A House-Party Part 29

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, p.r.i.c.king 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 moment 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 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 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 lantern and let himself out of his own door noiselessly, stealthily, as though he were on some guilty errand, and took the s.e.xton's spade from the tool-house, and went across the black shadows which stretched over the gra.s.s, towards the place where the body of Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo 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 Gesualdo awakened and alarmed them. He set his lantern 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 cla.s.ses carries every day, 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. Gravely 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 pa.s.sed him.

What had his reverence, they wondered, been doing with a spade at this time of night? Did he dig for treasure? There was a tradition in the country-side of sacks of ducats which had been buried by the river to save them from the French troops in the time of the invasion by the First Consul.

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 _capellano_, he bade him rise and set the bell ringing for the first ma.s.s. The man got up, grumbling because it was still quite dark, and next day talked to his neighbors 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 every one 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 agonized 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 bedchamber, 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, waking and sleeping, yet as unsuspected as a child unborn. And all the while Generosa was in prison. There was only one chance left; if she should be acquitted by her judges. But even then the slur and stain of an imputed, though unproved, crime would always rest upon her and make her future dark, her name a by-word in her birthplace. Yes, after what her lover had said, 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 10th of next month?" he said, in a low, stifled voice.

The young man, leaning back in his wooden chair, gave a sign of a.s.sent.

"And you," said 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 color: he hesitated.

"You will not!" said Gesualdo.

"I have not said so," answered the young man, evasively. "I do not know that she would exact it."

Exact it! 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 neighbors 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 always the strongest instincts. Gesualdo 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 G.o.d 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 every one say that my wife had been in jail 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. Gesualdo had gone across the rough gra.s.s of the garden, and had pa.s.sed 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 audit 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 snipes under the gorse. 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 a while to Gesualdo, as to the only one who like himself cared for the fate of Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo's wife; but now that suspicion had entered into him, there returned with it all his detestation of the Church and all the secular hatred 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 is a murderer as well!"

He knew that the idea was a kind of madness. Gesualdo had never been known to hurt a fly; indeed, his aversion even to 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 forbidden them to throw stones at the lambs or kids they drove to pasture. "They are not baptized," the children had often said, with a grin; and Gesualdo had as often answered, "The good G.o.d baptized 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 Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo 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 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, among 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 pa.s.sed (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 Italian sceptic is as narrow and as arrogant in his free-thought as the Italian believer in his bigotry. 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 at heart for the galleys or the scaffold,--a ma.s.s of concealed iniquity covered by his cloth.

"I believe you know more of it than any one," he said, roughly, one day when he pa.s.sed the priest on a narrow field-path, while his eyes flashed suspiciously over the downcast face of 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 embarra.s.sment 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, pa.s.sionately, "may all the devils you believe in torture you through all eternity!"

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, 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.