"I thought you loved her! I mistook," he said, bitterly. A rosy flush came for a moment on the wax-like pallor of his face.
Falko Melegari looked at him insolently.
"A churchman should not meddle with these things! Love her! I love her,—yes. It ruins my life to think of her yonder. I would cut off my right arm to save her; but to marry her if she come out absolved,—that is another thing; one's name a by-word, one's credulity laughed at, one's neighbors shy of one,—that is another thing, I say. It will not be enough for her judges to acquit her; that will not prove her innocence to all the people here, or to my people at home in my own country."
He rose and pushed his heavy chair away impatiently: he was ashamed of his own words, but in the most impetuous Italian natures prudence and self-love are always the strongest instincts. Gesualdo looked at him with a great scorn in the depths of his dark, deep, luminous eyes. This handsome and virile lover seemed to him a very poor creature, a coward and faithless.
"In the depths of your soul you doubt her yourself!" he said, with severity and contempt, as he turned away from the writing-table and went out through the windows into the garden beyond.
"No, as God lives, I do not doubt her," cried Falko Melegari. "Not for an hour, not for a moment. But to make others believe,—that is more difficult. I will maintain her and befriend her always if they set her free; but marry her,—take her to my people,—have every one say that my wife had been in jail on suspicion of murder,—that I could not do: no man would do it who had a reputation to lose. One loves for love's sake, but one marries for the world's."
He spoke to empty air: there was no one to hear him but the little green lizards who had slid out of their holes in the stone under the window-step. Gesualdo had gone across the rough grass of the garden, and had passed out of sight beyond the tall hedge of rose-laurel.
The young man resumed his writing, but he was restless and uneasy, and could not continue his calculations of debit and audit of loss and profit. He took his gun, whistled his dog, and went up towards the hills, where hares were to be found in the heather and snipes under the gorse. His temper was ruffled, and his mind in great irritation against his late companion: he felt angrily that he must have appeared a poltroon and a poor and unmanly lover in the eyes of the churchman. Yet he had only spoken, he felt sure, as any other man would have done in his place.
In the sympathy of their common affliction, his heart had warmed for a while to Gesualdo, as to the only one who like himself cared for the fate of Tasso Tassilo's wife; but now that suspicion had entered into him, there returned with it all his detestation of the Church and all the secular hatred which the gentle character of the priest of Marca had for a time lulled in him.
"Of course he is a liar and a hypocrite," he thought savagely. "Perhaps he is a murderer as well!"