Gesualdo himself, despite all the doctrine which had been instilled into him in his novitiate, did not know much more than they: he repeated the words of his offices without any distinct notion of all that they meant; he had a vague feeling that all self-denial and self-sacrifice were thrice blessed, and he tried his best to save his own soul and the souls of others; but there he ceased to think: outside that speculation lay, and speculation was a thrice-damnable offence. 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 professed had upon the lives of his people. His own life was altogether guided by it: why could not theirs be the same? Why did they go on all through the year swearing, cursing, drinking, quarrelling, lying, stealing? He could not but perceive that they came to him to confess their peccadilloes only that they might pursue them more completely at their ease. He could not flatter himself that his ministrations in Marca, which were now of six years' duration, had made the village a whit different from what it had been when he had entered it. Thinking of this, as he did think of it continually night and day, being a man of singularly sensitive conscience, he sat down on a 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 paved way in front of the church, through the stems of the cypresses which stood before the door, and found its way over the uneven slates 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 a hole in the wall, thrusting its delicate curled horns of perfume towards him. The whole entrance was bathed in golden warmth and light; the body of the church behind him was quite dark. He had opened his breviary 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 so stupid in the eyes of his housekeeper and his parishioners, but which was only the meditation of a poetic temper, cramped and cooped up in a narrow and uncongenial existence, and not educated or free enough to be able even to analyze what it felt. "The nightingale's song in June is altogether unlike its songs of April and May," thought this poor priest, whom Nature had made a poet, and to whom she had given the eyes which see and the ears which hear. "The very phrases are wholly different; the very accent is not the same: in spring it is all a canticle like the Song of Solomon, in midsummer--what is it he is singing? Is he lamenting the summer? or is he only teaching his young ones how they should sing next year?"