He never actually suspected her for a moment; but he knew that others would no doubt do more than suspect.
"Perhaps the brute killed himself," he thought, "that the blame of the crime might lie on her and part her from me."
Then he knew that such a thought was absurd. Tasso Tassilo had loved his life, loved his mill, and his money, and his petty power, and his possession of his beautiful wife; and, besides, what man could stab himself from behind between the shoulders? It was just the blow that a strong yet timid woman would give. As he walked to and fro on the old terrace whilst they saddled the horse, he felt a sickening shudder run through him. He did not suspect her. No, not for an instant. And yet there was a dim, unutterable horror upon him which veiled the remembered beauty of her face.
The passing of the days which came after this feast of the two apostles was full of an unspeakable horror to him, and in the brief space of them he grew haggard, hollow-cheeked, almost aged, despite his youth. The dread formalities and tyrannies of the law seized on the quiet village and tortured every soul in it: every one who had seen or heard or known aught of the dead man was questioned, tormented, harangued, examined, suspected. Don Gesualdo himself was made subject to a searching and oft-repeated interrogation, and severely reproved that he had not let the body lie untouched until the arrival of the officers of justice. He told the exact truth as far as he knew it, but when questioned as to the relations of the murdered man and his wife he hesitated, prevaricated, contradicted himself, and gave the impression to the judicial authorities that he knew much more against the wife than he would say. What he tried to do was to convey to others his own passionate conviction of the innocence of Generosa; but he utterly failed in doing this; and his very anxiety to defend her only created an additional suspicion against her.
The issue of the preliminary investigation was that the wife of Tasso Tassilo, murdered on the morning of the day of St. Peter and St. Paul, was consigned to prison, to be "detained as a precaution" under the lock and key of the law, circumstantial evidence being held to be strongly against her as the primary cause, if not the actual executant, of the murder of her lord.
Every one called from the village to speak of her spoke against her, with the exception of Falko Melegari, who was known to be her lover, and whose testimony weighed not a straw, and Don Gesualdo himself, a priest, indeed, but the examining judge was no friend of priests, and would not have believed them on their oaths, whilst the strong friendship for her, and the nervous anxiety to shield her, displayed so unwisely though so sincerely by him, did her more harm than good, and made his bias so visible that his declarations were held valueless.
"You know I am innocent!" she cried to him, the day of her arrest; and he answered her, with the tears falling down his cheeks, "I am sure of it! I would die to prove it! For one moment I did doubt you,—pardon me!—but only one. I am sure you are innocent, as I am sure that the sun hangs in the skies."
But his unsupported belief availed nothing to secure that of others: the dominant feeling among the people of Marca was against her, and, in face of that feeling and of the known jealousy of her which had consumed the latter days of the dead man, the authorities deemed that they could do no less than order her provisional arrest. Her very beauty was a weapon turned against her. It seemed so natural to her accusers that so lovely and so young a woman should have desired to rid herself of a husband, old, ill-favored, exacting, and unloved. In vain—utterly in vain—did Falko Melegari, black with rage and beside himself with misery, swear by every saint in the calendar that his relations with her had been hitherto absolutely innocent. No one believed him.
"You are obliged to say that," said the judge, with good-humored impatience.
"But, God in heaven, why not when it is true?" shouted Falko.