A House-Party Part 25

"You are wrong, my daughter," said Gesualdo, sternly. He colored; he knew not why. "I know nothing of these pa.s.sions," he added, with some embarra.s.sment; "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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sionate, 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 pa.s.sion and contempt.

She threw the branches of pomegranate over the hedge, gave him a glance half contemptuous and half compa.s.sionate, 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble, 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 s.p.a.ce and the ruined grandeur about him, and all the thoughts he had were given to his love, Generosa, the wife of Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo. From the terraces of the villa he could see the mill a mile farther down the stream, and he would pa.s.s half the short nights of the summer looking at the distant lights in it.

He was only five-and-twenty, and he was pa.s.sionately in love with all the increased ardor of a forbidden pa.s.sion.

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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 ma.s.s, 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 Fe, the wife of Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo."

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 pa.s.sion 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 Ta.s.silo 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. Ta.s.so Ta.s.silo 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. Ta.s.silo 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 Ta.s.silo is not a man to take his dishonor quietly."

"Who cares what Ta.s.silo 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 Ta.s.silo'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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.s away through the vines and mulberry-trees. The young man did not greatly venerate the Church himself, though he showed himself at ma.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sion, 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 G.o.dless love, which seemed to pa.s.s 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.