A House-Party, Don Gesualdo, and A Rainy June

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. A nightingale was 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 song of the nightingales in that dreamy trance which made him look so stupid in the eyes of his housekeeper and his parishioners, but which was only the meditation 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 analyze 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 Song of Solomon, in midsummer—what is it he is singing? Is he lamenting the summer? or is he only teaching his young ones how they should sing next year?"

And he fell again to listening to the sweetest bird that gladdens earth. The 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. Any one 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 among 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 color 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 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 misshapen shadows over the seas of flowering reeds and rushes.

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. "Gesualdo! chè Gesualdo!" 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 gayety 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 the Bocca d'Arno to live at the mill on the small river which was the sole water that 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 sea-gulls 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 in tempora, 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 a charge of small shot among 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 canebrakes 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 favorite resort of all the 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 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 colored through her warm, paleless skin. She was silent.

"It has not gone as far as you think," she muttered, after a pause.

"But I will not be accused for nothing," she added. "Tasso shall have what he thinks he has had. Why would he marry me? He knew I hated him. We were all very poor down there by Bocca d'Arno, but we were gay and happy. Why did he take me away?"

The tears started to her eyes and rolled down her hot cheeks. It was the hundredth time that she had told her sorrows to Gesualdo, in the confessional and out of it: it was an old story, of which she never tired of the telling. Her own people were far away by the sea-shore, and she had no friends in Marca, for she was thought a "foreigner," not being of that country-side, and the women were jealous of her beauty, and of the idle life which she led in comparison to theirs, and of the cared-for look of her person. Gesualdo seemed a countryman, and a relative, and a friend. She took all her woes to him. A priest was like a woman, she thought; only a still safer confidant.

"You are ungrateful, my daughter," he said, now, with an effort to be severe in reprimand. "You know that you were glad to marry so rich a man as Tassilo. You know that you father and mother were glad, and you yourself likewise. No doubt the man is not all that you could wish, but you owe him something; indeed, you owe him much. I speak to you now out of my office, only as a friend. I would entreat you to send your lover away. If not, there will be crime, perhaps bloodshed, and the fault of all that may happen will be yours."

She gave a gesture which said that she cared nothing, whatever might happen. She was in a headstrong and desperate mood; she had had a violent quarrel with her husband, and she loved Falko Melegari, the steward of the absent noble who owned the empty, half-ruined palace which stood on the banks of the river; he was a fair and handsome young man, with Lombard blood in him, tall, slender, vigorous, amorous and light-hearted,—the strongest of contrasts in all ways to Tasso Tassilo, taciturn, feeble, sullen, and unlovely, and twice the years of his wife.

There was not more than a mile between the mill-house and the deserted villa; Tassilo might as well have tried to arrest the sirocco or the mariner's winds, when they blew, as prevent an intercourse so favored and so facilitated by circumstances. The steward had a million reasons in a year to visit the mill, and when the miller insulted him and forbade him his doors he had no power to prevent him from fishing in the waters, from walking on the bank, from making signals from the villa terraces and appointments in the canebrakes and the vine-fields. Nothing could have broken off the intrigue except the departure of one or the other of the lovers from Marca. But Falko Melegari would not go away from a place where his interests and his passions both combined to hold him; and it never entered the mind of the miller to take his wife elsewhere. He had dwelt at the mill all the years of his life, and his forefathers for five generations before him. To change their residence never occurs to such people as these: they are fixed, like the cypress-trees, in the ground, and dream no more than they of new homes. Like the tree, they never change till death fells them. Generosa continued to pour out her woes, leaning against the pillar of the porch, and playing with a twig of pomegranate, whose buds were not more scarlet than her own lips; and Gesualdo continued to press on her his good counsels, knowing all the while that he might as well speak to the swallows under the church eaves, for any benefit that he could effect. In sole answer to the arguments of Gesualdo she retorted in scornful words.

"You may find duty enough for you because you are a saint," she added, with less of reverence than of disdain; "but I am no saint, and I will not spend all my best days tied to the side of a sickly and sullen old man."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She loves you," said Gesualdo, simply.

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

"She loves you," said Gesualdo, again.

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

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

Gesualdo frowned.

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

"How will it end?" said the priest.

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

Gesualdo winced, as though some one had wounded him.

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

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

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

"No one has sent me."

"Why, then–"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you believe in no duty, then?"

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II

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

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

It was now quite night. Gesualdo liked to walk late at night. All things were so peaceful, or at the least seemed so. You did not see the gashes in the lopped trees, the scars in the burned hill-side, the wounds in the mule's loins, the blood-shot eyes of the working ox, the goitred throat of the child rolling in the dust. Night, kindly friend of dreams, cast her soft veil over all woes, and made the very dust seem as a silvered highway to a throne for God.

He went now through the balmy air, the rustling canes, the low-hanging boughs of the fruit-laden peach-trees, and the sheaves of cut corn leaning one up against another under the hives. He followed the course of the water, a shallow thread at this season, glistening under the moon in its bed of shingle and sand. He passed the mill-house perforce on his homeward way, he saw the place of the weir made visible even in the dark by the lanterns which swung on a cord stretched from one bank to another, to entice any such fish as there might still be in the shallows. The mill stood down into the water, a strong place, built in olden days; the great black wheels were perforce at rest; the mules champed and chafed in their stalls, inactive, like the mill; for the next three months there would be nothing to do unless a storm came and brought a freshet from the hills. The miller would have the more leisure to nurse his wrongs, thought Gesualdo; and his heart was troubled: he had never met with these woes of the passions; they oppressed and alarmed him.