Ouida

“ The crickets were chirping, the lizards were gliding, the butterflies were flying above the ripe corn, the reapers were out amongst the wheat, and the tall stalks were swaying and falling under the sickle. Through the little windows of his sacristy, Don Gesualdo, the young vicar of San Bartolo, in the village of Marca, looked with wistful eyes at the hill-side which rose up in front of him, seen through a frame of cherry-boughs in full fruit. The hill-side was covered with corn, with vines, with mulberry trees; the men and women were at work amongst the trees (it was the first day of harvest) ”

“ 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. ”

“ Santina shrugged her shoulders. 'Brave men don't want excuses,' she said unkindly.
'Ask of me in Maremma,' said Caris sullenly. 'They will tell you whether men taste my blade.'
'Maremma is far,' said Santina, sarcastic and jeering; 'and the men there are weak!'
'You shall see what you shall see,' muttered Caris, growing purple, red, and then pale. 'Tell me a man you have a quarrel with—nay, one who stands well with you—that will be better.'
'Those are words,' she said, with curt contempt. ”

“ The crowd had dispersed; there was206 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 grey-green waves of Arno sweeping through the cane-brakes to the sea. ”

“ Myself, I fail to see how you could expect a young Italian, who has all the habits of the great world, and the memories of his vie de garçon, to be cheerful or contented in a wet June in an isolated English country house, with nobody to look at but yourself. Believe me, my dear child, it is the inordinate vanity of a woman which makes her imagine that she can be sufficient for her husband. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The only women with whom he had ever had any intercourse had been the rude wenches who tramped with the herds, and dug and hoed and cut grass and grain on the wastes of the Maremma; creatures burnt black with the sun and wrinkled by the winds, and with skin hard and hairy, and feet whose soles were like wood—'la femelle de l'homme,' but not so clean of hide or sweet of breath as the heifers they drove down along the sea-ways in autumn weather.
This girl who called herself Santina was wholesome as lavender, fresh as field thyme, richly and fairly odoured as the flower of the wild pomegranate. ”

“ It never entered the head of Caris, or of the few who knew him or worked with him, to wonder how he and his had come thither. They were there as the chestnut-trees were, as the broom was, as the goats and squirrels and wood-birds were there. The peasant no more wonders about his own existence than a stone does. For generations a Lascaris had lived in that old stone hut which might itself be a relic of an Etruscan tomb or temple. No one was concerned to know further.
The peasant does not look back; he only sees the road to gain his daily meal of bread or chestnuts. ”

“ Fulvo rose amongst the highest pines, upon a wind-swept and storm-scarred scarp.
Few were the dead who were taken there;261 meagre and miserable were the lot and the pittance of its poor Vicar, and weather-beaten and worn by toil were the score of peasants who made up its congregation, coming thence from the scattered huts and farmhouses of the hillside.
It was seven miles off from the chestnut wood where he dwelt, and twice seven from the four roads; a lonely and not over-safe tramp across the hills and the water-courses and the brushwood. ”

“ With the grim pathos and dignity which death imparts to the commonest creature, the murdered man lay on the bench of the sacristy, amidst the hubbub and the uproar of the crowding people; he and the priest the only mute creatures in the place.
Don Gesualdo kneeled by the dead man in his blood-stained, sand-stained canonicals; he was praying with all the soul there was in him, not for the dead man, but the living woman. ”

“ But even then the slur and stain of an imputed, though unproven, crime would always rest upon her and make her future dark, her name a by-word in her birth-place. No mere acquittal, leaving doubt and suspicion behind it, would give her back to the light and joy of life. Every man's hand would be against her; every child would point at her as the woman who had been accused of the assassination of her husband.
One day he sought Falko Melegari, when the latter was making up the accounts of his stewardship at an old bureau in a deep window-embrasure of the villa. ”

“ Even her lover, who loved her with all the sensual, coarse ardour of a young man's uncontrolled desires, had declared that he would be ashamed to walk beside her in broad day so long as this slur of possible, if unproven, crime were on her. Don Gesualdo mused on all these things until his sensitive soul began to take alarm lest it were not a kind of sin to be so occupied with the fate of one to the neglect and detriment of others. Candida saw him growing thinner and more shadow-like every day with ever-increasing anxiety. ”

“ 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 he could not use the power because the secrecy of his holy office was fastened on him like an iron padlock on his lips. ”

“ From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester to the Principessa di San Zenone.
'Where are your principles? Where are your duties? My dear little girl, you have married him; you must submit to him as he is. Marriages wouldn't last two days if, just because the man yawned, the woman ran away. Men always yawn when they are alone with their wives. Hitherto, all San Zenone's faults appear to consist in the very pardonable fact that, being an Italian, he is not alive to the charms of bucolic England in rainy weather, and that, being a young man, he wants to see his Paris again. ”

“ Falko laughed.
'Dear Don Gesualdo, you are a holy man, but you know nothing of love.'
Gesualdo winced a little again. It was the second time this had been said to him this evening.
'Is it love,' he said, after a pause, 'to risk her murder by her husband? I tell you Tassilo is not a man to take his dishonour quietly.'
'Who cares what Tassilo does?' said the young steward, petulantly. 'If he touch a hair of her head I will make him die a thousand deaths.'
'All those are mere words,' said Gesualdo. 'You cannot mend one crime by another, and you cannot protect a woman from her husband's vengeance. ”

“ So long as her husband lived, so long would she be doomed to live here, with the roar of the mill-wheels and the foaming of the weir water in her ear, and before her eyes the same thickets of cane, the same fields with their maples and vines, the same white, dusty road winding away beyond the poplars, and with nothing to distract her thoughts, or lull her mind away from its idolatry of her fair-haired138 lover at the old grey palace on the hill above her home. ”

“ Her gay lover will look at her no more.'
Falko Melegari loved her wildly, ardently, vehemently indeed; but Don Gesualdo, with that acute penetration which sometimes supplies in delicate natures that knowledge of the world which they lack, felt that it was not a love which had any qualities in it to withstand the trials of time or the loss of physical charms. Perchance, Generosa herself felt as much, and the cruel consciousness of it hurt her more than her prison bars. ”

“ She was headstrong, changeable, vain and full of thirst for pleasure and for triumph and for wealth. She would not pass her life in her little native town, in the wheelwright's old house with a jealous rheumatic curmudgeon, for all the saints in heaven and all the friends on earth.
'Not I! Not I! Oh, why did Lisabetta go underground for ever with half the cards unread?' she thought, as she sat upon her couch of sacking and dry maize leaves, and she shook her clenched hands at the moon with anger at its smiling indifference. The moon could sail where it chose and see what it liked ”

“ In this country you do not know what it is to be warm. You do not know what sunshine is like. You take an umbrella when you go in the garden. You put on a waterproof to go and hear one little, shivering nightingale sing in a wet elder bush. I tell you I am tired of your country, absolutely tired. You are an angel. No doubt you are an angel; but you cannot console me for the intolerable emptiness of this intolerable life, where there is nothing on earth to do but to eat, drink, and sleep, and drive in a dog-cart." All this he said in one breath, in a flash of forked lightning, as it were. ”

“ She is as blonde as the dawn and as pure as a pearl. It seems to me that I have never loved any woman at all in my life before. To love her is like plunging one's hand in cool spring water on a midsummer noon. She is such repose;2 such innocence; such holiness! In the midst of this crowded, over-coloured, vulgar London life—for it is very vulgar at its highest—she seems like some angel of purity. ”

“ In the lives of the poor there is little leisure for sorrow, and toil passes over them like an iron roller over the inequalities of a road, forcing them down into dull indifference, as the roller forces into level nothingness alike the jagged flint and the sprouting grass.
Meanwhile, Lizina, as she was called after her mother, grew up apace like the little lemon-tree which had been planted at her birth, a lovely child like a Correggio cherub, thriving on her dry bed and herb-soup as the lemon plant thrived on the dry earth and uncongenial atmosphere of the attic under the roofs. ”

“ The world has never understood that the moment the labourer is made to see, he is made unhappy, being ill at ease and morbidly envious and ashamed, and wholly useless. Left alone, he is content in his own ruminant manner, as the buffalo is when left untormented amidst the marshes, grazing at peace and slumbering amidst the rushes and the canes.
Caris was thus content. He had health and strength, though sometimes he had a fever-chill from new-turned soil and sometimes a frost-chill from going out on an empty stomach before the sun had broken the deep shadows of the night. ”

“ Her parents were poor, and the woodsman was rich as rubies are esteemed, amongst the oak scrub and chestnut saplings of the Pistoiese Apennines.
The Massaio people liked her and indulged her; but had they dreamed that she meant to elude her marriage they would have dragged her by the hair of her head, or kicked her with the soles of their hob-nailed boots down the hillside into her father's house, and given her up to punishment without pity, as they would have given a runaway horse or dog. ”

“ He dug and dug and dug, till the sweat rolled off his limbs and his shoulders ached and his arms quivered.
He threw spadefuls of clay one after another out on the ground around, his eyes growing used to the darkness, and his hands gripping the spade handle harder and harder in desperation. The very horror of his action nerved him to feverish force.
'Oh, Santina, Santina, you give my soul to hell fires everlasting!' he cried aloud once, as he jammed the iron spade down deeper and deeper into the ground, tearing the stiff soil asunder and crushing the stones. ”