"We had a terrible scene an hour ago," said Generosa, passing 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 Tassilo. 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 Tasso 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. "Tasso 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-shore, 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 Tassilo. 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 noble 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 Tasso Tassilo, 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; Tassilo 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 circumstances. 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 passions 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."

"You are wrong, my daughter," said Gesualdo, sternly. He colored; he knew not why. "I know nothing of these passions," he added, with some embarrassment; "but I know what duty is, and yours is clear."

He did not know much of human nature, and of woman nature nothing, yet he dimly comprehended that Generosa was now at that crisis of her life when all the ardors of her youth and all the delight in her own power made her passionately rebellious against the cruelties of her fate; when it was impossible to make duty look other than hateful to her, and when the very peril and difficulty which surrounded her love-story made it the sweeter and more irresistible to her. She was of a passionate, ardent, careless, daring temperament; and the dangers of the intrigue which she pursued had no terrors for her, whilst the indifference which she had felt for years for her husband had deepened of late into hatred.

"One is not a stick, nor a stone, nor a beam of timber, nor a block of granite, that one should be able to live without love all one's days!" she cried, with passion and contempt.

She threw the branches of pomegranate over the hedge, gave him a glance half contemptuous and half compassionate, and left the church door.

"After all, what should he understand!" she thought. "He is a saint, but he is not a man."

Gesualdo looked after her a moment as she went over the court-yard and between the stems of the cypresses out towards the open hill-side. The sun had set; there was a rosy after-glow which bathed her elastic figure in a carmine light; she had that beautiful walk which some Italian women have who have never worn shoes in the first fifteen years of their lives. The light shone on her dusky auburn hair, her gold ear-rings, the slender column of her throat, her vigorous and voluptuous form. Gesualdo looked after her, and a subtile warmth and pain passed through him, bringing with it a sharp sense of guilt. He looked away from her and went within his church and prayed.

That night Falko Melegari had just alighted from the saddle of his good gray horse, when he was told that the parocco of San Bartolo was waiting to see him.

The villa had been famous and splendid in other days; but it formed now only one of the many neglected possessions of a gay young noble, called Ser Baldo by his dependents, who spent what little money he had in pleasure-places out of Italy, seldom or never came near his estates, and accepted without investigation all such statements of accounts as his various men of business were disposed to send to him.

His steward lived on the ground-floor of the great villa, in the vast frescoed chambers with their domed and gilded ceilings, their sculptured cornices, their carved doors, their stately couches with the satin dropping in shreds, and the pale tapestries with the moths and the mice at work in them. His narrow camp-bed, his deal table and chairs, were sadly out of place in those once splendid halls; but he did not think about it: he vaguely liked the space and the ruined grandeur about him, and all the thoughts he had were given to his love, Generosa, the wife of Tasso Tassilo. From the terraces of the villa he could see the mill a mile farther down the stream, and he would pass half the short nights of the summer looking at the distant lights in it.

He was only five-and-twenty, and he was passionately in love with all the increased ardor of a forbidden passion.

He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, was well-made and very tall; in character he was neither better nor worse than most men of his age, but as a steward he was tolerably honest, and as a lover he was thoroughly sincere. He went with a quick step into the central hall to meet his visitor: he supposed that the vicar had come about flowers for the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, which was on the morrow. Though the villa gardens were wholly neglected, they were still rich in flowers which wanted no care, lilies, lavender, old-fashioned roses, oleanders red and white, and magnolia-trees.

"Good-evening, reverend Father. You do me honor," he said, as he saw Gesualdo. "Is there anything that I can do for you? I am your humble servant."

Gesualdo looked at him curiously. He had never noticed the young man before: he had seen him ride past, he had seen him at mass, he had spoken to him of the feasts of the Church, but he had never noticed him. Now he looked at him curiously as he answered, without any preface whatever,—

"I am come to speak to you of Generosa Fè, the wife of Tasso Tassilo."

The young steward colored violently. He was astonished and silent.

"She loves you," said Gesualdo, simply.

Falko Melegari made a gesture as though he implied that it was his place neither to deny nor to affirm.

"She loves you," said Gesualdo, again.

The young man had that fatuous smile which unconsciously expresses the consciousness of conquest. But he was honest in his passion and ardent in it.

"Not so much as I love her," he said, rapturously, forgetful of his hearer.

Gesualdo frowned.

"She is the wife of another man," he said, with reproof. Falko Melegari shrugged his shoulders: that did not seem any reason against it to him.

"How will it end?" said the priest.

The lover smiled. "These things always end in one way."

Gesualdo winced, as though some one had wounded him.

"I am come to bid you go out of Marca," he said, simply.

The young man stared at him; then he laughed angrily.

"Good Ser Vicario," he said, impatiently, "you are the keeper of our souls, no doubt, but not quite to such a point as that. Has Tassilo sent you to me, or she?" he added, with a gleam of suspicion in his eyes.

"No one has sent me."

"Why, then–"

"Because, if you do not go, there will be tragedy and misery. Tasso Tassilo is not a man to make you welcome to his couch. I have known Generosa since she was a little child: we were both born on the Bocca d'Arno. She is of a warm nature, but not a deep one; and if you go away she will forget. Tassilo is a rude man and a hard one; he gives her all she has; he has many claims on her, for in his way he has been generous and tender. You are a stranger; you can only ruin her life; you can with ease find another gattaria far away in another province: why will you not go? If you really loved her you would go."

Falko laughed. "Dear Don Gesualdo, you are a holy man, but you know nothing of love."

Gesualdo winced a little again. It was the second time this had been said to him this evening.

"Is it love," he said, after a pause, "to risk her murder by her husband? I tell you Tassilo is not a man to take his dishonor quietly."

"Who cares what Tassilo does?" said the young steward, petulantly. "If he touches a hair of her head I will make him die a thousand deaths."

"All those are words," said Gesualdo. "You cannot mend one crime by another, and you cannot protect a woman from her husband's just vengeance. There is only one way by which to save her from the danger you have dragged her into. It is for you to go away."

"I will go away when this house walks a mile," said Falko. "Not before. Go away!" he echoed, in wrath. "What! run like a mongrel dog before Tassilo's anger? What! leave her all alone to curse me as a faithless coward? What! go away, when all my life and my soul, and all the light of my eyes, is in Marca? Don Gesualdo, you are a good man, but you are mad. You must pardon me if I speak roughly. Your words make me beside myself."

"Do you believe in no duty, then?"

"I believe in the duty of every honest lover," said Falko, with vehemence, "and that duty is to do everything that the loved one wishes. She is bound to a cur; she is unhappy; she has not even any children to comfort her; she is like a beautiful flower shut up in a cellar, and she loves me—me!—and you bid me go away! Don Gesualdo, keep to your church offices, and leave the loves of others alone. What should you know of them? Forgive me if I am rude. You are a holy man, but you know nothing at all of men and women."

"I do not know much," said Gesualdo, meekly.

He was depressed and intimidated. He was sensible of his own utter ignorance of the passions of life. This man, nigh his own age, but so full of vigor, of ardor, of indignation, of pride in his consciousness that he was beloved, and of resolve to stay where that love was, be the cost what it would, daunted him with a sense of power and of triumph such as he himself could not even comprehend, and yet wistfully envied. It was sin, no doubt, he said to himself; and yet it was life, it was strength, it was virility.

He had come to reprove, to censure, and to persuade into repentance this headstrong lover, and he could only stand before him feeble and oppressed with a sense of his own ignorance and childishness. All the stock, trite arguments which his religious belief supplied him seemed to fall away and to be of no more use than empty husks of rotten nuts before the urgency, the fervor, and the self-will of real life. This man and woman loved each other, and they cared for no other fact than this on earth or in heaven. He left the villa-grounds in silence, with only a gesture of farewell salutation.

CHAPTER II

"Poor innocent, he meant well!" thought the steward, as he watched the dark, slender form of the priest pass away through the vines and mulberry-trees. The young man did not greatly venerate the Church himself, though he showed himself at mass and sent flowers for the feast-days because it was the custom to do so. He was like most young Italians who have had a smattering of education, very indifferent on such matters, and inclined to ridicule. He left them for women and old men. But there was something about his visitant which touched him,—a simplicity, an unworldliness, a sincerity, which moved his respect; and he knew in his secret heart that the parocco, as he called him, was right enough in everything that he had said.

Gesualdo himself went on his solitary way, his buckled shoes dragging wearily over the dusty grass of the wayside. He had done no good, and he did not see what good he could do. He felt helpless before the force and speed of an unknown and guilty passion, as he once felt before a forest fire which he had seen in the Marche. All his Church books gave him homilies enough on the sins of the flesh and the temptings of the devil; but none of these helped him before the facts of this lawless and godless love, which seemed to pass high above his head like a whirlwind. He went on slowly and dully along the edge of the river-bed: a sense of something which he had always missed, which he would miss eternally, was with him.

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 God.

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 passed 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 passions; they oppressed and alarmed him.

As he passed 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 impassioned imprecation. Tasso Tassilo 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 lust 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 passion. He left her with apprehension and a pained sense of his own impotence. She promised him that she would provoke Tassilo 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 mass,—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 mass was just over when into the church from without there arose a strange sound, shrill and yet hoarse, 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, "Tasso Tassilo 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, hoarse 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, compassion, 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.

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 passed a feverish night, locking her door against her husband, and spending the whole weary hours at the casement 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 passion.

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 Tasso Tassilo. 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.