It was the last day of peace which he was destined to know in Marca.
He turned from the window with reluctance and regret, as the old woman, who served him as housekeeper and church-cleaner in one, summoned him to his frugal supper. He could have supped at any hour he had chosen; there were none to say him nay, but it was the custom at Marca to sup at the twenty-third hour, and he was not a person to violate custom; he would as soon have thought of spitting on the blessed bread itself. Habit is a masterful ruler in all Italian communities. It has always been so. It is a formula which excuses all things and sanctifies all things, and to none did it do so more than to Don Gesualdo. Often he was not in the least hungry at sunset, often he grudged sorely the hours spent in breaking black bread, and eating poor soup, when Nature was at her fairest, and the skies giving their finest spectacle to a thankless earth. Yet never did he fail to meekly answer old Candida's summons to the humble repast. To have altered the hour of eating would have seemed to him irreligious, revolutionary, altogether impossible.
Candida was a little old woman, burnt black by the sun, with a whisp of grey hair fastened on the crown of her head, and a neater look about her kerchief and her gown than was usual in Marca, for she was a woman originally from a northern city. She had always been a servant in priests' houses, and, if the sacristan were ill or away, knew as well as he where every book, bell, and candle were kept, and could have said the offices herself had her sex allowed her. In tongue she was very sharp, and in secret was proud of the power she possessed of making the Vice-Regent of God afraid of her. The priest was the first man in this parish of poor folks, and the priest would shrink like a chidden child if she found out that he had given his best shirt to a beggar, or had inadvertently come in with wet boots over the brick floor, which she had just washed and sanded. It was the old story of so many sovereignties. He had power, no doubt, to bind and loose, to bless and curse, to cleanse, or refuse to cleanse, the sinful souls of men; but for all that he was only a stupid, forgetful baby of a man in his servant's eyes, and she made him feel the scorn she had for him, mixed up with a half-motherly, half-scolding admiration, which saw in him half a child, half a fool, and maybe she would add in her own thoughts, a kind of angel.
Don Gesualdo was not wise or learned in any way; he had barely been able to acquire enough knowledge to pass through the examinations necessary for entrance into the priesthood. That slender amount of scholarship was his all; but he was clever enough for Marca, which had very little brains of its own, and he did his duty most faithfully, as far as he saw it, at all times. As for doubts of any sort as to what that duty was, such scepticism never could possibly assail him. His creed appeared as plain and sure to him as the sun which shone in the heavens, and his faith was as single-hearted and unswerving as the devoted soul of a docile sheep dog.
He was of a poetic and retiring nature; religion had taken entire possession of his life, and he was as unworldly, as visionary, and as simple as anyone of the peccarelle di Dio who dwelt around Francesco d'Assissi. His mother had been a German servant girl, married out of a small inn in Pisa, and some qualities of the dreamy, slow, and serious Teutonic temperament were in him, all Italian of the western coast as he was. On such a dual mind the spiritual side of his creed had obtained intense power, and the office he filled was to him a Heaven-given mission which compelled him to incessant sacrifice of every earthly appetite and every selfish thought.
'He is too good to live,' said his old housekeeper.
It was a very simple and monotonous existence which was led by him in his charge. There was no kind of change in it for anybody, unless they went away, and few people born in Marca ever did that. They were not forced by climate to be nomads, like the mountaineers of the Apennines, nor like the men of the sea-coast and ague-haunted plains. Marca was a healthy, homely place on the slope of a hill in a pastoral country, where its sons and daughters could stay and work all the year round, if they chose, without risk of fever worse than such as might be brought on by too much new wine at close of autumn.
Marca was not pretty, or historical, or picturesque, or uncommon in any way; there are five hundred, five thousand villages like it, standing amongst corn lands and maize fields and mulberry trees, with its little dark church, and its white-washed presbytery, and its dusky, red-tiled houses, and its one great, silent, empty villa that used to be a fortified and stately palace, and now is given over to the rats and the spiders and the scorpions. A very quiet, little place, far away from cities and railways, dusty and uncomely in itself, but blessed in the abundant light and the divine landscape which are around it, and of which no one in it ever thought, except this simple young priest, Don Gesualdo Brasailo.
Of all natural gifts, a love of natural beauty surely brings most happiness to the possessor of it; happiness altogether unalloyed and unpurchasable, and created by the mere rustle of green leaves, the mere ripple of brown waters. It is not an Italian gift at all, nor an Italian feeling. To an Italian, gas is more beautiful than sunshine, and a cambric flower more beautiful than a real one; he usually thinks the mountains hateful and a city divine; he detests trees and adores crowds. But there are exceptions to all rules; there are poetic natures everywhere, though everywhere they are rare. Don Gesualdo was the exception in Marca and its neighbourhood, and evening after evening saw him in the summer weather strolling through the fields, his breviary in his hand, but his heart with the dancing fire-flies, the quivering poplar leaves, the tall green canes, the little silvery fish darting over the white stones of the shallow river-waters. He could not have told why he loved to watch these things; he thought it was because they reminded him of Bocca d'Arno and the sand-beach and the cane-brakes; but he did love them, and they filled him with a vague emotion; half pleasure and half pain.
His supper over, he went into his church; a little red-bricked, white-washed passage connected it with his parlour. The church was small, and dark, and old; it had an altar-piece, said to be old, and by a Sienese master, and of some value, but Gesualdo knew nothing of these matters. A Raphael might have hung there and he would have been none the wiser. He loved the church, ugly and simple as it was, as a mother loves a plain child or a dull one because it is hers; and now and then he preached strange, passionate, pathetic sermons in it, which none of his people understood, and which he barely understood himself. He had a sweet, full, far-reaching voice, with an accent of singular melancholy in it, and as his mystical, romantic, involved phrases passed far over the heads of his hearers, like a flight of birds flying high up against the clouds, the pathos and music in his tones stirred their hearts vaguely. He was certainly, they thought, a man whom the saints loved. Candida, sitting near the altar with her head bowed and her hands feeling her rosary, would think as she heard the unintelligible eloquence: 'Dear Lord, all that power of words, all that skill of the tongue, and he would put his shirt on bottom upwards were it not for me!'