Generosa did not wholly believe, but she thrust the grain of doubt and of remorse away from her and played with her handsome children. After all, she mused, what doubt could there be? Did not Don Gesualdo himself reveal his guilt, and had he not always cared for her, and was not the whole population of Marca willing to bear witness that they had always suspected him and had only held their peace out of respect for the Church?
He himself lived two long years amongst the galley-slaves of the western coast; all that time he never spoke, and he was considered by the authorities to be insane. Then, in the damp and cold of the third winter, his lungs decayed, his frail strength gave way, he died of what they called tuberculosis, in the spring of the year. In his last moments there was seen a light of unspeakable ecstasy upon his face, a smile of unspeakable rapture on his mouth.
'Domine Deus libera me!' he murmured, as he died.
A bird came and sang at the narrow casement of his prison cell as his spirit passed away. It was a nightingale: perchance one of those who had once sung to him in the summer nights from the wild-rose hedge at Marca.
[THE SILVER CHRIST]
I
Genistrello is a wild place in the Pistoiese hills.
Its name is derived from the genista or broom which covers many an acre of the soil, and shares with the stone pine and the sweet chestnut the scanty earth which covers its granite and sandstone. It is beautiful exceedingly; but its beauty is only seen by those to whom it is a dead letter which they have no eyes to read. It is one of the many spurs of the Apennines which here lie overlapping one another in curve upon curve of wooded slopes with the higher mountains rising behind them; palaces, which once were fortresses, hidden in their valleys, and ruined castles, or deserted monasteries, crowning their crests.