The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1885-11-15
A SKETCH BY "OUIDA."
"CHANDos" land OtherPo Novels
PART L.

surely brings most happiness to the possessor OF
it; happiness altogether unalloyed and unpur-
chasable, and created by the mere rustic of green
| leaves, the mere ripple of brown waters. 1t is not
an Italian gift at ALL nor an Italian feeling; to an
! Italian gas is more beautiful than sunshine and
cambria flower more beautiful than real one;
! he usually thinks the mountains hateful and a
city divine, he detests trees and adores crowds.
But there are exceptions to all rules; there are
poetic natures everywhere, though everywhere
rare; Gesualdo was the exception in Marca and
its neighborhood. and evening after evening
saw him, in the summer weather, strollinG
through the fields his breviary in his hand, but
his heart with the dancing fire flies, the culver
ing poplar leaves, the tall green cane. the little
sliyery fish darting over the white stones of the
shallow river waters. He could not have told
why he loved to watch these things; he thought
it was because they reminded him of Bocca
d. Arno and the sand beach and the canebrakes;
but he did love them. and they filled him with
that vague emotion, half pleasure, half pain,
known.
His supper over he went into his church-a
little red bricked, white washed passage con-
nected it with his parlor. The church was small,
and dark, and old. 1t had an altar-piece said to
be old, and by Senese master, and of some
value, but Gesualdo knew nothing of these
matters A Raphael might have hung there
and he would have been mono the wiser He
loved the church, ugly and simple as it was, as a
mother loves plain child dull one because
1t Is hers; and now and then he preached strange,
passionate, pathetic sermons in 1T, which none of
MS people understood and which he barely I'M
reaching voice, with an accent of singular
melancholy in it, and as his mystical,
romantic, involved phrases passed far
over the heads of his hearers, like a
Hight of birds flying high up against
the clouds. the pathos and music in his
tones stirred their hearts vaguely. He was GER
talnly they thought, man whom the saints
loved Candida, sitting the altar with her
head bowed and her hands feeling her rosary,
would think as she heard the unntelligible eo-
quence: Dear Lord, all that power of words.
all that skill of the tongue, and he would put his
SHIRT on bottom upwards were it not for mel"
There was no Office in his church that evening
out ne fingered about it, touching this thing and
the other with tender fingers There was al
ways sweet scent in the little place: its door
usually stood open to the fields amidst which it
was planted, and the smell of the incense which
century after century had been burned in it,
blended with the fragrance from primroses, or
dog-roses or newmown hay, or crushed ripe
season.
1t from without. Candida kept it very Clean
and the scorpions and spiders were left so little
peace there by her ever active broom that thew
oetook themselves elsewhere, dear as the
wooden benches and the crannied stones had
been to them for ages
Since he had come to Marca nothing of anv
kind had happened in it. There had been some
marriages, great many births not few
burals; but that was all. The people who came
to confession at Easter confessed very common
sins; they had stolen this that, che ated here
there and evervwhere got drunk and quarreed.
nothing more ne would give them clean bills of
spiritual health. and bid them go III peace and
sin no more, quite sure as they were sure them
selves, that they would have the sef-same sins
to tell off next time they came there.
Everybody in Marca thought a great deal of
their religlon-that is, they trusted to it in
helpless but confident kind of way as fetish
which being duly and carefully propitiateo
would make things all right for them after
death They would not have missed a mass
to save their lives; that they dozed through it,
and cracked nuts o. took suck at their pipe
stems when they woke. did not affect their awed
and Interchangeable belief in its miraculous and
saving powers. If they had been asked what
they believed, or why they believed they would
have scratched their heads and felt puzzled
Their minds dwelt In twilight in which moth
ing had any distinct form. The clearest idea
ever presented to them that of the Ma
donna; they thought of her as of some universal
and future if they only observed her cerelno-
mails; just as in the ages gone by upon these
same hillsides, the Latin peasant had thought
of the great Demeter.
which had been instied into him in his novitiate,
did not know much more than they; he repeated
the words OF his offices without any distinct no
tion of all that they meant: he had a vague feel
ing that all self denial and self-sacrfce were
thrice blessed and he tried his best to save his
of Int hove ha
ceased to think outside that speculation lay,
and speculation was thrice damnable offense
Yet he, being imaginative and intelligent in a
humble and dog like way, was at times infinitely
distressed to see how little effect this religion
which he taught and which they protested had
upon the lives of his people His own life was
altogether guided by it, Why could mot theirs
be the same2 Why did they go on all through
the year swearing, cursing, drinking. quarreing
lying, stealing; ne could not but perceive that
they came to him to confess their peccadlloes
only that they might pursue them more com
pletely at their ease. He could not fatter him
self that his ministrations in Marca which were
now of six years duration, had made the village
a whit different to what it had been when he
had entered it.
Thinking of this. as he did think of it contin-
| ually night and day, being man of singulary
sensitive conscience he sat down on q marble
bench near the door and opened his breviary
The sun was setting behind the pines on the
crest of the hills; the warm orange light poured
across the stems of the expresses which stood
before the door, and found its way over the un-
even states of the stone floor to his feet A
nightingale was singing somewhere in the dog
rose hedge beyond the cypress trees Lizards
ran from crack to crack in the pavement A
tendril of honeysuckle came through hole In
the wall, thrusting its delicate curled horns of
perfume towards him. The whole entrance was
paved in golden warmth and light; the body of
the church behind him was quite dark.
He had opened his brevlary from habit. but he
did not read: he sat and gazed at the evening
clouds, at the blue hills at the radiant air, and
listened to the song of the nightingales in that
dreamy trance which made him look stupid
in the eyes of his housekeeper and his parish
toner's, but which were only the meditations Of
poetic temper cramped and cooped up in a
narrow and uncongenal existence and not edu-
Gated or free enough to be able even to analyze
what it felt
THE nightngale's song in June is altogether
unlike its songs of April and May" thought this
poor priest, whom nature had made poet and