A House-Party Part 26

It was now quite night. Gesualdo 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 blood-shot eyes of the working ox, the goitred 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 a throne for G.o.d.

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 hives. 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 pa.s.sed 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 stood down into the water, a strong place, built in olden days; the great black wheels were 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 Gesualdo; and his heart was troubled: he had never met with these woes of the pa.s.sions; they oppressed and alarmed him.

As he pa.s.sed 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 the voices, raised high in stormy quarrel, 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 impa.s.sioned imprecation. Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo 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. Gesualdo was a weak man and physically timid; but here he hesitated but 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!"

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 l.u.s.t 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 pa.s.sion. He left her with apprehension and a pained sense of his own impotence. She promised him that she would provoke Ta.s.silo 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 still-uncut corn, 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 St. Peter and of St. Paul. Few people came to the early ma.s.s,--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 door-way; the nightingales in the wild-rose hedge sang all the while, their sweet voices crossing the monotonous Latin recitatives. The ma.s.s was just over when into the church from without there arose a strange sound, shrill and yet hoa.r.s.e, 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 the outcry.

"What is it?" asked Gesualdo.

Several voices shouted back to him, "Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo 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 through the heart.

The agitation in the people was unimaginable, the uproar deafening. Some one with a grain of sense remaining had sent for the carabineers, but their picket was two miles off, and they had not yet arrived. The dead man still lay where he had fallen: every one was afraid to touch him.

"Does his wife know?" said Gesualdo, in a strange, hoa.r.s.e 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.

Gesualdo, with a strong shudder of disgust, held up his hand in horror and reproof, then bent over the dead body where it lay among 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 in-doors," said the priest.

"You are in full canonicals!" cried Candida, twitching at his sleeve.

But 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 any one of the little crowd would have cared: they would not have stretched a hand even to drag him into the shade.

Gesualdo was a weakly man; he had always fasted long and often, and had never been strong from his birth; but indignation, compa.s.sion, 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.

Gesualdo, 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 breast. 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 door-ways half afraid, half angered: some of them went to the mill-house, eager to have the honor 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 up 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.

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 for 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 Gesualdo. "You will not bring him to life by starving yourself."

Gesualdo made a sign of refusal.