ed Melegari, made more furious by his
silence. "What did you do at night under the Grand Duke's poplars? Why
did you carry in and screen the corpse? Does not the whole village talk
of your strange ways and your altered habits? There is more than enough
against you to send to the galleys a score of better men than you.
Anyhow, I will denounce you if you do not make a clean breast of all you
know to the president to-morrow. You are either the assasin or the
accomplice, you accursed, black-coated hypocrite!"

A slight flush rose on the waxen pallor of Gesualdo's face, but he still
kept silence.

The young man watching him with eyes of hatred, saw guilt in that
obstinate and mulish dumbness.

"You dare not deny it, trained liar though you be!" he said, with
passionate scorn. "Oh, wretched cur, who venture to call yourself a
servitor of heaven, you would let her drag all her years out in misery
to save your own miserable, puling, sexless, worthless life! Well, hear
me, and understand. No one can say that I do not keep my word, and here,
by the cross which hangs above us, I take my oath that if you do not
tell all you know to-morrow, should she be condemned I will denounce you
to the law, and if the law fail to do justice I will kill you as Tasso
Tassilo was killed. May I die childless, penniless, and accursed if my
hand fail!"

Then, with no other word, he strode from the church, the golden
afternoon sunshine streaming through the stained windows above and
falling on his fair hair, his flushed face, his flaming eyes, till his
common humanity seemed as if transfigured. He looked like the avenging
angel of Tintoretto's Paradise.

Gesualdo stood immovable in the deserted church, his arms crossed on his
breast, his head bent. A great resolve, a mighty inspiration, had
descended on him with the furious words of his foe. Light had come to
him as from heaven itself. He could not give up the secret which had
been confided to him in the confessional, but he could give up himself.
His brain was filled with legends of sacrifice and martyrdom. Why might
he not become one of that holy band of martyrs?

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