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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42944 ***
+
+    A RAINY JUNE
+
+    ETC.
+
+
+
+
+OUIDA'S NOVELS
+
+    Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 3_s._ 6_d._ each; post 8vo, illustrated
+    boards, 2_s._ each.
+
+    _Held in Bondage._
+    _Tricotrin._
+    _Strathmore._
+    _Chandos._
+    _Cecil Castlemaine's Gage._
+    _Under Two Flags._
+    _Puck._
+    _Idalia._
+    _Folle-Favine._
+    _A Dog of Flanders._
+    _Pascarel._
+    _Signa._
+    _Two Little Wooden Shoes._
+    _In a Winter City_.
+    _Ariadne._
+    _Friendship._
+    _Moths._
+    _Pipistrello._
+    _A Village Commune._
+    _In Maremma._
+    _Bimbi._
+    _Syrlin._
+    _Wanda._
+    _Frescoes._
+    _Othmar._
+    _Princess Napraxine._
+    _Guilderoy._
+    _Ruffino._
+    _Santa Barbara._
+    _Two Offenders._
+
+    POPULAR EDITIONS, medium 8vo, 6_d._ each.
+
+    _Under Two Flags._
+    _Held in Bondage._
+    _Strathmore._
+    _Chandos._
+    _Moths._
+    _Puck._
+    _Tricotrin._
+    _The Massarenes._
+
+_A Rainy June, etc._ Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._
+
+_The Massarenes._ Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._
+
+_Syrlin._ Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._; post 8vo,
+
+    picture cloth, flat back, 2_s._; illustrated boards, 2_s._
+
+_Two Little Wooden Shoes._ LARGE TYPE EDITION.
+
+    Fcp. 8vo, cloth, 1_s._ net; leather, 1_s._ 6_d._ net.
+
+_The Waters of Edera._ Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._;
+
+    picture cloth, flat back, 2_s._
+
+    _Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos_, selected from the Works of OUIDA by
+    F. SYDNEY MORRIS. Post 8vo, cloth extra, 5_s._; CHEAP EDITION,
+    illustrated boards, 2_s._
+
+
+London: CHATTO & WINDUS, 111 St. Martin's Lane, W.C.
+
+
+
+
+    A RAINY JUNE
+
+
+    AND OTHER STORIES
+
+    BY
+
+    OUIDA
+
+    AUTHOR OF 'PUCK,' 'TRICOTRIN,' 'THE MASSARENES,' ETC.
+
+    [Illustration]
+
+
+    A NEW EDITION
+
+
+    LONDON
+    CHATTO & WINDUS
+    1905
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                              PAGE
+
+    A RAINY JUNE                 1
+
+    DON GESUALDO                89
+
+    THE SILVER CHRIST          215
+
+    A LEMON-TREE               305
+
+
+
+
+    A RAINY JUNE
+
+
+
+
+A RAINY JUNE
+
+
+    _From the Principe di San Zenone, Claridge's, London, to the
+    Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Monterone, near Val d'Aosta, Italy._
+
+'CARISSIMA TERESA--I received your letter, which is delightful to me
+because it is yours, and terrible to me because it scolds me, abuses
+me, flies at me, makes me feel like a schoolboy who has had a scolding.
+Yes; it is quite true. I cannot help it. She has bewitched me. She is a
+lily made into a woman. I feared you would be angry, especially angry
+because she is a foreigner; but the hour of fate has struck. You will
+not wonder when you see her. She is as blonde as the dawn and as pure
+as a pearl. It seems to me that I have never loved any woman at all in
+my life before. To love her is like plunging one's hand in cool spring
+water on a midsummer noon. She is such repose; such innocence; such
+holiness! In the midst of this crowded, over-coloured, vulgar London
+life--for it is very vulgar at its highest--she seems like some angel
+of purity. I saw her first standing with a knot of roses in her hand
+under a cedar tree, at one of their afternoon clubs on the river. She
+was drinking a cup of tea; they are always drinking tea. And she is so
+white. I never saw anything so white except the snow on the Leonessa.
+She is not in the least like the fast young ladies of England, of whom
+one sees so much in the winter at Rome. I do not like their fast young
+women. If you want a woman who is fast, a Parisienne is best, or even
+an American. Englishwomen overdo it. She is just like a primrose; like
+a piece of porcelain; like a soft, pale star shining in the morning.
+I write all kinds of poetry when I think of her. And then, there is
+something _Sainte Nitouche_ about her which is delicious, because it is
+so real. The only thing which was wanting in her was that she ought to
+have been shut up in a convent, and I ought to have had to imperil my
+soul for all eternity by getting her over a stone wall with a silken
+ladder. But it is a prosaic age, and this is a very prosaic country.
+London amuses me, but it is such a crowd, and it is frightfully ugly.
+I cannot think how people who are so enormously rich as the English
+can put up with such ugliness. The houses are all too small, even
+the big ones. I have not seen a good ballroom; they say there are
+good ones in the country houses. The clubs are admirable, but life in
+general seems to me hurried, costly, ungraceful, very noisy, and almost
+entirely consecrated to eating. It is made up of a scramble and a mass
+of food. People engage themselves for dinners a month in advance.
+Everybody's engagement book is so full that it is the burden of their
+days. They accept everything, and, at the eleventh hour, pick out what
+they prefer, and, to use their own language, "throw over" the rest.
+I do not think it is pretty behaviour, but nobody seems to object to
+it. I wonder that the women do not do so, but they seem to be afraid
+of losing their men altogether if they exact good manners from them.
+People here are not at all well-mannered, to my taste; neither the men
+nor the women. They are brusque and negligent, and have few _petits
+soins_. You should have come over for my marriage to show them all
+what an exquisite creature a Venetian patrician beauty can be. Why
+_would_ you marry that Piedmontese? Only two things seem to be of any
+importance in England--they are, eating and politics. They eat all
+day long, and are always talking of their politics. Half of them say
+some person I never heard of is the destruction of England, the other
+half say the same person is the salvation of England. Myself, I don't
+care the least which he is; only I know they cannot keep him out of
+their conversation, one way or another, for five minutes; which, to
+an unprejudiced foreigner, is a _seccatura_. But to-morrow I go down
+into the country with my primrose--all alone; to-morrow she will be
+mine altogether and unalterably, and I shall hear nothing about their
+detestable politics or anything that is tiresome. Of course, you are
+wondering that I should take this momentous step. I wonder myself,
+but then if I did not marry I should be compelled to say an eternal
+farewell to the Lenten Lily. She has such a spiked wall around her
+of male relatives and family greatness! It is not the convent wall;
+there is no ladder that will go over it; one must enter by the big
+front door, or not at all. Felicitate me, and yet compassionate me! I
+am going to Paradise, no doubt; but I have the uncomfortable doubt as
+to whether it will suit me, which all people who are going to Paradise
+always do feel. Why? Because we are mortal or because we are sinners?
+_A reverderci, cara mia Teresina!_ Write to me at my future Eden: it is
+called Coombe Bysset, near Luton, Bedfordshire. We are to be there a
+month. It is the choice of my primrose.'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Mary Bruton, Belgrave Square, London, to Mrs
+    d'Arcy, British Embassy, Berlin._
+
+'The season has been horribly dull; quantities of marriages--people
+always will marry, however dull it is. The one most talked about is
+that of the Cowes' second daughter, Lady Gladys, with the Prince of
+San Zenone. She is one of the beauties, but a very simple girl, quite
+old-fashioned, indeed. She has refused Lord Hampshire, and a good many
+other people, and then fallen in love in a week with this Roman, who is
+certainly as handsome as a picture. But Cowes didn't like it at all;
+he gave in because he couldn't help it, but he was dreadfully vexed
+that the Hampshire affair did not come off instead. Hampshire is such
+a good creature, and his estates are close to theirs. It is certainly
+very provoking for them that this Italian must take it into his head to
+spend a season in London, and lead the cotillon so beautifully that all
+the young women talked of nothing else but his charms.'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Mona St Clair, Grosvenor Square, London, to Miss
+    Burns, Schooner-yacht Persephone, off Cherbourg._
+
+'The wedding was very pretty yesterday. We had frocks of tussore silk,
+with bouquets of orchids and Penelope Boothby caps. She looked as
+white as her gown--such a goose!--it was ivory satin, with _point de
+Venise_. He is quite too handsome, and I cannot think what he could
+see in her! He gave us each a locket with _her_ portrait inside. I
+wished it had been _his_! I daresay Hampshire would have been better
+for her, and worn longer than Romeo. Lord Cowes is furious about Romeo.
+He detests the religion and all that, and he could hardly make himself
+look pleasant even at church. Of course, there were two ceremonies. The
+Cardinal had consented at last, though I believe he had made all kinds
+of fuss first. Lady Gladys, you know, is very, _very_ High Church, and
+I suppose that reconciled a little the very irreconcilable Prelate. She
+thinks of nothing but the Church and her missions and her poor people.
+I am afraid the Roman Prince will get dreadfully bored. And they are
+going down into Bedfordshire, of all places, to be shut up for a month!
+It is very stupid of her, and such a wet season as it is! They are
+going to Coombe Bysset, her aunt, Lady Caroline's place. I fancy Romeo
+will soon be bored, and I don't think Coombe Bysset at all judicious. I
+would have gone to Homburg, or Deauville, or Japan.'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton,
+    Beds., to the Countess of Cowes, London._
+
+'DEAREST MOTHER,--I am too, too, too happy. It is no use writing about
+it. I would if I could, but I _can't_. He is delighted with Coombe,
+and says the verdure is something wonderful. We got here just as the
+sun was setting. There were all Aunt Carrie's school children out to
+meet us, with baskets of roses. Piero said they looked like bigger
+roses themselves. He is enchanted with our rural England. It is very
+fine to-day, and I do so hope it won't rain, but the glass is falling.
+Forgive a hurried word like this. I am going to take Piero on the lake.
+I know you haven't liked it, dear; but I am sure when you see how happy
+I am you will say there was never anyone like him on earth.
+
+'He is an angel. We ride in the morning, we sing and play in the
+evening. We adore each other all the twenty-four hours through. I
+wonder however I could have lived without him. I am longing to see all
+he tells me about his great marble palaces, and his immense dreamlike
+villas, and his gardens with their multitude of statues, and the
+wonderful light that is over it all. He protests it is always twilight
+with us in England. It seems so absurd, when nowadays everybody knows
+everything about everywhere, that I should never have been to Italy.
+But we were such country mice down at dear, old, dull, green, muddy
+Ditchworth. Lanciano, the biggest of all their big places, must be like
+a poem. It is a great house, all of different coloured marbles, set
+amidst ilex groves on the mountain side, with cascades like Terni, and
+gardens that were planned by Giulio Romano, and temples that were there
+in the days of Horace. I long to see it all, and yet I hope he will not
+want to leave Coombe yet. There is no place like the place where one
+is _first_ happy. And somehow, I fancy I look better in these homely,
+low rooms of Aunt Carrie's, with their Chippendale furniture and their
+smell of dry rose leaves, than I shall do in those enormous palaces
+which want a Semiramis or a Cleopatra. They were kind enough to make a
+fuss about me in London, but I never thought much of myself, and I am
+afraid I must feel rather dull to Piero, who is so brilliant himself,
+and has all kinds of talents.'
+
+
+    _From the Countess of Cowes, Cowes House, London, to the
+    Duchess of Dunne, Wavernake, Worcestershire._
+
+'No, I confess I do not approve of the marriage; it will take her away
+from us, and I am afraid she won't be happy. She has always had such
+very exaggerated ideas. She is not in the least the girl of the period.
+Of course, she was taken by his picturesque face and his admirable
+manners. His manners are really wonderful in these days, when our men
+have none at all; and he has charmingly caressing and deferential ways
+which even win me. I cannot wonder at her, poor child, but I am afraid;
+candidly, I am afraid! He makes all our men look like ploughboys. And
+it was all done in such tremendous haste that she had no time to reason
+or reflect; and I don't think they have said two serious words to each
+other. If only it had been dear old Hampshire, whom we have known all
+our lives, and whose lands march with ours! But that was too good to
+be, I suppose, and there was no positive objection we could raise to
+San Zenone. We could not refuse his proposals merely because he is
+too good-looking, isn't an Englishman, and has a mother who is reputed
+_maîtresse femme_! Gladys writes from Coombe as from the seventh
+heaven. They have been married three days! But I fear she will have
+trouble before her. I fear he is weak and unstable, and will not back
+her up amongst his own people when she goes amongst them; and though,
+now-a-days, a man and woman, once wedded, see so little of each other,
+Gladys is not quite of the time in her notions. She will take it all
+very seriously, poor child, and expect the idyl to be prolonged over
+the honeymoon. And she is very English in her tastes, and has been so
+very little out of England. However, every girl in London is envying
+her; it is only her father and I who see these little black specks on
+the fruit she has plucked. They are gone to Coombe by her wish. I think
+it would have been wiser not to subject an Italian to such an ordeal as
+a wet English June in an utterly lonely country house. You know, even
+Englishmen, who can always find such refuge and comfort in prize pigs
+and strawyards, and unusually big mangolds, get bored if they are in
+the country when there is nothing to shoot, and Englishmen are used to
+being drenched to the skin every time they move out. He is not. Lord
+Cowes says love is like a cotton frock--very pretty as long as the sun
+shines, but it won't stand a wetting. I wish you had been here; Gladys
+looked quite lovely. The Cardinal most kindly relented, and the whole
+thing went off very well. Of the San Zenone family, there was only
+present Don Fabrizio, the younger son, a very good-looking young man.
+The terrible Duchess didn't come, on account, I think, of her sulks.
+She hates the marriage on her side as much as we do on ours, I am sure.
+Really, one must believe a little bit in fate. I do think that Gladys
+would soon have resigned herself to accepting Hampshire, out of sheer
+fatigue at saying "No," and, besides, she knew that we are so fond of
+him, and to live in the same county was such an attraction. But this
+irresistible young Roman must take it into his head that he wished to
+see a London season, and when once they had met (it was one afternoon
+at Ranelagh) there was no more chance for our poor, dear, good, stupid
+neighbour. Well, we must hope for the best!'
+
+
+    _From the Principe Piero di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the
+    Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Rome._
+
+'CARISSIMA MIA,--There are quantities of birds in little green nests
+at this season. I am in a green nest. I never saw anything so green as
+this Paradise of mine. It is certainly Paradise. If I feel a little
+like a fish out of water instead of a happy bird in it, it is only
+because I have been such a sinner. No doubt it is only that. Paradise
+is chilly; this is its only fault. It is the sixth of June and we have
+fires. Fires in the dressing-rooms, fires in the drawing-rooms, fires
+at both ends of the library, fires on both sides of the hall, fires
+everywhere; and with all of them I shiver. I cannot help shivering,
+and I feel convinced that in my rapture I have mistaken the month--it
+must be December! It is all extraordinarily trim and neat here; the
+whole place looks in such perfect order that it might have been taken
+out of a box of German toys last night. I have a little the sensation
+of being always at church. That, no doubt, is the effect of the first
+step towards virtue that I have ever made. Pray do not think that I
+am not perfectly happy. I should be more sensible of my happiness, no
+doubt, if I had not quite such a feeling, due to the dampness of the
+air, of having been put into an aquarium, like a jelly-fish. But Gladys
+is adorable in every way; and if she were not quite so easily scared,
+would be perfection. It was that little air of hers, like that of some
+irresistible Alpine flower, which bewitched me. But when one has got
+the Alpine flower, one cannot live for ever on it!--however _ma basta_!
+I was curious to know what a northern woman was like; I know now. She
+is exquisite, but a little monotonous, and a little prudish. Certainly
+she will never compromise me; but then, perhaps, she will never let
+me compromise myself, and that will be terrible! I am ungrateful; all
+men are ungrateful; but, then, is it not a little the women's fault?
+They do keep so very close to one. Now, an angel, you know, becomes
+tiresome if one never gets out of the shadow of its wings--here, at
+Coombe Bysset, the angel fills the horizon, and one's distance is a
+Botticelli picture!'
+
+
+    _From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Rome, to
+    the Principe Piero di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton, Beds.,
+    England._
+
+'CARO MIO PIERINO,--Are you sure you have an angel? People have a trick
+of always calling very commonplace women angels. "She is an angel" is
+a polite way of saying "she is a bore." I am not sure either that I
+should care to live with a veritable angel. One would see too much of
+the wings, as you say; and even a guardian angel must be the _terzo
+incommodo_ sometimes. Why _would_ you marry an English girl? I daresay
+she is so good-tempered that she never contradicts you, and you grow
+peevish out of sheer weariness at having everything your own way. If
+you had married Nicoletta, as I wanted you to do, she would have flown
+at you, like a little tigress, a dozen times a week, and kept you on
+the _qui vive_ to please her. We know what our own men want. I have
+half a mind to write to your wife and tell her that no Italian is
+comfortable unless he has his ears boxed twice a day. If your wife
+would be a little disagreeable, probably you would adore her. But it
+is a great mistake, _Pierino mio_, to confuse marriage and love. In
+reality, they have no more to do with one another than a horse chestnut
+and a chestnut horse; than the _zuccone_ that means a vegetable, and
+the _zuccone_ that means a simpleton. I should imagine that your
+wet English bird's-nest will force you to realise this truth with
+lamentable rapidity.'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton,
+    Beds., to Lady Gwendoline Dormer, British Embassy, Vienna._
+
+'DEAREST GWEN,--I did promise, I know, to write to you at once, and
+tell you everything; and a whole week is gone and I couldn't do it, I
+really couldn't; and even now I don't know where to begin. I suppose
+I am dreadfully _vieux jeu_. I suppose you will only laugh at me, and
+say "spoons." How glad I am Piero cannot say a word of English, and
+so I never hear that dreadful jargon which I do think so ugly and so
+vulgar, though you are all so fond of it. I ought not to have come to
+Coombe Bysset; at least, they all said it was silly. Nessie Fitzgerald
+was back in London before the week was out, and doing a play. To be
+sure she was married in October, and she didn't care a bit about him,
+and I suppose that made all the difference. To me, it seems so much
+more natural to shut one's self up, and Piero thought so too; but I
+am half afraid he finds it a little dull now. You see, we knew very
+little of one another. He came for a month of the London season, and he
+met me at Ranelagh, and he danced the cotillon with me at a good many
+houses, and we cared for one another in a week, and were married in a
+month, as you know. Papa hated it because it wasn't Lord Burlington or
+Lord Hampshire. But he couldn't really object, because the San Zenone
+are such a great Roman family, and all the world knows them; and they
+are Spanish dukes as well as Italian princes. And Piero is such a
+grand gentleman, and made quite superb settlements; much more, Papa
+said, than he could have expected, so poor as we are. But what I meant
+was, meeting like that in the rush of the season, at balls and dinners
+and garden parties, and luncheons at Hurlingham, and being married to
+one another just before Ascot, we really knew nothing at all of each
+other's tastes or habits or character. And when, on the first morning
+at Coombe, we realised that we were together for life, I think we both
+felt very odd. We adored one another, but we didn't know what to
+talk about; we never had talked to each other; we never had time. And
+I am afraid there is something of this feeling with him. I am afraid
+he is dreadfully bored, and I told him so, and he answered, "My dear
+little angel, your admirable countrymen are not bored in the country
+because they are always eating. They eat a big breakfast, they eat a
+big luncheon, they eat a big dinner, they are always eating. Myself, I
+have not that resource. Give me a little coffee and a little wine, and
+let me eat only once a day. You never told me I was expected to absorb
+continually food like the crocodiles." What would he say if he saw a
+hunting breakfast in the shires? I suppose life _is_ very material in
+England. I think it is why there is so much typhoid fever. Do you know,
+he wasn't going to dress for dinner because we were alone. As if that
+was any reason! I told him it would look so odd to the servants if he
+didn't dress, so he has done so since. But he says it was a _seccatura_
+(this means, I believe, a bore), and he told me we English sacrifice
+our whole lives to fuss, form and the outside of things. There is a
+good deal of truth in this. What numbers of people one knows who are
+ever so poor, and who yet, for the sake of the look of the thing, get
+into debt over their ears! And then, quantities of them go to church
+for the form of the thing, when they don't _believe_ one atom; they
+will tell you at luncheon that they don't. I fancy Italians are much
+more honest than we are in this sort of way. Piero says if they are
+poor, they don't mind saying so, and if they have no religion, they
+don't pretend to have any. He declares we English spoil all our lives
+because we fancy it is our duty to pretend to be something we are
+not. Now, isn't that really very true? I am sure you would delight in
+all he says. He is so original, so unconventional; our people think
+him ignorant, because he doesn't read, and doesn't care a straw about
+politics. But I assure you he is as clever as anything can be; and he
+doesn't get his ideas out of newspapers; nor repeat like a parrot what
+his chief of party tells him. I do wish you could have come over and
+could have seen him. It was so unkind of you to be ill just at the
+very time of my marriage. You know that it is only to you that I ever
+say quite what I feel about things. The girls are too young, and Mamma
+doesn't understand. She never could see why I would not marry poor
+Hampshire. She always said that I should care for him in time. I don't
+think Mamma can ever have been in love with anybody. I wonder what
+_she_ married for--don't you?'
+
+
+    _From the Principe Piero di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the
+    Count Zazzari, Italian Legation, London._
+
+'CARO GIGI,--Pray send me all the French novels you can find, and a
+case of Turkish cigarettes. I am in Paradise, but Paradise is a little
+dull, and exceedingly damp, at least in England. Does it always rain in
+this country? It has rained here without stopping for seventeen days
+and a half. I produce upon myself the impression of being one of those
+larks who sit behind wires on a little square of wet grass. I should
+like to run up to London. I see you have Sarah and Coquelin and the
+others; but I suppose it would be against all the unwritten canons of a
+honeymoon. What a strange institution. A honeymoon! Who first invented
+it?'
+
+
+    _From the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton, Beds.,
+    to the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Milano._
+
+'CARA TERESINA,--I ought to have written to you long since, but you
+know I am not fond of writing. I really, also, have nothing to say.
+Happy the people who have no history! I am like that people. I was
+made happy two weeks ago; I have been happy ever since. It is slightly
+monotonous. How can you vary happiness, except by quarrelling a little?
+And then it would not be happiness any longer. It seems to me that
+happiness is like an omelette, best impromptu.
+
+'Do not think that I am ungrateful, however, either to fate or to the
+charming innocent who has become my companion. We have not two ideas
+in common. She is lovely to look at, to caress, to adore; but what to
+say to her I confess I have no notion. Love ought never to have to find
+dinner-table conversation. He ought to climb up by a ladder, and get
+over a balcony, and, when his ecstasies are ended, he ought to go the
+same way. I fancy she is much better educated than I am, but, as that
+would be a discovery fatal to our comfort, I endeavour not to make
+it. She is extraordinarily sweet-tempered: indeed, so much so, that
+it makes me angry; it gives one no excuse for being impatient. She is
+divine, exquisite, nymph-like; but, alas, she is a prude!
+
+'Never was any creature on earth so exquisitely sensitive, so easily
+shocked. To live with her is to walk upon eggshells. Of course, it is
+very nice in a wife; very "proper," as the English say; but it is not
+amusing. It amused me at first, but now it seems to me a defect. She
+has brought me down to this terribly damp and very green place, where
+it rains every day and night. There is a library without novels; there
+is a cellar without absinthe; there is a _cuisine_ without tomatoes, or
+garlic, or any oil at all; there is an admirably-ordered establishment,
+so quiet that I fancy I am in a penitentiary. There are some adorably
+fine horses, and there are acres of glasshouses used to grow fruits
+that we throw in Italy to the pigs. By the way, there are also several
+of our field flowers in the conservatories. We eat pretty nearly all
+day; there is nothing else to do. Outside, the scenery is oppressively
+green, the green of spinach; there is no variety, there are no ilexes
+and there are no olives. I understand now why the English painters give
+such staring colours; unless the colours scream, you don't see them in
+this aqueous, dim atmosphere. That is why a benign Providence has made
+the landscape a _purée aux epinards_.
+
+'I think the air here, inside and out, must weigh heavily; it lies on
+one's lungs like a sponge. I once went down in a diving-bell when I
+was a boy; I have the sensation in this country of being always down
+in a diving-bell. The scamp Toniello, whom you may remember as having
+played Leporello to my Don Giovanno ever since we were lads, amuses
+himself with making love to all the pretty maidens in the village; but,
+then, I must not do that--now. They are not very pretty either. They
+have very big teeth, and very long upper lips. Their skins, however,
+are admirable. For a horse's skin and a woman's, there is no land
+comparable to England. It is the country of grooming.'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to Lady
+    Gwendolen Chichester, British Embassy, Petersburg._
+
+'He laughed at me because I went to church yesterday, and really I only
+went because I thought it _right_. We have been here a fortnight, and
+I have never been to church at all till yesterday, and you know how
+very serious dear Aunt Carrie is. To-day, as it is the second Sunday
+I have been here, I thought I ought to go just once, and I did go;
+but it was dreadfully pompous and lonely in the big red pew, and the
+villagers stared so, and all the little girls of the village giggled,
+and looked at me from under their sun-bonnets. Dear Mr Coate preached a
+sermon on Marriage. It was very kind of him; but, oh, how I wished he
+hadn't! When I got back, Piero was playing billiards with his servant.
+I wondered what Mr Coate would have thought of him. To be sure, English
+clergymen have to get used to fast Sundays now, when the country houses
+are full. It is such a dear little yew walk to the church from the
+house here, not twenty yards long, and all lined with fuchsia. Do you
+remember it? Even Piero admits that it is very pretty, only he says it
+is a vignette prettiness, which, I suppose, is true. "You can see no
+horizon, only a green wall," he keeps complaining; and his beautiful,
+lustrous eyes look as if they were made to gaze through endless
+fields of light. When I asked him yesterday what he really thought of
+England, what do you suppose he said? He said, "_Mia cara_, I think
+it would be a most delightful country if it had one-fifth of its
+population, one-half of its houses, a tithe of its dinners, a quarter
+of its machinery, none of its factories, none of its tramways, and a
+wholly different atmosphere!" I suppose this means that he dislikes
+it. I think him handsomer than ever. I sent you his photograph, but
+that can give you no idea of him. He is like one of his own marble
+statues. We came to Coombe Bysset directly after the ceremony, and we
+are here still. I could stay on for ever. It is so lovely in these
+Bedfordshire woods in mid-June. But I am afraid--just the very least
+bit afraid--that Piero may get bored with me--me--me--nothing but me.
+
+'You know I never was clever, and really--really--I haven't an idea
+what to talk to him about when we don't talk about ourselves. And
+then the weather provokes him. We have hardly had one fine day since
+we came; and no doubt it seems very grey and chilly to an Italian.
+"It cannot be June!" he says a dozen times a week. And when the whole
+day is rainy, as it is very often, for our Junes are such wet ones
+nowadays, I can see he gets impatient. He doesn't care for reading;
+he is fond of billiards, but I don't play a good enough game to be
+any amusement to him. And though he sings divinely, as I told you, he
+sings as the birds do; only just when the mood is on him. He does not
+care about music as a science in the least. He laughed when I said
+so. He declared it was no more a science than love is. Perhaps love
+ought to be a science too, in a way, or else it won't last? There has
+been a scandal in the village, caused by his servant, Toniello. An
+infuriated father came up to the house this morning about it. He is
+named John Best; he has one of Aunt Carrie's biggest farms. He was in
+such a dreadful rage, and I had to talk to him, because, of course,
+Piero couldn't understand him. Only when I translated what he said,
+Piero laughed till he cried, and offered him a cigarette, and called
+him "_figlio mio_," which only made Mr John Best purple with fury,
+and he went away in a greater rage than he had been in when he came,
+swearing he "would do for the Papist." I have sent for the steward.
+I am afraid Aunt Carrie will be terribly annoyed. It has always been
+such a model village. Not a public-house near for six miles, and all
+the girls such demure, quiet little maidens. This terrible Roman
+valet, with his starry eyes and his mandoline, and his audacities, has
+been like Mephistopheles in the opera to this secluded and innocent
+little hamlet. I beg Piero to send him away, but he looks unutterably
+reproachful, and declares he really cannot live without Toniello; and
+what can I say?'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
+    Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
+
+'You are quite in the wrong, my poor pet. If you were only a little
+older, and ever so much wiser, you would have telegraphed to the
+libraries yourself for the French books; you would have laughed at them
+when he laughed, and instead of taking Mr John Best as a tragedy, you
+would have made him into a little burlesque, which would have amused
+your husband for five minutes, as much as Gyp or Jean Richepin. I begin
+to think I should have married your Roman prince, and you should have
+married my good, dull George, whom a perverse destiny has shoved into
+diplomacy. Your Roman scandalises you, and my George bores me. Such is
+marriage, my dear, all the world over. What is the old story? That Jove
+split all the walnuts in two, and each half is always uselessly seeking
+its fellow.'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton,
+    Beds., to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, British Embassy, S.
+    Petersburg._
+
+'But, surely, if he loved me, he would be as perfectly happy with me
+alone as I am with him alone? I want no other companion--no other
+interest--no other thought.'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, British Embassy S.
+    Petersburg, to the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset,
+    Luton, Beds._
+
+'Of course you do not, because you are a woman. San Zenone is your
+god, your idol, your ideal, your universe. But _you_ are only one out
+of the many women who have pleased him, and attached to the pleasure
+you afford him is the very uncomfortable conviction that he will never
+be able to get away from you. My dear child, I have no patience with
+any woman when she says, "He does not love me." If he does not, it is
+probably the woman's fault. Probably she has worried him. Love dies
+directly it is worried, quite naturally. Poor Gladys! You were always
+such a good child; you were always devoted to your old women, and
+your queer little orphans, and your pet cripples, and your East-End
+missions. It certainly is hard that you should have fallen into the
+hands of a soulless Italian, who reads naughty novels all day long and
+sighs for the flesh-pots of Egypt! But, my child, in reason's name,
+what did you expect? Did you think that all in a moment he would sigh
+to hear Canon Farrar; the excellent vicar's sermons; take his guitar to
+a village concert, and teach Italian to the lodge-keeper's children?
+Be reasonable, and let your poor caged bird fly out of Coombe Bysset;
+which will certainly be your worst enemy if you shut him up in it much
+longer.'
+
+
+    _From the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the
+    Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Monterone, Val d'Aosta._
+
+'I am still in my box of wet moss. I have been in it two weeks, four
+days, and eleven hours, by the calendar and the clocks. I have read all
+my novels. I have spelled through my _Figaro_, from the title to the
+printer's address, every morning. I have smoked twenty cigarettes every
+twenty minutes, and I have yawned as many times. This is Paradise, I
+know it; I tell myself so; but still I cannot help it--I yawn. There
+is a pale, watery sun, which shines fitfully. There is a quantity of
+soaked hay, which they are going to dry by machinery. There is a great
+variety of muddy lanes in which to ride. There is a post-office seven
+miles off, and a telegraph station fifteen miles further off. The
+_ensemble_ is not animated. When you go out you see very sleek cattle,
+very white sheep, very fat children. You may meet, at intervals,
+labouring people, very round shouldered and very sulky. You also
+meet, if you are in luck's way, with a traction engine; and wherever
+you look you perceive a church steeple. It is all very harmless,
+except the traction engine; but it is not animated or enlivening. You
+will not wonder that I soon came to the end of my French novels. The
+French novels have enabled me to discover that my angel is very easily
+ruffled. In fact, she is that touchy thing--a saint. I had no idea that
+she was a saint when I saw her drinking her cup of tea in that garden
+on the Thames. True, she had her lovely little serene, holy, _noli me
+tangere_ air, but I thought that would pass; it does not pass. And
+when I wanted her to laugh with me at Gyp's '_Autour du Mariage_', she
+blushed up to the eyes, and was offended. What am I to do? I am no
+saint. I cannot pretend to be one. I am not worse than other men, but
+I like to amuse myself. I cannot go through life singing a _miserere_.
+I am afraid we shall quarrel. You think that very wholesome. But there
+are quarrels and quarrels. Some clear the air like thunderstorms. Ours
+are little irritating differences which end in her bursting into tears,
+and in myself looking ridiculous and feeling a brute. She has cried
+quite a number of times in the last fortnight. I daresay if she went
+into a rage, as you justly say Nicoletta would do, and you might have
+added you have done, it would rouse me, and I should be ready to strike
+her, and should end in covering her with kisses. But she only turns
+her eyes on me like a dying fawn, bursts into tears, and goes out of
+the room. Then she comes in again--to dinner, perhaps, or to that odd
+ceremony, five o'clock tea--with her little sad, stiff, reproachful
+air as of a martyr; answers meekly, and makes me again feel a brute.
+The English sulk a long time, I think. We are at daggers drawn one
+moment, but then we kiss and forget the next. We are more passionate,
+but we are more amiable. I want to get away, to go to Paris, Homburg,
+Trouville, anywhere; but I dare not propose it. I only drop adroit
+hints. If I should die of _ennui_, and be buried under the wet moss for
+ever, weep for me.'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to Lady
+    Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
+
+'Coombe is quite too lovely now. It does rain sometimes, certainly,
+but between the showers it is so delicious. I asked Piero to come out
+and hear the nightingale; there really is one in the home wood, and
+he laughed at the idea. He said, "We have hundreds of nightingales
+shouting all day and all night at Lanciano. We don't think about
+them, we eat them in _pasta_; they are very good." Fancy eating a
+nightingale! You might as well eat Romeo and Juliet. Piero has got a
+number of French books from London, and he lies about on the couches
+and reads them. He wants me to listen to naughty bits of fun out of
+them, but I will not, and then he calls me a prude, and gets angry. I
+don't see why he shouldn't laugh as much as he likes himself without
+telling me why he laughed. I dislike that sort of thing. I am horribly
+afraid I shall care for nothing but him all my life, while he--he
+yawned yesterday! Papa said to me, before we were married, "My dear
+little girl, San Zenone put on such a lot of steam at first, he'll
+be obliged to ease his pace after a bit. Don't be vexed if you find
+the thing cooling!" Now, Papa speaks so oddly; always that sort of
+floundering, bald metaphor, you remember it; but I knew what he meant.
+Nobody could _go on_ being such a lover as Piero was. Ah, dear, is it
+in the past already? No, I don't quite mean that. He is Romeo still
+very often, and he sings me the divinest love songs, lying at my feet
+on cushions in the moonlight. But it is not quite the same thing as it
+was at first. He found fault with one of my gowns this morning, and
+said I don't know how _de me faire valoir_. I am terribly frightened
+lest Coombe has bored him too much. I would come here. I wanted to be
+utterly out of the world, and so did he; and I'm sure there isn't a
+lover's nest anywhere comparable to Coombe in midsummer. You remember
+the rose garden, and the lime avenues, and the chapel ruins by the
+little lake? When Aunt Carrie offered it to us for this June I was so
+delighted, but now I am half afraid the choice of it was a mistake,
+and that he does not know what to do with himself. He is _dépaysé_.
+I cried a little yesterday; it was too silly, but I couldn't help it.
+He laughed at me, but he got a little angry. "_Enfin que veux tu?_" he
+said impatiently; "_je suis à toi, bien à toi, beaucoup trop à toi!_"
+He seemed to me to regret being mine. I told him so; he was more angry.
+It was, I suppose, what you would call a scene. In five minutes he was
+penitent, and caressed me as only he can do; and the sun came out, and
+we went into the woods and heard the nightingale; but the remembrance
+of it alarms me. If he can say as much as this in a month, what can he
+say in a year? I do not think I am silly. I had two London seasons,
+and all those country houses show one the world. I know people, when
+they are married, are always glad to get away from one another--they
+are always flirting with other people. But I should be miserable if I
+thought it would ever be like that with Piero and me. I worship his
+very shadow, and he does--or he did--worship mine. Why should that
+change? Why should it not go on for ever, as it does in poems? If it
+can't, why doesn't one die?'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
+    Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
+
+'What a goose you are, you dearest Gladys! You were always like that.
+To all you have said I can only reply, _connu_. When girls are romantic
+(and you always were, though it was quite gone out ages before our
+time), they always expect husbands to remain lovers. Now, my pet, you
+might just as well expect hay to remain grass. Papa was quite right.
+When there is such a lot of steam on, it must go off by degrees. I am
+afraid, too, you have begun with the passion, and the rapture, and the
+mutual adoration, and all the rest of it, which is _quite, quite gone
+out_. People don't feel in that sort of way nowadays. Nobody cares
+much; a sort of good-humoured liking is the utmost one sees. But you
+were always such a goose! And now you must marry an Italian, and expect
+it all to be balconies and guitars and moonlight for ever and ever.
+I think it quite natural he should want to get to Paris. You should
+never have taken him to Coombe. I do remember the rose gardens, and
+the lime avenues, and the ruins; and I remember being sent down there
+when I had too strong a flirtation with Philip Rous, who was in F. O.,
+and had nothing a year. You were a baby then, and I remember that I was
+bored to the very brink of suicide; that I have detested the smell of a
+lime tree ever since. I can sympathise with the Prince, if he longs to
+get away. There can't be anything for him to do, all day long, except
+smoke. The photo of him is wonderfully handsome, but can you live all
+your life, my dear, on a profile?'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady
+    Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
+
+'Because almost all Englishmen have snub noses, Englishwomen always
+think there is something immoral and delusive about a good profile.
+At all events, you will admit that the latter is the more agreeable
+object of contemplation. It still rains, rains dreadfully. The meadows
+are soaked, and they can't get the hay in, and we can't get out of the
+house. Piero does smoke, and he does yawn. He has been looking in the
+library for a French novel, but there is nothing except Mrs Craven's
+goody-goody books, and a boy's tale by Jules Verne. I am afraid you and
+Mamma are right. Coombe, in a wet June, is not the place for a Roman
+who knows his Paris by heart, and doesn't like the country anywhere.
+We seem to do nothing but eat. I put on an ulster and high boots,
+and I don't mind the rain a bit; but he screams when he sees me in
+an ulster. "You have no more figure in that thing than if you were a
+Bologna sausage," he says to me; and certainly ulsters are very ugly.
+But I had a delicious fortnight with the Duchess in a driving tour in
+Westmeath. We only took our ulsters with us, and it poured all the
+time, and we stayed in bed in the little inns while our things dried,
+and it was immense fun; the Duke drove us. But Piero would not like
+that sort of thing. He is like a cat about rain. He likes to shut the
+house up early, and have the electric light lit, and forget that it
+is all slop and mist outside. He declares that we have made a mistake
+in the calendar, and that it is November, not June. I change my gowns
+three times a day, just as if there were a large house party, but I
+feel I look awfully monotonous to him. I am afraid I never was amusing.
+I always envy those women who are all _chic_ and "go," who can make
+men laugh so at rubbish. They seem to carry about with them a sort of
+exhilarating ether. I don't think they are the best sort of women, but
+they do so amuse the men. I would give twenty years of my life if I
+could amuse Piero. He adores me, but that is another thing. That does
+not prevent him shaking the barometer and yawning. He seems happiest
+when he is talking Italian with his servant, Toniello. Toniello is
+allowed to play billiards with him sometimes. He is a very gay, merry,
+saucy, brown-eyed Roman. He has made all the maids in the house, and
+all the farmers' daughters round Coombe, in love with him, and I told
+you how he had scandalised one of the best tenants, Mr John Best.
+The Bedford rustics all vow vengeance against him, but he twangs his
+mandoline, and sings away at the top of his voice, and doesn't care
+a straw that the butler loathes him, the house steward abhors him,
+the grooms would horsewhip him if they dare, and the young farmers
+audibly threaten to duck him in the pond. Toniello is very fond of his
+master, but he does not extend his allegiance to me. Do you remember
+Mrs Stevens, Aunt Caroline's model housekeeper? You should see her face
+when she chances to hear Piero laughing and talking with Toniello. I
+think she believes that the end of the world has come. Piero calls
+Toniello "_figliolo mio_" and "_caro mio_," just as if they were
+cousins or brothers. It appears this is the Italian way. They are very
+proud in their own fashion, but it isn't our fashion. However, I am
+glad the man is there when I hear the click of the billiard balls, and
+the splash of the raindrops on the window panes. "We have been here
+just three weeks. _Dio!_ It seems three years," Piero said, when I
+reminded him of it this morning. For me, I don't know whether it is
+like a single day's dream or a whole eternity. You know what I mean.
+But I wish--I wish--it seemed either the day's dream or the eternity
+of Paradise to him! I daresay it is all my fault in coming to these
+quiet, bay-windowed, Queen Anne rooms, and the old-fashioned servants,
+and the dreary look-out over the drenched hay-fields. But the sun does
+come out sometimes, and then the wet roses smell so sweet, and the wet
+lime blossoms glisten in the light, and the larks sing overhead, and
+the woods are so green and so fresh. Still, I don't think he likes it
+even then, it is all too moist, too windy, too dim for him. When I
+put a rose in his button-hole this morning, it shook the drops over
+him, and he said, "_Mais quel pays!--même une fleur c'est une douche
+d'eau froide!_" Last month, if I had put a dandelion in his coat, he
+would have sworn it had the odour of the magnolia and the beauty of
+the orchid! It is just twenty-two days ago since we came here, and
+for the first four or five days, he never cared whether it rained or
+not; he only cared to lie at my feet, really, literally. We were all in
+all to each other, just like Cupid and Psyche. And now--he will play
+billiards with Toniello to pass the time, and he is longing for his
+_petits théâtres_! Is it my fault? I torment myself with a thousand
+self-accusations. Is it possible I can have been tiresome, dull,
+over-exacting? Is it possible he can be disappointed in me?'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
+    Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
+
+'No, it isn't your fault, you dear little donkey; it is only the
+natural sequence of things. Men are always like that when the woman
+loves them; when she don't, they behave much better. My dear, this is
+just what is so annoying about love; the man's is always going slower
+and slower towards a dead stop, as the woman's is "coaling" and getting
+steam up. I borrow Papa's admirably accurate metaphor, nothing can be
+truer. It is a great pity, but I suppose the fault is Nature's. _Entre
+nous_, I don't think Nature ever contemplated marriage, any more than
+she did crinolettes, pearl powder, or the electric light. There is
+no doubt that Nature intended to adjust the thing on the butterfly
+and buttercup system; on the _je reste, tu t'en vas_, principle. And
+nothing would be easier or nicer, only there are children and poverty.
+So the butterfly has to be pinned down by the buttercup. That is why
+the Communists and Anarchists always abolish Property and Marriage
+together. The one is evolved out of the other, just as the dear
+scientists say the horse was evolved out of a bird, which I never can
+see makes the matter any easier of comprehension; but, still--what
+was I saying? Oh, I meant to say this: you are only lamenting, as a
+special defalcation and disloyalty in San Zenone, what is merely his
+unconscious and involuntary and perfectly natural alteration from a
+lover into a husband. The butterfly is beginning to feel the pin, which
+has been run through him to stick him down. It is not your fault, my
+sweet little girl; it is the fault, if at all, of the world, which has
+decreed that the butterfly, to flirt legitimately with the buttercup,
+must suffer the corking pin. Now, take my advice: the pin is in, don't
+worry if he writhe on it a little bit! It is only what the beloved
+scientists again call automatic action. And do try and beat into your
+little head the fact that a man may love you very dearly, and yet yearn
+a little for the _petits théâtres_ in the silent recesses of his manly
+breast. Of course, I know this sort of rough awakening from delightful
+dreams is harder for you than it is for most, because you began at
+such tremendous altitudes. You had your Ruy Blas and Petrarca, and
+the mandoline and the moonlight, and the love-philtres, all mixed
+up in an intoxicating draught. You have naturally a great deal more
+disillusion to go through than if you had married a country squire, or
+a Scotch laird, who would never have suggested any romantic delights.
+One cannot go near Heaven without coming down with a crash, like the
+poor men in the balloons. You have been up in your balloon, and you
+are now coming down. Ah, my dear, everything depends on _how_ you come
+down. You will think me a monster for saying so, but it will rest so
+much in your own hands. You won't believe it, but it will. If you come
+down with tact and good-humour, it will all be right afterwards; but
+if you show temper, as men say of their horses, why, then, the balloon
+will lie prone, a torn, empty, useless bag, that will never again
+get off the ground. To speak plainly, dear, if you will receive with
+resignation and sweetness the unpleasant discovery that San Zenone is
+mortal, you won't be unhappy, and you will soon get used to it; but if
+you perpetually fret about it, you won't alter him, and you will both
+be miserable; or, if not miserable, you will do something worse; you
+will each find your amusement in somebody else. I know you so well,
+my poor, pretty Gladys; you want such an immense quantity of sympathy
+and affection, but you won't get it, my dear child. I quite understand
+that the Prince looks like a picture, and he has made life an erotic
+poem for you for a month, and the inevitable reaction which follows
+seems dull as ditch water, you would even say as cruel as the grave.
+But it is _nothing new_. Do try and get that well in your mind. Try,
+too, and be as light-hearted as you can. Men hate an unamusable woman.
+Make believe to laugh at the French novels, if you can't really do it;
+if you don't, dear, he will go to somebody else who will. Why do those
+_demi-monde_ women get such preference over us? Only because they don't
+bore their men. A man would sooner we flung a champagne glass at his
+head than cried for five minutes. We can't fling champagne glasses;
+the prejudices of our education are against it. It is an immense loss
+to us; we must make up for it as much as we can by being as agreeable
+as we know how to be. We shall always be a dozen lengths behind those
+others who _do_ fling the glasses. By the way, you said in one of
+your earliest notes that you wondered why our mother ever married. I
+am not sufficiently _au courant_ with pre-historic times to be able
+to tell you why, but I can see what she has done since she did marry.
+She has always effaced herself in the very wisest and most prudent
+manner. She has never begrudged Papa his Norway fishing, or his August
+yachting, though she knew he could ill afford them. She has never bored
+him _with_ herself, or _about_ us. She has constantly urged him to go
+away and enjoy himself, and when he is down with her in the country
+she always takes care that all the women he admires, and all the men
+who best amuse him, shall be invited in relays, to prevent his being
+dull or feeling teased for a moment. I am quite sure she has never
+cared the least about her own wishes, but has only studied his. This
+is what I call being a clever woman and a good woman. But I fear such
+women are as rare as blue roses. Try and be like her, my dear. She was
+quite as young as you are now when she married. But unfortunately,
+in truth, you are a terrible little egotist. You want to shut up this
+beautiful Roman all alone with you in a kind of attitude of perpetual
+adoration--of yourself. That is what women call affection; you are
+not alone in your ideas. Some men submit to this sort of demand, and
+go about for ever held tight in a leash, like unslipped pointers. The
+majority--well, the majority bolt. And I am sure I should if I were one
+of them. I do not think you could complain if your beautiful Romeo did.
+I can see you so exactly, with your pretty, little, grave face, and
+your eyes that have such a fatal aptitude for tears, and your solemn
+little views about matrimony and its responsibilities, making yourself
+quite odious to this mirthful Apollo of yours, and innocently believing
+all the while that you are pleasing Heaven and saving your own dignity
+by being so remarkably unpleasant! Are you _very_ angry with me? I am
+afraid so. Myself, I would much sooner have an unfaithful man than a
+dull one; the one may be bored _by_ you, but the other bores _you_,
+which is immeasurably worse.'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady
+    Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
+
+"DEAR GWEN,--How can you _possibly_ tell what Mamma did when she was
+young? I daresay she fretted dreadfully. Now, of course, she has got
+used to it--like all other miserable women. If people marry only to
+long to be with other people, what is the use of being married at all?
+I said so to Piero, and he answered, very insolently, "_Il n'y a point!
+Si on le savait!_" He sent for some more dreadful French books, Gyp's
+and Richepin's and Gui de Maupassant's, and he lies about reading them
+all day long when he isn't asleep. He is very often asleep in the
+daytime. He apologises when he is found out, but he yawns as he does
+so. You say I should amuse him, but I _can't_ amuse him. He doesn't
+care for any English news, and he is beginning to get irritable because
+I cannot talk to him in Italian, and he declares my French detestable,
+and there is always something dreadful happening. There has been such
+a terrible scene in the village. Four of the Coombe Bysset men, two
+blacksmiths, a carpenter, and a labourer, have ducked Toniello in
+the village pond on account of his attention to their womenkind; and
+Toniello, when he staggered out of the weeds and the slime, drew his
+knife on them and stabbed two very badly. Of course, he has been taken
+up by the constables, and the men he hurt moved to the county hospital.
+The magistrates are furious and scandalised; and Piero!--Piero has
+nobody to play billiards with him. When the magistrates interrogated
+him about Toniello, as, of course, they were obliged to do, he got into
+a dreadful passion because one of them said that it was just like a
+cowardly Italian to carry a knife and make use of it. Piero absolutely
+_hissed_ at the solemn old gentleman who mumbled this. "And your
+people," he cried, "are they so very courageous? Is it better to beat
+a man into a jelly, or kick a woman with nailed boots, as your English
+mob does? Where is there anything cowardly? He was one against four.
+In my country there is not a night that goes by without a _rissa_ of
+that sort, but nobody takes any notice. The jealous persons are left to
+fight it out as best they may; after all, it is the women's fault."
+And then he said some things that really I cannot repeat, and it was
+a mercy that, as he spoke in the most rapid and furious French, the
+old gentleman did not, I think, understand a syllable. But they saw
+he was in a passion, and that scandalised them, because, you know,
+English people always think that you should keep your bad temper for
+your own people at home. Meantime, of course, Toniello is in prison,
+and I am afraid they won't let us take him out on bail, because he has
+hurt one of the blacksmiths dreadfully. Aunt Carrie's solicitors are
+doing what they can for him, to please me, but I can see they consider
+it all _peines perdues_ for a rogue who ought to be hanged. "And to
+think," cries Toniello, "that in my own country I should have all the
+populace with me. The very carabineers themselves would have been
+with me! _Accidente a tutti quei grulli_," which means, "may apoplexy
+seize these fools." "They were only the women's husbands," he adds,
+with scorn; "they are well worth making a fuss about, certainly!" Then
+Piero consoles him, and gives him cigarettes, and is obliged to leave
+him sobbing and tearing his hair, and lying face downward on his bed
+of sacking. I thought Piero would not leave the poor fellow alone in
+prison, and so I supposed he would give up all idea of going from here,
+and so I began to say to myself, "_A quelque chose malheur est bon._"
+But to-day, at luncheon, Piero said "_Sai carina!_ It was bad enough
+with Toniello, but without him, I tell you frankly, I cannot stand
+any more of it. With Toniello one could laugh and forget a little.
+But now--_anima mia_, if you do not wish me to kill somebody, and be
+lodged beside Toniello by your worthy law-givers, you must really let
+me go to Trouville." "Alone!" I said; and I believe it is what he did
+mean, only the horror in my voice frightened him from confessing it.
+He sighed and got up. "I suppose I shall never be alone any more," he
+said impatiently. "If only men knew what they do when they marry--_on
+ne nous prendrait jamais_. No--no. Of course, I meant that you will, I
+hope, consent to come away with me somewhere out of this intolerable
+place, which is made up of fog and green leaves. Let us go to Paris
+to begin with; there is not a soul there, and the theatres are _en
+rélache_, but it is always delightful, and then in a week or so we will
+go down to Trouville, all the world is there." I couldn't answer him
+for crying. Perhaps that was best, for I am sure I should have said
+something wicked, which might have divided us for ever. And then what
+would people have thought?'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
+    Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
+
+'MY POOR LITTLE DEAR,--Are you already beginning to be miserable about
+what people will think? Then, indeed, your days of joy are numbered.
+If I were to write to you fifty times I could only repeat what I have
+always written. You are not wise, and you are doing everything you
+ought not to do. _Of two people who are married, there is always one
+who has the delusion that he or she is necessary and delightful to
+the life of the other. The other generally thinks just the contrary._
+The result is not peace. This gay, charming, handsome son of Rome has
+become your entire world, but don't suppose for a moment, my child,
+that you will ever be his. It is not in reason, not in Nature, that
+you should be. _If_ you have the intelligence, the tact, and the
+forbearance required, you _may_ become his friend and counsellor,
+but I fear you never will have these. You fret, you weep, and you
+understand nothing of the masculine temperament. "I see snakes," as
+the Americans observe; and you will not have either the coolness or the
+wisdom required to scotch a snake, much less to kill it. Once for all,
+my poor pet, go cheerfully to Paris, Trouville, and all the pleasure
+places in the world. Affect enjoyment if you feel it not, and try to
+remember, beyond everything, that affection is not to be retained or
+revived by either coercion or lamentation. Once dead, it is not to be
+awakened by all the "crooning" of its mourner. It is a corpse, for ever
+and aye. Myself, I fail to see how you could expect a young Italian,
+who has all the habits of the great world, and the memories of his _vie
+de garçon_, to be cheerful or contented in a wet June in an isolated
+English country house, with nobody to look at but yourself. Believe
+me, my dear child, it is the inordinate vanity of a woman which makes
+her imagine that she can be sufficient for her husband. Nothing but
+vanity. The cleverer a woman is, the more fully she recognises her own
+insufficiency for the amusement of a man, and the more carefully (if
+she be wise) does she take care that this deficiency in her shall never
+be forced upon his observation. Now, if you shut a man up with you in
+a country house, with the rain raining every day, as in Longfellow's
+poem, you do force it upon him most conspicuously. If you were not his
+wife, I daresay he would not tire of you, and he might even prefer a
+grey sky to a blue one. But as his wife!--oh, my dear, why, why don't
+you try and understand what a terrible penalty-weight you carry in
+the race? Write and tell me all about it. I shall be anxious. I am so
+afraid, my sweet little sister, that you think love is all moonlight
+and kisses, and forget that there are clouds in the sky and quarrels
+on earth. May Heaven save you from both. _P.S._--Do remember that this
+same love requires just as delicate handling as a cobweb does. If a
+rough touch break the cobweb, all the artists in the world can't mend
+it. There is a wholesome truth for you. If you prevent his going to
+Paris now, he will go in six months' time, and perhaps, then, he will
+go without you. You are not wise, my poor pet; you should make him feel
+that you sympathise with his pleasures, not that you and his pleasures
+are enemies. But it is no use to instil wisdom into you; you are very
+young, and very much in love. You look on all the natural distractions
+which he inclines to, as on so many rivals. So they may be, but _we
+don't beat our rivals by abusing them_. The really wise way is to
+tacitly show that we can be more attractive than they; if we cannot be
+so, we may sulk or sigh as we will, we shall be vanquished by them. You
+will think me very preachy-preachy, and, perhaps, you will throw me in
+the fire unread; but I must say just one word more. Dear, you are in
+love with Love, but underneath Love there is a real man, and real men
+are far from ideal creatures. Now, it is the real man that you want to
+consider, to humour, to study. If the real man be pleased, Love will
+take care of himself; whereas if you bore the real man, Love will fly
+away. If you had been wise, my poor pet, I repeat, you would have found
+nothing so delightful as Gyp and Octave de Mirbeau, and you would have
+declared that the Paris asphalte excelled all the English lawns in the
+world. He does not love you the less because he wants to be _dans le
+mouvement_, to hear what other men are saying, and to smoke his cigar
+amongst his fellow-creatures.'
+
+
+    _From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Hotel des Roches Noires,
+    Trouville, France, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe
+    Bysset, Luton, Beds., England._
+
+'Poor flower, in your box of wet moss, what has become of you? Are you
+dead, and dried in your wife's _hortus siccus_? She would be quite
+sure of you _then_, and I daresay much happier than if you were set
+forth in anybody else's bouquet. I try in vain to imagine you in that
+"perfectly proper" atmosphere (is not that correct English, "perfectly
+proper"?) Will you be dreadfully changed when one sees you again? There
+is a French proverb which says that "the years of joy count double."
+The days of _ennui_ certainly count for years, and give us grey hairs
+before we are five-and-twenty. But you know I cannot pity you. You
+_would_ marry an English girl because she looked pretty sipping her
+tea. I told you beforehand that you would be miserable with her, once
+shut up in the country. The episode of Toniello is enchanting. What
+people!--to put him in prison for a little bit of _chiasso_ like that!
+You should never have taken his bright eyes and his mandoline to that
+doleful and damp land of precisians. What will they do with him? And
+what can you do without him? The weather here is admirable. There are
+numbers of people one knows. It is really very amusing. I go and dance
+every night, and then we play--usually "bac" or roulette. Everybody is
+very merry. We all talk often of you, and say the _De Profundis_ over
+you, my poor Piero. Why did your cruel destiny make you see a _Sainte
+Nitouche_ drinking tea under a lime tree? I suppose _Sainte Nitouche_
+would not permit it, else, why not exchange the humid greenness of your
+matrimonial prison for the Rue des Planches and the Casino?'
+
+
+    _From the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the
+    Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Trouville._
+
+'CARISSIMA MIA,--I have set light to the fuse! I have frankly declared
+that if I do not get out of this damp and verdant Bastile, I shall
+perish of sheer inanition and exhaustion. The effect of the declaration
+was for the moment such, that I hoped, actually hoped, that she was
+going to get into a passion! It would have been so refreshing! After
+twenty-six days of dumb acquiescence and silent tears, it would have
+been positively delightful to have had a storm. But, no! For an instant
+she looked at me with unspeakable reproach; the next her dove's eyes
+filled, she sighed, she left the room! Do they not say that feather
+beds offer an admirable defence against bullets? I feel like the
+bullet which has been fired into the feather bed. The feather bed is
+victorious. I see the Rue des Planches through the perspective of the
+watery atmosphere; the Casino seems to smile at me from the end of the
+interminable lime tree avenue, which is one of the chief beauties of
+this house; but, alas! they are both as far off as if Trouville were in
+the moon. What could they do to me if I came alone? Do you know what
+they could do? I have not the remotest idea, but I imagine something
+frightful. They shut up their public-houses by force, and their
+dancing places. Perhaps they would shut up me. In England, they have a
+great belief in creating virtue by Act of Parliament. In myself, this
+enforced virtue creates such a revolt that I shall _tirer sur le mors_,
+and fly before very long. The admired excellence of this beautiful
+estate is that it lies in a ring-fence. I feel that I shall take a leap
+over that ring-fence. Do not mistake me, _cara mia Teresina_, I am
+exceedingly fond of my wife. I think her quite lovely, simple, saintly,
+and truly womanlike. She is exquisitely pretty, and entirely without
+vanity, and I am certain she is immeasurably my superior morally, and
+possibly mentally too. But--there is always such a long and melancholy
+"but" attached to marriage--she does not amuse me in the least. She is
+always the same. She is shocked at nearly everything that is natural
+or diverting. She thinks me unmanly because I dislike rain. She buttons
+about her a hideous, straight, waterproof garment, and walks out in a
+deluge. She blushes if I try to make her laugh at _Figaro_, and she
+goes out of the room when I mention Trouville. What am I to do with a
+woman like this? It is an admirable type, no doubt. Possibly if she had
+not shut me up in a country-house in a wet June, with the thermometer
+at 10 R., and the barometer fixedly at the word _Rainy_, I might have
+been always charmed with this S. Dorothea-like attitude, and never have
+found out the monotony of it. But, as it is--I yawn till I dislocate my
+neck. She thinks me a heathen already. I am convinced that very soon
+she will think me a brute. And I am neither. I only want to get out,
+like the bird in the cage. It is a worn simile, but it is such a true
+one!'
+
+
+    _From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Roches Noires, Trouville,
+    to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
+
+'PIERO MIO,--In marriage, the male bird is always wanting to get out
+when the female bird does not want him to get out; also, she is for
+ever tightening the wires over his head, and declaring that nothing
+can be more delightful than the perch which she sits on herself. Come
+to us here. There are any quantities of birds here who ought to be
+in their cages, but are not, and manage to enjoy themselves _quand
+même_. If only you had married Nicoletta! She might have torn your
+hair occasionally, but she would never have bored you. There is only
+one supreme art necessary for a woman: it is to thoroughly understand
+that she must never be a _seccatura_. A woman may be beautiful,
+admirable, a paragon of virtue, a marvel of intellect, but if she be
+a _seccatura--addio_! Whereas, she may be plain, small, nothing to
+look at in any way, and a very monster of sins, big and little, but if
+she know how to amuse your dull sex, she is mistress of you all. It is
+evident that this great art is not studied at Coombe Bysset.'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady
+    Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
+
+'OH, MY DEAR GWEN,--It is too dreadful, and I am so utterly wretched. I
+cannot tell you what I feel. He is quite determined to go to Trouville
+by Paris at once, and just now it is such exquisite weather. It has
+only rained three times this week, and the whole place is literally
+a bower of roses of every kind. He has been very restless the last
+few days, and at last, yesterday, after dinner, he said straight out,
+that he had had enough of Coombe, and he thought we might be seen at
+Homburg or Trouville next week. And he pretended to want every kind of
+thing that is to be bought at Paris and nowhere else. Paris--when we
+have been together just twenty-nine days to-day! Paris--I don't know
+why, but I feel as if it would be the end of everything! Paris--we
+shall dine at restaurants; we shall stay at the Bristol; we shall go
+to theatres; he will be at his club, he belongs to the Petit Cercle
+and the Mirliton; we shall be just like anybody else; just like all
+the million and one married people who are always in a crowd! To take
+one's new-born happiness to an hotel! It is as profane as it would be
+to say your prayers on the top of a drag. To me, it is quite horrible.
+And it will be put in _Galignani_ directly, of course, that the "Prince
+and Princess San Zenone have arrived at the Hotel Bristol." And then,
+all the pretty women who tried to flirt with him before will laugh, and
+say: "There, you see, she has bored him already." Everybody will say
+so, for they all know I wished to spend the whole summer at Coombe.
+If he would only go to his own country I would not say a word. I am
+really longing to see his people, and his palaces, and the wonderful
+gardens with their statues and their ilex woods, and the temples
+that are as old as the days of Augustus, and the fire-flies and the
+magnolia groves, and the peasants who are always singing. But he won't
+go there. He says it is a _seccatura_. Everything is a _seccatura_. He
+only likes places where he can meet all the world. "Paris will be a
+solitude, too, never fear," he said, very petulantly; "but there will
+be all the _petits théâtres_ and the open-air concerts, and we can
+dine in the Bois and down the river, and we can run to Trouville. It
+will be better than rain, rain, rain, and nothing to look at except
+your amiable aunt's big horses and big trees. I adore horses, and
+trees are not bad if they are planted away from the house, but, viewed
+as eternal companions, one may have too much of them." And I am his
+eternal companion, but it seems already I don't count! I have not said
+anything. I know one oughtn't. But Piero saw how it vexed me, and it
+made him cross. "_Cara mia_," he said, "why did you not tell me before
+we married that you intended me to be buried for ever in a box under
+wet leaves like a rose that is being sent to the market? I should
+have known what to expect, and I do not like wet leaves." I could not
+help reminding him that he had been ever, ever so anxious to come to
+Coombe. Then he laughed, but he was very cross too. "Could I tell,
+_anima mia_," he cried, "that Coombe was situated in a succession of
+lagoons, contains not one single French novel, is seven miles asunder
+from its own railway station, and is blessed with a population of sulky
+labourers? What man have I seen since I have been here except your
+parish priest, who mumbles, wears spectacles, and tries to give me a
+tract against the Holy Father? In this country you do not know what
+it is to be warm. You do not know what sunshine is like. You take an
+umbrella when you go in the garden. You put on a waterproof to go and
+hear one little, shivering nightingale sing in a wet elder bush. I tell
+you I am tired of your country, absolutely tired. You are an angel. No
+doubt you are an angel; but you cannot console me for the intolerable
+emptiness of this intolerable life, where there is nothing on earth to
+do but to eat, drink, and sleep, and drive in a dog-cart." All this he
+said in one breath, in a flash of forked lightning, as it were. Now
+that I write it down, it does not seem so very dreadful; but as he,
+with the most fiery scorn, the most contemptuous passion, said it, I
+assure you it was terrible. It revealed, just as the flash of lightning
+would show a gravel pit, how fearfully bored he has been all the time I
+thought he was happy!'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
+    Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._
+
+'Men are very easily bored, my dear, if they have any brains. It is
+only the dull ones who are not.'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone to the Lady Gwendolen
+    Chichester._
+
+'If I believed what your cynical letter says, I should leave him
+to-morrow. I would never live through a succession of disillusions and
+of insults.'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester to the Principessa di San
+    Zenone._
+
+'Where are your principles? Where are your duties? My dear little
+girl, you have married him; you must submit to him as he is. Marriages
+wouldn't last two days if, just because the man yawned, the woman ran
+away. Men always yawn when they are alone with their wives. Hitherto,
+all San Zenone's faults appear to consist in the very pardonable fact
+that, being an Italian, he is not alive to the charms of bucolic
+England in rainy weather, and that, being a young man, he wants to
+see his Paris again. Neither of these seem to me irreparable crimes.
+Go to Paris and try to enjoy yourself. After all, if his profile be
+so beautiful, you ought to be sufficiently happy in gazing at it
+from the back of a _baignoir_. I grant that it is not the highest
+amatory ideal--to rush about the boulevards in a daument, and eat
+delicious little dinners in the cafés, and laugh at naughty little
+plays afterwards; but _l'amour peut se nicher_ anywhere. And Love
+won't be any the worse for having his digestion studied by good
+cooks, and his possible _ennui_ exorcised by good players. You see
+for yourself that the great passion yawns after a time. Turn back to
+what you call my cynical letter, and re-read my remarks upon Nature.
+By the way, I entirely deny that they are cynical. On the contrary,
+I inculcate on you patience, sweetness of temper, and adaptability
+to circumstances; three most amiable qualities. If I were a cynic, I
+should say to you that Marriage is a Mistake, and two capital letters
+could hardly emphasise this melancholy truth sufficiently. But, as
+there are men and women, and, as I before observed, property in the
+world, nothing better for the consolidation of rents and freeholds has,
+as yet, been discovered. I daresay some Anarchist in his prison could
+devise something better, but they are afraid of trying Anarchism. So
+we all jog on in the old routine, vaguely conscious that we are all
+blunderers, but indisposed for such a drastic remedy as would alone
+cure us. Just you remark to any lawyer that marriage is a mistake, as I
+have said before, and see what answer you will get. He will certainly
+reply to you that there is no other way of securing the transmission
+of property safely. I confess that this view of wealth makes me, for
+one, a most desperate Radical. Only think, if there were no property we
+should all be frisking about in our happy valleys as free and as merry
+as little kids. I shouldn't now be obliged to put on all my war-paint
+and beads, like a savage, and go out to a dreadful Court dinner, four
+hours long, because George has a "career," and thinks my suffering
+advances it. Oh, you happy child, to have nothing worse to do than to
+rattle down the Bois in a _milord_, and sup off a _matelote_ by the
+lake with your Romeo!'
+
+
+    _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady
+    Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._
+
+'We are to leave for Paris and Trouville to-morrow. I have yielded--as
+you and Mamma seemed to think it was my _duty_ to do. But my life is
+over. I shall say farewell to all happiness when the gates of Coombe
+Bysset close upon me. Henceforth we shall be like everybody else.
+However, you cannot reproach me any longer with being selfish, nor can
+he. There is a great friend of his, the Duchess of Aquila Fulva, at
+Trouville. She writes to him very often, I know. He never offers to
+show me her letters. _I believe the choice of Trouville is her doing._
+Write to me at Paris, at the Windsor.'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the
+    Principessa di San Zenone, Hotel Windsor, Paris._
+
+'MY POOR CHILD,--Has the green-eyed monster already invaded your
+gentle soul because he doesn't show you his own letters? My dear, no
+man who was not born a _cur_ would show a woman's letters to his wife.
+Surely you wish your hero to know the A B C of gentle manners? I am
+delighted you are going into the world; but if you only go as "a duty,"
+I am afraid the results won't be sunshiny. "Duty" is such a _very_
+disagreeable thing. It always rolls itself up like a hedgehog with all
+its prickles out, turning for ever round and round on the axle of its
+own self-admiration. If you go to Trouville (and wherever else you do
+go) as a martyr, my dear, you will give the mischievous Duchess, if
+she be mischievous, a terrible advantage over you at starting. If you
+mean to be silent, unpleasant, and enwrapped in a gloomy contemplation
+of your own merits and wrongs, don't blame _him_ if he spend his time
+at the Casino with his friend, or somebody worse. I am quite sure you
+_mean_ to be unselfish, and you fancy you are so, and all the rest of
+it, quite honestly; but, in real truth, as I told you before, you are
+only an egotist. You would rather keep this unhappy Piero on thorns
+beside you, than see him enjoy himself with other people. Now, I call
+that shockingly selfish, and if you go in that spirit to Trouville,
+he will soon begin to wish, my dear child, that he had never had a
+fancy to come over to a London season. I can see you so exactly! Too
+dignified to be cross, too offended to be companionable; silent,
+reproachful, terrible!'
+
+
+    _From the Lady Mary Bruton, Roches Noires, Trouville, to Mrs
+    d'Arcy, British Embassy, Berlin._
+
+    _'15th July._
+
+'... Amongst the new arrivals here are the San Zenone. You remember my
+telling you of their marriage some six weeks ago. It was quite _the_
+marriage of the season. They really were immensely in love with each
+other, but that stupid month down in the country has done its usual
+work. In a rainy June, too! Of course, any poor Cupid would emerge
+from his captivity bedraggled, dripping and disenchanted. She is
+really very pretty, quite lovely, indeed; but she looks fretful and
+dull; her handsome husband, on the contrary, is as gay as a lark which
+has found the door of its cage wide open one morning. There is here
+a great friend of his, a Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva. _She_ is very
+gay, too; she is always perfectly dressed, and chattering from morning
+to night in shrill Italian or voluble French. She is the cynosure of
+all eyes as she goes to swim in a rose-coloured _maillot_, with an
+orange and gold eastern burnous flung about her artistically. She has
+that wonderful Venetian colouring, which can stand a contrast and glow
+of colour which would simply kill any other woman. She is very tall,
+and magnificently made, and yet uncommonly graceful. Last night she
+was persuaded to dance a _salterello_ with San Zenone at the Maison
+Persane, and it was marvellous. They are both such handsome people, and
+threw such wonderful _brio_, as they would call it, into the affair.
+The poor, little, pretty Princess, looking as fair and as dull as a
+primrose in a shower, sat looking on dismally. Stupid little thing!--as
+if _that_ would do her any good! A few days ago Lord Hampshire arrived
+off here in his yacht. He was present at the _salterello_, and as I
+saw him out in the gardens afterwards with the neglected one, sitting
+beside her in the moonlight, I presume he was offering her sympathy and
+consolation. He is a heavy young fellow, but exceedingly good-humoured
+and kind-hearted. _He_ would have been in Heaven in the wet June at
+Coombe Bysset--but she refused him, silly little thing! I am quite
+angry with her; she has had her own way and she won't make the best of
+that. I met her, and her rejected admirer, riding together this morning
+towards Villerville, while the beautiful Prince was splashing about
+in the water with his Venetian friend. I see a great many eventual
+complications ahead. Well, they will all be the fault of that Rainy
+June!'
+
+
+
+
+DON GESUALDO
+
+
+
+
+DON GESUALDO
+
+
+I
+
+It was a day in June.
+
+The crickets were chirping, the lizards were gliding, the butterflies
+were flying above the ripe corn, the reapers were out amongst the
+wheat, and the tall stalks were swaying and falling under the sickle.
+Through the little windows of his sacristy, Don Gesualdo, the young
+vicar of San Bartolo, in the village of Marca, looked with wistful eyes
+at the hill-side which rose up in front of him, seen through a frame of
+cherry-boughs in full fruit. The hill-side was covered with corn, with
+vines, with mulberry trees; the men and women were at work amongst the
+trees (it was the first day of harvest); there was a blue, happy sky
+above them all; their voices, chattering and calling to one another
+over the sea of grain, came to his ears gaily and softened by air and
+distance. He sighed as he looked and as he heard. Yet, interrogated, he
+would have said that he was happy and wanted for nothing.
+
+He was a slight, pale man, still almost a youth, with a delicate
+face, without colour and beardless, his eyes were brown and tender
+and serious, his mouth was sensitive and sweet. He was the son of a
+fisherman away by Bocca d'Arno, where the river meets the sea, amidst
+the cane and cactus brakes which Costa loves to paint. But who could
+say what fine, time-filtered, pure Etruscan, or Latin, blood might not
+run in his veins? There is so much of the classic features and the
+classic forms amongst the peasants of Tyrrhene seashores, of Cimbrian
+oak woods, of Roman grass plains, of Maremana marshes.
+
+It was the last day of peace which he was destined to know in Marca.
+
+He turned from the window with reluctance and regret, as the old woman,
+who served him as housekeeper and church-cleaner in one, summoned him
+to his frugal supper. He could have supped at any hour he had chosen;
+there were none to say him nay, but it was the custom at Marca to sup
+at the twenty-third hour, and he was not a person to violate custom;
+he would as soon have thought of spitting on the blessed bread itself.
+Habit is a masterful ruler in all Italian communities. It has always
+been so. It is a formula which excuses all things and sanctifies all
+things, and to none did it do so more than to Don Gesualdo. Often he
+was not in the least hungry at sunset, often he grudged sorely the
+hours spent in breaking black bread, and eating poor soup, when Nature
+was at her fairest, and the skies giving their finest spectacle to a
+thankless earth. Yet never did he fail to meekly answer old Candida's
+summons to the humble repast. To have altered the hour of eating would
+have seemed to him irreligious, revolutionary, altogether impossible.
+
+Candida was a little old woman, burnt black by the sun, with a whisp
+of grey hair fastened on the crown of her head, and a neater look
+about her kerchief and her gown than was usual in Marca, for she was a
+woman originally from a northern city. She had always been a servant
+in priests' houses, and, if the sacristan were ill or away, knew as
+well as he where every book, bell, and candle were kept, and could
+have said the offices herself had her sex allowed her. In tongue she
+was very sharp, and in secret was proud of the power she possessed of
+making the Vice-Regent of God afraid of her. The priest was the first
+man in this parish of poor folks, and the priest would shrink like a
+chidden child if she found out that he had given his best shirt to a
+beggar, or had inadvertently come in with wet boots over the brick
+floor, which she had just washed and sanded. It was the old story of so
+many sovereignties. He had power, no doubt, to bind and loose, to bless
+and curse, to cleanse, or refuse to cleanse, the sinful souls of men;
+but for all that he was only a stupid, forgetful baby of a man in his
+servant's eyes, and she made him feel the scorn she had for him, mixed
+up with a half-motherly, half-scolding admiration, which saw in him
+half a child, half a fool, and maybe she would add in her own thoughts,
+a kind of angel.
+
+Don Gesualdo was not wise or learned in any way; he had barely been
+able to acquire enough knowledge to pass through the examinations
+necessary for entrance into the priesthood. That slender amount of
+scholarship was his all; but he was clever enough for Marca, which had
+very little brains of its own, and he did his duty most faithfully, as
+far as he saw it, at all times. As for doubts of any sort as to what
+that duty was, such scepticism never could possibly assail him. His
+creed appeared as plain and sure to him as the sun which shone in the
+heavens, and his faith was as single-hearted and unswerving as the
+devoted soul of a docile sheep dog.
+
+He was of a poetic and retiring nature; religion had taken entire
+possession of his life, and he was as unworldly, as visionary, and as
+simple as anyone of the _peccarelle di Dio_ who dwelt around Francesco
+d'Assissi. His mother had been a German servant girl, married out
+of a small inn in Pisa, and some qualities of the dreamy, slow, and
+serious Teutonic temperament were in him, all Italian of the western
+coast as he was. On such a dual mind the spiritual side of his creed
+had obtained intense power, and the office he filled was to him a
+Heaven-given mission which compelled him to incessant sacrifice of
+every earthly appetite and every selfish thought.
+
+'He is too good to live,' said his old housekeeper.
+
+It was a very simple and monotonous existence which was led by him in
+his charge. There was no kind of change in it for anybody, unless they
+went away, and few people born in Marca ever did that. They were not
+forced by climate to be nomads, like the mountaineers of the Apennines,
+nor like the men of the sea-coast and ague-haunted plains. Marca was
+a healthy, homely place on the slope of a hill in a pastoral country,
+where its sons and daughters could stay and work all the year round, if
+they chose, without risk of fever worse than such as might be brought
+on by too much new wine at close of autumn.
+
+Marca was not pretty, or historical, or picturesque, or uncommon in any
+way; there are five hundred, five thousand villages like it, standing
+amongst corn lands and maize fields and mulberry trees, with its little
+dark church, and its white-washed presbytery, and its dusky, red-tiled
+houses, and its one great, silent, empty villa that used to be a
+fortified and stately palace, and now is given over to the rats and the
+spiders and the scorpions. A very quiet, little place, far away from
+cities and railways, dusty and uncomely in itself, but blessed in the
+abundant light and the divine landscape which are around it, and of
+which no one in it ever thought, except this simple young priest, Don
+Gesualdo Brasailo.
+
+Of all natural gifts, a love of natural beauty surely brings most
+happiness to the possessor of it; happiness altogether unalloyed and
+unpurchasable, and created by the mere rustle of green leaves, the
+mere ripple of brown waters. It is not an Italian gift at all, nor an
+Italian feeling. To an Italian, gas is more beautiful than sunshine,
+and a cambric flower more beautiful than a real one; he usually thinks
+the mountains hateful and a city divine; he detests trees and adores
+crowds. But there are exceptions to all rules; there are poetic natures
+everywhere, though everywhere they are rare. Don Gesualdo was the
+exception in Marca and its neighbourhood, and evening after evening saw
+him in the summer weather strolling through the fields, his breviary
+in his hand, but his heart with the dancing fire-flies, the quivering
+poplar leaves, the tall green canes, the little silvery fish darting
+over the white stones of the shallow river-waters. He could not have
+told why he loved to watch these things; he thought it was because they
+reminded him of Bocca d'Arno and the sand-beach and the cane-brakes;
+but he did love them, and they filled him with a vague emotion; half
+pleasure and half pain.
+
+His supper over, he went into his church; a little red-bricked,
+white-washed passage connected it with his parlour. The church was
+small, and dark, and old; it had an altar-piece, said to be old, and by
+a Sienese master, and of some value, but Gesualdo knew nothing of these
+matters. A Raphael might have hung there and he would have been none
+the wiser. He loved the church, ugly and simple as it was, as a mother
+loves a plain child or a dull one because it is hers; and now and then
+he preached strange, passionate, pathetic sermons in it, which none of
+his people understood, and which he barely understood himself. He had a
+sweet, full, far-reaching voice, with an accent of singular melancholy
+in it, and as his mystical, romantic, involved phrases passed far
+over the heads of his hearers, like a flight of birds flying high up
+against the clouds, the pathos and music in his tones stirred their
+hearts vaguely. He was certainly, they thought, a man whom the saints
+loved. Candida, sitting near the altar with her head bowed and her
+hands feeling her rosary, would think as she heard the unintelligible
+eloquence: 'Dear Lord, all that power of words, all that skill of the
+tongue, and he would put his shirt on bottom upwards were it not for
+me!'
+
+There was no office in his church that evening, but he lingered about
+it, touching this thing and the other with tender fingers. There was
+always a sweet scent in the little place; its door usually stood
+open to the fields amidst which it was planted, and the smell of the
+incense, which century after century had been burned in it, blended
+with the fragrance from primroses, or dog-roses, or new-mown hay, or
+crushed ripe grapes, which, according to the season, came into it from
+without. Candida kept it very clean, and the scorpions and spiders were
+left so little peace there by her ever-active broom, that they betook
+themselves elsewhere, dear as the wooden benches and the crannied
+stones had been to them for ages.
+
+Since he had come to Marca, nothing of any kind had happened in it.
+There had been some marriages, a great many births, not a few burials;
+but that was all. The people who came to confession at Easter confessed
+very common sins; they had stolen this or that, cheated here, there,
+and everywhere; got drunk and quarrelled, nothing more. He would give
+them clean bills of spiritual health, and bid them go in peace and sin
+no more, quite sure, as they were sure themselves, that they would have
+the self-same sins to tell of the next time that they should come there.
+
+Everybody in Marca thought a great deal of their religion, that is,
+they trusted to it in a helpless but confident kind of way as a fetish,
+which, being duly and carefully propitiated, would make things all
+right for them after death. They would not have missed a mass to save
+their lives; that they dozed through it, and cracked nuts, or took a
+suck at their pipe stems when they woke, did not affect their awed
+and unchangeable belief in its miraculous and saving powers. If they
+had been asked what they believed, or why they believed, they would
+have scratched their heads and felt puzzled. Their minds dwelt in a
+twilight in which nothing had any distinct form. The clearest idea ever
+presented to them was that of the Madonna: they thought of her as of
+some universal mother who wanted to do them good in the present and
+future if they only observed her ceremonials: just as in the ages gone
+by, upon these same hill-sides, the Latin peasant had thought of the
+great Demeter.
+
+Don Gesualdo himself, despite all the doctrine which had been instilled
+into him in his novitiate, did not know much more than they; he
+repeated the words of his offices without any distinct notion of all
+that they meant; he had a vague feeling that all self-denial and
+self-sacrifice were thrice blessed, and he tried his best to save his
+own soul and the souls of others; but there he ceased to think; outside
+that, speculation lay, and speculation was a thrice damnable offence.
+Yet he, being imaginative and intelligent in a humble and dog-like
+way, was at times infinitely distressed to see how little effect this
+religion, which he taught and which they professed, had upon the lives
+of his people. His own life was altogether guided by it. Why could not
+theirs be the same? Why did they go on, all through the year, swearing,
+cursing, drinking, quarrelling, lying, stealing? He could not but
+perceive that they came to him to confess their peccadilloes, only that
+they might pursue them more completely at their ease. He could not
+flatter himself that his ministrations in Marca, which were now of six
+years' duration, had made the village a whit different to what it had
+been when he had entered it.
+
+Thinking of this, as he did think of it continually night and day,
+being a man of singularly sensitive conscience, he sat down on a marble
+bench near the door and opened his breviary. The sun was setting behind
+the pines on the crest of the hills; the warm orange light poured
+across the paved way in front of the church, through the stems of the
+cypresses, which stood before the door, and found its way over the
+uneven slates of the stone floor to his feet. Nightingales were singing
+somewhere in the dog-rose hedge beyond the cypress trees. Lizards ran
+from crack to crack in the pavement. A tendril of honeysuckle came
+through a hole in the wall, thrusting its delicate curled horns of
+perfume towards him. The whole entrance was bathed in golden warmth and
+light; the body of the church behind him was quite dark.
+
+He had opened his breviary from habit, but he did not read; he sat and
+gazed at the evening clouds, at the blue hills, at the radiant air,
+and listened to the songs of the nightingales in that dreamy trance
+which made him look so stupid in the eyes of his housekeeper and his
+parishioners, but which were only the meditations of a poetic temper,
+cramped and cooped up in a narrow and uncongenial existence, and not
+educated or free enough to be able even to analyse what it felt.
+
+'The nightingale's song in June is altogether unlike its songs of
+April and May,' thought this poor priest, whom Nature had made a poet,
+and to whom she had given the eyes which see and the ears which hear.
+'The very phrases are wholly different; the very accent is not the
+same; in spring it is all a canticle, like the songs of Solomon; in
+midsummer--what is it he is singing? Is he lamenting the summer? or is
+it he is only teaching his young ones how they should sing next year?'
+
+And he fell again to listening to the sweetest bird that gladdens
+earth. One nightingale was patiently repeating his song again and
+again, sometimes more slowly, sometimes more quickly, seeming to lay
+stress on some phrases more than on others, and another voice, fainter
+and feebler than his own, repeated the trills and roulades after him
+fitfully, and often breaking down altogether. It was plain that there
+in the wild-rose hedge he was teaching his son. Anyone who will may
+hear these sweet lessons given under bays and myrtle, under arbutus and
+pomegranate, through all the month of June.
+
+Nightingales in Marca were only regarded as creatures to be trapped,
+shot, caged, eaten, sold for a centime like any other small bird;
+but about the church no one touched them; the people knew that their
+_parocco_ cared to hear their songs coming sweetly through the
+pauses in the recitatives of the office. Absorbed, as he was now, in
+hearkening to the music lesson amongst the white dog-roses, he started
+violently as a shadow fell across the threshold, and a voice called to
+him, 'Good evening, Don Gesualdo!'
+
+He looked up and saw a woman whom he knew well, a young woman scarcely
+indeed eighteen years old; very handsome, with a face full of warmth,
+and colour, and fire, and tenderness, great flashing eyes which could
+at times be as soft as a dog's, and a beautiful ruddy mouth with teeth
+as white as a dog's are also. She was by name Generosa Fè; she was the
+wife of Tasso Tassilo, the miller.
+
+In Marca, most of the women by toil and sun were black as berries by
+the time they were twenty, and looked old almost before they were
+young; with rough hair and loose forms and wrinkled skins, and children
+dragging at their breasts all the year through. Generosa was not like
+them; she did little work; she had the form of a goddess; she took
+care of her beauty, and she had no children, though she had married at
+fifteen. She was friends with Don Gesualdo; they had both come from the
+Bocca d'Arno, and it was a link of common memory and mutual attachment.
+They liked to recall how they had each run through the tall canes and
+cactus, and waded in the surf, and slept in the hot sand, and hidden
+themselves for fright when the king's camels had come towards them,
+throwing their huge mis-shapen shadows over the seas of flowering reeds
+and rushes and grey spiked aloes.
+
+He remembered her a small child, jumping about on the sand and laughing
+at him, a youth, when he was going to college to study for entrance
+into the Church. 'Gesualdino! Gesualdino!' she had cried. 'A fine
+priest he will make for us all to confess to!' And she had screamed
+with mirth, her handsome little face rippling all over with gaiety,
+like the waves of the sea with the sunshine.
+
+He had remembered her and had been glad when Tasso Tassilo, the miller,
+had gone sixty miles away for a wife, and had brought her from Bocca
+d'Arno to live at the mill on the small river, which was the sole water
+which ran through the village of Marca.
+
+Tasso Tassilo, going on business once to the sea coast, had chanced to
+see that handsome face of hers, and had wooed and won her without great
+difficulty; for her people were poor folk, living by carting sand, and
+she herself was tired of her bare legs and face, her robust hunger,
+which made her glad to eat the fruit off the cactus plants, and her
+great beauty, which nobody ever saw except the seagulls, and carters,
+and fishers, and cane-cutters, who were all as poor as she was herself.
+
+Tasso Tassilo, in his own person, she hated; an ugly, dry, elderly man,
+with his soul wrapped up in his flour-bags and his money-bags; but
+he adored her, and let her spend as she chose on her attire and her
+ornaments; and the mill-house was a pleasant place enough, with its
+walls painted on the outside with scriptural subjects, and the willows
+drooping over its eaves, and the young men and the mules loitering
+about on the land side of it, and the peasants coming up with corn to
+be ground whenever there had been rain in summer, and so water enough
+in the river bed to turn the mill wheels. In drought, the stream was
+low and its stones dry, and no work could be done by the grindstones.
+There was then only water enough for the ducks to paddle in, and the
+pretty teal to float in, which they would always do at sunrise unless
+the miller let fly a charge of small shot amongst them from the
+windows under the roof.
+
+'Good evening, Don Gesualdo,' said the miller's wife now, in the midst
+of the nightingale's song and the orange glow from the sunset.
+
+Gesualdo rose with a smile. He was always glad to see her; she had
+something about her for him of boyhood, of home, of the sea, and of
+the careless days before he became a seminarist. He did not positively
+regret that he had entered the priesthood, but he remembered the
+earlier life wistfully, and with wonder that he could ever have been
+that light-hearted lad who had run through the cane-brakes to plunge
+into the rolling waters, with all the wide, gay, sunlit world of sea
+and sky and river and shore before him, behind him, and above him.
+
+'What is wrong, Generosa?' he asked her, seeing as he looked up that
+her handsome face was clouded. Her days were not often tranquil; her
+husband was jealous, and she gave him cause for jealousy. The mill
+was a favourite resort of all young men for thirty miles around, and
+unless Tasso Tassilo had ceased to grind corn he could not have shut
+his doors to them.
+
+'It is the old story, Don Gesualdo,' she answered, leaning against the
+church porch. 'You know what Tasso is, and what a dog's life he leads
+me.'
+
+'You are not always prudent, my daughter,' said Gesualdo, with a faint
+smile.
+
+'Who could be always prudent at my years?' said the miller's young
+wife. 'Tasso is a brute, and a fool too. One day he will drive me out
+of myself; I tell him so.'
+
+'That is not the way to make him better,' said Gesualdo. 'I am sorry
+you do not see it. The man loves you, and he feels he is old, and he
+knows that you do not care; that knowledge is always like a thorn in
+his flesh; he feels you do not care.'
+
+'How should he suppose that I care?' said Generosa, passionately. 'I
+hated him always; he is as old as my father; he expects me to be shut
+up like a nun; if he had his own way I should never stir out of the
+house. Does one marry for that?'
+
+'One should marry to do one's duty,' said Gesualdo, timidly; for he
+felt the feebleness of his counsels and arguments against the force and
+the warmth and the self-will of a woman, conscious of her beauty, and
+her power, and her lovers, and moved by all the instincts of vanity and
+passion.
+
+'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 coloured through her warm, tanned 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 seashore, and
+she had no friends in Marca, for she was thought a 'foreigner,' not
+being of that countryside, 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 far 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 your 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 thrice 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
+sea winds when they blew, as prevent an intercourse so favoured and so
+facilitated by circumstances. The steward had a million reasons in the
+year to visit the mill, and when the miller insulted him and forbade
+him his doors, the jealous husband 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 cane-brakes and the
+vine-fields. Nothing could have broken off the intrigue except the
+departure of one or 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
+the heeder, 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 that duty is 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 coloured; 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 ardours of her youth, and all the delight in her
+own power, combined to render 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 blossoms of pomegranate over the hedge; she 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
+earrings, the slender column of her throat, her vigorous and voluptuous
+form. Gesualdo looked after her, and a subtle 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
+grey 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 dependants, 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 wearing away
+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 further 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 ardour 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 SS. Peter and 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 honour,' 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 coloured violently. He was astonished and silent.
+
+'She loves you,' said Gesualdo, simply.
+
+Falko Melegari made a gesture as though he implied that it was not his
+place either to deny or 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 someone 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.
+
+'Reverend Vicar,' 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 stewardship 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 dishonour quietly.'
+
+'Who cares what Tassilo does?' said the young steward, petulantly. 'If
+he touch a hair of her head I will make him die a thousand deaths.'
+
+'All those are mere words,' said Gesualdo. 'You cannot mend one
+crime by another, and you cannot protect a woman from her husband's
+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 vigour, of ardour, 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 fervour, 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 salutation in farewell.
+
+
+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.
+
+Don 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 Marches. 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. He 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 bloodshot eyes of the working ox, the goitered 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 the throne of a beneficent 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 maples, or the walnut trunks.
+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-walls stood down into the
+water, a strong place built in olden days; the great black wheels were
+now 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 Don
+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 he heard voices, raised
+high in stormy quarrel, which 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. Don Gesualdo was a weak man and physically timid, but here he
+hesitated not 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!'
+
+Don 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 cut corn, the long grass, the high hedges, 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 Peter and of 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
+doorway; 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 their 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 under his heart. The agitation in the people was
+great; the uproar deafening. Someone had sent for the carabineers, but
+their nearest picket was two miles off, and they had not yet arrived.
+The dead man still lay where he had fallen; everyone was afraid to
+touch him.
+
+'Does his wife know?' said Don 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.
+
+The vicar, with a strong shudder of disgust, held up his hand in horror
+and reproof, then bent over the dead body where it lay amongst 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 indoors,' said the priest.
+
+'You are in full canonicals!' cried Candida, twitching at his sleeve.
+
+But Don 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
+anyone of the little crowd would have cared; they would not have
+stretched a hand even to drag him into the shade.
+
+Don 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. The
+priest, 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 back. 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 doorways, half afraid, half angered;
+some of them went to the mill-house, eager to have the honour 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 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.
+
+Don 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 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 Don Gesualdo. 'You will
+not bring him to life by starving yourself.'
+
+He 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 grey villa where her lover dwelt, standing out against the
+moonlight amongst 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 candour 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 the corner of her soul she was vaguely
+conscious that there was a degree of unfairness and baseness in
+setting their youth and their ardour 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 vicar's reproof
+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 in 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 grey 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 Vendramino, 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 mass 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, 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 day, breaking 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
+neighbours, 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 doorway and watched her suspiciously and
+without compassion. There was no one there who did not believe her to
+be the murderess. No one except Don 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 title 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.'
+
+In a later time they remembered against the young vicar all this which
+he did now.
+
+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 Municipality in which Marca
+was enrolled had its seat of justice, its tax offices and its schools.
+There were 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.
+
+The feast of SS. Peter and 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 passion for Falko Melegari, were facts known
+to all the village, and who else had any interest in his death? The
+whole of Marca pronounced 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.
+
+'Neighbours 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 passed, 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 casement, saw Falko Melegari on his grey 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.
+
+Don Gesualdo bowed his head and spread out his hands, palm downwards,
+in a gesture, meaning hopeless doubt.
+
+'I was 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
+nought of it. Oh, my God, why was I not here? They should not have
+taken her without it costing them hard.'
+
+'You would have done her no good,' said Don 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 clenched 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.
+
+Don 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 amongst 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 Tasso Tassilo's
+have filled his soul, was quenched in the darkness of horror in which
+her fate was snatched 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. Tasso Tassilo 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 fresh 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 passing of the days which came after this feast of the two apostles
+was full of an unspeakable horror to him, and in the brief space of
+them he grew haggard, hollow-cheeked, almost aged, despite his youth.
+The dread formalities and tyrannies of law seized on the quiet village,
+and tortured every soul in it; everyone 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
+passionate 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 Tasso
+Tassilo, murdered on the morning of the day of SS. Peter and Paul, was
+consigned to prison, to be 'detained as a precaution' under the lock
+and key of the law, circumstantial evidence being held to be strongly
+against her as the primary cause, if not the actual executant, of the
+murder of her lord.
+
+Everyone 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 amongst 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-favoured, 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-humoured
+impatience.
+
+'But, God in Heaven, why not, when it is true?' shouted Falko.
+
+'It is always true when the _damo_ is a man of honour,' 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 neighbours, and was taken to the
+town of Vendramino, and there left to lie in prison until such time as
+the majesty of the law should be pleased to decide whether or no 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-coloured 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
+Tassilo, who had always had a share in it, both of labour 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 earrings
+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?
+
+The authorities at Vendramino 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 assure 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 Don
+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.
+
+
+III
+
+The winter passed away, and with February the corn spread a green
+carpet everywhere; the almond trees blossomed on the hill-sides, the
+violets opened the ways for the anemones, and the willows budded beside
+the water-mill. There were braying of bugles, twanging of lutes,
+cracking of shots, drinking of wines on the farms and in the village as
+a rustic celebration of carnival. Not much of it, for times are hard
+and men's hearts heavy in these days, and the sunlit grace and airy
+gaiety natural to it are things for ever dead in Italy, like the ilex
+forests and the great gardens that have perished for ever and aye.
+
+Lent came, with its church bells sounding in melancholy iteration over
+the March fields, where the daffodils were blowing by millions and the
+young priest of San Bartolo fasted and prayed and mortified his flesh
+in every way that his creed allowed, and hoped by such miseries, pains
+and penances to attain grace in heaven, if not on earth, for Generosa
+in her misery. All through Lent he wearied the saints with incessant
+supplication for her.
+
+Day and night he racked his brain to discover any evidence as to who
+the assassin had been. He never once doubted her; if the very apostles
+of his Church had all descended on earth to witness against her, he
+would have cried to them that she was innocent.
+
+The sickening suspicions, the haunting, irrepressible doubts, which now
+and then came over the mind of her lover as he walked to and fro by the
+edge of the river at night, looking up at what had been the casement
+of her chamber, did not assail for an instant the stronger faith of
+Gesualdo, weak as he was in body, and, in some ways, weak in character.
+
+The truth might remain in horrid mystery, in impenetrable darkness, for
+ever; it would made no difference to him; he would be always convinced
+that she had been innocent. Had he not known her when she was a little
+barefooted child, coming flying through the shallow green pools and the
+great yellow grasses and the sunny cane-brakes of Bocca d'Arno?
+
+Most innocent, indeed, had been his relations with the wife of Tassilo,
+but to him it seemed that the interest he had taken in her, the
+pleasure he had felt in converse with her, had been criminal. There had
+been times when his eyes, which should have only seen in her a soul to
+save, had become aware of her mere bodily beauty, had dwelt on her with
+an awakening of carnal admiration. It sufficed to make him guilty in
+his own sight. This agony, which he felt for her, was the sympathy of a
+personal affection. He knew it, and his consciousness of it flung him
+at the feet of his crucifix in tortures of conscience.
+
+He knew, too, that he had done her harm by the incoherence and the
+reticence of his testimony, by the mere vehemence with which he had
+unwisely striven to affirm an innocence which he had no power to
+prove; even by that natural impulse of humanity which had moved him
+to bring her husband's corpse under the roof of the church and close
+the door upon the clamorous and staring throng who saw in the tragedy
+but a pastime. He, more than any other, had helped to cast on her the
+darkness of suspicion; he, more than any other, had helped to make
+earthly peace and happiness for ever denied to her.
+
+Even if they acquitted her in the house of law yonder, she would be
+dishonoured for life. Even her lover, who loved her with all the
+sensual, coarse ardour of a young man's uncontrolled desires, had
+declared that he would be ashamed to walk beside her in broad day so
+long as this slur of possible, if unproven, crime were on her. Don
+Gesualdo mused on all these things until his sensitive soul began to
+take alarm lest it were not a kind of sin to be so occupied with the
+fate of one to the neglect and detriment of others. Candida saw him
+growing thinner and more shadow-like every day with ever-increasing
+anxiety. To fast, she knew, was needful above all for a priest in Lent,
+but he did not touch what he might lawfully have eaten; the new-laid
+eggs and the crisp lettuces of her providing failed to tempt him, and
+no mortal man, she told him, could live on air and water as he did.
+
+'There should be reason in all piety,' she said to him, and he assented.
+
+But he did not change his ways, which were rather those of a monk of
+the Thebaid than of a vicar of a parish. He had the soul in him of a
+St Anthony, of a St Francis, and he had been born too late; the world
+as it is was too coarse, and too incredulous, for him, even in a little
+rustic primitive village hidden away from the eyes of men under its
+millet and its fig trees.
+
+The people of Marca, like his old servant, noticed the great change
+in him. Pale he had always been, but now he was the colour of his
+own ivory Christ; taciturn, too, he had always been, yet he had ever
+had playful words for the children, kind words for the aged; these
+were silent now. The listless and mechanical manner with which he
+went through the offices of the Church contrasted with the passionate
+and despairing cries which seemed to come from his very soul when he
+preached, and which vaguely frightened a rural congregation who were
+wholly unable to understand them.
+
+'One would think the good _parocco_ had some awful sin on his soul,'
+said a woman to Candida one evening.
+
+'Nay, nay; he is as pure as a lamb,' said Candida, twirling her
+distaff, 'but he was always helpless and childlike, and too much taken
+up with heavenly things--may the saints forgive me for saying so. He
+should be in a monastery along with St Romolo and St Francis.'
+
+But yet, the housekeeper, though loyalty itself, was, in her own secret
+thoughts, not a little troubled at the change she saw in her master.
+She put it down to the score of his agitation at the peril of Generosa
+Fè; but this in itself seemed to her unfitting in one of his sacred
+calling. A mere light-o'-love and saucebox, as she had always herself
+called the miller's wife, was wholly unworthy to occupy, even in pity,
+the thoughts of so holy a man.
+
+'There could not be a doubt that she had given that knife-stroke
+amongst the canes in the dusk of the dawn of SS. Peter and Paul,'
+thought Candida, amongst whose virtues charity had small place; 'but
+what had the _parocco_ to do with it?'
+
+In her rough way, motherly and unmannerly, she ventured to take her
+master to task for taking so much interest in a sinner.
+
+'The people of Marca say you think too much about that foul business;
+they do even whisper that you neglect your holy duties,' she said to
+him, as she served the frugal supper of cabbage soaked in oil. 'There
+will always be crimes as long as the world wags on, but that is no
+reason why good souls should put themselves about over that which they
+cannot help.'
+
+Don Gesualdo said nothing, but she saw the nerves of his mouth quiver.
+
+'I have no business to lecture your reverence on your duties,' she
+added, tartly; 'but they do say that so much anxiety for a guilty woman
+is a manner of injustice to innocent souls.'
+
+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 up 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.
+
+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 tenth of next
+month?' he said, in a low, stifled voice.
+
+The young man, leaning back in his wooden chair, gave a sign of assent.
+
+'And you?' said Don 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 colour; he
+hesitated.
+
+'You will not!' said Don Gesualdo.
+
+'I have not said so,' answered the young man, evasively. 'I do not know
+that she would exact it.'
+
+Exact it! Don 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 neighbours 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 oftentimes the strongest instincts. The priest 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 God 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 everyone say that my
+wife had been in gaol 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. Don Gesualdo had gone across the rough grass of
+the garden, and had passed 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 credit, 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 snipe under the
+gorse, for close time was unrecognised in the province. 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
+awhile to Gesualdo, as to the only one who, like himself, cared for the
+fate of Tasso Tassilo's wife; but now that suspicion had entered into
+him, there returned with it all his detestation of the Church and all
+the secular hatreds 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 was a murderer as well!'
+
+He knew that the idea was a kind of madness. Don Gesualdo had never
+been known to hurt a fly; indeed, his aversion to even 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 forbade them to throw stones at the lambs or
+kids they drove to pasture. 'They are not baptised,' the children had
+often said, with a grin, and Gesualdo had often answered: 'The good God
+baptised 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
+Tasso Tassilo 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 we do 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, amongst 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
+passed (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 sceptic is sometimes as narrow and as arrogant in his
+free-thought as the believer in his bigotry. Falko 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 for the
+galleys, or the scaffold, a mass of concealed iniquity covered by his
+cloth.
+
+'I believe you know more than anyone,' he said, roughly, one day when
+he passed the vicar on a narrow field-path, while his eyes flashed
+suspiciously over the downcast face of Don 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 embarrassment,
+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, passionately, 'may all the devils you believe in torture you
+through all eternity!'
+
+Don 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,
+but scowled at him in scorn, 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.
+
+
+IV
+
+Meantime Don Gesualdo was striving with the utmost force that was in
+him to persuade the real criminal to confess publicly what he had told
+under the seal of confession. He saw the man secretly, and used every
+argument with which the doctrines of his Church and his own intense
+desires could supply him. But there is no obstinacy so dogged, no
+egotism so impenetrable, no shield against persuasion so absolute, as
+the stolid ignorance and self-love of a low mind. The carter turned a
+deaf ear to all censure as to all entreaty; he was stolidly indifferent
+to all the woe that he had caused and would cause if he remained
+silent. What was all that to him? The thought of the miller's widow
+shut up in prison pleased him. He had always hated her as he had seen
+her in what he called her finery, going by him in the sunshine, with
+all her bravery of pearl necklace, of silver hairpins, of gold breast
+chains. Many and many a time he had thirsted to snatch at them and
+pull them off her. What right had she to them, she, a daughter of
+naked, hungry folks, who dug and carted sea and river sand for a living
+even as he carted sacks of flour. She was no better than himself! Now
+and then, Generosa had called him, in her careless, imperious fashion,
+to draw water or carry wood for her, and when he had done so she never
+had taken the trouble to bid him good day or to say a good-natured
+word. His pride had been hurt, and he had had much ado to restrain
+himself from calling her a daughter of beggars, a worm of the sand.
+Like her own people, he was pleased that she should now find her fine
+clothes and her jewelled trinkets of no avail to her, and that she
+should weep the light out of her big eyes, and the rose-bloom off her
+peach-like cheeks in the squalor and nausea of a town prison.
+
+Don Gesualdo, with all the force which a profound conviction that he
+speaks the truth lends to any speaker, wrestled for the soul of this
+dogged brute, and warned him of the punishment everlasting which would
+await him if he persisted in his refusal to surrender himself to
+justice. But he might as well have spoken to the great millstones that
+rest in the river water. Why, then, had this wretch cast the burden of
+his vile secret on innocent shoulders? It was the most poignant anguish
+to him that he could awaken no sense of guilt in the conscience of the
+criminal. The man had come to him partly from a vague superstitious
+impulse, remnant of a credulity instilled into him in childhood,
+and partly from the want to unburden his mind, to tell his story to
+someone, which is characteristic of all weak minds in times of trouble
+and peril. It had relieved him to drag the priest into sharing his own
+guilty consciousness; he was half proud and half afraid of the manner
+in which he had slain his master, and bitterly incensed that he had
+done the deed for nothing; but, beyond this, he had no other emotion
+except that he was glad that Generosa should suffer through and for it.
+
+'You will burn for ever if you persist in such hideous wickedness,'
+said Don Gesualdo again and again to him.
+
+'I will take my chance of that,' said the man. 'Hell is far off, and
+the galleys are near.'
+
+'But if you do not believe in my power to absolve you or leave you
+accursed, why did you ever confess to me?' cried Don Gesualdo.
+
+'Because one must clear one's breast to somebody when one has a thing
+like that on one's mind,' answered the carter, 'and I know you cannot
+tell of it again.'
+
+From that position nothing moved him. No entreaties, threats,
+arguments, denunciations, stirred him a hair's-breadth. He had
+confessed _per sfogarsi_ (to relieve himself): that was all.
+
+But one night after Gesualdo had thus spoken to him, vague fears
+assailed him, terrors material, not spiritual; he had parted with his
+secret; who could tell that it might not come out like a sleuth hound,
+and find him and denounce him? He had told it to be at peace, but he
+was not at peace. He feared every instant to have the hand of the law
+upon him. Whenever he heard the trot of the carabineers' horses going
+through the village, or saw their white belts and cocked hats in the
+sunlight of the fields, a cold tremor of terror seized him lest the
+priest should after all have told. He knew that it was impossible, and
+yet he was afraid.
+
+He counted up the money he had saved, a little roll of filthy and
+crumpled bank notes for very small amounts, and wondered if they would
+be enough to take him across to America. They were very few, but his
+fear compelled him to trust to them. He invented a story of remittances
+which he had received from his brother, and told his fellow-labourers
+and his employer that he was invited to join that brother, and then he
+packed up his few clothes and went. At the mill and in the village they
+talked a little of it, saying that the fellow was in luck, but that
+they for their parts would not care to go so far. Don Gesualdo heard of
+his flight in the course of the day.
+
+'Gone away! Out of the country?' he cried involuntarily, with white
+lips.
+
+The people who heard him wondered what it could matter to him that a
+carter had gone to seek his fortunes over the seas.
+
+The carter had not been either such a good worker, or such a good boon
+companion, that anyone at the mill or in the village should greatly
+regret him.
+
+'America gets all our rubbish,' said the people, 'much good may it do
+her.'
+
+Meantime, the man took his way across the country, and, sometimes by
+walking, sometimes by lifts in waggons, sometimes by helping charcoal
+burners on the road, made his way, first to Vendramino to have his
+papers put in order, and then to the sea coast, and in the port of
+Leghorn took his passage in an emigrant ship then loading there. The
+green cane-brakes and peaceful millet fields of Marca saw him no more.
+
+But he had left the burden of his blood-guiltiness behind him, and it
+lay on the guiltless soul with the weight of the world.
+
+So long as the man had remained in Marca, there had been always a
+hope present with Don Gesualdo that he would persuade him to confess
+in a court of justice what he had confessed to the church, or that
+some sequence of accidents would lead up to the discovery of his
+guilt. But with the ruffian gone across the seas, lost in that utter
+darkness which swallows up the lives of the poor and obscure when
+once they have left the hamlet in which their names mean something to
+their neighbours, this one hope was quenched, and the vicar, in agony,
+reproached himself with not having prevailed in his struggle for the
+wretch's soul; with not having been eloquent enough, or wise enough, or
+stern enough to awe him into declaration of his ghastly secret to the
+law.
+
+His failure seemed to him a sign of Heaven's wrath against himself.
+
+'How dare I,' he thought, 'how dare I, feeble and timid and useless as
+I am, call myself a servant of God, or attempt to minister to other
+souls?'
+
+He had thought, like an imbecile, as he told himself, to be able to
+awaken the conscience and compel the public confession of this man,
+and the possibility of flight had never presented itself to his mind,
+natural and simple as had been such a course to a creature without
+remorse, continually haunted by personal fears of punishment. He, he
+alone on earth, knew the man's guilt; he, he alone had the power to
+save Generosa, and he could not use the power because the secrecy of
+his holy office was fastened on him like an iron padlock on his lips.
+
+The days passed him like nightmares; he did his duties mechanically,
+scarcely consciously; the frightful alternative which was set before
+him seemed to parch up the very springs of life itself. He knew that
+he must look strangely in the eyes of the people; his voice sounded
+strangely in his own ears; he began to feel that he was unworthy to
+administer the blessed bread to the living, to give the last unction to
+the dying; he knew that he was not at fault, and yet he felt that he
+was accursed. Choose what he would, he must, he thought, commit some
+hateful sin.
+
+The day appointed for the trial came; it was the tenth of May. A hot
+day, with the bees booming amongst the acacia flowers, and the green
+tree-frogs shouting joyously above in the ilex tops, and the lizards
+running in and out of the china-rose hedges on the highways. Many
+people of Marca were summoned as witnesses, and these went to the town
+in mule carts or crazy chaises, with the farm-horse put in the shafts,
+and grumbled because they would lose their day's labour in their
+fields, and yet were pleasurably excited at the idea of seeing Generosa
+in the prisoner's dock, and being able themselves to tell all they
+knew, and a great deal that they did not know.
+
+Falko Melegari rode over at dawn by himself, and Don Gesualdo, with
+his housekeeper and sacristan, who were all summoned to give testimony,
+went by the diligence, which started from Sant' Arturo, and rolled
+through the dusty roads and over the bridges, and past the wayside
+shrines, and shops, and forges, across the country to the town.
+
+The vicar never spoke throughout the four weary hours during which the
+rickety and crowded vehicle, with its poor, starved, bruised beasts,
+rumbled on its road through the lovely shadows and cool sunlight of
+the early morning. He held his breviary in his hand for form's sake,
+and, seeing him thus absorbed in holy meditation as they thought,
+his garrulous neighbours did not disturb him, but chattered amongst
+themselves, filling the honeysuckle-scented air with the odours of
+garlic and wine and coarse tobacco.
+
+Candida glanced at him anxiously from time to time, haunted by a vague
+presentiment of ill. His face looked very strange, she thought, and
+his closely-locked lips were white as the lips of a corpse. When the
+diligence was driven over the stones of the town, all the passengers
+by it descended at the first wine-house which they saw on the piazza
+to eat and drink, but he, with never a word, motioned his housekeeper
+aside when she would have pressed food on him, and went into the
+cathedral of the place to pray alone.
+
+The town was hot and dusty and sparsely peopled. It had brown walls
+and large brick palaces untenanted, and ancient towers, also of brick,
+pointing high to heaven. It was a place dear to the memory of lovers
+of art for the sake of some fine paintings of the Sienese school which
+hung in its churches, and was occasionally visited by strangers for
+sake of these; but, for the most part, it was utterly forgotten by
+the world, and its bridge of many arches, said to have been built by
+Augustus, seldom resounded to any other echoes than those of the heavy
+wheels of the hay or corn waggons coming in from the pastoral country
+around.
+
+The Court-house, where all great trials took place, stood in one of
+the bare, silent, dusty squares of the town. It had once been the
+ancient palace of the Podesta, and had the machicolated walls, the
+turreted towers, and the vast stairways and frescoed chambers of a
+larger and statelier time than ours. The hall of justice was a vast
+chamber pillared with marble, vaulted and painted, sombre and grand.
+It was closely thronged with country folks; there was a scent of hay,
+of garlic, of smoking pipes hastily thrust into trouser pockets, of
+unwashed flesh steaming hotly in the crowd, and the close air. The
+judge was there with his officers, a mediæval figure in black square
+cap and black gown. The accused was behind the cage assigned to such
+prisoners, guarded by carabineers and by the jailers. Don Gesualdo
+looked in once from a distant doorway; then with a noise in his ears
+like the sound of the sea, and a deadly sickness on him, he stayed
+without in the audience-chamber, where a breath of air came to him up
+one of the staircases, there waiting until his name was called.
+
+The trial began. Everything was the same as it had been in the
+preliminary examination which had preceded her committal on the charge
+of murder. The same depositions were made now that had then been made.
+In the interval, the people of Marca had forgotten a good deal, so
+added somewhat of their own invention to make up for the deficiency;
+but, on the whole, the testimony was the same given with that
+large looseness of statement, and absolute indifference to fact, so
+characteristic of the Italian mind, the judge, from habit, sifting the
+chaff from the wheat in the evidence with unerring skill, and following
+with admirable patience the tortuous windings and the hazy imagination
+of the peasants he examined.
+
+The examination of the vicar did not come on until the third day. These
+seventy or eighty hours of suspense were terrible to him. He scarcely
+broke his fast, or was conscious of what he did. The whole of the time
+was passed by him listening in the court of justice, or praying in
+the churches. When at last he was summoned, a cold sweat bathed his
+face and hair; his hands trembled; he answered the interrogations of
+the judge and of the advocates almost at random; his replies seemed
+scarcely to be those of a rational being; he passionately affirmed her
+innocence with delirious repetition and emphasis, which produced on the
+minds of the examiners the contrary effect to that which he endeavoured
+to create.
+
+'This priest knows that she is guilty,' thought the president. 'He
+knows it--perhaps he knows even more--perhaps he was her accomplice.'
+
+His evidence, his aspect, his wild and contradictory words, did as
+much harm to her cause as he ignorantly strove to do good. From other
+witnesses of Marca, the Court had learned that a great friendship had
+always been seen to exist between the vicar of San Bartolo and Generosa
+Fè, and that on the morning when the murder was discovered, the priest
+had removed the body of the dead man to the sacristy, forestalling the
+officers of justice and disturbing the scene of the murder. A strong
+impression against him was created beforehand in the audience and on
+the bench, and his pallid, agitated countenance, his incoherent words,
+his wild eyes, which incessantly sought the face of the prisoner,
+all gave him the appearance of a man conscious of some guilt himself
+and driven out of his mind by fear. The president cross-examined him
+without mercy, censured him, railed at him, and did his uttermost to
+extract the truth which he believed that Don Gesualdo concealed, but to
+no avail; incoherent and half-insane as he seemed, he said no syllable
+which could betray that which he really knew. Only when his eyes
+rested on Generosa, there was such an agony in them that she herself
+was startled by it.
+
+'Who would ever have dreamt that he would have cared so much?' she
+thought. 'But he was always a tender soul; he always pitied the birds
+in the traps, and the oxen that went to the slaughter.'
+
+Reproved, and censured without stint, for the president knew that to
+insult a priest was to merit promotion in high quarters, Don Gesualdo
+was at last permitted to escape from his place of torture. Blind and
+sick he got away through the crowd, past the officials, down the
+stairs, and out into the hot air. The piazza was thronged with people
+who could not find standing room in the Court-house. The murmur of
+their rapid and loud voices was like the noise of a sea on his ears;
+they had all the same burden. They all repeated like one man the same
+words: 'They will condemn her,' and then wondered what sentence she
+would receive; whether a score of years of seclusion or a lifetime.
+
+He went through the chattering, curious cruel throng, barbarous with
+that barbarity of the populace, which in all countries sees with glee a
+bull die, a wrestler drop, a malefactor ascend the scaffold, or a rat
+scour the streets soaked in petroleum and burning alive. The dead man
+had been nothing to them, and his wife had done none of them any harm,
+yet there was not a man or a woman, a youth or a girl in the crowd, who
+would not have felt that he or she was defrauded of his entertainment
+if she were acquitted by her judges, although there was a general sense
+amongst them that she had done no more than had been natural, and no
+more than had been her right.
+
+The dark, slender, emaciated figure of the priest glided through the
+excited and boisterous groups; the air had the heat of summer; the
+sky above was blue and cloudless; the brown brick walls of church and
+palace seemed baking in the light of the sun. In the corner of the
+square was a fountain relic of the old times when the town had been
+a place of pageantry and power; beautiful pale green water, cold and
+fresh, leaping and flowing around marble dolphins. Don Gesualdo stooped
+and drank thirstily, as though he would never cease to drink, then
+went on his way and pushed aside the leathern curtain of the cathedral
+door and entered into the coolness and solitude of that place of refuge.
+
+There he stretched himself before the cross in prayer, and wept bitter,
+burning, unavailing tears for the burden which he bore of another's sin
+and his own helplessness beneath it, which seemed to him like a greater
+crime.
+
+But even at the very altar of his God, peace was denied him. Hurried,
+loud, impetuous steps from heavy boots fell on the old, worn, marble
+floor of the church, and Falko Melegari strode up behind him and laid a
+heavy hand upon his shoulders. The young man's face was deeply flushed,
+his eyes were savage, his breath was quick and uneven; he had no heed
+for the sanctity of the place or of his companion.
+
+'Get up and hear me,' he said, roughly. 'They all say the verdict will
+be against her; you heard them.'
+
+Don Gesualdo made a gesture of assent.
+
+'Very well, then,' said the steward, through his clenched teeth, 'if it
+be so, indeed, I swear, as you and I live, that I will denounce you to
+the judges in her stead.'
+
+Don Gesualdo did not speak. He stood in a meditative attitude with
+his arms folded on his chest. He did not express either surprise or
+indignation.
+
+'I will denounce you,' repeated Melegari, made more furious by his
+silence. 'What did you do at night with your spade under the Grand
+Duke's poplars? Why did you carry in and screen the corpse? Does not
+the whole village talk of your strange ways and your altered habits?
+There is more than enough against you to send to the galleys a score of
+better men than you. Anyhow, I will denounce you if you do not make a
+clean breast of all you know to the president to-morrow. You are either
+the assassin or the accomplice, you accursed, black-coated hypocrite!'
+
+A slight flush rose on the waxen pallor of Don Gesualdo's face, but he
+still kept silence.
+
+The young man, watching him with eyes of hatred, saw guilt in that
+obstinate and mulish dumbness.
+
+'You dare not deny it, trained liar though you be!' he said, with
+passionate scorn. 'Oh, wretched cur, who ventures to call yourself a
+servitor of heaven, you would let her drag all her years out in misery
+to save your own miserable, puling, sexless, worthless life! Well! hear
+me and understand. No one can say that I do not keep my word, and here,
+by the cross which hangs above us, I take my oath that if you do not
+tell all you know to-morrow, should she be condemned, I will denounce
+you to the law, and if the law fail to do justice, I will kill you as
+Tasso Tassilo was killed. May I die childless, penniless, and accursed
+if my hand fail!'
+
+Then, with no other word, he strode from the church, the golden
+afternoon sunshine streaming through the stained windows above and
+falling on his fair hair, his flushed face, his flaming eyes, till his
+common humanity seemed all transfigured. He looked like the avenging
+angel of Tintoretto's Paradise.
+
+Don Gesualdo stood immovable in the deserted church; his arms crossed
+on his breast, his head bent. A great resolve, a mighty inspiration,
+had descended on him with the furious words of his foe. Light had come
+to him as from heaven itself. He could not give up the secret which
+had been confided to him in the confessional, but he could give up
+himself. His brain was filled with legends of sacrifice and martyrdom.
+Why might he not become one of that holy band of martyrs?
+
+Nay, he was too humble to place himself beside them even in thought.
+The utmost he could do, he knew, would be only expiation for what
+seemed to him his ineffaceable sin in letting any human affection,
+however harmless, unselfish, and distant, stain the singleness and
+purity of his devotion to his vows. He had been but a fisher-boy, until
+he had taken his tender heart and his ignorant mind to the seminary,
+and he had been born with the soul of a San Rocco, of a S. John, out
+of place, out of time, in the world he lived in; a soul in which the
+passions of faith and of sacrifice were as strong as are the passions
+of lust and of selfishness in other natures. The spiritual world was to
+him a reality, and the earth, with its merciless and greedy peoples,
+its plague of lusts, its suffering hearts, its endless injustice, an
+unreal and hideous dream.
+
+To his temper, the sacrifice which suddenly rose before him as his
+duty, appeared one which would reconcile him at once to the Deity he
+had offended, and the humanity he was tempted to betray. To his mind,
+enfeebled and exhausted by long fasting of the body and denial of every
+natural indulgence, such sacrifice of self seemed an imperious command
+from heaven. He would drag out his own life in misery, and obloquy,
+indeed, but what of that? Had not the great martyrs and founders of his
+Church endured as much or more? Was it not by such torture, voluntarily
+accepted and endured on earth, that the grace of God was won?
+
+He would tell a lie, indeed; he would draw down ignominy on the name
+of the Church; he would make men believe that an anointed priest was
+a common murderer, swayed by low and jealous hatreds; but of this he
+did not think. In the tension and perplexity of his tortured soul, the
+vision of a sacrifice in which he would be the only sufferer, in which
+the woman would be saved, and the secret told to him be preserved,
+appeared as a heaven-sent solution of the doubts and difficulties in
+his path. Stretched in agonised prayer before one of the side altars of
+the cathedral, he imagined the afternoon sunbeams streaming through
+the high window on his face to be the light of a celestial world, and
+in the hush and heat of the incense-scented air, he believed that he
+heard a voice which cried to him, 'By suffering all things are made
+pure.'
+
+He was not a wise, or strong, or educated man. He had the heart of a
+poet, and the mind of a child. There was a courage in him to which
+sacrifice was welcome, and there was a credulity in him which made all
+exaggeration of simple faith possible. He was young and ignorant and
+weak; yet at the core of his heart there was a dim heroism: he could
+suffer and be mute, and in the depths of his heart he loved this woman
+better than himself, with a love which in his belief made him accursed
+for all time.
+
+When he at last arose and went out of the church doors, his mind was
+made up to the course that he would take; an immense calm had descended
+upon the unrest of his soul.
+
+The day was done, the sun had set, the scarlet flame of its afterglow
+bathed all the rusty walls and dusty ground with colours of glory. The
+crowd had dispersed; there was no sound in the deserted square except
+the ripple of the water as it fell from the dolphins' mouths into the
+marble basin. As he heard that sweet, familiar murmur of the falling
+stream, the tears rose in his eyes and blotted out the flame-like pomp
+and beauty of the skies. Never again would he hear the water of the
+Marca river rushing, in cool autumn days, past the poplar stems and the
+primrose roots upon its mossy banks; never again would he hear in the
+place of his birth the grey-green waves of Arno sweeping through the
+cane-brakes to the sea.
+
+At three of the clock on the following day the judgment was given in
+the court.
+
+Generosa Fè was decreed guilty of the murder of her husband, and
+sentenced to twenty years of solitary confinement. She dropped like a
+stone when she heard the sentence, and was carried out from the court
+insensible. Her lover, when he heard it, gave a roar of anguish like
+that of some great beast in torment, and dashed his head against the
+wall and struggled like a mad bull in the hands of the men who tried to
+hold him. Don Gesualdo, waiting without, on the head of the staircase,
+did not even change countenance; to him this bitterness, as of the
+bitterness of death, had been long past; he had been long certain what
+the verdict would be, and he had, many hours before, resolved on his
+own part.
+
+A great calm had come upon his soul, and his face had that tranquillity
+which comes alone from a soul which is at peace within itself.
+
+The sultry afternoon shed its yellow light on the brown and grey and
+dusty town; the crowd poured out of the Court-house, excited, contrite,
+voluble, pushing and bawling at one another, ready to take the side
+of the condemned creature now that she was the victim of the law. The
+priest alone of them all did not move; he remained sitting on the
+upright chair under a sculptured allegory of Justice and Equity which
+was on the arch above his head, and with the golden light of sunset
+falling down on him through the high casement above. He paid no heed
+to the hurrying of the crowd, to the tramp of guards, to the haste of
+clerks and officials eager to finish their day's work and get away
+to their wine and dominoes at the taverns. His hands mechanically
+held his breviary; his lips mechanically repeated a Latin formula of
+prayer. When all the people were gone, one of the custodians of the
+place touched his arm, telling him that they were about to close the
+doors; he raised his eyes like one who is wakened from a trance, and to
+the man said quietly:
+
+'I would see the president of the court for a moment, quite alone. Is
+it possible?'
+
+After many demurs and much delay, they brought him into the presence of
+the judge, in a small chamber of the great palace.
+
+'What do you want with me?' asked the judge, looking nervously at the
+white face and the wild eyes of his unbidden visitant.
+
+Don Gesualdo answered: 'I am come to tell you that you have condemned
+an innocent woman.'
+
+The judge looked at him with sardonic derision and contempt.
+
+'What more?' he asked. 'If she be innocent, will you tell me who is
+guilty?'
+
+'I am,' replied the priest.
+
+At his trial he never spoke.
+
+With his head bowed and his hands clasped, he stood in the cage where
+she had stood, and never replied by any single word to the repeated
+interrogations of his judges. Many witnesses were called, and all they
+said testified to the apparent truth of his self-accusation. Those who
+had always vaguely suspected him, all those who had seen him close
+the door of the sacristy on the crowd when he had borne the murdered
+man within, the mule drivers who had seen him digging at night under
+the great poplars, the sacristan who had been awakened by him that
+same night so early, even his old housekeeper, though she swore that
+he was a lamb, a saint, an angel, a creature too good for earth, a
+holy man whose mind was distraught by fasting, by visions, these
+all, either wilfully or ignorantly, bore witness which confirmed his
+own confession. The men of law had the mould and grass dug up under
+the Grand Duke's poplar, and when the blood-stained knife was found
+therein, the very earth, it seemed, yielded up testimony against him.
+
+In the end, after many weeks of investigation, Generosa was released
+and Don Gesualdo was sentenced in her place.
+
+Falko Melegari married her, and they went to live in his own country in
+the Lombard plains, and were happy and prosperous, and the village of
+Marca and the waters of its cane-shadowed stream knew them no more.
+
+Sometimes she would say to her husband: 'I cannot think that he was
+guilty; there was some mystery in it.'
+
+Her husband always laughed, and said in answer: 'He was guilty, be
+sure; it was I who frightened him into confession; those black rats of
+the Church have livers as white as their coats are black.'
+
+Generosa did not wholly believe, but she thrust the grain of doubt and
+of remorse away from her and played with her handsome children. After
+all, she mused, what doubt could there be? Did not Don Gesualdo himself
+reveal his guilt, and had he not always cared for her, and was not the
+whole population of Marca willing to bear witness that they had always
+suspected him and had only held their peace out of respect for the
+Church?
+
+He himself lived two long years amongst the galley-slaves of the
+western coast; all that time he never spoke, and he was considered by
+the authorities to be insane. Then, in the damp and cold of the third
+winter, his lungs decayed, his frail strength gave way, he died of
+what they called tuberculosis, in the spring of the year. In his last
+moments there was seen a light of unspeakable ecstasy upon his face, a
+smile of unspeakable rapture on his mouth.
+
+'Domine Deus libera me!' he murmured, as he died.
+
+A bird came and sang at the narrow casement of his prison cell as his
+spirit passed away. It was a nightingale: perchance one of those who
+had once sung to him in the summer nights from the wild-rose hedge at
+Marca.
+
+
+
+
+THE SILVER CHRIST
+
+
+
+
+THE SILVER CHRIST
+
+
+I
+
+Genistrello is a wild place in the Pistoiese hills.
+
+Its name is derived from the genista or broom which covers many an acre
+of the soil, and shares with the stone pine and the sweet chestnut the
+scanty earth which covers its granite and sandstone. It is beautiful
+exceedingly; but its beauty is only seen by those to whom it is a dead
+letter which they have no eyes to read. It is one of the many spurs
+of the Apennines which here lie overlapping one another in curve upon
+curve of wooded slopes with the higher mountains rising behind them;
+palaces, which once were fortresses, hidden in their valleys, and
+ruined castles, or deserted monasteries, crowning their crests.
+
+From some of these green hills the sea is visible, and when the sun
+sets where the sea is and the red evening glows behind the distant
+peaks, it is lovely as a poet's dream.
+
+On the side of this lonely hill, known as Genistrello, there dwelt
+a man of the name of Castruccio Lascarisi. He was called 'Caris' by
+the whole countryside; indeed, scarcely any knew that he had another
+patronymic, so entirely amongst these people does the nickname
+extinguish, by its perpetual use, the longer appellative.
+
+His family name was of Greek extraction undoubtedly; learned Greeks
+made it familiar in the Italian Renaissance, at the courts of Lorenzo
+and of Ludovico; but how it had travelled to the Pistoiese hills to be
+borne by unlearned hinds none knew, any more than any know who first
+made the red tulip blossom as a wild flower amidst the wheat, or who
+first sowed the bulb of the narcissus amongst the wayside grass.
+
+He lived miles away from the chapel and the hamlet. He had a little
+cabin in the heart of the chestnut woods, which his forefathers had
+lived in before him; they had no title which they could have shown
+for it except usage, but that had been title enough for them, and was
+enough for Caris.
+
+It had been always so. It would be always so. His ideas went no
+further. The autumnal migration was as natural and inevitable to him
+as to the storks and herons and wild duck which used to sail over his
+head, going southward like himself as he walked through the Tuscan to
+the Roman Maremma. But his dislike to the Maremma winters was great,
+and had never changed in him since he had trotted by his father's
+side, a curly-pated baby in a little goatskin shirt looking like a
+Correggio's St. John.
+
+What he longed for, and what he loved, were the cool heights of
+Genistrello and the stone hut with the little rivulet of water gushing
+at its threshold. No one had ever disturbed his people there. It was
+a square little place built of big unmortared stones in old Etruscan
+fashion; the smoke from the hearth went out by a hole in the roof, and
+a shutter and door of unplaned wood closed its only apertures.
+
+The lichen and weeds and mosses had welded the stones together, and
+climbed up over its conical rush roof. No better home could be needed
+in summer-time; and when the cold weather came, he locked the door and
+went down with his pack on his back and a goatshair belt round his
+loins to take the familiar way to the Roman Maremma.
+
+Caris was six-and-twenty years old; he worked amongst the chestnut
+woods in summer and went to the Maremma for field labour in the winter,
+as so many of these husbandmen do; walking the many leagues which
+separate the provinces, and living hardly in both seasons. The songs
+they sing are full of allusions to this semi-nomadic life, and the
+annual migration has been a custom ever since the world was young--when
+the great Roman fleets anchored where now are sand and marsh, and
+stately classic villas lifted their marble to the sun where now the
+only habitation seen is the charcoal-burner's rush-roofed, moss-lined
+hut.
+
+Caris was a well-built, lithe, slender son of the soil, brown from
+sun and wind, with the straight features and the broad low brows of
+the classic type, and great brown eyes like those of the oxen which
+he drove over the vast plains down in the Maremma solitudes. He knew
+nothing except his work.
+
+He was not very wise, and he was wholly unlearned, but he had a love
+of nature in his breast, and he would sit at the door of his hut at
+evening time, with his bowl of bean-soup between his knees, and often
+forget to eat in his absorbed delight as the roseate glow from the
+vanished sunrays overspread all the slopes of the Pistoiese Apennines
+and the snow-crowned crests of the Carara mountains.
+
+'What do you see there, goose?' said a charcoal-burner, once passing
+him as he sat thus upon his threshold with the dog at his feet.
+
+Caris shrugged his shoulders stupidly and half-ashamed. He could not
+read the great book outspread upon the knees of the mountains, yet he
+imperfectly felt the beauty of its emblazoned pages.
+
+The only furniture in the cabin was a table made of a plank, two rude
+benches, and one small cupboard; the bed was only dried leaves and
+moss. There were a pipkin, two platters, and a big iron pot which swung
+by a cord and a hook over the stones where the fire, when lighted,
+burned. They were enough; he would not have known what to do with more
+if he had had more. He was only there from May to October; and in the
+fragrant summers of Italian chestnut woods, privation is easily borne.
+The winter life was harder and more hateful; yet it never occurred to
+him to do else than to go to Maremma; his father and grandfather had
+always gone thither, and as naturally as the chestnuts ripen and fall,
+so do the men in autumn join the long lines of shepherds and drovers
+and women and children and flocks and herds which wind their way down
+the mountain slopes and across the level wastes of plain and marsh to
+seek herbage and work for the winter-time.
+
+It never entered the head of Caris, or of the few who knew him or
+worked with him, to wonder how he and his had come thither. They were
+there as the chestnut-trees were, as the broom was, as the goats and
+squirrels and wood-birds were there. The peasant no more wonders
+about his own existence than a stone does. For generations a Lascaris
+had lived in that old stone hut which might itself be a relic of an
+Etruscan tomb or temple. No one was concerned to know further.
+
+The peasant does not look back; he only sees the road to gain his daily
+meal of bread or chestnuts. The past has no meaning to him, and to
+the future he never looks. That is the reason why those who want to
+cultivate or convince him fail utterly. If a man cannot see the horizon
+itself, it is of no use to point out to him spires or trees or towers
+which stand out against it.
+
+The world has never understood that the moment the labourer is made
+to see, he is made unhappy, being ill at ease and morbidly envious
+and ashamed, and wholly useless. Left alone, he is content in his own
+ruminant manner, as the buffalo is when left untormented amidst the
+marshes, grazing at peace and slumbering amidst the rushes and the
+canes.
+
+Caris was thus content. He had health and strength, though sometimes
+he had a fever-chill from new-turned soil and sometimes a frost-chill
+from going out on an empty stomach before the sun had broken the deep
+shadows of the night. But from these maladies all outdoor labourers
+suffer, and he was young, and they soon passed. He had been the only
+son of his mother; and this fact had saved him from conscription. As
+if she had lived long enough when she had rendered him this service,
+she died just as he had fulfilled his twenty-third year; and without
+her the stone hut seemed for awhile lonely; he had to make his fire,
+and boil or roast his chestnuts, and mend holes in his shirts, and make
+his own rye loaves; but he soon got used to this, and when in Maremma
+he always worked with a gang, and was fed and lodged--badly, indeed,
+but regularly--at the huge stone burn which served such purposes on
+the vast tenuta where the long lines of husbandmen toiled from dusk of
+dawn to dusk of eve under the eye and lash of their overseer; and when
+on his native slopes of Genistrello he was always welcome to join the
+charcoal-burners' rough company or the woodsmen's scanty supper, and
+seldom passed, or had need to pass, his leisure hours alone. And these
+were very few.
+
+His mother had been a violent-tempered woman, ruling him with a rod of
+iron, as she had ruled her husband before him; a woman loud of tongue,
+stern of temper, dreaded for miles around as a witch and an evil-eye;
+and although the silence and solitude which reigned in the cabin after
+her death oppressed him painfully at first, he soon grew used to these,
+and found the comfort of them. He brought a dog with him after his
+winter in Maremma which followed on his mother's loss--a white dog of
+the Maremma breed, and he and the dog kept house together in the lonely
+woods in fellowship and peace. Caris was gentle and could never beat or
+kick a beast as others of his kind do; and the oxen he drove knew this.
+He felt more akin to them and to the dogs than he did to the men with
+whom he worked. He could not have expressed or explained this, but he
+felt it.
+
+He had little mind, and what he had moved slowly when it moved at all;
+but he had a generous nature, a loyal soul, and a simple and manly
+enjoyment of his hard life. It did not seem hard to him. He had run
+about on his bare feet all his childhood until their soles were as hard
+as leather, and he was so used to his daily meal of chestnuts in cold
+weather, and of maize or rye-bread with cabbage, or bean-soup, in the
+hot season, that he never thought of either as meagre fare. In summer
+he wore rough hempen shirt and trousers; in winter goatskin and rough
+homespun wool. In appearance, in habits, in clothing, in occupation, he
+differed little from the peasant who was on that hillside in the times
+of Pliny and of Properticus. Only the gods were changed; Pan piped no
+more in the thicket, the Naiad laughed no longer in the brook, the
+Nymph and Satyr frolicked never beneath the fronds of the ferns.
+
+In their stead there was only a little gaudy chapel on a stony slope,
+and a greasy, double-chinned, yellow-cheeked man in black, who frowned
+if you did not give him your hardly-earned pence, and lick the uneven
+bricks of the chapel floor when he ordered you a penance.
+
+Caris cared little for that man's frown.
+
+He sat thus at his door one evening when the sun was setting behind the
+many peaks and domes of the Apennine spurs which fronted him. The sun
+itself had sunk beyond them half an hour before, but the red glow which
+comes and stays long after it was in the heavens and on the hills.
+
+Genistrello was a solitary place, and only here and there a hut or cot
+like his own was hidden away under the saplings and undergrowth. Far
+away down in the valley were the belfries and towers of the little
+strong-walled city which had been so often as a lion in the path to the
+invading hosts of Germany; and like a narrow white cord the post-road,
+now so rarely used, wound in and out until its slender thread was lost
+in the blue vapours of the distance, and the shadows from the clouds.
+
+Bells were tolling from all the little spires and towers on the hills
+and in the valleys, for it was a vigil, and there was the nearer tinkle
+of the goats' bells under the heather and broom as those innocent
+marauders cropped their supper off the tender chestnut-shoots, the
+trails of ground ivy, and the curling woodbine. Caris, with his bowl
+of bean-soup between his knees and his hunch of rye-bread in his hand,
+ate hungrily, whilst his eyes filled themselves with the beauty of
+the landscape. His stomach was empty--which he knew, and his soul was
+empty--which he did not know.
+
+He looked up, and saw a young woman standing in front of him. She was
+handsome, with big, bright eyes, and a rosy mouth, and dusky glossy
+hair coiled up on her head like a Greek Venus.
+
+He had never seen her before, and her sudden apparition there startled
+him.
+
+'Good-even, Caris,' she said familiarly, with a smile like a burst of
+sunlight. 'Is the mother indoors, eh?'
+
+Caris continued to stare at her.
+
+'Eh, are you deaf?' she asked impatiently. 'Is the mother in, I want to
+know?'
+
+'My mother is dead,' said Caris, without preamble.
+
+'Dead! When did she die?'
+
+'Half a year ago,' said Caris, with the peasant's confusion of dates
+and elongation of time.
+
+'That is impossible,' said the young woman quickly. 'I saw her myself
+and spoke with her here on this very spot in Easter week. What makes
+you say she is dead?'
+
+'Because she is dead!' said Caris doggedly. 'If you do not believe it,
+go and ask the sacristan and sexton over there.'
+
+He made a gesture of his head towards the belfry of an old hoary
+church, dedicated to St. Fulvo, which was seven miles away amongst the
+chestnut woods of an opposing hillside, and where his mother had been
+buried by her wish, because it was her birthplace.
+
+The girl this time believed him. She was dumb for a little while
+with astonishment and regret. Then she said, in a tone of awe and
+expectation, 'She left her learning and power with you, eh?--and the
+books?'
+
+'No,' said Caris rudely. 'I had all the uncanny things buried with
+her. What use were they? She lived and died with scarce a shift to her
+back.'
+
+'Oh!' said the girl, in a shocked tone, as though she reproved a
+blasphemy. 'She was a wonderful woman, Caris.'
+
+Caris laughed a little.
+
+'Eh, you say so. Well, all her wisdom never put bit nor drop in her
+mouth nor a copper piece in her hand that I did not work for; what use
+was it, pray?'
+
+'Hush. Don't speak so!' said the maiden, looking timidly over her
+shoulder to the undergrowth and coppice growing dim in the shadows of
+the evening.
+
+'Tis the truth!' said Caris stubbornly. 'I did my duty by her, poor
+soul; and yet I fear me the Evil One waited for her all the while,
+for as soon as the rattle came in her throat, a white owl flapped and
+screeched on the thatch, and a black cat had sat on the stones yonder
+ever since the sun had set.'
+
+'The saints preserve us!' murmured the girl, her rich brown and red
+skin growing pale.
+
+There was silence; Caris finished munching his bread; he looked now
+and then at his visitor with open-eyed surprise and mute expectation.
+
+'You have buried the things with her?' she asked him, in a low tone, at
+length.
+
+He nodded in assent.
+
+'What a pity! What a pity!'
+
+'Why that?'
+
+'Because if they are underground with her nobody can use them.'
+
+Caris stared with his eyes wider opened still.
+
+'What do you want with the devil's tools, a fresh, fair young thing
+like you?'
+
+'Your mother used them for me,' she answered crossly. 'And she had told
+me a number of things--ay, a vast number! And just in the middle uncle
+spied us out, and he swore at her and dragged me away, and I had never
+a chance to get back here till to-night, and now--now you say she is
+dead, and she will never tell me aught any more.'
+
+'What can you want so sore to know?' said Caris, with wonder, as he
+rose to his feet.
+
+'That is my business,' said the girl.
+
+'True, so it is,' said Caris.
+
+But he looked at her with wonder in his dark-brown, ox-like eyes.
+
+'Where do you live?' he asked; 'and how knew you my name?'
+
+'Everybody knows your name,' she answered. 'You are Caris, the son of
+Lisabetta, and when you sit on your doorstep it would be a fool indeed
+would not see who you are.'
+
+'So it would,' said Caris. 'But you,' he added after a pause, 'who are
+you? And what did you want with Black Magic?'
+
+'I am Santina, the daughter of Neri, the smith, by the west gate in
+Pistoia,' she said in reply to the first question, and making none to
+the second.
+
+'But what wanted you of my mother?' he persisted.
+
+'They said she knew strange things,' said the girl evasively.
+
+'If she did she had little profit of them,' said Caris sadly.
+
+The girl looked at him with great persuasiveness in her face, and
+leaned a little nearer to him.
+
+'You did not really bury the charms with her? You have got them inside?
+You will let me see them, eh?'
+
+'As the saints live, I buried them,' said Caris truthfully; 'they were
+rubbish, or worse; accursed maybe. They are safe down in the ground
+till the Last Day. What can such a bright wench as yourself want with
+such queer, unhallowed notions?'
+
+The girl Santina glanced over her shoulders to make sure that no one
+was listening; then she said in a whisper:
+
+'There is the Gobbo's treasure in these woods somewhere--and Lisabetta
+had the wand that finds gold and silver.'
+
+Caris burst into a loud laugh.
+
+'Ah, truly! That is a good jest. If she could find gold and silver, why
+did we always have iron spoons for our soup, and a gnawing imp in our
+stomachs? Go to, my maiden. Do not tell such tales. Lisabetta was a
+poor and hungry woman all her days, and scarce left enough linen to lay
+her out in decently, so help me Heaven!'
+
+The girl shook her head.
+
+'You know there is the treasure in the woods,' she said angrily.
+
+'Nay, I never heard of it. Oh, the Gobbo's? Che-che! For hundreds of
+years they have grubbed for it all over the woods, and who ever found
+anything, eh?'
+
+'Your mother was very nigh it often and often. She told me.'
+
+'In her dreams, poor soul!'
+
+'But dreams mean a great deal.'
+
+'Sometimes,' said Caris seriously. 'But what is it to you?' he added,
+the suspicion always inherent to the peasant struggling with his
+admiration of the girl, who, unbidden, had seated herself upon the
+stone before the door. With feminine instinct she felt that to make him
+do what she wished, she must confide in him, or appear to confide.
+
+And thereon she told him that unless she could save herself, her family
+would wed her to a wealthy old curmudgeon who was a cart-maker in
+the town; and to escape this fate she had interrogated the stars by
+means of the dead Lisabetta and of the astrologer Faraone, who dwelt
+also in the hills, but this latter reader of destiny would tell her
+nothing, because he was a friend of her father's, and now the witch of
+Genistrello was dead and had left her fate but half told!
+
+'What did she tell you?' said Caris, wincing at the word witch.
+
+'Only that I should go over the mountains to some city and grow rich.
+But it was all dark--obscure--uncertain; she said she would know more
+next time; and how could I tell that before I came again she would have
+died?'
+
+'You could not tell that, no,' said Caris absently.
+
+He was thinking of the elderly well-to-do wheelwright in the town,
+and he felt that he would have liked to brain him with one of his
+own wooden spokes or iron linchpins. For the girl Santina was very
+beautiful as she sat there with her large eyes shining in the shadows
+and the tears of chagrin and disappointment stealing down her cheeks.
+For her faith in her charms and cards had been great, and in her bosom
+there smouldered desires and ideas of which she did not speak.
+
+She saw the effect that her beauty produced, and said to herself: 'He
+shall dig up the things before he is a week older.'
+
+She got up with apparent haste and alarm; seeing how dark it had grown
+around her, only a faint red light lingering far away above the lines
+of the mountains.
+
+'I am staying at the four roads with my aunt, who married Massaio,'
+she said as she looked over her shoulder and walked away between the
+chestnut sapling and the furze.
+
+Caris did not offer to accompany or try to follow her. He stood like
+one bewitched watching her lithe, erect figure run down the hill and
+vanish as the path wound out of sight amongst the pines. No woman had
+ever moved him thus. He felt as if she had poured into him at once
+scalded wine and snow-water.
+
+She was so handsome and bold and lissom, and yet she made his flesh
+creep talking of his mother's incantations, and bidding him knock at
+the door of the grave.
+
+'What an awful creature for tempting a man is a woman,' he thought,
+'and they will scream at their own shadows one minute and dare the
+devil himself the next!'
+
+That night Caris sat smoking his black pipe on the stone before the
+door where she had sat, and the scalded wine and the snow-water coursed
+by turns feverishly through his veins, as once through Cymon's.
+
+
+II
+
+'Where hast been, hussy?' said Massaio crossly, yet jokingly, to his
+niece when she went home that night.
+
+The four roads was a place where the four cart-tracks at the foot of
+that group of hills met and parted; the man was a seller of wood, and
+his cottage and his wood-yards and sheds thatched with furze stood
+where the four roads met under some huge stone pines. The aunt of
+Santina had married there many years before.
+
+They were people well-off, who ate meat, drank wine, and had a house
+full of hardware, pottery, and old oak: people as far removed from
+Caris and his like as if they had been lords or princes. He knew them
+by sight, and doffed his hat to them in the woods.
+
+The thought that she was the niece of Massaio, the man who paid for his
+wood and charcoal with rolls of banknotes, and sent his own mules to
+bring the loads down from the hills, placed Santina leagues away from
+and above him.
+
+The only women with whom he had ever had any intercourse had been the
+rude wenches who tramped with the herds, and dug and hoed and cut grass
+and grain on the wastes of the Maremma; creatures burnt black with the
+sun and wrinkled by the winds, and with skin hard and hairy, and feet
+whose soles were like wood--'la femelle de l'homme,' but not so clean
+of hide or sweet of breath as the heifers they drove down along the
+sea-ways in autumn weather.
+
+This girl who called herself Santina was wholesome as lavender, fresh
+as field thyme, richly and fairly odoured as the flower of the wild
+pomegranate.
+
+When supper was over and the house was on the point of being bolted and
+barred, Santina threw her brown soft round arm round her uncle's neck.
+
+'I went down to see Don Fabio, and he was out, and I sat talking with
+his woman and forgot the time,' she said penitently.
+
+Don Fabio was the priest of the little gaudy church low down in the
+valley where the post-road ran.
+
+Massaio patted the cheek, which was like an apricot, and believed her.
+
+Her aunt did not.
+
+'There is still snow where the man of God lives up yonder, and there is
+no water, only dust, on her shoes,' thought the shrewd observer.
+
+But she did not say so; for she had no wish to put her husband out of
+humour with her kinsfolk.
+
+But to Santina, when with her alone, she said testily:
+
+'I fear you are going again to the black arts of that woman Lisabetta;
+no good ever is got of them; it is playing with fire, and the devil
+breathes the fire out of his mouth!'
+
+'I cannot play with it if I wished,' said Santina innocently;
+'Lisabetta is dead months ago.'
+
+'That is no loss to anybody if it be true,' said Eufemia Massaio
+angrily.
+
+Lisabetta had been such an obscure and lonely creature, that her
+death had been taken little note of anywhere, and the busy, bustling
+housewife of Massaio had had no heed of such an event. She had not even
+known the woman by sight; had only been cognizant of her evil repute
+for powers of sorcery.
+
+Santina went up to her room, which she shared with three of the Massaio
+children. Long after they were sleeping in a tangle of rough hair and
+brown limbs and healthy rosy nudity, the girl, their elder, sat up on
+the rude couch staring at the moon through the little square window.
+
+She was thinking of words that Lisabetta had said, as she had dealt out
+the cards and gazed in a bowl of spring water, 'Over the hills and far
+away; wealth and pleasure and love galore--where? how? when?--ay, that
+is hid; but we shall see, we shall see; only over the hills you go, and
+all the men are your slaves.'
+
+How? when? where? That was hidden with the dead fortune-teller under
+the earth.
+
+Santina did not for a moment doubt the truth of the prophecy, but she
+was impatient for its fulfilment to begin. She knew she was of unusual
+beauty, and the organist at the duomo in Pistoia had told her that her
+voice was of rare compass, and only wanted tuition to be such a voice
+as fetches gold in the big world which lay beyond these hills. But that
+was all.
+
+She could sing well and loudly, and she knew all the 'canzoe' and
+'stornelli' of the district by heart; but there her knowledge stopped;
+and no one had cared to instruct or enlighten her more. Her own family
+thought the words of the organist rubbish.
+
+There are so many of these clear-voiced, flute-throated girls and boys
+singing in their adolescence in the fields and woods and highways; but
+no one thinks anything of their carols, and life and its travail tell
+on them and make them hoarse, and their once liquid tones grow harsh
+and rough from exposure to the weather, and from calling so loudly
+from hill to hill to summon their children, or their cattle, or their
+comrades, home.
+
+The human voice is a pipe soon broken. The nightingale sings on and
+on and on, from youth to age, and neither rain nor wind hurt his
+throat; but men and women, in rough, rustic lives, soon lose their gift
+of song. They sing at all ages, indeed, over their furrows, their
+washing-tank, their yoked oxen, their plait of straw or hank of flax;
+but the voice loses its beauty as early as the skin its bloom.
+
+Santina had no notion in what way she could make hers a means to reach
+those distant parts in which her fate was to await her if the cards
+spake truly. Only to get away somewhere, somehow, was her fixed idea;
+and she would no more have married the sober, well-to-do wheelwright
+her people picked out for her, than she would have thrown her vigorous
+and virgin body down the well.
+
+'He shall get me the cards and the treasure wand out of her grave
+before this moon is out,' she said, between her white teeth, with which
+she could crack nuts and bite through string and grind the black bread
+into powder.
+
+Caris took no definite shape in her eyes except as an instrument to get
+her will and ways. She was but a country girl just knowing her letters,
+and no more; but the yeast of restless ambition was fermenting in her.
+
+She sat staring at the moon, while the tired children slept as
+motionless as plucked poppies. The moon was near its full. Before it
+waned she swore to herself that she would have Lisabetta's magic tools
+in her hands. Could she only know more, or else get money! She was
+ignorant, but she knew that money was power. With money she could get
+away over those hills which seemed drawn like a screen between her fate
+and her.
+
+Marry Matteo! She laughed aloud, and thought the face in the moon
+laughed too.
+
+The outfit was made, the pearls were bought, the 'stimatore' who
+is called in to appraise every article of a marriage corredo had
+fingered and weighed and adjudged the cost of every single thing, and
+the wheelwright had bought the bed and the furniture, and many other
+matters not usual or incumbent on a bridegroom, and her parents had
+said that such a warm man and so liberal a one was never seen in their
+day: and very little time was there now left wherein she could escape
+her fate.
+
+All unwillingness on her part would have been regarded by her parents
+as an insanity, and would have only seemed to her bridegroom as the
+spice which is added to the stewed hare. There was no chance for her
+but to use this single fortnight which she had been allowed to spend
+in farewell at the four roads of Genistrello.
+
+Her uncle and aunt had helped generously in the getting together of
+the corredo; and their wish to have her with them had been at once
+conceded. Her parents were poor, and the woodsman was rich as rubies
+are esteemed, amongst the oak scrub and chestnut saplings of the
+Pistoiese Apennines.
+
+The Massaio people liked her and indulged her; but had they dreamed
+that she meant to elude her marriage they would have dragged her by
+the hair of her head, or kicked her with the soles of their hob-nailed
+boots down the hillside into her father's house, and given her up to
+punishment without pity, as they would have given a runaway horse or
+dog.
+
+The day for the ceremony had not been fixed, for in this country, where
+love intrigues speed by as swift as lightning, matrimonial contracts
+move slowly and cautiously; but the word was passed, the goods were
+purchased, the house was ready; and to break a betrothal at such a
+point would have been held a crime and a disgrace.
+
+Santina herself knew that; she was well aware that decent maidens do
+not do such things when the dower clothing and linen are all stitched,
+and the marriage-bed bought by the bridegroom. She knew, but she did
+not care. She was headstrong, changeable, vain and full of thirst for
+pleasure and for triumph and for wealth. She would not pass her life in
+her little native town, in the wheelwright's old house with a jealous
+rheumatic curmudgeon, for all the saints in heaven and all the friends
+on earth.
+
+'Not I! Not I! Oh, why did Lisabetta go underground for ever with half
+the cards unread?' she thought, as she sat upon her couch of sacking
+and dry maize leaves, and she shook her clenched hands at the moon with
+anger at its smiling indifference. The moon could sail where it chose
+and see what it liked; and she was chained down here by her youth, and
+her sex, and her ignorance, and her poverty; and her only one faint
+hope of escape and aid lay in the closed grave of a dead old woman.
+
+Though she was voluble and garrulous and imprudent and passionate, she
+could keep her own counsel.
+
+Under her Tuscan volubility there was also the Tuscan secretiveness.
+Nobody saw inside her true thoughts. Her mind was like a little locked
+iron box into which no one could peep.
+
+The Tuscan laughs quickly, weeps quickly, rages, fumes, smiles, jumps
+with joy; seems a merely emotional creature, with his whole heart
+turned inside out; but in his inmost nature there is always an ego
+wholly different to that which is shown to others, always a deep
+reserve of unspoken intents and calculations and desires.
+
+It resembles a rosebush all bloom and dew and leaf and sunshine, inside
+which is made the nest of a little snake, never seen, but always there;
+sometimes, instead of the snake, there is only a flat stone; but
+something alien there always is under the carelessly blowing roses.
+
+The Tuscan never completely trusts his nearest or dearest, his oldest
+friend, his truest companion, his fondest familiar; be he gentle or
+simple, he never gives himself away.
+
+The homeliest son and daughter of the soil will always act as though he
+or she were cognizant of the axiom of the fine philosopher of courts:
+'Deal with your friend at all times as though some day he would become
+your enemy.'
+
+Santina, therefore, had told her secret intent to no living soul, and
+only Caris's old weird mother had been shrewd enough to guess it in
+the girl's flashing eyes and in her eager questioning of Fate.
+
+The house of Massaio was a very busy house, especially so at this
+season of the year, when the purchasing and fetching and stacking of
+wood for the coming winter was in full vigour, and all the boys and
+girls were up in the woods all day long, seeking out and bringing down
+brushwood and pines and cut heather.
+
+Santina with wonderful alacrity entered into the work, although usually
+she was averse to rough labour, fearing that it would spoil her hands
+and her skin before she could get to that unknown life of delight which
+she coveted.
+
+But going with the heedless and unobservant children up on the
+hillsides where the heather and chestnut scrub grew, and farther up
+still where the tall stone pines grew, she had chances of meeting Caris
+or of again getting away to his hut unnoticed. He was usually at this
+season occupied in carrying wood or helping the charcoal-burners, and
+was now in one place, now in another, as men who have no fixed labour
+must be.
+
+Moreover, her just estimate of her own attraction for him made her
+guess that this year he would choose to labour nearer the four roads
+than usual, if he could get employment, and she was in no manner
+surprised when she saw him amongst a group of men who were pulling at
+the ropes of one of her uncle's wood-carts, to prevent the cart and the
+mules harnessed to it from running amuck down the steep incline which
+led to that green nook at the foot of Genistrello, where the woodman's
+buildings and sheds were situated.
+
+She gave him a sidelong glance and a shy smile as she passed them, and
+Caris, colouring to the roots of his hair, let his rope slacken and
+fall, and was sworn at fiercely by his fellow-labourers, for the cart
+lurched, and one of the wheels sunk up to its hub in the soft wet sand.
+
+'Get away, lass!' shouted the carter roughly. 'Where women are men's
+work is always fouled.'
+
+'You unmannerly churl!' shouted Caris; and he struck the carter sharply
+across the shoulders with his end of the rope.
+
+The man flung himself round and tried to strike his assailant in return
+with the thong of his long mule-whip; but Caris caught it in his grip
+and closed with him.
+
+They wrestled savagely for a moment, then the carter, freeing his
+right arm, snatched out of his breeches belt the knife which every man
+carries, however severely the law may denounce and forbid such a habit.
+It would have buried its sharp, narrow blade in the ribs or the breast
+of Caris had not the other men, at a shout from Massaio, who came
+hurrying up, thrown themselves on the two combatants, and pulled them
+apart.
+
+'To ---- with you both!' cried Massaio, furious to see his cart stuck
+in the sand, its load of wood oscillating, and the time wasted of men
+whom he paid by the day.
+
+Santina had stood quietly on the bank above the mules and the men,
+watching with keen interest and pleasure.
+
+'Why did you stop them, uncle?' she cried to Massaio pettishly. 'I do
+love to see two good lads fight. 'Tis a sight that warms one's blood
+like good communion wine.'
+
+But no one heeded what she said.
+
+On these hills women are used but never listened to by any man.
+
+'The cows give milk, not opinions,' the men said to their womenkind.
+
+Only Caris had seen in the sunlight that lithe erect figure amongst the
+gorse, and those two burning, melting, shining eyes, which had incited
+him to combat.
+
+He was deeply angered with Massaio for stopping the duello.
+
+A knife? What mattered a knife? He had one, too, in his breeches band;
+in another second he, too, would have had his out, and then Santina
+would have seen work fit for a brave, bold woman to watch, with the red
+blood running merrily through the thirsty sand and the tufted heather.
+
+He was not quarrelsome or bloodthirsty; but any man who goes down into
+Maremma through the 'macchia,' where the 'mal-viventi' hide, learns
+to know very well how to sell his own life dearly, and hold the lives
+of others cheaply; and these contraband knives, which the law forbids
+so uselessly, cost very little to buy, and yet do their work surely,
+quickly, and well.
+
+He cast one longing look up at Santina standing above amongst the
+gorse, and moved on sullenly with the other men and the mule, when
+the cart with rare effort had been pulled erect and dragged out of the
+sand. It was then only an hour or two after daybreak.
+
+The day came and ended without Caris seeing his goddess again.
+
+During the repose at noontide, when he with others broke bread and ate
+soup at the big table in Massaio's kitchen, she was not there. They
+were served by her aunt Eufemia. He had only accepted this work of
+fetching and stacking for sake of the vicinity to her which it offered;
+and his heart was heavy and his blood was turned, as he would himself
+have expressed it.
+
+Chagrin and irritation, in the Italian's opinion, turns the blood as
+tempest changes milk. He was too shy and tongue-tied to venture to
+inquire for her; and the instinct of secrecy which characterizes all
+passion was joined to his natural hesitation in speech.
+
+Massaio's people seemed, too, to him to be very grand folks, with
+their byres and stalls filled with beasts, and their casks of wine and
+great earthen jars of oil standing there for anybody to read in mute
+declaration of their prosperity.
+
+A barrel of wine had never entered the hut of the Lascarises within the
+memory of man. No one took any notice of him. He was a 'bracciante,'
+paid by the day, nothing more. Had Eufemia known that he was the old
+witch's son he would have attracted her attention; but she did not know
+it. When there is quick rough work to be done, nobody notices who does
+it.
+
+When the last wood of the day was brought in, Caris went home by
+himself, by ways he knew. He was downcast and dull. He had been baulked
+of his knife-play with the carter, and he had not seen Santina.
+
+At a bend in the hill-path, where the chestnut saplings grew taller
+than usual, and aged pines with scaly scarred trunks were left
+standing, he heard a laugh amongst the leafy scrub, and in the dusk of
+the moonless evening a slender straight figure shot up from its screen
+of heather.
+
+'Eh, Caris!' cried the girl to him. 'What a poor day's work! Have you
+left Black Simon without an inch of steel in him? Fie for shame! A man
+should always write his name large when he has a stiletto for his pen.'
+
+Caris gazed at her dumb and agitated, the veins in his throat and
+temples throbbing.
+
+'It was your uncle stopping the play,' he muttered; 'and I could not
+begin to brawl in his house.'
+
+Santina shrugged her shoulders. 'Brave men don't want excuses,' she
+said unkindly.
+
+'Ask of me in Maremma,' said Caris sullenly. 'They will tell you
+whether men taste my blade.'
+
+'Maremma is far,' said Santina, sarcastic and jeering; 'and the men
+there are weak!'
+
+'You shall see what you shall see,' muttered Caris, growing purple,
+red, and then pale. 'Tell me a man you have a quarrel with--nay, one
+who stands well with you--that will be better.'
+
+'Those are words,' she said, with curt contempt.
+
+'You shall see deeds. Who is it stands well with you?'
+
+'No one. Many wish it.'
+
+'Your promised man should; but he is old, and a poor creature. 'Twould
+be no credit to do away with him.'
+
+'He is a poor creature,' said Santina, her lips curling. 'So are you,
+when to do a woman a pleasure you will not open a grave.'
+
+'Open a grave! Nay, nay, the saints forbid.'
+
+'The saints! That is how all weaklings and cowards talk. What harm
+could it do any saint in heaven for you to get those magic things? If
+they be the devil's toys and tools, as you say, more reason to pluck
+them out of holy ground.'
+
+'How you go on!' muttered Caris, whose slower brain was scared and
+terrified by his companion's rapid and fearless strides of thought.
+'Heaven have mercy on us! You would have me commit sacrilege! Rifle a
+tomb! Holy Christ! and that tomb my mother's!'
+
+The sweat stood on his brow, and made the chestnut curls of his hair
+wet as with dew or rain.
+
+Santina poured into his all the magnetic force and fire of her own
+eyes, shining in the dusk like some wild cat of the woods.
+
+'Sacrilege! whew! Where got you that big word? You put the things in;
+you can take the things out. Your mother will sleep sounder without
+them. I want them, my lad, do you understand? I want them. And what I
+want I get from those who love me; and those who deny me, hate me, and
+I hate them.'
+
+Caris shuddered as he heard.
+
+'I love you,' he stammered. 'Do not hate me--for pity's sake, do not
+hate me.'
+
+'Obey me, then,' she said, with her dark level brows contracting over
+her luminous eyes.
+
+'In anything else!'
+
+'Oh, ay! It is always anything else, except the one thing which is
+wanted!'
+
+'But what is it you want?'
+
+'I want the charms and the wand and the book out of your mother's
+grave.'
+
+'What could you do with them? Without the knowledge, they are no more
+than a dry twig and a few dirty play-cards.'
+
+'How know you what knowledge I have? I want the things, that is all, I
+tell you.'
+
+'They were accursed if they had any use in them. And what use had they?
+She who understood them lived and died all but a beggar. If they had
+any power in them, they cheated and starved her.'
+
+The speech was a long one for Caris, whose thoughts were so little used
+to fit themselves to utterance.
+
+Santina heard him with the passionate impatience and intolerance of a
+swift mind with a dull one, of a bold will with a timid nature.
+
+She had set her soul on possessing these magic things; she was
+convinced that she should find the way to make them work; superstition
+was intense and overwhelming in her, and allied to a furious ambition,
+all the more powerful because given loose rein through her complete
+ignorance.
+
+'Oh, you white-livered ninny!' she cried to him, with boundless scorn.
+'Would to Heaven Black Simon had buried his blade into you! It would
+have rid the earth of a dolt and a dastard!'
+
+'Then let me be, if I be worth so little,' said Caris sullenly, whilst
+his eyes devoured her beauty half seen in the darkness which preceded
+the late rising of the moon. Then she saw that she had mistaken her
+path, and she changed it. She let great tears come into her eyes, and
+her mouth trembled, and her bosom heaved.
+
+'This was the lad I could have loved!' she murmured. 'This was
+the strong bold youth whom I thought would be my brave and bonny
+damo before all the countryside. Oh, what fools are women--what
+fools!--taken by the eye, with a falcon glance and a sheaf of nut-brown
+curls and a broad breast that looks as if the heart of a true man beat
+in it. Oh, woe is me! Oh, woe is me! I dreamed a dream, and it has no
+more truth in it than the slate shingle here has of silver.'
+
+She kicked downward scornfully as she spoke the crumbling slate and mia
+which showed here and there betwixt the heather plants in the tremulous
+shadow relics of a quarry worked long centuries before, and forsaken
+when the fires of the camp of Hun and Goth had blazed upon those
+hillsides.
+
+
+III
+
+Caris stared at her as she spoke, his whole frame thrilling and all his
+senses alive as they had never been before under a woman's glamour.
+He heeded not the derision, he thought not of the strangeness of the
+avowal; delicacy is not often a plant which grows in uncultured soil,
+and he had none of the intuition and suspicion which an educated man
+would have been moved by before such an avowal and such an upbraiding.
+He only knew, or thought he was bidden to know, that he had the power
+in him to please her fancy and awaken her desire.
+
+'You love me! You can love me!' he shouted in a loud, vibrating,
+exultant voice which wakened all the echoes of the hills around him,
+and he sprang forward to seize her in his arms. But Santina, agile and
+strong, pushed him back, and stood aloof.
+
+'Nay, nay, stand off!' she cried to him. 'Ne'er a coward shall touch
+me. All I said was, you might have won me.'
+
+'I am no coward,' said Caris hotly. 'And why do you fool and tempt one
+so? 'Tis unfair. 'Tis unfair. You may rue it.'
+
+His face was convulsed, his eyes were aflame, he breathed like a bull
+in a hard combat.
+
+Santina smiled; that was how she liked to see a man look.
+
+She had all the delight in watching and weighing the effects of the
+passion which she excited that moved the great queens of Asia and the
+empresses of Rome. She was only a poor girl, but the love of dominance
+and the violence of the senses were in her strong and hot and reckless.
+
+In her was all that ferment of ambition and vanity and discontent which
+drives out from their hamlets those who are born with something in them
+different to their lot and alien to their fellows. She had never been
+anywhere farther afield than the hills and woods about Pistanse, but
+she knew that there were big cities somewhere, where men were made of
+money, and women wore satin all day long, and everybody ate and drank
+out of gold plates and silver vessels. She knew that; and to get to
+these kingdoms of delight was the one longing which possessed her day
+and night.
+
+She wanted to get one thing out of this man--the means of liberty--and
+she cared nothing how she won it. Besides, he was so simple, so
+malleable, so credulous, it diverted her to play on him as one could
+play on a chitarra, making the strings leap and sigh and thrill and
+groan. And he was good to look at, too, with his tanned, fresh face,
+and his clustering curls, and his strong, straight, cleanly limbs.
+
+'I only said you might have won me,' she repeated--'nay, you may still,
+if you have the heart of a man and not of a mouse. Hearken!'
+
+'Do not fool me,' said Caris sternly, 'or as the Lord lives above
+us----'
+
+She laughed airily.
+
+'Oh, big oaths cannot frighten me. It shall lie with you. I want those
+things of your mother's. When you bring them I will thank you--as you
+choose.'
+
+He grew gray under his brown, bright skin.
+
+'Always that,' he muttered--always that!'
+
+'Naturally, it is what I want.'
+
+'Go, get them, since you think it holy work.'
+
+'I will,' said Santina, 'and then good-night to you, my good Caris; you
+will never see me more.'
+
+She turned on her heel and began to run down the slope in the moonlight.
+
+Santina would not have ventured inside the graveyard at night to get
+mountains of gold. She would not have passed after nightfall within a
+mile of its gate without crossing herself and murmuring Aves all the
+way. Superstition was born and bred in every inch of her bone and every
+drop of her blood, and she would no more have carried out her threat
+than she would have carried the mountain upon her shoulders.
+
+But he did not know that. She was so bold, so careless, so
+self-confident, if she had told him she would split open the earth to
+its centre he would have believed her.
+
+He overtook her as she fled down the slope and seized her in his arms.
+
+'No, no!' he cried, close in her ear. 'It is not work for you. If it
+must be done I will do it. Will you swear that you will give yourself
+to me if I bring you the unholy things?'
+
+'I love you!' she said breathlessly, while her lips brushed his
+throat--'yes, I do love you! Go, get the things, and bring them hither
+at dawn. I will meet you. Oh, I will find the way to use them, never
+fear. That is my business. Get you gone. They are calling below. They
+shut the house at the twenty-four.'
+
+No one was calling, but she wished to get rid of him. He was strong,
+and he was on fire with her touch and her glance; he strained her in
+his arms until her face was bruised against the hairy sinews and bones
+of his chest.
+
+She thrust him away with a supreme effort, and ran down the stony side
+of the hill, and was swallowed up in the duskiness of the tangled scrub.
+
+A little scops owl flitted past, uttering its soft, low note, which
+echoes so far and long in the silence of evening in the hills.
+
+Caris shook himself like a man who has been half stunned by a heavy
+fall. He was on fire with the alcohol of passion, and chilled to the
+marrow by the promise he had made.
+
+Open a tomb! Rifle a grave! See his mother again in her cere
+clothes--see all the untold and untellable horrors of which the dead
+and the earth make their secrets!
+
+Oh, why had he ever admitted that he had sealed up the uncanny things
+in the coffin! He could have bitten his tongue out for its tell-tale
+folly.
+
+He had thrust them in almost without consciousness of his act as he had
+hammered the lid down on the deal shell all alone with it in his cabin.
+
+The things had been always under his mother's pillow at night; it had
+seemed to him that they ought to go with her down to the grave. He had
+had a secret fear of them, and he had thought that their occult powers
+would be nullified once thrust in sacred soil. He had been afraid to
+burn them.
+
+The churchyard in which his mother lay was on the topmost slope of
+Genistrello, where the brown brick tower of the massive medieval church
+of St. Fulvo rose amongst the highest pines, upon a wind-swept and
+storm-scarred scarp.
+
+Few were the dead who were taken there; meagre and miserable were the
+lot and the pittance of its poor Vicar, and weather-beaten and worn by
+toil were the score of peasants who made up its congregation, coming
+thence from the scattered huts and farmhouses of the hillside.
+
+It was seven miles off from the chestnut wood where he dwelt, and twice
+seven from the four roads; a lonely and not over-safe tramp across the
+hills and the water-courses and the brushwood.
+
+But it was not the distance which troubled him, nor any possible
+danger. He knew his way through all that country, and the full round
+moon was by now showing her broad disc over the edge of the farther
+mountains on the south-east. But the thought of what he would have to
+do at the end of his pilgrimage made him sick with fear not altogether
+unmanly.
+
+He knew that what he would do would be sacrilege and punishable by
+law, but it was not of that he thought: his mind was filled with those
+terrors of the nether world, of the unknown, of the unseen, which a
+lonely life and a latent imagination made at once so indistinct and so
+powerful to him.
+
+'Had she but asked me anything else! 'he thought piteously.
+'Anything!--to cut off my right hand or to take the life of any man!'
+
+But she had set him this task; inexorably as women of old set their
+lovers to search for the Grail or beard the Saracen in his mosque, and
+he knew that he must do what she willed or never again feel those warm
+red lips breathe on his own.
+
+He tightened the canvas belt round his loins, and went home to his
+cabin to fetch a pickaxe and a spade, and, bidding his dog stay to
+guard the empty hut, he set out to walk across the vast steep breadth
+of woodland darkness which separated him from the church and churchyard
+which were his goal.
+
+A labourer on those hills all his life, and accustomed also to the more
+perilous and murderous thickets of Maremma, where escaped galley-slaves
+hid amongst the boxwood and the bearberry, and lived in caves and
+hollow trees, no physical alarm moved him as he strode on across the
+uneven ground with the familiar scents and sounds of a woodland night
+around him on every side.
+
+The moon had now risen so high that the valleys were bathed in her
+light, and the sky was radiant with a brilliancy which seemed but a
+more ethereal day.
+
+He had no eyes for its beauty. His whole soul was consumed by the
+horror of his errand. He only looked up at the pointers and the
+pole-star which he knew, so as to guide himself by them up the steep
+slopes to the church, for he had left the cart-tracks and mule-paths
+and struck perforce through the gorse and undergrowth westward,
+gradually ascending as he went.
+
+'Poor mother! poor mother!' he kept saying to himself. It seemed
+horrible to him to go and molest her out in her last sleep and take
+those things which were buried with her. Would she know? Would she
+awake? Would she rise and strike him?
+
+Then he thought of a dead woman whom he had found once in the 'macchia'
+in Maremma, lying unburied under some myrtle bushes; he remembered how
+hideous she had looked, how the ants and worms had eaten her, how the
+wild boars had gnawed her flesh, how the jaws had grinned and the empty
+eyeballs had stared, and how a black toad had sat on her breast.
+
+Would his mother look like that?
+
+No; for she was safe under ground, under sacred ground, shut up secure
+from wind and weather in that deal shell which he had himself made and
+hammered down; and she was in her clothes, all neat and proper, and the
+holy oil had been upon her.
+
+No, she had been put in her grave like a Christian, witch though they
+said that she was. She could not look like the woman in Maremma, who
+had been a vagrant and a gipsy.
+
+Yet he was afraid--horribly afraid.
+
+
+IV
+
+It was a soft and luminous night; there was the faintest of south winds
+now and then wandering amongst the tops of the pines, and fanning their
+aromatic odours out of them. The sound of little threads of water
+trickling through the sand and moss, and falling downward through the
+heather, was the only sound, save when a night bird called through the
+dark, or a night beetle whirred on its way.
+
+The summit of the hillside was sere and arid, and its bold stony
+expanse had seldom a living thing on it by daylight. By night, when the
+priest and sacristan of St. Fulvo were sleeping, there was not a single
+sign of any life, except the blowing of the pine-tops in the breeze.
+
+He had never been there except by broad day; his knees shook under him
+as he looked up at the tall straight black tower, with the moonlit
+clouds shining through the bars of its open belfry. If he had not heard
+the voice of Santina crying to him, 'No coward shall win me,' he would
+have turned and fled.
+
+He was alone as utterly as though all the world were dead.
+
+It was still barely midnight when he saw the bell-tower on high looming
+darker than the dark clouds about it, and the pine-trees and the
+presbytery and the walls of the burial-ground gathered round it black
+and gaunt, their shapes all fused together in one heap of gloom.
+
+The guardians of the place, old men who went early to their beds, were
+sleeping somewhere under those black roofs against the tower. Below,
+the hills and valleys were all wrapped in the silence of the country
+night.
+
+On some far road a tired team of charcoal-bearing mules might be
+treading woefully to the swing of their heavy bells, or some belated
+string of wine-carts might be creeping carefully through the darkness,
+the men half-drunk and their beasts half-asleep.
+
+But there was no sound or sign of them in the vast brooding stillness
+which covered like great soft wings the peaceful hills overlapping one
+another, and the serenity of the mountains bathed in the rays of the
+moon.
+
+There was no sound anywhere: not even the bleat of a sheep from the
+flocks, nor the bark of a dog from the homesteads.
+
+Caris crossed himself, and mounted the steep path which led to the
+church-gate.
+
+The last time he had come thither he had climbed up with the weight of
+his mother's coffin on his shoulders; the ascent being too steep for a
+mule to mount and he too poor to pay for assistance.
+
+The walls of the graveyard were high, and the only access to it was
+through a wooden iron-studded door, which had on one side of it a
+little hollowed stone for holy water, and above it a cross of iron and
+an iron crown. To force the door was impossible; to climb the wall was
+difficult, but he was agile as a wild cat, and accustomed to crawl up
+the stems of the pines to gather their cones, and the smooth trunks of
+the poplars in the valleys to lop their crowns.
+
+He paused a moment, feeling the cold dews run like rain off his
+forehead, and wished that his dog was with him, a childish wish, for
+the dog could not have climbed: then he kicked off his boots, set his
+toe-nails in the first crevice in the brick surface, and began to
+mount with his hands and feet with prehensile agility.
+
+In a few moments he was above on the broad parapet which edged the
+wall, and could look down into the burial-place below. But he did not
+dare to look; he shut his eyes convulsively and began to descend,
+holding by such slight aids as the uneven surface and the projecting
+lichens afforded him. He dropped at last roughly but safely on the
+coarse grass within the enclosure.
+
+All was black and still; the graveyard was shut in on three sides by
+its walls, and at the fourth side by the tower of the church.
+
+The moon had passed behind a cloud and he could see nothing.
+
+He stood ankle-deep in the grass; and as he stirred he stumbled over
+the uneven broken ground, made irregular by so many nameless graves. He
+felt in his breeches pockets for his pipe and matches, and drew one of
+the latter out and struck it on a stone.
+
+But the little flame was too feeble to show him even whereabouts he
+was, and he could not in the darkness tell one grave from another.
+
+Stooping and stretching out his hands, he could feel the rank grass and
+the hillocks all round him; there were a few head-stones, but only a
+few; of such dead as were buried in the graveyard of St. Fulvo, scarce
+one mourner in a century could afford a memorial stone or even a wooden
+cross.
+
+He stood still and helpless, not having foreseen the difficulty of the
+darkness.
+
+He could feel the stirring of wings in the air around him. His sense
+told him that they were but owls and bats, of which the old tower was
+full; but he shivered as he heard them go by; who could be sure what
+devilish thing they might not be?
+
+The horror of the place grew on him.
+
+Still, harmless, sacred though it was, it filled him with a terror
+which fastened upon him, making his eyeballs start, and his flesh
+creep, and his limbs shake beneath him.
+
+Yet he gripped his pickaxe closer and tighter, and held his ground, and
+waited for the moon to shine from the clouds.
+
+Santina should see he was no white-livered boy. He would get her what
+she asked, and then she would be his--his--his; and the woods would
+hide their loves and the cold moss grow warm with their embrace.
+
+Stung into courage and impatience by her memory, he struck violently
+upon one of the stones his whole handful of brimstone matches; they
+flared alight with a blue, sharp flash, and he saw there at his feet
+his mother's grave.
+
+He could not doubt that it was hers; it was a mound of clay on which no
+grass had had time to grow, and there were the cross-sticks he had set
+up on it as a memorial, with a bit of an old blue kerchief which had
+been hers tied to them.
+
+It was just as he had left them there four months before, when the
+summer had been green and the brooks dry and the days long and light.
+She was there under his feet where he and the priest had laid her, the
+two crossed chestnut sticks the only memorial she would ever have, poor
+soul!
+
+She was there, lying out in all wind and weather alone--horribly,
+eternally alone; the rain raining on her and the sun shining on her,
+and she knowing nought, poor, dead woman!
+
+Then the wickedness of what he came to do smote him all of a sudden so
+strongly that he staggered as under a blow, and a shower of hot tears
+gushed from his eyes, and he wept bitterly.
+
+'Oh, mother, poor mother!' he cried aloud.
+
+She had been a hard mother to him, and had had ways which he had feared
+and disliked, and a cruel tongue and a bad name on the hillside, but
+she had been his mother, and when she had lain dying she had been
+sorrowful to think that she would leave him alone.
+
+She had been his mother, and he came to rifle her grave.
+
+What a crime! What a foul, black crime, such as men and women would
+scarce speak of with bated breath by their hearths in the full blaze of
+day! What a crime! He abhorred himself for doing it, as he would have
+abhorred a poisoner or a parricide seeing them pass to the gallows.
+
+'Oh, mother, mother, forgive me! She will have it so!' he sobbed with a
+piteous prayer.
+
+He thought that, being dead, his mother would understand and forgive,
+as she would never have understood or forgiven when living.
+
+Then he struck his spade down into the heavy clay on which no
+bird-sown seed of blade or blossom had yet had any time to spring.
+
+He dug and dug and dug, till the sweat rolled off his limbs and his
+shoulders ached and his arms quivered.
+
+He threw spadefuls of clay one after another out on the ground around,
+his eyes growing used to the darkness, and his hands gripping the spade
+handle harder and harder in desperation. The very horror of his action
+nerved him to feverish force.
+
+'Oh, Santina, Santina, you give my soul to hell fires everlasting!' he
+cried aloud once, as he jammed the iron spade down deeper and deeper
+into the ground, tearing the stiff soil asunder and crushing the stones.
+
+The moon came forth from the clouds, and the burial-ground grew white
+with her light where the shadows of the wall did not fall. He looked
+up once; then he saw black crosses, black skulls and cross-bones, rank
+grass, crumbling headstones, nameless mounds all round him, and beyond
+them the tower of the church.
+
+But his mother's coffin he did not find. In vain he dug, and searched,
+and frantically tossed aside the earth in such haste to have ended and
+finished with his horrible task.
+
+His mother's coffin he could not find.
+
+Under the rays of the moon the desecrated ground lay, all broken up
+and heaped and tossed together, as though an earthquake had riven the
+soil. But the deal shell which he had made with his own hands and borne
+thither on his own shoulders, he could not find.
+
+'She will never believe! she will never believe!' he thought.
+
+Santina would never believe that he had come there if he met her at
+dawn with empty hands. He could hear in fancy her shrill, cruel,
+hissing shriek of mockery and derision; and he felt that if he did so
+hear it in reality it would drive him mad.
+
+He dug, and dug, and dug, more furiously, more blindly, going
+unconsciously farther and farther away from where the two crossed
+chestnut sticks had been; they had been uprooted and buried long before
+under the first heap of clay which he had thrown out from the grave.
+
+He had forgotten that they alone were his landmarks and guides; in the
+darkness which had been followed by the uncertain, misleading light of
+the moon, he had gone far from them.
+
+His work had become almost a frenzy with him; his nerves were strung to
+an uncontrollable pitch of excitation, fear, and horror, and obstinacy,
+and a furious resolve to obtain what he sought, with a terrible dread
+of what he should see when he should reach it, had together, in their
+conflict of opposing passions, driven him beside himself.
+
+He dug on and on, without any consciousness of how far he had gone from
+his goal, and no sense left but the fury of determination to possess
+himself of what he knew was there in the earth beneath him.
+
+He stood up to his knees in the yawning clay, with the heavy clods of
+it flung up on either side of him, and the moon hanging up on high in
+the central heavens, her light often obscured by drifting cloud wrack,
+and at other times shining cold and white into his face, as though by
+its searching rays to read his soul.
+
+How long he had been there he knew not; time was a blank to him; his
+supernatural terrors were lost in the anguish of dread lest he should
+be unable to do Santina's will.
+
+He felt as though he strove with the fiend himself.
+
+Who but some hideous power of evil could have moved the corpse and
+baffled and beaten him thus? Perhaps truly the charms had been things
+born of the devil, and the devil had taken them both to himself,
+and the body of his mother with them. He dug on and on frantically,
+deriving relief from the fever within him through that violent exertion
+which strained every vein and muscle in his body, till he felt as
+though beaten with iron rods.
+
+He did not see, in the confusion of his mind and the gloom of the
+night, that he had come close under the graveyard wall, and was digging
+almost at its base. He believed himself still to be on the spot where
+he had buried his mother; and he had deepened the pit about him until
+he was sunk up to his loins. He never remembered the danger of the
+priest or the sacristan waking and rising and seeing him at his occult
+labour.
+
+He never remembered that the bell would toll for matins whilst the
+stars would be still in their places, and the hills and the valleys
+still dark. All sense had left him except one set, insane resolve to
+obtain that by which the beauty of a woman was alone to be won.
+
+Of crime he had grown reckless, of emotion he had none left; he was
+only frantically, furiously determined to find that which he had come
+to seek. Standing in the damp, clogging soil, with the sense of moving
+creatures about him which his labours had disturbed in the bowels of
+the earth, he dug and dug and dug until his actions had no purpose or
+direction in them, only hurling clod upon clod in breathless, aimless,
+senseless monotony and haste.
+
+At last his spade struck on some substance other than the heavy soil
+and the slimy worms; he thrilled through all his frame with triumph and
+with terror.
+
+At last! At last! He never doubted that it was the coffin he sought; he
+did not know that his mother's grave lay actually yards away from him.
+Oh, were there only light, he thought; it was so dark, for the moon had
+now passed down behind the wall of the graveyard, and there would be
+only henceforth growing ever darker and darker that dense gloom which
+precedes the dawn. He dared not go on digging; he was afraid that the
+iron of his spade should stave in the soft wood of the coffin, and cut
+and maim the body within it. He stooped and pushed the clay aside with
+his hands, trying to feel what the tool had struck.
+
+What met his touch was not wood, but metal--rounded, smooth, polished;
+though clogged and crusted with the clay-bed in which it lay. He pushed
+the earth farther and farther away, and the object he had reached
+seemed to lie far down, under the soil, and to be held down by it.
+
+He was himself hemmed in by the broken clods, and stood in the hole
+he had dug, half imprisoned by it. But he could move enough to strike
+a few remaining matches on the iron of the spade, and let their light
+fall on what he had unearthed.
+
+Then it seemed to him that a miracle had been wrought.
+
+Before him lay a silver image of the Child Christ. His knees shook,
+his whole frame trembled, his lips gasped for breath; the flame of the
+matches died out; he was left in the dark with the image.
+
+'It is the Gesu! It is the Gesu!' he muttered, sure that his dead
+mother, or the saints, or both, had wrought this miracle to show him
+the evil of his ways.
+
+In truth, the statue had lain there many centuries, buried against the
+wall by pious hands in times when the torch of war had been carried
+flaming over all the wasted villages and ravaged fields in the plain
+below.
+
+But no such explanation dawned on the mind of Caris.
+
+To him it was a miracle wrought by the saints or by the dead. In the
+dark he could feel its round shoulders, its small hands folded as in
+prayer, its smooth cheek and brow, its little breast; and he touched
+them reverently, trembling in every nerve.
+
+He had heard of holy images shown thus to reward belief or to confound
+disbelief.
+
+His faith was vague, dull, foolish, but it was deep-rooted in him. He
+was a miserable sinner; and the dead and the saints turned him thus
+backward on his road to hell; so he thought, standing waist-deep in the
+rugged clay and clutching his spade to keep himself from falling in a
+swoon.
+
+
+V
+
+To Caris miracles were as possible as daily bread.
+
+He knew little of them, but he believed in them with his whole soul. It
+seemed wonderful that the heavenly powers should create one for such
+a poor and humble creature as himself; but it did not seem in any way
+wonderful that such a thing should be.
+
+The Divine Child was there in the earth, keeping away all evil things
+by its presence, and he could not doubt that the saints who were with
+Mary, or perchance his own mother's purified spirit, had called the
+image there to save him from the fiend.
+
+He sank on his knees on the clay, and said over breathlessly all the
+Aves he could think of in his awe. They were few, but he repeated them
+over and over again, hoping thus to find grace and mercy for his sin
+for having broken into these sacred precincts and disturbed the dead in
+their rest.
+
+But what of Santina? Would she believe him when he told her of this
+wondrous thing?
+
+If he went to her with his hands empty, would she ever credit that he
+had courage to come upon this quest? He could hear, as it were, at his
+ear, her mocking, cruel, incredulous laughter.
+
+She had said, 'Bring me the magic toys.' What would the tale of
+a miracle matter to her? She wanted treasure and knowledge. She
+would care nothing for the souls of the dead or the works of the
+saints--nothing.
+
+He knew that her heart was set on getting things which she knew were
+evil, but believed were powerful for good and ill, for fate and future.
+
+Suddenly a thought which froze his veins with its terror arose in him,
+and fascinated him with its wickedness and his daring. What if he took
+the holy image to her in proof that he had tried to do her will, and
+had been turned from his errand by powers more than mortal?
+
+Since she had believed in the occult powers of his mother's divining
+tools, surely she would still more readily believe in the direct and
+visible interposition of the dead?
+
+If he bore the Gesu to her in his arms, she could not then doubt that
+he had passed the hours of this night in the graveyard of St. Fulvo.
+
+She could not, before its sacred testimony, be angry, or scornful, or
+incredulous, or unkind.
+
+But could he dare to touch the holy thing? Would the image consent to
+be so taken? Would not its limbs rebel, its lips open, its body blister
+and blast the mortal hands which would thus dare to desecrate it?
+
+A new fear, worse, more unspeakable than any which had moved him
+before, now took possession of him as he knelt there on the bottom of
+the pit which he had dug, gazing through the blackness of the darkness
+to the spot where he knew the silver body of the Christ Child lay.
+
+The thing was holy in his eyes, and he meant to use it for unholy
+purposes. He felt that his hands would wither at the wrist if they took
+up that silver Gesu from its bed of earth.
+
+His heart beat loudly against his ribs, his head swam.
+
+It was still dark, though dawn in the east had risen.
+
+He crawled out of the pit of clay with difficulty, holding the silver
+image to his bosom with one arm, and stood erect, and gazed around him.
+
+If saints or friends were there beside him, they made no sign; they
+neither prevented nor avenged the sacrilege.
+
+The sweet, sharp smell of the wet blowing grasses was in his nostrils,
+and the damp clinging sods were about his feet, dragging at the soles
+of his boots, that was all.
+
+He began to think of the way in which he could, thus burdened, climb
+the wall.
+
+The silver Christ was heavy in his hold, and he needed to have both
+hands free to ascend the height above him.
+
+He knew it was an image and not a living god; yet none the less was
+it in his sight holy, heaven-sent, miraculous, potent for the service
+of the saints, and to take it up and bear it away seemed to him like
+stealing the very Hostia itself.
+
+True, he would bring it back and give it to the vicar, and let it,
+according to the reverend man's choice, be returned to its grave or
+laid on the altar of the church for the worship of the people, and the
+continued working of miracles.
+
+Yes, he said to himself, assuredly he would bring it back. He would
+only bear it in his arms most reverently to Santina, that she might see
+and believe, and become his; and then he would return hither with it
+and tell the priest the wondrous story.
+
+Yet he shook as with palsy at the thought of carrying the blessed image
+as though it were a mere living human babe.
+
+It seemed to him as if no man could do such a deed and live. The
+anointed hands of a priest might touch it, but not his--his so hard and
+rough and scarred with work, never having held aught better than his
+pipe of clay and his tool of wood or of iron, and the horn haft of his
+pocket-knife.
+
+Nor was even his motive for taking it pure. He wanted through it to
+justify himself in the sight of a woman, and to find favour with her,
+and to gratify a strong and furious passion. His reasons were earthly,
+gross, selfish; they could not redeem, or consecrate, or excuse his
+act. That he knew.
+
+All was still, dusky, solitary; the church was wrapt in gloom, the
+daybreak did not reach it; only above the inland hills the white light
+spread where he could not see; behind the high wall of the graveyard,
+beyond the ranges of the inland hills, the gray soft light of daybreak
+had arisen.
+
+He thought he heard voices all around him, and amongst them that of
+his mother warning him to leave untouched the sacred Child, and get up
+on his feet and flee. But above these he heard the laughter of Santina
+mocking him as an empty-handed, white-livered fool, who came with
+foolish tales of visions to hide his quaking soul.
+
+Better that his arms should shrivel, that his sight should be blinded,
+that his body should be shrunken and stricken with the judgment of
+heaven, than that he should live to hear her red lips laugh and call
+him a feckless coward.
+
+With all the life which was in him shrinking and sickening in deadly
+fear, he stooped down, groped in the dark until he found the image,
+grasped its metal breast and limbs, and dragged it upward from the
+encircling earth.
+
+It was of the size of a human child of a year old.
+
+He plucked it roughly upward, for his terror made him rude and fierce,
+and held it in his arms, whilst he wondered in his great awe and horror
+that no judgment of affronted heaven followed on his desperate act.
+
+All was still well with him; he saw, he heard, he breathed, he lived;
+the cool night air was blowing about him, the clouds were letting fall
+a faint fine mist-like rain.
+
+He undid the belt about his loins--a mere piece of webbing with a
+buckle--strapped it around the body of the Gesu, and taking the ends
+thereof between his firm, strong teeth, sought in the dark for the
+place whence he had descended, and found it.
+
+He climbed the wall with slow, laborious, and painful effort, the dead
+weight of the silver figure encumbering him as he mounted with cat-like
+skill, cutting his hands and bruising his skin against the rough,
+undressed stones.
+
+He dropped carefully down on the earth beneath, and began the descent
+of the hill.
+
+'When I can bring the little Christ back, I can get the tools,' he
+thought. It seemed a small matter.
+
+He was forced to leave behind him his spade and pickaxe.
+
+
+VI
+
+When at last he reached the top of the coping, he saw that it was dawn.
+His heart leaped in his breast. Down in the chestnut coppice Santina
+would be awaiting him; and she would believe--surely, certainly she
+would believe--when she should see this holy Gesu brought out from the
+tomb.
+
+He was in good time. It was barely day. He unslung the little Christ
+and took it again in his arms, as carefully as a woman would take a
+new-born child. The polished limbs grew warm in his hands; its small
+face leaned against his breast; he lost his awe of it; he ceased to
+fear what it might do to him; he felt a kind of love for it.
+
+'Oh, Gesu, dear Gesu, smile on us!' he said to it; and although it was
+still too dark to see more than its outline faintly, he thought he saw
+the mouth move in answer.
+
+Holding it to him, he started homeward down the stony slope. He was
+thankful to be out of that ghostly place of tombs; he was thankful to
+have escaped from that scene of terror whole in limb, and uncursed if
+unpardoned; the tension of his nerves in the past hours had given place
+to an unreasoning and overstrung gladness. But for his reverence for
+the burden he carried, he could have laughed aloud.
+
+Only once now and then, as he went, his conscience smote him. His poor
+mother!--he had forgotten her; he had displaced the mark set above her
+grave; no one would ever now be sure where she was buried. Did it hurt
+her, what he had done? Would she be jealous in her grave of the woman
+for whom he did it? Was it cruel to have come away without smoothing
+the rugged earth above her bed and saying an Ave for her?
+
+But these thoughts, this remorse, were fleeting; his whole mind was
+filled with the heat of passion and its expectation. Fatigued and
+overworked and sleepless as he was, he almost ran down the paths of the
+hills in his haste, and tore his skin and his clothes as he pushed his
+way through the brushwood and furze, guarding only the Gesu from hurt
+as he went.
+
+The day had now fully dawned, and the sun had risen; its rosy flush
+was warm over all the land and sky; the woodlarks and the linnets were
+singing under the bushes; the wild doves were dabbling in the rivulets
+of water; the hawks were circling high in the light.
+
+On the wooded hillside all was peaceful with the loveliness of the
+unworn day; the air was full of the smell of heather and wet mosses and
+resinous pine-cones; rain was falling above where the church was, but
+in these lower woods there was a burst of sunrise warmth and light.
+None of these things, however, did he note. He went on and on, downward
+and downward, holding the silver image close against his breast,
+scarcely feeling the boughs which grazed his cheeks or the flints which
+wounded his naked feet.
+
+When he came within sight of the place where he had left Santina the
+night before, he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of her through
+the tangle of leaves and twigs and fronds. And true enough to her
+tryst she was there, waiting impatiently, fretting, wishing the time
+away, blaming her own folly in setting all her hopes of freedom and
+the future on a foolish, cowardly churl--for so she called him in her
+angry thought, as she crouched down under the chestnut scrub and saw
+the daylight widen and brighten.
+
+She ran a great risk in hiding there; if any of her people or their
+carters saw her, their suspicions would be aroused and their questions
+endless. She would say that she came for mushrooms; but they would not
+believe her. She was too well known for a late riser and a lazy wench.
+
+Still, she had imperilled everything to keep her word with him, and she
+waited for him seated on the moss, half covered with leaves, except at
+such times as her impatient temper made her cast prudence to the winds
+and rise and look out of the thicket upward to the hills.
+
+She had made herself look her best; a yellow kerchief was tied over her
+head, her hair shone like a blackbird's wing, her whole face and form
+were full of vivid, rich, and eager animal beauty. To get away--oh,
+only to get away! She looked up at the wild doves sailing over the tops
+of the tall pines and envied them their flight.
+
+Caris saw that eager, longing look upon her countenance before he
+reached her, and he thought it was caused by love for him.
+
+He held the Gesu to his bosom with both hands and coursed like
+lightning down the steep slope which still divided him from her; he
+was unconscious of how jaded, soiled, and uncomely he looked after his
+long night's work and all his ghostly fears; his feet were scratched
+and bleeding, his shirt soaked in sweat, his flesh bespattered with the
+clay, his hair wet and matted with moisture; he had no remembrance of
+that, he had no suspicion that even in that moment of agitation, when
+she believed her errand done, her will accomplished, she was saying in
+her heart as she watched him draw nigh: 'He has got them, he has got
+them; but, Holy Mary! what a clown!--he has all the mud of fifty graves
+upon him!'
+
+He rushed downward to her, and held the silver image out at
+arm's-length, and sobbed and laughed and cried aloud, indifferent who
+might hear, his voice trembling with awe and ecstasy.
+
+'It is the Gesu Himself, the Gesu--and I have brought Him to you
+because now you will believe--and my mother must be well with them
+in heaven or they never had wrought such a miracle for me--and such
+a night as I have passed, dear God! such things as I have seen and
+heard--but the Child smiles--the Child is pleased--and now you will
+believe in me, though I could not find the magic things--and I said
+to myself when she sees the Gesu she will believe--and she will be
+mine--mine--mine! The Lord forgive me, that has been all my thought,
+though heaven wrought such a miracle for me!'
+
+The words poured out of his mouth one over another like the rush of
+water let loose through a narrow channel. He was blind with his own
+excess of emotion, his own breathless desire; he did not see the
+changes which swept over the face of Santina in a tumult of wrath,
+wonder, fury, eagerness, suspicion, cupidity, as one after another each
+emotion went coursing through her soul and shining in her eyes, making
+her beauty distorted and terrible.
+
+Her first impulse was fury at his failure to bring her what she wanted;
+the second was to comprehend in a flash of instantaneous insight the
+money value of that to which he only attached a spiritual merit.
+
+She snatched the image from him, and in the morning light she saw the
+silver of it glisten through the earth which still in parts clung to
+it. It might be better, surer, more quick aid to her than the uncertain
+divining tools whereof she was ignorant of the full employ. Her rapid
+mind swept over in a second all the uses to which it might be put,
+and comprehended the superstitious adoration of it which moved Caris
+and made him control his passion for herself, as he stood gazing at
+it in her arms, his own hands clasped in prayer, and his whole frame
+trembling with the portentous sense of the mercy of heaven which had
+been made manifest to him.
+
+She in a second divined that it had been part of some buried treasure
+which he had by accident disinterred, but she was too keen and wise to
+let him see that she did so; it was her part to humour and to confirm
+him in his self-deception.
+
+She calmed the angry, gibing words which rose to her lips, she held
+back the exultant covetousness which flashed in her eyes and betrayed
+itself in the clutching grasp of her fingers; she gazed on the Gesu
+with a worship half real, half affected, for it was also a holy image
+to her, if its sanctity were to her outweighed and outshone by its
+monetary worth in precious metal.
+
+'Tell me how you found this?' she asked, under her breath, as one
+almost speechless with awe before such a manifestation from on high.
+
+She was really in genuine fear. He had been into precincts which none
+could enter without offending immortal and unseen powers. He had done
+it at her bidding. Who could be sure that the offending spirits would
+not avenge his sacrilege on her?
+
+But through her fears she kept her hold upon the image, whilst she
+asked the question.
+
+Tremblingly he told her how he had passed the awful hours of the night
+and failed to find his mother's tomb, but in its stead found this.
+
+'And I brought it that you should know that I had been there,' he said
+in conclusion, 'that you might know I had been where you willed, and am
+no coward; and we will take it back together and give it to the holy
+man up yonder--and now--and now--and now----'
+
+His hands touched her, his breath was upon her, his timid yet violent
+passion blazed in his eyes and quivered all over his frame: he had
+dared all things for his reward, and he claimed it. But, quick as
+lightning, and merciless as dishonest, she put the holy image between
+her and him. The sacred silver froze his burning lips.
+
+His arms fell to his side as though they were paralyzed.
+
+'Not while the Gesu is with us,' she murmured in rebuke. 'Let us not be
+unworthy--you say yourself a miracle was wrought.'
+
+'But----'
+
+He stood before her, checked, daunted, breathing heavily, like a horse
+thrown back on its haunches in full flight.
+
+'Hush!' she said, with a scared look. 'There are people near; I hear
+them. We will take the Gesu back to the church, but that cannot be till
+dusk. I will keep Him safe with me. Go, you dear, and clean your skin
+and your clothes, lest any seeing you should suspect what you have
+done.'
+
+'I will not go,' he muttered; 'you promised----'
+
+'I promised, oh fool!' she said, with quick passion, 'and my word I
+will keep, but not while the Gesu is with us. I love you for all you
+have braved. I love you for all you have done. I will be yours and no
+other's. See! I swear it on the Holy Child's head!'
+
+And she kissed the silver brow of the babe.
+
+He was convinced, yet irresolute and impatient.
+
+'Let us go back with it now, then,' he muttered. 'I did but bring him
+to show you in witness of what I had done.'
+
+'No,' she said, with that imperious command in her voice and her gaze
+which made the resolve in him melt like wax beneath a flame. 'You
+cannot be seen with me in such a state as you are. I will carry the
+Christ back to the church if so be that He rests uneasily in common
+arms like ours, and then--well, I will pass by your cabin as I come
+down. Dost complain of that, my ingrate?'
+
+A flood of warmth and joy and full belief swept like flame through the
+whole being of Caris. Her eyes were suffused, her cheek blushed, her
+lips smiled; he believed himself beloved; he thought himself on the
+threshold of ecstasy; the minutes seemed like hours until he should
+regain his hut and watch from its door for her coming.
+
+'You will go now?' he asked eagerly.
+
+'At once,' she answered, holding the Gesu to her as a woman would hold
+a sucking child.
+
+Caris closed his eyes, dazed with her beauty and the wild, sweet
+thought of how she would hold to her breast some child of his on some
+fair unborn morrow.
+
+'Then go,' he muttered. 'The sooner we part, the sooner we shall meet.
+Oh, my angel!'
+
+She gave him a smile over her shoulder, and she pushed her way upward
+through the chestnut boughs, carrying the Gesu folded to her bosom.
+
+Watching her thus depart, a sudden and new terror struck him.
+
+'Wait,' he called to her. 'Will the priest be angered that I disturbed
+the graves, think you?'
+
+'Nay, nay, not when he sees that you give him the image,' she called
+backward in answer.
+
+Then she disappeared in the green haze of foliage, and Caris struck
+onward in the opposite direction, to take the way which led to his
+cabin on Genistrello. Her words had awakened him to a consciousness of
+his bruised, befouled, and tattered state.
+
+He wished to avoid meeting anyone who might question him as to his
+condition.
+
+He got as quickly as he could by solitary paths to his home, and was
+met with rapture by his dog. He entered the house, and drank thirstily;
+he could not eat; he washed in the tank at the back of the hut, and
+clothed himself in the best that he had: what he wore on holy and on
+festal days.
+
+Then he set his house-door wide open to the gay morning light which,
+green and gleeful, poured through the trunks of the chestnuts and
+pines; and he sat down on his threshold with the dog at his feet, and
+waited.
+
+It would be a whole working-day lost, but what of that? A lover may
+well lose a day's pay for love's crown of joy.
+
+Hour after hour passed by, and his eyes strained and ached with looking
+into the green light of the woods. But Santina came not.
+
+The forenoon, and noontide and afternoon went by; and still no living
+thing came up to his solitary house. The whole day wore away, and he
+saw no one, heard nothing, had no visitant except the black stoat which
+flitted across the path, and the grey thrushes which flew by on their
+autumn flights towards lower ground.
+
+The long, fragrant, empty day crept slowly by, and at last ended. She
+had not come.
+
+He was still fasting. He drank thirstily, but he could not eat, though
+he fed the dog.
+
+He was in a state of nervous excitation almost delirious. The trees and
+the hills and the sky seemed to whirl around him. He dared not leave
+the hut, lest she should come thither in his absence. He stared till he
+was sightless along the green path which led down to the four roads.
+Now and then, stupidly, uselessly, he shouted aloud; and the mountains
+echoed his solitary voice.
+
+The dog knew that something was wrong with his master, and was pained
+and afraid.
+
+The evening fell. The night wore away. He put a little lamp in his
+doorway, thinking she might come, through shyness, after dark; but no
+one came. Of her there was no sign, or from her any word.
+
+When the day came he was still dressed and sleepless, seated before
+his door; the flame of the little lamp burnt on, garish and yellow in
+the sunshine.
+
+The sun mounted to the zenith; it was again noon. He went indoors,
+and took a great knife which he was accustomed to carry with him to
+Maremma. He put it in his belt inside his breeches, so that it was
+invisible.
+
+Then he called the dog to him, kissed him on the forehead, gave him
+bread, and motioned to him to guard the house; then he took his way
+once more down the hillside to Massaio's house.
+
+If she had fooled him yet again, she would not live to do it thrice.
+His throat was dry as sand; his eyes were bloodshot; his look was
+strange.
+
+The dog howled and moaned as he passed out of sight.
+
+He went onward under the boughs tinged with their autumnal fires, until
+he came to the place where the house and sheds and walls of the wood
+merchant's homestead stood. He walked straight in through the open
+gates, and then stood still.
+
+He saw that there was some unusual stir and trouble in the place: no
+one was at work, the children were gaping and gabbling, the housewife
+was standing doing nothing, her hands at her sides; Massaio himself was
+seated drumming absently on the table.
+
+'Where is Santina?' asked Caris.
+
+They all spoke in answer, 'Santina is a jade'--Massaio's voice louder
+and rougher than the rest.
+
+'She has gone out of the town and away, none knows where; and she has
+left a letter behind her saying that none need try to follow, for she
+is gone to a fine new world, where she will want none of us about her;
+and my brother says it is all my fault, giving her liberty out on the
+hills. And the marvel is where she got the money, for we and they kept
+her so close--not a stiver--not a penny--and it seems she took the
+train that goes over the mountains ever so far, and paid a power of
+gold at the station wicket.'
+
+The voice of Caris crossed his in a loud, bitter cry. 'She sold the
+Gesu! As God lives--she sold the Gesu!'
+
+Then the blood rushed from his nostrils and his mouth, and he fell face
+downwards.
+
+
+VII
+
+A few days later he was arrested for having violated and robbed the
+tombs in the burial-grounds of St. Fulvo. The pickaxe and the spade had
+been found with his name burned on the wood of them; he was sentenced
+to three years at the galleys for sacrilege and theft.
+
+When the three years were ended he was an old, gray, bowed man, though
+only twenty-nine years of age; he returned to his cabin, and the dog,
+who had been cared for by the charcoal-burners, knew him from afar off,
+and flew down the hill-path to meet him.
+
+'The wench who ruined you,' said the charcoal-burners around their
+fire that night, 'they do say she is a fine singer and a rich madam
+somewhere in foreign parts. She sold the Gesu--ay, she sold the Gesu to
+a silversmith down in the town. That gave her the money to start with,
+and the rest her face and her voice have done for her.'
+
+'Who has the Gesu?' asked Caris, hiding his eyes on the head of the dog.
+
+'Oh, the Gesu, they say, was put in the smelting-pot,' said the
+charcoal-burner.
+
+Caris felt for the knife which was inside his belt. It had been given
+back to him with his clothes when he had been set free at the end of
+his sentence.
+
+'One could find her,' he thought, with a thrill of savage longing. Then
+he looked down at the dog and across at the green aisles of the pines
+and chestnuts.
+
+'Let the jade be,' said the forest-man to him. 'You are home again, and
+'twas not you who bartered the Christ.'
+
+Caris fondled the haft of the great knife under his waistband.
+
+'She stole the Gesu and sold Him,' he said, in a hushed voice. 'One day
+I will find her, and I will strike her: once for myself and twice for
+Him.'
+
+
+
+
+A LEMON-TREE
+
+
+
+
+A LEMON-TREE
+
+
+I
+
+It was a small lemon-tree, not more than forty inches high, growing
+in its red earthen vase as all lemons are obliged to be grown further
+north than Rome. There were many thousands and tens of thousands of
+other such trees in the land; but this one, although so little, was
+a source of joy and pride to its owner. He had grown it himself from
+a slender slip cast away on a heap of rubbish, and he had saved his
+pence up with effort and self-denial to purchase, second-hand, the big
+pot of ruddy clay in which it grew, now that it had reached its first
+fruit-bearing prime. It had borne as its first crop seven big, fragrant
+lemons, hanging from its boughs amidst leaves which were as fresh and
+green as a meadow in May. He had watched its first buds creep out of
+the slender twigs, and swell and swell gradually into sharp-pointed
+little cones, which in their turn became pale yellow fruit, 'fit for
+a princess,' as he said, patting their primrose-coloured rind. They
+seemed so many separate miracles to him, coming as by some magic out of
+the little starry white flowers on the glossy twigs.
+
+He was a poor, ignorant man, by name Dario Baldassino, known as
+Fringuello (or the Chaffinch) to his neighbourhood and fellow workmen.
+He lived on the south side of the ferry of Royezano, and dug and carted
+the river-sand; a rude labour and a thankless, taking the sinew and
+spirit out of a man, and putting little in return into his pocket. The
+nave or ferry is a place to please an artist. All the land around on
+this south side is orchard--great pear-trees and cherry-trees linked
+together by low-growing vines, and in the spring months making a sea
+of blossom stretching to the river's edge. The watermills, which were
+there centuries ago, stand yellow and old, and cluster like beavers'
+dams upon the water. The noise of the weir is loud, but the song of
+the nightingale can be heard above it. Looking along westward down
+the widening, curving stream, above the fruit-trees planted thick as
+woods, there arise, two miles off, the domes and spires of the city
+of Florence, backed by the hills, which here take an Alpine look upon
+them when the sun sets beyond the rounded summits of the more distant
+Carrara range; and the spurs of the Apennines grow deeply blue with
+that intense transparent colour which is never seen in northern lands.
+To the north also lie the mountains, and on the east; and late into May
+the snow lingers where the day breaks above Vallombrosa and Casentino.
+All the vale is orchard, broken now and then by some great stone-pine,
+some walnut or chestnut tree, some church spire with its statue of
+its saint, some low, red-brown roofs, some grey old granary with
+open-timbered lofts. It is a serene and sylvan scene--at sunset and at
+sunrise grand--and the distant city rises on its throne of verdure,
+seeming transfigured as Dante, exiled, may have seen it in his dreams.
+
+Of all this beauty outspread before his sight Fringuello saw little;
+his eyes were always set on the sand and shingle into which he drove
+his heart-shaped spade--all which is the pageant of the painter, the
+paradise of the poet, but is nothing to the toiler of the soil. The
+sweat of his fatigue drops down before his eyes, and shuts out from
+him the scenes amidst which he dwells. For him the weir has no song,
+the orchard no poem, the mountains no counsel, and the vales no charm.
+He does but see the cart-rucks in the sand, the house-fly in the
+sunlight, the coins hard-earned in his horny palm, the straw which
+covers the coveted wine-flask, or the glass which holds the hot and
+acid flavours of less natural drinks. Now and then Giotto looks up from
+his sheepfold, and Robert Burns from his furrow, but it is only once in
+a century. This poor labourer, Fringuello, lived in two little rooms
+in a poor house which looked on the weir and the water-mills. He had
+never been able to have a house of his own, and even the small charge
+of the rooms was more than he could easily pay, miserable though they
+were. His employment was intermittent, and in winter, when the river
+was spread wide over its bed, covering the sand and shingle, it ceased
+entirely. Some odd jobs he got elsewhere, but nothing certain. He had
+no knowledge of any other work than the digging and carrying which had
+been his lot. But he was always merry, with the mirth which had gained
+him his nickname, and in his light-hearted poverty had done what the
+poorest always do--he had married at twenty a girl as poor as himself.
+She was called Lizina, the familiar corruption of Luisa, and was the
+daughter of a cobbler of the adjacent village of Ripoli.
+
+It was an imprudent union and a foolish one, but it was happier than
+many which fulfil every condition of prudence and thrift. Lizina was
+a blithe, buoyant, active, and laborious creature, and whilst she
+lived he never had a hole in his hempen shirt, or went without a
+tablespoonful of oil to his beans and bread. They were as merry and
+happy as if they had really been a pair of chaffinches in a nest in
+one of the pear-trees. But of joy the gods are envious, whether it go
+to roost in garret or palace, and in a few brief years Lizina died of
+fever and left him all alone with one little girl, as like herself as
+the bud is like the flower.
+
+For months he never sang as he worked, and his ruddy face was pale,
+and he had long fits of weeping when he lay on his lonely bed, and
+stared up at the starry skies which were visible through the square,
+unshuttered window. Lizina was in the ground, in a nameless grave,
+with two crossed sticks set above it, and the river rolled over the
+weir, and the wide wheel turned, and the orchards blossomed, and the
+people laughed on the yellow sand, and no one cared that a little
+merry, glad, tender, harmless life was done for and over, stamped down
+into the clay like a crushed butterfly, a broken branch, a rotten
+fruit, or a dead grasshopper. Nobody cared; and after a time he, too,
+ceased to care, and began to hum and whistle and carol once more as
+he worked, and laughed once more at his comrades' jokes as they dug
+up the heavy sand. In the lives of the poor there is little leisure
+for sorrow, and toil passes over them like an iron roller over the
+inequalities of a road, forcing them down into dull indifference, as
+the roller forces into level nothingness alike the jagged flint and the
+sprouting grass.
+
+Meanwhile, Lizina, as she was called after her mother, grew up apace
+like the little lemon-tree which had been planted at her birth, a
+lovely child like a Correggio cherub, thriving on her dry bed and
+herb-soup as the lemon plant thrived on the dry earth and uncongenial
+atmosphere of the attic under the roofs.
+
+Fringuello did his best by both of them, making up to them by
+tenderness and gentleness what he was forced to refuse to both of
+material comfort. Both the child and the tree went hungry often,
+suffered from cold and frost in the sharp, short winters, and
+languished in the scorching days, when foul odours rose from the naked
+bed of the shrunken river, and white clouds of little moths hovered
+over the cracked sand, and the leaves of the orchards grew yellow and
+wrinkled, and curled up, and dropped in the heat before their time.
+
+All that he could not help; he could not help it more than he could
+help the shrinking of the river in drought, and the coming of blight to
+the orchards. Though it went to his soul like a knife-thrust when he
+saw the child pale and thin, and the lemon-tree sickly and shrunk, he
+could do nothing. But he murmured always, 'Patience, courage,' as he
+coaxed the child to eat a morsel of crust, and consoled the tree with
+a spray of spring-water, and he got them both safely through several
+burning summers and icy winters, and when they were both sixteen years
+old the tree was strong and buxom, with glossy foliage and fine fruit,
+and the child was healthy and handsome, with shining eyes and laughing
+mouth.
+
+He had worked as hard as any mule for them both, and though a young man
+in years, he looked an old man from excess of toil, though his heart
+was light and his smile was like sunshine.
+
+When he got up in the dark to go to his work, and drew his leathern
+belt about his lean ribs, he always looked at the pale light of dawn
+as it touched the green leaves of the tree and the closed eyes of the
+child, and then he muttered an Ave, content and thankful at heart. Many
+would have thought the hardness of his lot excuse enough for suicide;
+he never knew what it was not to feel tired, he never knew what it was
+to have a coin in his pocket for pleasure. His bones ached, and the
+gnawing of rheumatism was in his nerves, from the many hours spent
+knee-deep in water or damp sand, and always at the pit of his stomach
+was that other still worse gnawing of perpetual insufficiency of food.
+But he was content and grateful to his fate, as the birds are, though
+they hunger and thirst, and every man's hand is against them.
+
+The child and the tree were indissolubly united in his mind and
+memory. They had grown up together, and seemed part and parcel of each
+other. Imagination scarcely exists in the brains of the poor; they do
+not know what it is. The perpetual grind of daily want leaves no space
+for or possibility of impersonal fancy in it; but, in a vague kind of
+superstitious way, he associated the well-being of the one with the
+welfare of the other. If the tree sickened and drooped for a day, he
+always looked nervously at Lizina to see if she ailed anything also.
+If the little girl coughed or grew hot with fever, he always watched
+anxiously the leaves of the lemon. It was a talisman and fetish to him;
+and when he came up from the river at evening when his work was done,
+he looked upward always to see the green boughs of the tree at the
+square little window of his garret under the deep eaves, and above an
+archway of old brown-red brick.
+
+If it had been missing at the window, he would have told himself that
+Lizina was dead. There was no likelihood that it would ever be missing
+there. Lemon-trees live long, and this one would, he knew, most likely
+outlive himself if he kept it from worm and fly, and rot and mildew.
+Nevertheless, he always glanced upward to make sure that it was there
+when he toiled up the strip of road which led to his home when his work
+in the sand was done. Lizina herself did not wait at the window. She
+always came jumping and dancing down the path, her auburn curls flying,
+and her big brown eyes sparkling; barefooted, ill-clad, scarcely fed,
+but happy and healthy, singing at the top of her voice as her father
+had always done in his youth.
+
+When they reached their fifteenth birthday, neither she nor the
+lemon-tree had ever ailed anything worse than a passing chill from a
+frosty week, or a transient sickness from a sultry drought.
+
+The lemon-tree had given her the few little gifts she had ever
+received. The pence brought in by its fruit were always laid out for
+her: cake at Christmas, sugar-egg at Easter, a white ribbon for her
+first Communion, a pair of shoes to wear on high feasts and holy
+days--these little joys, few and far between, had all come to her
+from the copper pieces gained by the pale, wrinkled, fragrant fruit
+sold at five centimes each in the village or the town. '_Soldi della
+Lizinanina_,' said her father whenever he put any so gained in his
+trousers pocket.
+
+Well as he loved his pipe, and thankful as he was when he could get a
+drink of watered wine, he never touched a halfpenny of the lemon money
+to buy a pinch of tobacco or a glass of _mezzo-vino_. It was all saved
+up carefully for his little girl's small wants. Sometimes in hard
+seasons it had even to go in bread for her, but of that bread he would
+never himself take a mouthful. Moreover, the pence were few, for the
+lemons were not many.
+
+Lizina remained quite a child, though she grew fast, and her little
+round breasts swelled up high and firm where the rough hempen shift
+cut across them. Young as she was, the eyes of an admirer had fallen
+upon her, and young Cecco, the son of Lillo, the _contadino_ where the
+big pine stood (a pine three hundred years old if one), had said to
+her father and to her that when he had served out his time in the army
+he should say something serious about it; but Fringuello had answered
+him ungraciously that he could never give her bridal clothes or bridal
+linen, so that she would needs die a maid, and his own people had told
+him roughly that when he should have served his time he would be in a
+different mind. But Cecco, nevertheless, thought nothing would please
+him ever so well as this ragged, pretty child with her blowing cloud
+of short, crisp bright curls, and he said to her one evening as she
+sat on the wall by the ferry, 'If you will be patient, my Lizinanina,
+I will be true;' and Lizina, too young to be serious, but amused and
+triumphant, laughed gaily and saucily, and replied to him: 'I will make
+no promises, Cecco. You will come back with a shorn pate and soft hands
+and tender soles to your feet.'
+
+For the soldier seems but a poor creature to the children of the soil,
+and is, indeed, of but little use when the barracks vomit him out of
+their jaws and send him back to his home, a poor, indifferent trooper,
+but also a spoiled peasant; having learned to write indeed, but having
+forgotten how to handle a spade, drive a plough, or prune a grape-vine,
+and to whose feet, once hard and firm as leather, the once familiar
+earth with its stones and thorns and sticks seems rough and sharp and
+painful, after having marched in ill-fitting boots for three years
+along smooth roads and paven streets.
+
+To the city lad and lass the conscript may seem somebody very fine; but
+to the country ones he seems but a mere popinjay, only useful to waste
+powder. Lizina, although only a river labourer's daughter, was country
+born and bred, and had the prejudices and preferences of the country,
+and had run about under the orchard boughs and down the vineyards of
+the countryside till she thought as a peasant and spoke as one.
+
+Cecco was mortified, but he shared her views of the life to which he
+was about to go. He was useful now to tame a steer, to milk a heifer,
+to fell a tree, to mow a meadow, to reap a field, to get up in the dark
+and drive the colt into the city with a load of straw and bring back
+a load of manure. But in the barracks he would be nothing--worse than
+nothing; a poor numb-skull, strapped up in stiff clothes with a pack on
+his back, and a musket, which he must fire at nothing, on his shoulder.
+
+'Wait for me, Lizina,' he said sadly. 'The time will soon pass, and I
+will come back and marry you, despite them all.'
+
+'Pooh! I shall have married a man with a mint of money by the time they
+let you come back,' said the unkind child, saucily tossing the curls
+out of her eyes; but through her long lashes her glance rested a moment
+softly on the ruddy face of Cecco, which had looked down on her so
+often through the boughs and twigs of the cherry or pear trees of his
+father's farm, as he threw down fruit into her outstretched and eager
+little hands where she stood in the grass of the orchard.
+
+She said nothing more tender then, being coy and wayward and hard to
+please, as became her incipient womanhood; but before she went to bed
+that night she came close to her father's side and put her hand on his.
+
+'Cecco says he will come back and marry me, _babbo_,' she said, with a
+child's directness. Her father stroked her curls.
+
+'That is a joke, dear; his people would never let him marry a little
+penniless chit like you.'
+
+Lizina shook her head sagely with a little proud smile.
+
+'He will not mind his people. He will do it--if I wish--when he comes
+back.'
+
+Her father looked at her in amazement; in his eyes she was a little
+child still.
+
+'Why, baby, you speak like a woman!' he said stupidly. 'I am glad this
+lad goes away, as he puts such nonsense into your head.'
+
+'But if we both wish, you would not mind, _babbo_?' she asked,
+persistent and serious.
+
+'The angels save us! She speaks like a grown woman!' cried her father.
+'My poor little dear,' he thought sadly, 'you will never be able to
+wed anyone. We are poor! so poor! I can never give you even a set of
+shifts. Who could go to a house so naked--in rags, as one may say? My
+poor little angel, you must live a maid or go to a husband as beggared
+as I.'
+
+He wished to say all this, but the words choked him in his throat. It
+seemed so cruel to set before the child the harsh, mean demands of
+life, the merciless rules and habits of that narrow world of theirs,
+which was bounded by the river and the sand on one side, and the
+cornfields and orchards on the other.
+
+'Let be, let be,' he said to himself. 'She is but a child, and the
+youth is going away for years; if it please her to think of this thing,
+it can hurt no one. He will forget, and she will forget.'
+
+So he patted her pretty brown cheek, and drew her closer and kissed her.
+
+'You are but a baby, my treasure,' he said softly. 'Put these grave
+thoughts out of your head. Many moons will wax and wane before Cecco
+will be free again to come to his old home. The future can take care of
+itself. I will say neither yea nor nay. We will see what the years will
+bring forth.'
+
+'But you would not mind?' she murmured coaxingly.
+
+The tears started to his eyes.
+
+'Ah! God knows, dear, how sweet it would be to me!'
+
+He thought of his little girl safe and happy for her lifetime in that
+pleasant and plentiful household under the red-brown roofs where the
+big pine grew amongst the pear and cherry trees. The vision of it was
+beautiful and impossible. It hurt him to look on it, as the sun dazzles
+the eyes at noon.
+
+'But put it out of your head--out of your head, little one!' he said.
+'Even if the boy should keep of the same mind, never would Lillo
+consent.'
+
+'Cecco will keep in the same mind,' said Lizina, with the serene
+undoubting certainty of childhood, and she broke off a little twig of
+the lemon-tree, with a bud upon it and three leaves, and gave it to
+Cecco that evening in the dusk as they sat again upon the river-wall.
+It was all she had to give, except her little waking heart.
+
+The next day he went away along the dusty high-road in his father's
+cart to begin his new life. He sobbed as if his heart would break, and
+fastened in his shirt was the lemon shoot.
+
+'To break off a bud! Oh, Lizina!' cried her father, in reproof and
+reproach. 'A bud means a fruit, and a fruit means a halfpenny, perhaps
+a penny.'
+
+'It is only one,' said the child; 'and I have nothing else.'
+
+Lizina did not speak of him, nor did she seem to fret in any way. Her
+blithe voice rang in clear carol over the green river water, as she sat
+on the wall whilst her father worked below, and she ate her dry bread
+with healthy and happy appetite.
+
+'She is only a baby. She has forgotten the boy already,' thought her
+father, half disappointed, half relieved, whilst he broke up the earth
+about the roots of the lemon-tree, and counted the little pointed
+fruits coming out on it, green as malachite, and promising a fair crop.
+
+No letters could arrive to stimulate her memory, for Cecco could
+scarcely scrawl his name, and Lizina could not read her A B C. Absence
+to the poor is a complete rupture, an absolute blank, over which the
+intelligence can throw no bridge.
+
+Fringuello worked early and late, worked like a willing mule, and lost
+no chance of doing anything, however hard, which could bring in a
+centime; and he was so tired when night fell that he could do little
+except swallow his bread-soup and fling himself down on his bed of
+dry leaves thrust into an old sack. So that as long as Lizina's voice
+was heard in song, and her little bare feet ran busily to and fro, he
+noticed nothing else, and was content, believing all was well with her.
+
+The winter which followed on Cecco's departure to his military service
+was of unusual rigour for the vale of Arno; the waters were stormy
+and dark, and the fields were frozen and brown, and snow lay on the
+long lines of the mountains from their summit to their base. But the
+lemon-tree flourished before its narrow window, and Lizina was well and
+gay in the cold little brick-floored, plaster-walled, unceiled garret;
+and her father asked nothing more of Fate, and went out to his work in
+the bitter coldness and darkness of the morning dawns with an empty
+stomach but a warm heart, leaving her sleeping, easily and dreamlessly,
+curled up like a little dormouse in her corner of the room.
+
+The winter passed and the spring came, making all the orchard lands
+once more become seas of white flowers, and setting the chaffinches
+and linnets and nightingales to work at their nests amongst the lovely
+labyrinth of bursting blossom; and one sunlit afternoon, towards the
+close of April, the village priest, coming along the road by the river,
+saw Fringuello, who was backing his sand-cart into the bed of the now
+shallow stream, and beckoned to him. The priest had an open letter in
+his hand, and his plump, smooth olive face was sad.
+
+'Dario,' he said gravely, 'I have some terrible news in this paper.
+Lillo's son, Cecco, is dead. I have to go and tell the family. The
+authorities have written to me.'
+
+He stopped suddenly, surprised by the effect which his news had on his
+hearer.
+
+'Saints protect us, how you look!' he cried. 'One would think you were
+the lad's father!'
+
+'Is it sure? Is it true?' stammered Fringuello.
+
+'Ay, ay, it is true and sure enough. The authorities write to me,'
+answered the vicar, with some pride. 'Poor lad! Poor, good, pretty lad!
+They sent him to the Marenna marshes, and the ague and fever got on
+him, and he died in the fort a week ago. And only to think that this
+time last year he was bringing me armfuls of blooming cherry boughs for
+the altar at Easter-day! And now dead and buried. Good lack! Far away
+from all his friends, poor lad! The decrees of heaven are inscrutable,
+but it is of course for the best.'
+
+He crossed himself and went on his way.
+
+Fringuello doffed his cap mechanically, and crossed himself also, and
+rested against the shaft of his cart with his face leaning on his
+hands. His hope was struck down into nothingness; the future had no
+longer a smile. Though he had told himself, and them, that children
+were fickle and unstable, and that nothing was less likely than that
+the lad would come back in the same mind, he had nevertheless clung
+to and cherished the idea of such a fate for his little daughter with
+a tenacity of which he had been unconscious until his air castle was
+scattered to the winds by the words of the priest. The boy was dead;
+and never would Lizina go to dwell in peace and plenty at the old
+farmhouse by the great pine.
+
+'It was too good to be. Patience!' he said to himself, with a groan, as
+he lifted his head and bade the mule between the shafts move onward.
+His job had to be done; his load had to be carried; he had no leisure
+to sit down alone with his regret.
+
+'And it is worse for Lillo than it is for me,' he said to himself, with
+an unselfish thought for the lad's father.
+
+He looked up at the little window of his own attic which he could see
+afar off; the lemon-tree was visible, and beside it the little brown
+head of Lizina as she sat sewing.
+
+'Perhaps she will not care; I hope she will not care,' he thought.
+
+He longed to go and tell her himself lest she should hear it from some
+gossip, but he could not leave his work. Yet, he could not bear the
+child to learn it first from the careless chattering of neighbouring
+gossips.
+
+When he had discharged the load he carried, he fastened the mule to a
+post by the water-side, and said to a fellow-carter, 'Will you watch
+him a moment whilst I run home?' and on the man's assenting he flew
+with lightning speed along the road and up the staircase of his house.
+
+Lizina dropped her sewing in amazement as he burst into the room and
+stood on the threshold with a look which frightened her.
+
+She ran to him quickly.
+
+'_Babbo!_ _Babbo!_ What is the matter?' she cried to him. Then, before
+he could answer, she said timidly, under her breath, 'Is anything
+wrong--with Cecco?'
+
+Then Fringuello turned his head away and wept aloud.
+
+He had hoped the child had forgotten. He knew now that she had
+remembered only too well. All through the year which had gone by since
+the departure of the youth she had been as happy as a field-mouse
+undisturbed in the wheat. The grain was not ripe yet for her, but she
+was sure that it would be, and that her harvest would be plenteous. She
+had always been sure, quite sure, that Cecco would come back; and now,
+in an instant, she understood that he was dead.
+
+Lizina said little then or at any time; but the little gay life of her
+changed, grew dull, seemed to shrink into itself and wither up as a
+flower will when a worm is at its root. She had been so sure that Cecco
+would return!
+
+'She is so young; soon it will not matter to her,' her father told
+himself.
+
+But the months went by and the seasons, and she did not recover her
+bloom, her mirth, her elasticity; her small face was always grave and
+pale. She went about her work in the same way, and was docile, and
+industrious, and uncomplaining, but something was wrong with her. She
+did not laugh, she did not sing; she seldom even spoke unless she was
+spoken to first. He tried to persuade himself that there was no change
+in her, but he knew that he tried to feed himself on falsehood. He
+might as well have thought his lemon-tree unaltered if he had found it
+withered up by fire.
+
+
+II
+
+Once Lizina said to her father, 'Could one walk there?'
+
+'Where, dear? Where?'
+
+'Where they have put Cecco,' she answered, knowing nothing of distances
+or measurements or the meaning of travel or change of place.
+
+She had never been farther than across the ferry to the other bank of
+the river.
+
+Her father threw up his hands in despair.
+
+'Lord! my treasure! why it is miles and miles and miles away! I don't
+know rightly even where--some place where the sun goes down.'
+
+And her idea of walking thither seemed to him so stupefying, so
+amazing, so incredible, that he stared at her timorously, afraid that
+her brain was going wrong. He had never gone anywhere in all his life.
+
+'Oh, my pretty, what should we do, you and I, in a strange place?'
+moaned Fringuello, weeping with fear at the thought of change and with
+grief at the worn, fevered face lifted up to his. 'Never have I stirred
+from here since I was born, nor you. To move to and fro--that is for
+well-to-do folks, not for us; and when you are so ill, my poor little
+one, that you can scarcely stand on your feet--if you were to die on
+the way----'
+
+'I shall not die on the way,' said the child firmly.
+
+'But I know nought of the way,' he cried wildly and piteously. 'Never
+was I in one of those strings of fire-led waggons, nor was ever any one
+of my people that ever I heard tell of. How should we ever get there,
+you and I? I know not even rightly what place it is.'
+
+'I know,' said Lizina; and she took a crumpled scrap of paper out of
+the breast of her worn and frayed cotton frock. It bore the name of the
+seashore town where Cecco had died. She had got the priest to write it
+down for her. 'If we show this all along as we go people will put us
+right until we reach the place,' she said, with that quiet persistency
+which was so new in her. 'Ask how one can get there,' she persisted,
+and wound her arm about his throat, and laid her cheek against his in
+her old caressing way.
+
+'You are mad, little one--quite mad!' said Fringuello, aghast and
+affrighted; and he begged the priest to come and see her.
+
+The priest did come, but said sorrowfully to him:
+
+'Were I you, I would take her down to one of the hospitals in the town;
+she is ill.'
+
+He did so. He had been in the town but a few times in his whole life;
+she never. It was now wintry weather; the roads were wet, the winds
+were cold; the child coughed as she walked and shivered in her scanty
+and too thin clothes. The wise men at the hospital looked at her
+hastily among a crowd of sick people, and said some unintelligible
+words, and scrawled something on a piece of paper--a medicine, as it
+proved--which cost to buy more than a day of a sand carter's wage.
+
+'Has she really any illness?' he asked, with wild, imploring eyes, of
+the chemist who made up the medicine.
+
+'Oh no--a mere nothing,' said the man in answer; but thought as he
+spoke: 'The doctors might spare the poor devil's money. When the blood
+is all water like that there is nothing to be done; the life just goes
+out like a wind-blown candle.' 'Get her good wine; butcher's meat;
+plenty of nourishing food,' he added, reflecting that while there is
+youth there is hope.
+
+The father groaned aloud, as he laid down the coins which were the
+price of the medicine. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! They might as well have
+bidden him feed her on powdered pearls and melted gold. They got home
+that day footsore and wet through; he made a little fire of boughs and
+vine-branches, and, for the first time ever since it had been planted,
+he forgot to look at the lemon-tree.
+
+'You are not ill, my Lizinanina?' he said eagerly. 'The chemist told me
+it was nothing.'
+
+'Oh no, it is nothing,' said the child; and she spoke cheerfully and
+tried to control the cough which shook her from head to foot.
+
+Tears rolled down her father's cheeks and fell on to the smouldering
+heather, which he set all right. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! The three
+vain words rang through his head all night. They might as well have
+bade him set her on a golden throne and call the stars down from their
+spheres to circle round her.
+
+'My poor little baby!' he thought; 'never did she have a finger ache,
+or a winter chill, or an hour's discomfort, or a moment's pain in mind
+or body until now!'
+
+The child wasted and sickened visibly day by day. Her father looked
+to see the lemon-tree waste and sicken also; but it flourished still,
+a green, fresh, happy thing, though growing in a place so poor. A
+superstitious, silly notion took possession of him, begotten by his
+nervous terrors for his child, and by the mental weakness which came
+of physical want. He fancied the lemon-tree hurt the child, and drew
+nourishment and strength away from her. Perhaps in the night, in some
+mysterious way--who knew how? He grew stupid and feverish, working
+so hardly all day on hardly more than a crust, and not sleeping at
+night through his fears for Lizina. Everything seemed to him cruel,
+wicked, unintelligible. Why had the State taken away the boy who was so
+contented and useful where he was born? Why had the strange, confined,
+wearisome life amongst the marshlands killed him? Why was he himself
+without even means to get decent food? Why, after working hard all
+these years, could he have no peace? Must he even lose the one little
+creature he had? The harshness and injustice of it all disturbed his
+brain and weighed upon his soul. He sank into a sullen silence; he
+was in the mood when good men turn bad, and burn, pillage, slay--not
+because they are wicked or unkind by nature, but because they are mad
+from misery.
+
+But she was so young, and had been always so strong, he thought; this
+would pass before long, and she would be herself again--brisk, brown,
+agile, mirthful, singing at the top of her voice as she ran through
+the lines of the cherry-trees. He denied himself everything to get her
+food, and left himself scarce enough to keep the spark of life in him.
+He sold even his one better suit of clothes and his one pair of boots;
+but she had no appetite, and perceiving his sacrifice, took it so
+piteously to heart that it made her worse.
+
+The neighbours were good-natured and brought now an egg, now a fruit,
+now a loaf for Lizina; but they could not bring her appetite, and were
+offended and chilled by her lassitude, her apparent ignorance of their
+good intentions, and her indifference to their gifts.
+
+Some suggested this nostrum, others that; some urged religious
+pilgrimages, and some herbs, and some charms, and some spoke of a wise
+woman, who, if you crossed her hand with silver, could relieve you of
+any evil if she would. But amidst the multitude of counsellors, Lizina
+only grew thinner and thinner, paler and paler, all her youth seeming
+slowly to wane and die out of her.
+
+Her little sick heart was set obstinately on what her father had told
+her was impossible.
+
+None of Cecco's own people thought of going to the place where he died.
+He was dead, and there was an end to it; even his mother, although she
+wept for him, did not dream of throwing away good money in a silly and
+useless journey to the place where he had been put in the ground.
+
+Only the little girl, who had laughed at him and flouted him as they
+sat on the wall by the river, did think of it constantly, tenaciously,
+silently. It seemed to her horrible to leave him all alone in some
+unfamiliar, desolate place, where no step was ever heard of any whom
+he had ever known. She said nothing of it, for she saw that even her
+father did not understand; but she brooded over the thought of it
+constantly, turning to and fro in her mind the little she had ever
+known or heard of the manner and means by which people transported
+themselves from place to place. There were many, of course, in the
+village who could have told her how others travelled, but she was
+too shy to speak of the matter even to the old man of the ferry, in
+whose boat, when it was moored to a _poula_ driven in the sand, she
+had spent many an hour of playtime. She had always been a babbling,
+communicative, merry child, chattering like a starling or a swift,
+until now. Now she spoke rarely, and never of the thing of which her
+heart was full.
+
+One day her father looked from her pinched, wan face to the bright
+green leaves of the flourishing lemon-tree, and muttered an oath.
+
+'Day and night, for as many years as you are old, I have taken care of
+that tree, and sheltered it and fed it; and now it alone is fair to see
+and strong, whilst you--verily, oh verily, Lizina, I could find it in
+my heart to take a billhook and hew it down for its cruelty in being
+glad and full of vigour, whilst you pinch and fade, day by day, before
+my sight!'
+
+Lizina shook her head, and looked at the tree which had been the
+companion of her fifteen years of life.
+
+'It's a good tree, _babbo_!' she said gently. 'Think how much it has
+given us; how many things you bought me with the lemon money! Oh! it
+is very good; do not ever say a word against it; but--but--if you are
+in anger with it, there is a thing which you might do. You have always
+kept the money which it brought for me?'
+
+'Surely, dear. I have always thought it yours,' he answered, wondering
+where her thoughts were tending.
+
+'Then--then,' said Lizina timidly, 'if it be as mine really, and you
+see it no more with pleasure in its place there, will you sell it, and
+with the price of it take me to where Cecco lies?'
+
+Her eyes were intensely wistful; her cheeks grew momentarily red in her
+eagerness; she put both hands to her chest and tried to stop the cough
+which began to choke her words. Her father stared, incredulous that he
+could hear aright.
+
+'Sell the tree?' he asked stupidly.
+
+Not in his uttermost needs had the idea of selling it come to him. He
+held it in a superstitious awe.
+
+'Since you say it is mine,' said the child. 'It would sell well. It is
+strong and beautiful and bears good fruit. You could take me down where
+the sun sets and the sea is--where Cecco lies in the grass.'
+
+'Good Lord!' said Fringuello, with a moan.
+
+It seemed to him that the sorrow for her lost sweetheart had turned the
+child's brain.
+
+'Do, father--do!' she urged, her thin brown lips trembling with anxiety
+and with the sense of her own powerlessness to move unless he would
+consent.
+
+Her father hid his face in his hands; he felt helpless before her
+stronger will. She would force him to do what she desired, he knew;
+and he trembled, for he had neither knowledge nor means to make such a
+journey as this would be to the marshlands in the west, where Cecco lay.
+
+'And the tree--the tree!' he muttered.
+
+He had seen the tree so long by that little square window, it was part
+of his life and hers. The thought of its sale terrified him as if he
+were going to sell some human friend into bondage.
+
+'There is no other way,' said Lizina sadly.
+
+She, too, was loth to sell the tree, but they had nothing else to
+sell; and the intense selfishness of a fixed idea possessed her to the
+exclusion of all other feeling.
+
+Then the cough shook her once more from head to foot, and a little
+froth of blood came to her lips.
+
+Lizina, in the double cruelty of her childhood and of her ill-health,
+was merciless to her father, and to the tree which had been her
+companion so long. She was possessed by the egotism of sorrow. She was
+a little thing, now enfeebled and broken by long nights without sleep
+and long days without food, and her heart was set on this one idea,
+which she did not reveal--that she would die down there, and that then
+they would put her in the same ground with him. This was her idea.
+
+In the night she got up noiselessly, whilst her father was for awhile
+sunk in the deep sleep which comes after hard manual toil, and came up
+to the lemon-tree and leaned her cheek against its earthen vase.
+
+'I am sorry to send you away, dearie,' she said to it; 'but there is no
+other way to go to him.'
+
+She felt as if it must understand and must feel wounded. Then she broke
+off a little branch--a small one with a few flowers on it.
+
+'That is for him,' she said to it.
+
+And she stood there sleepily with the moonlight pouring in on her and
+the lemon-tree through the little square hole of the window.
+
+When she got back to her bed she was chilled to the bone, and she
+stuffed the rough sacking of her coverture between her teeth to stop
+the coughing, which might wake her father. She had put the little
+branch of her lemon into the broken pitcher which stood by her at night
+to slake her thirst.
+
+'Sell it, _babbo_, quick, quick!' she said in the morning.
+
+She was afraid her strength would not last for the journey, but she did
+not say so. She tried to seem cheerful. He thought her better.
+
+'Sell it to-day--quick, quick!' she cried feverishly; and she knew
+that she was cruel and ungrateful, but she persisted in her cruelty and
+ingratitude.
+
+Her father, in despair, yielded.
+
+It seemed to him as if he were cutting the throat of a friend. Then
+he approached the tree to carry it away. He had called in one of his
+fellow-carters to help to move it, for it was too heavy for one man.
+With difficulty it was forced through the narrow, low door and down the
+steep stair, its leaves brushing the walls with a sighing sound, and
+its earthen jar grinding on the stone of the steps. Lizina watched it
+go without a sigh, without a tear. Her eyes were dry and shining; her
+little body was quivering; her face was red and pale in quick, uneven
+changes.
+
+'It goes where it will be better than with us,' said Fringuello, in a
+vague apology to it, as he lifted it out of the entrance of the house.
+
+He had sold it to a gardener in a villa near at hand.
+
+'Oh yes, it will be better off,' he said feverishly, in the doubtful
+yet aggressive tone of one who argues that which he knows is not true.
+'With rich people instead of poor; out in a fine garden half the year,
+and in a beautiful airy wooden house all winter. Oh yes, it will be
+much better off. Now it has grown so big it was choked where it stood
+in my little place; no light, no air, no sun, nothing which it wanted.
+It will be much better off where it goes; it will have rich, new earth
+and every sort of care.'
+
+'It has done well enough with you,' said his comrade carelessly, as he
+helped to shove the vase on to the hand-cart.
+
+'Yes, yes,' said Fringuello impatiently, 'but it will do better where
+it goes. It has grown too big for a room. It would starve with me.'
+
+'Well, it is your own business,' said the other man.
+
+'Yes, it is his own business,' said the neighbours, who were standing
+to see it borne away as if it were some rare spectacle. 'But the tree
+was always there; and the money you get will go,' they added, in their
+collective wisdom.
+
+He took up the handles of the little cart and placed the yoke of cord
+over his shoulders, and began to drag it away. He bent his head down
+very low so that the people should not see the tears which were running
+down his cheeks.
+
+When he came back to his home he carried its price in his hands--thirty
+francs in three paper notes. He held them out to Lizina.
+
+'All is well with it; it is to stand in a beautiful place, close to
+falling water, half in shade, half in sun, as it likes best. Oh, all is
+well with it, dear! do not be afraid.' Then his voice failed him, and
+he sobbed aloud.
+
+The child took the money. She had a little bundle in her hand, and she
+had put on the only pair of shoes she possessed.
+
+'Clean yourself, father, and come--come quickly,' she said in a little
+hard, dry, panting voice.
+
+'Oh wait, wait, my angel!' he cried piteously through his sobs.
+
+I cannot wait,' said the child, 'not a minute, not a minute. Clean
+yourself and come.'
+
+In an hour's time they were in the train. The child did
+everything--found the railway-station, asked the way, paid their fares,
+took their seats, pushing her father hither and thither as if he were
+a blind man. He was dumb with terror and regret; he resisted nothing.
+Having sold the tree, there seemed to him nothing left for him to do.
+Lizina obeyed him no more--she commanded.
+
+People turned to look after this little sick girl with death written
+on her face, who spoke and moved with such feverish decision, and
+dragged after her this thin dumb man, her small lean hand shut with
+nervous force upon his own. All the way she ate nothing; she only drank
+thirstily of water whenever the train stopped.
+
+The novelty and strangeness of the transit, the crowd, and haste, and
+noise, the unfamiliar scenes, the pressure of unknown people, and the
+stare of unknown eyes--all which was so bewildering and terrible to her
+father, had no effect upon her. All she thought of was to get to the
+place of which the name was written on the scrap of paper which she had
+shown at the ticket-office, and which she continued to show mutely to
+anyone who spoke to her. It said everything to her; she thought it must
+say everything to everyone else.
+
+Nothing could alarm her or arrest her attention. Her whole mind was set
+on her goal.
+
+'Your little lady is very ill!' said more than one in a crowded
+railway-waggon, where they jammed one on to another, thick as herrings
+in a barrel.
+
+'Ay, ay, she is very ill,' he answered stupidly; and they did not
+know whether he was unfeeling or daft. He was dizzy and sick with the
+unwonted motion of the train, the choking dust, the giddy landscape
+which seemed to run past him, earth and sky together; but on Lizina
+they made no impression, except that she coughed almost incessantly.
+She seemed to ail nothing and to perceive nothing. He was seized with a
+panic of dread lest they should be taken in some wrong direction, even
+out of the world altogether; dreaded fire, accident, death, treachery;
+felt himself caught up by strong, invisible hands, and whirled away,
+the powers of heaven or hell alone knew where. His awful fear grew on
+him every moment greater and greater; and he would have given his soul
+to be back safe on the sand of the river at his home.
+
+But Lizina neither showed nor felt any fear whatever.
+
+The journey took the whole day and part of the ensuing night; for the
+slow cheap train by which they travelled gave way to others, passed
+hours motionless, thrust aside and forgotten, and paused at every
+little station on the road. They suffered from hunger and thirst,
+and heat and draught, and fatigue and contusion, as the poor cattle
+suffered in the trucks beside them. But the child did not seem to feel
+either exhaustion or pain, or to want anything except to be there--to
+be there. The towns, the mountains, the sea, the coast, all so strange
+and wonderful to untravelled eyes, had no wonder for her. She only
+wanted to get beyond them, to where it was that Cecco lay. Every now
+and then she opened her bundle and looked at the little twig of the
+lemon-tree.
+
+Alarmed at her aspect, and the racking cough, their companions shrank
+away from them as far as the crowding of the waggon allowed of, and
+they were left unquestioned and undisturbed, whilst the day wore on and
+the sun went down into the sea and the evening deepened into night.
+
+It was dawn when they were told to descend; they had reached their
+destination--a dull, sun-baked, fever-stricken little port, with the
+salt water on one side of it, and the _machia_ and marsh on the other.
+
+Lizina got down from the train, holding her little bundle in one hand
+and in the other her father's wrist. Their limbs were bruised, aching,
+trembling, their spines felt broken, their heads seemed like empty
+bladders, in which their brains went round and round; but she did
+not faint or fall--she went straight onward as though the place was
+familiar to her.
+
+Close to the desolate, sand-strewn station there was a fort of
+decaying yellow stone, high walls with loopholes, mounds of sand with
+sea-thistle and bryony growing in them; before these was the blue
+water, and a long stone wall running far out into the water. To the
+iron rings in it a few fisher boats were moored by their cables. The
+sun was rising over the inland wilderness, where wild boars and buffalo
+dwelt under impenetrable thickets. Lizina led her father by the hand
+past the fortifications to a little desolate church with crumbling
+belfry, where she knew the burial-ground must be. There were four
+lime-washed walls, with a black iron door, through the bars of which
+the graves within and the rank grass around them could be seen. The
+gate was locked; the child sat down on a stone before it and waited.
+She motioned to her father to do the same. He was like a poor steer
+landed after a long voyage in which he has neither eaten nor drank,
+but has been bruised, buffeted, thrown to and fro, galled, stunned,
+tormented. They waited, as she wished, in the cool dust of the breaking
+day. The bell above in the church steeple was tolling for the first
+Mass.
+
+In a little while a sacristan came out of the presbytery near the
+church, and began to turn a great rusty key in the church door. He saw
+the two sitting there by the graveyard, and looking at them over his
+shoulder, said to them, 'You are strangers--what would you?'
+
+Lizina rose and answered him: 'Will you open to me? I come to see my
+Cecco, who lies here. I have something to give him.'
+
+The sacristan looked at her father.
+
+'Cecco?' he repeated, in a doubtful tone.
+
+'A lad of Royezzano, a soldier who died here,' said Fringuello,
+hoarsely and faintly, for his throat was parched and swollen, and his
+head swam. 'He and my child were playmates. Canst tell us, good man,
+where his grave is made?'
+
+The sacristan paused, standing before the leathern curtain of the
+church porch, trying to remember. Save for soldiers and the fisher
+folk, there was no one who either lived or died there; his mind went
+back over the winter and autumn months, to the last summer, in which
+the marsh fever and the pestilential drought had made many sicken and
+some die in the fort and in the town.
+
+'Cecco? Cecco?' he said doubtfully. 'A Tuscan lad? A conscript? Ay, I
+do recall him now. He got the tertian fever and died in barracks. His
+reverence wrote about him to his family. Yes, I remember. There were
+three soldier lads died last year, all in the summer. There are three
+crosses where they lie. I put them there; his is the one nearest the
+wall. Yes, you can go in; I have the key.'
+
+He stepped across the road and unlocked the gate. He looked wonderingly
+on Lizina as he did so. 'Poor little one!' he muttered, in compassion.
+'How small, how ill, to come so far!'
+
+Neither she nor her father seemed to hear him. The child pressed
+through the aperture as soon as the door was drawn ajar, and Fringuello
+followed her. The burial-ground was small and crowded, covered with
+rank grass, and here and there sea-lavender was growing. The sacristan
+led them to a spot by the western wall where there were three rude
+crosses made of unbarked sticks nailed across one another. The rank
+grass was growing amongst the clods of sun-baked yellow clay; the high
+white wall rose behind the crossed sticks; the sun beat down on the
+place: there was nothing else.
+
+The sacristan motioned to the cross nearest the wall, and then went
+back to the church, being in haste, as it was late for matins. Lizina
+stood by the two poor rude sticks, once branches of the hazel, which
+were all that marked the grave of Cecco.
+
+Her father, uncovering his head, fell on his knees.
+
+The child's face was illuminated with a strange and holy rapture. She
+kissed the lemon bough which she held in her hand, and then laid it
+gently down upon the grass and clay under the wall.
+
+'I have remembered, dear,' she said softly, and knelt on the ground
+and joined her hands in prayer. Then the weakness of her body overcame
+the strength of her spirit; she leaned forward lower and lower until
+her face was bowed over the yellow grass. 'I came to lie with you,'
+she said under her breath; and then her lips parted more widely with a
+choking sigh, the blood gushed from her mouth, and in a few minutes she
+was dead.
+
+They laid her there in the clay and the sand and the tussocks of grass,
+and her father went back alone to his native place and empty room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day on the river-bank a man said to him:
+
+'It is odd, but that lemon-tree which you sold to my master never did
+well; it died within the week--a fine, strong, fresh young tree. Were
+there worms at its root, think you, or did the change to the open air
+kill it?'
+
+Fringuello, who had always had a scared, wild, dazed look on his face
+since he returned from the sea-coast, looked at the speaker stupidly,
+not with any wonder, but like one who hears what he has long known but
+only imperfectly understands.
+
+'It knew Lizina was dead,' he said simply; and then thrust his spade
+into the sand and dug.
+
+He would never smile nor sing any more, nor any more know any joys of
+life; but he still worked on from that habit which is the tyrant and
+saviour of the poor.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+
+Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
+preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
+
+Simple typographical errors were corrected, sometimes by referencing
+other editions of these stories.
+
+Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Rainy June and Other Stories, by Ouida
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42944 ***