"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 door-ways half afraid, half angered: some of them went to the mill-house, eager to have the honor 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 up 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.
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 for 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 Gesualdo. "You will not bring him to life by starving yourself."
Gesualdo 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.