In Marca, most of the women by toil and sun were black as berries by the time they were twenty, and looked old almost before they were young; with rough hair and loose forms and wrinkled skins, and children dragging at their breasts all the year through. Generosa was not like them; she did little work; she had the form of a goddess; she took care of her beauty, and she had no children, though she had married at fifteen. She was friends with Don Gesualdo; they had both come from the Bocca d'Arno, and it was a link of common memory and mutual attachment. They liked to recall how they had each run through the tall canes and cactus, and waded in the surf, and slept in the hot sand, and hidden themselves for fright when the king's camels had come towards them, throwing their huge mis-shapen shadows over the seas of flowering reeds and rushes and grey spiked aloes.
He remembered her a small child, jumping about on the sand and laughing at him, a youth, when he was going to college to study for entrance into the Church. 'Gesualdino! Gesualdino!' she had cried. 'A fine priest he will make for us all to confess to!' And she had screamed with mirth, her handsome little face rippling all over with gaiety, like the waves of the sea with the sunshine.
He had remembered her and had been glad when Tasso Tassilo, the miller, had gone sixty miles away for a wife, and had brought her from Bocca d'Arno to live at the mill on the small river, which was the sole water which ran through the village of Marca.
Tasso Tassilo, going on business once to the sea coast, had chanced to see that handsome face of hers, and had wooed and won her without great difficulty; for her people were poor folk, living by carting sand, and she herself was tired of her bare legs and face, her robust hunger, which made her glad to eat the fruit off the cactus plants, and her great beauty, which nobody ever saw except the seagulls, and carters, and fishers, and cane-cutters, who were all as poor as she was herself.
Tasso Tassilo, in his own person, she hated; an ugly, dry, elderly man, with his soul wrapped up in his flour-bags and his money-bags; but he adored her, and let her spend as she chose on her attire and her ornaments; and the mill-house was a pleasant place enough, with its walls painted on the outside with scriptural subjects, and the willows drooping over its eaves, and the young men and the mules loitering about on the land side of it, and the peasants coming up with corn to be ground whenever there had been rain in summer, and so water enough in the river bed to turn the mill wheels. In drought, the stream was low and its stones dry, and no work could be done by the grindstones. There was then only water enough for the ducks to paddle in, and the pretty teal to float in, which they would always do at sunrise unless the miller let fly a charge of small shot amongst them from the windows under the roof.
'Good evening, Don Gesualdo,' said the miller's wife now, in the midst of the nightingale's song and the orange glow from the sunset.
Gesualdo rose with a smile. He was always glad to see her; she had something about her for him of boyhood, of home, of the sea, and of the careless days before he became a seminarist. He did not positively regret that he had entered the priesthood, but he remembered the earlier life wistfully, and with wonder that he could ever have been that light-hearted lad who had run through the cane-brakes to plunge into the rolling waters, with all the wide, gay, sunlit world of sea and sky and river and shore before him, behind him, and above him.
'What is wrong, Generosa?' he asked her, seeing as he looked up that her handsome face was clouded. Her days were not often tranquil; her husband was jealous, and she gave him cause for jealousy. The mill was a favourite resort of all young men for thirty miles around, and unless Tasso Tassilo had ceased to grind corn he could not have shut his doors to them.
'It is the old story, Don Gesualdo,' she answered, leaning against the church porch. 'You know what Tasso is, and what a dog's life he leads me.'
'You are not always prudent, my daughter,' said Gesualdo, with a faint smile.