A House-Party, Don Gesualdo, and A Rainy June

by Ouida

Candida looked at him with shrewd suspicious eyes as she set down the bottle of vinegar.

"I have met with nobody who doubts it," she said, cruelly, "except your reverence, and her lover up yonder at the villa."

"You are all far too ready to believe evil," said Gesualdo, with nervous haste; and he arose and pushed aside the untasted dish and went out of the house.

"He is beside himself for that jade's sake," thought Candida, and, after waiting a little while to see if he returned, she sat down and ate the cabbage.

Whether there were as many crimes in the world as flies on the pavement in summer, she saw no reason why that good food should be wasted.

After her supper, she took her distaff and went and sat on the low wall which divided the church ground from the road, and gossiped with any one of the villagers who chanced to come by. No one was ever too much occupied not to have leisure to talk in Marca, and the church wall was a favorite gathering-place for the sunburnt women with faces like leather under their broad summer hats or their woollen winter kerchiefs, who came and went to and from the fields or the well or the washing-reservoir, with its broad stone tanks brimming with brown water under a vine-covered pergola, where the hapless linen was wont to be beaten and banged as though it were so many sheets of cast-iron. And here with her gossips and friends Candida could not help letting fall little words—stray sentences—which revealed the trouble her mind was in as to the change in her master. She was devoted to him, but her devotion was not so strong as her love of mystery and her impatience of anything which opposed a barrier to her curiosity. She was not conscious that she said a syllable which could have affected his reputation, yet her neighbors all went away from her with the idea that there was something wrong in the presbytery, and that if she had chosen, the priest's housekeeper could have told some very strange tales.

Since the days of the miller's murder, a vague feeling against Don Gesualdo had been growing up in Marca. A man who does not cackle and scream and roar till he is hoarse at the slightest thing which happens is always unnatural and suspicious in the eyes of an Italian community. The people of Marca began to remember that he had some foreign blood in him, and that he had always been more friendly with the wife of Tasso Tassilo than was meet in one of his calling.

Falko Melegari had been denied admittance to her by the authorities. They were not sure that he, as her lover, had not some complicity in the crime committed; and, moreover, his impetuous and inconsiderate language to the judge of instruction at the preliminary investigation had been so fierce and so unwise that it had prejudiced against him all the officers of the law. This exclusion of him heightened the misery he felt, and moved him also to a querulous impatience with the vicar of San Bartolo for being allowed to see her.

"Those black snakes slip and slide in anywhere," he thought, savagely, and his contempt for and dislike of ecclesiastics, which the manner and character of Gesualdo had held in abeyance, revived in its pristine force.

In Easter-time Gesualdo was always greatly fatigued; and when Easter came round this year, and the sins of Marca were poured into his ear,—little, sordid, mean sins, of which the narration wearied and sickened him,—they seemed more loathsome to him than they had ever done. There was such likeness and such repetition in the confessions of all of them,—greed, avarice, dishonesty, fornication: the scale never varied, and the story told kept always at the same low level of petty and coarse things. Their confessor heard with a tired mind and a sick heart, and, as he gave them absolution, shuddered at the doubts of the infallibility of his Church which for the first time passed with dread terror through his thoughts. The whole world seems to him changing. He felt as though the solid earth itself were giving way beneath his feet. His large eyes had a startled and frightened look in them, and his face grew thinner every day.