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The Valley of Decision

by Edith Wharton · English · Gutenberg #4327 · 900,385 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Valley of Decision

Author: Edith Wharton


        
Release date: August 1, 2003 [eBook #4327]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4327

Credits: Produced by Sue Asscher.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VALLEY OF DECISION ***




Produced by Sue Asscher.  HTML version by Al Haines.










THE VALLEY OF DECISION

BY

EDITH WHARTON

Author of "A Gift from the Grave," "Crucial Instances," etc.



"Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision."



TO

MY FRIENDS

PAUL AND MINNIE BOURGET

IN REMEMBRANCE OF

ITALIAN DAYS TOGETHER.



CONTENTS.

BOOK I. THE OLD ORDER.

BOOK II. THE NEW LIGHT.

BOOK III. THE CHOICE.

BOOK IV. THE REWARD.



BOOK I.

THE OLD ORDER.

    Prima che incontro alla festosa fronte
    I lugubri suoi lampi il ver baleni.

1.1.

It was very still in the small neglected chapel. The noises of the farm
came faintly through closed doors--voices shouting at the oxen in the
lower fields, the querulous bark of the old house-dog, and Filomena's
angry calls to the little white-faced foundling in the kitchen.

The February day was closing, and a ray of sunshine, slanting through a
slit in the chapel wall, brought out the vision of a pale haloed head
floating against the dusky background of the chancel like a water-lily
on its leaf. The face was that of the saint of Assisi--a sunken ravaged
countenance, lit with an ecstasy of suffering that seemed not so much to
reflect the anguish of the Christ at whose feet the saint knelt, as the
mute pain of all poor down-trodden folk on earth.

When the small Odo Valsecca--the only frequenter of the chapel--had been
taunted by the farmer's wife for being a beggar's brat, or when his ears
were tingling from the heavy hand of the farmer's son, he found a
melancholy kinship in that suffering face; but since he had fighting
blood in him too, coming on the mother's side of the rude Piedmontese
stock of the Marquesses di Donnaz, there were other moods when he turned
instead to the stout Saint George in gold armour, just discernible
through the grime and dust of the opposite wall.

The chapel of Pontesordo was indeed as wonderful a storybook as fate
ever unrolled before the eyes of a neglected and solitary child. For a
hundred years or more Pontesordo, a fortified manor of the Dukes of
Pianura, had been used as a farmhouse; and the chapel was never opened
save when, on Easter Sunday, a priest came from the town to say mass. At
other times it stood abandoned, cobwebs curtaining the narrow windows,
farm tools leaning against the walls, and the dust deep on the sea-gods
and acanthus volutes of the altar. The manor of Pontesordo was very old.
The country people said that the great warlock Virgil, whose
dwelling-place was at Mantua, had once shut himself up for a year in the
topmost chamber of the keep, engaged in unholy researches; and another
legend related that Alda, wife of an early lord of Pianura, had thrown
herself from its battlements to escape the pursuit of the terrible
Ezzelino. The chapel adjoined this keep, and Filomena, the farmer's
wife, told Odo that it was even older than the tower and that the walls
had been painted by early martyrs who had concealed themselves there
from the persecutions of the pagan emperors.

On such questions a child of Odo's age could obviously have no
pronounced opinion, the less so as Filomena's facts varied according to
the seasons or her mood, so that on a day of east wind or when the worms
were not hatching well, she had been known to affirm that the pagans had
painted the chapel under Virgil's instruction, to commemorate the
Christians they had tortured. In spite of the distance to which these
conflicting statements seemed to relegate them, Odo somehow felt as
though these pale strange people--youths with ardent faces under their
small round caps, damsels with wheat-coloured hair and boys no bigger
than himself, holding spotted dogs in leash--were younger and nearer to
him than the dwellers on the farm: Jacopone the farmer, the shrill
Filomena, who was Odo's foster-mother, the hulking bully their son and
the abate who once a week came out from Pianura to give Odo religious
instruction and who dismissed his questions with the invariable
exhortation not to pry into matters that were beyond his years. Odo had
loved the pictures in the chapel all the better since the abate, with a
shrug, had told him they were nothing but old rubbish, the work of the
barbarians.

Life at Pontesordo was in truth not very pleasant for an ardent and
sensitive little boy of nine, whose remote connection with the reigning
line of Pianura did not preserve him from wearing torn clothes and
eating black bread and beans out of an earthen bowl on the kitchen
doorstep.

"Go ask your mother for new clothes!" Filomena would snap at him, when
his toes came through his shoes and the rents in his jacket-sleeves had
spread beyond darning. "These you are wearing are my Giannozzo's, as you
well know, and every rag on your back is mine, if there were any law for
poor folk, for not a copper of pay for your keep or a stitch of clothing
for your body have we had these two years come Assumption--. What's
that? You can't ask your mother, you say, because she never comes here?
True enough--fine ladies let their brats live in cow-dung, but they must
have Indian carpets under their own feet. Well, ask the abate, then--he
has lace ruffles to his coat and a naked woman painted on his snuff
box--What? He only holds his hands up when you ask? Well, then, go ask
your friends on the chapel-walls--maybe they'll give you a pair of
shoes--though Saint Francis, for that matter, was the father of the
discalced, and would doubtless tell you to go without!" And she would
add with a coarse laugh: "Don't you know that the discalced are shod
with gold?"

It was after such a scene that the beggar-noble, as they called him at
Pontesordo, would steal away to the chapel and, seating himself on an
upturned basket or a heap of pumpkins, gaze long into the face of the
mournful saint.

There was nothing unusual in Odo's lot. It was that of many children in
the eighteenth century, especially those whose parents were cadets of
noble houses, with an appanage barely sufficient to keep their wives and
themselves in court finery, much less to pay their debts and clothe and
educate their children. All over Italy at that moment, had Odo Valsecca
but known it, were lads whose ancestors, like his own, had been dukes
and crusaders, but who, none the less, were faring, as he fared, on
black bread and hard blows, and the half-comprehended taunts of unpaid
foster-parents. Many, doubtless, there were who cared little enough, as
long as they might play morro with the farmer's lads and ride the colt
bare-back through the pasture and go bird-netting and frog-hunting with
the village children; but some perhaps, like Odo, suffered in a dumb
animal way, without understanding why life was so hard on little boys.

Odo, for his part, had small taste for the sports in which Gianozzo and
the village lads took pleasure. He shrank from any amusement associated
with the frightening or hurting of animals, and his bosom swelled with
the fine gentleman's scorn of the clowns who got their fun in so coarse
a way. Now and then he found a moment's glee in a sharp tussle with one
of the younger children who had been tormenting a frog or a beetle; but
he was still too young for real fighting, and could only hang on the
outskirts when the bigger boys closed, and think how some day he would
be at them and break their lubberly heads. There were thus many hours
when he turned to the silent consolations of the chapel. So familiar had
he grown with the images on its walls that he had a name for every one:
the King, the Knight, the Lady, the children with guinea-pigs, basilisks
and leopards, and lastly the Friend, as he called Saint Francis. An
almond-faced lady on a white palfrey with gold trappings represented his
mother, whom he had seen too seldom for any distinct image to interfere
with the illusion; a knight in damascened armour and scarlet cloak was
the valiant captain, his father, who held a commission in the ducal
army; and a proud young man in diadem and ermine, attended by a retinue
of pages, stood for his cousin, the reigning Duke of Pianura.

A mist, as usual at that hour, was rising from the marshes between
Pontesordo and Pianura, and the light soon ebbed from the saint's face,
leaving the chapel in obscurity. Odo had crept there that afternoon with
a keener sense than usual of the fact that life was hard on little boys;
and though he was cold and hungry and half afraid, the solitude in which
he cowered seemed more endurable than the noisy kitchen where, at that
hour, the farm hands were gathering for their polenta, and Filomena was
screaming at the frightened orphan who carried the dishes to the table.
He knew, of course, that life at Pontesordo would not last for
ever--that in time he would grow up and be mysteriously transformed into
a young gentleman with a sword and laced coat, who would go to court and
perhaps be an officer in the Duke's army or in that of some neighbouring
prince; but, viewed from the lowliness of his nine years, that dazzling
prospect was too remote to yield much solace for the cuffs and sneers,
the ragged shoes and sour bread of the present. The fog outside had
thickened, and the face of Odo's friend was now discernible only as a
spot of pallor in the surrounding dimness. Even he seemed farther away
than usual, withdrawn into the fog as into that mist of indifference
which lay all about Odo's hot and eager spirit. The child sat down among
the gourds and medlars on the muddy floor and hid his face against his
knees.

He had sat there a long time when the noise of wheels and the crack of a
postillion's whip roused the dogs chained in the stable. Odo's heart
began to beat. What could the sounds mean? It was as though the
flood-tide of the unknown were rising about him and bursting open the
chapel door to pour in on his loneliness. It was, in fact, Filomena who
opened the door, crying out to him in an odd Easter Sunday voice, the
voice she used when she had on her silk neckerchief and gold chain or
when she was talking to the bailiff.

Odo sprang up and hid his face in her lap. She seemed, of a sudden,
nearer to him than any one else--a last barrier between himself and the
mystery that awaited him outside.

"Come, you poor sparrow," she said, dragging him across the threshold of
the chapel, "the abate is here asking for you;" and she crossed herself,
as though she had named a saint.

Odo pulled away from her with a last wistful glance at Saint Francis,
who looked back at him in an ecstasy of commiseration.

"Come, come," Filomena repeated, dropping to her ordinary key as she
felt the resistance of the little boy's hand. "Have you no heart, you
wicked child? But, to be sure, the poor innocent doesn't know! Come
cavaliere, your illustrious mother waits."

"My mother?" The blood rushed to his face; and she had called him
"cavaliere"!

"Not here, my poor lamb! The abate is here; don't you see the lights of
the carriage? There, there, go to him. I haven't told him, your
reverence; it's my silly tender-heartedness that won't let me. He's
always been like one of my own creatures to me--" and she confounded Odo
by bursting into tears.

The abate stood on the doorstep. He was a tall stout man with a hooked
nose and lace ruffles. His nostrils were stained with snuff and he took
a pinch from a tortoise-shell box set with the miniature of a lady; then
he looked down at Odo and shrugged his shoulders.

Odo was growing sick with apprehension. It was two days before the
appointed time for his weekly instruction and he had not prepared his
catechism. He had not even thought of it--and the abate could use the
cane. Odo stood silent and envied girls, who are not disgraced by
crying. The tears were in his throat, but he had fixed principles about
crying. It was his opinion that a little boy who was a cavaliere might
weep when he was angry or sorry, but never when he was afraid; so he
held his head high and put his hand to his side, as though to rest it on
his sword.

The abate sneezed and tapped his snuff-box.

"Come, come, cavaliere, you must be brave--you must be a man; you have
duties, you have responsibilities. It's your duty to console your
mother--the poor lady is plunged in despair. Eh? What's that? You
haven't told him? Cavaliere, your illustrious father is no more."

Odo stared a moment without understanding; then his grief burst from him
in a great sob, and he hid himself against Filomena's apron, weeping for
the father in damascened armour and scarlet cloak.

"Come, come," said the abate impatiently. "Is supper laid? for we must
be gone as soon as the mist rises." He took the little boy by the hand.
"Would it not distract your mind to recite the catechism?" he inquired.

"No, no!" cried Odo with redoubled sobs.

"Well, then, as you will. What a madman!" he exclaimed to Filomena. "I
warrant it hasn't seen its father three times in its life. Come in,
cavaliere; come to supper."

Filomena had laid a table in the stone chamber known as the bailiff's
parlour, and thither the abate dragged his charge and set him down
before the coarse tablecloth covered with earthen platters. A tallow dip
threw its flare on the abate's big aquiline face as he sat opposite Odo,
gulping the hastily prepared frittura and the thick purple wine in its
wicker flask. Odo could eat nothing. The tears still ran down his cheeks
and his whole soul was possessed by the longing to steal back and see
whether the figure of the knight in the scarlet cloak had vanished from
the chapel wall. The abate sat in silence, gobbling his food like the
old black pig in the yard. When he had finished he stood up, exclaiming:
"Death comes to us all, as the hawk said to the chicken. You must be a
man, cavaliere." Then he stepped into the kitchen, and called out for
the horses to be put to.

The farm hands had slunk away to one of the outhouses, and Filomena and
Jacopone stood bowing and curtseying as the carriage drew up at the
kitchen door. In a corner of the big vaulted room the little foundling
was washing the dishes, heaping the scraps in a bowl for herself and the
fowls. Odo ran back and touched her arm. She gave a start and looked at
him with frightened eyes. He had nothing to give her, but he said:
"Good-bye, Momola"; and he thought to himself that when he was grown up
and had a sword he would surely come back and bring her a pair of shoes
and a panettone. The abate was calling him, and the next moment he found
himself lifted into the carriage, amid the blessings and lamentations of
his foster-parents; and with a great baying of dogs and clacking of
whipcord the horses clattered out of the farmyard, and turned their
heads toward Pianura.

The mist had rolled back and fields and vineyards lay bare to the winter
moon. The way was lonely, for it skirted the marsh, where no one lived;
and only here and there the tall black shadow of a crucifix ate into the
whiteness of the road. Shreds of vapour still hung about the hollows,
but beyond these fold on fold of translucent hills melted into a sky
dewy with stars. Odo cowered in his corner, staring out awestruck at the
unrolling of the strange white landscape. He had seldom been out at
night, and never in a carriage; and there was something terrifying to
him in this flight through the silent moon-washed fields, where no oxen
moved in the furrows, no peasants pruned the mulberries, and not a
goat's bell tinkled among the oaks. He felt himself alone in a ghostly
world from which even the animals had vanished, and at last he averted
his eyes from the dreadful scene and sat watching the abate, who had
fixed a reading-lamp at his back, and whose hooked-nosed shadow, as the
springs jolted him up and down, danced overhead like the huge Pulcinella
at the fair of Pontesordo.


1.2.

The gleam of a lantern woke Odo. The horses had stopped at the gates of
Pianura, and the abate giving the pass-word, the carriage rolled under
the gatehouse and continued its way over the loud cobble-stones of the
ducal streets. These streets were so dark, being lit but by some lantern
projecting here and there from the angle of a wall, or by the flare of
an oil-lamp under a shrine, that Odo, leaning eagerly out, could only
now and then catch a sculptured palace-window, the grinning mask on the
keystone of an archway, or the gleaming yellowish facade of a church
inlaid with marbles. Once or twice an uncurtained window showed a group
of men drinking about a wineshop table, or an artisan bending over his
work by the light of a tallow dip; but for the most part doors and
windows were barred and the streets disturbed only by the watchman's cry
or by a flash of light and noise as a sedan chair passed with its escort
of linkmen and servants. All this was amazing enough to the sleepy eyes
of the little boy so unexpectedly translated from the solitude of
Pontesordo; but when the carriage turned under another arch and drew up
before the doorway of a great building ablaze with lights, the pressure
of accumulated emotions made him fling his arms about his preceptor's
neck.

"Courage, cavaliere, courage! You have duties, you have
responsibilities," the abate admonished him; and Odo, choking back his
fright, suffered himself to be lifted out by one of the lacqueys grouped
about the door. The abate, who carried a much lower crest than at
Pontesordo, and seemed far more anxious to please the servants than they
to oblige him, led the way up a shining marble staircase where beggars
whined on the landings and powdered footmen in the ducal livery were
running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his
mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his
father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and
mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs
and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music
below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors.
The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in
the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the
other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and
he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling
over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed
finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat
disconsolately at supper.

"Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing forward in a passion of tears.

The lady, who was young, pale and handsome, pushed back her chair with a
warning hand.

"Child," she exclaimed, "your shoes are covered with mud; and, good
heavens, how you smell of the stable! Abate, is it thus you teach your
pupil to approach me?"

"Madam, I am abashed by the cavaliere's temerity. But in truth I believe
excessive grief has clouded his wits--'tis inconceivable how he mourns
his father!"

Donna Laura's eyebrows rose in a faint smile. "May he never have worse
to grieve for!" said she in French; then, extending her scented hand to
the little boy, she added solemnly: "My son, we have suffered an
irreparable loss."

Odo, abashed by her rebuke and the abate's apology, had drawn his heels
together in a rustic version of the low bow with which the children of
that day were taught to approach their parents.

"Holy Virgin!" said his mother with a laugh, "I perceive they have no
dancing-master at Pontesordo. Cavaliere, you may kiss my hand.
So--that's better; we shall make a gentleman of you yet. But what makes
your face so wet? Ah, crying, to be sure. Mother of God! as for crying,
there's enough to cry about." She put the child aside and turned to the
preceptor. "The Duke refuses to pay," she said with a shrug of despair.

"Good heavens!" lamented the abate, raising his hands. "And Don Lelio?"
he faltered.

She shrugged again, impatiently. "As great a gambler as my husband.
They're all alike, abate: six times since last Easter has the bill been
sent to me for that trifle of a turquoise buckle he made such a to-do
about giving me." She rose and began to pace the room in disorder. "I'm
a ruined woman," she cried, "and it's a disgrace for the Duke to refuse
me."

The abate raised an admonishing finger. "Excellency...excellency..."

She glanced over her shoulder.

"Eh? You're right. Everything is heard here. But who's to pay for my
mourning the saints alone know! I sent an express this morning to my
father, but you know my brothers bleed him like leeches. I could have
got this easily enough from the Duke a year ago--it's his marriage has
made him so stiff. That little white-faced fool--she hates me because
Lelio won't look at her, and she thinks it's my fault. As if I cared
whom he looks at! Sometimes I think he has money put away...all I want
is two hundred ducats...a woman of my rank!" She turned suddenly on Odo,
who stood, very small and frightened, in the corner to which she had
pushed him. "What are you staring at, child? Eh! the monkey is dropping
with sleep. Look at his eyes, abate! Here, Vanna, Tonina, to bed with
him; he may sleep with you in my dressing-closet, Tonina. Go with her,
child, go; but for God's sake wake him if he snores. I'm too ill to have
my rest disturbed." And she lifted a pomander to her nostrils.

The next few days dwelt in Odo's memory as a blur of strange sights and
sounds. The super-acute state of his perceptions was succeeded after a
night's sleep by the natural passivity with which children accept the
improbable, so that he passed from one novel impression to another as
easily and with the same exhilaration as if he had been listening to a
fairy tale. Solitude and neglect had no surprises for him, and it seemed
natural enough that his mother and her maids should be too busy to
remember his presence.

For the first day or two he sat unnoticed on his little stool in a
corner of his mother's room, while packing-chests were dragged in,
wardrobes emptied, mantua-makers and milliners consulted, and
troublesome creditors dismissed with abuse, or even blows, by the
servants lounging in the ante-chamber. Donna Laura continued to show the
liveliest symptoms of concern, but the child perceived her distress to
be but indirectly connected with the loss she had suffered, and he had
seen enough of poverty at the farm to guess that the need of money was
somehow at the bottom of her troubles. How any one could be in want, who
slept between damask curtains and lived on sweet cakes and chocolate, it
exceeded his fancy to conceive; yet there were times when his mother's
voice had the same frightened angry sound as Filomena's on the days when
the bailiff went over the accounts at Pontesordo.

Her excellency's rooms, during these days, were always crowded, for
besides the dressmakers and other merchants there was the hairdresser,
or French Monsu--a loud, important figure, with a bag full of cosmetics
and curling-irons--the abate, always running in and out with messages
and letters, and taking no more notice of Odo than if he had never seen
him, and a succession of ladies brimming with condolences, and each
followed by a servant who swelled the noisy crowd of card-playing
lacqueys in the ante-chamber.

Through all these figures came and went another, to Odo the most
noticeable,--that of a handsome young man with a high manner, dressed
always in black, but with an excess of lace ruffles and jewels, a
clouded amber head to his cane, and red heels to his shoes. This young
gentleman, whose age could not have been more than twenty, and who had
the coldest insolent air, was treated with profound respect by all but
Donna Laura, who was for ever quarrelling with him when he was present,
yet could not support his absence without lamentations and alarm. The
abate appeared to act as messenger between the two, and when he came to
say that the Count rode with the court, or was engaged to sup with the
Prime Minister, or had business on his father's estate in the country,
the lady would openly yield to her distress, crying out that she knew
well enough what his excuses meant: that she was the most cruelly
outraged of women, and that he treated her no better than a husband.

For two days Odo languished in his corner, whisked by the women's
skirts, smothered under the hoops and falbalas which the dressmakers
unpacked from their cases, fed at irregular hours, and faring on the
whole no better than at Pontesordo. The third morning, Vanna, who seemed
the most good-natured of the women, cried out on his pale looks when she
brought him his cup of chocolate. "I declare," she exclaimed, "the child
has had no air since he came in from the farm. What does your excellency
say? Shall the hunchback take him for a walk in the gardens?"

To this her excellency, who sat at her toilet under the hair-dresser's
hands, irritably replied that she had not slept all night and was in no
state to be tormented about such trifles, but that the child might go
where he pleased.

Odo, who was very weary of his corner, sprang up readily enough when
Vanna, at this, beckoned him to the inner ante-chamber. Here, where
persons of a certain condition waited (the outer being given over to
servants and tradesmen), they found a lean humpbacked boy, shabbily
dressed in darned stockings and a faded coat, but with an extraordinary
keen pale face that at once attracted and frightened the child.

"There, go with him; he won't eat you," said Vanna, giving him a push as
she hurried away; and Odo, trembling a little, laid his hand in the
boy's. "Where do you come from?" he faltered, looking up into his
companion's face.

The boy laughed and the blood rose to his high cheekbones. "I?--From the
Innocenti, if your Excellency knows where that is," said he.

Odo's face lit up. "Of course I do," he cried, reassured. "I know a girl
who comes from there--the Momola at Pontesordo."

"Ah, indeed?" said the boy with a queer look. "Well, she's my sister,
then. Give her my compliments when you see her, cavaliere. Oh, we're a
large family, we are!"

Odo's perplexity was returning. "Are you really Momola's brother?" he
asked.

"Eh, in a way--we're children of the same house."

"But you live in the palace, don't you?" Odo persisted, his curiosity
surmounting his fear. "Are you a servant of my mother's?"

"I'm the servant of your illustrious mother's servants; the abatino of
the waiting-women. I write their love-letters, do you see, cavaliere, I
carry their rubbish to the pawnbroker's when their sweethearts have bled
them of their savings; I clean the birdcages and feed the monkeys, and
do the steward's accounts when he's drunk, and sleep on a bench in the
portico and steal my food from the pantry...and my father very likely
goes in velvet and carries a sword at his side."

The boy's voice had grown shrill, and his eyes blazed like an owl's in
the dark. Odo would have given the world to be back in his corner, but
he was ashamed to betray his lack of heart; and to give himself courage
he asked haughtily: "And what is your name, boy?"

The hunchback gave him a gleaming look. "Call me Brutus," he cried, "for
Brutus killed a tyrant." He gave Odo's hand a pull. "Come along," said
he, "and I'll show you his statue in the garden--Brutus's statue in a
prince's garden, mind you!" And as the little boy trotted at his side
down the long corridors he kept repeating under his breath in a kind of
angry sing-song, "For Brutus killed a tyrant."

The sense of strangeness inspired by his odd companion soon gave way in
Odo's mind to emotions of delight and wonder. He was, even at that age,
unusually sensitive to external impressions, and when the hunchback,
after descending many stairs and winding through endless back-passages,
at length led him out on a terrace above the gardens, the beauty of the
sight swelled his little heart to bursting.

A Duke of Pianura had, some hundred years earlier, caused a great wing
to be added to his palace by the eminent architect Carlo Borromini, and
this accomplished designer had at the same time replanted and enlarged
the ducal gardens. To Odo, who had never seen plantations more artful
than the vineyards and mulberry orchards about Pontesordo, these
perspectives of clipped beech and yew, these knots of box filled in with
multi-coloured sand, appeared, with the fountains, colonnades and
trellised arbours surmounted by globes of glass, to represent the very
pattern and Paradise of gardens. It seemed indeed too beautiful to be
real, and he trembled, as he sometimes did at the music of the Easter
mass, when the hunchback, laughing at his amazement, led him down the
terrace steps.

It was Odo's lot in after years to walk the alleys of many a splendid
garden, and to pace, often wearily enough, the paths along which he was
now led; but never after did he renew the first enchanted impression of
mystery and brightness that remained with him as the most vivid emotion
of his childhood.

Though it was February the season was so soft that the orange and lemon
trees had been put out in their earthen vases before the lemon-house,
and the beds in the parterres were full of violets, daffodils and
auriculas; but the scent of the orange-blossoms and the bright colours
of the flowers moved Odo less than the noble ordonnance of the pleached
alleys, each terminated by a statue or a marble seat; and when he came
to the grotto where, amid rearing sea-horses and Tritons, a cascade
poured from the grove above, his wonder passed into such delicious awe
as hung him speechless on the hunchback's hand.

"Eh," said the latter with a sneer, "it's a finer garden than we have at
our family palace. Do you know what's planted there?" he asked, turning
suddenly on the little boy. "Dead bodies, cavaliere! Rows and rows of
them; the bodies of my brothers and sisters, the Innocents who die like
flies every year of the cholera and the measles and the putrid fever."
He saw the terror in Odo's face and added in a gentler tone: "Eh, don't
cry, cavaliere; they sleep better in those beds than in any others
they're like to lie on. Come, come, and I'll show your excellency the
aviaries."

From the aviaries they passed to the Chinese pavilion, where the Duke
supped on summer evenings, and thence to the bowling-alley, the
fish-stew and the fruit-garden. At every step some fresh surprise
arrested Odo; but the terrible vision of that other garden planted with
the dead bodies of the Innocents robbed the spectacle of its brightness,
dulled the plumage of the birds behind their gilt wires and cast a
deeper shade over the beech-grove, where figures of goat-faced men
lurked balefully in the twilight. Odo was glad when they left the
blackness of this grove for the open walks, where gardeners were working
and he had the reassurance of the sky. The hunchback, who seemed sorry
that he had frightened him, told him many curious stories about the
marble images that adorned the walks; and pausing suddenly before one of
a naked man with a knife in his hand, cried out in a frenzy: "This is my
namesake, Brutus!" But when Odo would have asked if the naked man was a
kinsman, the boy hurried him on, saying only: "You'll read of him some
day in Plutarch."


1.3.

Odo, next morning, under the hunchback's guidance, continued his
exploration of the palace. His mother seemed glad to be rid of him, and
Vanna packing him off early, with the warning that he was not to fall
into the fishponds or get himself trampled by the horses, he guessed,
with a thrill, that he had leave to visit the stables. Here in fact the
two boys were soon making their way among the crowd of grooms and
strappers in the yard, seeing the Duke's carriage-horses groomed, and
the Duchess's cream-coloured hackney saddled for her ride in the chase;
and at length, after much lingering and gazing, going on to the
harness-rooms and coach-house. The state-carriages, with their carved
and gilt wheels, their panels gay with flushed divinities and their
stupendous velvet hammer-cloths edged with bullion, held Odo spellbound.
He had a born taste for splendour, and the thought that he might one day
sit in one of these glittering vehicles puffed his breast with pride and
made him address the hunchback with sudden condescension. "When I'm a
man I shall ride in these carriages," he said; whereat the other laughed
and returned good-humouredly: "Eh, that's not so much to boast of,
cavaliere; I shall ride in a carriage one of these days myself." Odo
stared, not over-pleased, and the boy added: "When I'm carried to the
churchyard, I mean," with a chuckle of relish at the joke.

From the stables they passed to the riding-school, with its open
galleries supported on twisted columns, where the duke's gentlemen
managed their horses and took their exercise in bad weather. Several
rode there that morning; and among them, on a fine Arab, Odo recognised
the young man in black velvet who was so often in Donna Laura's
apartments.

"Who's that?" he whispered, pulling the hunchback's sleeve, as the
gentleman, just below them, made his horse execute a brilliant balotade.

"That? Bless the innocent! Why, the Count Lelio Trescorre, your
illustrious mother's cavaliere servente."

Odo was puzzled, but some instinct of reserve withheld him from further
questions. The hunchback, however, had no such scruples. "They do say,
though," he went on, "that her Highness has her eye on him, and in that
case I'll wager your illustrious mamma has no more chance than a sparrow
against a hawk."

The boy's words were incomprehensible, but the vague sense that some
danger might be threatening his mother's friend made Odo whisper: "What
would her Highness do to him?"

"Make him a prime-minister, cavaliere," the hunchback laughed.

Odo's guide, it appeared, was not privileged to conduct him through the
state apartments of the palace, and the little boy had now been four
days under the ducal roof without catching so much as a glimpse of his
sovereign and cousin. The very next morning, however, Vanna swept him
from his trundle-bed with the announcement that he was to be received by
the Duke that day, and that the tailor was now waiting to try on his
court dress. He found his mother propped against her pillows, drinking
chocolate, feeding her pet monkey and giving agitated directions to the
maidservants on their knees before the open carriage-trunks. Her
excellency informed Odo that she had that moment received an express
from his grandfather, the old Marquess di Donnaz; that they were to
start next morning for the castle of Donnaz, and that he was to be
presented to the Duke as soon as his Highness had risen from dinner. A
plump purse lay on the coverlet, and her countenance wore an air of
kindness and animation which, together with the prospect of wearing a
court dress and travelling to his grandfather's castle in the mountains,
so worked on Odo's spirits that, forgetting the abate's instructions, he
sprang to her with an eager caress.

"Child, child," was her only rebuke; and she added, with a tap on his
cheek: "It is lucky I shall have a sword to protect me."

Long before the hour Odo was buttoned into his embroidered coat and
waistcoat. He would have on the sword at once, and when they sat down to
dinner, though his mother pressed him to eat with more concern than she
had before shown, it went hard with him to put his weapon aside, and he
cast longing eyes at the corner where it lay. At length a chamberlain
summoned them and they set out down the corridors, attended by two
servants. Odo held his head high, with one hand leading Donna Laura (for
he would not appear to be led by her) while the other fingered his
sword. The deformed beggars who always lurked about the great staircase
fawned on them as they passed, and on a landing they crossed the
humpbacked boy, who grinned mockingly at Odo; but the latter, with his
chin up, would not so much as glance at him.

A master of ceremonies in short black cloak and gold chain received them
in the antechamber of the Duchess's apartments, where the court played
lansquenet after dinner; the doors of her Highness's closet were thrown
open, and Odo, now glad enough to cling to his mother's hand, found
himself in a tall room, with gods and goddesses in the clouds overhead
and personages as supra-terrestrial seated in gilt armchairs about a
smoking brazier. Before one of these, to whom Donna Laura swept
successive curtsies in advancing, the frightened cavaliere found himself
dragged with his sword between his legs. He ducked his head like the old
drake diving for worms in the puddle at the farm, and when at last he
dared look up, it was to see an odd sallow face, half-smothered in an
immense wig, bowing back at him with infinite ceremony--and Odo's heart
sank to think that this was his sovereign.

The Duke was in fact a sickly narrow-faced young man with thick
obstinate lips and a slight lameness that made his walk ungainly; but
though no way resembling the ermine-cloaked king of the chapel at
Pontesordo, he yet knew how to put on a certain majesty with his state
wig and his orders. As for the newly married Duchess, who sat at the
other end of the cabinet caressing a toy spaniel, she was scant fourteen
and looked a mere child in her great hoop and jewelled stomacher. Her
wonderful fair hair, drawn over a cushion and lightly powdered, was
twisted with pearls and roses, and her cheeks excessively rouged, in the
French fashion; so that as she arose on the approach of the visitors she
looked to Odo for all the world like the wooden Virgin hung with votive
offerings in the parish church at Pontesordo. Though they were but three
months married the Duke, it was rumoured, was never with her, preferring
the company of the young Marquess of Cerveno, his cousin and
heir-presumptive, a pale boy scented with musk and painted like a
comedian, whom his Highness would never suffer away from him and who now
leaned with an impertinent air against the back of the ducal armchair.

On the other side of the brazier sat the dowager Duchess, the Duke's
grandmother, an old lady so high and forbidding of aspect that Odo cast
but one look at her face, which was yellow and wrinkled as a medlar, and
surmounted, in the Spanish style, with black veils and a high coif. What
these alarming personages said and did, the child could never recall;
nor were his own actions clear to him, except for a furtive caress that
he remembered giving the spaniel as he kissed the Duchess's hand;
whereupon her Highness snatched up the pampered animal and walked away
with a pout of anger. Odo noticed that her angry look followed him as he
and Donna Laura withdrew; but the next moment he heard the Duke's voice
and saw his Highness limping after them.

"You must have a furred cloak for your journey, cousin," said he
awkwardly, pressing something in the hand of Odo's mother, who broke
into fresh compliments and curtsies, while the Duke, with a finger on
his thick lip, withdrew hastily into the closet.

The next morning early they set out on their journey. There had been
frost in the night and a cold sun sparkled on the palace windows and on
the marble church-fronts as their carriage lumbered through the streets,
now full of noise and animation. It was Odo's first glimpse of the town
by daylight, and he clapped his hands with delight at sight of the
people picking their way across the reeking gutters, the asses laden
with milk and vegetables, the servant-girls bargaining at the
provision-stalls, the shop-keepers' wives going to mass in pattens and
hoods, with scaldini in their muffs, the dark recessed openings in the
palace basements, where fruit sellers, wine-merchants and coppersmiths
displayed their wares, the pedlars hawking books and toys, and here and
there a gentleman in a sedan chair returning flushed and disordered from
a night at bassett or faro. The travelling-carriage was escorted by
half-a-dozen of the Duke's troopers and Don Lelio rode at the door
followed by two grooms. He wore a furred coat and boots, and never, to
Odo, had he appeared more proud and splendid; but Donna Laura had hardly
a word for him, and he rode with the set air of a man who acquits
himself of a troublesome duty.

Outside the gates the spectacle seemed tame in comparison; for the road
bent toward Pontesordo, and Odo was familiar enough with the look of the
bare fields, set here and there with oak-copses to which the leaves
still clung. As the carriage skirted the marsh his mother raised the
windows, exclaiming that they must not expose themselves to the
pestilent air; and though Odo was not yet addicted to general
reflections, he could not but wonder that she should display such dread
of an atmosphere she had let him breathe since his birth. He knew of
course that the sunset vapours on the marsh were unhealthy: everybody on
the farm had a touch of the ague, and it was a saying in the village
that no one lived at Pontesordo who could buy an ass to carry him away;
but that Donna Laura, in skirting the place on a clear morning of frost,
should show such fear of infection, gave a sinister emphasis to the
ill-repute of the region.

The thought, he knew not why, turned his mind to Momola, who often on
damp evenings sat shaking and burning in the kitchen corner. He
reflected with a pang that he might never see her again, and leaning
forward he strained his eyes for a glimpse of Pontesordo. They were
passing through a patch of oaks; but where these ended the country
opened, and beyond a belt of osiers and the mottled faded stretches of
the marsh the keep stood up like a beckoning finger. Odo cried out as
though in answer to its call; but that moment the road turned a knoll
and bent across rising ground toward an unfamiliar region.

"Thank God!" cried his mother, lowering the window, "we're rid of that
poison and can breath the air."

As the keep vanished Odo reproached himself for not having begged a pair
of shoes for Momola. He had felt very sorry for her since the hunchback
had spoken so strangely of life at the foundling hospital; and he had a
sudden vision of her bare feet, pinched with cold and cut with the
pebbles of the yard, perpetually running across the damp stone floors,
with Filomena crying after her: "Hasten then, child of iniquity! You
are slower than a day without bread!" He had almost resolved to speak of
the foundling to his mother, who still seemed in a condescending humour;
but his attention was unexpectedly distracted by a troop of Egyptians,
who came along the road leading a dancing bear; and hardly had these
passed when the chariot of an itinerant dentist engaged him. The whole
way, indeed, was alive with such surprises; and at Valsecca, where they
dined, they found the yard of the inn crowded with the sumpter-mules and
servants of a cardinal travelling to Rome, who was to lie there that
night and whose bedstead and saucepans had preceded him.

Here, after dinner, Don Lelio took leave of Odo's mother, with small
show of regret on either side; the lady high and sarcastic, the
gentleman sullen and polite; and both, as it seemed, easier when the
business was despatched and the Count's foot in the stirrup. He had so
far taken little notice of Odo, but he now bent from the saddle and
tapped the boy's cheek, saying in his cold way: "In a few years I shall
see you at court;" and with that rode away toward Pianura.


1.4.

Lying that night at Pavia, the travellers set forward next morning for
the city of Vercelli. The road, though it ran for the most part through
flat mulberry orchards and rice-fields reflecting the pale blue sky in
their sodden channels, would yet have appeared diverting enough to Odo,
had his mother been in the mood to reply to his questions; for whether
their carriage overtook a party of strolling jugglers, travelling in a
roofed-in waggon, with the younger children of the company running
alongside in threadbare tights and trunkhose decked with tinsel; or
whether they drove through a village market-place, where yellow earthen
crocks and gaudy Indian cottons, brass pails and braziers and platters
of bluish pewter, filled the stalls with a medley of colour--at every
turn was something that excited the boy's wonder; but Donna Laura, who
had fallen into a depression of spirits, lamenting the cold, her
misfortunes and the discomfort of the journey, was at no more pains than
the abate to satisfy the promptings of his curiosity.

Odo had indeed met but one person who cared to listen to him, and that
was the strange hunchback who had called himself Brutus. Remembering how
entertainingly this odd guide had explained all the wonders of the ducal
grounds, Odo began to regret that he had not asked his mother to let him
have Brutus for a body-servant. Meanwhile no one attended to his
questions and the hours were beginning to seem long when, on the third
day, they set out from Vercelli toward the hills. The cold increased as
they rose; and Odo, though he had often wished to see the mountains, was
yet dismayed at the gloomy and menacing aspect of the region on which
they were entering. Leafless woods, prodigious boulders and white
torrents foaming and roaring seemed a poor exchange for the
pleasantly-ordered gardens of Pianura. Here were no violets and cowslips
in bloom; hardly a green blade pierced the sodden roadside, and
snowdrifts lingered in the shaded hollows.

Donna Laura's loudly expressed fear of robbers seemed to increase the
loneliness of the way, which now traversed tracts of naked moorland, now
plunged again into forest, with no sign of habitation but here and there
a cowherd's hut under the trees or a chapel standing apart on some
grassy eminence. When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind
swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed
every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and cold
at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted
from his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorway
set in battlemented walls. He was carried into a hall lit with smoky
oil-lamps and hung with armour and torn banners.

Here, among a group of rough-looking servants, a tall old man in a
nightcap and furred gown was giving orders in a loud passionate voice.
This personage, who was of a choleric complexion, with a face like
mottled red marble, seized Odo by the wrist and led him up a flight of
stairs so worn and slippery that he tripped at every step; thence down a
corridor and into a gloomy apartment where three ladies shivered about a
table set with candles. Bidden by the old gentleman to salute his
grandmother and great-aunts, Odo bowed over three wrinkled hands, one
fat and soft as a toad's stomach, the others yellow and dry as
lemon-skins. His mother embraced the ladies in the same humble manner,
and the Marquess, first furiously calling for supper, thrust Odo down on
a stool in the ingle.

From this point of observation the child, now vividly awake, noted the
hangings of faded tapestry that heaved in the draught, the ceiling of
beams and the stone floor strewn with rushes. The candle-light
flickering on the faces of his aged relatives showed his grandmother to
be a pale heavy-cheeked person with little watchful black eyes which she
dropped at her husband's approach; while the two great-aunts, seated
side by side in high-backed chairs with their feet on braziers, reminded
Odo of the narrow elongated saints squeezed into the niches of a
church-door. The old Marchioness wore the high coif and veil of the
previous century; the aunts, who, as Odo afterwards learned, were
canonesses of a noble order, were habited in a semi-conventual dress,
with crosses hanging on their bosoms; and none spoke but when the
Marquess addressed them.

Their timidity appeared to infect Odo's mother, who, from her habitual
volubility of temper, sank to a mood of like submissiveness. A supper of
venison and goat's cheese was not designed to restore her spirits, and
when at length she and Odo had withdrawn to their cavernous bedchamber,
she flung herself weeping on the bed and declared she must die if she
remained long in this prison.

Falling asleep under such influences, it was the more wonderful to Odo
to wake with the sun on his counterpane, a sweet noise of streams
through the casement and the joyous barking of hounds in the castle
court. From the window-seat he looked out on a scene extraordinarily
novel to his lowland eyes. The chamber commanded the wooded steep below
the castle, with a stream looping its base; beyond, the pastures sloped
pleasantly under walnut trees, with here and there a clearing ploughed
for the spring crops and a sunny ledge or two planted with vines. Above
this pastoral landscape, bare crags upheld a snowpeak; and, as if to
lend a human interest to the scene, the old Marquess, his flintlock on
his shoulder, his dogs and beaters at his heels, now rode across the
valley.

Wonder succeeded to wonder that first morning; for there was the castle
to be seen, with the kennels and stables roughly kept, but full of dogs
and horses; and Odo, in the Marquess's absence, was left free to visit
every nook of his new home. Pontesordo, though perhaps as ancient as
Donnaz, was but a fortified manor in the plain; but here was the
turreted border castle, bristling at the head of the gorge like the
fangs in a boar's throat: its walls overhung by machicolations, its
portcullis still dropped at nightfall, and the loud stream forming a
natural moat at its base. Through the desert spaces of this great
structure Odo wandered at will, losing himself in its network of bare
chambers, some now put to domestic uses, with smoked meats hanging from
the rafters, cheeses ranged on shelves and farmer's implements stacked
on the floor; others abandoned to bats and spiders, with slit-like
openings choked by a growth of wild cherries, and little animals
scurrying into their holes as Odo opened the unused doors. At the next
turn he mounted by a winding stair to the platform behind the
battlements, whence he could look down on the inner court, where horses
were being groomed, dogs fed, harnesses mended, and platters of smoking
food carried from the kitchen to the pantry; or, leaning another way,
discovered, between the cliff and the rampart a tiny walled garden with
fruit-trees and a sundial.

The ladies kept to themselves in a corner of the castle, where the rooms
were hung with tapestry and a few straight-backed chairs stood about the
hearth; but even here no fires were suffered till nightfall, nor was
there so much as a carpet in the castle. Odo's grandmother, the old
Marchioness, a heavy woman who would doubtless have enjoyed her ease in
a cushioned seat, was afoot all day attending to her household; for
besides the dairy and the bakehouse and the stillroom where fruits were
stewed and pastes prepared, there was the great spinning-room full of
distaffs and looms, where the women spun and wove all the linen used in
the castle and the coarse stuffs worn by its inmates; with workshops for
the cobbler and tailor who clothed and shod the Marquess and his
household. All these the Marchioness must visit, and attend to her
devotions between; the ladies being governed by a dark-faced priest,
their chaplain and director, who kept them perpetually running along the
cold stone corridors to the chapel in a distant wing, where they knelt
without so much as a brazier to warm them or a cushion to their knees.
As to the chapel, though larger and loftier than that of Pontesordo,
with a fine carved and painted tabernacle and many silver candlesticks,
it seemed to Odo, by reason of its bare walls, much less beautiful than
that deserted oratory; nor did he, amid all the novelty of his
surroundings, cease to regret the companionship of his familiar images.

His delight was the greater, therefore, when, exploring a part of the
castle now quite abandoned, he came one day on a vaulted chamber used as
a kind of granary, where, under layers of dirt and cobwebs, lovely
countenances flowered from the walls. The scenes depicted differed
indeed from those of Pontesordo, being less animated and homely and more
difficult for a child to interpret; for here were naked laurel-crowned
knights on prancing horses, nimble goat-faced creatures grouped in
adoration round a smoking altar and youths piping to saffron-haired
damsels on grass-banks set with poplars. The very strangeness of the
fable set forth perhaps engaged the child's fancy; or the benignant
mildness of the countenances, so unlike the eager individual faces of
the earlier artist; for he returned again and again to gaze unweariedly
on the inhabitants of that tranquil grassy world, studying every inch of
the walls and with much awe and fruitless speculation deciphering on the
hem of a floating drapery the inscription: Bernardinus Lovinus pinxit.

His impatience to know more of the history of these paintings led him to
question an old man, half house-servant, half huntsman, now too infirm
for service and often to be found sunning himself in the court with an
old hound's chin on his knee. The old man, whose name was Bruno, told
him the room in question had been painted for the Marquess Gualberto di
Donnaz, who had fought under the Duke of Milan hundreds of years before:
a splendid and hospitable noble, patron of learning and the arts, who
had brought the great Milanese painter to Donnaz and kept him there a
whole summer adorning the banqueting-room. "But I advise you, little
master," Bruno added, "not to talk too loudly of your discovery; for we
live in changed days, do you see, and it seems those are pagan sorcerers
and witches painted on the wall, and because of that, and their
nakedness, the chaplain has forbidden all the young boys and wenches
about the place to set foot there; and the Marchioness herself, I'm
told, doesn't enter without leave."

This was the more puzzling to Odo that he had seen so many naked pagans,
in colours and marble, at his cousin's palace of Pianura, where they
were praised as the chief ornament of that sumptuous fabric; but he kept
Bruno's warning in mind and so timed his visits that they escaped the
chaplain's observation. Whether this touch of mystery added charm to the
paintings; or whether there was already forming in him what afterward
became an instinctive resistance to many of the dictates of his age;
certain it is that, even after he had been privileged to admire the
stupendous works of the Caracci at Parma and of the immortal Giulio
Romano at Mantua, Odo's fancy always turned with peculiar fondness to
the clear-limbed youths moving in that world of untroubled beauty.

Odo, the day after his arrival at Donnaz, learned that the chaplain was
to be his governor; and he was not long in discovering that the system
of that ecclesiastic bore no resemblance to the desultory methods of his
former pedagogue. It was not that Don Gervaso was a man of superior
acquirements: in writing, ciphering and the rudiments of Latin he seemed
little likely to carry Odo farther than the other; but in religious
instruction he suffered no negligence or inattention. His piety was of a
stamp so different from the abate's that it vivified the theological
abstractions over which Odo had formerly languished, infusing a
passionate meaning into the formulas of the textbooks. His discourse
breathed the same spirit, and had his religion been warmed by
imagination or tempered by charity the child had been a ductile
substance in his hands; but the shadow of the Council of Trent still
hung over the Church in Savoy, making its approach almost as sombre and
forbidding as that of the Calvinist heresy. As it was, the fascination
that drew Odo to the divine teachings was counteracted by a depressing
awe: he trembled in God's presence almost as much as in his
grandfather's, and with the same despair of discovering what course of
action was most likely to call down the impending wrath. The beauty of
the Church's offices, now for the first time revealed to him in the
well-ordered services of the chapel, was doubly moving in contrast with
the rude life at Donnaz; but his confessions tortured him and the
penances which the chaplain inflicted abased without reforming his
spirit.

Next to the mass, the books Don Gervaso lent him were his chief
pleasure: the Lives of the Saints, Cardinal Bellarmine's Fables and The
Mirror of true Penitence. The Lives of the Saints fed at once his
imagination and his heart, and over the story of Saint Francis, now
first made known to him, he trembled with delicious sympathy. The
longing to found a hermitage like the Portiuncula among the savage rocks
of Donnaz, and live there in gentle communion with plants and animals,
alternated in him with the martial ambition to ride forth against the
Church's enemies, as his ancestors had ridden against the bloody and
pestilent Waldenses; but whether his piety took the passive or the
aggressive form, it always shrank from the subtleties of doctrine. To
live like the saints, rather than to reason like the fathers, was his
ideal of Christian conduct; if indeed a vague pity for suffering
creatures and animals was not the source of his monastic yearnings, and
a desire to see strange countries the secret of his zeal against the
infidel.

The chaplain, though reproving his lukewarmness in matters of dogma,
could not but commend his devotion to the saints; and one day his
grandmother, to reward him for some act of piety, informed him with
tears of joy that he was destined for holy orders, and that she had good
hopes of living to see him a bishop. This news had hardly the intended
effect; for Odo's dream was of the saint's halo rather than the bishop's
mitre; and throwing himself on his knees before the old Marquess, who
was present, he besought that he might be allowed to join the Franciscan
order. The Marquess at this flew into so furious a rage, cursing the
meddlesomeness of women and the chaplain's bigotry, that the ladies
burst into tears and Odo's swelling zeal turned small. There was indeed
but one person in the castle who seemed not to regard its master's
violences, and that was the dark-faced chaplain, who, when the Marquess
had paused out of breath, tranquilly returned that nothing could make
him repent of having brought a soul to Christ, and that, as to the
cavaliere Odo, if his maker designed him for a religious, the Pope
himself could not cross his vocation.

"Ay, ay! vocation," snarled the Marquess. "You and the women here shut
the child up between you and stuff his ears full of monkish stories and
miracles and the Lord knows what, and then talk of the simpleton's
vocation. His vocation, nom de Dieu, is to be an abbot first, and then a
monsignore, and then a bishop, if he can--and to the devil with your
cowls and cloisters!" And he gave orders that Odo should hunt with him
next morning.

The chaplain smiled. "Hubert was a huntsman," said he, "and yet he died
a saint."

From that time forth the old Marquess kept Odo oftener at his side,
making his grandson ride with him about his estates and on such
hunting-parties as were not beyond the boy's strength. The domain of
Donnaz included many a mile of vine and forest, over which, till the
fifteenth century, its lords had ruled as sovereign Marquesses. They
still retained a part of their feudal privileges, and Odo's grandfather,
tenacious of these dwindling rights, was for ever engaged in vain
contests with his peasantry. To see these poor creatures cursed and
brow-beaten, their least offences punished, their few claims disputed,
must have turned Odo's fear of his grandfather to hatred, had he not
observed that the old man gave with one hand what he took with the
other, so that, in his dealings with his people, he resembled one of
those torrents which now devastate and now enrich their banks. The
Marquess, in fact, while he held obstinately to his fishing rights,
prosecuted poachers, enforced the corvee and took toll at every ford,
yet laboured to improve his lands, exterminated the wild beasts that
preyed on them, helped his peasants in sickness, nourished them in old
age and governed them with a paternal tyranny doubtless less
insufferable than the negligence of the great land-owners who lived at
court.

To Odo, however, these rides among the tenantry were less agreeable than
the hunting-expeditions which carried them up the mountain in the
solitude of morning. Here the wild freshness of the scene and the
exhilaration of pursuit roused the fighting strain in the boy's blood,
and so stirred his memory with tales of prowess that sometimes, as they
climbed the stony defiles in the clear shadow before sunrise, he fancied
himself riding forth to exterminate the Waldenses who, according to the
chaplain, still lurked like basilisks and dragons in the recesses of the
mountains. Certain it is that his rides with the old Marquess, if they
inflamed his zeal against heresy, cooled the ardour of his monastic
vocation; and if he pondered on his future, it was to reflect that
doubtless he would some day be a bishop, and that bishops were
territorial lords, we might hunt the wolf and boar in their own domains.


1.5.

Reluctantly, every year about the Epiphany, the old Marquess rode down
from Donnaz to spend two months in Turin. It was a service exacted by
King Charles Emanuel, who viewed with a jealous eye those of his nobles
inclined to absent themselves from court and rewarded their presence
with privileges and preferments. At the same time the two canonesses
descended to their abbey in the plain, and thus with the closing in of
winter the old Marchioness, Odo and his mother were left alone in the
castle.

To the Marchioness this was an agreeable period of spiritual compunction
and bodily repose; but to Donna Laura a season of despair. The poor
lady, who had been early removed from the rough life at Donnaz to the
luxurious court of Pianura, and was yet in the fulness of youth and
vivacity, could not resign herself to an existence no better, as she
declared, than that of any herdsman's wife upon the mountains. Here was
neither music nor cards, scandal nor love-making; no news of the
fashions, no visits from silk-mercers or jewellers, no Monsu to curl her
hair and tempt her with new lotions, or so much as a strolling
soothsayer or juggler to lighten the dullness of the long afternoons.
The only visitors to the castle were the mendicant friars drawn thither
by the Marchioness's pious repute; and though Donna Laura disdained not
to call these to her chamber and question them for news, yet their
country-side scandals were no more to her fancy than the two-penny wares
of the chapmen who unpacked their baubles on the kitchen hearth.

She pined for some word of Pianura; but when a young abate, who had
touched there on his way from Tuscany, called for a night at the castle
to pay his duty to Don Gervaso, the word he brought with him of the
birth of an heir to the duchy was so little to Donna Laura's humour that
she sprang up from the supper-table, and crying out to the astonished
Odo, "Ah, now you are for the Church indeed," withdrew in disorder to
her chamber. The abate, who ascribed her commotion to a sudden seizure,
continued to retail the news of Pianura, and Odo, listening with his
elders, learned that Count Lelio Trescorre had been appointed Master of
the Horse, to the indignation of the Bishop, who desired the place for
his nephew, Don Serafino; that the Duke and Duchess were never together;
that the Duchess was suspected of being in secret correspondence with
the Austrians, and that the young Marquess of Cerveno was gone to the
baths of Lucca to recover from an attack of tertian fever contracted the
previous autumn at the Duke's hunting-lodge near Pontesordo. Odo
listened for some mention of his humpbacked friend, or of Momola the
foundling; but the abate's talk kept a higher level and no one less than
a cavaliere figured on his lips. He was the only visitor of quality who
came that winter to Donnaz, and after his departure a fixed gloom
settled on Donna Laura's spirits. Dusk at that season fell early in the
gorge, fierce winds blew off the glaciers, and Donna Laura sat shivering
and lamenting on one side of the hearth, while the old Marchioness, on
the other, strained her eyes over an embroidery in which the pattern
repeated itself like the invocations of a litany, and Don Gervaso, near
the smoking oil-lamp, read aloud from the Glories of Mary or the Way of
Perfection of Saint Theresa.

On such evenings Odo, stealing from the tapestry parlour, would seek out
Bruno, who sat by the kitchen hearth with the old hound's nose at his
feet. The kitchen, indeed, on winter nights, was the pleasantest place
in the castle. The fire-light from its great stone chimney shone on the
strings of maize and bunches of dried vegetables that hung from the roof
and on the copper kettles and saucepans ranged along the wall. The wind
raged against the shutters of the unglazed windows, and the
maid-servants, distaff in hand, crowded closer to the blaze, listening
to the songs of some wandering fiddler or to the stories of a
ruddy-nosed Capuchin monk who was being regaled, by the steward's
orders, on a supper of tripe and mulled wine. The Capuchin's tales, told
in the Piedmontese jargon, and seasoned with strange allusions and
boisterous laughter, were of little interest to Odo, who would creep
into the ingle beside Bruno and beg for some story of his ancestors. The
old man was never weary of rehearsing the feats and gestures of the
lords of Donnaz, and Odo heard again and again how they had fought the
savage Switzers north of the Alps and the Dauphin's men in the west; how
they had marched with Savoy against Montferrat and with France against
the Republic of Genoa. Better still he liked to hear of the Marquess
Gualberto, who had been the Duke of Milan's ally and had brought home
the great Milanese painter to adorn his banqueting-room at Donnaz. The
lords of Donnaz had never been noted for learning, and Odo's grandfather
was fond of declaring that a nobleman need not be a scholar; but the
great Marquess Gualberto, if himself unlettered, had been the patron of
poets and painters and had kept learned clerks to write down the annals
of his house on parchment painted by the monks. These annals were locked
in the archives, under Don Gervaso's care; but Odo learned from the old
servant that some of the great Marquess's books had lain for years on an
upper shelf in the vestry off the chapel; and here one day, with Bruno's
aid, the little boy dislodged from a corner behind the missals and
altar-books certain sheepskin volumes clasped in blackened silver. The
comeliest of these, which bore on their title-page a dolphin curled
about an anchor, were printed in unknown characters; but on opening the
smaller volumes Odo felt the same joyous catching of the breath as when
he had stepped out on the garden-terrace at Pianura. For here indeed
were gates leading to a land of delectation: the country of the giant
Morgante, the enchanted island of Avillion, the court of the Soldan and
the King's palace at Camelot.

In this region Odo spent many blissful hours. His fancy ranged in the
wake of heroes and adventurers who, for all he knew, might still be
feasting and fighting north of the Alps, or might any day with a blast
of their magic horns summon the porter to the gates of Donnaz. Foremost
among them, a figure towering above even Rinaldo, Arthur and the Emperor
Frederic, was that Conrad, father of Conradin, whose sayings are set
down in the old story-book of the Cento Novelle, "the flower of gentle
speech." There was one tale of King Conrad that the boy never forgot:
how the King, in his youth, had always about him a company of twelve
lads of his own age; how when Conrad did wrong, his governors, instead
of punishing him, beat his twelve companions; and how, on the young
King's asking what the lads were being punished for, the pedagogues
replied:

"For your Majesty's offences."

"And why do you punish my companions instead of me?"

"Because you are our lord and master," he was told.

At this the King fell to thinking, and thereafter, it is said, in pity
for those who must suffer in his stead he set close watch on himself,
lest his sinning should work harm to others. This was the story of King
Conrad; and much as Odo loved the clash of arms and joyous feats of
paladins rescuing fair maids in battle, yet Conrad's seemed to him, even
then, a braver deed than these.

In March of the second year the old Marquess, returning from Turin, was
accompanied, to the surprise of all, by the fantastical figure of an
elderly gentleman in the richest travelling dress, with one of the new
French toupets, a thin wrinkled painted face, and emitting with every
movement a prodigious odour of millefleurs. This visitor, who was
attended by his French barber and two or three liveried servants, the
Marquess introduced as the lord of Valdu, a neighbouring seigneurie of
no great account. Though his lands marched with the Marquess's, it was
years since the Count had visited Donnaz, being one of the King's
chamberlains and always in attendance on his Majesty; and it was amazing
to see with what smirks and grimaces, and ejaculations in Piedmontese
French, he complimented the Marchioness on her appearance, and exclaimed
at the magnificence of the castle, which must doubtless have appeared to
him little better than a cattle-grange. His talk was unintelligible to
Odo, but there was no mistaking the nature of the glances he fixed on
Donna Laura, who, having fled to her room on his approach, presently
descended in a ravishing new sacque, with an air of extreme surprise,
and her hair curled (as Odo afterward learned) by the Count's own
barber.

Odo had never seen his mother look handsomer. She sparkled at the
Count's compliments, embraced her father, playfully readjusted her
mother's coif, and in the prettiest way made their excuses to the Count
for the cold draughts and bare floors of the castle. "For having lived
at court myself," said she, "I know to what your excellency is
accustomed, and can the better value your condescension in exposing
yourself, at this rigorous season, to the hardships of our
mountain-top."

The Marquess at this began to look black, but seeing the Count's
pleasure in the compliment, contented himself with calling out for
dinner, which, said he, with all respect to their visitor, would stay
his stomach better than the French kick-shaws at his Majesty's table.
Whether the Count was of the same mind, it was impossible to say, though
Odo could not help observing that the stewed venison and spiced boar's
flesh seemed to present certain obstacles either to his jaws or his
palate, and that his appetite lingered on the fried chicken-livers and
tunny-fish in oil; but he cast such looks at Donna Laura as seemed to
declare that for her sake he would willingly have risked his teeth on
the very cobblestones of the court. Knowing how she pined for company,
Odo was not surprised at his mother's complaisance; yet wondered to see
the smile with which she presently received the Count's half-bantering
disparagement of Pianura. For the duchy, by his showing, was a place of
small consequence, an asylum of superannuated fashions; whereas no
Frenchman of quality ever visited Turin without exclaiming on its
resemblance to Paris, and vowing that none who had the entree of
Stupinigi need cross the Alps to see Versailles. As to the Marquess's
depriving the court of Donna Laura's presence, their guest protested
against it as an act of overt disloyalty to the sovereign; and what most
surprised Odo, who had often heard his grandfather declaim against the
Count as a cheap jackanapes that hung about the court for what he could
make at play, was the indulgence with which the Marquess received his
visitor's sallies. Father and daughter in fact vied in amenities to the
Count. The fire was kept alight all day in his rooms, his Monsu waited
on with singular civility by the steward, and Donna Laura's own woman
sent down by her mistress to prepare his morning chocolate.

Next day it was agreed the gentlemen should ride to Valdu; but its lord
being as stiff-jointed as a marionette, Donna Laura, with charming tact,
begged to be of the party, and thus enabled him to attend her in her
litter. The Marquess thereupon called on Odo to ride with him; and
setting forth across the mountain they descended by a long defile to the
half-ruined village of Valdu. Here, for the first time, Odo saw the
spectacle of a neglected estate, its last penny wrung from it for the
absent master's pleasure by a bailiff who was expected to extract his
pay from the sale of clandestine concessions to the tenants. Riding
beside the Marquess, who swore under his breath at the ravages of the
undyked stream and the sight of good arable land run wild and choked
with underbrush, the little boy obtained a precocious insight into the
evils of a system which had long outlived its purpose, and the idea of
feudalism was ever afterward embodied for him in his glimpse of the
peasants of Valdu looking up sullenly from their work as their suzerain
and protector thrust an unfamiliar painted smile between the curtains of
his litter.

What his grandfather thought of Valdu (to which the Count on the way
home referred with smirking apologies as the mountain-lair of his
barbarous ancestors) was patent enough even to Odo's undeveloped
perceptions; but it would have required a more experienced understanding
to detect the motive that led the Marquess, scarce two days after their
visit, to accord his daughter's hand to the Count. Odo felt a shock of
dismay on learning that his beautiful mother was to become the property
of an old gentleman whom he guessed to be of his grandfather's age, and
whose enamoured grimaces recalled the antics of her favourite monkey,
and the boy's face reflected the blush of embarrassment with which Donna
Laura imparted the news; but the children of that day were trained to a
passive acquiescence, and had she informed him that she was to be
chained in the keep on bread and water, Odo would have accepted the fact
with equal philosophy. Three weeks afterward his mother and the old
Count were married in the chapel of Donnaz, and Donna Laura, with many
tears and embraces, set out for Turin, taking her monkey but leaving her
son behind. It was not till later that Odo learned of the social usage
which compelled young widows to choose between remarriage and the
cloister; and his subsequent views were unconsciously tinged by the
remembrance of his mother's melancholy bridal.

Her departure left no traces but were speedily repaired by the coming of
spring. The sun growing warmer, and the close season putting an end to
the Marquess's hunting, it was now Odo's chief pleasure to carry his
books to the walled garden between the castle and the southern face of
the cliff. This small enclosure, probably a survival of medieval
horticulture, had along the upper ledge of its wall a grass walk
commanding the flow of the stream, and an angle turret that turned one
slit to the valley, the other to the garden lying below like a tranquil
well of scent and brightness: its box trees clipped to the shape of
peacocks and lions, its clove pinks and simples set in a border of
thrift, and a pear tree basking on its sunny wall. These pleasant
spaces, which Odo had to himself save when the canonesses walked there
to recite their rosary, he peopled with the knights and ladies of the
novelle, and the fantastic beings of Pulci's epic: there walked the Fay
Morgana, Regulus the loyal knight, the giant Morgante, Trajan the just
Emperor and the proud figure of King Conrad; so that, escaping thither
from the after-dinner dullness of the tapestry parlour, the boy seemed
to pass from the most oppressive solitude to a world of warmth and
fellowship.


1.6.

Odo, who, like all neglected children, was quick to note in the
demeanour of his elders any hint of a change in his own condition, had
been keenly conscious of the effect produced at Donnaz by the news of
the Duchess of Pianura's deliverance. Guided perhaps by his mother's
exclamation, he noticed an added zeal in Don Gervaso's teachings and an
unction in the manner of his aunts and grandmother, who embraced him as
though they were handling a relic; while the old Marquess, though he
took his grandson seldomer on his rides, would sit staring at him with a
frowning tenderness that once found vent in the growl--"Morbleu, but
he's too good for the tonsure!" All this made it clear to Odo that he
was indeed meant for the Church, and he learned without surprise that
the following spring he was to be sent to the seminary at Asti.

With a view to prepare him for this change, the canonesses suggested his
attending them that year on their annual pilgrimage to the sanctuary of
Oropa. Thither, for every feast of the Assumption, these pious ladies
travelled in their litter; and Odo had heard from them many tales of the
miraculous Black Virgin who drew thousands to her shrine among the
mountains. They set forth in August, two days before the feast,
ascending through chestnut groves to the region of bare rocks; thence
downward across torrents hung with white acacia and along park-like
grassy levels deep in shade. The lively air, the murmur of verdure, the
perfume of mown grass in the meadows and the sweet call of the cuckoos
from every thicket made an enchantment of the way; but Odo's pleasure
redoubled when, gaining the high-road to Oropa, they mingled with the
long train of devotees ascending from the plain. Here were pilgrims of
every condition, from the noble lady of Turin or Asti (for it was the
favourite pilgrimage of the Sardinian court), attended by her physician
and her cicisbeo, to the half-naked goatherd of Val Sesia or Salluzzo;
the cheerful farmers of the Milanese, with their wives, in silver
necklaces and hairpins, riding pillion on plump white asses; sick
persons travelling in closed litters or carried on hand-stretchers;
crippled beggars obtruding their deformities; confraternities of hooded
penitents, Franciscans, Capuchins and Poor Clares in dusty companies;
jugglers, pedlars, Egyptians and sellers of drugs and amulets. From
among these, as the canonesses' litter jogged along, an odd figure
advanced toward Odo, who had obtained leave to do the last mile of the
journey on foot. This was a plump abate in tattered ecclesiastical
dress, his shoes white as a miller's and the perspiration streaking his
face as he laboured along in the dust. He accosted Odo in a soft shrill
voice, begging leave to walk beside the young cavaliere, whom he had
more than once had the honour of seeing at Pianura; and, in reply to the
boy's surprised glance, added, with a swelling of the chest and an
absurd gesture of self-introduction, "But perhaps the cavaliere is not
too young to have heard of the illustrious Cantapresto, late primo
soprano of the ducal theatre of Pianura?"

Odo being obliged to avow his ignorance, the fat creature mopped his
brow and continued with a gasp--"Ah, your excellency, what is fame? From
glory to obscurity is no farther than from one milestone to another! Not
eight years ago, cavaliere, I was followed through the streets of
Pianura by a greater crowd than the Duke ever drew after him! But what
then? The voice goes--it lasts no longer than the bloom of a flower--and
with it goes everything: fortune, credit, consideration, friends and
parasites! Not eight years ago, sir--would you believe me?--I was
supping nightly in private with the Bishop, who had nearly quarrelled
with his late Highness for carrying me off by force one evening to his
casino; I was heaped with dignities and favours; all the poets in the
town composed sonnets in my honour; the Marquess of Trescorre fought a
duel about me with the Bishop's nephew, Don Serafino; I attended his
lordship to Rome; I spent the villeggiatura at his villa, where I sat at
play with the highest nobles in the land; yet when my voice went,
cavaliere, it was on my knees I had to beg of my heartless patron the
paltry favour of the minor orders!" Tears were running down the abate's
cheeks, and he paused to wipe them with a corner of tattered bands.

Though Odo had been bred in an abhorrence of the theatre, the strange
creature's aspect so pricked his compassion that he asked him what he
was now engaged in; at which Cantapresto piteously cried, "Alas, what am
I not engaged in, if the occasion offers? For whatever a man's habit, he
will not wear it long if it cover an empty belly; and he that respects
his calling must find food enough to continue in it. But as for me, sir,
I have put a hand to every trade, from composing scenarios for the ducal
company of Pianura, to writing satirical sonnets for noblemen that
desire to pass for wits. I've a pretty taste, too, in compiling
almanacks, and when nothing else served I have played the public
scrivener at the street corner; nay, sir, necessity has even driven me
to hold the candle in one or two transactions I would not more actively
have mixed in; and it was to efface the remembrance of one of these--for
my conscience is still over-nice for my condition--that I set out on
this laborious pilgrimage."

Much of this was unintelligible to Odo; but he was moved by any mention
of Pianura, and in the abate's first pause he risked the question--"Do
you know the hump-backed boy Brutus?"

His companion stared and pursed his soft lips.

"Brutus?" says he. "Brutus? Is he about the Duke's person?"

"He lives in the palace," said Odo doubtfully.

The fat ecclesiastic clapped a hand to his thigh.

"Can it be your excellency has in mind the foundling boy Carlo Gamba?
Does the jackanapes call himself Brutus now? He was always full of his
classical allusions! Why, sir, I think I know him very well; he is even
rumoured to be a brother of Don Lelio Trescorre's, and I believe the
Duke has lately given him to the Marquess of Cerveno, for I saw him not
long since in the Marquess's livery at Pontesordo."

"Pontesordo?" cried Odo. "It was there I lived."

"Did you indeed, cavaliere? But I think you will have been at the Duke's
manor of that name; and it was the hunting-lodge on the edge of the
chase that I had in mind. The Marquess uses it, I believe, as a kind of
casino; though not without risk of a distemper. Indeed, there is much
wonder at his frequenting it, and 'tis said he does so against the
Duke's wishes."

The name of Pontesordo had set Odo's memories humming like a hive of
bees, and without heeding his companion's allusions he asked--"And did
you see the Momola?"

The other looked his perplexity.

"She's an Innocent too," Odo hastened to explain. "She is Filomena's
servant at the farm."

The abate at this, standing still in the road, screwed up his eyelids
and protruded a relishing lip. "Eh, eh," said he, "the girl from the
farm, you say?" And he gave a chuckle. "You've an eye, cavaliere, you've
an eye," he cried, his soft body shaking with enjoyment; but before Odo
could make a guess at his meaning their conversation was interrupted by
a sharp call from the litter. The abate at once disappeared in the
crowd, and a moment later the litter had debouched on the grassy
quadrangle before the outer gates of the monastery. This space was set
in beech-woods, amid which gleamed the white-pillared chapels of the Way
of the Cross; and the devouter pilgrims, dispersed beneath the trees,
were ascending from one chapel to another, preparatory to entering the
church.

The quadrangle itself was crowded with people, and the sellers of votive
offerings, in their booths roofed with acacia-boughs, were driving a
noisy trade in scapulars and Agnus Deis, images of the Black Virgin of
Oropa, silver hearts and crosses, and phials of Jordan water warranted
to effect the immediate conversion of Jews and heretics. In one corner a
Carmelite missionary had set up his portable pulpit, and, crucifix in
hand, was exhorting the crowd; in another, an improvisatore intoned
canticles to the miraculous Virgin; a barefoot friar sat selling
indulgences at the monastery gate, and pedlars with trays of rosaries
and religious prints pushed their way among the pilgrims. Young women of
less pious aspect solicited the attention of the better-dressed
travellers, and jugglers, mountebanks and quacks of every description
hung on the outskirts of the square. The sight speedily turned Odo's
thought from his late companion, and the litter coming to a halt he was
leaning forward to observe the antics of a tumbler who had spread his
carpet beneath the trees, when the abate's face suddenly rose to the
surface of the throng and his hand thrust a crumpled paper between the
curtains of the litter. Odo was quick-witted enough to capture this
missive without attracting the notice of his grand-aunts, and stealing a
glance at it, he read--"Cavaliere, I starve. When the illustrious ladies
descend, for Christ's sake beg a scudo of them for the unhappy
Cantapresto."

By this the litter had disengaged itself and was moving toward the outer
gates. Odo, aware of the disfavour with which the theatre was viewed at
Donnaz, and unable to guess how far the soprano's present habit would be
held to palliate the scandal of his former connection, was perplexed how
to communicate his petition to the canonesses. A moment later, however,
the question solved itself; for as the aunts descended at the door of
the rector's lodging, the porter, running to meet them, stumbled on a
black mass under the arcade, and raised the cry that here was a man
dropped dead. A crowd gathering, some one called out that it was an
ecclesiastic had fallen; whereat the great-aunts were hurrying forward
when Odo whispered the eldest, Donna Livia, that the sick man was indeed
an abate from Pianura. Donna Livia immediately bid her servants lift him
into the porter's lodge, where, with the administering of spirits, the
poor soprano presently revived and cast a drowning glance about the
chamber.

"Eight years ago, illustrious ladies," he gurgled, "I had nearly died
one night of a surfeit of ortolans; and now it is of a surfeit of
emptiness that I am perishing."

The ladies at this, with exclamations of pity, called on the
lay-brothers for broth and cordials, and bidding the porter enquire more
particularly into the history of the unhappy ecclesiastic, hastened away
with Odo to the rector's parlour.

Next morning betimes all were afoot for the procession, which the
canonesses were to witness from the monastery windows. The apothecary
had brought word that the abate, whose seizure was indeed the result of
hunger, was still too weak to rise; and Donna Livia, eager to open her
devotions with an act of pity, pressed a sequin in the man's hand, and
bid him spare no care for the sufferer's comfort.

This sent Odo in a cheerful mood to the red-hung windows, whence,
peering between the folds of his aunts' gala habits, he admired the
great court enclosed in nobly-ordered cloisters and strewn with fresh
herbs and flowers. Thence one of the rector's chaplains conducted them
to the church, placing them, in company with the monastery's other noble
guests, in a tribune constructed above the choir. It was Odo's first
sight of a great religious ceremony, and as he looked down on the church
glimmering with votive offerings and gold-fringed draperies, and seen
through rolling incense in which the altar-candles swam like stars
reflected in a river, he felt an almost sensual thrill of pleasure at
the thought that his life was to be passed amid scenes of such mystic
beauty. The sweet singing of the choir raised his spirit to a higher
view of the scene; and the sight of the huddled misery on the floor of
the church revived in him the old longing for the Franciscan cowl.

From these raptures he was speedily diverted by the sight awaiting him
at the conclusion of the mass. Hardly had the spectators returned to the
rector's windows when, the doors of the church swinging open, a
procession headed by the rector himself descended the steps and began to
make the circuit of the court. Odo's eyes swam with the splendour of
this burst of banners, images and jewelled reliquaries, surmounting the
long train of tonsured heads and bathed in a light almost blinding after
the mild penumbra of the church. As the monks advanced, the pilgrims,
pouring after them, filled the court with a dark undulating mass through
which the procession wound like a ray of sunlight down the brown bosom
of a torrent. Branches of oleander swung in the air, devout cries hailed
the approach of the Black Madonna's canopy, and hoarse voices swelled to
a roar the measured litanies of the friars.

The ceremonies over, Odo, with the canonesses, set out to visit the
chapels studding the beech-knoll above the monastic buildings. Passing
out of Juvara's great portico they stood a moment above the grassy
common, which presented a scene in curious contrast to that they had
just quitted. Here refreshment-booths had been set up, musicians were
fiddling, jugglers unrolling their carpets, dentists shouting out the
merits of their panaceas, and light women drinking with the liveried
servants of the nobility. The very cripples who had groaned the loudest
in church now rollicked with the mountebanks and dancers; and no trace
remained of the celebration just concluded but the medals and relics
strung about the necks of those engaged in these gross diversions.

It was strange to pass from this scene to the solitude of the grove,
where, in a twilight rustling with streams, the chapels lifted their
white porches. Peering through the grated door of each little edifice,
Odo beheld within a group of terra-cotta figures representing some scene
of the Passion--here a Last Supper, with a tigerish Judas and a Saint
John resting his yellow curls on his Master's bosom, there an Entombment
or a group of stricken Maries. These figures, though rudely modelled and
daubed with bright colours, yet, by a vivacity of attitude and gesture
which the mystery of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling
impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age
when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic
counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured
image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange
borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he gazed through
the chapel gratings, that those long-distant episodes of the divine
tragedy had been here preserved in some miraculous state of suspended
animation, and as he climbed from one shrine to another he had the sense
of treading the actual stones of Gethsemane and Calvary.

As was usual with him, the impressions of the moment had effaced those
preceding it, and it was almost with surprise that, at the rector's
door, he beheld the primo soprano of Pianura totter forth to the litter
and offer his knee as a step for the canonesses. The charitable ladies
cried out on him for this imprudence, and his pallor still giving
evidence of distress, he was bidden to wait on them after supper with
his story. He presented himself promptly in the parlour, and being
questioned as to his condition at once rashly proclaimed his former
connection with the ducal theatre of Pianura. No avowal could have been
more disastrous to his cause. The canonesses crossed themselves with
horror, and the abate, seeing his mistake, hastened to repair it by
exclaiming--"What, ladies, would you punish me for following a vocation
to which my frivolous parents condemned me when I was too young to
resist their purpose? And have not my subsequent sufferings, my penances
and pilgrimages, and the state to which they have reduced me,
sufficiently effaced the record of an involuntary error?"

Seeing the effect of this appeal the abate made haste to follow up his
advantage. "Ah, illustrious ladies," he cried, "am I not a living
example of the fate of those who leave all to follow righteousness? For
while I remained on the stage, among the most dissolute surroundings,
fortune showered me with every benefit she heaps on her favourites. I
had my seat at every table in Pianura; the Duke's chair to carry me to
the theatre; and more money than I could devise how to spend; while now
that I have resigned my calling to embrace the religious life, you see
me reduced to begging a crust from the very mendicants I formerly
nourished. For," said he, moved to tears by his own recital, "my
superfluity was always spent in buying the prayers of the unfortunate,
and to judge how I was esteemed by those acquainted with my private
behaviour you need only learn that, on my renouncing the stage, 'twas
the Bishop of Pianura who himself accorded me the tonsure."

This discourse, which Odo admired for its adroitness, visibly excited
the commiseration of the ladies; but at mention of the Bishop, Donna
Livia exchanged a glance with her sister, who enquired, with a quaint
air of astuteness, "But how comes it, abate, that with so powerful a
protector you have been exposed to such incredible reverses?"

Cantapresto rolled a meaning eye.

"Alas, madam, it was through my protector that misfortune attacked me;
for his lordship having appointed me secretary to his favourite nephew,
Don Serafino, that imprudent nobleman required of me services so
incompatible with my cloth that disobedience became a duty; whereupon,
not satisfied with dismissing me in disgrace, he punished me by
blackening my character to his uncle. To defend myself was to traduce
Don Serafino; and rather than reveal his courses to the Bishop I sank to
the state in which you see me; a state," he added with emotion, "that I
have travelled this long way to commend to the adorable pity of Her
whose Son had not where to lay His head."

This stroke visibly touched the canonesses, still soft from the
macerations of the morning; and Donna Livia compassionately asked how he
had subsisted since his rupture with the Bishop.

"Madam, by the sale of my talents in any service not at odds with my
calling: as the compiling of pious almanacks, the inditing of rhymed
litanies and canticles, and even the construction of theatrical
pieces"--the ladies lifted hands of reprobation--"of theatrical pieces,"
Cantapresto impressively repeated, "for the use of the Carmelite nuns of
Pianura. But," said he with a deprecating smile, "the wages of virtue
are less liberal than those of sin, and spite of a versatility I think I
may honestly claim, I have often had to subsist on the gifts of the
pious, and sometimes, madam, to starve on their compassion."

This ready discourse, and the soprano's evident distress, so worked on
the canonesses that, having little money at their disposal, it was
fixed, after some private consultation, that he should attend them to
Donnaz, where Don Gervaso, in consideration of his edifying conduct in
renouncing the stage, might be interested in helping him to a situation;
and when the little party set forth from Oropa, the abate Cantapresto
closed the procession on one of the baggage-mules, with Odo riding
pillion at his back. Good fortune loosened the poor soprano's tongue,
and as soon as the canonesses' litter was a safe distance ahead he began
to beguile the way with fragments of reminiscence and adventure. Though
few of his allusions were clear to Odo, the glimpse they gave of the
motley theatrical life of the north Italian cities--the quarrels between
Goldoni and the supporters of the expiring commedia dell' arte--the
rivalries of the prime donne and the arrogance of the popular
comedians--all these peeps into a tinsel world of mirth, cabal and
folly, enlivened by the recurring names of the Four Masks, those
lingering gods of the older dispensation, so lured the boy's fancy and
set free his vagrant wonder, that he was almost sorry to see the keep of
Donnaz reddening in the second evening's sunset.

Such regrets, however, their arrival at the castle soon effaced; for in
the doorway stood the old Marquess, a letter in hand, who springing
forward caught his grandson by the shoulders, and cried with his great
boar-hunting shout, "Cavaliere, you are heir-presumptive of Pianura!"


1.7.

The Marquess of Cerveno had succumbed to the tertian ague contracted at
the hunting-lodge of Pontesordo; and this unforeseen calamity left but
one life, that of the sickly ducal infant, between Odo and the
succession to the throne of Pianura. Such was the news conveyed
post-haste from Turin by Donna Laura; who added the Duke's express wish
that his young kinsman should be fitted for the secular career, and the
information that Count Valdu had already entered his stepson's name at
the Royal Academy of Turin.

The Duke of Pianura being young and in good health, and his wife having
already given him an heir, the most sanguine imagination could hardly
view Odo as being brought much nearer the succession; yet the change in
his condition was striking enough to excuse the fancy of those about him
for shaping the future to their liking. The priestling was to turn
courtier and perhaps soldier; Asti was to be exchanged for Turin, the
seminary for the academy; and even the old chief of Donnaz betrayed in
his grumbling counsels to the boy a sense of the exalted future in which
they might some day serve him.

The preparations of departure and the wonder of his new state left Odo
little space wherein to store his thought with impressions of what he
was leaving; and it was only in after years, when the accretion of
superficial incident had dropped from his past, that those last days at
Donnaz gained their full distinctness. He saw them then, heavy with the
warmth of the long summer, from the topmost pine-belt to the bronzed
vineyards turning their metallic clusters to the sun; and in the midst
his small bewildered figure, netted in a web of association, and
seeming, as he broke away, to leave a shred of himself in every corner
of the castle.

Sharpest of all, there remained with him the vision of his last hour
with Don Gervaso. The news of Odo's changed condition had been received
in silence by the chaplain. He was not the man to waste words and he
knew the futility of asserting the Church's claim to the
heir-presumptive of a reigning house. Therefore if he showed no
enthusiasm he betrayed no resentment; but, the evening before the boy's
departure, led him, still in silence, to the chapel. Here the priest
knelt with Odo; then, raising him, sat on one of the benches facing the
high altar, and spoke a few grave words.

"You are setting out," said he, "on a way far different from that in
which it has been my care to guide you; yet the high road and the
mountain path may, by diverse windings, lead to the same point; and
whatever walk a man chooses, it will surely carry him to the end that
God has appointed. If you are called to serve Him in the world, the
journey on which you are now starting may lead you to the throne of
Pianura; but even so," he went on, "there is this I would have you
remember: that should this dignity come to you it may come as a calamity
rather than a joy; for when God confers earthly honours on a child of
His predilection, He sometimes deigns to render them as innocuous as
misfortune; and my chief prayer for you is that you should be raised to
this eminence, it may be at a moment when such advancement seems to
thrust you in the dust."

The words burned themselves into Odo's heart like some mystic writing on
the walls of memory, long afterward to start into fiery meaning. At the
time he felt only that the priest spoke with a power and dignity no
human authority could give; and for a moment all the stored influences
of his faith reached out to him from the dimly-gleaming altar.

The next sun rose on a new world. He was to set out at daylight, and
dawn found him at the casement, footing it in thought down the road as
yet undistinguishable in a dying glimmer of stars. Bruno was to attend
him to Turin; but one of the women presently brought word that the old
huntsman's rheumatism had caught him in the knee, and that the Marquess,
resolved not to delay his grandson's departure, had chosen Cantapresto
as the boy's companion. The courtyard, when Odo descended, fairly
bubbled with the voluble joy of the fat soprano, who was giving
directions to the servants, receiving commissions and instructions from
the aunts, assuring everybody of his undying devotion to the
heir-presumptive of Pianura, and citing impressive instances of the
responsibilities with which the great of the earth had formerly
entrusted him.

As a companion for Odo the abate was clearly not to Don Gervaso's taste;
but he stood silent, turning the comment of a cool eye on the soprano's
protestations, and saying only, as Cantapresto swept the company into
the circle of an obsequious farewell:--"Remember, signor abate, it is to
your cloth this business is entrusted." The abate's answer was a rush of
purple to the forehead; but Don Gervaso imperturbably added, "And you
lie but one night on the road."

Meanwhile the old Marquess, visibly moved, was charging Odo to respect
his elders and superiors, while in the same breath warning him not to
take up with the Frenchified notions of the court, but to remember that
for a lad of his condition the chief virtues were a tight seat in the
saddle, a quick hand on the sword and a slow tongue in counsel. "Mind
your own business," he concluded, "and see that others mind theirs."

The Marchioness thereupon, with many tears, hung a scapular about Odo's
neck, bidding him shun the theatre and be regular at confession; one of
the canonesses reminded him not to omit a visit to the chapel of the
Holy Winding-sheet, while the other begged him to burn a candle for her
at the Consolata; and the servants pressed forward to embrace and bless
their little master.

Day was high by this, and as the Marquess's travelling-chariot rumbled
down the valley the shadows seemed to fly before it. Odo at first lay
numb; but presently his senses woke to the call of the brightening
landscape. The scene was such as Salvator might have painted: wild
blocks of stone heaped under walnut-shade; here the white plunge of
water down a wall of granite, and there, in bluer depths, a charcoal
burner's hut sending up its spiral of smoke to the dark raftering of
branches. Though it was but a few hours since Odo had travelled from
Oropa, years seemed to have passed over him, and he saw the world with a
new eye. Each sound and scent plucked at him in passing: the roadside
started into detail like the foreground of some minute Dutch painter;
every pendent mass of fern, dark dripping rock, late tuft of harebell
called out to him: "Look well, for this is your last sight of us!" His
first sight too, it seemed: since he had lived through twelve Italian
summers without sense of the sun-steeped quality of atmosphere that,
even in shade, gives each object a golden salience. He was conscious of
it now only as it suggested fingering a missal stiff with gold-leaf and
edged with a swarming diversity of buds and insects. The carriage moved
so slowly that he was in no haste to turn the pages; and each spike of
yellow foxglove, each clouding of butterflies about a patch of
speedwell, each quiver of grass over a hidden thread of moisture, became
a marvel to be thumbed and treasured.

From this mood he was detached by the next bend of the road. The way,
hitherto winding through narrow glens, now swung to a ledge overhanging
the last escarpment of the mountains; and far below, the Piedmontese
plain unrolled to the southward its interminable blue-green distances
mottled with forest. A sight to lift the heart; for on those sunny
reaches Ivrea, Novara, Vercelli lay like sea-birds on a summer sea. It
was the future unfolding itself to the boy; dark forests, wide rivers,
strange cities and a new horizon: all the mystery of the coming years
figured to him in that great plain stretching away to the greater
mystery of heaven.

To all this Cantapresto turned a snoring countenance. The lively air of
the hills, the good fare of Donnaz, and the satisfaction, above all, of
rolling on cushions over a road he had thought to trudge on foot, had
lapped the abate in Capuan slumber. The midday halt aroused him. The
travellers rested at an inn on the edge of the hills, and here
Cantapresto proved to his charge that, as he phrased it, his belly had
as short a memory for food as his heart for injuries. A flask of Asti
put him in the talking mood, and as they drove on he regaled Odo with a
lively picture of the life on which he was about to enter.

"You are going," said he, "to one of the first cities of Europe; one
that has all the beauty and elegance of the French capital without its
follies and excesses. Turin is blessed with a court where good manners
and a fine tone are more highly prized than the extravagances of genius;
and I have heard it said of his Majesty that he was delighted to see his
courtiers wearing the French fashions outside their heads, provided they
didn't carry the French ideas within. You are too young, doubtless,
cavaliere, to have heard of the philosophers who are raising such a
pother north of the Alps: a set of madmen that, because their birth
doesn't give them the entree of Versailles, are preaching that men
should return to a state of nature, great ladies suckle their young like
animals, and the peasantry own their land like nobles. Luckily you'll
hear little of this infectious talk in Turin: the King stamps out the
philosophers like vermin or packs them off to splutter their heresies in
Milan or Venice. But to a nobleman mindful of the privileges of his
condition there is no more agreeable sojourn in Europe. The wines are
delicious, the women--er--accomplished--and though the sbirri may hug
one a trifle close now and then, why, with money and discretion, a
friend or two in the right quarters, and the wit to stand well with the
Church, there's no city in Europe where a man may have pleasanter sins
to confess."

The carriage, by this, was descending the last curves above the valley,
and before them, in a hollow of the hills, blinked the warm shimmer of
maize and vine, like some bright vintage brimming its cup. The soprano
waved a convivial hand.

"Look," he cried, "what Nature has done for this happy region! Where
herself has spread the table so bountifully, should her children hang
back from the feast? I vow, cavaliere, if the mountains were built for
hermits and ascetics, then the plain was made level for dancing,
banqueting and the pleasures of the villeggiatura. If God had meant us
to break our teeth on nuts and roots, why did He hang the vine with
fruit and draw three crops of wheat from this indulgent soil? I protest
when I look on such a scene as this, it is sufficient incentive to
lowliness to remember that the meek shall inherit the earth!"

This mood held Cantapresto till his after-dinner sleep overtook him; and
when he woke again the chariot was clattering across the bridge of
Chivasso. The Po rolled its sunset crimson between flats that seemed
dull and featureless after the broken scenery of the hills; but beyond
the bridge rose the towers and roofs of the town, with its
cathedral-front catching the last slant of light. In the streets dusk
had fallen and a lamp flared under the arch of the inn before which the
travellers halted. Odo's head was heavy, and he hardly noticed the
figures thronging the caffe into which they were led; but presently
there rose a shout of "Cantapresto!" and a ring of waving arms and
flashing teeth encircled his companion.

These appendages belonged to a troop of men and women, some masked and
in motley, others in discoloured travel-stained garments, who pressed
about the soprano with cries of joyous recognition. He was evidently an
old favourite of the band, for a duenna in tattered velvet fell on his
neck with genial unreserve, a pert soubrette caught him by the arm the
duenna left free, and a terrific Matamor with a nose like a scimitar
slapped him on the back with a tin sword.

Odo's glimpse of the square at Oropa told him that here was a band of
strolling players such as Cantapresto had talked of on the ride back to
Donnaz. Don Gervaso's instructions and the old Marchioness's warning
against the theatre were present enough in the boy's mind to add a touch
of awe to the curiosity with which he observed these strange objects of
the Church's reprobation. They struck him, it must be owned, as more
pitiable than alarming, for the duenna's toes were coming through her
shoes, and one or two of the children who hung on the outskirts of the
group looked as lean and hungry under their spangles as the
foundling-girl of Pontesordo. Spite of this they seemed a jolly crew,
and ready (at Cantapresto's expense) to celebrate their encounter with
the ex-soprano in unlimited libations of Asti and Val Pulicello. The
singer, however, hung back with protesting gestures.

"Gently, then, gently, dear friends--dear companions! When was it we
parted? In the spring of the year--and we meet now in the late summer.
As the seasons change so do our conditions: if the spring is a season of
folly, then is the harvest-time the period for reflection. When we last
met I was a strolling poet, glad to serve your gifted company within the
scope of my talents--now, ladies and gentlemen, now"--he drew himself up
with pride--"now you behold in me the governor and friend of the
heir-presumptive of Pianura."

Cries of incredulity and derision greeted this announcement, and one of
the girls called out laughingly, "Yet you have the same old cassock to
your back!"

"And the same old passage from your mouth to your belly," added an
elastic Harlequin, reaching an arm across the women's shoulders. "Come,
Cantapresto, we'll help you line it with good wine, to the health of his
most superlatively serene Highness, the heir-presumptive of Pianura; and
where is that fabulous personage, by the way?"

Odo at this retreated hastily behind the soprano; but a pretty girl
catching sight of him, he found himself dragged into the centre of the
company, who hailed him with fantastic obeisances. Supper meanwhile was
being laid on the greasy table down the middle of the room. The Matamor,
who seemed the director of the troupe, thundered out his orders for
maccaroni, fried eels and sausages; the inn-servants flanked the plates
with wine-flasks and lumps of black bread, and in a moment the hungry
comedians, thrusting Odo into a high seat at the head of the table, were
falling on the repast with a prodigious clatter of cutlery.

Of the subsequent incidents of the feast--the banter of the younger
women, the duenna's lachrymose confidences, the incessant interchange of
theatrical jargon and coarse pleasantry--there remained to Odo but a
confused image, obscured by the smoke of guttering candles, the fumes of
wine and the stifling air of the low-ceilinged tavern. Even the face of
the pretty girl who had dragged him from his concealment, and who now
sat at his side, plying him with sweets from her own plate, began to
fade into the general blur; and his last impression was of Cantapresto's
figure dilating to immense proportions at the other end of the table, as
the soprano rose with shaking wine-glass to favour the company with a
song. The chorus, bursting forth in response, surged over Odo's drowning
senses, and he was barely aware, in the tumult of noise and lights, of
an arm slipped about him, a softly-heaving pillow beneath his head, and
the gradual subsidence into dark delicious peace.

So, on the first night of his new life, the heir-presumptive of Pianura
fell asleep with his head in a dancing-girl's breast.


1.8.

The travellers were to journey by Vettura from Chivasso to Turin; and
when Odo woke next morning the carriage stood ready in the courtyard.

Cantapresto, mottled and shamefaced, with his bands awry and an air of
tottering dignity, was gathering their possessions together, and the
pretty girl who had pillowed Odo's slumbers now knelt by his bed and
laughingly drew on his stockings. She was a slim brown morsel, not much
above his age, with a glance that flitted like a bird, and round
shoulders slipping out of her kerchief. A wave of shyness bathed Odo to
the forehead as their eyes met: he hung his head stupidly and turned
away when she fetched the comb to dress his hair.

His toilet completed, she called out to the abate to go below and see
that the cavaliere's chocolate was ready; and as the door closed she
turned and kissed Odo on the lips.

"Oh, how red you are!" she cried laughing. "Is that the first kiss
you've ever had? Then you'll remember me when you're Duke of
Pianura--Mirandolina of Chioggia, the first girl you ever kissed!" She
was pulling his collar straight while she talked, so that he could not
get away from her. "You will remember me, won't you?" she persisted. "I
shall be a great actress by that time, and you'll appoint me prima
amorosa to the ducal theatre of Pianura, and throw me a diamond bracelet
from your Highness's box and make all the court ladies ready to poison
me for rage!" She released his collar and dropped away from him. "Ah,
no, I shall be a poor strolling player, and you a great prince," she
sighed, "and you'll never, never think of me again; but I shall always
remember that I was the first girl you ever kissed!"

She hung back in a dazzle of tears, looking so bright and tender that
Odo's bashfulness melted like a spring frost.

"I shall never be Duke," he cried, "and I shall never forget you!" And
with that he turned and kissed her boldly and then bolted down the
stairs like a hare. And all that day he scorched and froze with the
thought that perhaps she had been laughing at him.

Cantapresto was torpid after the feast, and Odo detected in him an air
of guilty constraint. The boy was glad enough to keep silence, and they
rolled on without speaking through the wide glowing landscape. Already
the nearness of a great city began to make itself felt. The bright
champaign was scattered over with farm-houses, their red-tiled
pigeon-cots and their granges latticed with openwork terra-cotta
pleasantly breaking the expanse of maize and mulberry; villages lay
along the banks of the canals intersecting the plain; and the hills
beyond the Po were planted with villas and monasteries.

All the afternoon they drove between umbrageous parks and under the
walls of terraced vineyards. It was a region of delectable shade, with
glimpses here and there of gardens flashing with fountains and villa
roofs decked with statues and vases; and at length, toward sunset, a
bend of the road brought them out on a fair-spreading city, so
flourishing in buildings, so beset with smiling hills, that Odo,
springing from his seat, cried out in sheer joy of the spectacle.

They had still the suburbs to traverse; and darkness was falling when
they entered the gates of Turin. This brought the fresh amazement of
wide lamplit streets, clean and bright as a ball-room, lined with
palaces and filled with well-dressed loungers: officers in the brilliant
Sardinian uniforms, fine gentlemen in French tie-wigs and narrow-sleeved
coats, merchants hurrying home from business, ecclesiastics in
high-swung carriages, and young bloods dashing by in their curricles.
The tables before the coffee-houses were thronged with idlers taking
their chocolate and reading the gazettes; and here and there the arched
doorway of a palace showed some gay party supping al fresco in a garden
hung with lamps.

The flashing of lights and the noise of the streets roused Cantapresto,
who sat up with a sudden assumption of dignity.

"Ah, cavaliere," said he, "you now see a great city, a famous city, a
city aptly called 'the Paris of Italy.' Nowhere else shall you find such
well-lit streets, such fair pavements, shops so full of Parisian wares,
promenades so crowded with fine carriages and horses. What a life a
young gentleman may lead here! The court is hospitable, society amiable,
the theatres are the best-appointed in Italy."

Here Cantapresto paused with a deprecating cough.

"Only one thing is necessary," he went on, "to complete enjoyment of the
fruits of this garden of Eden; and that is"--he coughed
again--"discretion. His Majesty, cavaliere, is a father to his subjects;
the Church is their zealous mother; and between two such parents, and
the innumerable delegates of their authority, why, you may fancy, sir,
that a man has to wear his eyes on all sides of his head. Discretion is
a virtue the Church herself commends; it is natural, then, that she
should afford her children full opportunity to practise it. And look
you, cavaliere, it is like gymnastics: the younger you acquire it, the
less effort it costs. Our Maker Himself has taught us the value of
silence by putting us speechless into the world: if we learn to talk
later we do it at our own risk! But for your own part, cavaliere--since
the habit cannot too early be exercised--I would humbly counsel you to
say nothing to your illustrious parents of our little diversion of last
evening."

The Countess Valdu lived on the upper floor of a rococo palace near the
Piazza San Carlo; and here Odo, led by Cantapresto, presently found
himself shown into an apartment where several ladies and gentlemen sat
at cards. His mother, detaching herself from the group, embraced him
with unusual warmth, and the old Count, more painted and perfumed than
ever, hurried up with an obsequious greeting. Odo for the first time
found himself of consequence in the world; and as he was passed from
guest to guest, questioned about his journey, praised for his good
colour and stout looks, complimented on his high prospects, and
laughingly entreated not to forget his old friends when fortune should
advance him to the duchy, he began to feel himself a reigning potentate
already.

His mother, as he soon learned, had sunk into a life almost as dull and
restricted as that she had left Donnaz to escape. Count Valdu's position
at court was more ornamental than remunerative, the income from his
estates was growing annually smaller, and he was involved in costly
litigation over the sale of some entailed property. Such conditions were
little to the Countess's humour, and the society to which her narrow
means confined her offered few distractions to her vanity. The
frequenters of the house were chiefly poor relations and hangers-on of
the Count's, the parasites who in those days were glad to subsist on the
crumbs of the slenderest larder. Half-a-dozen hungry Countesses, their
lean admirers, a superannuated abate or two, and a flock of threadbare
ecclesiastics, made up Donna Laura's circle; and even her cicisbeo,
selected in family council under the direction of her confessor, was an
austere gentleman of middle age, who collected ancient coins and was
engaged in composing an essay on the Martellian verse.

This company, which devoted hours to the new French diversion of the
parfilage, and spent the evenings in drinking lemonade and playing
basset for small stakes, found its chief topic of conversation in the
only two subjects safely discussed in Turin at that day--the doings of
the aristocracy and of the clergy. The fashion of the Queen's headdress
at the last circle, the marked manner in which his Majesty had lately
distinguished the brilliant young cavalry officer, Count Roberto di
Tournanches, the third marriage of the Countess Alfieri of Asti, the
incredibility of the rumour that the court ladies of Versailles had
taken to white muslin and Leghorn hats, the probable significance of the
Vicar-general's visit to Rome, the subject of the next sacred
representation to be given by the nuns of Santa Croce--such were the
questions that engaged the noble frequenters of Casa Valdu.

This was the only society that Donna Laura saw; for she was too poor to
dress to her taste and too proud to show herself in public without the
appointments becoming her station. Her sole distraction consisted in
visits to the various shrines--the Sudario, the Consolata, the Corpus
Domini--at which the feminine aristocracy offered up its devotions and
implored absolution for sins it had often no opportunity to commit: for
though fashion accorded cicisbei to the fine ladies of Turin, the Church
usually restricted their intercourse to the exchange of the most
harmless amenities.

Meanwhile the antechamber was as full of duns as the approach to Donna
Laura's apartment at Pianura; and Odo guessed that the warmth of the
maternal welcome sprang less from natural affection than from the hope
of using his expectations as a sop to her creditors. The pittance which
the ducal treasury allowed for his education was scarce large enough to
be worth diverting to other ends; but a potential prince is a shield to
the most vulnerable fortunes. In this character Odo for the first time
found himself flattered, indulged, and made the centre of the company.
The contrast to his life of subjection at Donnaz; the precocious
initiation into motives that tainted the very fount of filial piety; the
taste of this mingled draught of adulation and disillusionment, might
have perverted a nature more self-centred than his. From this
perversion, and from many subsequent perils he was saved by a kind of
imaginative sympathy, a wondering joy in the mere spectacle of life,
that tinged his most personal impressions with a streak of the
philosophic temper. If this trait did not save him from sorrow, it at
least lifted him above pettiness; if it could not solve the difficulties
of life it could arm him to endure them. It was the best gift of the
past from which he sprang; but it was blent with another quality, a deep
moral curiosity that ennobled his sensuous enjoyment of the outward show
of life; and these elements were already tending in him, as in countless
youths of his generation, to the formation of a new spirit, the spirit
that was to destroy one world without surviving to create another.

Of all this none could have been less conscious than the lad just
preparing to enter on his studies at the Royal Academy of Turin. That
institution, adjoining the royal palace, was a kind of nursery or
forcing-house for the budding nobility of Savoy. In one division of the
sumptuous building were housed his Majesty's pages, a corps of luxurious
indolent young fops; another wing accommodated the regular students of
the Academy, sons of noblemen and gentlemen destined for the secular
life, while a third was set aside for the "forestieri" or students from
foreign countries and from the other Italian states. To this quarter Odo
Valsecca was allotted; though it was understood that on leaving the
Academy he was to enter the Sardinian service.

It was customary for a young gentleman of Odo's rank to be attended at
the Academy not only by a body-servant but by a private governor or
pedant, whose business it was to overlook his studies, attend him
abroad, and have an eye to the society he frequented. The old Marquess
of Donnaz had sent his daughter, by Odo's hand, a letter recommending
her to select her son's governor with particular care, choosing rather a
person of grave behaviour and assured morality than one of your glib
ink-spatterers who may know the inside of all the folios in the King's
library without being the better qualified for the direction of a young
gentleman's conduct; and to this letter Don Gervaso appended the terse
postcript: "Your excellency is especially warned against according this
or any other position of trust to the merry-andrew who calls himself the
abate Cantapresto."

Donna Laura, with a shrug, handed the letter to her husband; Count
Valdu, adjusting his glasses, observed it was notorious that people
living in the depths of the country thought themselves qualified to
instruct their city relatives on all points connected with the social
usages; and the cicisbeo suggested that he could recommend an abate who
was proficient in the construction of the Martellian verse, and who
would made no extra charge for that accomplishment.

"Charges!" the Countess cried. "There's a matter my father doesn't deign
to consider. It's not enough, nowadays, to give the lads a governor, but
they must maintain their servants too, an idle gluttonous crew that prey
on their pockets and get a commission off every tradesman's bill."

Count Valdu lifted a deprecating hand.

"My dear, nothing could be more offensive to his Majesty than any
attempt to reduce the way of living of the pupils of the Academy."

"Of course," she shrugged--"But who's to pay? The Duke's beggarly
pittance hardly clothes him."

The cicisbeo suggested that the cavaliere Odo had expectations; at which
Donna Laura flushed and turned uneasy; while the Count, part of whose
marital duty it was to intervene discreetly between his lady and her
knight, now put forth the remark that the abate Cantapresto seemed a
shrewd serviceable fellow.

"Nor do I like to turn him adrift," cried the Countess instantly, "after
he has obliged us by attending my son on his journey."

"And I understand," added the Count, "that he would be glad to serve the
cavaliere in any capacity you might designate."

"Why not in all?" said the cicisbeo thoughtfully. "There would be
undoubted advantages to the cavaliere in possessing a servant who would
explain the globes while powdering his hair and not be above calling his
chair when he attended him to a lecture."

And the upshot of it was that when Odo, a few days later, entered on his
first term at the Academy, he was accompanied by the abate Cantapresto,
who had agreed, for a minimum of pay, to serve him faithfully in the
double capacity of pedagogue and lacquey.

The considerable liberty accorded the foreign students made Odo's first
year at the Academy at once pleasanter and less profitable than had he
been one of the regular pupils. The companions among whom he found
himself were a set of lively undisciplined young gentlemen, chiefly from
England, Russia and the German principalities; all in possession of more
or less pocket-money and attended by governors either pedantic and
self-engrossed or vulgarly subservient. These young sprigs, whose
ambition it was to ape the dress and manners of the royal pages, led a
life of dissipation barely interrupted by a few hours of attendance at
the academic classes. From the ill-effects of such surroundings Odo was
preserved by an intellectual curiosity that flung him ravening on his
studies. It was not that he was of a bookish habit, or that the drudgery
of the classes was less irksome to him than to the other pupils; but not
even the pedantic methods then prevailing, or the distractions of his
new life, could dull the flush of his first encounter with the past. His
imagination took fire over the dry pages of Cornelius Nepos, glowed with
the mild pastoral warmth of the Georgics and burst into flame at the
first hexameters of the Aeneid. He caught but a fragment of meaning here
and there, but the sumptuous imagery, the stirring names, the glimpses
into a past where Roman senators were mingled with the gods of a
gold-pillared Olympus, filled his mind with a misty pageant of
immortals. These moments of high emotion were interspersed with hours of
plodding over the Latin grammar and the textbooks of philosophy and
logic. Books were unknown ground to Cantapresto, and among masters and
pupils there was not one who could help Odo to the meaning of his task,
or who seemed aware that it might have a meaning. To most of the lads
about him the purpose of the Academy was to fit young gentlemen for the
army or the court; to give them the chance of sweating a shirt every
morning with the fencing-master and of learning to thread the
intricacies of the court minuet. They modelled themselves on the dress
and bearing of the pages, who were always ruffling it about the
quadrangle in court dress and sword, or booted and spurred for a day's
hunting at the King's chase of Stupinigi. To receive a nod or a word
from one of these young demigods on his way to the King's opera-box or
just back from a pleasure-party at her Majesty's villa above the Po--to
hear of their tremendous exploits and thrilling escapades--seemed to put
the whole school in touch with the fine gentleman's world of intrigue,
cards and duelling: the world in which ladies were subjugated, fortunes
lost, adversaries run through and tradesmen ruined with that
imperturbable grace which distinguished the man of quality from the
plebeian.

Among the privileges of the foreign pupils were frequent visits to the
royal theatre; and here was to Odo a source of unimagined joys. His
superstitious dread of the stage (a sentiment, he soon discovered, that
not even his mother's director shared) made his heart beat oppressively
as he first set foot in the theatre. It was a gala night, boxes and
stalls were thronged, and the audience-hall unfolded its glittering
curves like some poisonous flower enveloping him in rich malignant
fragrance. This impression was dispelled by the rising of the curtain on
a scene of such Claude-like loveliness as it would have been impossible
to associate with the bug-bear tales of Donnaz or with the coarse antics
of the comedians at Chivasso. A temple girt with mysterious shade,
lifting its colonnade above a sunlit harbour; and before the temple,
vine-wreathed nymphs waving their thyrsi through the turns of a
melodious dance--such was the vision that caught up Odo and swept him
leagues away from the rouged and starred assemblage gathered in the
boxes to gossip, flirt, eat ices and chocolates, and incidentally, in
the pauses of their talk, to listen for a moment to the ravishing airs
of Metastasio's Achilles in Scyros.

The distance between such performances--magic evocations of light and
colour and melody--and the gross buffoonery of the popular stage, still
tainted with the obscenities of the old commedia dell' arte, in a
measure explains the different points from which at that period the
stage was viewed in Italy: a period when in such cities as Milan,
Venice, Turin, actors and singers were praised to the skies and loaded
with wealth and favours, while the tatterdemalion players who set up
their boards in the small towns at market-time or on feast-days were
despised by the people and flung like carrion into unconsecrated graves.
The impression Odo had gathered from Don Gervaso's talk was of the
provincial stage in all its pothouse license; but here was a spectacle
as lofty and harmonious as some great religious pageant. As the action
developed and the beauty of the verse was borne to Odo on the light
hurrying ripples of Caldara's music he turned instinctively to share his
pleasure with those about him. Cantapresto, in a new black coat and
ruffles, was conspicuously taking snuff from the tortoiseshell box which
the Countess's cicisbeo had given him; but Odo saw that he took less
pleasure in the spectacle than in the fact of accompanying the
heir-presumptive of Pianura to a gala performance at the royal theatre;
and the lads about them were for the most part engaged either with their
own dress and appearance, or in exchanging greetings with the royal
pages and the older students. A few of these sat near Odo, disdainfully
superior in their fob-chains and queues; and as the boy glanced about
him he met the fixed stare of one of the number, a tall youth seated at
his elbow, and conspicuous, even in that modish company, for the
exaggerated elegance of his dress. This young man, whose awkward bearing
and long lava-hued face crowned with flamboyant hair contrasted oddly
with his finical apparel, returned Odo's look with a gaze of eager
comprehension. He too, it was clear, felt the thrill and wonder, or at
least re-lived them in the younger lad's emotion; and from that moment
Odo felt himself in mute communion with his neighbour.

The quick movement of the story--the succession of devices by which the
wily Ulysses lures Achilles to throw off his disguise, while Deidamia
strives to conceal his identity; the scenic beauties of the background,
shifting from sculpture-gallery to pleasance, from pleasance to
banquet-hall; the pomp and glitter of the royal train, the melting
graces of Deidamia and her maidens; seemed, in their multiple appeal, to
develop in Odo new faculties of perception. It was his first initiation
into Italian poetry, and the numbers, now broken, harsh and passionate,
now flowing into liquid sweetness, were so blent with sound and colour
that he scarce knew through which sense they reached him. Deidamia's
strophes thrilled him like the singing-girl's kiss, and at the young
hero's cry--

    Ma lo so ch' io sono Achille,
    E mi sento Achille in sen--

his fists tightened and the blood hummed in his ears.

In the scene of the banquet-hall, where the followers of Ulysses lay
before Lycomedes the offerings of the Greek chieftains, and, while the
King and Deidamia are marvelling at the jewels and the Tyrian robes,
Achilles, unmindful of his disguise, bursts out

Ah, chi vide finora armi piu belle?

--at this supreme point Odo again turned to his neighbour. They
exchanged another look, and at the close of the act the youth leaned
forward to ask with an air of condescension: "Is this your first
acquaintance with the divine Metastasio?"

"I have never been in a play-house before," said Odo reddening.

The other smiled. "You are fortunate in having so worthy an introduction
to the stage. Many of our operas are merely vulgar and ridiculous; but
Metastasio is a great poet." Odo nodded a breathless assent. "A great
poet," his new acquaintance resumed, "and handling a great theme. But do
you not suffer from the silly songs that perpetually interrupt the flow
of the verse? To me they are intolerable. Metastasio might have been a
great tragic dramatist if Italy would have let him. But Italy does not
want tragedies--she wishes to be sung to, danced to, made eyes at,
flattered and amused! Give her anything, anything that shall help her to
forget her own abasement. Panem et circenses! that is always her cry.
And who can wonder that her sovereigns and statesmen are willing to
humour her, when even her poets stoop to play the mountebank for her
diversion?" The speaker, ruffling his locks with a hand that scattered
the powder, turned on the brilliant audience his strange corrugated
frown. "Fools! simpletons!" he cried, "not to see that in applauding the
Achilles of Metastasio they are smiling at the allegory of their own
abasement! What are the Italians of today but men tricked out in women's
finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first
signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who dares tell
them the truth, not disguised in sentimental frippery, not ending in a
maudlin reconciliation of love and glory--but the whole truth, naked,
cold and fatal as a patriot's blade; a poet who dares show these
bedizened courtiers they are no freer than the peasants they oppress,
and tell the peasants they are entitled to the same privileges as their
masters!" He paused and drew back with a supercilious smile. "But
doubtless, sir," said he, "I offend you in thus arraigning your sacred
caste; for unless I mistake you belong to the race of demi-gods--the
Titans whose downfall is at hand?" He swept the boxes with a
contemptuous eye.

Little of this tirade was clear to Odo; but something in the speaker's
tone moved him to answer, with a quick lifting of his head: "My name is
Odo Valsecca, of the Dukes of Pianura;" when, fearing he had seemed to
parade his birth before one evidently of inferior station, he at once
added with a touch of shyness: "And you, sir, are perhaps a poet, since
you speak so beautifully?"

At which, with a stare and a straightening of his long awkward body, the
other haughtily returned: "A poet, sir? I am the Count Vittorio Alfieri
of Asti."


1.9.

The singular being with whom chance had thus brought him acquainted was
to have a lasting influence on the formation of Odo's character.

Vittorio Alfieri, then just concluding, at the age of sixteen, his
desultory years of academic schooling, was probably the most
extraordinary youth in Charles Emmanuel's dominion. Of the future
student, of the tragic poet who was to prepare the liberation of Italy
by raising the political ideals of his generation, this moody boy with
his craze for dress and horses, his pride of birth and contempt for his
own class, his liberal theories and insolently aristocratic practice,
must have given small promise to the most discerning observer. It seems
indeed probable that none thought him worth observing and that he passed
among his townsmen merely as one of the most idle and extravagant young
noblemen in a society where idleness and extravagance were held to be
the natural attributes of the great. But in the growth of character the
light on the road to Damascus is apt to be preceded by faint premonitory
gleams; and even in his frivolous days at the Academy Alfieri carried a
Virgil in his pocket and wept and trembled over Ariosto's verse.

It was the instant response of Odo's imagination that drew the two
together. Odo, as one of the foreign pupils, was quartered in the same
wing of the Academy with the students of Alfieri's class, and enjoyed an
almost equal freedom. Thus, despite the difference of age, the lads
found themselves allied by taste and circumstances. Among the youth of
their class they were perhaps the only two who already felt, however
obscurely, the stirring of unborn ideals, the pressure of that tide of
renovation that was to sweep them, on widely-sundered currents, to the
same uncharted deep. Alfieri, at any rate, represented to the younger
lad the seer who held in his hands the keys of knowledge and beauty. Odo
could never forget the youth who first leant him Annibale Caro's Aeneid
and Metastasio's opera libretti, Voltaire's Zaire and the comedies of
Goldoni; while Alfieri perhaps found in his companion's sympathy with
his own half-dormant tastes the first incentive to a nobler activity.
Certain it is that, in the interchange of their daily comradeship, the
elder gave his friend much that he was himself unconscious of
possessing, and perhaps first saw reflected in Odo's more vivid
sensibility an outline of the formless ideals coiled in the depths of
his own sluggish nature.

The difference in age, and the possession of an independent fortune,
which the laws of Savoy had left Alfieri free to enjoy since his
fifteenth year, gave him an obvious superiority over Odo; but if
Alfieri's amusements separated him from his young friend, his tastes
were always drawing them together; and Odo was happily of those who are
more engaged in profiting by what comes their way than in pining for
what escapes them. Much as he admired Alfieri, it was somehow impossible
for the latter to condescend to him; and the equality of intercourse
between the two was perhaps its chief attraction to a youth surfeited
with adulation.

Of the opportunities his new friendship brought him, none became in
after years a pleasanter memory to Odo than his visits with Vittorio to
the latter's uncle, the illustrious architect Count Benedetto Alfieri.
This accomplished and amiable man, who had for many years devoted his
talents to the King's service, was lodged in a palace adjoining the
Academy; and thither, one holiday afternoon, Vittorio conducted his
young friend.

Ignorant as Odo was of all the arts, he felt on the very threshold the
new quality of his surroundings. These tall bare rooms, where busts and
sarcophagi were ranged as in the twilight of a temple, diffused an
influence that lowered the voice and hushed the step. In the
semi-Parisian capital where French architects designed the King's
pleasure-houses and the nobility imported their boudoir-panellings from
Paris and their damask hangings from Lyons, Benedetto Alfieri
represented the old classic tradition, the tradition of the "grand
manner," which had held its own through all later variations of taste,
running parallel with the barocchismo of the seventeenth century and the
effeminate caprices of the rococo period. He had lived much in Rome, in
the company of men like Winckelmann and Maffei, in that society where
the revival of classical research was being forwarded by the liberality
of Princes and Cardinals and by the indefatigable zeal of the scholars
in their pay. From this centre of aesthetic reaction Alfieri had
returned to the Gallicized Turin, with its preference for the graceful
and ingenious rather than for the large, the noble, the restrained;
bringing to bear on the taste of his native city the influence of a view
raised but perhaps narrowed by close study of the past: the view of a
generation of architects in whom archeological curiosity had stifled the
artistic instinct, and who, instead of assimilating the spirit of the
past like their great predecessors, were engrossed in a sterile
restoration of the letter. It may be said of this school of architects
that they were of more service to posterity than to their
contemporaries; for while they opened the way to modern antiquarian
research, their pedantry checked the natural development of a style
which, if left to itself, might in time have found new and more vigorous
forms of expression.

To Odo, happily, Count Benedetto's surroundings spoke more forcibly than
his theories. Every object in the calm severe rooms appealed to the boy
with the pure eloquence of form. Casts of the Vatican busts stood
against the walls and a niche at one end of the library contained a
marble copy of the Apollo Belvedere. The sarcophagi with their winged
genii, their garlands and bucranes, and porphyry tazzas, the fragments
of Roman mosaic and Pompeian fresco-painting, roused Odo's curiosity as
if they had been the scattered letters of a new alphabet; and he saw
with astonishment his friend Vittorio's indifference to these wonders.
Count Benedetto, it was clear, was resigned to his nephew's lack of
interest. The old man doubtless knew that he represented to the youth
only the rich uncle whose crotchets must be humoured for the sake of
what his pocket may procure; and such kindly tolerance made Odo regret
that Vittorio should not at least affect an interest in his uncle's
pursuits.

Odo's eagerness to see and learn filled Count Benedetto with a simple
joy. He brought forth all his treasures for the boy's instruction and
the two spent many an afternoon poring over Piranesi's Roman etchings,
Maffei's Verona Illustrata, and Count Benedetto's own elegant
pencil-drawings of classical remains. Like all students of his day he
had also his cabinet of antique gems and coins, from which Odo obtained
more intimate glimpses of that buried life so marvellously exhumed
before him: hints of traffic in far-off market-places and familiar
gestures of hands on which those very jewels might have sparkled. Nor
did the Count restrict the boy's enquiries to that distant past; and for
the first time Odo heard of the masters who had maintained the great
classical tradition on Latin soil: Sanmichele, Vignola, Sansovino, and
the divine Michael Angelo, whom the old architect never named without
baring his head. From the works of these architects Odo formed his first
conception of the earlier, more virile manner which the first contact
with Graeco-Roman antiquity had produced. The Count told him, too, of
the great painters whose popularity had been lessened, if their fame had
not been dimmed, by the more recent achievements of Correggio, Guido,
Guercino, and the Bolognese school. The splendour of the stanze of the
Vatican, the dreadful majesty of the Sistine ceiling, revealed to Odo
the beauty of that unmatched moment before grandeur broke into bombast.
His early association with the expressive homely art of the chapel at
Pontesordo and with the half-pagan beauty of Luini's compositions had
formed his taste on soberer lines than the fashion of the day affected;
and his imagination breathed freely on the heights of the Latin
Parnassus. Thus, while his friend Vittorio stormed up and down the quiet
rooms, chattering about his horses, boasting of his escapades, or
ranting against the tyranny of the Sardinian government, Odo, at the old
Count's side, was entering on the great inheritance of the past.

Such an initiation was the more precious to him from the indifference of
those about him to all forms of liberal culture. Among the greater
Italian cities, Turin was at that period the least open to new
influences, the most rigidly bound up in the formulas of the past. While
Milan, under the Austrian rule, was becoming a centre of philosophic
thought; while Naples was producing a group of economists such as
Galiani, Gravina and Filangieri; while ecclesiastical Rome was
dedicating herself to the investigation of ancient art and polity, and
even flighty Venice had her little set of "liberals," who read Voltaire
and Hume and wept over the rights of man, the old Piedmontese capital
lay in the grasp of a bigoted clergy and of a reigning house which was
already preparing to superimpose Prussian militarism on the old feudal
discipline of the border. Generations of hard fighting and rigorous
living had developed in the nobles the qualities which were preparing
them for the great part their country was to play; and contact with the
Waldensian and Calvinist heresies had stiffened Piedmontese piety into a
sombre hatred of schism and a minute observance of the mechanical rules
of the faith. Such qualities could be produced only at the expense of
intellectual freedom; and if Piedmont could show a few nobles like
Massimo d'Azeglio's father, who "made the education of his children his
first and gravest thought" and supplemented the deficiencies of his
wife's conventual training by "consecrating to her daily four hours of
reading, translating and other suitable exercises," the commoner view
was that of Alfieri's own parents, who frequently repeated in their
son's hearing "the old maxim of the Piedmontese nobility" that there is
no need for a gentleman to be a scholar. Such at any rate was the
opinion of the old Marquess of Donnaz, and of all the frequenters of
Casa Valdu. Odo's stepfather was engrossed in the fulfilment of his
duties about the court, and Donna Laura, under the influence of poverty
and ennui, had sunk into a state of rigid pietism; so that the lad, on
his visits to his mother, found himself in a world where art was
represented by the latest pastel-portrait of a court beauty, literature
by Liguori's Glories of Mary or the blessed Battista's Mental Sorrows of
Christ, and history by the conviction that Piedmont's efforts to stamp
out the enemies of the Church had distinguished her above every other
country of Europe. Donna Laura's cicisbeo was indeed a member of the
local Arcadia, and given to celebrating in verse every incident in the
noble household of Valdu, from its lady's name-day to the death of a pet
canary; but his own tastes inclined to the elegant Bettinelli, whose
Lettere Virgiliane had so conclusively shown Dante to be a writer of
barbarous doggerel; and among the dilettanti of the day one heard less
of Raphael than of Carlo Maratta, less of Ariosto and Petrarch than of
the Jesuit poet Padre Cevo, author of the sublime "heroico-comic" poem
on the infancy of Jesus.

It was in fact mainly to the Jesuits that Italy, in the early part of
the eighteenth century, owed her literature and her art, as well as the
direction of her religious life. Though the reaction against the order
was everywhere making itself felt, though one Italian sovereign after
another had been constrained to purchase popularity or even security by
banishing the Society from his dominions, the Jesuits maintained their
hold on the aristocracy, whose pretentions they flattered, whose tastes
they affected, and to whom they represented the spirit of religious and
political conservatism, against which invisible forces were already felt
to be moving. For the use of their noble supporters, the Jesuits had
devised a religion as elaborate and ceremonious as the social usages of
the aristocracy: a religion which decked its chapels in imitation of
great ladies' boudoirs and prescribed observances in keeping with the
vapid and gossiping existence of their inmates.

To Odo, fresh from the pure air of Donnaz, where the faith of his
kinsfolk expressed itself in charity, self-denial and a noble decency of
life, there was something stifling in the atmosphere of languishing
pietism in which his mother's friends veiled the emptiness of their
days. Under the instruction of the Countess's director the boy's
conscience was enervated by the casuistries of Liguorianism and his
devotion dulled by the imposition of interminable "pious practices." It
was in his nature to grudge no sacrifice to his ideals, and he might
have accomplished without question the monotonous observances his
confessor exacted, but for the changed aspect of the Deity in whose name
they were imposed.

As with most thoughtful natures, Odo's first disillusionment was to come
from discovering not what his God condemned, but what He condoned.
Between Cantapresto's coarse philosophy of pleasure and the refined
complaisances of his new confessor he felt the distinction to be one
rather of taste than of principle; and it seemed to him that the
religion of the aristocracy might not unfairly be summed up in the
ex-soprano's cynical aphorism: "As respectful children of our Heavenly
Father it behoves us not to speak till we are spoken to."

Even the religious ceremonies he witnessed did not console him for that
chill hour of dawn, when, in the chapel at Donnaz, he had served the
mass for Don Gervaso, with a heart trembling at its own unworthiness yet
uplifted by the sense of the Divine Presence. In the churches adorned
like aristocratic drawing-rooms, of which some Madonna, wreathed in
artificial flowers, seemed the amiable and indulgent hostess, and where
the florid passionate music of the mass was rendered by the King's opera
singers before a throng of chattering cavaliers and ladies, Odo prayed
in vain for a reawakening of the old emotion. The sense of sonship was
gone. He felt himself an alien in the temple of this affable divinity,
and his heart echoed no more than the cry which had once lifted him on
wings of praise to the very threshold of the hidden glory--

Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et locum habitationis gloriae tuae!

It was in the first reaction from this dimly felt loss that he lit one
day on a volume which Alfieri had smuggled into the Academy--the Lettres
Philosophiques of Francois Arouet de Voltaire.



BOOK II.

THE NEW LIGHT.

Zu neuen Ufern lockt ein neuer Tag.


2.1.

One afternoon of April in the year 1774, Odo Valsecca, riding down the
hillside below the church of the Superga, had reined in his horse at a
point where a group of Spanish chestnuts overhung the way. The air was
light and pure, the shady turf invited him, and dismounting he bid his
servant lead the horses to the wayside inn half way down the slope.

The spot he had chosen, though secluded as some nook above the gorge of
Donnaz, commanded a view of the Po rolling at his feet like a flood of
yellowish metal, and beyond, outspread in clear spring sunshine, the
great city in the bosom of the plain. The spectacle was fair enough to
touch any fancy: brown domes and facades set in new-leaved gardens and
surrounded by vineyards extending to the nearest acclivities;
country-houses glancing through the fresh green of planes and willows;
monastery-walls cresting the higher ridges; and westward the Po winding
in sunlit curves toward the Alps.

Odo had lost none of his sensitiveness to such impressions; but the sway
of another mood turned his eye from the outstretched beauty of the city
to the vernal solitude about him. It was the season when old memories of
Donnaz worked in his blood; when the banks and hedges of the fresh
hill-country about Turin cheated him with a breath of budding
beech-groves and the fragrance of crushed fern in the glens of the high
Pennine valleys. It was a mere waft, perhaps, from some clod of loosened
earth, or the touch of cool elastic moss as he flung himself face
downward under the trees; but the savour, the contact filled his
nostrils with mountain air and his eyes with dim-branched distances. At
Donnaz the slow motions of the northern spring had endeared to him all
those sweet incipiencies preceding the full choral burst of leaf and
flower: the mauve mist over bare woodlands, the wet black gleams in
frost-bound hollows, the thrust of fronds through withered bracken, the
primrose-patches spreading like pale sunshine along wintry lanes. He had
always felt a sympathy for these delicate unnoted changes; but the
feeling which had formerly been like the blind stir of sap in a plant
was now a conscious sensation that groped for speech and understanding.

He had grown up among people to whom such emotions were unknown. The old
Marquess's passion for his fields and woods was the love of the
agriculturist and the hunter, not that of the naturalist or the poet;
and the aristocracy of the cities regarded the country merely as so much
soil from which to draw their maintenance. The gentlefolk never absented
themselves from town but for a few weeks of autumn, when they went to
their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of
city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that
were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo's
tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every
shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would
have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting
Countess had received the handful of wind-flowers that, fresh from a
sunrise on the hills, he had laid one morning among her toilet-boxes.
The Countess Clarice had stared and laughed, and every one of his
acquaintance, Alfieri even, would have echoed her laugh; but one man at
least had felt the divine commotion of nature's touch, had felt and
interpreted it, in words as fresh as spring verdure, in the pages of a
volume that Odo now drew from his pocket.

"I longed to dream, but some unexpected spectacle continually distracted
me from my musings. Here immense rocks hung their ruinous masses above
my head; there the thick mist of roaring waterfalls enveloped me; or
some unceasing torrent tore open at my very feet an abyss into which the
gaze feared to plunge. Sometimes I was lost in the twilight of a thick
wood; sometimes, on emerging from a dark ravine, my eyes were charmed by
the sight of an open meadow...Nature seemed to revel in unwonted
contrasts; such varieties of aspect had she united in one spot. Here was
an eastern prospect bright with spring flowers, while autumn fruits
ripened to the south and the northern face of the scene was still locked
in wintry frosts...Add to this the different angles at which the peaks
took the light, the chiaroscuro of sun and shade, and the variations of
light resulting from it at morning and evening...sum up the impressions
I have tried to describe and you will be able to form an idea of the
enchanting situation in which I found myself...The scene has indeed a
magical, a supernatural quality, which so ravishes the spirit and senses
that one seems to lose all exact notion of one's surroundings and
identity."

This was a new language to eighteenth-century readers. Already it had
swept through the length and breadth of France, like a spring storm-wind
bursting open doors and windows, and filling close candle-lit rooms with
wet gusts and the scent of beaten blossoms; but south of the Alps the
new ideas travelled slowly, and the Piedmontese were as yet scarce aware
of the man who had written thus of their own mountains. It was true
that, some thirty years earlier, in one of the very monasteries on which
Odo now looked down, a Swiss vagrant called Rousseau had embraced the
true faith with the most moving signs of edification; but the rescue of
Helvetian heretics was a favourite occupation of the Turinese nobility
and it is doubtful if any recalled the name of the strange proselyte who
had hastened to signalise his conversion by robbing his employers and
slandering an innocent maid-servant. Odo in fact owed his first
acquaintance with the French writers to Alfieri, who, in the intervals
of his wandering over Europe, now and then reappeared in Turin laden
with the latest novelties in Transalpine literature and haberdashery.
What his eccentric friend failed to provide, Odo had little difficulty
in obtaining for himself; for though most of the new writers were on the
Index, and the Sardinian censorship was notoriously severe, there was
never yet a barrier that could keep out books, and Cantapresto was a
skilled purveyor of contraband dainties. Odo had thus acquainted himself
with the lighter literature of England and France; and though he had
read but few philosophical treatises, was yet dimly aware of the new
standpoint from which, north of the Alps, men were beginning to test the
accepted forms of thought. The first disturbance of his childish faith,
and the coincident reading of the Lettres Philosophiques, had been
followed by a period of moral perturbation, during which he suffered
from that sense of bewilderment, of inability to classify the phenomena
of life, that is one of the keenest trials of inexperience. Youth and
nature had their way with him, however, and a wholesome reaction of
indifference set in. The invisible world of thought and conduct had been
the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was
close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself
and the distant heights of speculation. The old doubts, the old
dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too
profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless
acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment
of life. Some day, no doubt, the intellectual curiosity and the moral
disquietude would revive; but what he wanted now were books which
appealed not to his reason but to his emotions, which reflected as in a
mirror the rich and varied life of the senses: books that were warm to
the touch, like the little volume in his hand.

For it was not only of nature that the book spoke. Amid scenes of such
rustic freshness were set human passions as fresh and natural: a great
romantic love, subdued to duty, yet breaking forth again and again as
young shoots spring from the root of a felled tree. To
eighteenth-century readers such a picture of life was as new as its
setting. Duty, in that day, to people of quality, meant the observance
of certain fixed conventions: the correct stepping of a moral minuet; as
an inner obligation, as a voluntary tribute to Diderot's "divinity on
earth," it had hardly yet drawn breath. To depict a personal relation so
much purer and more profound than any form of sentiment then in fashion,
and then to subordinate it, unflinchingly, to the ideal of those larger
relations that link the individual to the group--this was a stroke of
originality for which it would be hard to find a parallel in modern
fiction. Here at last was an answer to the blind impulses agrope in
Odo's breast--the loosening of those springs of emotion that gushed
forth in such fresh contrast to the stagnant rills of the sentimental
pleasure-garden. To renounce a Julie would be more thrilling than--

Odo, with a sigh, thrust the book in his pocket and rose to his feet. It
was the hour of the promenade at the Valentino and he had promised the
Countess Clarice to attend her. The old high-roofed palace of the French
princess lay below him, in its gardens along the river: he could figure,
as he looked down on it, the throng of carriages and chairs, the
modishly dressed riders, the pedestrians crowding the footpath to watch
the quality go by. The vision of all that noise and glitter deepened the
sweetness of the woodland hush. He sighed again. Suddenly voices sounded
in the road below--a man's speech flecked with girlish laughter. Odo
hung back listening: the girl's voice rang like a bird-call through his
rustling fancies. Presently she came in sight: a slender black-mantled
figure hung on the arm of an elderly man in the sober dress of one of
the learned professions--a physician or a lawyer, Odo guessed. Their
being afoot, and the style of the man's dress, showed that they were of
the middle class; their demeanour, that they were father and daughter.
The girl moved with a light forward flowing of her whole body that
seemed the pledge of grace in every limb: of her face Odo had but a
bright glimpse in the eclipse of her flapping hat-brim. She stood under
his tree unheeded; but as they rose abreast of him the girl paused and
dropped her companion's arm.

"Look! The cherry flowers!" she cried, and stretched her arms to a white
gush of blossoms above the wall across the road. The movement tilted
back her hat, and Odo caught her small fine profile, wide-browed as the
head on some Sicilian coin, with a little harp-shaped ear bedded in dark
ripples.

"Oh," she wailed, straining on tiptoe, "I can't reach them!"

Her father smiled. "May temptation," said he philosophically, "always
hang as far out of your reach."

"Temptation?" she echoed.

"Is it not theft you're bent on?"

"Theft? This is a monk's orchard, not a peasant's plot."

"Confiscation, then," he humorously conceded.

"Since they pay no taxes on their cherries they might at least," she
argued, "spare a few to us poor taxpayers."

"Ah," said her father, "I want to tax their cherries, not to gather
them." He slipped a hand through her arm. "Come, child," said he, "does
not the philosopher tell us that he who enjoys a thing possesses it? The
flowers are yours already!"

"Oh, are they?" she retorted. "Then why doesn't the loaf in the baker's
window feed the beggar that looks in at it?"

"Casuist!" he cried and drew her up the bend of the road.

Odo stood gazing after them. Their words, their aspect, seemed an echo
of his reading. The father in his plain broadcloth and square-buckled
shoes, the daughter with her unpowdered hair and spreading hat, might
have stepped from the pages of the romance. What a breath of freshness
they brought with them! The girl's cheek was clear as the
cherry-blossoms, and with what lovely freedom did she move! Thus Julie
might have led Saint Preux through her "Elysium." Odo crossed the road
and, breaking one of the blossoming twigs, thrust it in the breast of
his uniform. Then he walked down the hill to the inn where the horses
waited. Half an hour later he rode up to the house where he lodged in
the Piazza San Carlo.

In the archway Cantapresto, heavy with a nine years' accretion of fat,
laid an admonishing hand on his bridle.

"Cavaliere, the Countess's black boy--"

"Well?"

"Three several times has battered the door down with a missive."

"Well?"

"The last time, I shook him off with the message that you would be there
before him."

"Be where?"

"At the Valentino; but that was an hour ago!"

Odo slipped from the saddle.

"I must dress first. Call a chair; or no--write a letter for me first.
Let Antonio carry it."

The ex-soprano, wheezing under the double burden of flesh and
consequence, had painfully laboured after Odo up the high stone flights
to that young gentleman's modest lodgings, and they stood together in a
study lined with books and hung with prints and casts from the antique.
Odo threw off his dusty coat and called the servant to remove his boots.

"Will you read the lady's letters, cavaliere?" Cantapresto asked,
obsequiously offering them on a lacquered tray.

"No--no: write first. Begin 'My angelic lady'--"

"You began the last letter in those terms, cavaliere," his scribe
reminded him with suspended pen.

"The devil! Well, then--wait. 'Throned goddess'--"

"You ended the last letter with 'throned goddess.'"

"Curse the last letter! Why did you send it?" Odo sprang up and slipped
his arms into the dress-tunic his servant had brought him. "Write
anything. Say that I am suddenly summoned by--"

"By the Count Alfieri?" Cantapresto suggested.

"Count Alfieri? Is he here? He has returned?"

"He arrived an hour ago, cavaliere. He sent you this Moorish scimitar
with his compliments. I understand he comes recently from Spain."

"Imbecile, not to have told me before! Quick, Antonio--my gloves, my
sword." Odo, flushed and animated, buckled his sword-belt with impatient
hands. "Write anything--anything to free my evening. Tomorrow
morning--tomorrow morning I shall wait on the lady. Let Antonio carry
her a nosegay with my compliments. Did you see him Cantapresto? Was he
in good health? Does he sup at home? He left no message? Quick, Antonio,
a chair!" he cried with his hand on the door.

Odo had acquired, at twenty-two, a nobility of carriage not incompatible
with the boyish candour of his gaze, and becomingly set off by the
brilliant dress-uniform of a lieutenant in one of the provincial
regiments. He was tall and fair, and a certain languor of complexion,
inherited from his father's house, was corrected in him by the vivacity
of the Donnaz blood. This now sparkled in his grey eye, and gave a glow
to his cheek, as he stepped across the threshold, treading on a sprig of
cherry-blossom that had dropped unnoticed to the floor.

Cantapresto, looking after him, caught sight of the flowers and kicked
them aside with a contemptuous toe. "I sometimes think he botanises," he
murmured with a shrug. "The Lord knows what queer notions he gets out of
all these books!"


2.2.

As an infusion of fresh blood to Odo were Alfieri's meteoric returns to
Turin. Life moved languidly in the strait-laced city, even to a young
gentleman a-tiptoe for adventure and framed to elicit it as the
hazel-wand draws water. Not that vulgar distractions were lacking. The
town, as Cantapresto had long since advised him, had its secret
leniencies, its posterns opening on clandestine pleasure; but there was
that in Odo which early turned him from such cheap counterfeits of
living. He accepted the diversions of his age, but with a clear sense of
their worth; and the youth who calls his pleasures by their true name
has learned the secret of resisting them.

Alfieri's coming set deeper springs in motion. His follies and
extravagances were on a less provincial scale than those of Odo's daily
associates. The breath of a freer life clung to him and his allusions
were so many glimpses into a larger world. His political theories were
but the enlargement of his private grievances, but the mere play of
criticism on accepted institutions was an exercise more novel and
exhilirating than the wildest ride on one of his half-tamed
thorough-breds. Still chiefly a man of pleasure, and the slave, as
always, of some rash infatuation, Alfieri was already shaking off the
intellectual torpor of his youth; and the first stirrings of his
curiosity roused an answering passion in Odo. Their tastes were indeed
divergent, for to that external beauty which was to Odo the very bloom
of life, Alfieri remained insensible; while of its imaginative
counterpart, its prolongation in the realm of thought and emotion, he
had but the most limited conception. But his love of ringing deeds woke
the chivalrous strain in Odo, and his vague celebration of Liberty, that
unknown goddess to whom altars were everywhere building, chimed with the
other's scorn of oppression and injustice. So far, it is true, their
companionship had been mainly one of pleasure; but the temper of both
gave their follies that provisional character which saves them from
vulgarity.

Odo, who had slept late on the morning after his friend's return, was
waked by the pompous mouthing of certain lines just then on every lip in
Italy:--

    Meet was it that, its ancient seats forsaking,
    An Empire should set forth with dauntless sail,
    And braving tempests and the deep's betrayal,
    Break down the barriers of inviolate worlds--
    That Cortez and Pizarro should esteem
    The blood of man a trivial sacrifice
    When, flinging down from their ancestral thrones
    Incas and Mexicans of royal line,
    They wrecked two kingdoms to refresh thy palate--

They were the verses in which the abate Parini, in his satire of The
Morning, apostrophizes the cup of chocolate which the lacquey presents
to his master. Cantapresto had in fact just entered with a cup of this
beverage, and Alfieri, who stood at his friend's bedside with unpowdered
locks and a fashionable undress of Parisian cut, snatching the tray from
the soprano's hands presented it to Odo in an attitude of mock
servility.

The young man sprang up laughing. It was the fashion to applaud Parini's
verse in the circles at which his satire was aimed, and none recited his
mock heroics with greater zest than the young gentlemen whose fopperies
he ridiculed. Odo's toilet was indeed a rite almost as elaborate as that
of Parini's hero; and this accomplished, he was on his way to fulfil the
very duty the poet most unsparingly derides: the morning visit of the
cicisbeo to his lady; but meanwhile he liked to show himself above the
follies of his class by joining in the laugh against them. When he
issued from the powder-room in his gold-laced uniform, with scented
gloves and carefully-adjusted queue, he presented the image of a young
gentleman so clearly equal to the most flattering emergencies that
Alfieri broke into a smile of half-ironical approval. "I see, my dear
cavaliere, that it were idle to invite you to try one of the new Arabs I
have brought with me from Spain, since it is plain other duties engage
you; but I come to lay claim to your evening."

Odo hesitated. "The Queen holds a circle this evening," he said.

"And her lady-in-waiting is in attendance?" returned Alfieri. "And the
lady-in-waiting's gentleman-in-waiting also?"

Odo made an impatient movement. "What inducements do you offer?" said he
carelessly.

Alfieri stepped close and tapped him on the sleeve. "Meet me at ten
o'clock at the turn of the lane behind the Corpus Domini. Wear a cloak
and a mask, and leave this gentleman at home with a flask of Asti." He
glanced at Cantapresto.

Odo hesitated a moment. He knew well enough where such midnight turnings
led, and across the vision evoked by his friend's words a girl's face
flitted suddenly.

"Is that all?" he said with a shrug. "You find me, I fear, in no humour
for such exploits."

Alfieri smiled. "And if I say that I have promised to bring you?"

"Promised--?"

"To one as chary of exacting such pledges as I of giving them. If I say
that you stake your life on the adventure, and that the stake is not too
great for the reward--?"

His sallow face had reddened with excitement, and Odo's forehead
reflected the flush. Was it possible--? But the thought set him tingling
with disgust.

"Why, you say little," he cried lightly, "at the rate at which I value
my life."

Alfieri turned on him. "If your life is worthless; make it worth
something!" he exclaimed. "I offer you the opportunity tonight."

"What opportunity?"

"The sight of a face that men have laid down their lives to see."

Odo laughed and buckled on his sword. "If you answer for the risk, I
agree to take it," said he. "At ten o'clock then, behind the Corpus
Domini."

If the ladies whom gallant gentlemen delight to serve could guess what
secret touchstones of worth these same gentlemen sometimes carry into
the adored presence, many a handsome head would be carried with less
assurance, and many a fond exaction less confidently imposed. If, for
instance, the Countess Clarice di Tournanches, whose high-coloured image
reflected itself so complacently in her Venetian toilet-glass, could
have known that the Cavaliere Odo Valsecca's devoted glance saw her
through the medium of a countenance compared to which her own revealed
the most unexpected shortcomings, she might have received him with less
airy petulance of manner. But how could so accomplished a mistress doubt
the permanence of her rule? The Countess Clarice, in singling out young
Odo Valsecca (to the despair of a score of more experienced cavaliers)
had done him an honour that she could no more imagine his resigning than
an adventurer a throne to which he is unexpectedly raised. She was a
finished example of the pretty woman who views the universe as planned
for her convenience. What could go wrong in a world where noble ladies
lived in palaces hung with tapestry and damask, with powdered lacqueys
to wait on them, a turbaned blackamoor to tend their parrots and
monkeys, a coronet-coach at the door to carry them to mass or the
ridotto, and a handsome cicisbeo to display on the promenade? Everything
had combined to strengthen the Countess Clarice's faith in the existing
order of things. Her husband, Count Roberto di Tournanches, was one of
the King's equerries and distinguished for his brilliant career as an
officer of the Piedmontese army--a man marked for the highest favours in
a society where military influences were paramount. Passing at sixteen
from an aristocratic convent to the dreary magnificence of the Palazzo
Tournanches, Clarice had found herself a lady-in-waiting at the dullest
court in Europe and the wife of an army officer engrossed in his
profession, and pledged by etiquette to the service of another lady. Odo
Valsecca represented her escape from this bondage--the dash of romance
and folly in a life of elegant formalities; and the Countess, who would
not have sacrificed to him one of her rights as a court-lady or a nobil
donna of the Golden Book, regarded him as the reward which Providence
accords to a well-regulated conduct.

Her room, when Odo entered it on taking leave of Alfieri, was crowded,
as usual at that hour, with the hangers-on of the noble lady's lever:
the abatino in lace ruffles, handing about his latest rhymed acrostic,
the jeweller displaying a set of enamelled buckles newly imported from
Paris, and the black-breeched doctor with white bands who concocted
remedies for the Countess's vapours and megrims. These personages,
grouped about the toilet-table where the Countess sat under the hands of
a Parisian hairdresser, were picturesquely relieved against the stucco
panelling and narrow mirrors of the apartment, with its windows looking
on a garden set with mossy statues. To Odo, however, the scene suggested
the most tedious part of his day's routine. The compliments to be
exchanged, the silly verses to be praised, the gewgaws from Paris to be
admired, were all contrasted in his mind with the vision of that other
life which had come to him on the hillside of the Superga. On this mood
the Countess Clarice's sarcasms fell without effect. To be pouted at
because he had failed to attend the promenade of the Valentino was to
Odo but a convenient pretext for excusing himself from the Queen's
circle that evening. He had engaged with little ardour to join Alfieri
in what he guessed to be a sufficiently commonplace adventure; but as he
listened to the Countess's chatter about the last minuet-step, and the
relative merits of sanspareil water and oil-of-lilies, of gloves from
Blois and Vendome, his impatience hailed any alternative as a release.
Meanwhile, however, long hours of servitude intervened. The lady's
toilet completed, to the adjusting of the last patch, he must attend her
to dinner, where, placed at her side, he was awarded the honour of
carving the roast; must sit through two hours of biribi in company with
the abatino, the doctor, and half-a-dozen parasites of the noble table;
and for two hours more must ride in her gilt coach up and down the
promenade of the Valentino.

Escaping from this ceremonial, with the consciousness that it must be
repeated on the morrow, Odo was seized with that longing for freedom
that makes the first street-corner an invitation to flight. How he
envied Alfieri, whose travelling-carriage stood at the beck of such
moods! Odo's scant means forbade evasion, even had his military duties
not kept him in Turin. He felt himself no more than a puppet dancing to
the tune of Parini's satire, a puny doll condemned, as the strings of
custom pulled, to feign the gestures of immortal passions.


2.3.

The night was moonless, with cold dashes of rain, and though the streets
of Turin were well-lit no lantern-ray reached the windings of the lane
behind the Corpus Domini.

As Odo, alone under the wall of the church, awaited his friend's
arrival, he wondered what risk had constrained the reckless Alfieri to
such unwonted caution. Italy was at that time a vast network of
espionage, and the Piedmontese capital passed for one of the
best-policed cities in Europe; but even on a moonless night the law
distinguished between the noble pleasure-seeker and the obscure
delinquent whose fate it was to pay the other's shot. Odo knew that he
would probably be followed and his movements reported to the
authorities; but he was almost equally certain that there would be no
active interference in his affairs. What chiefly puzzled him was
Alfieri's insistence that Cantapresto should not be privy to the
adventure. The soprano had long been the confidant of his pupil's
escapades, and his adroitness had often been of service in intrigues
such as that on which Odo now fancied himself engaged. The place, again,
perplexed him: a sober quarter of convents and private dwellings, in the
very eye of the royal palace, scarce seeming the theatre for a light
adventure. These incongruities revived his former wonder; nor was this
dispelled by Alfieri's approach.

The poet, masked and unattended, rejoined his friend without a word; and
Odo guessed in him an eye and ear alert for pursuit. Guided by the
pressure of his arm, Odo was hurried round the bend of the lane, up a
transverse alley and across a little square lost between high shuttered
buildings. Alfieri, at his first word, gripped his arm with a backward
glance; then urged him on under the denser blackness of an arched
passage-way, at the end of which an oil-light glimmered. Here a gate in
a wall confronted them. It opened at Alfieri's tap and Odo scented wet
box-borders and felt the gravel of a path under foot. The gate was at
once locked behind them and they entered the ground-floor of a house as
dark as the garden. Here a maid-servant of close aspect met them with a
lamp and preceded them upstairs to a bare landing hung with charts and
portulani. On Odo's flushed anticipations this antechamber, which seemed
the approach to some pedant's cabinet, had an effect undeniably
chilling; but Alfieri, heedless of his surprise, had cast off cloak and
mask, and now led the way into a long conventual-looking room lined with
book-shelves. A knot of middle-aged gentlemen of sober dress and manner,
gathered about a cabinet of fossils in the centre of this apartment,
looked up at the entrance of the two friends; then the group divided,
and Odo with a start recognised the girl he had seen on the road to the
Superga.

She bowed gravely to the young men. "My father," said she, in a clear
voice without trace of diffidence, "has gone to his study for a book,
but will be with you in a moment."

She wore a dress in keeping with her manner, its black stuff folds and
the lawn kerchief crossed on her bosom giving height and authority to
her slight figure. The dark unpowdered hair drawn back over a cushion
made a severer setting for her face than the fluctuating brim of her
shade-hat; and this perhaps added to the sense of estrangement with
which Odo gazed at her; but she met his look with a smile, and instantly
the rosy girl flashed through her grave exterior.

"Here is my father," said she; and her companion of the previous day
stepped into the room with several folios under his arm.

Alfieri turned to Odo. "This, my dear Odo," said he, "is my
distinguished friend, Professor Vivaldi, who has done us the honour of
inviting us to his house." He took the Professor's hand. "I have brought
you," he continued, "the friend you were kind enough to include in your
invitation--the Cavaliere Odo Valsecca."

Vivaldi bowed. "Count Alfieri's friends," said he, "are always welcome
to my house; though I fear there is here little to interest a young
gentleman of the Cavaliere Valsecca's years." And Odo detected a shade
of doubt in his glance.

"The Cavaliere Valsecca," Alfieri smilingly rejoined, "is above his
years in wit and learning, and I answer for his interest as I do for his
discretion."

The Professor bowed again. "Count Alfieri, sir," he said, "has doubtless
explained to you the necessity that obliges me to be so private in
receiving my friends; and now perhaps you will join these gentlemen in
examining some rare fossil fish newly sent me from the Monte Bolca."

Odo murmured a civil rejoinder; but the wonder into which the sight of
the young girl had thrown him was fast verging on stupefaction. What
mystery was here? What necessity compelled an elderly professor to
receive his scientific friends like a band of political conspirators?
How above all, in the light of the girl's presence, was Odo to interpret
Alfieri's extravagant allusions to the nature of their visit?

The company having returned to the cabinet of fossils, none seemed to
observe his disorder but the young lady who was its cause; and seeing
him stand apart she advanced with a smile, saying, "Perhaps you would
rather look at some of my father's other curiosities."

Simple as the words were, they failed to restore Odo's self-possession,
and for a moment he made no answer. Perhaps she partly guessed the cause
of his commotion; yet it was not so much her beauty that silenced him,
as the spirit that seemed to inhabit it. Nature, in general so chary of
her gifts, so prone to use one good feature as the palliation of a dozen
deficiencies, to wed the eloquent lip with the ineffectual eye, had
indeed compounded her of all fine meanings, making each grace the
complement of another and every outward charm expressive of some inward
quality. Here was as little of the convent-bred miss as of the flippant
and vapourish fine lady; and any suggestion of a less fair alternative
vanished before such candid graces. Odo's confusion had in truth sprung
from Alfieri's ambiguous hints; and these shrivelling to nought in the
gaze that encountered his, constraint gave way to a sense of wondering
pleasure.

"I should like to see whatever you will show me," said he, as simply as
one child speaking to another; and she answered in the same tone, "Then
we'll glance at my father's collections before the serious business of
the evening begins."

With these words she began to lead him about the room, pointing out and
explaining the curiosities it contained. It was clear that, like many
scholars of his day, Professor Vivaldi was something of an eclectic in
his studies, for while one table held a fine orrery, a cabinet of coins
stood near, and the book-shelves were surmounted by specimens of coral
and petrified wood. Of all these rarities his daughter had a word to
say, and though her explanations were brief and without affectation of
pedantry, they put her companion's ignorance to the blush. It must be
owned, however, that had his learning been a match for hers it would
have stood him in poor stead at the moment; his faculties being lost in
the wonder of hearing such discourse from such lips. To his compliments
on her erudition she returned with a smile that what learning she had
was no merit, since she had been bred in a library; to which she
suddenly added:--"You are not unknown to me, Cavaliere; but I never
thought to see you here."

The words renewed her hearer's surprise; but giving him no time to
reply, she went on in a lower tone:--"You are young and the world is
fair before you. Have you considered that before risking yourself among
us?"

She coloured under Odo's wondering gaze, and at his random rejoinder
that it was a risk any man would gladly take without considering, she
turned from him with a gesture in which he fancied a shade of
disappointment.

By this they had reached the cabinet of fossils, about which the
interest of the other guests still seemed to centre. Alfieri, indeed,
paced the farther end of the room with the air of awaiting the despatch
of some tedious business; but the others were engaged in an animated
discussion necessitating frequent reference to the folios Vivaldi had
brought from his study.

The latter turned to Odo as though to include him in the group. "I do
not know, sir," said he, "whether you have found leisure to study these
enigmas of that mysterious Sphinx, the earth; for though Count Alfieri
has spoken to me of your unusual acquirements, I understand your tastes
have hitherto lain rather in the direction of philosophy and letters;"
and on Odo's prompt admission of ignorance, he courteously continued:
"The physical sciences seem, indeed, less likely to appeal to the
imaginative and poetical faculty in man, and, on the other hand,
religion has appeared to prohibit their too close investigation; yet I
question if any thoughtful mind can enter on the study of these curious
phenomena without feeling, as it were, an affinity between such
investigations and the most abstract forms of thought. For whether we
regard these figured stones as of terriginous origin, either mere lusus
naturae, or mineral formations produced by a plastic virtue latent in
the earth, or whether as in fact organic substances lapidified by the
action of water; in either case, what speculations must their origin
excite, leading us back into that dark and unexplored period of time
when the breath of Creation was yet moving on the face of the waters!"

Odo had listened but confusedly to the first words of this discourse;
but his intellectual curiosity was too great not to respond to such an
appeal, and all his perplexities slipped from him in the pursuit of the
Professor's thought.

One of the other guests seemed struck by his look of attention. "My dear
Vivaldi," said this gentleman, laying down a fossil, and fixing his gaze
on Odo while he addressed the Professor, "why use such superannuated
formulas in introducing a neophyte to a study designed to subvert the
very foundations of the Mosaic cosmogony? I take it the Cavaliere is one
of us, since he is here this evening: why, then, permit him to stray
even for a moment in the labyrinth of theological error?"

The Professor's deprecating murmur was cut short by an outburst from
another of the learned group, a red-faced spectacled personage in a
doctor's gown.

"Pardon me for suggesting," he exclaimed, "that the conditional terms in
which our host was careful to present his hypotheses are better suited
to the instruction of the neophyte than our learned friend's positive
assertions. But if the Vulcanists are to claim the Cavaliere Valsecca,
may not the Diluvials also have a hearing? How often must it be repeated
that theology as well as physical science is satisfied by the Diluvial
explanation of the origin of petrified organisms, whereas inexorable
logic compels the Vulcanists to own that their thesis is subversive of
all dogmatic belief?"

The first speaker answered with a gesture of disdain. "My dear doctor,
you occupy a chair in our venerated University. From that exalted
cathedra the Mosaic theory of Creation must still be expounded; but in
the security of these surroundings--the catacombs of the new faith--why
keep up the forms of an obsolete creed? As long ago as Pythagoras, man
was taught that all things were in a state of flux, without end as
without beginning, and must we still, after more than two thousand
years, pretend to regard the universe as some gigantic toy manufactured
in six days by a Superhuman Artisan, who is presently to destroy it at
his pleasure?"

"Sir," cried the other, flushing from red to purple at this assault, "I
know not on what ground you insinuate that my private convictions differ
from my public doctrine--"

But here, with a firmness tempered by the most scrupulous courtesy,
Professor Vivaldi intervened.

"Gentlemen," said he, "the discussion in which you are engaged,
interesting as it is, must, I fear, distract us from the true purpose of
our meeting. I am happy to offer my house as the asylum of all free
research; but you must remember that the first object of these reunions
is, not the special study of any one branch of modern science, but the
application of physical investigation to the origin and destiny of man.
In other words, we ask the study of nature to lead us to the knowledge
of ourselves; and it is because we approach this great problem from a
point as yet unsanctioned by dogmatic authority, that I am reluctantly
obliged"--and here he turned to Odo with a smile--"to throw a veil of
privacy over these inoffensive meetings."

Here at last was the key to the enigma. The gentlemen assembled in
Professor Vivaldi's rooms were met there to discuss questions not safely
aired in public. They were conspirators indeed, but the liberation they
planned was intellectual rather than political; though the acuter among
them doubtless saw whither such innovations tended. Meanwhile they were
content to linger in that wide field of speculation which the
development of the physical sciences had recently opened to philosophic
thought. As, at the Revival of Learning, the thinker imprisoned in
mediaeval dialectics suddenly felt under his feet the firm ground of
classic argument, so, in the eighteenth century, philosophy, long
suspended in the void of metaphysic, touched earth again and,
Antaeus-like, drew fresh life from the contact. It was clear that
Professor Vivaldi, whose very name had been unknown to Odo, was an
important figure in the learned world, and one uniting the tact and
firmness necessary to control those dissensions from which philosophy
itself does not preserve its disciples. His words calmed the two
disputants who were preparing to do battle over Odo's unborn scientific
creed, and the talk growing more general, the Professor turned to his
daughter, saying, "My Fulvia, is the study prepared?"

She signed her assent, and her father led the way to an inner cabinet,
where seats were drawn about a table scattered with pamphlets, gazettes
and dictionaries, and set out with modest refreshments. Here began a
conversation ranging from chemistry to taxation, and from the
perfectibility of man to the secondary origin of the earth's surface. It
was evident to Odo that, though the Professor's guests represented all
shades of opinion, some being clearly loth to leave the safe anchorage
of orthodoxy, while others already braved the seas of free enquiry, yet
all were at one as to the need of unhampered action and discussion.
Odo's dormant curiosity woke with a start at the summons of fresh
knowledge. Here were worlds to explore, or rather the actual world about
him, a region then stranger and more unfamiliar than the lost Atlantis
of fable. Liberty was the word on every lip, and if to some it
represented the right to doubt the Diluvial origin of fossils, to others
that of reforming the penal code, to a third (as to Alfieri) merely
personal independence and relief from civil restrictions; yet these
fragmentary conceptions seemed, to Odo's excited fancy, to blend in the
vision of a New Light encircling the whole horizon of thought. He
understood at last Alfieri's allusion to a face for the sight of which
men were ready to lay down their lives; and if, as he walked home before
dawn, those heavenly lineaments were blent in memory with features of a
mortal cast, yet these were pure and grave enough to stand for the image
of the goddess.


2.4.

Professor Orazio Vivaldi, after filling with distinction the chair of
Philosophy at the University of Turin, had lately resigned his office
that he might have leisure to complete a long-contemplated work on the
Origin of Civilisation. His house was the meeting-place of a society
calling itself of the Honey-Bees and ostensibly devoted to the study of
the classical poets, from whose pages the members were supposed to cull
mellifluous nourishment; but under this guise the so-called literati had
for some time indulged in free discussion of religious and scientific
questions. The Academy of the Honey-Bees comprised among its members all
the independent thinkers of Turin: doctors of law, of philosophy and
medicine, chemists, philologists and naturalists, with one or two
members of the nobility, who, like Alfieri, felt, or affected, an
interest in the graver problems of life, and could be trusted not to
betray the true character of the association.

These details Odo learned the next day from Alfieri; who went on to say
that, owing to the increased vigilance of the government, and to the
banishment of several distinguished men accused by the Church of
heretical or seditious opinions, the Honey-Bees had of late been obliged
to hold their meetings secretly, it being even rumoured that Vivaldi,
who was their president, had resigned his professorship and withdrawn
behind the shelter of literary employment in order to elude the
observation of the authorities. Men had not yet forgotten the fate of
the Neapolitan historian, Pietro Giannone, who for daring to attack the
censorship and the growth of the temporal power had been driven from
Naples to Vienna, from Vienna back to Venice, and at length, at the
prompting of the Holy See, lured across the Piedmontese frontier by
Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, and imprisoned for life in the citadel of
Turin. The memory of his tragic history--most of all, perhaps, of his
recantation and the "devout ending" to which solitude and persecution
had forced the freest spirit of his day--hovered like a warning on the
horizon of thought and constrained political speculation to hide itself
behind the study of fashionable trifles. Alfieri had lately joined the
association of the Honey-Bees, and the Professor, at his suggestion, had
invited Odo, for whose discretion his friend declared himself ready to
answer. The Honey-Bees were in fact desirous of attracting young men of
rank who felt an interest in scientific or economic problems; for it was
hoped that in this manner the new ideas might imperceptibly permeate the
class whose privileges and traditions presented the chief obstacle to
reform. In France, it was whispered, free-thinkers and political
agitators were the honoured guests of the nobility, who eagerly embraced
their theories and applied them to the remedy of social abuses. Only by
similar means could the ideals of the Piedmontese reformers be realised;
and in those early days of universal illusion none appeared to suspect
the danger of arming inexperienced hands with untried weapons. Utopia
was already in sight; and all the world was setting out for it as for
some heavenly picnic ground.

Of Vivaldi himself, Alfieri spoke with extravagant admiration. His
affable exterior was said to conceal the moral courage of one of
Plutarch's heroes. He was a man after the antique pattern, ready to lay
down fortune, credit and freedom in the defence of his convictions. "An
Agamemnon," Alfieri exclaimed, "who would not hesitate to sacrifice his
daughter to obtain a favourable wind for his enterprise!"

The metaphor was perhaps scarcely to Odo's taste; but at least it gave
him the chance for which he had waited. "And the daughter?" he asked.

"The lovely doctoress?" said Alfieri carelessly. "Oh, she's one of your
prodigies of female learning, such as our topsy-turvy land produces: an
incipient Laura Bassi or Gaetana Agnesi, to name the most distinguished
of their tribe; though I believe that hitherto her father's good sense
or her own has kept her from aspiring to academic honours. The beautiful
Fulvia is a good daughter, and devotes herself, I'm told, to helping
Vivaldi in his work; a far more becoming employment for one of her age
and sex than defending Latin theses before a crew of ribald students."

In this Odo was of one mind with him; for though Italy was used to the
spectacle of the Improvisatrice and the female doctor of philosophy, it
is doubtful if the character was one in which any admirer cared to see
his divinity figure. Odo, at any rate, felt a distinct satisfaction in
learning that Fulvia Vivaldi had thus far made no public display of her
learning. How much pleasanter to picture her as her father's aid,
perhaps a sharer in his dreams: a vestal cherishing the flame of Liberty
in the secret sanctuary of the goddess! He scarce knew as yet of what
his feeling for the girl was compounded. The sentiment she had roused
was one for which his experience had no name: an emotion in which awe
mingled with an almost boyish sense of fellowship, sex as yet lurking
out of sight as in some hidden ambush. It was perhaps her association
with a world so unfamiliar and alluring that lent her for the moment her
greatest charm. Odo's imagination had been profoundly stirred by what he
had heard and seen at the meeting of the Honey-Bees. That impatience
with the vanity of his own pursuits and with the injustice of existing
conditions, which hovered like a phantom at the feast of life, had at
last found form and utterance. Parini's satires and the bitter mockery
of the "Frusta Letteraria" were but instruments of demolition; but the
arguments of the Professor's friends had that constructive quality so
appealing to the urgent temper of youth. Was the world in ruins? Then
here was a plan to rebuild it. Was humanity in chains? Behold the angel
on the threshold of the prison!

Odo, too impatient to await the next reunion of the Honey-Bees, sought
out and frequented those among the members whose conversation had
chiefly attracted him. They were grave men, of studious and retiring
habit, leading the frugal life of the Italian middle-class, a life in
dignified contrast to the wasteful and aimless existence of the
nobility. Odo's sensitiveness to outward impressions made him peculiarly
alive to this contrast. None was more open than he to the seducements of
luxurious living, the polish of manners, the tacit exclusion of all that
is ugly or distressing; but it seemed to him that fine living should be
but the flower of fine feeling, and that such external graces, when they
adorned a dull and vapid society, were as incongruous as the royal
purple on a clown. Among certain of his new friends he found a
clumsiness of manner somewhat absurdly allied with an attempt at Roman
austerity; but he was fair-minded enough to see that the middle-class
doctor or lawyer who tries to play the Cicero is, after all, a more
respectable figure than the Marquess who apes Caligula or Commodus.
Still, his lurking dilettantism made him doubly alive to the elegance of
the Palazzo Tournanches when he went thither from a coarse meal in the
stuffy dining-parlour of one of his new acquaintances; as he never
relished the discourse

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