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

by Ouida

Nay, he was too humble to place himself beside them even in thought. The utmost he could do, he knew, would be only expiation for what seemed to him his ineffaceable sin in letting any human affection, however harmless, unselfish, and distant, stain the singleness and purity of his devotion to his vows. He had been but a peasant-boy until he had taken his tender heart and his ignorant mind to the seminary, and he had been born with the soul of a St. Francis, of a San Rocco, of a St. John, out of place, out of time, in the world he lived in, and in which the passions of faith and of sacrifice were as strong as are the passions of lust and of selfishness in other natures. The spiritual world was to him a reality, and the earth, with its merciless and greedy peoples, its plague of lusts, its suffering hearts, its endless injustice, an unreal and hideous dream.

To his temper, the sacrifice which suddenly rose before him as his duty appeared one which would reconcile him at once to the Deity he had offended and the humanity he was tempted to betray. To his mind, enfeebled and exhausted by long fasting of the body and denial of every natural indulgence, such sacrifice of self seemed an imperious command from heaven. He would drag out his own life in misery and obloquy, indeed; but what of that? Had not the great martyrs and founders of his Church endured as much or more? Was it not by such torture voluntarily accepted and endured on earth that the grace of God was won?

He would tell a lie, indeed; he would draw down ignominy on the name of the Church; he would make men believe that an anointed priest was a common murderer, swayed by low and jealous hatreds; but of this he did not think. In the tension and perplexity of his tortured soul, the vision of a sacrifice in which he would be the only sufferer, in which the woman would be saved and the secret told to him be preserved, appeared as a heaven-sent solution of the doubts and difficulties in his path. Stretched in agonized prayer before one of the side altars of the church, he imagined the afternoon sunbeams streaming through the high window on his face to be the light of a celestial world, and in the hush and heat of the incense-scented air he believed that he heard a voice which cried to him, "By suffering all things are made pure."

He was not a wise, or strong, or educated man. He had the heart of a poet and the mind of a child. There was a courage in him to which sacrifice was welcome, and there was a credulity in him which made all exaggeration of simple faith possible. He was young and ignorant and weak; yet at the core of his heart there was a dim heroism: he could suffer and be mute: and in the depths of his heart he loved this woman better than himself,—with a love which in his belief made him accursed for all time.

When he at last arose and went out of the church doors his mind was made up to the course that he would take: an immense calm had descended upon the unrest of his soul.

The day was done, the sun had set, the scarlet flame of its after-glow bathed all the rusty walls and dusty ground with colors of glory. The crowd had dispersed; there was no sound in the deserted square except the ripple of the water as it fell from the dolphins' mouths into the marble basin. As he heard that sweet familiar murmur of the falling stream, the tears rose in his eyes and blotted out the flame-like pomp and beauty of the skies. Never again would he hear the water of the Marca river rushing in cool autumn days past the poplar-stems and the primrose-roots upon its mossy banks; never again would he hear in the place of his birth the gray-green waves of Arno sweeping through the canebrakes to the sea.

At three of the clock on the following day the judgment was given in the court.

Generosa Fè was decreed guilty of the murder of her husband, and sentenced to twenty years of solitary confinement. She dropped like a stone when she heard the sentence, and was carried out from the court insensible. Her lover, when he heard it, gave a roar of anguish like that of some great beast in torment and dashed his head against the wall, and struggled like a mad bull in the hands of the men who tried to hold him. Gesualdo, waiting without on the head of the great staircase, did not even change countenance: to him this bitterness, as of the bitterness of death, had been long past; he had been long certain what the verdict would be; and he had many hours before resolved on his own part.

A great calm had come upon his soul, and his face had that tranquillity which comes alone from a soul which is at peace within itself.

The sultry afternoon shed its yellow light on the brown and gray and dusty town; the crowd poured out of the court-house, excited, contrite, voluble, pushing and bawling at one another, ready to take the side of the condemned creature now that she was the victim of the law. The priest alone of them all did not move: he remained sitting on the upright chair under a sculptured allegory of Justice and Equity which was on the arch above his head, and with the golden light of sunset falling down on him through the high casement above. He paid no heed to the hurrying of the crowd, to the tramp of guards, to the haste of clerks and officials eager to finish their day's work and get away to their wine and dominoes at the taverns. His hands mechanically held his breviary; his lips mechanically repeated a Latin formula of prayer. When all the people were gone, one of the custodians of the place touched his arm, telling him that they were about to close the doors. He raised his eyes like one who is wakened from a trance, and to the man said, quietly,—