Soon he saw her, coming with swift feet and flying skirts and bare head, through the boles of the cypresses. She was livid; her unbound hair was streaming behind her.
She had passed a feverish night, locking her door against her husband, and spending the whole weary hours at the casement where she could see the old gray villa where her lover dwelt, standing out against the moonlight among its ilex- and olive-trees. She had had no sense of the beauty of the night: she had been only concerned by the fret and fever of a first love and of a guilty passion.
She was not callous at heart, though wholly untrained and undisciplined in character, and her conscience told her that she gave a bad return to a man who had honestly and generously adored her, who had been lavish to her poverty out of his riches, and had never been unkind until a natural and justified jealousy had embittered the whole current of his life. She held the offence of infidelity lightly, yet her candor compelled her to feel that she was returning evil for good, and repaying in a base manner an old man's unwise but generous affection. She would have hesitated at nothing that could have united her life to her lover; yet in a corner of her soul she was vaguely conscious that there was a degree of unfairness and baseness in setting their youth and their ardor to hoodwink and betray a feeble and aged creature like Tasso Tassilo. She hated him fiercely: he was her jailer, her tyrant, her keeper. She detested the sound of his slow step, of his croaking voice, of his harsh calls to his men and his horses and mules; the sight of his withered features, flushed and hot with restless jealous pains, was at once absurd and loathsome to her. Youth has no pity for such woes of age, and she often mocked him openly and cruelly to his face. Still, she knew that she did him wrong, and her conscience had been more stirred by the reproof of Gesualdo than she had acknowledged. She was in that wavering mood when a woman may be saved from an unwise course by change, travel, movement, and the distractions of the world; but there were none of these for the miller's young wife. So long as her husband lived, so long would she be doomed to live here, with the roar of the mill-wheels and the foaming of the weir-water on her ear, and before her eyes the same thickets of cane, the same fields with their maples and vines, the same white, dusty road winding away beyond the poplars, and with nothing to distract her thoughts or lull her mind away from its idolatry of her fair-haired lover at the old gray palace on the hill above her home.
She had spent the whole night gazing at the place where he lived. He was not even there at that moment: he had gone away for two days to a grain-fair in the town of Vendraminõ, but she recalled with ecstasy their meetings by the side of the low green river, their hours in the wild flowering gardens of the palace, the lovely evenings when she had stolen out to see him come through the maize and canes, the fire-flies all alight about his footsteps. Sleepless but languid, weary and yet restless, she had thrown herself on her bed without taking off her clothes, and in the dark, as the bells for the first mass had rung over the shadowy fields. She had for the first time fallen into a heavy sleep, haunted by dreams of her lover, which made her stretch her arms to him in the empty air, and murmur, sleeping, wild and tender words.
She had been still on her bed, when the men of the mill had roused her, beating at the chamber door and crying to her,—
"Generosa, Generosa, Padrona! get up! The master is murdered, and lying dead at the church!"
She had been lying dreaming of Falko, and feeling in memory his kisses on her mouth, when those screams had come through the stillness of the early daybreak, through the music of the blackbirds piping in the cherry-boughs outside her windows.
She had sprung from off her bed.
She had huddled on some decenter clothing, and, bursting through the detaining hands of the henchmen and neighbors, had fled, as fast as her trembling limbs could bear her, to the church.
"Is it true? Is it true?" she cried, with white lips, to Gesualdo.