CHAPTER 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 among 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 among 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 gayly 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 color 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 form among the peasants of Tyrrhene sea-shores, of Cimbrian oak woods, of Roman grass-plains, of Maremma 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 Gesualdo. Often he was not in the least hungry at sunset, often he grudged sorely the hours spent in breaking black bread and in eating poor soup when Nature was at her sweetest 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 wisp of gray 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 in making the vicegerent 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 soul, and he was as unworldly, as visionary, and as simple as any one of the peccarelle di Dio who dwelt around Francesco d'Assisci. 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.