A House-Party Part 27

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 pa.s.sed a feverish night, locking her door against her husband, and spending the whole weary hours at the cas.e.m.e.nt where she could see the old gray villa where her lover dwelt, standing out against the moonlight among 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 pa.s.sion.

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 candor 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 a corner of her soul she was vaguely conscious that there was a degree of unfairness and baseness in setting their youth and their ardor to hoodwink and betray a feeble and aged creature like Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo. 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 reproof of Gesualdo 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 on 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 gray 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 Vendramin, 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 ma.s.s 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, Padrona! 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 daybreak, 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 neighbors, 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 door-way and watched her suspiciously and without compa.s.sion. There was no one there who did not believe her to be the murderess. No one except 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 t.i.tle 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."

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 munic.i.p.ality in which Marca was enrolled had its seat of justice, its tax-offices, and its schools.

There was 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.

In a later time they remembered against him all this which he did now.

The feast of St. Peter and St. 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 pa.s.sion for Falko Melegari were facts known to all the village, and who else had any interest in his death? The whole of Marca p.r.o.nounced 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.

"Neighbors 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 pa.s.sed, 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 cas.e.m.e.nt, saw Falko Melegari on his gray 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.

Gesualdo bowed his head and spread out his hands, palm downward, in a gesture which meant hopeless doubt.

"I went 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 naught of it. Oh, my G.o.d, why was I not here? They should not have taken her without its costing them hard."

"You would have done her no good," said 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 clinched 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.

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 among 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 Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo's have filled his soul was quenched in the darkness of horror in which her fate was s.n.a.t.c.hed 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. Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo 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 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 pa.s.sing of the days which came after this feast of the two apostles was full of an unspeakable horror to him, and in the brief s.p.a.ce of them he grew haggard, hollow-cheeked, almost aged, despite his youth. The dread formalities and tyrannies of the law seized on the quiet village and tortured every soul in it: every one 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 pa.s.sionate 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 Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo, murdered on the morning of the day of St. Peter and St. Paul, was consigned to prison, to be "detained as a precaution" under the lock and key of the law, circ.u.mstantial evidence being held to be strongly against her as the primary cause, if not the actual executant, of the murder of her lord.

Every one 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 among 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-favored, 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-humored impatience.

"But, G.o.d in heaven, why not when it is true?" shouted Falko.

"It is always true when the _damo_ is a man of honor?" 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 neighbors, and was taken to the town of Vendramin, and there left to lie in prison until such time as the majesty of the law should be pleased to decide whether or not 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-colored 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 Ta.s.silo, who had always had a share in it, both of labor 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 ear-rings 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?

They 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 a.s.sure 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 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.