wife.
Surely you wish your hero to know the A B C of gentle manners? I am
delighted you are going into the world; but if you only go as "a duty,"
I am afraid the results won't be sunshiny. "Duty" is such a _very_
disagreeable thing. It always rolls itself up like a hedgehog with all
its prickles out, turning for ever round and round on the axle of its
own self-admiration. If you go to Trouville (and wherever else you do
go) as a martyr, my dear, you will give the mischievous Duchess, if
she be mischievous, a terrible advantage over you at starting. If you
mean to be silent, unpleasant, and enwrapped in a gloomy contemplation
of your own merits and wrongs, don't blame _him_ if he spend his time
at the Casino with his friend, or somebody worse. I am quite sure you
_mean_ to be unselfish, and you fancy you are so, and all the rest of
it, quite honestly; but, in real truth, as I told you before, you are
only an egotist. You would rather keep this unhappy Piero on thorns
beside you, than see him enjoy himself with other people. Now, I call
that shockingly selfish, and if you go in that spirit to Trouville,
he will soon begin to wish, my dear child, that he had never had a
fancy to come over to a London season. I can see you so exactly! Too
dignified to be cross, too offended to be companionable; silent,
reproachful, terrible!'
_From the Lady Mary Bruton, Roches Noires, Trouville, to Mrs
d'Arcy, British Embassy, Berlin._
_'15th July._
'... Amongst the new arrivals here are the San Zenone. You remember my
telling you of their marriage some six weeks ago. It was quite _the_
marriage of the season. They really were immensely in love with each
other, but that stupid month down in the country has done its usual
work. In a rainy June, too! Of course, any poor Cupid would emerge
from his captivity bedraggled, dripping and disenchanted. She is
really very pretty, quite lovely, indeed; but she looks fretful and
dull; her handsome husband, on the contrary, is as gay as a lark which
has found the door of its cage wide open one morning. There is here
a great friend of his, a Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva. _She_ is very
gay, too; she is always perfectly dressed, and chattering from morning
to night in shrill Italian or voluble French. She is the cynosure of
all eyes as she goes to swim in a rose-coloured _maillot_, with an
orange and gold eastern burnous flung about her artistically. She has
that wonderful Venetian colouring, which can stand a contrast and glow
of colour which would simply kill any other woman. She is very tall,
and magnificently made, and yet uncommonly graceful. Last night she
was persuaded to dance a _salterello_ with San Zenone at the Maison
Persane, and it was marvellous. They are both such handsome people, and
threw such wonderful _brio_, as they would call it, into the affair.
The poor, little, pretty Princess, looking as fair and as dull as a
primrose in a shower, sat looking on dismally. Stupid little thing!--as
if _that_ would do her any good! A few days ago Lord Hampshire arrived
off here in his yacht. He was present at the _salterello_, and as I
saw him out in the gardens afterwards with the neglected one, sitting
beside her in the moonlight, I presume he was offering her sympathy and
consolation. He is a heavy young fellow, but exceedingly good-humoured
and kind-hearted. _He_ would have been in Heaven in the wet June at
Coombe Bysset--but she refused him, silly little thing! I am quite
angry with her; she has had her own way and she won't make the best of
that. I met her, and her rejected admirer, riding together this morning
towards Villerville, while the beautiful Prince was splashing about
in the water with his Venetian friend. I see a great many eventual
complications ahead. Well, they will all be the fault of that Rainy
June!'
DON GESUALDO
DON GESUALDO
I
It was a day in June.
The crickets were chirping, the lizards were gliding, the butterflies
were flying above the ripe corn, the reapers were out amongst the
wheat, and the tall stalks were swaying and falling under the sickle.
Through the little windows of his sacristy, Don Gesualdo, the young
vicar of San Bartolo, in the village of Marca, looked with wistful eyes
at the hill-side which rose up in front of him, seen through a frame of
cherry-boughs in full fruit. The hill-side was covered with corn, with
vines, with mulberry trees; the men and women were at work amongst the
trees (it was the first day of harvest); there was a blue, happy sky
above them all; their voices, chattering and calling to one another
over the sea of grain, came to his ears gaily and softened by air and
distance. He sighed as he looked and as he heard. Yet, interrogated, he
would have said that he was happy and wanted for nothing.
He was a slight, pale man, still almost a youth, with a delicate
face, without colour and beardless, his eyes were brown and tender
and serious, his mouth was sensitive and sweet. He was the son of a
fisherman away by Bocca d'Arno, where the river meets the sea, amidst
the cane and cactus brakes which Costa loves to paint. But who could
say what fine, time-filtered, pure Etruscan, or Latin, blood might not
run in his veins? There is so much of the classic features and the
classic forms amongst the peasants of Tyrrhene seashores, of Cimbrian
oak woods, of Roman grass plains, of Maremana marshes.
It was the last day of peace which he was destined to know in Marca.
He turned from the window with reluctance and regret, as the old woman,
who served him as housekeeper and church-cleaner in one, summoned him
to his frugal supper. He could have supped at any hour he had chosen;
there were none to say him nay, but it was the custom at Marca to sup
at the twenty-third hour, and he was not a person to violate custom;
he would as soon have thought of spitting on the blessed bread itself.
Habit is a masterful ruler in all Italian communities. It has always
been so. It is a formula which excuses all things and sanctifies all
things, and to none did it do so more than to Don Gesualdo. Often he
was not in the least hungry at sunset, often he grudged sorely the
hours spent in breaking black bread, and eating poor soup, when Nature
was at her fairest, and the skies giving their finest spectacle to a
thankless earth. Yet never did he fail to meekly answer old Candida's
summons to the humble repast. To have altered the hour of eating would
have seemed to him irreligious, revolutionary, altogether impossible.
Candida was a little old woman, burnt black by the sun, with a whisp
of grey hair fastened on the crown of her head, and a neater look
about her kerchief and her gown than was usual in Marca, for she was a
woman originally from a northern city. She had always been a servant
in priests' houses, and, if the sacristan were ill or away, knew as
well as he where every book, bell, and candle were kept, and could
have said the offices herself had her sex allowed her. In tongue she
was very sharp, and in secret was proud of the power she possessed of
making the Vice-Regent of God afraid of her. The priest was the first
man in this parish of poor folks, and the priest would shrink like a
chidden child if she found out that he had given his best shirt to a
beggar, or had inadvertently come in with wet boots over the brick
floor, which she had just washed and sanded. It was the old story of so
many sovereignties. He had power, no doubt, to bind and loose, to bless
and curse, to cleanse, or refuse to cleanse, the sinful souls of men;
but for all that he was only a stupid, forgetful baby of a man in his
servant's eyes, and she made him feel the scorn she had for him, mixed
up with a half-motherly, half-scolding admiration, which saw in him
half a child, half a fool, and maybe she would add in her own thoughts,
a kind of angel.
Don Gesualdo was not wise or learned in any way; he had barely been
able to acquire enough knowledge to pass through the examinations
necessary for entrance into the priesthood. That slender amount of
scholarship was his all; but he was clever enough for Marca, which had
very little brains of its own, and he did his duty most faithfully, as
far as he saw it, at all times. As for doubts of any sort as to what
that duty was, such scepticism never could possibly assail him. His
creed appeared as plain and sure to him as the sun which shone in the
heavens, and his faith was as single-hearted and unswerving as the
devoted soul of a docile sheep dog.
He was of a poetic and retiring nature; religion had taken entire
possession of his life, and he was as unworldly, as visionary, and as
simple as anyone of the _peccarelle di Dio_ who dwelt around Francesco
d'Assissi. His mother had been a German servant girl, married out
of a small inn in Pisa, and some qualities of the dreamy, slow, and
serious Teutonic temperament were in him, all Italian of the western
coast as he was. On such a dual mind the spiritual side of his creed
had obtained intense power, and the office he filled was to him a
Heaven-given mission which compelled him to incessant sacrifice of
every earthly appetite and every selfish thought.
'He is too good to live,' said his old housekeeper.
It was a very simple and monotonous existence which was led by him in
his charge. There was no kind of change in it for anybody, unless they
went away, and few people born in Marca ever did that. They were not
forced by climate to be nomads, like the mountaineers of the Apennines,
nor like the men of the sea-coast and ague-haunted plains. Marca was
a healthy, homely place on the slope of a hill in a pastoral country,
where its sons and daughters could stay and work all the year round, if
they chose, without risk of fever worse than such as might be brought
on by too much new wine at close of autumn.
Marca was not pretty, or historical, or picturesque, or uncommon in any
way; there are five hundred, five thousand villages like it, standing
amongst corn lands and maize fields and mulberry trees, with its little
dark church, and its white-washed presbytery, and its dusky, red-tiled
houses, and its one great, silent, empty villa that used to be a
fortified and stately palace, and now is given over to the rats and the
spiders and the scorpions. A very quiet, little place, far away from
cities and railways, dusty and uncomely in itself, but blessed in the
abundant light and the divine landscape which are around it, and of
which no one in it ever thought, except this simple young priest, Don
Gesualdo Brasailo.
Of all natural gifts, a love of natural beauty surely brings most
happiness to the possessor of it; happiness altogether unalloyed and
unpurchasable, and created by the mere rustle of green leaves, the
mere ripple of brown waters. It is not an Italian gift at all, nor an
Italian feeling. To an Italian, gas is more beautiful than sunshine,
and a cambric flower more beautiful than a real one; he usually thinks
the mountains hateful and a city divine; he detests trees and adores
crowds. But there are exceptions to all rules; there are poetic natures
everywhere, though everywhere they are rare. Don Gesualdo was the
exception in Marca and its neighbourhood, and evening after evening saw
him in the summer weather strolling through the fields, his breviary
in his hand, but his heart with the dancing fire-flies, the quivering
poplar leaves, the tall green canes, the little silvery fish darting
over the white stones of the shallow river-waters. He could not have
told why he loved to watch these things; he thought it was because they
reminded him of Bocca d'Arno and the sand-beach and the cane-brakes;
but he did love them, and they filled him with a vague emotion; half
pleasure and half pain.
His supper over, he went into his church; a little red-bricked,
white-washed passage connected it with his parlour. The church was
small, and dark, and old; it had an altar-piece, said to be old, and by
a Sienese master, and of some value, but Gesualdo knew nothing of these
matters. A Raphael might have hung there and he would have been none
the wiser. He loved the church, ugly and simple as it was, as a mother
loves a plain child or a dull one because it is hers; and now and then
he preached strange, passionate, pathetic sermons in it, which none of
his people understood, and which he barely understood himself. He had a
sweet, full, far-reaching voice, with an accent of singular melancholy
in it, and as his mystical, romantic, involved phrases passed far
over the heads of his hearers, like a flight of birds flying high up
against the clouds, the pathos and music in his tones stirred their
hearts vaguely. He was certainly, they thought, a man whom the saints
loved. Candida, sitting near the altar with her head bowed and her
hands feeling her rosary, would think as she heard the unintelligible
eloquence: 'Dear Lord, all that power of words, all that skill of the
tongue, and he would put his shirt on bottom upwards were it not for
me!'
There was no office in his church that evening, but he lingered about
it, touching this thing and the other with tender fingers. There was
always a sweet scent in the little place; its door usually stood
open to the fields amidst which it was planted, and the smell of the
incense, which century after century had been burned in it, blended
with the fragrance from primroses, or dog-roses, or new-mown hay, or
crushed ripe grapes, which, according to the season, came into it from
without. Candida kept it very clean, and the scorpions and spiders were
left so little peace there by her ever-active broom, that they betook
themselves elsewhere, dear as the wooden benches and the crannied
stones had been to them for ages.
Since he had come to Marca, nothing of any kind had happened in it.
There had been some marriages, a great many births, not a few burials;
but that was all. The people who came to confession at Easter confessed
very common sins; they had stolen this or that, cheated here, there,
and everywhere; got drunk and quarrelled, nothing more. He would give
them clean bills of spiritual health, and bid them go in peace and sin
no more, quite sure, as they were sure themselves, that they would have
the self-same sins to tell of the next time that they should come there.
Everybody in Marca thought a great deal of their religion, that is,
they trusted to it in a helpless but confident kind of way as a fetish,
which, being duly and carefully propitiated, would make things all
right for them after death. They would not have missed a mass to save
their lives; that they dozed through it, and cracked nuts, or took a
suck at their pipe stems when they woke, did not affect their awed
and unchangeable belief in its miraculous and saving powers. If they
had been asked what they believed, or why they believed, they would
have scratched their heads and felt puzzled. Their minds dwelt in a
twilight in which nothing had any distinct form. The clearest idea ever
presented to them was that of the Madonna: they thought of her as of
some universal mother who wanted to do them good in the present and
future if they only observed her ceremonials: just as in the ages gone
by, upon these same hill-sides, the Latin peasant had thought of the
great Demeter.
Don Gesualdo himself, despite all the doctrine which had been instilled
into him in his novitiate, did not know much more than they; he
repeated the words of his offices without any distinct notion of all
that they meant; he had a vague feeling that all self-denial and
self-sacrifice were thrice blessed, and he tried his best to save his
own soul and the souls of others; but there he ceased to think; outside
that, speculation lay, and speculation was a thrice damnable offence.
Yet he, being imaginative and intelligent in a humble and dog-like
way, was at times infinitely distressed to see how little effect this
religion, which he taught and which they professed, had upon the lives
of his people. His own life was altogether guided by it. Why could not
theirs be the same? Why did they go on, all through the year, swearing,
cursing, drinking, quarrelling, lying, stealing? He could not but
perceive that they came to him to confess their peccadilloes, only that
they might pursue them more completely at their ease. He could not
flatter himself that his ministrations in Marca, which were now of six
years' duration, had made the village a whit different to what it had
been when he had entered it.
Thinking of this, as he did think of it continually night and day,
being a man of singularly sensitive conscience, he sat down on a marble
bench near the door and opened his breviary. The sun was setting behind
the pines on the crest of the hills; the warm orange light poured
across the paved way in front of the church, through the stems of the
cypresses, which stood before the door, and found its way over the
uneven slates of the stone floor to his feet. Nightingales were singing
somewhere in the dog-rose hedge beyond the cypress trees. Lizards ran
from crack to crack in the pavement. A tendril of honeysuckle came
through a hole in the wall, thrusting its delicate curled horns of
perfume towards him. The whole entrance was bathed in golden warmth and
light; the body of the church behind him was quite dark.
He had opened his breviary from habit, but he did not read; he sat and
gazed at the evening clouds, at the blue hills, at the radiant air,
and listened to the songs of the nightingales in that dreamy trance
which made him look so stupid in the eyes of his housekeeper and his
parishioners, but which were only the meditations of a poetic temper,
cramped and cooped up in a narrow and uncongenial existence, and not
educated or free enough to be able even to analyse what it felt.
'The nightingale's song in June is altogether unlike its songs of
April and May,' thought this poor priest, whom Nature had made a poet,
and to whom she had given the eyes which see and the ears which hear.
'The very phrases are wholly different; the very accent is not the
same; in spring it is all a canticle, like the songs of Solomon; in
midsummer--what is it he is singing? Is he lamenting the summer? or is
it he is only teaching his young ones how they should sing next year?'
And he fell again to listening to the sweetest bird that gladdens
earth. One nightingale was patiently repeating his song again and
again, sometimes more slowly, sometimes more quickly, seeming to lay
stress on some phrases more than on others, and another voice, fainter
and feebler than his own, repeated the trills and roulades after him
fitfully, and often breaking down altogether. It was plain that there
in the wild-rose hedge he was teaching his son. Anyone who will may
hear these sweet lessons given under bays and myrtle, under arbutus and
pomegranate, through all the month of June.
Nightingales in Marca were only regarded as creatures to be trapped,
shot, caged, eaten, sold for a centime like any other small bird;
but about the church no one touched them; the people knew that their
_parocco_ cared to hear their songs coming sweetly through the
pauses in the recitatives of the office. Absorbed, as he was now, in
hearkening to the music lesson amongst the white dog-roses, he started
violently as a shadow fell across the threshold, and a voice called to
him, 'Good evening, Don Gesualdo!'
He looked up and saw a woman whom he knew well, a young woman scarcely
indeed eighteen years old; very handsome, with a face full of warmth,
and colour, and fire, and tenderness, great flashing eyes which could
at times be as soft as a dog's, and a beautiful ruddy mouth with teeth
as white as a dog's are also. She was by name Generosa Fè; she was the
wife of Tasso Tassilo, the miller.
In Marca, most of the women by toil and sun were black as berries by
the time they were twenty, and looked old almost before they were
young; with rough hair and loose forms and wrinkled skins, and children
dragging at their breasts all the year through. Generosa was not like
them; she did little work; she had the form of a goddess; she took
care of her beauty, and she had no children, though she had married at
fifteen. She was friends with Don Gesualdo; they had both come from the
Bocca d'Arno, and it was a link of common memory and mutual attachment.
They liked to recall how they had each run through the tall canes and
cactus, and waded in the surf, and slept in the hot sand, and hidden
themselves for fright when the king's camels had come towards them,
throwing their huge mis-shapen shadows over the seas of flowering reeds
and rushes and grey spiked aloes.
He remembered her a small child, jumping about on the sand and laughing
at him, a youth, when he was going to college to study for entrance
into the Church. 'Gesualdino! Gesualdino!' she had cried. 'A fine
priest he will make for us all to confess to!' And she had screamed
with mirth, her handsome little face rippling all over with gaiety,
like the waves of the sea with the sunshine.
He had remembered her and had been glad when Tasso Tassilo, the miller,
had gone sixty miles away for a wife, and had brought her from Bocca
d'Arno to live at the mill on the small river, which was the sole water
which ran through the village of Marca.
Tasso Tassilo, going on business once to the sea coast, had chanced to
see that handsome face of hers, and had wooed and won her without great
difficulty; for her people were poor folk, living by carting sand, and
she herself was tired of her bare legs and face, her robust hunger,
which made her glad to eat the fruit off the cactus plants, and her
great beauty, which nobody ever saw except the seagulls, and carters,
and fishers, and cane-cutters, who were all as poor as she was herself.
Tasso Tassilo, in his own person, she hated; an ugly, dry, elderly man,
with his soul wrapped up in his flour-bags and his money-bags; but
he adored her, and let her spend as she chose on her attire and her
ornaments; and the mill-house was a pleasant place enough, with its
walls painted on the outside with scriptural subjects, and the willows
drooping over its eaves, and the young men and the mules loitering
about on the land side of it, and the peasants coming up with corn to
be ground whenever there had been rain in summer, and so water enough
in the river bed to turn the mill wheels. In drought, the stream was
low and its stones dry, and no work could be done by the grindstones.
There was then only water enough for the ducks to paddle in, and the
pretty teal to float in, which they would always do at sunrise unless
the miller let fly a charge of small shot amongst them from the
windows under the roof.
'Good evening, Don Gesualdo,' said the miller's wife now, in the midst
of the nightingale's song and the orange glow from the sunset.
Gesualdo rose with a smile. He was always glad to see her; she had
something about her for him of boyhood, of home, of the sea, and of
the careless days before he became a seminarist. He did not positively
regret that he had entered the priesthood, but he remembered the
earlier life wistfully, and with wonder that he could ever have been
that light-hearted lad who had run through the cane-brakes to plunge
into the rolling waters, with all the wide, gay, sunlit world of sea
and sky and river and shore before him, behind him, and above him.
'What is wrong, Generosa?' he asked her, seeing as he looked up that
her handsome face was clouded. Her days were not often tranquil; her
husband was jealous, and she gave him cause for jealousy. The mill
was a favourite resort of all young men for thirty miles around, and
unless Tasso Tassilo had ceased to grind corn he could not have shut
his doors to them.
'It is the old story, Don Gesualdo,' she answered, leaning against the
church porch. 'You know what Tasso is, and what a dog's life he leads
me.'
'You are not always prudent, my daughter,' said Gesualdo, with a faint
smile.
'Who could be always prudent at my years?' said the miller's young
wife. 'Tasso is a brute, and a fool too. One day he will drive me out
of myself; I tell him so.'
'That is not the way to make him better,' said Gesualdo. 'I am sorry
you do not see it. The man loves you, and he feels he is old, and he
knows that you do not care; that knowledge is always like a thorn in
his flesh; he feels you do not care.'
'How should he suppose that I care?' said Generosa, passionately. 'I
hated him always; he is as old as my father; he expects me to be shut
up like a nun; if he had his own way I should never stir out of the
house. Does one marry for that?'
'One should marry to do one's duty,' said Gesualdo, timidly; for he
felt the feebleness of his counsels and arguments against the force and
the warmth and the self-will of a woman, conscious of her beauty, and
her power, and her lovers, and moved by all the instincts of vanity and
passion.
'We had a terrible scene an hour ago,' said Generosa, passing over what
she did not choose to answer. 'It cost me much not to put a knife into
him. It was about Falko. There was nothing new, but he thought there
was. I fear he will do Falko mischief one day; he threatened it; it is
not the first time.'
'That is very grave,' said Gesualdo, growing paler as he heard. 'My
daughter, you are more in error than Tassilo. After all, he has his
rights. Why do you not send the young man away? He would obey you.'
'He would obey me in anything else, not in that,' said the woman, with
the little conscious smile of one who knows her own power. 'He would
not go away. Indeed, why should he go away? He has his employment here.
Why should he go away because Tasso is a jealous fool?'
'Is he such a fool?' said Gesualdo, and he raised his eyes suddenly and
looked straight into hers.
Generosa coloured through her warm, tanned skin. She was silent.
'It has not gone as far as you think,' she muttered, after a pause.
'But I will not be accused for nothing,' she added. 'Tasso shall have
what he thinks he has had. Why would he marry me? He knew I hated him.
We were all very poor down there by Bocca d'Arno, but we were gay and
happy. Why did he take me away?'
The tears started to her eyes and rolled down her hot cheeks. It was
the hundredth time that she had told her sorrows to Gesualdo, in the
confessional and out of it; it was an old story of which she never
tired of the telling. Her own people were far away by the seashore, and
she had no friends in Marca, for she was thought a 'foreigner,' not
being of that countryside, and the women were jealous of her beauty,
and of the idle life which she led in comparison to theirs, and of the
cared-for look of her person. Gesualdo seemed a countryman, and a
relative and a friend. She took all her woes to him. A priest was like
a woman, she thought; only a far safer confidant.
'You are ungrateful, my daughter,' he said, now, with an effort to be
severe in reprimand. 'You know that you were glad to marry so rich a
man as Tassilo. You know that your father and mother were glad, and you
yourself likewise. No doubt, the man is not all that you could wish,
but you owe him something; indeed, you owe him much. I speak to you now
out of my office, only as a friend. I would entreat you to send your
lover away. If not, there will be crime, perhaps bloodshed, and the
fault of all that may happen will be yours.'
She gave a gesture, which said that she cared nothing, whatever might
happen. She was in a headstrong and desperate mood. She had had a
violent quarrel with her husband, and she loved Falko Melegari, the
steward of the absent noble who owned the empty, half-ruined palace
which stood on the banks of the river. He was a fair and handsome young
man, with Lombard blood in him; tall, slender, vigorous, amorous and
light-hearted; the strongest of contrasts in all ways to Tasso Tassilo,
taciturn, feeble, sullen, and unlovely, and thrice the years of his
wife.
There was not more than a mile between the mill-house and the deserted
villa. Tassilo might as well have tried to arrest the sirocco, or the
sea winds when they blew, as prevent an intercourse so favoured and so
facilitated by circumstances. The steward had a million reasons in the
year to visit the mill, and when the miller insulted him and forbade
him his doors, the jealous husband had no power to prevent him from
fishing in the waters, from walking on the bank, from making signals
from the villa terraces, and appointments in the cane-brakes and the
vine-fields. Nothing could have broken off the intrigue except the
departure of one or other of the lovers from Marca.
But Falko Melegari would not go away from a place where his interests
and his passions both combined to hold him; and it never entered the
mind of the miller to take his wife elsewhere. He had dwelt at the mill
all the years of his life, and his forefathers for five generations
before him. To change their residence never occurs to such people as
these; they are fixed, like the cypress trees, in the ground, and dream
no more than they of new homes. Like the tree, they never change till
the heeder, Death, fells them.
Generosa continued to pour out her woes, leaning against the pillar of
the porch, and playing with a twig of pomegranate, whose buds were not
more scarlet than her own lips; and Gesualdo continued to press on her
his good counsels, knowing all the while that he might as well speak
to the swallows under the church eaves for any benefit that he could
effect. In sole answer to the arguments of Gesualdo, she retorted in
scornful words.
'You may find that duty is enough for you, because you are a saint,'
she added with less of reverence than of disdain, 'but I am no saint,
and I will not spend all my best days tied to the side of a sickly and
sullen old man.'
'You are wrong, my daughter,' said Gesualdo, sternly.
He coloured; he knew not why.
'I know nothing of these passions,' he added, with some embarrassment,
'but I know what duty is, and yours is clear.'
He did not know much of human nature, and of woman nature nothing;
yet he dimly comprehended that Generosa was now at that crisis of her
life when all the ardours of her youth, and all the delight in her
own power, combined to render her passionately rebellious against the
cruelties of her fate; when it was impossible to make duty look other
than hateful to her, and when the very peril and difficulty which
surrounded her love-story made it the sweeter and more irresistible to
her. She was of a passionate, ardent, careless, daring temperament, and
the dangers of the intrigue which she pursued had no terrors for her,
whilst the indifference which she had felt for years for her husband
had deepened of late into hatred.
'One is not a stick nor a stone, nor a beam of timber nor a block of
granite, that one should be able to live without love all one's days!'
she cried, with passion and contempt.
She threw the blossoms of pomegranate over the hedge; she gave him a
glance half-contemptuous and half-compassionate, and left the church
door.
'After all, what should he understand!' she thought. 'He is a saint,
but he is not a man.'
Gesualdo looked after her a moment as she went over the court-yard,
and between the stems of the cypresses out towards the open hill-side.
The sun had set; there was a rosy after-glow which bathed her elastic
figure in a carmine light; she had that beautiful walk which some
Italian women have who have never worn shoes in the first fifteen years
of their lives. The light shone on her dusky auburn hair, her gold
earrings, the slender column of her throat, her vigorous and voluptuous
form. Gesualdo looked after her, and a subtle warmth and pain passed
through him, bringing with it a sharp sense of guilt. He looked away
from her, and went within his church and prayed.
That night Falko Melegari had just alighted from the saddle of his good
grey horse, when he was told that the _Parocco_ of San Bartolo was
waiting to see him.
The villa had been famous and splendid in other days, but it formed
now only one of the many neglected possessions of a gay young noble,
called Ser Baldo by his dependants, who spent what little money he had
in pleasure-places out of Italy, seldom or never came near his estates,
and accepted, without investigation, all such statements of accounts as
his various men of business were disposed to send to him.
His steward lived on the ground floor of the great villa, in the
vast frescoed chambers, with their domed and gilded ceilings, their
sculptured cornices, their carved doors, their stately couches, with
the satin dropping in shreds, and the pale tapestries wearing away
with the moths and the mice at work in them. His narrow camp-bed, his
deal table and chairs, were sadly out of place in those once splendid
halls, but he did not think about it; he vaguely liked the space and
the ruined grandeur about him, and all the thoughts he had were given
to his love, Generosa, the wife of Tasso Tassilo. From the terraces of
the villa he could see the mill a mile further down the stream, and he
would pass half the short nights of the summer looking at the distant
lights in it.
He was only five-and-twenty, and he was passionately in love, with all
the increased ardour of a forbidden passion.
He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, was well made, and very tall. In
character he was neither better nor worse than most men of his age; but
as a steward he was tolerably honest, and as a lover he was thoroughly
sincere. He went with a quick step into the central hall to meet his
visitor. He supposed that the vicar had come about flowers for the
feast of SS. Peter and Paul, which was on the morrow. Though the villa
gardens were wholly neglected, they were still rich in flowers which
wanted no care--lilies, lavender, old-fashioned roses, oleanders red
and white, and magnolia trees.
'Good evening, Reverend Father, you do me honour,' he said, as he saw
Gesualdo. 'Is there anything that I can do for you? I am your humble
servant.'
Gesualdo looked at him curiously. He had never noticed the young man
before. He had seen him ride past; he had seen him at mass; he had
spoken to him of the feasts of the Church; but he had never noticed
him. Now he looked at him curiously as he answered, without any
preface whatever,----
'I am come to speak to you of Generosa Fè, the wife of Tasso Tassilo.'
The young steward coloured violently. He was astonished and silent.
'She loves you,' said Gesualdo, simply.
Falko Melegari made a gesture as though he implied that it was not his
place either to deny or to affirm.
'She loves you,' said Gesualdo again.
The young man had that fatuous smile which unconsciously expresses the
consciousness of conquest. But he was honest in his passion and ardent
in it.
'Not so much as I love her,' he said, rapturously, forgetful of his
hearer.
Gesualdo frowned.
'She is the wife of another man,' he said with reproof.
Falko Melegari shrugged his shoulders; that did not seem any reason
against it to him.
'How will it end?' said the priest. The lover smiled.
'These things always end in one way.'
Gesualdo winced, as though someone had wounded him.
'I am come to bid you go out of Marca,' he said simply.
The young man stared at him; then he laughed angrily.
'Reverend Vicar,' he said impatiently; 'you are the keeper of our
souls, no doubt; but not quite to such a point as that. Has Tassilo
sent you to me, or she?' he added, with a gleam of suspicion in his
eyes.
'No one has sent me.'
'Why then--'
'Because, if you do not go, there will be tragedy and misery. Tasso
Tassilo is not a man to make you welcome to his couch. I have known
Generosa since she was a little child; we were both born on the Bocca
d'Arno. She is of a warm nature, but not a deep one; and if you go away
she will forget. Tassilo is a rude man and a hard one; he gives her all
she has; he has many claims on her, for in his way he has been generous
and tender. You are a stranger; you can only ruin her life; you can
with ease find another stewardship far away in another province; why
will you not go? If you really loved her you would go.'
Falko laughed.
'Dear Don Gesualdo, you are a holy man, but you know nothing of love.'
Gesualdo winced a little again. It was the second time this had been
said to him this evening.
'Is it love,' he said, after a pause, 'to risk her murder by her
husband? I tell you Tassilo is not a man to take his dishonour quietly.'
'Who cares what Tassilo does?' said the young steward, petulantly. 'If
he touch a hair of her head I will make him die a thousand deaths.'
'All those are mere words,' said Gesualdo. 'You cannot mend one
crime by another, and you cannot protect a woman from her husband's
vengeance. There is only one way by which to save her from the danger
you have dragged her into. It is for you to go away.'
'I will go away when this house walks a mile,' said Falko, 'not before.
Go away!' he echoed, in wrath. 'What! run like a mongrel dog before
Tassilo's anger? What! leave her all alone to curse me as a faithless
coward? What! go away when all my life and my soul, and all the light
of my eyes is in Marca? Don Gesualdo, you are a good man, but you are
mad. You must pardon me if I speak roughly. Your words make me beside
myself.'
'Do you believe in no duty, then?'
'I believe in the duty of every honest lover!' said Falko, with
vehemence, 'and that duty is to do everything that the loved one
wishes. She is bound to a cur; she is unhappy; she has not even any
children to comfort her; she is like a beautiful flower shut up in a
cellar, and she loves me--me!--and you bid me go away! Don Gesualdo,
keep to your Church offices, and leave the loves of others alone. What
should you know of them? Forgive me, if I am rude. You are a holy man,
but you know nothing at all of men and women.'
'I do not know much,' said Gesualdo, meekly.
He was depressed and intimidated. He was sensible of his own utter
ignorance of the passions of life. This man, nigh his own age,
but so full of vigour, of ardour, of indignation, of pride in his
consciousness that he was beloved, and of resolve to stay where that
love was, be the cost what it would, daunted him with a sense of power
and of triumph such as he himself could not even comprehend, and yet
wistfully envied. It was sin, no doubt, he said to himself; and yet it
was life, it was strength, it was virility.
He had come to reprove, to censure, and to persuade into repentance
this headstrong lover, and he could only stand before him feeble and
oppressed, with a sense of his own ignorance and childishness. All the
stock, trite arguments which his religious belief supplied him seemed
to fall away and to be of no more use than empty husks of rotten nuts
before the urgency, the fervour, and the self-will of real life. This
man and woman loved each other, and they cared for no other fact than
this on earth or in heaven. He left the villa grounds in silence, with
only a gesture of salutation in farewell.
II
'Poor innocent, he meant well!' thought the steward, as he watched
the dark, slender form of the priest pass away through the vines and
mulberry trees. The young man did not greatly venerate the Church
himself, though he showed himself at mass and sent flowers for the
feast days because it was the custom to do so. He was, like most young
Italians who have had a smattering of education, very indifferent on
such matters, and inclined to ridicule. He left them for women and old
men. But there was something about his visitant which touched him; a
simplicity, an unworldliness, a sincerity which moved his respect; and
he knew in his secret heart that the _parocco_, as he called him, was
right enough in everything that he had said.
Don Gesualdo himself went on his solitary way, his buckled shoes
dragging wearily over the dusty grass of the wayside. He had done no
good, and he did not see what good he could do. He felt helpless
before the force and speed of an unknown and guilty passion, as he once
felt before a forest fire which he had seen in the Marches. All his
Church books gave him homilies enough on the sins of the flesh and the
temptings of the devil, but none of these helped him before the facts
of this lawless and godless love, which seemed to pass high above his
head like a whirlwind. He went on slowly and dully along the edge of
the river-bed; a sense of something which he had always missed, which
he would miss eternally, was with him.
It was now quite night. He liked to walk late at night. All things were
so peaceful, or at the least seemed so. You did not see the gashes in
the lopped trees, the scars in the burned hill-side, the wounds in the
mule's loins, the bloodshot eyes of the working ox, the goitered throat
of the child rolling in the dust. Night, kindly friend of dreams, cast
her soft veil over all woes, and made the very dust seem as a silvered
highway to the throne of a beneficent God.
He went now through the balmy air, the rustling canes, the low-hanging
boughs of the fruit-laden peach trees, and the sheaves of cut corn
leaning one up against another under the maples, or the walnut trunks.
He followed the course of the water, a shallow thread at this season,
glistening under the moon in its bed of shingle and sand. He passed the
mill-house perforce on his homeward way; he saw the place of the weir,
made visible even in the dark by the lanterns which swung on a cord
stretched from one bank to another, to entice any such fish as there
might still be in the shallows. The mill-walls stood down into the
water, a strong place built in olden days; the great black wheels were
now perforce at rest; the mules champed and chafed in their stalls,
inactive, like the mill; for the next three months there would be
nothing to do unless a storm came and brought a freshet from the hills.
The miller would have the more leisure to nurse his wrongs, thought Don
Gesualdo; and his heart was troubled. He had never met with these woes
of the passions; they oppressed and alarmed him.
As he passed the low mill windows, protected from thieves by their iron
gratings, he could see the interior, lighted as it was by the flame
of oil lamps, and through the open lattices he heard voices, raised
high in stormy quarrel, which seemed to smite the holy stillness of the
night like a blow. The figure of Generosa stood out against the light
which shone behind her. She was in a paroxysm of rage; her eyes flashed
like the lightnings of the hills, and her beautiful arms were tossed
above her head in impassioned imprecation. Tasso Tassilo seemed for the
moment to crouch beneath this rain of flame-like words; his face, on
which the light shone full, was deformed with malignant and impotent
fury, with covetous and jealous desire; there was no need to hear
her words to know that she was taunting him with her love for Falko
Melegari. Don Gesualdo was a weak man and physically timid, but here he
hesitated not one instant. He lifted the latch of the house door and
walked straightway into the mill kitchen.
'In the name of Christ, be silent!' he said to them, and made the sign
of the cross.
The torrent of words stopped on the lips of the young woman; the miller
scowled and shrank from the light, and was mute.
'Is this how you keep your vows to Heaven and to each other?' said
Gesualdo.
A flush of shame came over the face of the woman; the man drew his
hat farther over his eyes, and went out of the kitchen silently. The
victory had been easier than their monitor had expected. 'And yet of
what use was it?' he thought. They were silent out of respect for him.
As soon as the restraint of his presence should be removed they would
begin afresh. Unless he could change their souls it was of little avail
to bridle their lips for an hour.
There was a wild, chafing hatred on one side, and a tyrannical,
covetous, dissatisfied love on the other. Out of such discordant
elements what peace could come?
Gesualdo shut the wooden shutters of the windows that others should not
see, as he had seen, into the interior; then he strove to pacify his
old playmate, whose heaving breast and burning cheeks, and eyes which
scorched up in fire their own tears, spoke of a tempest lulled, not
spent. He spoke with all the wisdom with which study and the counsels
of the Fathers had supplied him, and with what was sweeter, and more
likely to be efficacious, a true and yearning wish to save her from
herself. She was altogether wrong, and he strove to make her see the
danger and the error of her ways. But he strove in vain. She had one of
those temperaments--reckless, vehement, pleasure-loving, ardent, and
profoundly selfish--which see only their own immediate gain, their own
immediate desires. When he tried to stir her conscience by speaking of
the danger she drew down on the head of the man she professed to love,
she almost laughed.
'He would be a poor creature,' she said proudly, 'if all danger would
not be dear to him for me!'
Don Gesualdo looked her full in the eyes.
'You know that this matter must end in the death of one man or of the
other. Do you mean that this troubles you not one whit?'
'It will not be my fault,' said Generosa, and he saw in her the woman's
lust of vanity which finds food for its pride in the blood shed for
her, as the tigress does, and even the gentle hind.
He remained an hour or more with her, exhausting every argument which
his creed and his sympathy could suggest to him as having any possible
force in it to sway this wayward and sin-bound soul; but he knew that
his words were poured on her ear as uselessly as water on a stone
floor. She was in a manner grateful to him as her friend, in a manner
afraid of that vague majesty of some unknown power which he represented
to her; but she hated her husband, she adored her lover;--he could
not stir her from those two extremes of passion. He left her with
apprehension and a pained sense of his own impotence. She promised
him that she would provoke Tassilo no more that night, and this poor
promise was all that he could wring from her. It was late when he left
the mill-house. He feared Candida would be alarmed at his unusual
absence; and hastened, with trouble on his soul, towards the village,
lying white and lonely underneath the midsummer moon. He had so little
influence, so slender a power to persuade or warn, to counsel or
command; he felt afraid that he was unworthy of his calling.
'I should have been better in the cloister,' he thought sadly; 'I have
not the key to human hearts.'
He went on through a starry world of fire-flies, making luminous
the cut corn, the long grass, the high hedges, and, entering his
presbytery, crept noiselessly up the stairs to his chamber, thankful
that the voice of his housekeeper did not cry to him out of the
darkness to know why he had so long tarried. He slept little that
night, and was up, as was his wont, by daybreak.
It was still dark when the church bell was clanging above his head for
the first office.
It was the day of Peter and of Paul. Few people came to the early mass;
some peasants who wanted to have the rest of the day clear; some women,
thrifty housewives who were up betimes; Candida herself; no others.
The lovely morning light streamed in, cool and roseate; there were a
few lilies and roses on the altar; some red draperies floated in the
doorway; the nightingales in the wild-rose hedge sang all the while,
their sweet voices crossing the monotonous Latin recitatives. The mass
was just over, when into the church from without there arose a strange
sound, shrill and yet hoarse, inarticulate and yet uproarious; it
came from the throats of many people, all screaming, and shouting, and
talking, and swearing together. The peasants and the women, who were on
their knees, scrambled to their feet, and rushed to the door, thinking
the earth had opened and the houses were falling. Gesualdo came down
from the altar and strove to calm them, but they did not heed him, and
he followed them despite himself. The whole village seemed out--man,
woman, and child--the nightingales grew dumb under their outcry.
'What is it?' asked Gesualdo.
Several voices shouted back to him, 'Tasso Tassilo has been murdered!'
'Ah!'
Gesualdo gave a low cry, and leaned against the stem of a cypress tree
to save himself from falling. What use had been his words that night?
The murdered man had been found lying under the canes on the wayside
not a rood from the church. A dog smelling at it had caused the body
to be sought out and discovered. He had been dead but a few hours;
apparently killed by a knife, thrust under his left shoulder, which
had struck straight under his heart. The agitation in the people was
great; the uproar deafening. Someone had sent for the carabineers, but
their nearest picket was two miles off, and they had not yet arrived.
The dead man still lay where he had fallen; everyone was afraid to
touch him.
'Does his wife know?' said Don Gesualdo, in a strange, hoarse voice.
'His wife will not grieve,' said a man in the crowd, and there was a
laugh, subdued by awe, and the presence of death and of the priest.
The vicar, with a strong shudder of disgust, held up his hand in horror
and reproof, then bent over the dead body where it lay amongst the
reeds.
'Bring him to the sacristy,' he said, to the men nearest him. 'He must
not lie there like a beast, unclean, by the roadside; go, fetch a
hurdle, a sheet, anything.'
But no one of them would stir.
'If we touch him they will take us up for murdering him,' they muttered
as one man.
'Cowards! Stand off; I will carry him indoors,' said the priest.
'You are in full canonicals!' cried Candida, twitching at his sleeve.
But Don Gesualdo did not heed her. He was brushing off with a tender
hand the flies which had begun to buzz about the dead man's mouth.
The flies might have stung and eaten him all the day through for what
anyone of the little crowd would have cared; they would not have
stretched a hand even to drag him into the shade.
Don Gesualdo was a weakly man; he had always fasted long and often, and
had never been strong from his birth; but indignation, compassion, and
horror for the moment lent him a strength not his own. He stooped down
and raised the dead body in his arms, and, staggering under his burden,
he bore it the few roods which separated the place where it had fallen
from the church and the vicar's house.
The people looked on open-mouthed with wonder and awe. 'It is against
the law,' they muttered, but they did not offer active opposition. The
priest, unmolested, save for the cries of the old housekeeper, carried
his load into his own house and laid it reverently down on the couch
which stood in the sacristy. He was exhausted with the great strain and
effort; his limbs shook under him, the sweat poured off his face, the
white silk and golden embroideries of his cope and stole were stained
with the clotted blood which had fallen from the wound in the dead
man's back. He did not heed it, nor did he hear the cries of Candida
mourning the disfigured vestments, nor the loud chattering of the crowd
thrusting itself into the sacristy. He stood looking down on the poor,
dusty, stiffening corpse before him with blind eyes and thinking in
silent terror, 'Is it her work?'
In his own soul he had no doubt.
Candida plucked once more at his robes.
'The vestments, the vestments! You will ruin them; take them off--'
He put her from him with a gesture of dignity which she had never seen
in him, and motioned the throng back towards the open door.
'I will watch with him till the guards come,' he said; 'go, send his
wife hither.'
Then he scattered holy water on the dead body, and kneeled down beside
it and prayed.
The crowd thought that he acted strangely. Why was he so still and
cold, and why did he seem so stunned and stricken? If he had screamed
and raved, and run hither and thither purposelessly, and let the corpse
lie where it was in the canes, he would have acted naturally in their
estimation. They hung about the doorways, half afraid, half angered;
some of them went to the mill-house, eager to have the honour of being
the first bearer of such news.
No one was sorry for the dead man, except some few who were in his
debt, and knew that now they would be obliged to pay, with heavy
interest, what they owed 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 his sacristan bring linen, and spread it over the corpse to
cheat the flies and the gnats of their ghastly repast. No men of law
came. The messengers returned. The picket-house had been closed at dawn
and the carabineers were away. There was nothing to be done but to
wait. The villagers stood or sat about in the paved court, and in the
road under the cypresses. They seldom had such an event as this in the
dulness of their lives. They brought hunches of bread and ate as they
discoursed of it.
'Will you not break your fast?' said Candida to 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 the whole 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-haired lover 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 felt that she was guiltless. He
called Candida to her and left her, and closed the door on the curious,
cruel, staring eyes of the throng without.
The people murmured. What title had he more than they to command and
direct in this matter? The murder was a precious feast to them; why
should he defraud them of their rights?
'He knows she is guilty,' they muttered, 'and he wants to screen her
and give her time to recover herself and to arrange what story she
shall tell.'
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
bickerings of 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 she is in
the shade they'll fling the stones fast enough,' and she was ready to
fling her own stone. Generosa had always seemed an impudent jade to
her, coming and talking with Don Gesualdo, as she did, at all hours,
and as though the church and the sacristy were open bazaars!
How that day passed, and how he bore himself through all its functions,
he never knew. It was the dead of night, when he, still dressed, and
unable even to think calmly, clasping his crucifix in his hands, and
pacing to and fro his narrow chamber with restless and uneven steps,
heard his name called by the voice of a man in great agitation, and,
looking out of his casement, saw Falko Melegari on his 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 he wheeled his horse sharply round, and, without any
other word, rode off towards his home in the glistening white light, to
stable his weary horse, and to saddle another to ride into the larger
village of Sant' Arturo. It was past midnight; he could do no good; he
could see no one; but it was a relief to him to be in movement. He felt
that it would choke him to sit and sup, and sleep, and smoke as usual
in his quiet house 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 questioned
as to the relations of the murdered man and his wife, he hesitated,
prevaricated, contradicted himself, and gave the impression to the
judicial authorities that he knew much more against the wife than
he would say. What he tried to do was to convey to others his own
passionate conviction of the innocence of Generosa, but he utterly
failed in doing this, and his very anxiety to defend her only created
an additional suspicion against her.
The issue of the preliminary investigation was, that the wife of Tasso
Tassilo, murdered on the morning of the day of 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 her and the nervous anxiety to shield her, displayed so
unwisely, though so sincerely by him, did her more harm than good, and
made his bias so visible, that his declarations were held valueless.
'You know I am innocent!' she cried to him, the day of her arrest; and
he answered her with the tears falling down his cheeks: 'I am sure of
it; I would die to prove it! For one moment I did doubt you--pardon
me--but only one. I am sure you are innocent as I am sure that the sun
hangs in the skies.'
But his unsupported belief availed nothing to secure that of others;
the dominant feeling 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
his relations 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 the _damo_ is 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 her _damo_?' they asked, and
no one could answer.
So she was taken away by the men of justice, and Marca no more saw
her handsome head, with the silver pins in its coiled hair, leaning
out from the square mill windows, or her bright-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 misfortunes after many days, and then only by chance, through
a travelling hawker. They could do nothing for her, and did not try.
She had never sent them as much of her husband's money as they had
expected her to do, and now that she was in trouble she might get out
of it as she could, so they said. She had always cared for her 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, 'If she lose her
beauty and grow old before her time, what avail will it be to her even
if they declare her innocent? Her gay lover will look at her no more.'
Falko Melegari loved her wildly, ardently, vehemently indeed; but 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.
III
The winter passed away, and with February the corn spread a green
carpet everywhere; the almond trees blossomed on the hill-sides, the
violets opened the 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 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 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, had helped 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 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, 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 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
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 the _parocco_ to 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 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 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 while to 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 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 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, 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
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 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 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 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 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
or narrates 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 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 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 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 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, 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,
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
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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Church and 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 supposition so 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 to believe 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 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,
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 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.
IV
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. 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
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 himself to
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
confessed _per 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 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 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 before
him 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 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 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 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 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--perhaps he knows even more--perhaps he was her accomplice.'
His evidence, his aspect, his wild and contradictory words, did as
much harm to her cause as he ignorantly strove to do good. From other
witnesses of Marca, the Court had learned that a great friendship had
always been seen to exist between the vicar of San Bartolo and Generosa
Fè, and that on the morning when the murder was discovered, the priest
had removed the body of the dead man to the sacristy, forestalling the
officers of justice and disturbing the scene of the murder. A strong
impression against him was created beforehand in the audience and on
the bench, and his pallid, agitated countenance, his incoherent words,
his wild eyes, which incessantly sought the face of the prisoner,
all gave him the appearance of a man conscious of some guilt himself
and driven out of his mind by fear. The president cross-examined him
without mercy, censured him, railed at him, and did his uttermost to
extract the tru
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