Chapter XXXIII: A Village "festa."

Philip went down to the presbytery and had a short interview with the padre. Chiara was dying at last; the sacraments had been administered to her, and her life could not linger on through many hours. What did the English signore propose to do for his penniless countryman?

Philip answered briefly that he would take steps to restore him to his family. He then went to the telegraph office and dispatched another message to his father. "Received yours. Urgent reasons for your presence here."

He would accompany his mother to-morrow to Toblach; but he could not quit the neighborhood until something could be decided about his brother. His brother! He stood still abruptly in the village street, with a half laugh of stupefied amazement. His brother! It must be some egregious blunder of his own imagination; his brain had been weakened by the fever. He turned away into a by-road and cautiously took out the letter and the morocco case. No, that was his father's portrait; he recognized it too well. The eyes looking out of the faded daguerreotype resembled the sad, frank, frightened eyes of the oppressed and persecuted outcast.

He did not venture indoors again until dinner time, and immediately after dinner he complained of fatigue. Margaret went to his room before going to bed herself, entering very softly through the door between their two chambers lest he should be sleeping. He knew she stood for a minute or two beside him, shading the lamp with her hand; but he dared not move or speak. She bent over him and laid her lips on his hair that she might run no risk of awakening him. He had never loved her so much as at this moment, and he longed to throw his arms round her neck and tell her what was troubling him, as he had done when he was a boy not so very long ago. But he could not tell her this sorrow; would it not crush her to death? Would to God he could die if his death would save her!

The morning was wonderfully bright and sunny, and through the transparent thinness of the air the most distant peaks shone clearly, with their soft colors and delicate tracery of snow. The _festa_ began early with the ringing of bells and the firing of musketry. Long files of peasantry came down in troops along the narrow tracks leading from the valley to the mountains. Margaret and Dorothy hurried over their coffee and rolls to hasten down to the church. But it was already full, and hundreds of women and children were kneeling outside the western door, and a similar crowd of men outside the northern door. Some women sitting on a bench offered a seat to Margaret, whose beautiful face was lit up with an expression of sympathy with their devotion. The women, like the men, were praying with their hats in their hands, bareheaded under a burning sun. Margaret shared a prayer book with the peasant woman beside her, and read the prayers and meditations in Italian; while here and there the woman marked with her thumb some special words, and looked up into her face to see if she was "_sympatica_"; and she and her companions smiled as they saw Margaret's lips move with the uttering of the same prayers they were themselves repeating.

Presently, amid the ringing of the bells and to the music of a brass band, a procession was formed, and all the congregation thronged out of the church, and those who had been praying without fell into their places--men, and women, and children. There were altars erected in the streets, at which mass was to be celebrated; and the long procession filed away with many banners fluttering along it. Last of all, and at a little distance from the rest, there came a man whom Margaret had already noticed as standing aloof, half hidden behind a corner of a wall. He was an uncouth creature, tall and ungainly, with uncut, matted hair, and a coarse beard; yet there was something in his whole appearance that reminded her of somebody she knew.

"Why!" exclaimed Dorothy in accents of surprise. "Look! look! How like that poor fellow is to Andrew Goldsmith!"

Yes, that was it. This awkward Tyrolean peasant, who hardly knew how to use his great limbs, was like Andrew--oddly like him; he might have been Andrew's own son. She smiled at the oddity of such a resemblance; but apart from this, the man's solitariness and aloofness interested her greatly. She turned to the old woman beside her, who was sitting still, waiting for the procession to accomplish part of its route before she joined it.

"Who is that poor man?" she inquired.

"He is English," replied the woman, "an Englishman who was born here in the very hotel itself where the signora is staying. Will she wish to hear all the circumstances? Because I know; I was a servant there when Martino was born."

"Is his name Martino?" asked Margaret.

"Yes, signora," she went on eagerly; "I will tell the English lady. It is nearly thirty years ago, a little later than this _festa_. An English signore and signora came to the hotel, and the name written in the register by the signore was Martino. So when the child was born he was named Martin; and Saint Martin is his patron, but the saint has done nothing for him, because his parents were heretics, and not Christians."

"Martin!" repeated Margaret, with growing interest; "but what became of the parents?"

"The little mother died, poor soul, in giving him birth," said the old woman, "and lies buried yonder in the cemetery, and Chiara took the boy for her own. Chiara was the head servant in the hotel, and folks say she made money by it in some way; but there was not much money in the signora's trunks--only enough to bury her; or if there was money, it never did Chiara any good, poor soul! They say she lies dying this morning up yonder in a hut on the hills, and all she will hear of the _festa_ is the ringing of the bells and the firing of the cannon. She's no older than I am; and you behold me!"

"But the father of Martino," said Margaret, "what became of him?"

"An old story," she answered; "he had forsaken her three or four weeks before the boy was born. He was a fine, handsome signore, and she worshiped him. But what then? Young signori cannot trouble themselves about girls. Why should they? Girls are too plentiful. He went off one fine day, and nobody ever saw him again."

"But did no one try to find him on account of his child?" asked Margaret.

"Once," said the woman, "about six years after, a strange Englishman came here in the winter, and made inquiries, and saw the boy. But he went away again, and no more was heard of him. Chiara brought the boy up to be her servant. Her servant? Her slave! His life was worse than a dog's. We are poor here, signora, but Martino is the poorest creature of us all. He never had as much as he could eat; not once in his life. Old Chiara is a skinflint."

The procession was out of sight, but the monotonous chant droned by thousands of voices came plainly to their ears. Margaret listened to the strange sound, with eyes dim with tears for the poor fellow, whose life was so desolate and hard.

"Will the lady wish to see the grave of the pretty English girl?" asked the woman, with an eye to a possible gratuity. "It is not far off in the cemetery, and we shall be there before the procession passes."

"I will go," said Margaret in a pitying voice. "Dorothy, stay and bring Philip to me."

The murmur of the chanted prayers filled the quiet air as they passed down a side lane toward the cemetery, broken only by the clashing of the bells and the firing of cannon at the moment when the Host was elevated. This triumphal burst of noisy sound came as they passed through the gates of the neglected burial ground, and Margaret's guide fell down on her knees and waited until the chant was renewed. Then she led the way to the corner, apart from the other graves, and somewhat more overgrown with weeds and nettles, where Sophy lay buried.

There was a rude cross at the head of the grave, made of two bits of wood nailed clumsily together; and round it lay an outline of white pebbles. To-day, a handful of blue gentians lay upon it. There was a pathetic sadness about these awkward efforts to care for the grave, as if some bungler had done his best to express his grief, and had scarcely known what to do. The tears fell fast from Margaret's eyes as she laid her hand reverently on the rough wood of the cross.

"Has that poor fellow done this?" she asked.

"Yes, signora," was the answer, "it's his mother's grave. The pretty English girl is buried here. I can recollect her well, with blue eyes and gold hair, and a skin like roses and lilies. He called her Sophy."

Margaret started. A sudden pang shot through her heart. After all these years was she to discover the fate of the poor girl, whose loss she had mourned so long, in this remote spot? Could this be Sophy Goldsmith's grave? And oh! how sorrowful beyond all their fears must her sad lot have been! Dying, alone, deserted; leaving behind her a child who had grown into this miserable pariah of the mountains. Swiftly the thought of Andrew Goldsmith, and his dark, deep grief when he learnt all, passed through her mind.

The refrain of the chant came nearer, and the long procession had reached the doors of the church close to the cemetery. Suddenly the peasant woman broke the silence with which she had respected Margaret's tears.

"Will the signora pardon me if I leave her?" she asked. "They are going into church now. God!" she cried in a tone of terror, "here is the young English signore himself! the signore who forsook the poor English girl. Oh, my God!"

Margaret turned round, with a sickening sensation of terror, such as she had never felt before, as if she would be compelled to see some dreaded vision. Coming slowly toward them down the weedy path of the cemetery was Philip, with Dorothy at his side. Both looked grave, as if they felt the desolation of the neglected spot; but there was an air of moody preoccupation about Philip, as though his thoughts were dealing with some subject a thousandfold more sad than the uncared-for dead.

"No, no," continued the woman, "it cannot be! The signore would be an old man now; it is thirty years ago. But just so he looked, and just so he walked. Did the signora know the poor girl who is buried here called Sophy, Martino's mother?"

"Hush! hush!" cried Margaret, in an agony of apprehension; "say nothing more now. This is my son. Go away to church, and I will see you again some time soon."

A moment afterward Philip was standing opposite to her, looking down on the rudely outlined grave and the rough cross. Neither of them spoke. He did not ask whose grave it was; and her parched lips could have given him no answer.

"It looks like a God-forsaken spot," said Dorothy, pityingly. "Oh, how can people leave their dear ones in such a desolate graveyard? I always fancy 'the field to bury strangers in,' which was bought with the money Judas flung away, must have been such a place as this."

But neither Margaret nor Philip answered her, and she looked up in surprise. Margaret's face was like that of one stunned and almost paralyzed by a sudden shock; her eyes were fixed, and her lips half open, as if she was gazing on some sight of horror. It was but for a brief half minute; then she sighed heavily, and tears fell fast and thick down her pale cheeks.

"O Philip!" cried his mother, "let us go away quickly from this place. Let us start at once. I am not myself here. Take me away as quickly as we can go."

"Yes, mother," he answered, drawing her hand tenderly through his arm. He did not dare to ask her any question. He guessed whose grave this was by which she was standing, and felt sure that she knew something of the dread secret that oppressed himself. But it was impossible for him to ask her. She stood nearer to his father even than he did. The close, inseparable, sacred nature of the tie that unites man and wife struck him as it had never done before. Any sin of her husband would be an intolerable burden to her.

He hurried their departure from the hotel, though it was difficult to get a carriage on a _festa_ day like this. But at length they started, and he felt that every step taking them away from Cortina was a gain. They passed little groups of peasants going homeward; and the sound of church bells ringing joyous peals pursued them for several miles. But they left the valley behind them after a time. The drive they were hurrying over was one of the most beautiful in Europe, but only Dorothy saw it that day. Once, when she saw a red peak, with clouds rolling across it, and the spots of crimson gleaming like flames beneath the vapor, and a pale gray rock close by looking ghostlike beside it, she turned to Margaret with a low exclamation of delight. But Margaret's eyes were closed, and her ears were deaf. A vague, undefined terror in her soul had almost absolute rule over her. She must have been blind and deaf to the glories of heaven itself, with that fear of an almost impossible crime in her husband which was haunting her.