For suspicion is a poisonous weed which, if left to grow unchecked, soon reaches maturity, and Falko Melegari soon persuaded himself that his own suspicion was a truth, which only lacked time and testimony to become as clear to all eyes as it was to his.
CHAPTER IV.
Meantime, Gesualdo was striving with the utmost force that was in him to persuade the real criminal to confess publicly what he had told under the seal of confession. He saw the man secretly, and used every argument with which the doctrines of his Church and his own intense desires could supply him. But there is no obstinacy so dogged, no egotism so impenetrable, no shield against persuasion so absolute, as the stolid ignorance and self-love of a low mind. The Girellone turned a deaf ear to all censure as to all entreaty: he was stolidly indifferent to all the woe that he had caused and would cause if he remained silent. What was all that to him? The thought of the miller's widow shut up in prison pleased him; he had hated her as he had seen her in what he called her finery, going by him in the sunshine, with all her bravery of pearl necklace, of silver hair-pins, of gold watch and chain. Many and many a time he had thirsted to snatch at them and pull them off her. What right had she to them, she, a daughter of naked hungry folks, who dug and carted sea- and river-sand for a living? She was no better than himself! Now and then, Generosa had called him, in her careless, imperious fashion, to draw water or carry wood for her, and when she had done so she never had taken the trouble to bid him good-day or to say a good-natured word. His pride was hurt, and he had had much ado to restrain himself from calling her a daughter of beggars, a worm of the sand. Like her own people, he was pleased that she should now find her fine clothes and her jewelled trinkets of no avail to her, and that she should weep the light out of her big eyes, and the rose-bloom off her peach-like cheeks, in the squalor and nausea of a town prison.
Gesualdo, with all the force which a profound conviction that he speaks the truth lends to any speaker, wrestled for the soul of this dogged brute, and warned him of the punishment everlasting which would await him if he persisted in his refusal to surrender himself to justice. But he might as well have spoken to the great millstones at rest in the river-water. Why then had this wretch cast the burden of his vile secret on innocent shoulders? It was the most poignant anguish to him that he could awaken no sense of guilt in the conscience of the criminal. The man had come to him partly from a vague superstitious impulse, remnant of a credulity instilled into him in childhood, and partly from the want to sfogare himself, as he called it,—to tell his story to some one,—which is characteristic of all weak minds in times of trouble and peril. It had relieved him to drag the priest into sharing his own guilty consciousness; he was half proud and half afraid of the manner in which he had slain his master, and bitterly incensed that he had done the deed for nothing; but beyond this he had no other emotion, except that he was glad that Generosa should suffer through and for it.
"You will burn forever if you persist in such hideous wickedness," said Gesualdo again and again to him.
"I will take my chance of that," said the man. "Hell is far off, and the galleys are near."
"But if you do not believe in my power to absolve you or leave you accursed, why did you ever confess to me?" cried Gesualdo.
"Because one must clear one's breast to somebody when one has a thing like that on one's mind," answered the Girellone, "and I know you cannot tell of it again."
And from that position nothing moved him. No entreaties, threats, arguments, denunciations, stirred him a hair's-breadth. He had confessed per sfogarsi: that was all.