by Ouida
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 u
p 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.