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.