"Peace, woman!" said Gesualdo, in a tone which she had never heard from him. He went within and closed the door. He longed for the light of dawn, and yet he dreaded it.
When the dawn came it brought nothing to him except the knowledge that the real murderer was there, within a quarter of a mile of him, and yet could not be denounced by him to justice even to save the guiltless. The usual occupations of a week-day claimed his time, and he went through them all with mechanical precision, but he spoke all his words as in a dream, and the red sanded bricks of his house, the deal table, with the black coffee and the round loaf set out on it, the stone sink at which Candida was washing endive and cutting lettuces, the old men and women who came and went telling their troubles garrulously and begging for pence, the sunshine which streamed in over the threshold, the poultry which picked up the crumbs off the floor, all these homely and familiar things seemed unreal to him, and were seen as through a mist.
This little narrow dwelling with the black cypress shadows falling athwart it, which had once seemed to him the abode of perfect peace, now seemed to imprison him, till his heart failed and died within him.
In the dead of night, at the end of the week, moved by an unconquerable impulse which had haunted him the whole seven days, he rose, and lit a lantern and let himself out of his own door noiselessly, stealthily, as though he were on some guilty errand, and took the sexton's spade from the tool-house, and went across the black shadows which stretched over the grass, towards the place where the body of Tasso Tassilo had lain dead. In the moonlight there stood tall and straight a column of green leaves: it was the stately Lombardy poplar, which was spared by the hatchet, because Marca was, so far as it understood anything, loyal in its regret for the days that were gone. Many birds which had been for hours sound asleep in its boughs flew out with a great whirr of wings and with chirps of terror as the footfall of Gesualdo awakened and alarmed them. He set his lantern down on the ground, for the rays of the moon did not penetrate as far as the deep gloom the poplars threw around them, and began to dig. He dug some little time without success: then his spade struck against something which shone amidst the dry clay soil; it was the knife. He took it up with a shudder. There were dark red spots on the steel blade. It was a narrow, slightly-curved knife about six inches long, such a knife as every Italian of the lower classes carries every day, and with which most Italian murders are committed.
He looked at it long. If the inanimate thing could but have spoken, could but have told, the act which it had done!
He, kneeling on the ground, gazed at it with a sickening fascination; then he replaced it deeper down in the ground, and with his spade smoothed the earth with which he covered it. The soil was so dry that it did not show much trace of having been disturbed. Gravely he returned homeward, convinced now of the truth of the confession made to him. Some men met him on the road, country lads driving cattle early to a distant fair: they saluted him with respect, but laughed when they had passed him.
What had his reverence, they wondered, been doing with a spade at this time of night? Did he dig for treasure? There was a tradition in the country-side of sacks of ducats which had been buried by the river to save them from the French troops in the time of the invasion by the First Consul.
Gesualdo, unconscious of their comments, went home, put the spade back in the tool-house, unlocked his church, entered, and prayed long; then, waking his sleepy capellano, he bade him rise and set the bell ringing for the first mass. The man got up, grumbling because it was still quite dark, and next day talked to his neighbors about the queer ways of his vicar,—how he would walk all night about his room, sometimes get up and go out in the dead of night even. He complained that his own health and patience would soon give way. An uneasy feeling grew up in the village: some gossips even suggested that the bishop should be spoken to in the town; but every one was fearful of being the first to take such a step, and no one was sure how so great a person could be approached, and the matter remained in abeyance. But the disquietude and the antagonism which the manner and appearance of their priest had created grew with the growth of the year, and with it also the impression that he knew more of the miller's assassination than he would ever say.
A horrible sense of being this man's accomplice grew also upon himself: the bond of silence which he kept perforce with this wretch seemed to him to make him so. His slender strength and sensitive nerves ill fitted him to sustain so heavy a burden, so horrible a knowledge.
"It has come to chastise me because I have thought of her too often, have been moved by her too warmly," he told himself; and his soul shrank within him at what appeared the greatness of his own guilt.