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

by Ouida

But one night after Gesualdo had thus spoken to him, vague fears assailed him,—terrors material, not spiritual: he had parted with his secret: who could tell that it might not come out like a sleuth-hound and find him and denounce him? He had told it to be at peace, but he was not at peace. He feared every instant to have the hand of the law upon him. Whenever he heard the trot of the carabineers' horses going through the village, or saw the white belts and cocked hats of gendarmes in the sunlight of the fields, a cold tremor of terror seized him lest the priest should, after all, have told. He knew that it was impossible, and yet he was afraid.

He counted up the money he had saved, a little roll of filthy and crumpled bank-notes for very small amounts, and wondered if they would be enough to take him across to America. They were very few, but his fear compelled him to trust to them. He invented a story of remittances which he had received from his brother, and told his fellow-laborers and his employer that he was invited to join that brother; and then he packed up his few clothes and went. At the mill and in the village they talked a little of it, saying that the Girellone was in luck, but that they for their parts would not care to go so far.

Gesualdo heard of his flight in the course of the day.

"My God!—gone away!—out of the country?" he cried, involuntarily, with white lips.

The people who heard him wondered. "What could it matter to him that a carter had gone to seek his fortunes over the seas?"

The Girellone had not been either such a good worker or such a good boon companion that any one at the mill or in the village should greatly regret him.

"America gets all our rubbish," said the people. "Much good may it do her!"

Meantime, the man took his way across the country, and, sometimes by walking, sometimes by lifts in wagons, sometimes by helping charcoal-burners on the road, made his way, without spending much, to the sea-coast, and in the port of Leghorn took his passage in an emigrant-ship then loading there. The green canebrakes and peaceful millet-fields of Marca saw him no more.

But he had left the burden of his blood-guiltiness behind him, and it lay on the guiltless soul with the weight of the world.

So long as the man had remained in Marca there had been always a hope present with Gesualdo that he would persuade him to confess in a court of justice what he had confessed to the Church, or that some sequence of accidents would lead up to the discovery of his guilt. But with the ruffian gone across the seas, lost in that utter darkness which swallows up the lives of the poor and obscure when once they have left the hamlet in which their names mean something to their neighbors, this one hope was quenched; and Gesualdo in agony reproached himself with not having prevailed in his struggle for the wretch's soul,—with not having been eloquent enough, or wise enough, or stern enough, to awe him into declaration of his ghastly secret to the law.