Odo drew back with a start; then, as if in spite of himself, he broke

into a laugh. "By the saints," said he, almost joyously, "I am sorry to

be where I am not wanted; but since no better company offers, will you

not make the best of mine and suffer me to hand you in to supper with

our friends?" And with a low bow he offered her his arm.

The effect was instantaneous. He saw her catch at the balustrade for

support.

"Sancta simplicitas!" he exulted, "and did you think to play the part at

such short notice?" He fell at her feet and covered her hands with

kisses. "My Fulvia! My poor child! come with me, come away from here,"

he entreated. "I know not what mad hazard has brought us thus together,

but I thank God on my knees for the encounter. You shall tell me all or

nothing, as you please--you shall presently dismiss me at your

convent-gate, and never see me again if you so will it--but till then, I

swear, you are in my charge, and no human power shall come between us!"

As he ended the Marquess's voice called gaily through the open window:

"Friends, the burgundy is uncorked! Will you not join us in a glass of

good French wine?"

Fulvia flung herself upon Odo. "Yes--yes; away--take me away from here!"

she cried, clinging to him. She had gathered her cloak about her and

drawn the hood over her disordered hair. "Away! Away!" she repeated. "I

cannot see them again. Good God, is there no other way out?"

With a gesture he warned her to be silent and drew her along the terrace

in the shadow of the house. The gravel creaked beneath their feet, and

she shook at the least sound; but her hand lay in his like a child's and

he felt himself her master. At the farther end of the terrace a flight

of steps led to a narrow strip of shore. He helped her down and after

listening a moment gave a whistle. Presently they heard a low plash of

oars and saw the prow of a gondola cautiously rounding the angle of the

terrace. The water was shallow and the boatmen proceeded slowly and at

length paused a few yards from the land.

"We can come no nearer," one of them called; "what is it?"

"Your mistress is unwell and wishes to return," Odo answered; and

catching Fulvia in his arms he waded out with her to the gondola and

lifted her over the side. "To Santa Chiara!" he ordered, as he laid her

on the cushions beneath the felze; and the boatmen, recognising her as

one of their late fares, without more ado began to row rapidly toward

the city.

3.4.

In the pitying darkness of the gondola she lay beyond speech, her hand

in his, her breath coming fitfully. Odo waited in suspense, not daring

to question her, yet sure that if she did not speak then she would never

do so. All doubt and perplexity of spirit had vanished in the simple

sense of her nearness. The throb of her hand in his was like the

heart-beat of hope. He felt himself no longer a drifting spectator of

life but a sharer in its gifts and renunciations. Which this meeting

would bring he dared not yet surmise: it was enough that he was with

Fulvia and that love had freed his spirit.

At length she began to speak. Her agitation was so great that he had

difficulty in piecing together the fragments of her story; but for the

moment he was more concerned in regaining her confidence than in seeking

to obtain a clear picture of the past. Before she could end, the gondola

rounded the corner of the narrow canal skirting the garden-wall of Santa

Chiara. Alarmed lest he should lose her again he passionately urged her

to receive him on the morrow; and after some hesitation she consented. A

moment later their prow touched the postern and the boatman gave a low

call which proved him no novice at the business. Fulvia signed to Odo

not to speak or move; and they sat listening intently for the opening of

the gate. As soon as it was unbarred she sprang ashore and vanished in

the darkness of the garden; and with a cold sense of failure Odo heard

the bolt slipping back and the stealthy fall of the oars as the gondola

slid away under the shadow of the convent-wall. Whither was he being

carried and would that bolt ever be drawn for him again? In the sultry

dawn the convent loomed forbiddingly as a prison, and he could hardly

believe that a few hours earlier the very doors now closed against him

had stood open to all the world. They would open again; but whether to

him, who could conjecture? He was resolved to see Fulvia again, but he

shrank from the thought of forcing himself upon her. She had promised to

receive him; but what revulsion of feeling might not the morrow bring?

Unable to sleep, he bade the boatmen carry him to the Lido. The sun was

just rising above the Friulian Alps and the lagoon lay dull and smooth

as a breathed-on mirror. As he paced the lonely sands he tried to

reconstruct Fulvia's broken story, supplementing it with such details as

his experience of Venetian life suggested. It appeared that after her

father's death she had found herself possessed of a small sum of money

which he had painfully accumulated for her during the two years they had

spent in Pavia. Her only thought was to employ this inheritance in

publishing the great work on the origin of civilisation which Vivaldi

had completed a few days before his last seizure. Through one of the

professors of the University, who had been her father's friend, she

negotiated with a printer of Amsterdam for the production of the book,

and the terms being agreed on, despatched the money and the manuscript

thither by a sure hand. Both were duly delivered and the publisher had

advanced so far in his work as to send Fulvia the proof-sheets of the

first chapters, when he took alarm at the renewed activity of the Holy

Office in France and Italy, declared there would be no market for the

book in the present state of affairs, and refused either to continue

printing it, or to restore the money, which he said had barely covered

the setting-up of the type. Fulvia then attempted to recover the

manuscript; but the publisher refusing to surrender it, she found

herself doubly beggared at a stroke.

In this extremity she turned to a sister of her father's, who lived near

Treviso; and this excellent woman, though persuaded that her brother's

heretical views had doomed him to everlasting torment, did not scruple

to offer his child a home. Here Fulvia had lived for two years when her

aunt's sudden death left her destitute; for the good lady, to atone for

having given shelter to a niece of doubtful orthodoxy, had left the

whole of her small property to the Church.

Fulvia's only other relations were certain distant cousins of her

mother's, members of the Venetian nobility, but of the indigent class

called Barnabotti, who lived on the bounty of the state. While in

Treviso she had made the acquaintance of one of these cousins, a

stirring noisy fellow involved in all the political agitations of the

state. It was among the Barnabotti, the class most indebted to the

government, that these seditious movements generally arose; and Fulvia's

cousin was one of the most notorious malcontents of his order. She had

mistaken his revolutionary bluster for philosophic enlightenment; and,

persuaded that he shared in her views, she rashly appealed to him for

help. With the most eloquent expressions of sympathy he offered her a

home under his own roof; but on reaching Venice she was but ill-received

by his wife and family, who made no scruple of declaring that, being but

pensioners themselves, they were in no state to nourish their pauper

relatives. Fulvia could not but own that they were right; for they lived

in the garret of a half-ruined house, pawning their very beds to pay for

ices in the Piazza and sitting at home all the week in dirty shifts and

night-caps that they might go to mass in silk and powder on a Sunday.

After two months of wretchedness with these unfriendly hosts, whom she

vainly tried to conciliate by a hundred little services and attentions

the poor girl resolved to return to Milan, where she hoped to obtain

some menial position in the household of one of her father's friends.

Her cousins, at this, made a great outcry, protesting that none of their

blood should so demean herself, and that they would spare no efforts to

find some better way of providing for her. Their noble connections gave

Fulvia the hope that they might obtain a small pension for her, and she

unsuspiciously yielded to their wishes; but to her dismay she learned a

few weeks later, that, thanks to their exertions, she was to be admitted

as a novice to the convent of Santa Chiara. Though it was the common way

of disposing of portionless girls, the liberal views of her cousins had

reassured Fulvia, and she woke to her fate too late to escape it. She

was to enter on her novitiate on the morrow; but even had delay been

possible she knew that both the civil and religious authorities would

sustain her family in their course.

Her cousins, knowing her independent spirit, and perhaps fearing an

outcry if they sequestered her too closely, had thought to soften her

resistance by placing her in a convent noted for its leniencies; but to

Fulvia such surroundings were more repugnant than the strictest monastic

discipline. The corruption of the religious orders was a favourite topic

with her father's friends, and the Venetian nuns were noted throughout

Italy for their frivolous and dissipated lives; but nothing that Fulvia

had heard or imagined approached the realities that awaited her. At

first the mere sense of imprisonment, of being cut off forever from the

world of free thought and action which had been her native element,

overwhelmed every other feeling, and she lay numb in the clutch of fate.

But she was too young for this merciful torpor to last, and with the

returning consciousness of her situation came the instinctive effort to

amend it. How she longed then to have been buried in some strict order,

where she might have spent her days in solitary work and meditation! How

she loathed the petty gossip of the nuns, their furtive reaching after

forbidden pleasures! The blindest bigotry would have been less

insufferable than this clandestine commerce with the world, the

strictest sequestration than this open parody of the monastic calling.

She sought in vain among her companions for an answering mind. Many,

like herself, were in open rebellion against their lot; but for reasons

so different that the feeling was an added estrangement. At last the

longing to escape over-mastered every other sensation. It became a fixed

idea, a devouring passion. She did not trust herself to think of what

must follow, but centred every faculty on the effort of evasion.

At this point in her story her growing distress had made it hard for Odo

to gather more than a general hint of her meaning. It was clear,

however, that she had found her sole hope of escape lay in gaining the

friendship of one of the more favoured nuns. Her own position in the

community was of the humblest, for she had neither rank nor wealth to

commend her; but her skill on the harpsichord had attracted the notice

of the music-mistress and she had been enrolled in the convent orchestra

before her novitiate was over. This had brought her into contact with a

few of the more favoured sisters, and among them she had recognised in

Sister Mary of the Crucifix the daughter of the nobleman who had been

her aunt's landlord at Treviso. Fulvia's name was not unknown to the

handsome nun, and the coincidence was enough to draw them together in a

community where such trivial affinities must replace the ties of nature.

Fulvia soon learned that Mary of the Crucifix was the spoiled darling of

the convent. Her beauty and spirit, as much perhaps as her family

connections, had given her this predominance; and no scruples interfered

with her use of it. Finding herself, as she declared, on the wrong side

of the grate, she determined to gather in all the pleasures she could

reach through it; and her reach was certainly prodigious. Here Odo had

been obliged to fall back on his knowledge of Venetian customs to

conjecture the incidents leading up to the scene of the previous night.

He divined that Fulvia, maddened by having had to pronounce the

irrevocable vows, had resolved to fly at all hazards; that Sister Mary,

unconscious of her designs, had proposed to take her on a party of

pleasure, and that the rash girl, blind to every risk but that of delay,

had seized on this desperate means of escape. What must have followed

had she not chanced on Odo, she had clearly neither the courage nor the

experience to picture; but she seemed to have had some confused idea of

throwing herself on the mercy of the foreign nobleman she believed she

was to meet.

So much Odo had gathered; and her voice, her gesture, the disorder of

her spirit, supplied what her words omitted. Not for a moment, either in

listening to her or in the soberer period of revision, did he question

the exact truth of her narrative. It was the second time that they had

met under strange circumstances; yet now as before the sense of her

candour was his ruling thought. He concluded that, whatever plight she

found herself in, she would be its immediate justification; and felt

sure he must have reached this conclusion though love had not had a

stake in the verdict. This perhaps but proved him the more deeply taken;

for it is when passion tightens the net that reason flaps her wings most

loudly.

Day was high when he returned to his lodgings, impatient for a word from

Fulvia. None had come; and as the hours passed he yielded to the most

disheartening fancies. His wretchedness was increased by the thought

that he had once inflicted on her such suspense he was now enduring; and

he went so far as to wonder if this were her revenge for Vercelli. But

if the past was intolerable to consider the future was all baffling

fears. His immediate study was how to see her; and this her continued

silence seemed to refuse him. The extremity of her plight was his best

ally; yet here again anxiety suggested that his having been the witness

of her humiliation must insensibly turn her against him. Never perhaps

does a man show less knowledge of human nature than in speculating on

the conduct of his beloved; and every step in the labyrinth of his

conjectures carried Odo farther from the truth. This rose on him at

nightfall, in the shape of a letter slipped in his hand by a lay-sister

as he crossed the square before his lodgings. He stepped to the light of

the nearest shrine and read the few words in a tumult. "This being

Friday, no visitors are admitted to the convent; but I entreat you to

come to me tomorrow an hour before benediction." A postcript added: "It

is the hour when visitors are most frequent."

He saw her meaning in a flash: his best chance of speaking with her was

in a crowd, and his heart bounded at the significance of her admission.

Now indeed he felt himself lord of the future. Nothing counted but that

he was to see her. His horizon was narrowed to the bars through which

her hand would greet him; yet never had the world appeared so vast.

Long before the hour appointed he was at the gate of Santa Chiara. He

asked to speak with Sister Veronica and the portress led him to the

parlour. Several nuns were already behind the grate, chatting with a

group of fashionable ladies and their gallants; but Fulvia was not among

them. In a few moments the portress returned and informed Odo that

Sister Veronica was indisposed and unable to leave her cell. His heart

sank, and he asked if she had sent no message. The portress answered in

the negative, but added that the abbess begged him to come to her

parlour; and at this his hopes took wing again.

The abbess's parlour was preceded by a handsome antechamber, where Odo

was bidden to wait. It was doubtless the Reverend Mother's hour for

receiving company, for through the door beyond he heard laughter and

music and the sound of lively talk. Presently this door opened and Mary

of the Crucifix entered. In her monastic habit she looked coarse and

overblown: the severe lines and sober tints of the dress did not become

her. Odo felt an insurmountable repugnance at seeing her. He could not

conceive why Fulvia had chosen such an intermediary, and for the first

time a stealing doubt tainted his thoughts of her.

Sister Mary seemed to read his mind. "You bear me a grudge," said she

gaily; "but I think you will live to own that I do not return it. Come

with me if you wish to speak with Sister Veronica."

Odo flushed with surprise. "She is not too unwell to receive me?"

Sister Mary raised her eyebrows in astonishment. "To receive her cousin?

Her nearest male relative, come from Treviso purposely to visit her? The

saints forbid!" she cried. "The poor child is indeed dying--but only to

see her cousin!" And with that she seized his hand and hurried him down

the corridor to a door on which she tapped three times. It opened at

once, and catching Odo by the shoulder she pushed him laughingly over

the threshold and cried out as she vanished: "Be careful not to agitate

the sufferer!"

Odo found himself in a neat plain cell; but he had no eyes for his

surroundings. All that he saw was Fulvia, dressed in her nun's habit and

seated near the window, through which the afternoon light fell softly on

her white coif and the austere folds of her dress. She rose and greeted

him with a smile.

"You are not ill, then?" he cried, stupidly, and the colour rose to her

pale face.

"No," she said, "I am not ill, and at first I was reluctant to make use

of such a subterfuge; but to feign an indisposition was the only way of

speaking with you privately, and, alas, in this school one soon becomes

a proficient in deceit." She paused a moment and then added with an

effort: "Even this favour I could not have obtained save through Sister

Mary of the Crucifix; but she now understands that you are an old friend

of my father's, and that my motive for wishing to see you is not what

she at first supposed."

This was said with such noble simplicity and so direct a glance, that

Odo, confused by the sense of his own doubts, could only murmur as he

bent over her hand: "Fuoco di quest' incendio non v' assale."

She drew back gently and signed him to a seat. "I trust not," she said,

answering his citation; "but I think the flame through which Beatrice

walked must have been less contaminating than this morass in which I

flounder."

She was silent a moment and he had leisure to steal a closer look at

her. It was the first time since their meeting that he had really seen

her face; and he was struck by the touch of awe that had come upon her

beauty. Perhaps her recent suffering had spiritualised a countenance

already pure and lofty; for as he looked at her it seemed to him that

she was transformed into a being beyond earthly contact, and his heart

sank with the sense of her remoteness. Presently she began to speak and

his consciousness of the distance between them was increased by the

composure of her manner. All signs of confusion and distress had

vanished. She faced him with the same innocent freedom as under her

father's roof, and all that had since passed between them seemed to have

slipped from her without a trace.

She began by thanking him for coming, and then at once reverted to her

desperate situation and to her determination to escape.

"I am alone and friendless," she said, "and though the length of our

past acquaintance" (and here indeed she blushed) "scarce warrants such a

presumption, yet I believe that in my father's name I may appeal to you.

It may be that with the best will to help me you can discover no way of

doing so, but at least I shall have the benefit of your advice. I now

see," she added, again deeply blushing, but keeping her eyes on his,

"the madness of my late attempt, and the depth of the abyss from which

you rescued me. Death were indeed preferable to such chances; but I do

not mean to die while life holds out a hope of liberation."

As she spoke there flashed on Odo the reason of her remoteness and

composure. He had come to her as a lover: she received him as a friend.

His longing to aid her was inspired by passion: she saw in it only the

natural impulse of benevolence. So mortifying was the discovery that he

hardly followed her words. All his thoughts were engaged in reviewing

the past; and he now saw that if, as she said, their acquaintance scarce

warranted her appealing to him as a friend, it still less justified his

addressing her as a lover. Only once before had he spoken to her of

love, and that under circumstances which almost forbade a return to the

subject, or at least compelled an added prudence in approaching it. Once

again he found himself the prisoner of his folly, and stood aghast at

the ingenuity of the punishment. To play the part she ascribed to him

was his only portion; and he resolved at least to play it like a man.

With what composure he might, he assured Fulvia of his desire to serve

her, and asked if she had no hope of obtaining her release from the Holy

See. She answered: none, since enquiry must reveal that she was the

daughter of a man who had been prosecuted for heresy, and that after his

death she had devoted the small sum he had left her to the publication

of his writings. She added that his Holiness, resolved to counteract the

effects of the late Pope's leniency, had greatly enlarged the powers of

the Inquisition, and had taken special measures to prevent those who

entered the religious life from renouncing their calling.

"Since I have been here," she said, "three nuns have tried to obtain

their release, and one has conclusively proved that she was forced to

take the vows by fraud; but their pleas have been rejected, and mine

would meet the same fate. Indeed, the only result would be to deprive me

of what little liberty I am allowed; for the three nuns I speak of are

now the most closely watched in the convent."

She went on to explain that, thanks to the connivance of Sister Mary of

the Crucifix, her actual escape might be effected without much

difficulty; but that she was now awake to the madness of taking so

desperate a step without knowing whither it would lead her.

"To be safe," she said, "I must cross the borders of Switzerland. If I

could reach Geneva I should be beyond the arm of the Holy Office, and at

the University there I should find friends of my father who would surely

take pity on my situation and help me to a living. But the journey is

long and difficult, and not to be safely attempted without some

assurance of shelter on the way."

It was on Odo's lips to declare that he would provide her with shelter

and escort; but at this moment three warning taps announced the return

of Sister Mary of the Crucifix.

She entered merrily and at once laid one hand on Fulvia's brow and

caught her wrist in the other. "The patient's pulse has risen," she

declared, "and rest and a lowering treatment are essential. I must ask

the cavaliere to withdraw."

Fulvia, with an air of constraint, held out her hand to Odo.

"I shall see you soon again?" he whispered; and Sister Mary, as though

she had guessed his words, cried out, "I think your excellency may count

on a recurrence of the seizure two days hence at the same hour!"

3.5.

With this Odo was forced to be content; and he passed the intervening

time in devising the means of Fulvia's rescue. He was resolved to let no

rashness or negligence hinder the attempt, and to prove, by the

discretion of his course, that he was no longer the light fool who had

once hazarded her safety. He went about his preparations as one that had

no private stake in the venture; but he was therefore the more

punctilious to show himself worthy of her trust and sensible of the

charge it laid upon him.

At their next meeting he found her in the same open and friendly mood,

and she listened gratefully as he set forth his plan. This was that she

should first write to a doctor of the University in Geneva, who had been

her father's friend, stating her plight and asking if he could help her

to a living should she contrive to reach Geneva. Pending the reply, Odo

was to plan the stages of the journey in such fashion that she might

count on concealment in case of pursuit; and she was not to attempt her

escape till these details were decided. Fulvia was the more ready to

acquiesce in this postponement as she did not wish to involve Sister

Mary in her adventure, but hoped to escape unassisted during an

entertainment which was to take place in the convent on the feast of

Saint Michael, some six weeks later.

To Odo the delay was still more welcome; for it gave him what he must

needs regard as his last opportunity of being in the girl's company. She

had accepted his companionship on the journey with a readiness in which

he saw only the magnanimity of pardon; but in Geneva they must part, and

what hope had he of seeing her again? The first smart of vanity allayed,

he was glad she chose to treat him as a friend. It was in this character

that he could best prove his disinterestedness, his resolve to make

amends for the past; and in this character only--as he now felt--would

it be possible for him to part from her.

On his second visit he ventured to discharge his mind of its heaviest

burden by enquiring what had befallen her and her father after he had

lost trace of them at Vercelli. She told him quite simply that, failing

to meet him at the appointed place, they at once guessed that his plan

had been winded by the abate who travelled with him; and that after a

few hours' delay her father had succeeded in securing a chaise which had

taken them safely across the border. She went on to speak of the

hardships they had suffered after reaching Milan. Even under a

comparatively liberal government it was small advantage to be marked by

the Holy Office; and though he received much kindness, and even material

aid, from those of his way of thinking, Vivaldi was unable to obtain the

professorship he had hoped for.

From Milan they went to Pavia; but in this University, the most liberal

in Italy, the chairs were so sought after that there was no hope of his

receiving a charge worthy of his talents. Here, however, his spirit

breathed its natural air, and reluctant to lose the privileges of such

intercourse he decided to accept the post of librarian to an eccentric

nobleman of the town. If his pay was modest his duties left him leisure

for the work which was his chief concern; for his patron, who had houses

in Milan and Brescia, came seldom to Pavia, and Fulvia and her father

had the vast palace to themselves. They lodged in a corner adjoining the

library, spending their days in studious seclusion, their evenings in

conversation with some of the first scholars of Europe: the learned

botanist Scopoli, Spallanzani, Volta, and Father Fontana, the famous

mathematician. In such surroundings Vivaldi might have pursued his task

contentedly enough, but for the thought of Fulvia's future. This, his

daughter said, continually preyed on him, driving him to labours beyond

his strength; for he hoped by the publication of his book to make good,

at least in part, the loss of the small property which the Sardinian

government had confiscated. All her entreaties could not dissuade him

from over-exertion; and in addition to his regular duties he took on

himself (as she afterward learned) the tedious work of revising proofs

and copying manuscripts for the professors. This drudgery, combined with

severe intellectual effort, exceeded his flagging powers; and the book

was hardly completed when his patron, apprised of its contents, abruptly

removed him from his post. From that day Vivaldi sank in health; but he

ended as became a sage, content to have discharged the task for which he

had given up home and substance, and dying with the great Stoic's words

upon his lips:--

Lex non poena mors.

Vivaldi's friends in Milan came generously to Fulvia's aid, and she

would gladly have remained among them; but after the loss of her small

inheritance and of her father's manuscript she was without means of

repaying their kindness, and nothing remained but to turn to her own

kin.

As Odo sat in the quiet cell, listening to her story, and hearing again

the great names his youth had reverenced, he felt himself an exile

returning to his own, mounting the familiar heights and breathing the

air that was his birthright. Looking back from this recovered standpoint

he saw how far behind his early hopes had been left. Since his departure

from Naples there had been nothing to remind him of that vast noiseless

labour of the spirit going on everywhere beneath the social surface:

that baffled but undiscouraged endeavour in which he had once so

impatiently claimed his share. Now every word of Fulvia's smote the

bones of some dead purpose, till his bosom seemed a very valley of

Ezekiel. Her own trials had fanned her love of freedom, and the near

hope of release lent an exaltation to her words. Of bitterness, of

resentment she gave no sign; and he was awed by the same serenity of

spirit which had struck him in the imprisoned doctor. But perhaps the

strongest impression she produced was that of increasing his points of

contact with life. His other sentimental ties had been a barrier between

himself and the outer world; but the feeling which drew him to Fulvia

had the effect of levelling the bounds of egoism, of letting into the

circle of his nearest emotions that great tide of human longing and

effort that had always faintly sounded on the shores of self. Perhaps it

was her power of evoking this wider life that gave a sense of

permanence, of security almost, to the stolen moments of their

intercourse, lulling the lover's impatience of actual conditions with

the sense of something that must survive the accidents of fortune. Only

in some such way could he explain, in looking back, the completeness of

each moment spent with her. He was conscious even at the time of a

suspension of the emotional laws, a charmed surrender to the limitations

of his fate. When he was away his impatience reasserted itself; but her

presence was like a soothing hand on his spirit, and he knew that his

quiet hours with her would count among those intervals between the

crises of life that flower in memory when the crises themselves have

faded.

It was natural that in the course of these visits she in turn should

question him; and as his past rearranged itself beneath her scrutiny he

seemed once more to trace the thread of purpose on which its fragments

hung. He told her of his connection with the liberals of Pianura, of the

situation at court, and of the reason for his prolonged travels. As he

talked her eyes conveyed the exquisite sense of her complete

comprehension. She saw, before he could justify himself, how the

uncertainty of his future, and his inability to act, had cast him adrift

upon a life of superficial enjoyment; and how his latent dissatisfaction

with this life had inevitably resulted in self-distrust and vacillation.

"You wait your hour," she said of him; and he seized on the phrase as a

justification of his inactivity and, when chance should offer, a spur to

fresh endeavour. Her interest in the liberal cause had been intensified

and exalted by her father's death--his martyrdom, as she described it.

Like most women possessed of an abstract idea she had unconsciously

personified the idea and made a religion of it; but it was a religion of

charity and not of vindictiveness. "I should like my father's death

avenged by love and not by hate," she said; "I would have it bring

peace, not a sword."

On one point only she remained, if not hostile yet unresponsive. This

was when he spoke of de Crucis. Her manner hardened instantly, and he

perceived that, though he dwelt on the Jesuit's tolerant view and

cultivated tastes, she beheld only the priest and not the man. She had

been eager to hear of Crescenti, whom she knew by name as a student of

European repute, and to the praise of whose parochial charities she

listened with outspoken sympathy; but the Jesuits stood for the Holy

Office, and she had suffered too deeply at the hands of the Holy Office

to regard with an open mind any who might be supposed to represent its

principles. It was impossible for Odo to make her understand how

distinctly, in de Crucis's case, the man predominated over the order;

and conscious of the painfulness of the subject, he gave up the attempt

to interest her in his friend.

Three or four times he was permitted to visit her in her cell: after

that they met almost daily in the parlour, where, about the hour of

benediction, they could talk almost as privately under cover of the

general chatter. In due time Fulvia received an answer from the

Calvinist professor, who assured her of a welcome in Geneva and shelter

under his roof. Odo, meanwhile, had perfected the plan of their journey;

but as Michaelmas approached he began to fear Cantapresto's observation.

He now bitterly regretted that he had not held to his purpose of sending

the soprano back to Pianura; but to do so at this point would be to

challenge observation and he resolved instead on despatching him to

Monte Alloro with a letter to the old Duke. As the way to Geneva lay in

the opposite direction this would at least give the fugitives a three

days' lead; and they had little cause to fear pursuit from any other

quarter. The convent indeed might raise a hue and cry; but the nuns of

Santa Chiara had lately given the devout so much cause for scandal that

the abbess would probably be disposed to hush up any fresh delinquency.

The time too was well-chosen; for the sisters had prevailed on the

Reverend Mother to celebrate the saint's day by a masked ball, and the

whole convent was engrossed in the invention of whimsical disguises. The

nuns indeed were not to take part in the ball; but a number of them were

to appear in an allegorical entertainment with which the evening was to

open. The new Papal Nuncio, who was lately arrived in Venice, had

promised to be present; and as he was known to be a man of pleasure

there was scarce a sister in the convent but had an eye to his conquest.

These circumstances gave to Fulvia's plans the shelter of indifference;

for in the delightful effort of surpassing the other nuns even Mary of

the Crucifix lost interest in her friend's affairs.

Odo, to preserve the secrecy of his designs, had been obliged to keep up

a pretence of his former habits, showing himself abroad with

Coeur-Volant and Castelrovinato and frequenting the Procuratessa's routs

and card-parties. This lady, though lately returned to the Brenta, had

announced her intention of coming to Venice for the ball at Santa

Chiara; and Coeur-Volant was mightily preoccupied with the

entertainment, at which he purposed his mistress should outshine all her

companions.

The evening came at last, and Odo found himself entering the gates of

Santa Chiara with a throng of merry-makers. The convent was noted for

its splendid hospitality, and unwonted preparations had been made to

honour the saint. The brightly-illuminated bridge leading to the square

of Santa Chiara was decked with a colonnade of pasteboard and stiffened

linen cunningly painted, and a classical portico masked the entrance

gate. A flourish of trumpets and hautboys, and the firing of miniature

cannon, greeted the arrival of the guests, who were escorted to the

parlour, which was hung with tapestries and glowing with lights like a

Lady Chapel. Here they were received by the abbess, who, on the arrival

of the Nuncio, led the way to the garden, where a stage had been

erected.

The nuns who were not to take part in the play had been seated directly

under the stage, divided from the rest of the company by a low screen of

foliage. Ranged beneath the footlights, which shone on their bare

shoulders and white gowns, and on the gauze veils replacing their

monastic coifs, they seemed a choir of pagan virgins grouped in the

proscenium of an antique theatre. Everything indeed combined to produce

the impression of some classic festival: the setting of motionless

foliage, the mild autumnal sky in which the stars hung near and vivid,

and the foreground thronged with a motley company lit by the shifting

brightness of torches.

As Odo, in mask and travesty, stood observing the fantastically-dressed

audience, the pasteboard theatre adorned with statuary, and the nuns

flitting across the stage, his imagination, strung to the highest pitch

by his own impending venture, was thrilled by the contrast between the

outward appearance of the scene and its underlying reality. From where

he stood he looked directly at the abbess, who was seated with the

Nuncio and his suite under the tall crucifix in the centre of the

garden. As if to emphasise the irony of the situation, the torch fixed

behind this noble group cast an enlarged shadow of the cross over the

abbess's white gown and the splendid robes of her companions, who,

though they wore the mask, had not laid aside their clerical dress. To

Odo the juxtaposition had the effect of some supernatural warning, the

shadow of the divine wrath projected on its heedless ministers; an

impression heightened by the fact that, just opposite the cross, a

lively figure of Pan, surmounting the pediment of the theatre, seemed to

fling defiance at the Galilean intruder.

The nuns, like the rest of the company, were masked; and it had been

agreed between Odo and Fulvia that the latter should wear a wreath of

myrtle above her veil. As almost all her companions had chosen

brightly-coloured flowers this dark green chaplet was easily

distinguished among the clustered heads beneath the stage, and Odo had

no doubt of being able to rejoin Fulvia in the moment of dispersal that

should follow the conclusion of the play. He knew that the sisters were

to precede their guests and be locked behind the grate before the ball

began; but as they passed through the garden and cloisters the barrier

between nuns and visitors would probably not be too strictly maintained.

As he had foreseen, the company, attracted by the graceful procession,

pressed forward regardless of the assistant mistresses' protests, and

the shadowy arcades were full of laughter and whispered snatches of talk

as the white flock was driven back to its fold.

Odo had withdrawn to the darkest angle of the cloister, close to a door

leading to the pharmacy. It was here that Fulvia had told him to wait;

and though he had lost sight of her when the audience rose, he stood

confidently watching for the reappearance of the myrtle-wreath.

Presently he saw it close at hand; and just then the line of sisters

flowed toward him, driven forward by a group of lively masqueraders,

among whom he seemed to recognise Coeur-Volant's voice and figure.

Nothing could have been more opportune, for the pressure swept the

wearer of the myrtle-wreath almost into his arms; and as the intruders

were dispersed and the nuns laughingly reformed their lines, her hand

lingered in his and he felt himself drawn toward the door.

It yielded to her touch and Odo followed her down a dark passageway to

the empty room where rows of old Faenza jars and quaintly-shaped flagons

glimmered in the dusk. Beyond the pharmacy was another door, the key of

which hung on the wall with the portress's hood and cloak. Without a

word the girl wrapped herself in the cloak and, fitting the key to the

lock, softly opened the door. All this was done with a rapidity and

assurance for which Odo was unprepared; but, reflecting that Fulvia's

whole future hung on the promptness with which each detail of her plan

was executed, he concluded that her natural force of character enabled

her to assume an ease she could hardly feel.

The door opened on the kitchen-garden, and brushing the lavender-hedges

with her flying skirts she sped on ahead of Odo to the postern which the

nuns were accustomed to use for their nocturnal escapades. Only the

thickness of an oaken gate stood between Fulvia and the outer world. To

her the opening of the gate meant the first step toward freedom, but to

Odo the passing from their enchanted weeks of fellowship to the inner

loneliness of his former life. He hung back silent while she drew the

bolt.

A moment later they had crossed the threshold and his gondola was

slipping toward them out of the shadow of the wall. Fulvia sprang on

board and he followed her under the felze. The warm darkness enclosing

them stirred impulses which their daily intercourse had subdued, and in

the sense of her nearness he lost sight of the conditions which had

brought them together. The feeling seemed to communicate itself; for as

the gondola rounded the angle of the convent-wall and swung out on the

open, she drooped toward him with the turn of the boat and their lips

met under the loosened masks.

At the same instant the light of the Virgin's shrine in the corner of

the convent-wall fell through the window of the felze on the face lifted

to Odo's; and he found himself suddenly confronted by the tender eyes

and malicious smile of Sister Mary of the Crucifix.

"By Diana," she cried as he started back, "I did but claim my pay in

advance; nor do I think that, when she knows all, Sister Veronica will

grudge me my reward!"

He continued to stare at her in speechless bewilderment, and she went on

with a kind of tender impatience: "You simpleton, can you not guess that

you were watched, and that but for me your Veronica would at this moment

be lying under lock and key in her cell? Instead of which," she

continued, speaking more slowly, and leaning back as though to enjoy the

full savour of his suspense, "instead of which she now awaits you in a

safe nook of my choosing, where, within half an hour's time, you may

atone to her with interest for the infidelity into which I have betrayed

you."

"She knows, then?" Odo faltered, not daring to say more in his ignorance

of Sister Mary's share in the secret.

Sister Mary shook her head with a tantalising laugh. "That you are

coming? Alas, no, poor angel! She fancies that she has been sent from

the convent to avoid you--as indeed she was, and by the Reverend

Mother's own order, who, it seems, had wind of the intrigue this

morning. But, the saints be praised, the excellent sister who was

ordered to attend her is in my pay and instead of conducting her to her

relatives of San Barnado, who were to keep her locked up over night,

has, if I mistake not, taken her to a good woman of my acquaintance--an

old servant, in fact--who will guard her as jealously as the family

plate till you and I come to her release."

As she spoke she put out her head and gave a whispered order to the

gondolier; and at the word the boat swung round and headed for the city.

In the violent reaction which this strange encounter produced, Odo was

for the moment incapable of taking any clear note of his surroundings.

Uncertain if he were not once more the victim of some such mischance as

seemed to attend all his efforts to succour Fulvia, he sat in silent

apprehension as the gondola shot across the Grand Canal and entered the

labyrinth of water-ways behind San Moise. Sister Mary took his silence

philosophically.

"You dare not speak to me, for fear of betraying yourself," she said,

"and I scarce wonder at your distrust; for your plans were so well laid

that I had no notion of what was on foot, and must have remained in

ignorance if Veronica had not been put in Sister Martha's charge. But

you will both live to thank me, and I hope," she added, laughing, "to

own that you would have done better to take me into your confidence from

the first."

As she spoke the gondola touched at the head of a narrow passage which

lost itself in the blackness of the overhanging houses. Sister Mary

sprang out and drew Odo after her. A few yards down the alley she

entered a plain low-storied house somewhat withdrawn behind its

neighbours. Followed by Odo she groped her way up a dark flight of

stairs and knocked at a door on the upper landing. A vague flutter

within, indicative of whispers and uncertain movements, was followed by

the slipping of the bolt, and a middle-aged woman looked out. She drew

back with an exclamation of welcome, and Sister Mary, seizing Odo by the

shoulders, pushed him across the threshold of a small dimly-lit kitchen.

Fulvia, in her nun's habit, cowered in the darkest corner; but at sight

of Odo she sprang up, and ran toward him with a happy cry.

3.6.

An hour later the two were well on their way toward Mestre, where a

travelling-chaise awaited them. Odo, having learned that Andreoni was

settled in Padua, had asked him to receive Fulvia in his house till the

next night-fall; and the bookseller, whom he had taken into his

confidence, was eager to welcome the daughter of the revered Vivaldi.

The extremes of hope and apprehension had left Fulvia too exhausted for

many words, and Odo, after she had confirmed every particular of Sister

Mary's story, refrained from questioning her farther. Thanks to her

friend's resources she had been able to exchange her nun's dress for the

plain gown and travelling-cloak of a young woman of the middle class;

and this dress painfully recalled to Odo the day when he had found her

standing beside the broken-down chaise on the road to Vercelli.

The recollection was not calculated to put him at his ease; and indeed

it was only now that he began to feel the peculiar constraint of his

position. To Andreoni his explanation of Fulvia's flight had seemed

natural enough; but on the subsequent stages of their journey she must

pass for his mistress or his wife, and he hardly knew in what spirit she

would take the misapprehensions that must inevitably arise.

At Mestre their carriage waited, and they drove rapidly toward Padua

through the waning night. Andreoni, in his concern for Fulvia's safety,

had prepared for her reception a little farm-house of his wife's, in a

vineyard beyond the town; and here at daybreak it was almost a relief to

Odo to commit his charge to the Signora Andreoni's care.

The day was spent indoors, and Andreoni having thought it more prudent

to bring no servant from Padua, his wife prepared the meals for their

guests and the bookseller drew a jar of his own wine from the cellar.

Fulvia kept to herself during the day; but at dusk she surprised Odo by

entering the room with a trayful of plates and glasses, and helping

their hostess to set out the supper-table. The few hours of rest had

restored to her not only the serenity of the convent, but a lightness of

step and glance that Odo had not seen in her since the early days of

their friendship. He marvelled to see how the first breath of freedom

had set her blood in motion and fanned her languid eye; but he could not

suppress the accompanying thought that his own presence had failed to

work such miracles.

They had planned to ride that night to a little village in the hills

beyond Vicenza, where Fulvia's foster-mother, a peasant of the

Vicentine, lived with her son, who was a vine-dresser; and supper was

hardly over when they were told that their horses waited. Their kind

hosts dared not urge them to linger; and after a hurried farewell they

rode forth into the fresh darkness of the September night.

The new moon was down and they had to thread their way slowly through

the stony lanes between the vineyards. At length they gained the open

country, and growing more accustomed to the darkness put their horses to

a trot. The change of pace, and the exhilaration of traversing an

unknown country in the hush and mystery of night, combined to free their

spirits, and Odo began to be aware that the barrier between them was

lifted. To the charm of their intercourse at Santa Chiara was added that

closer sympathy produced by the sense of isolation. They were enclosed

in their common risk as in some secret meeting-place where no

consciousness of the outer world intruded; and though their talk kept

the safe level of their immediate concerns he felt the change in every

inflection of Fulvia's voice and in the subtler emphasis of her

silences.

The way was long, and he had feared that she would be taxed beyond her

strength; but the miles seemed to fly beneath their horses' feet, and

they could scarcely believe that the dark hills which rose ahead of them

against a whitening sky marked the limit of their journey.

With some difficulty they found their way to the vine-dresser's house, a

mere hut in a remote fold of the hills. From motives of prudence they

had not warned the nurse of their coming; but they found the old woman

already at work in her melon-patch and learned from her that her son had

gone down to his day's labour in the valley. She received Fulvia with a

tender wonder, as at some supernatural presence descending into her

life, too much awed, till the first embraces were over, to risk any

conjecture as to Odo's presence. But with the returning sense of

familiarity--the fancied recovery of the nurseling's features in the

girl's definite outline--came the inevitable reaction of curiosity, and

the fugitives felt themselves coupled in the old woman's meaning smiles.

To Odo's surprise Fulvia received these innuendoes with baffling

composure, parrying the questions she seemed to answer, and finally

taking refuge in a plea for rest. But the accord of the previous night

was broken; and when the travellers set out again, starting a little

before sunset to avoid the vine-dresser's return, the constraint of the

day began to weigh upon them. In Fulvia's case physical weariness

perhaps had a share in the change; but whatever the cause, its effect

was to make this stage of the journey strangely tedious to both.

Their way lay through the country north of Vicenza, whence they hoped by

dawn to gain Peschiera on the lake of Garda, and hire a chaise which

should take them across the border. For the first hour or two they had

the new moon to light them; but as it set the sky clouded and drops of

rain began to fall. Fulvia had hitherto shown a gay indifference to the

discomforts of the journey; but she presently began to complain of the

cold and to question Odo anxiously as to the length of the way. The

hilliness of the country forced them to travel slowly, and it seemed to

Odo that hours had elapsed before they saw lights in the valley below

them. Their plan had been to avoid the towns on their way, and Fulvia,

the night before, had contented herself with a half-hour's rest by the

roadside; but a heavy rain was now falling, and she at once assented to

Odo's tentative proposal that they should take shelter till the storm

was over.

They dismounted at an inn on the outskirts of the village. The sleepy

landlord stared as he unbarred the door and led them into the kitchen;

but he offered no comment beyond remarking that it was a good night to

be under cover.

Fulvia sank down on the wooden settle near the chimney, where a fire had

been hastily kindled. She took no notice of Odo when he removed the

dripping cloak from her shoulders, but sat gazing before her in a kind

of apathy.

"I cannot eat," she said, as Odo pressed her to take her place at the

table.

The innkeeper turned to him with a confidential nod. "Your lady looks

fairly beaten," he said. "I've a notion that one of my good beds would

be more to her taste than the best supper in the land. Shall I have a

room made ready for your excellencies?"

"No, no," said Fulvia, starting up. "We must set out again as soon as we

have supped."

She approached the table and hastily emptied the glass of country wine

that Odo had poured out for her.

The innkeeper seemed a simple unsuspicious fellow, but at this he put

down the plate of cheese he was carrying and looked at her curiously.

"Start out again at this hour of the night?" he exclaimed. "By the

saints, your excellencies must be running a race with the sun! Or do you

doubt my being able to provide you with decent lodgings, that you prefer

mud and rain to my good sheets and pillows?"

"Indeed, no," Odo amicably interposed; "but we are hurrying to meet a

friend who is to rejoin us tomorrow at Peschiera."

"Ah--at Peschiera," said the other, as though the name had struck him.

He took a dish of eggs from the fire and set it before Fulvia. "Well,"

he went on with a shrug, "it is written that none of my beds shall be

slept in tonight. Not two hours since I had a gentleman here that gave

the very same excuse for hurrying forward; though his horses were so

spent that I had to provide him with another pair before he could

continue his journey." He laughed and uncorked a second bottle.

"That reminds me," he went on, pausing suddenly before Fulvia, "that the

other gentleman was travelling to meet a friend too; a lady, he said--a

young lady. He fancied she might have passed this way and questioned me

closely; but as it happened there had been no petticoat under my roof

for three days.--I wonder, now, if he could have been looking for your

excellencies?"

Fulvia flushed high at this, but a sign from Odo checked the denial on

her lips.

"Why," said he, "it is not unlikely, though I had fancied our friend

would come from another direction. What was this gentleman like?"

The landlord hesitated, evidently not so much from any reluctance to

impart what he knew as from the inability to express it. "Well," said

he, trying to supplement his words by a vaguely descriptive gesture, "he

was a handsome personable-looking man--smallish built, but with a fine

manner, and dressed not unlike your excellency."

"Ah," said Odo carelessly, "our friend is an ecclesiastic.--And which

way did this gentleman travel?" he went on, pouring himself another

glass.

The landlord assumed an air of country cunning. "There's the fishy part

of it," said he. "He gave orders to go toward Verona; but my boy, who

chased the carriage down the road, as lads will, says that at the

cross-ways below the old mill the driver took the turn for Peschiera."

Fulvia at this seemed no longer able to control herself. She came close

to Odo and said in a low urgent tone: "For heaven's sake, let us set

forward!"

Odo again signed to her to keep silent, and with an effort she resumed

her seat and made a pretence of eating. A moment later he despatched the

landlord to the stable, to see that the horses had been rubbed down; and

as soon as the door closed she broke out passionately.

"It is my fault," she cried, "it is all my fault for coming here. If I

had had the courage to keep on this would never have happened!"

"No," said Odo quietly, "and we should have gone straight to Peschiera

and landed in the arms of our pursuer--if this mysterious traveller is

in pursuit of us."

His tone seemed to steady her. "Oh," she said, and the colour flickered

out of her face.

"As it happens," he went on, "nothing could have been more fortunate

than our coming here."

"I see--I see--; but now we must go on at once," she persisted.

He looked at her gravely. "This is your wish?"

She seemed seized with a panic fear. "I cannot stay here!" she repeated.

"Which way shall we go, then? If we continue to Peschiera, and this man

is after us, we are lost."

"But if he does not find us he may return here--he will surely return

here!"

"He cannot return before morning. It is close on midnight already.

Meanwhile you can take a few hours' rest while I devise means of

reaching the lake by some mule-track across the mountain."

It cost him an effort to take this tone with her; but he saw that in her

high-strung mood any other would have been less effective. She rose

slowly, keeping her eyes on him with the look of a frightened child. "I

will do as you wish," she said.

"Let the landlord prepare a bed for you, then. I will keep watch down

here and the horses shall be saddled at daylight."

She stood silent while he went to the door to call the innkeeper; but

when the order was given, and the door closed again, she disconcerted

him by a sudden sob.

"What a burden I am!" she cried. "I had no right to accept this of you."

And she turned and fled up the dark stairs.

The night passed and toward dawn the rain ceased. Odo rose from his

dreary vigil in the kitchen, and called to the innkeeper to carry up

bread and wine to Fulvia's room. Then he went out to see that the horses

were fed and watered. He had not dared to question the landlord as to

the roads, lest his doing so should excite suspicion; but he hoped to

find an ostler who would give him the information he needed.

The stable was empty, however; and he prepared to bait the horses

himself. As he stooped to place his lantern on the floor he caught the

gleam of a small polished object at his feet. He picked it up and found

that it was a silver coat-of-arms, such as are attached to the blinders

and saddles of a carriage-harness. His curiosity was aroused, and

holding the light closer he recognised the ducal crown of Pianura

surmounting the "Humilitas" of the Valseccas.

The discovery was so startling that for some moments he stood gazing at

the small object in his hand without being able to steady his confused

ideas. Gradually they took shape, and he saw that, if the ornament had

fallen from the harness of the traveller who had just preceded them, it

was not Fulvia but he himself who was being pursued. But who was it who

sought him and to what purpose? One fact alone was clear: the traveller,

whoever he was, rode in one of the Duke's carriages, and therefore

presumably upon his sovereign's business.

Odo was still trying to thread a way through these conjectures when a

yawning ostler pushed open the stable-door.

"Your excellency is in a hurry to be gone," he said, with a surprised

glance.

Odo handed him the coat-of-arms. "Can you tell me what this is?" he

asked carelessly. "I picked it up here a moment ago."

The other turned it over and stared. "Why," said he, "that's off the

harness of the gentleman that supped here last night--the same that went

on later to Peschiera."

Odo proceeded to question him about the mule-tracks over Monte Baldo,

and having bidden him saddle the horses in half an hour, crossed the

courtyard and re-entered the inn. A grey light was already falling

through the windows, and he mounted the stairs and knocked on the door

which he thought must be Fulvia's. Her voice bade him enter and he found

her seated fully dressed beside the window. She rose with a smile and he

saw that she had regained her usual self-possession.

"Do we set out at once?" she asked.

"There is no great haste," he answered. "You must eat first, and by that

time the horses will be saddled."

"As you please," she returned, with a readiness in which he divined the

wish to make amends for her wilfulness the previous night. Her eyes and

cheeks glowed with an excitement which counterfeited the effects of a

night's rest, and he thought he had never seen her more radiant. She

approached the table on which the wine and bread had been placed, and

drew another chair beside her own.

"Will you not share with me?" she asked, filling a glass for him.

He took it from her with a smile. "I have good news for you," he said,

holding out the bit of silver which he had brought from the stable.

She examined it wonderingly. "What does this mean?" she asked, looking

up at him.

"That it is I who am being followed--and not you."

She started and the ornament slipped from her hand.

"You?" she faltered with a quick change of colour.

"This coat-of-arms," he explained, "dropped from the harness of the

traveller who left the inn just before our arrival last night."

"Well--" she said, still without understanding; "and do you know the

coat?"

Odo smiled. "It is mine," he answered; "and the crown is my cousin's.

The traveller must have been a messenger of the Duke's."

She stood leaning against the seat from which she had risen, one hand

still grasping it while the other hung inert. Her lips parted but she

did not speak. Her pallor troubled Odo and he went up to her and took

her hand.

"Do you not understand," he said gently, "that there is no farther cause

for alarm? I have no reason to think that the Duke's messenger is in

pursuit of me; but should he be so, and should he overtake us, he has no

authority over you and no reason for betraying you to your enemies."

The blood poured back to her face. "Me! My enemies!" she stammered. "It

is not of them I think." She raised her head and faced him in a glow.

For a moment he stood stupidly gazing at her; then the mist lifted and

through it he saw a great light.

* * * * *

The landlord's knock warned them that their horses waited, and they rode

out in the grey morning. The world about them still lay in shade, and as

they climbed the wooded defile above the valley Odo was reminded of the

days at Donnaz when he had ridden up the mountain in the same early

light. Never since then had he felt, as he did now, the boy's easy

kinship with the unexpected, the sense that no encounter could be too

wonderful to fit in with the mere wonder of living.

To avoid the road to Peschiera they had resolved to cross the Monte

Baldo by a mule-track which should bring them out at one of the villages

on the eastern shore of Garda; and the search for this path led them up

through steep rain-scented woods where they had to part the wet boughs

as they passed. From time to time they regained the highway and rode

abreast, almost silent at first with the weight of their new nearness,

and then breaking into talk that was the mere overflow of what they were

thinking. There was in truth more to be felt between them than to be

said; since, as each was aware, the new light that suffused the present

left the future as obscure as before. But what mattered, when the hour

was theirs? The narrow kingdom of today is better worth ruling over than

the widest past or future; but not more than once does a man hold its

fugitive sceptre. The past, however, was theirs also: a past so

transformed that he must revisit it with her, joyously confronting her

new self with the image of her that met them at each turn. Then he had

himself to trace in her memories, his transfigured likeness to linger

over in the Narcissus-mirror of her faith in him. This interchange of

recollections served them as well as any outspoken expression of

feeling, and the most commonplace allusion was charged with happy

meanings.

Arabia Petraea had been an Eden to such travellers; how much more the

happy slopes they were now descending! All the afternoon their path

wound down the western incline of Monte Baldo, first under huge olives,

then through thickets of laurel and acacia, to emerge on a lower level

of lemon and orange groves, with the blue lake showing through a diaper

of golden-fruited boughs. Fulvia, to whom this clear-cut southern

foliage was as new as the pure intensity of light that bathed it, seemed

to herself to be moving through the landscape of a dream. It was as

though nature had been remodelled, transformed almost, under the touch

of their love: as though they had found their way to the Hesperian

glades in which poets and painters placed the legendary lovers of

antiquity.

Such feelings were intensified by the strangeness of the situation. In

Italy the young girls of the middle class, though seemingly allowed a

greater freedom of intercourse than the daughters of noblemen, were in

reality as strictly guarded. Though, like Fulvia, they might converse

with the elderly merchants or scholars frequenting the family table,

they were never alone in the company of men, and the high standard of

conduct prevailing in the bourgeoisie forbade all thought of clandestine

intercourse. This was especially true of the families of men of letters,

where the liberal education of the young girls, and their habit of

associating as equals with men of serious and cultivated minds, gave

them a self-possession disconcerting to the young blood accustomed to

conquer with a glance. These girls as a rule, were married early to men

of their own standing, and though the cicisbeo was not unknown after

marriage he was not an authorised member of the household. Fulvia,

indeed, belonged to the class most inaccessible to men of Odo's rank:

the only class in Italy in which the wife's fidelity was as much

esteemed as the innocence of the girl. Such principles had long been

ridiculed by persons of quality and satirised by poets and playwrights.

From Aristophanes to Beaumarchais the cheated husband and the outwitted

guardian had been the figures on which the dramatist relied for his

comic effects. Even the miser tricked out of his savings was a shade

less ridiculous, less grotesquely deserving of his fate, than the

husband defrauded of his wife's affection. The plausible adulteress and

the adroit seducer had a recognised claim on the sympathy of the public.

But the inevitable reaction was at hand; and the new teachers to whom

Odo's contemporaries were beginning to listen had thrown a strangely

poetic light over the dull figures of the domestic virtues. Faithfulness

to the family sanctities, reverence for the marriage tie, courage to

sacrifice the loftiest passion to the most plodding duty: these were

qualities to touch the fancy of a generation sated with derision. If

love as a sentiment was the discovery of the medieval poets, love as a

moral emotion might be called that of the eighteenth-century

philosophers, who, for all their celebration of free unions and fatal

passions, were really on the side of the angels, were fighting the

battle of the spiritual against the sensual, of conscience against

appetite.

The imperceptible action of these new influences formed the real barrier

between Odo and Fulvia. The girl stood for the embodiment of the

purifying emotions that were to renew the world. Her candour, her

unapproachableness, her simple trust in him, were a part of the magic

light which the new idealism had shed over the old social structure. His

was, in short, a love large enough to include other emotions: a widening

rather than a contraction of the emotional range. Youth and propinquity

have before now broken down stronger defences; but Fulvia's situation

was an unspoken appeal to her lover's forbearance. The sense that her

safety depended on him kept his sentimental impulses in check and made

the happiness of the moment seem, in its exquisite unreality, a mere

dreamlike interlude between the facts of life.

Toward sunset they rested in an olive-orchard, tethering their horses to

the low boughs. Overhead, through the thin foliage of tarnished silver,

the sky, as the moon suffused it, melted from steel blue to a clearer

silver. A peasant-woman whose hut stood close by brought them a goat's

cheese on a vine-leaf and a jug of spring-water; and as they supped, a

little goat-herd, driving his flock down the hill, paused to watch them

with furtive woodland eyes.

Odo, questioning him, learned that at the village on the shore below

they could obtain a boat to carry them across the lake. Fulvia, for lack

of a passport, dared not set foot on Austrian soil; but the Swiss

authorities were less exacting and Odo had hopes of crossing the border

without difficulty. They set out again presently, descending through the

grey dusk of the olives till the path became too steep for riding; then

Odo lifted Fulvia from the saddle and led the two horses after her. Here

and there, between the trees, they caught a momentary glimpse of lights

on the shore and the pale gleam of the lake enclosed in black foliage.

From the village below came snatches of song and the shrill wail of a

pipe; and as the night deepened they saw, far out on the water, the wild

flare of the fish-spearers' torches, like comets in an inverted sky.

With nightfall the spirits of both had sunk. Fulvia walked ahead in

silence and Odo read a mute apprehension in her drooping outline. Every

step brought them nearer to the point they both feared to face, and

though each knew what lay in the other's thoughts neither dared break

the silence. Odo's mind turned anxiously to the incidents of the

morning, to the finding of the ducal coat-of-arms, and to all the

possibilities it suggested. What errand save one could have carried an

envoy from Pianura to that remote hamlet among the hills? He could

scarcely doubt that it was in pursuit of himself that the ducal

messenger travelled; but with what object was the journey undertaken?

Was he to be recalled in obedience to some new whim of the Duke's? Or

had some unforeseen change--he dared not let his thoughts define

it--suddenly made his presence needful in Pianura? It was more probable

that the possibility of his flight with Fulvia had been suggested to the

Duke by the ecclesiastical authorities, and that the same hand which had

parted them before was again secretly at work. In any case, it was Odo's

first business to see his companion safely across the border; and in

that endeavour he had now little fear of being thwarted. If the Duke's

messenger awaited them at Peschiera he waited in vain; and though their

flight across the lake might be known before dawn it would then be no

easy matter to overtake them.

In an hour's time, as Odo had hoped, they were putting off from the

shore in a blunt-nosed fishing-boat which was the lightest craft the

village could provide. The lake was stark calm, and the two boatmen,

silhouetted against the moonlight, drove the boat forward with even

vigorous strokes. Fulvia, shivering in the autumnal chill, had drawn her

hood close about her and sat silent, her face in shade. Measured by

their secret apprehensions the boat's progress seemed at first

indescribably slow; but gradually the sounds from the shore grew

fainter, and the fugitives felt themselves alone in a world enclosed by

the moonlit circle of the waters.

As they advanced this sense of isolation and security grew deeper and

more impressive. The motionless surface of the lake was enclosed in a

wall of mountains which the moonlight seemed to vein with marble. A sky

in which the stars were dissolved in white radiance curved high above

their heads; and not a sail flecked the lake or a cloud the sky. The

boat seemed suspended alone in some ethereal medium.

Presently one of the boatmen spoke to the other and glanced toward the

north. Then the second silently shipped his oar and hoisted the sail.

Hardly had he made it fast when a fresh of wind came down the lake and

they began to stretch across the bay with spreading canvas. The wind was

contrary, but Odo welcomed it, for he saw at once that it would be

quicker work to tack to the other shore than to depend on the oars. The

scene underwent a sudden change. The silver mirror over which they had

appeared to glide was shivered into sparkling fragments, and in the

enveloping rush and murmur of the night the boat woke to a creaking

straining activity.

The man at the rudder suddenly pointed to a huddle of lights to the

south. "Peschiera."

Odo laughed. "We shall soon show it our heels," said he.

The other boatman shrugged his shoulders. "Even an enemy's roof may

serve to keep out the storm," he observed philosophically.

"The storm? What storm?"

The man pointed to the north. Against the sky hung a little black cloud,

the merest flaw in the perfect curve of the night.

"The lake is shrewish at this season," the boatman continued. "Did your

excellencies burn a candle before starting?"

Odo sat silent, his eyes fixed on the cloud. It was growing visibly now.

With every moment its outline seemed to shift and spread, till its black

menace dilated to the zenith. The bright water still broke about them in

diamond spray; but as the shadow travelled the lake beneath it turned to

lead. Then the storm dropped on them. It fell suddenly out of

mid-heaven. Sky and water grew black and a long shudder ran through the

boat. For a moment she hung back, staggering under a white fury of

blows; then the gale seemed to lift and swing her about and she shot

forward through a long tunnel of glistening blackness, bows on for

Peschiera.

"The enemy's roof!" thought Odo. He reached for Fulvia's hand and found

it in the darkness. The rain was driving against them now and he drew

her close and wrapped his cloak about her. She lay still, without a

tremor, as though in that shelter no fears could reach her. The night

roared about them and the waters seemed to divide beneath their keel.

Through the tumult Odo shouted to the boatmen to try to make some

harbour north of Peschiera. They shouted back that they must go where

the wind willed and bless the saints if they made any harbour at all;

and Odo saw that Peschiera was their destiny.

It was past midnight when they set foot on shore. The rain still fell in

torrents and they could hardly grope their way up the steps of the

landing-stage. Odo's first concern was to avoid the inn; but the

boatmen, exhausted by their efforts and impatient to be under shelter,

could not be bribed to seek out at that hour another lodging for the

travellers. Odo dared not expose Fulvia longer to the storm, and

reluctantly they turned toward the inn, trusting that at that hour their

coming would attract little notice.

A travelling-carriage stood in the courtyard, and somewhat to Odo's

surprise the landlord was still afoot. He led them into the public

parlour, which was alight, with a good fire on the hearth. A gentleman

in travelling-dress sat near this fire, his back to the door, reading by

a shaded candle. He rose as the travellers entered, and Odo recognised

the abate de Crucis.

The latter advanced with a smile in which pleasure was more visible than

surprise. He bowed slightly to Fulvia, who had shrunk back into the

shadow of the doorway; then he turned to Odo and said: "Cavaliere, I

have travelled six days to overtake you. The Duke of Pianura is dying

and has named you regent."

3.7.

Odo heard a slight movement behind him. He turned and saw that Fulvia

had vanished. He understood her wish for concealment, but its futility

was written in the glance with which de Crucis followed her flight.

The abate continued to speak in urgent tones. "I implore you," he said,

"to lose no time in accompanying me to Pianura. The situation there is

critical and before now his Highness's death may have placed the reins

in your hands." He glanced at his watch. "If your excellency is not too

tired to set out at once, my horses can be harnessed within the half

hour."

Odo's heart sank. To have let his thoughts dwell on such a possibility

seemed to have done little to prepare him for its realisation. He hardly

understood what de Crucis was saying: he knew only that an hour before

he had fancied himself master of his fate and that now he was again in

bonds. His first clear thought was that nothing should part him from

Fulvia.

De Crucis seemed to read the thought.

"Cavaliere," he said, "at a moment when time is so valuable you will

pardon my directness. You are accompanying to Switzerland a lady who has

placed herself in your charge--"

Odo made no reply, and the other went on in the same firm but courteous

tone: "Foreseeing that it would be difficult for you to leave her so

abruptly I provided myself, in Venice, with a passport which will take

her safely across the border." He drew a paper from his coat. "This,"

said he, handing it to Odo, "is the Papal Nuncio's authorisation to the

Signorina Fulvia Vivaldi, known in religion as Sister Veronica, to

absent herself from Italy for an indefinite period. With this passport

and a good escort your companion will have no difficulty in joining her

friends."

Excess of astonishment kept Odo silent for a moment; and in that moment

he had as it were a fugitive glimpse into the workings of the great

power which still strove for predominance in Italy. A safe-conduct from

the Papal Nuncio to Fulvia Vivaldi was equivalent to her release from

her vows; and this in turn implied that, for the moment, religious

discipline had been frankly sacrificed to the pressure of political

necessities. How the invisible hands made and unmade the destinies of

those who came in their way! How boldly the Church swept aside her own

defences when they obstructed her course! He was conscious, even at the

moment, of all that men like de Crucis had to say in defence of this

higher expediency, this avowed discrimination between the factors in

each fresh combination of circumstances. He had himself felt the complex

wonder of thoughtful minds before the Church's perpetual miracle of

change disguised in immutability; but now he saw only the meaner side of

the game, its elements of cruelty and falseness; and he felt himself no

more than a frail bark on the dark and tossing seas of ecclesiastical

intrigue. For a moment his heart shuddered back from its fate.

"No passport, no safe-conduct," he said at length, "can release me from

my duty to the lady who has placed herself in my care. I shall not leave

her till she has joined her friends."

De Crucis bowed. "This is the answer I expected," he said, not without

sadness.

Odo glanced at him in surprise. The two men, hitherto, had addressed

each other as strangers; but now something in the abate's tone recalled

to Odo the familiarity of their former intercourse, their deep community

of thought, the significance of the days they had spent together in the

monastery of Monte Cassino. The association of ideas brought before him

the profound sense of responsibility with which, at that time, he had

looked forward to such an hour as this.

The abate was watching him gravely.

"Cavaliere," he said, "every instant counts, all you had once hoped to

do for Pianura is now yours to accomplish. But in your absence your

enemies are not idle. His Highness may revoke your appointment at any

hour. Of late I have had his ear, but I have now been near a week

absent, and you know the Duke is not long constant to one

purpose.--Cavaliere," he exclaimed, "I appeal to you not in the name of

the God whom you have come to doubt, but in that of your fellow-men,

whom you have wished to serve."

Odo looked at him, not without a confused sense of the irony of such an

appeal on such lips, yet with the distinct consciousness that it was

uttered in all sincerity, and that, whatever their superficial diversity

of view, he and de Crucis were at one on those deeper questions that

gave the moment its real significance.

"It is impossible," he repeated, "that I should go with you."

De Crucis was again silent, and Odo was aware of the renewed intentness

of his scrutiny. "If the lady--" broke from him once; but he checked

himself and took a turn in the room.

Meanwhile a resolve was slowly forming itself in Odo. He would not be

false to the call which, since his boyhood, had so often made itself

heard before the voice of pleasure and self-interest; but he would at

least reserve the right to obey it in his own fashion and under

conditions which left his private inclination free.

"There may be more than one way of serving one's fellows," he said

quietly. "Go back without me, abate. Tell my cousin that I resign my

rights to the succession. I shall live my own life elsewhere, not

unworthily, I hope, but as a private person."

De Crucis had turned pale. For a moment his habitual self-command seemed

about to fail him; and Odo could not but see that a sincere personal

regret was mingled with the political agent's consciousness of failure.

He himself was chiefly aware of a sense of relief, of self-recovery, as

though he had at last solved a baffling enigma and found himself once

more at one with his fate.

Suddenly he heard a step behind him. Fulvia had re-entered the room. She

had put off her drenched cloak, but the hair lay in damp strands on her

forehead, deepening her pallor and the lines of weariness under her

eyes. She moved across the room, carrying her head high and advancing

tranquilly to Odo's side. Even in that moment of confused emotions he

was struck by the nobility of her gait and gesture.

She turned to de Crucis, and Odo had the immediate intuition that she

had recognised him.

"Will you let me speak a word privately to the cavaliere Valsecca?" she

said.

The other bowed silently and turned away. The door closed on him, and

Odo and Fulvia remained alone. For a moment neither spoke; then she

said: "That was the abate de Crucis?"

He assented.

She looked at him sadly. "You still believe him to be your friend?"

"Yes," he answered frankly, "I still believe him to be my friend, and,

spite of his cloth, the friend of justice and humanity. But he is here

simply as the Duke's agent. He has been for some time the governor of

Prince Ferrante."

"I knew," she murmured, "I knew--"

He went up to her and caught her hands. "Why do we waste our time upon

him?" he exclaimed impatiently. "Nothing matters but that I am free at

last."

She drew back, gently releasing herself. "Free--?"

"My choice is made. I have resigned my right to the succession. I shall

not return to Pianura."

She continued to stare at him, leaning against the chair from which de

Crucis had risen.

"Your choice is made! Your choice is made!" she repeated. "And you have

chosen--"

"You," he said simply. "Will you go to France with me, Fulvia? Will you

be my wife and work with me at a distance for the cause that, in Italy,

we may not serve together? I have never abandoned the aims your father

taught me to strive for; they are dearer, more sacred to me than ever;

but I cannot strive for them alone. I must feel your hand in mine, I

must know that your heart beats with mine, I must hear the voice of

liberty speak to me in your voice--" He broke off suddenly and went up

to her. "All this is nothing," he said. "I love you. I cannot give you

up. That is all."

For a moment, as he spoke, her face shone with an extraordinary light.

She looked at him intently, as one who seemed to gaze beyond and through

him, at some mystic vision that his words evoked. Then the brightness

faded.

"The picture you draw is a beautiful one," she said, speaking slowly, in

sweet deliberate tones, "but it is not for me to look on. What you said

last is not true. If you love me it is because we have thought the same

thoughts, dreamed the same dream, heard the same voice--in each other's

voices, perhaps, as you say, but none the less a real voice, apart from

us and above us, and one which would speak to us as loudly if we were

apart--one which both of us must follow to the end."

He gazed at her eagerly as she spoke; and while he gazed there came to

him, perversely enough, a vision of the life he was renouncing, not as

it concerned the public welfare but in its merely personal aspect: a

vision of the power, the luxury, the sumptuous background of traditional

state and prerogative in which his artistic and intellectual tastes, as

well as his easy impulses of benevolence, would find unchecked and

immediate gratification. It was the first time that he had been aware of

such lurking influences under his most generous aspirations; but even as

Fulvia ceased to speak the vision faded, leaving only an intenser

longing to bend her will to his.

"You are right," he rejoined; "we must follow that voice to the end; but

why not together? Your father himself often questioned whether the

patriot could not serve his people better at a distance than in their

midst. In France, where the new ideas are not only tolerated but put in

practice, we shall be able to study their effects and to learn how they

may best be applied to the relief of our own unhappy people; and as a

private person, independent of party and patronage, could I not do more

than as the nominal head of a narrow priest-ridden government, where

every act and word would be used by my enemies to injure me and the

cause I represent?"

The vigour and rapidity of the attack, and the promptness with which he

converted her argument to his own use, were not without visible effect.

Odo saw his words reflected in the wavering glow of Fulvia's cheek; but

almost at once she regained control of her pulses and faced him with

that serenity which seemed to come to her at such moments.

"What you say might be true," she answered, "were your opportunities

indeed restricted to the regency. But the little prince's life is known

to hang on a thread: at any moment you may be Duke. And you will not

deny that as Duke of Pianura you can serve your people better than as an

obscure pamphleteer in Paris."

Odo made an impatient gesture. "Are you so sure?" he said. "Even as Duke

I must be the puppet of powers greater than myself--of Austria, of Rome,

nay, of the wealthy nobles who will always league themselves with their

sovereign's enemies rather than suffer a hand upon their privileges. And

even if I were fortunate enough to outwit my masters and rule indeed,

over what a toy kingdom should I reign! How small a number would be

benefited! How little the cause would be helped by my example! As an

obscure pamphleteer I might reach the hearts of thousands and speak to

great kings on their thrones; as Duke of Pianura, fighting single-handed

to reform the laws of my little state, I should rank at best with the

other petty sovereigns who are amusing themselves all over Italy with

agricultural experiments and improved methods of cheese-making."

Again the brightness shone in Fulvia's face. "How you love me!" she said

as he paused; and went on, restraining him with a gesture of the

gentlest dignity: "For it is love that speaks thus in you and not

reason; and you know as I do that the duty to which a man is born comes

before any of his own choosing. You are called to serve liberty on a

throne, I in some obscure corner of the private life. We can no more

exchange our duties than our stations; but if our lives divide, our

purpose remains one, and as pious persons recall each other in the

mystery of the Sacrament, so we shall meet in spirit in the new religion

we profess."

Her voice gained strength and measure as she spoke, and Odo felt that

all that passion could urge must spend itself in vain against such high

security of spirit.

"Go, cavaliere," she continued, "I implore you to lose no time in

reaching Pianura. Occasion is short-lived, and an hour's lingering may

cost you the regency, and with it the chance of gaining a hold on your

people. I will not expatiate, as some might, on the power and dignities

that await you. You are no adventurer plotting to steal a throne, but a

soldier pledged to his post." She moved close to him and suddenly caught

his hand and raised it to her lips. "Your excellency," said she, "has

deigned to look for a moment on a poor girl that crossed your path. Now

your eyes must be on your people, who will yet have cause to love and

bless you as she does."

She shone on him with a weeping brightness that dissolved his very soul.

"Ah," he cried, "you have indeed learned your lesson well! I admire with

what stoic calmness you pronounce my doom, with what readiness you

dispose of my future!"

"It is not mine to dispose of," she caught him up, "nor yours; but

belongs, as much as any slave's to his master, to the people you are

called to rule. Think for how many generations their unheeded

sufferings, their unrewarded toil, have paid for the pomp and pleasure

of your house! That is the debt you are called on to acquit, the wrong

you are pledged to set right."

Odo was silent. She had found the unanswerable word. Yes, he was called

on to acquit the accumulated debt of that long unrighteous rule: it was

he who must pay, if need be with the last drop of his blood, for the

savage victories of Bracciaforte, the rapacity of Guidobaldo, the

magnificence of Ascanio, the religious terrors and secret vices of the

poor Duke now nearing his end. All these passions had preyed on the

people, on the tillers and weavers and vine-dressers, obscure servants

of a wasteful greatness: theirs had been the blood that renewed the

exhausted veins of their rulers, through generation after generation of

dumb labour and privation. And the noblest passions, as well as the

basest, had been nourished at the same cost. Every flower in the ducal

gardens, every picture on the palace walls, every honour in the ancient

annals of the house, had been planted, paid for, fought for by the

people. With mute inconscient irony the two powers had faced each other

for generations: the subjects never guessing that their sovereigns were

puppets of their own making, the Dukes that all their pomp and

circumstance were but a borrowed motley. Now the evil wrought in

ignorance remained to be undone in the light of the world's new

knowledge: the discovery of that universal brotherhood which Christ had

long ago proclaimed, and which, after so many centuries, those who

denied Christ were the first to put in practice. Hour by hour, day by

day, at the cost of every personal inclination, of all that endears life

and ennobles failure, Odo must set himself to redeem the credit of his

house. He saw his way straight before him; but in that hour of insight

his heart's instinct of self-preservation made one last effort against

fate.

He turned to Fulvia.

"You are right," he said; "I have no choice. You have shown me the way;

but must I travel it alone? You ask me to give up at a stroke all that

makes life desirable: to set forth, without a backward glance, on the

very road that leads me farthest from you! Yesterday I might have

obeyed; but how can I turn today from this near view of my happiness?"

He paused a moment and she seemed about to answer; but he hurried on

without giving her time. "Fulvia, if you ask this sacrifice of me, is

there none you will make in return? If you bid me go forth and work for

my people, will you not come with me and work for them too?" He

stretched out his hands, in a gesture that seemed to sum up his infinite

need of her, and for a moment they faced each other, silenced by the

nearness of great issues.

She knew well enough what he offered. According to the code of the day

there was no dishonour in the offer and it did not occur to her to

resent it. But she looked at him sadly and he read her refusal in the

look.

"The Regent's mistress?" she said slowly. "The key to the treasury, the

back-door to preferment, the secret trafficker in titles and

appointments? That is what I should stand for--and it is not to such

services that you must even appear to owe your power. I will not say

that I have my own work to do; for the dearest service I could perform

would be to help you in yours. But to do this I must stand aside. To be

near you I must go from you. To love you I must give you up."

She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke; then she went up to him

and kissed him. It was the first kiss she had given him since she had

thrown herself in his arms in her father's garden; but now he felt her

whole being on her lips.

He would have held her fast, forgetting everything in the sweetness of

her surrender; but she drew back quickly and, before he could guess her

intention, throw open the door of the room to which de Crucis had

withdrawn.

"Signor abate!" she said.

The Jesuit came forward. Odo was dimly aware that, for an instant, the

two measured each other; then Fulvia said quietly:

"His excellency goes with you to Pianura."

What more she said, or what de Crucis answered, he could never afterward

recall. He had a confused sense of having cried out a last unavailing

protest, faintly, inarticulately, like a man struggling to make himself

heard in a dream; then the room grew dark about him, and in its stead he

saw the old chapel at Donnaz, with its dimly-gleaming shrine, and heard

the voice of the chaplain, harsh and yet strangely shaken:--"My chief

prayer for you is that, should you be raised to this eminence, it may be

at a moment when such advancement seems to thrust you in the dust."

Odo lifted his head and saw de Crucis standing alone before him.

"I am ready," he said.