His failure seemed to him a sign of heaven's wrath against himself.
"How dare I," he thought, "how dare I, feeble and timid and useless as I am, call myself a servant of God, or attempt to minister to other souls?"
He had thought, like an imbecile, as he told himself, to be able to awaken the conscience and compel the public confession of this man, and the possibility of flight had never presented itself to his mind, natural and simple as had been such a course to a creature without remorse, continually haunted by personal fears of punishment. He, he alone on earth, knew the man's guilt; he, he alone, had the power to save Generosa, and could not use the power because the secrecy of his holy office was fastened on him like an iron padlock on his lips.
The days passed him like nightmares; he did his duties mechanically, scarcely consciously; the frightful alternative which was set before him seemed to parch up the very springs of life itself. He knew that he must look strange in the eyes of the people; his voice sounded strangely in his own ears; he began to feel that he was unworthy to administer the blessed bread to the living, to give the last unction to the dying: he knew that he was not at fault, and yet he felt that he was accursed. Choose what he would, he must commit some hateful sin.
The day appointed for the trial came: it was the 10th of May. A hot day, with the bees booming among the acacia-flowers, and the green tree-frogs shouting joyously above in the ilex-tops, and the lizards running in and out of the china-rose hedges on the highways. Many people of Marca were summoned as witnesses, and these went to the town in mule-carts or crazy chaises, with the farm-horse put in the shafts, and grumbled because they would lose their day's labor in their fields, and yet were pleasurably excited at the idea of seeing Generosa in the prisoner's dock, and being able themselves to tell all they knew, and a great deal that they did not know.
Falko Melegari rode over at dawn by himself, and Gesualdo with his housekeeper and sacristan, who were all summoned to give testimony, went, as they had no choice but to do, by the diligence, which started from Sant' Arturo, and rolled through the dusty roads, and over the bridges, and past the wayside shrines and shops and forges, across the country to the town.
The vicar never spoke throughout the four weary hours during which the rickety and crowded vehicle, with its poor, starved, bruised beasts, rumbled on its road through the lovely shadows and cool sunlight of the early morning. He held his breviary in his hand for form's sake, and, seeing him thus absorbed in holy meditation, as they thought, his garrulous neighbors did not disturb him, but chattered among themselves, filling the honeysuckle-scented air with the odors of garlic and wine and coarse tobacco.
Candida glanced at him anxiously from time to time, haunted by she could not have said what,—a vague presentiment of ill. His face looked very strange, she thought, and his closely-locked lips were white as the lips of a corpse. When the diligence was driven over the stones of the town, all the passengers by it descended at the first wine-house which they saw on the piazza, to eat and drink; but he, with never a word, motioned his housekeeper aside when she would have pressed food on him, and went into the great church of the place to pray alone.
The town was hot and dusty and sparsely peopled. It had brown walls and large brick palaces untenanted, and ancient towers, also of brick, pointing high to heaven. It was a place dear to the memory of lovers of art for the sake of some fine paintings of the Sienese school which hung in its churches, and was occasionally visited by strangers for sake of these; but for the most part it was utterly forgotten by the world; and its bridge of many arches, said to have been built by Augustus, seldom resounded to any other echoes than those of the heavy wheels of the hay- or corn-wagons coming in from the pastoral country around.
The court-house, where all great trials took place, stood in one of the bare, silent, dusty squares of the town. It had once been the ancient palace of the podestà, and had the machicolated walls, the turreted towers, and the vast stairways and frescoed chambers of a larger and statelier time than ours. The hall of justice was a vast chamber pillared with marble, vaulted and painted, sombre and grand: it was closely thronged with country-folks; there was a scent of hay, of garlic, of smoking pipes hastily thrust into trouser-pockets, of unwashed flesh steaming hotly in the crowd and the close air. The judge was there with his officers, a Renaissance figure in black square cap and black gown. The accused was behind the cage assigned to such prisoners, guarded by carabineers and by the jailers. Gesualdo looked in once from a distant door-way; then, with a noise in his ears like the sound of the sea, and a deadly sickness on him, he stayed without in the audience-chamber, where a breath of air came to him up one of the staircases, there waiting until his name was called.