A House-Party Part 24

It was a day in June.

The crickets were chirping, the lizards were gliding, the b.u.t.terflies were flying above the ripe corn, the reapers were out among the wheat, and the tall stalks were swaying and falling under the sickle. Through the little windows of his sacristy Don Gesualdo, the young vicar of San Bartolo, in the village of Marca, looked with wistful eyes at the hill-side which rose up in front of him, seen through a frame of cherry-boughs in full fruit. The hill-side was covered with corn, with vines, with mulberry-trees; the men and women were at work among the trees, it was the first day of harvest; there was a blue, happy sky above them all; their voices chattering and calling to one another over the sea of grain came to his ears gayly and softened by air and distance. He sighed as he looked and as he heard. Yet, interrogated, he would have said that he was happy and wanted for nothing.

He was a slight, pale man, still almost a youth, with a delicate face without color and beardless; his eyes were brown and tender and serious, his mouth was sensitive and sweet. He was the son of a fisherman away by Bocca d'Arno, where the river meets the sea, amidst the cane- and cactus-brakes which Costa loves to paint. But who could say what fine, time-filtered, pure Etruscan or Latin blood might not run in his veins?

There is so much of the cla.s.sic features and the cla.s.sic form among the peasants of Tyrrhene sea-sh.o.r.es, of Cimbrian oak woods, of Roman gra.s.s-plains, of Maremma marshes.

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

He turned from the window with reluctance and regret, as the old woman who served him as housekeeper and church-cleaner in one summoned him to his frugal supper. He could have supped at any hour he had chosen, there were none to say him nay, but it was the custom at Marca to sup at the twenty-third hour, and he was not a person to violate custom: he would as soon have thought of spitting on the blessed bread itself. Habit is a masterful ruler in all Italian communities; it has always been so; it is a formula which excuses all things and sanctifies all things, and to none did it do so more than to Gesualdo. Often he was not in the least hungry at sunset, often he grudged sorely the hours spent in breaking black bread and in eating poor soup when Nature was at her sweetest and the skies giving their finest spectacle to a thankless earth. Yet never did he fail to meekly answer old Candida's summons to the humble repast.

To have altered the hour of eating would have seemed to him irreligious, revolutionary, altogether impossible.

Candida was a little old woman, burnt black by the sun, with a wisp of gray hair fastened on the crown of her head, and a neater look about her kerchief and her gown than was usual in Marca, for she was a woman originally from a Northern city. She had always been a servant in priests' houses, and, if the sacristan were ill or away, knew as well as he where every book, bell, and candle were kept, and could have said the offices herself had her s.e.x allowed her. In tongue she was very sharp, and in secret was proud of the power she possessed in making the vicegerent of G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sail him. His creed appeared as plain and sure to him as the sun which shone in the heavens, and his faith was as single-hearted and unswerving as the devoted soul of a docile sheep-dog.

He was of a poetic and retiring nature; religion had taken entire possession of his soul, and he was as unworldly, as visionary, and as simple as any one of the _peccarelle di Dio_ who dwelt around Francesco d'a.s.sisci. 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 appet.i.te and every selfish thought.

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

It was a very simple and monotonous life which was led by him in his charge. There was no kind of change in it for anybody, unless they went away, and few people born in Marca ever did that. They were not forced by climate to be nomads, like the mountaineers of the Apennines, nor like the men of the sea-coast and ague-haunted plains. Marca was a healthy, homely place on the slope of a hill in the wilderness, where its sons and daughters could stay and work all the year round, if they chose, without risk of fever worse than such as might be brought on by too much new wine at close of autumn. Marca was not pretty, nor historical, nor picturesque, nor uncommon in any way: there are five hundred, five thousand, villages like it, standing among corn-lands and maize-fields and mulberry-trees, with its little dark church, and its whitewashed presbytery, and its dusky red-tiled houses, and its great silent empty villa, that used to be a fortified and stately palace and now is given over to the rats and the spiders and the scorpions. A very quiet little place, far away from cities and railways, dusty and uncomely in itself, but blessed in the abundant light and the divine landscape which are around it, and of which no one in it ever thought, except this simple young priest, Gesualdo Brasalo.

Of all natural gifts, a love of natural beauty surely brings most happiness to the possessor of it,--happiness altogether unalloyed and unpurchasable, and created by the mere rustle of green leaves, the mere ripple of brown waters. It is not an Italian gift at all, nor an Italian feeling; to an Italian, gas is more beautiful than sunshine, and a cambric flower more beautiful than a real one; he usually thinks the mountains hateful and a city divine, he detests trees and adores crowds.

But there are exceptions to all rules: there are poetic natures everywhere, though everywhere rare: Gesualdo was the exception in Marca and its neighborhood, and evening after evening saw him in the summer weather strolling through the fields, his breviary in his hand, but his heart with the dancing fire-flies, the quivering poplar leaves, the tall green cane, the little silvery fish darting over the white stones of the shallow river-waters. He could not have told why he loved to watch these things: he thought it was because they reminded him of Bocca d'Arno and the sand-beach and the canebrakes; but he did love them, and they filled him with that vague emotion, half pleasure, half pain, known to all who love Nature for herself alone.

His supper over, he went into his church: a little, red-bricked, whitewashed pa.s.sage connected it with his parlor. The church was small, and dark, and old; it had an altar-piece said to be old, and by a Sienese master, and of some value, but Gesualdo knew nothing of these matters: a Raphael might have hung there and he would have been none the wiser. He loved the church, ugly and simple as it was, as a mother loves a plain child or a dull one because it is hers; and now and then he preached strange, pa.s.sionate, 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 pa.s.sed far over the heads of his hearers, like a flight of birds flying high up against the clouds, the pathos and music in his tones stirred their hearts vaguely. He was certainly, they thought, a man whom the saints loved.

Candida, sitting near the altar with her head bowed and her hands feeling her rosary, would think, as she heard the unintelligible eloquence, "Dear Lord, all that power of words, all that skill of the tongue, and he would put his shirt on bottom upward were it not for me!"

There was no office in his church that evening, but he lingered about it, touching this thing and the other with tender fingers. There was always a sweet scent in the little place: its door usually stood open to the fields amidst which it was planted, and the smell of the incense which century after century had been burned in it blended with the fragrance from primroses, or dog-roses, or new-mown hay, or crushed ripe grapes, which, according to the season, came in it from without. Candida kept it very clean, and the scorpions and spiders were left so little peace there by her everactive broom that they betook themselves elsewhere, dear as the wooden benches and the crannied stones had been to them for ages.

Since he had come to Marca nothing of any kind had happened in it. There had been some marriages, a great many births, not a few burials; but that was all. The people who came to confession at Easter confessed very common sins: they had stolen this or that, cheated here, there, and everywhere, got drunk and quarrelled, nothing more: he would give them clean bills of spiritual health, and bid them go in peace and sin no more, quite sure, as they were sure themselves, that they would have the self-same sins to tell off next time they came there.

Everybody in Marca thought a great deal of their religion; that is, they trusted to it in a helpless but confident kind of way as a fetich which, being duly and carefully propitiated, would make things all right for them after death. They would not have missed a ma.s.s to save their lives: that they dozed through it, and cracked nuts or took a suck at their pipe-stems when they woke, did not affect their awed and unchangeable belief in its miraculous and saving powers. If they had been asked what they believed, or why they believed, they would have scratched their heads and felt puzzled. Their minds dwelt in a twilight in which nothing had any distinct form. The clearest idea ever presented to them was that of the Madonna: they thought of her as of some universal mother who wanted to do them good in present and future if they only observed her ceremonials: just as in the ages gone by upon these same hill-sides the Latin peasant had thought of the great Demeter.

Gesualdo himself, despite all the doctrine which had been instilled into him in his novitiate, did not know much more than they: he repeated the words of his offices without any distinct notion of all that they meant; he had a vague feeling that all self-denial and self-sacrifice were thrice blessed, and he tried his best to save his own soul and the souls of others; but there he ceased to think: outside that speculation lay, and speculation was a thrice-d.a.m.nable offence. Yet he, being imaginative and intelligent in a humble and dog-like way, was at times infinitely distressed to see how little effect this religion which he taught and which they professed had upon the lives of his people. His own life was altogether guided by it: why could not theirs be the same? Why did they go on all through the year swearing, cursing, drinking, quarrelling, lying, stealing? He could not but perceive that they came to him to confess their peccadilloes only that they might pursue them more completely at their ease. He could not flatter himself that his ministrations in Marca, which were now of six years' duration, had made the village a whit different from what it had been when he had entered it.

Thinking of this, as he did think of it continually night and day, being a man of singularly sensitive conscience, he sat down on a marble bench near the door and opened his breviary. The sun was setting behind the pines on the crest of the hills; the warm orange light poured across the paved way in front of the church, through the stems of the cypresses which stood before the door, and found its way over the uneven slates of the stone floor to his feet. A nightingale was singing somewhere in the dog-rose hedge beyond the cypress-trees. Lizards ran from crack to crack in the pavement. A tendril of honeysuckle came through a hole in the wall, thrusting its delicate curled horns of perfume towards him. The whole entrance was bathed in golden warmth and light; the body of the church behind him was quite dark.

He had opened his breviary from habit, but he did not read: he sat and gazed at the evening clouds, at the blue hills, at the radiant air, and listened to the song of the nightingales in that dreamy trance which made him look so stupid in the eyes of his housekeeper and his parishioners, but which was only the meditation of a poetic temper, cramped and cooped up in a narrow and uncongenial existence, and not educated or free enough to be able even to a.n.a.lyze what it felt.

"The nightingale's song in June is altogether unlike its songs of April and May," thought this poor priest, whom Nature had made a poet, and to whom she had given the eyes which see and the ears which hear. "The very phrases are wholly different; the very accent is not the same: in spring it is all a canticle like the Song of Solomon, in midsummer--what is it he is singing? Is he lamenting the summer? or is he only teaching his young ones how they should sing next year?"

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

The nightingale was patiently repeating his song, again and again, sometimes more slowly, sometimes more quickly, seeming to lay stress on some phrases more than on others; and another voice, fainter and feebler than his own, repeated the trills and roulades after him fitfully, and often breaking down altogether. It was plain that there in the wild-rose hedge he was teaching his son. Any one who will may hear these sweet lessons given under bays and myrtle, under arbutus and pomegranate, through all the month of June.

Nightingales in Marca were only regarded as creatures to be trapped, shot, caged, eaten, sold for a centime like any other small bird; but about the church no one touched them: the people knew that their _parocco_ cared to hear their songs coming sweetly through the pauses in the recitatives of the office. Absorbed as he was now in hearkening to the music-lesson among the white dog-roses, he started violently as a shadow fell across the threshold and a voice called to him, "Good-evening, Don Gesualdo."

He looked up and saw a woman whom he knew well,--a young woman, scarcely indeed eighteen years old, very handsome, with a face full of warmth and color and fire and tenderness, great flashing eyes which could at times be as soft as a dog's, and a beautiful ruddy mouth with teeth as white as a dog's are also. She was by name Generosa Fe: she was the wife of Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s all the year through. Generosa was not like them: she did little work; she had the form of a G.o.ddess; she took care of her beauty, and she had no children, though she had married at fifteen. She was friends with Gesualdo; they had both come from the Bocca d'Arno, and it was a link of common memory and mutual attachment. They liked to recall how they had each run through the tall canes and cactus, and waded in the surf, and slept in the hot sand, and hidden themselves for fright when the king's camels had come towards them, throwing their huge misshapen shadows over the seas of flowering reeds and rushes.

He remembered her a small child, jumping about on the sand and laughing at him, a youth, when he was going to college to study for entrance into the Church. "Gesualdo! che Gesualdo!" she had cried. "A fine priest he will make for us all to confess to!" And she had screamed with mirth, her handsome little face rippling all over with gayety like the waves of the sea with the sunshine.

He had remembered her, and had been glad when Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo, the miller, had gone sixty miles away for a wife, and had brought her from the Bocca d'Arno to live at the mill on the small river which was the sole water that ran through the village of Marca.

Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo, 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 n.o.body ever saw except the sea-gulls and carters and fishers and cane-cutters, who were all as poor as she was herself.

Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo, in his own person, she hated, an ugly, dry, elderly man, with his soul wrapped up in his flour-bags and his money-bags; but he adored her, and let her spend as she chose on her attire and her ornaments; and the mill-house was a pleasant place enough with its walls painted on the outside _in tempora_, and the willows drooping over its eaves, and the young men and the mules loitering about on the land-side of it, and the peasants coming up with corn to be ground whenever there had been rain in summer and so water enough in the river-bed to turn the mill-wheels. In drought the stream was low and its stones dry and no work could be done by the grindstones. There was then only water enough for the ducks to paddle in, and the pretty teal to float in, which they would always do at sunrise unless the miller let fly a a charge of small shot among them from the windows under the roof.

"Good-evening, Don Gesualdo," said the miller's wife now, in the midst of the nightingale's song and the orange glow from the sunset.

Gesualdo rose with a smile. He was always glad to see her. She had something about her for him of boyhood, of home, of the sea, and of the careless days before he became a seminarist: he did not positively regret that he had entered the priesthood, but he remembered the earlier life wistfully, and with wonder that he could ever have been that light-hearted lad who had run through the canebrakes to plunge into the rolling waters with all the wide gay sunlit world of sea and sky and river and sh.o.r.e before him, behind him, and above him.

"What is wrong, Generosa?" he asked her, seeing as he looked up that her handsome face was clouded. Her days were not often tranquil; her husband was jealous, and she gave him cause for jealousy: the mill was a favorite resort of all the young men for thirty miles around, and unless Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo 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 Ta.s.so, 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.

"Ta.s.so is a brute, and a fool too. One day he will drive me out of myself: I tell him so."

"That is not the way to make him better," said Gesualdo. "I am sorry you do not see it. The man loves you, and he feels he is old, and he knows that you do not care: that is always like a thorn in his flesh: he feels you do not care."

"How should he suppose that I care?" said Generosa, pa.s.sionately. "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 pa.s.sion.

"We had a terrible scene an hour ago," said Generosa, pa.s.sing 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 Ta.s.silo. 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 Ta.s.so is a jealous fool?"

"Is he such a fool?" said Gesualdo, and he raised his eyes suddenly and looked straight into hers. Generosa colored through her warm, paleless skin. She was silent.

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

"But I will not be accused for nothing," she added. "Ta.s.so shall have what he thinks he has had. Why would he marry me? He knew I hated him.

We were all very poor down there by Bocca d'Arno, but we were gay and happy. Why did he take me away?"

The tears started to her eyes and rolled down her hot cheeks. It was the hundredth time that she had told her sorrows to Gesualdo, in the confessional and out of it: it was an old story, of which she never tired of the telling. Her own people were far away by the sea-sh.o.r.e, and she had no friends in Marca, for she was thought a "foreigner," not being of that country-side, and the women were jealous of her beauty, and of the idle life which she led in comparison to theirs, and of the cared-for look of her person. Gesualdo seemed a countryman, and a relative, and a friend. She took all her woes to him. A priest was like a woman, she thought; only a still safer confidant.

"You are ungrateful, my daughter," he said, now, with an effort to be severe in reprimand. "You know that you were glad to marry so rich a man as Ta.s.silo. You know that you father and mother were glad, and you yourself likewise. No doubt the man is not all that you could wish, but you owe him something; indeed, you owe him much. I speak to you now out of my office, only as a friend. I would entreat you to send your lover away. If not, there will be crime, perhaps bloodshed, and the fault of all that may happen will be yours."

She gave a gesture which said that she cared nothing, whatever might happen. She was in a headstrong and desperate mood; she had had a violent quarrel with her husband, and she loved Falko Melegari, the steward of the absent n.o.ble 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 Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo, taciturn, feeble, sullen, and unlovely, and twice the years of his wife.

There was not more than a mile between the mill-house and the deserted villa; Ta.s.silo might as well have tried to arrest the sirocco or the mariner's winds, when they blew, as prevent an intercourse so favored and so facilitated by circ.u.mstances. The steward had a million reasons in a year to visit the mill, and when the miller insulted him and forbade him his doors he had no power to prevent him from fishing in the waters, from walking on the bank, from making signals from the villa terraces and appointments in the canebrakes and the vine-fields. Nothing could have broken off the intrigue except the departure of one or the other of the lovers from Marca. But Falko Melegari would not go away from a place where his interests and his pa.s.sions both combined to hold him; and it never entered the mind of the miller to take his wife elsewhere. He had dwelt at the mill all the years of his life, and his forefathers for five generations before him. To change their residence never occurs to such people as these: they are fixed, like the cypress-trees, in the ground, and dream no more than they of new homes.

Like the tree, they never change till death fells them. Generosa continued to pour out her woes, leaning against the pillar of the porch, and playing with a twig of pomegranate, whose buds were not more scarlet than her own lips; and Gesualdo continued to press on her his good counsels, knowing all the while that he might as well speak to the swallows under the church eaves, for any benefit that he could effect.

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

"You may find duty enough for you because you are a saint," she added, with less of reverence than of disdain; "but I am no saint, and I will not spend all my best days tied to the side of a sickly and sullen old man."