Several voices shouted back to him, "Tasso Tassilo has been murdered!"
"Ah!"
Gesualdo gave a low cry, and leaned against the stem of a cypress-tree to save himself from falling. What use had been his words that night!
The murdered man had been found lying under the canes on the wayside not a rood from the church. A dog smelling at it had caused the body to be sought out and discovered. He had been dead but a few hours,—apparently killed by a knife thrust under his left shoulder, which had struck straight through the heart.
The agitation in the people was unimaginable, the uproar deafening. Some one with a grain of sense remaining had sent for the carabineers, but their picket was two miles off, and they had not yet arrived. The dead man still lay where he had fallen: every one was afraid to touch him.
"Does his wife know?" said Gesualdo, in a strange, hoarse voice.
"His wife will not grieve," said a man in the crowd, and there was a laugh, subdued by awe and the presence of death and of the priest.
Gesualdo, with a strong shudder of disgust, held up his hand in horror and reproof, then bent over the dead body where it lay among the reeds.
"Bring him to the sacristy," he said to the men nearest him. "He must not lie there, like a beast unclean, by the roadside. Go fetch a hurdle,—a sheet,—anything."
But no one of them would stir.