BOOK IV.

THE REWARD.

Where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their

vows?

4.1.

One bright March day in the year 1783 the bells of Pianura began to ring

at sunrise, and with their first peal the townsfolk were abroad.

The city was already dressed for a festival. A canopy of crimson velvet,

surmounted by the ducal crown and by the "Humilitas" of the Valseccas,

concealed the columns of the Cathedral porch and fell in royal folds

about the featureless porphyry lions who had seen so many successive

rulers ascend the steps between their outstretched paws. The frieze of

ramping and running animals around the ancient baptistery was concealed

by heavy green garlands alternating with religious banners; and every

church and chapel had draped its doorway with crimson and placed above

the image of its patron saint the ducal crown of Pianura.

No less sumptuous was the adornment of the private dwellings. The great

families--the Trescorri, the Belverdi, the Pievepelaghi--had outdone

each other in the display of golden-threaded tapestries and Genoese

velvets emblazoned with armorial bearings; and even the sombre facade of

the Boscofolto palace showed a rich drapery surmounted by the

quarterings of the new Marchioness.

But it was not only the palace-fronts that had put on a holiday dress.

The contagion had spread to the poorer quarters, and in many a narrow

street and crooked lane, where surely no part of the coming pageant

might be expected to pass, the crazy balconies and unglazed windows were

decked out with scraps of finery: a yard or two of velvet filched from

the state hangings of some noble house, a torn and discoloured church

banner, even a cast-off sacque of brocade or a peasant's holiday

kerchief, skilfully draped about the rusty iron and held in place by

pots of clove-pink and sweet basil. The half-ruined palace which had

once housed Gamba and Momola showed a few shreds of colour on its sullen

front, and the abate Crescenti's modest house, wedged in a corner of the

city walls, was dressed like the altar of a Lady Chapel; while even the

tanners' quarter by the river displayed its festoons of coloured paper

and tinsel, ingeniously twisted into the semblance of a crown.

For the new Duke, who was about to enter his capital in state, was

extraordinarily popular with all classes. His popularity, as yet, was

mainly due to a general detestation of the rule he had replaced; but

such a sentiment gives to a new sovereign an impetus which, if he knows

how to use it, will carry him a long way toward success; and among those

in the Duke's confidence it was rumoured that he was qualified not only

to profit by the expectations he had raised but to fulfil them. The last

months of the late Duke's life had plunged the duchy into such political

and financial disorder that all parties were agreed in welcoming a

change. Even those that had most to lose by the accession of the new

sovereign, or most to fear from the policy he was known to favour,

preferred the possibility of new evils to a continuance of present

conditions. The expertest angler in troubled waters may find waters too

troubled for his sport; and under a government where power is passed

from hand to hand like the handkerchief in a children's game, the most

adroit time-server may find himself grasping the empty air.

It would indeed have been difficult to say who had ruled during the year

preceding the Duke's death. Prime ministers had succeeded each other

like the clowns in a harlequinade. Just as the Church seemed to have

gained the upper hand some mysterious revulsion of feeling would fling

the Duke toward Trescorre and the liberals; and when these had

attempted, by some trifling concession to popular feeling, to restore

the credit of the government, their sovereign, seized by religious

scruples, would hastily recall the clerical party. So the administration

staggered on, reeling from one policy to another, clutching now at this

support and now at that, while Austria and the Holy See hung on its

steps, awaiting the inevitable fall.

A cruel winter and a fresh outbreak of the silkworm disease had

aggravated the misery of the people, while the mounting extravagance of

the Duchess had put a last strain on the exhausted treasury. The

consequent increase of the salt-tax roused such popular fury that Father

Ignazio, who was responsible for the measure, was dismissed by the

panic-stricken Duke, and Trescorre, as usual, called in to repair his

rival's mistake. But it would have taken a greater statesman than

Trescorre to reach the root of such evils; and the new minister

succeeded neither in pacifying the people nor in reassuring his

sovereign.

Meanwhile the Duke was sinking under the mysterious disease which had

hung upon him since his birth. It was hinted that his last hours were

darkened by hallucinations, and the pious pictured him as haunted by

profligate visions, while the free-thinkers maintained that he was the

dupe of priestly jugglery. Toward the end there was the inevitable

rumour of acqua tofana, and the populace cried out that the Jesuits were

at work again. It seems more probable, however, that his Highness, who

had assisted at the annual festival of the Madonna del Monte, and had

mingled on foot with the swarm of devotees thronging thither from all

parts, had contracted a pestilent disorder from one of the pilgrims.

Certain it is that death came in a dreadful form. The Duchess, alarmed

for the health of Prince Ferrante, fled with him to the dower-house by

the Piana; and the strange nature of his Highness's distemper caused

many to follow her example. Even the Duke's servants, and the quacks

that lived on his bounty, were said to have abandoned the death-chamber;

and an English traveller passing through Pianura boasted that, by the

payment of a small fee to the palace porter, he had obtained leave to

enter his Highness's closet and peer through the doorway at the dying

man. However this may be, it would appear that the Duke's confessor--a

monk of the Barnabite order--was not to be found when his Highness

called for him; and the servant sent forth in haste to fetch a priest

returned, strangely enough, with the abate Crescenti, whose suspected

orthodoxy had so long made him the object of the Duke's detestation. He

it was who alone witnessed the end of that tormented life, and knew upon

what hopes or fears it closed.

Meanwhile it appeared that the Duchess's precautions were not unfounded;

for Prince Ferrante presently sickened of the same malady which had cut

off his father, and when the Regent, travelling post-haste, arrived in

Pianura, he had barely time to pass from the Duke's obsequies to the

death-bed of the heir.

Etiquette required that a year of mourning should elapse between the

accession of the new sovereign and his state entry into his capital; so

that if Duke Odo's character and intentions were still matter of

conjecture to his subjects, his appearance was already familiar to them.

His youth, his good looks, his open mien, his known affability of

manner, were so many arguments in his favour with an impressionable and

impulsive people; and it was perhaps natural that he should interpret as

a tribute to his principles the sympathy which his person aroused.

It is certain that he fancied himself, at that time, as well-acquainted

with his subjects as they believed themselves to be with him; and the

understanding supposed to exist was productive of equal satisfaction to

both sides. The new Duke had thrown himself with extraordinary zeal into

the task of loving and understanding his people. It had been his refuge

from a hundred doubts and uncertainties, the one clearly-defined object

in an obscure and troubled fate. And their response had, almost

immediately, turned his task into a pleasure. It was so easy to rule if

one's subjects loved one! And so easy to be loved if only one loved

enough in return! If he did not, like the Pope, describe himself to his

people as the servant of the servants of God, he at least longed to make

them feel that this new gospel of service was the base on which all

sovereignty must henceforth repose.

It was not that his first year of power had been without moments of

disillusionment. He had had more than one embittering experience of

intrigue and perfidy, more than one glimpse of the pitfalls besetting

his course; but his confidence in his own powers and his faith in his

people remained unshaken, and with two such beliefs to sustain him it

seemed as though no difficulties would prove insurmountable.

Such at least was the mood in which, on the morning of his entry into

Pianura, he prepared to face his subjects. Strangely enough, the state

entry began at Ponte di Po, the very spot where, on a stormy midnight

some seven years earlier, the new Duke had landed, a fugitive from his

future realm. Here, according to an ancient custom, the sovereign

awaited the arrival of his ministers and court; and then, taking seat in

his state barge, proceeded by water to Pianura, followed by an escort of

galleys.

A great tent hung with tapestries had been set up on the river-bank; and

here Odo awaited the approach of the barge. As it touched at the

landing-stage he stepped out, and his prime minister, Count Trescorre,

advanced toward him, accompanied by the dignitaries of the court.

Trescorre had aged in the intervening years. His delicate features had

withered like a woman's, and the fine irony of his smile had taken an

edge of cruelty. His face suggested a worn engraving, the lines of which

have been deepened by a too-incisive instrument.

The functionaries attending him were, with few exceptions, the same who

had figured in a like capacity at the late sovereign's court. With the

passing of the years they had grown heavier or thinner, more ponderous

or stiffer in their movements, and as they advanced, in their splendid

but unwieldy court dress, they seemed to Odo like superannuated

marionettes whose springs and wires have rusted from disuse.

The barge was a magnificent gilded Bucentaur, presented to the late

Duke's father by the Doge of Venice, and carved by his Serenity's most

famous sculptors in wood. Tritons and sea-goddesses encircled the prow

and throned above the stern, and the interior of the deck-house was

adorned with delicate rilievi and painted by Tiepolo with scenes from

the myth of Amphitrite. Here the new Duke seated himself, surrounded by

his household, and presently the heavy craft, rowed by sixty

galley-slaves, was moving slowly up the river toward Pianura.

In the clear spring light the old walled city, with its domes and

towers, rose pleasantly among budding orchards and fields. Close at hand

were the crenellations of Bracciaforte's keep, and just beyond, the

ornate cupola of the royal chapel, symbolising in their proximity the

successive ambitions of the ducal race; while the round-arched campanile

of the Cathedral and the square tower of the mediaeval town-hall sprang

up side by side, marking the centre of the free city which the Valseccas

had subjugated. It seemed to the new Duke, who was given to such

reflections, that he could read his race's history in that broken

skyline; but he was soon snatched from its perusal by the cheers of the

crowd who thronged the river-bank to greet his approach.

As the Bucentaur touched at the landing-stage and Odo stepped out on the

red carpet strewn with flowers, while cannon thundered from the walls

and the bells burst into renewed jubilation, he felt himself for the

first time face to face with his people. The very ceremonial which in

other cases kept them apart was now a means of closer communication; for

it was to show himself to them that he was making a public entry into

his capital, and it was to see him that the city had poured forth her

shouting throngs. The shouts rose and widened as he advanced, enveloping

him in a mounting tide of welcome, in which cannon, bells and

voices--the decreed and the spontaneous acclamations--were

indistinguishably merged. In like manner, approbation of his person was

mingled with a simple enjoyment of the show of which he formed a part;

and it must have taken a more experienced head than Odo's to distinguish

between the two currents of enthusiasm on which he felt himself swept

forward.

The pageant was indeed brilliant enough to justify the popular

transport; and the fact that the new Duke formed a worthy centre to so

much magnificence was not lost on his splendour-loving subjects. The

late sovereign had so long held himself aloof that the city was

unaccustomed to such shows, and as the procession wound into the square

before the Cathedral, where the thickest of the crowd was massed, the

very pealing of the church-bells was lost in the roar of human voices.

Don Serafino, the Bishop's nephew, and now Master of the Horse, rode

first, on a splendid charger, preceded by four trumpets and followed by

his esquires; then came the court dignitaries, attended by their pages

and staffieri in gala liveries, the marshals with their staves, the

masters of ceremony, and the clergy mounted on mules trapped with

velvet, each led by two running footmen. The Duke rode next, alone and

somewhat pale. Two pages of arms, helmeted and carrying lances, walked

at his horse's bridle; and behind him came his household and ministers,

with their gentlemen and a long train of servants, followed by the

regiment of light horse which closed the procession.

The houses surrounding the square afforded the best point of view to

those unwilling to mix with the crowd in the streets; and among the

spectators thronging the windows and balconies, and leaning over the

edge of the leads, were many who, from one motive or another, felt a

personal interest in the new Duke. The Marchioness of Boscofolto had

accepted a seat in the windows of the Pievepelaghi palace, which formed

an angle of the square, and she and her hostess--the same lady who had

been relieved of her diamond necklace by footpads suspected of wearing

the Duchess's livery--sat observing the scene behind the garlanded

balconies of the piano nobile. In the mezzanin windows of a neighbouring

wine-shop the bookseller Andreoni, with half a dozen members of the

philosophical society to which Odo had belonged, peered above the heads

of the crowd thronging the arcade, and through a dormer of the leads

Carlo Gamba, the assistant in the ducal library, looked out on the

triumph of his former patron. Among the Church dignities grouped about

his Highness was Father Ignazio, the late Duke's confessor, now Prior of

the Dominicans, and said to be withdrawn from political life. Seated on

his richly-trapped mule he observed the scene with impassive face; while

from his place in the long line of minor clergy, the abate Crescenti,

with eyes of infinite tenderness and concern, watched the young Duke

solemnly ascending the Cathedral steps.

In the porch the Bishop waited, impressive as ever in his white and gold

dalmatic, against the red robes of the chapter. Preceded by two

chamberlains Odo mounted the steps amid the sudden silence of the

people. The great bronze portals of the Cathedral, which were never

opened save on occasions of state, swung slowly inward, pouring a wave

of music and incense out upon the hushed sunlit square; then they closed

again, engulphing the brilliant procession--the Duke, the Bishop, the

clergy and the court--and leaving the populace to scatter in search of

the diversions prepared for them at every street-corner.

It was not till late that night that the new Duke found himself alone.

He had withdrawn at last from the torch-lit balcony overlooking the

square, whither the shouts of his subjects had persistently recalled

him. Silence was falling on the illuminated streets, and the dimness of

midnight upon the sky through which rocket after rocket had torn its

brilliant furrows. In the palace a profounder stillness reigned. Since

his accession Odo, out of respect for the late Duke, had lodged in one

of the wings of the great building; but tradition demanded that he

should henceforth inhabit the ducal apartments, and thither, at the

close of the day's ceremonies, his gentlemen had conducted him.

Trescorre had asked permission to wait on him before he slept; and he

knew that the prime minister would be kept late by his conference with

the secret police, whose nightly report could not be handed in till the

festivities were over. Meanwhile Odo was in no mood for sleep. He sat

alone in the closet, still hung with saints' images and jewelled

reliquaries, where his cousin had so often given him audience, and

whence, through the open door, he could see the embroidered curtains and

plumed baldachin of the state bed which was presently to receive him.

All day his heart had beat with high ambitions; but now a weight sank

upon his spirit. The reaction from the tumultuous welcome of the streets

to the closely-guarded silence of the palace made him feel how unreal

was the fancied union between himself and his people, how insuperable

the distance that tradition and habit had placed between them. In the

narrow closet where his predecessor had taken refuge from the detested

task of reigning, the new Duke felt the same moral lassitude steal over

him. How was such a puny will as his to contend against the great forces

of greed and prejudice? All the influences arrayed against

him--tradition, superstition, the lust of power, the arrogance of

race--seemed concentrated in the atmosphere of that silent room, with

its guarded threshold, its pious relics, and lying on the desk in the

embrasure of the window, the manuscript litany which the late Duke had

not lived to complete.

Oppressed by his surroundings, Odo rose and entered the bed-chamber. A

lamp burned before the image of the Madonna at the head of the bed, and

two lighted flambeaux flanked the picture of the Last Judgment on the

opposite wall. Odo remembered the look of terror which the Duke had

fixed on the picture during their first strange conversation. A

praying-stool stood beneath it, and it was said that here, rather than

before the Virgin's image, the melancholy prince performed his private

devotions. The horrors of the scene were depicted with a childish

minuteness of detail, as though the painter had sought to produce an

impression of moral anguish by the accumulation of physical sufferings;

and just such puerile images of the wrath to come may have haunted the

mysterious recesses of the Duke's imagination. Crescenti had told Odo

how the dying man's thoughts had seemed to centre upon this dreadful

subject, and how again and again, amid his ravings, he had cried out

that the picture must be burned, as though the sight of it was become

intolerable to him.

Odo's own mind, across which the events and emotions of the day still

threw the fantastic shadows of an expiring illumination, was wrought to

the highest state of impressionability. He saw in a flash all that the

picture must have symbolised to his cousin's fancy; and in his desire to

reconstruct that dying vision of fleshly retribution, he stepped close

to the diptych, resting a knee on the stool beneath it. As he did so,

the picture suddenly opened, disclosing the inner panel. Odo caught up

one of the flambeaux, and in its light, as on a sunlit wave, there

stepped forth to him the lost Venus of Giorgione.

He knew the picture in an instant. There was no mistaking the glow of

the limbs, the midsummer languor of the smile, the magical atmosphere in

which the gold of sunlight, of autumn leaves, of amber grapes, seemed

fused by some lost alchemy of the brush. As he gazed, the scene changed,

and he saw himself in a darkened room with cabalistic hangings. He saw

Heiligenstern's tall figure, towering in supernatural light, the Duke

leaning eagerly forward, the Duchess with set lips and troubled eyes,

the little prince bent wonderingly above the magic crystal...

A step in the antechamber announced Trescorre's approach. Odo returned

to the cabinet and the minister advanced with a low bow. The two men had

had time to grow accustomed to the new relation in which they stood to

one another, yet there were moments when, to Odo, the past seemed to lie

like fallen leaves beneath Trescorre's steps--Donna Laura, fond and

foolish in her weeds, Gamba, Momola, and the pure featherhead Cerveno,

dying at nineteen of a distemper because he had stood in the other's

way. The impression was strong on him now--but it was only momentary.

Habit reasserted itself, and the minister effaced the man. Odo signed to

Trescorre to seat himself and the latter silently presented his report.

He was a diligent and capable administrator, and however mixed might be

the motives which attached him to his sovereign, they did not interfere

with the exact performance of his duties. Odo knew this and was grateful

for it. He knew that Trescorre, ambitious of the regency, had intrigued

against him to the last. He knew that an intemperate love of power was

the mainspring of that seemingly dispassionate nature. But death had

crossed Trescorre's schemes; and he was too adroit an opportunist not to

see that his best chance now lay in making himself indispensable to his

new sovereign. Of all this Odo was aware; but his own motives in

appointing Trescorre did not justify his looking for great

disinterestedness in his minister. The irony of circumstances had forced

them upon each other, and each knew that the other understood the

situation and was prepared to make the best of it.

The Duke presently rose, and handed back to Trescorre the reports of the

secret police. They were the documents he most disliked to handle.

"You have acquitted yourself admirably of your disagreeable duties," he

said with a smile. "I hope I have done as well. At any rate the day is

over."

Trescorre returned the smile, with his usual tinge of irony. "Another

has already begun," said he.

"Ah," said Odo, with a touch of impatience, "are we not to sleep on our

laurels?"

Trescorre bowed. "Austria, your Highness, never sleeps."

Odo looked at him with surprise. "What do you mean?"

"That I have to remind your Highness--"

"Of what--?"

Trescorre had one of his characteristic pauses.

"That the Duke of Monte Alloro is in failing health--and that her

Highness's year of widowhood ended yesterday."

There was a silence. Odo, who had reseated himself, rose and walked to

the window. The shutters stood open and he looked out over the formless

obscurity of the gardens. Above the intervening masses of foliage the

Borromini wing raised its vague grey bulk. He saw lights in Maria

Clementina's apartments and wondered if she still waked. An hour or two

earlier she had given him her hand in the contra-dance at the state

ball. It was her first public appearance since the late Duke's death,

and with the laying off of her weeds she had regained something of her

former brilliancy. At the moment he had hardly observed her: she had

seemed a mere inanimate part of the pageant of which he formed the

throbbing centre. But now the sense of her nearness pressed upon him.

She seemed close to him, ingrown with his fate; and with the curious

duality of vision that belongs to such moments he beheld her again as

she had first shone on him--the imperious child whom he had angered by

stroking her spaniel, the radiant girl who had welcomed him on his

return to Pianura. Trescorre's voice aroused him.

"At any moment," the minister was saying, "her Highness may fall heir to

Monte Alloro. It is the moment for which Austria waits. There is always

an Archduke ready--and her Highness is still a young woman."

Odo turned slowly from the window. "I have told you that this is

impossible," he murmured.

Trescorre looked down and thoughtfully fingered the documents in his

hands.

"Your Highness," said he, "is as well-acquainted as your ministers with

the difficulties that beset us. Monte Alloro is one of the richest

states in Italy. It is a pity to alienate such revenues from Pianura."

The new Duke was silent. His minister's words were merely the audible

expression of his own thoughts. He knew that the future welfare of

Pianura depended on the annexation of Monte Alloro. He owed it to his

people to unite the two sovereignties.

At length he said: "You are building on an unwarrantable assumption."

Trescorre raised an interrogative glance.

"You assume her Highness's consent."

The minister again paused; and his pause seemed to flash an ironical

light on the poverty of the other's defences.

"I come straight from her Highness," said he quietly, "and I assume

nothing that I am not in a position to affirm."

Odo turned on him with a start. "Do I understand that you have

presumed--?"

His minister raised a deprecating hand. "Sir," said he, "the Archduke's

envoy is in Pianura."

4.2.

Odo, on his return to Pianura, had taken it for granted that de Crucis

would remain in his service.

There had been little talk between the two on the way. The one was deep

in his own wretchedness, and the other had too fine a tact to intrude on

it; but Odo felt the nearness of that penetrating sympathy which was

almost a gift of divination. He was glad to have de Crucis at his side

at a moment when any other companionship had been intolerable; and in

the egotism of his misery he imagined that he could dispose as he

pleased of his friend's future.

After the little Prince's death, however, de Crucis had at once asked

permission to leave Pianura. He was perhaps not displeased by Odo's

expressions of surprise and disappointment; but they did not alter his

decision. He reminded the new Duke that he had been called to Pianura as

governor to the late heir, and that, death having cut short his task, he

had now no farther pretext for remaining.

Odo listened with a strange sense of loneliness. The responsibilities of

his new state weighed heavily on the musing speculative side of his

nature. Face to face with the sudden summons to action, with the

necessity for prompt and not too-curious choice of means and method, he

felt a stealing apathy of the will, an inclination toward the subtle

duality of judgment that had so often weakened and diffused his

energies. At such a crisis it seemed to him that, de Crucis gone, he

remained without a friend. He urged the abate to reconsider his

decision, begging him to choose a post about his person.

De Crucis shook his head.

"The offer," said he, "is more tempting to me than your Highness can

guess; but my business here is at an end, and must be taken up

elsewhere. My calling is that of a pedagogue. When I was summoned to

take charge of Prince Ferrante's education I gave up my position in the

household of Prince Bracciano not only because I believed that I could

make myself more useful in training a future sovereign than the son of a

private nobleman, but also," he added with a smile, "because I was

curious to visit a state of which your Highness had so often spoken, and

because I believed that my residence here might enable me to be of

service to your Highness. In this I was not mistaken; and I will gladly

remain in Pianura long enough to give your Highness such counsels as my

experience suggests; but that business discharged, I must ask leave to

go."

From this position no entreaties could move him; and so fixed was his

resolve that it confirmed the idea that he was still a secret agent of

the Jesuits. Strangely enough, this did not prejudice Odo, who was more

than ever under the spell of de Crucis's personal influence. Though Odo

had been acquainted with many professed philosophers he had never met

among them a character so nearly resembling the old stoical ideal of

temperance and serenity, and he could never be long with de Crucis

without reflecting that the training which could form and nourish so

noble a nature must be other than the world conceived it.

De Crucis, however, frankly pointed out that his former connection with

the Jesuits was too well known in Pianura not to be an obstacle in the

way of his usefulness.

"I own," said he, "that before the late Duke's death I exerted such

influence as I possessed to bring about your Highness's appointment as

regent; but the very connections that favoured me with your predecessor

must stand in the way of my serving your Highness. Nothing could be more

fatal to your prospects than to have it said that you had chosen a

former Jesuit as your advisor. In the present juncture of affairs it is

needful that you should appear to be in sympathy with the liberals, and

that whatever reforms you attempt should seem the result of popular

pressure rather than of your own free choice. Such an attitude may not

flatter the sovereign's pride, and is in fact merely a higher form of

expediency; but it is one which the proudest monarchs of Europe are

finding themselves constrained to take if they would preserve their

power and use it effectually."

Soon afterward de Crucis left Pianura; but before leaving he imparted to

Odo the result of his observations while in the late Duke's service. De

Crucis's view was that of the more thoughtful men of his day who had not

broken with the Church, yet were conscious that the whole social system

of Europe was in need of renovation. The movement of ideas in France,

and their rapid transformation into legislative measures of unforeseen

importance, had as yet made little impression in Italy; and the clergy

in particular lived in serene unconsciousness of any impending change.

De Crucis, however, had been much in France, and had frequented the

French churchmen, who (save in the highest ranks of the hierarchy) were

keenly alive to the need of reform, and ready, in many instances, to

sacrifice their own privileges in the public cause. These men, living in

their provincial cures or abbeys, were necessarily in closer contact

with the people, better acquainted with their needs and more competent

to relieve them, than the city demagogues theorising in Parisian

coffee-houses on the Rights of Man and the Code of Nature. But the voice

of the demagogues carried farther than that of the clergy; and such

revolutionary notions as crossed the Alps had more to do with the

founding of future Utopias than with the remedy of present evils.

Even in France the temperate counsels of the clergy were being overruled

by the sentimental imprudences of the nobles and by the bluster of the

politicians. It was to put Odo on his guard against these two influences

that de Crucis was chiefly anxious; but the intelligent cooperation of

the clergy was sadly lacking in his administrative scheme. He knew that

Odo could not count on the support of the Church party, and that he must

make what use he could of the liberals in his attempts at reform. The

clergy of Pianura had been in power too long to believe in the necessity

of conceding anything to the new spirit; and since the banishment of the

Society of Jesus the presumption of the other orders had increased

instead of diminishing. The priests, whatever their failings, had

attached the needy by a lavish bounty; and they had a powerful auxiliary

in the Madonna of the Mountain, who drew pilgrims from all parts of

Italy and thus contributed to the material welfare of the state as well

as to its spiritual privileges. To the common people their Virgin was

not only a protection against disease and famine, but a kind of oracle,

who by divers signs and tokens gave evidence of divine approval or

displeasure; and it was naturally to the priests that the faithful

looked for a reading of these phenomena. This gave the clergy a powerful

hold on the religious sensibilities of the people; and more than once

the manifest disapproval of the Mountain Madonna had turned the scales

against some economic measure which threatened the rights of her augurs.

De Crucis understood the force of these traditional influences; but Odo,

in common with the more cultivated men of his day, had lived too long in

an atmosphere of polite scepticism to measure the profound hold of

religion on the consciousness of the people. Christ had been so long

banished from the drawing-room that it was has hard to believe that He

still ruled in field and vineyard. To men of Odo's stamp the piety of

the masses was a mere superficial growth, a kind of mental mould to be

dried off by the first beams of knowledge. He did not conceive it as a

habit of thought so old that it had become instinctive, so closely

intertwined with every sense that to hope to eradicate it was like

trying to drain all the blood from a man's body without killing him. He

knew nothing of the unwearied workings of that power, patient as a

natural force, which, to reach spirits darkened by ignorance and eyes

dulled by toil, had stooped to a thousand disguises, humble, tender and

grotesque--peopling the earth with a new race of avenging or protecting

deities, guarding the babe in the cradle and the cattle in the stalls,

blessing the good man's vineyard or blighting the crops of the

blasphemer, guiding the lonely traveller over torrents and precipices,

smoothing the sea and hushing the whirlwind, praying with the mother

over her sick child, and watching beside the dead in plague-house and

lazaret and galley--entering into every joy and grief of the obscurest

consciousness, penetrating to depths of misery which no human compassion

ever reached, and redressing by a prompt and summary justice wrongs of

which no human legislation took account.

Odo's first act after his accession had been to recall the political

offenders banished by his predecessor; and so general was the custom of

marking the opening of a new reign by an amnesty to political exiles,

that Trescorre offered no opposition to the measure. Andreoni and his

friends at once returned to Pianura, and Gamba at the same time emerged

from his mysterious hiding-place. He was the only one of the group who

struck Odo as having any administrative capacity; yet he was more likely

to be of use as a pamphleteer than as an office-holder. As to the other

philosophers, they were what their name implied: thoughtful and

high-minded men, with a generous conception of their civic duties, and a

noble readiness to fulfil them at any cost, but untrained to action, and

totally ignorant of the complex science of government.

Odo found the hunchback changed. He had withered like Trescorre, but

under the harsher blight of physical privations; and his tongue had an

added bitterness. He replied evasively to all enquiries as to what had

become of him during his absence from Pianura; but on Odo's asking for

news of Momola and the child he said coldly: "They are both dead."

"Dead?" Odo exclaimed. "Together?"

"There was scarce an hour between them," Gamba answered. "She said she

must keep alive as long as the boy needed her--after that she turned on

her side and died."

"But of what disorder? How came they to sicken at the same time?"

The hunchback stood silent, his eyes on the ground. Suddenly he raised

them and looked full at the Duke.

"Those that saw them called it the plague."

"The plague? Good God!" Odo slowly returned his stare. "Is it

possible--" he paused--"that she too was at the feast of the Madonna?"

"She was there, but it was not there that she contracted the distemper."

"Not there--?"

"No; for she dragged herself from her bed to go."

There was another silence. The hunchback had lowered his eyes. The Duke

sat motionless, resting his head on his hand. Suddenly he made a gesture

of dismissal...

Two months after his state entry into Pianura Odo married his cousin's

widow.

It surprised him, in looking back, to see how completely the thought of

Maria Clementina had passed out of his life, how wholly he had ceased to

reckon with her as one of the factors in his destiny. At her child's

death-bed he had seen in her only the stricken mother, centred in her

loss, and recalling, in an agony of tears, the little prince's prophetic

vision of the winged playmates who came to him carrying toys from

Paradise. After Prince Ferrante's death she had gone on a long visit to

her uncle of Monte Alloro; and since her return to Pianura she had lived

in the dower-house, refusing Odo's offer of a palace in the town. She

had first shown herself to the public on the day of the state entry; and

now, her year of widowhood over, she was again the consort of a reigning

Duke of Pianura.

No one was more ignorant than her husband of the motives determining her

act. As Duchess of Monte Alloro she might have enjoyed the wealth and

independence which her uncle's death had bestowed on her, but in

marrying again she resigned the right to her new possessions, which

became vested in the crown of Pianura. Was it love that had prompted the

sacrifice? As she stood beside him on the altar steps of the Cathedral,

as she rode home beside him between their shouting subjects, Odo asked

himself the question again and again. The years had dealt lightly with

her, and she had crossed the threshold of the thirties with the assured

step of a woman who has no cause to fear what awaits her. But her blood

no longer spoke her thoughts, and the transparence of youth had changed

to a brilliant density. He could not penetrate beneath the surface of

her smile: she seemed to him like a beautiful toy which might conceal a

lacerating weapon.

Meanwhile between himself and any better understanding of her stood the

remembrance of their talk in the hunting-lodge of Pontesordo. What she

had offered then he had refused to take: was she the woman to forget

such a refusal? Was it not rather to keep its memory alive that she had

married him? Or was she but the flighty girl he had once imagined her,

driven hither and thither by spasmodic impulses, and incapable of

consistent action, whether for good or ill? The barrier of their

past--of all that lay unsaid and undone between them--so completely cut

her off from him that he had, in her presence, the strange sensation of

a man who believes himself to be alone yet feels that he is

watched...The first months of their marriage were oppressed by this

sense of constraint; but gradually habit bridged the distance between

them and he found himself at once nearer to her and less acutely aware

of her. In the second year an heir was born and died; and the hopes and

grief thus shared drew them insensibly into the relation of the ordinary

husband and wife, knitted together at the roots in spite of superficial

divergencies.

In his passionate need of sympathy and counsel Odo longed to make the

most of this enforced community of interests. Already his first zeal was

flagging, his belief in his mission wavering: he needed the

encouragement of a kindred faith. He had no hope of finding in Maria

Clementina that pure passion for justice which seemed to him the noblest

ardour of the soul. He had read it in one woman's eyes, but these had

long been turned from him. Unconsciously perhaps he counted rather on

his wife's less generous qualities: the passion for dominion, the blind

arrogance of temper that, for the mere pleasure of making her power

felt, had so often drawn her into public affairs. Might not this waste

force--which implied, after all, a certain prodigality of courage--be

used for good as well as evil? Might not his influence make of the

undisciplined creature at his side an unconscious instrument in the

great work of order and reconstruction?

His first appeal to her brought the answer. At his request his ministers

had drawn up a plan of financial reorganisation, which should include

the two duchies; for Monte Alloro, though wealthier than Pianura, was in

even greater need of fiscal reform. As a first step towards replenishing

the treasury the Duke had declared himself ready to limit his private

expenditure to a fixed sum; and he now asked the Duchess to pledge

herself in the same manner. Maria Clementina, since her uncle's death,

had been in receipt of a third of the annual revenues of Monte Alloro.

This should have enabled her to pay her debts and put some dignity and

order into her establishment; but the first year's income had gone in

the building of a villa on the Piana, in imitation of the country-seats

along the Brenta; the second was spent in establishing a menagerie of

wild animals like that of the French Queen at Versailles; and rumour had

it that the Duchess carried her imitation of her royal cousin so far as

to be involved in an ugly quarrel with her jewellers about a necklace

for which she owed a thousand ducats.

All these reports had of course reached Odo; but he still hoped that an

appeal to her love of dominion might prove stronger than the habit of

self-indulgence. He said to himself that nothing had ever been done to

rouse her ambition, that hitherto, if she had meddled in politics, it

had been merely from thwarted vanity or the desire to gratify some

personal spite. Now he hoped to take her by higher passions, and by

associating her with his own schemes to utilise her dormant energies.

For the first moments she listened with the strained fixity of a child;

then her attention flickered and died out. The life-long habit of

referring every question to a personal standpoint made it difficult for

her to follow a general argument, and she leaned back with the resigned

eyelids of piety under the pulpit. Odo, resolved to be patient, and

seeing that the subject was too large for her, tried to take it apart,

putting it before her bit by bit, and at such an angle that she should

catch her own reflection in it. He thought to take her by the Austrian

side, touching on the well-known antagonism between Vienna and Rome, on

the reforms of the Tuscan Grand-Duke, on the Emperor Joseph's open

defiance of the Church's feudal claims. But she scented a personal

application.

"My cousin the Emperor should be a priest himself," she shrugged, "for

he belongs to the preaching order. He never goes to France but he gives

the poor Queen such a scolding that her eyes are red for a week. Has

Joseph been trying to set our house in order?"

Discouraged, but more than ever bent on patience, he tried the chord of

vanity, of her love of popularity. The people called her the beautiful

Duchess--why not let history name her the great? But the mention of

history was unfortunate. It reminded her of her lesson-books, and of the

stupid Greeks and Romans, whose dates she could never recall. She hoped

she should never be anything so dull as an historical personage! And

besides, greatness was for the men--it was enough for a princess to be

virtuous. And she looked as edifying as her own epitaph.

He caught this up and tried to make her distinguish between the public

and the private virtues. But the word "responsibility" slipped from him

and he felt her stiffen. This was preaching, and she hated preaching

even more than history. Her attention strayed again and he rallied his

forces in a last appeal. But he knew it was a lost battle: every

argument broke against the close front of her indifference. He was

talking a language she had never learned--it was all as remote from her

as Church Latin. A princess did not need to know Latin. She let her eye

linger suggestively on the clock. It was a fine hunting morning, and she

had meant to kill a stag in the Caccia del Vescovo.

When he began to sum up, and the question narrowed to a direct appeal,

her eyes left the clock and returned to him. Now she was listening. He

pressed on to the matter of retrenchment. Would she join him, would she

help to make the great work possible? At first she seemed hardly to

understand; but as his meaning grew clear to her--"Is the money no

longer ours?" she exclaimed.

He hesitated. "I suppose it is as much ours as ever," he said.

"And how much is that?" she asked impatiently.

"It is ours as a trust for our people."

She stared in honest wonder. These were new signs in her heaven.

"A trust? A trust? I am not sure that I know what that means. Is the

money ours or theirs?"

He hesitated. "In strict honour, it is ours only as long as we spend it

for their benefit."

She turned aside to examine an enamelled patch-box by Van Blarenberghe

which the court jeweller had newly received from Paris. When she raised

her eyes she said: "And if we do not spend it for their benefit--?"

Odo glanced about the room. He looked at the delicate adornment of the

walls, the curtains of Lyons damask, the crystal girandoles, the toys in

porcelain of Saxony and Sevres, in bronze and ivory and Chinese lacquer,

crowding the tables and cabinets of inlaid wood. Overhead floated a rosy

allegory by Luca Giordano; underfoot lay a carpet of the royal

manufactory of France; and through the open windows he heard the plash

of the garden fountains and saw the alignment of the long green alleys

set with the statues of Roman patriots.

"Then," said he--and the words sounded strangely in his own ears--"then

they may take it from us some day--and all this with it, to the very toy

you are playing with."

She rose, and from her fullest height dropped a brilliant smile on him;

then her eyes turned to the portrait of the great fighting Duke set in

the monumental stucchi of the chimney-piece.

"If you take after your ancestors you will know how to defend it," she

said.

4.3.

The new Duke sat in his closet. The walls had been stripped of their

pious relics and lined with books, and above the fireplace hung the

Venus of Giorgione, liberated at last from her long imprisonment. The

windows stood open, admitting the soft September air. Twilight had

fallen on the gardens, and through it a young moon floated above the

cypresses.

On just such an evening three years earlier he had ridden down the slope

of the Monte Baldo with Fulvia Vivaldi at his side. How often, since, he

had relived the incidents of that night! With singular precision they

succeeded each other in his thoughts. He felt the wild sweep of the

storm across the lake, the warmth of her nearness, the sense of her

complete trust in him; then their arrival at the inn, the dazzle of

light as they crossed the threshold, and de Crucis confronting them

within. He heard her voice pleading with him in every accent that pride

and tenderness and a noble loyalty could command; he felt her will

slowly dominating his, like a supernatural power forcing him into his

destined path; he felt--and with how profound an irony of spirit!--the

passion of self-dedication in which he had taken up his task.

He had known moments of happiness since; moments when he believed in

himself and in his calling, and felt himself indeed the man she thought

him. That was in the exaltation of the first months, when his

opportunities had seemed as boundless as his dreams, and he had not yet

learned that the sovereign's power may be a kind of spiritual prison to

the man. Since then, indeed, he had known another kind of happiness, had

been aware of a secret voice whispering within him that she was right

and had chosen wisely for him; but this was when he had realised that he

lived in a prison, and had begun to admire the sumptuous adornment of

its walls. For a while the mere external show of power amused him, and

his imagination was charmed by the historic dignity of his surroundings.

In such a setting, against the background of such a past, it seemed easy

to play the benefactor and friend of the people. His sensibility was

touched by the contrast, and he saw himself as a picturesque figure

linking the new dreams of liberty and equality to the feudal traditions

of a thousand years. But this masquerading soon ceased to divert him.

The round of court ceremonial wearied him, and books and art lost their

fascination. The more he varied his amusements the more monotonous they

became, the more he crowded his life with petty duties the more empty of

achievement it seemed.

At first he had hoped to bury his personal disappointments in the task

of reconstructing his little state; but on every side he felt a mute

resistance to his efforts. The philosophical faction had indeed poured

forth pamphlets celebrating his reforms, and comparing his reign to the

return of the Golden Age. But it was not for the philosophers that he

laboured; and the benefits of free speech, a free press, a secular

education did not, after all, reach those over whom his heart yearned.

It was the people he longed to serve; and the people were hungry, were

fever-stricken, were crushed with tithes and taxes. It was hopeless to

try to reach them by the diffusion of popular knowledge. They must first

be fed and clothed; and before they could be fed and clothed the chains

of feudalism must be broken.

Men like Gamba and Andreoni saw this clearly enough; but it was not from

them that help could come. The nobility and clergy must be coaxed or

coerced into sympathy with the new movement; and to accomplish this

exceeded Odo's powers. In France, the revolt from feudalism had found

some of its boldest leaders in the very class that had most to lose by

the change; but in Italy fewer causes were at work to set such

disinterested passions in motion. South of the Alps liberalism was

merely one of the new fashions from France: the men ran after the

pamphlets from Paris as the women ran after the cosmetics; and the

politics went no deeper than the powder. Even among the freest

intellects liberalism resulted in a new way of thinking rather in a new

way of living. Nowhere among the better classes was there any desire to

attack existing institutions. The Church had never troubled the Latin

consciousness. The Renaissance had taught cultivated Italians how to

live at peace with a creed in which they no longer believed; and their

easy-going scepticism was combined with a traditional conviction that

the priest knew better than any one how to deal with the poor, and that

the clergy were of distinct use in relieving the individual conscience

of its obligation to its fellows.

It was against such deep-seated habits of thought that Odo had to

struggle. Centuries of fierce individualism, or of sullen apathy under a

foreign rule, had left the Italians incapable of any concerted political

action; but suspicion, avarice and vanity, combined with a lurking fear

of the Church, united all parties in a kind of passive opposition to

reform. Thus the Duke's resolve to put the University under lay

direction had excited the enmity of the Barnabites, who had been at its

head since the suppression of the Society of Jesus; his efforts to

partition among the peasantry the Caccia del Vescovo, that great waste

domain of the see of Pianura, had roused a storm of fear among all who

laid claim to feudal rights; and his own personal attempts at

retrenchment, which necessitated the suppression of numerous court

offices, had done more than anything else to increase his unpopularity.

Even the people, in whose behalf these sacrifices were made, looked

askance at his diminished state, and showed a perverse sympathy with the

dispossessed officials who had taken so picturesque a part in the public

ceremonials of the court. All Odo's philosophy could not fortify him

against such disillusionments. He felt the lack of Fulvia's

unquestioning faith not only in the abstract beauty of the new ideals

but in their immediate adaptability to the complex conditions of life.

Only a woman's convictions, nourished on sentiment and self-sacrifice,

could burn with that clear unwavering flame: his own beliefs were at the

mercy of every wind of doubt or ingratitude that blew across his

unsheltered sensibilities.

It was more than a year since he had had news of Fulvia. For a while

they had exchanged letters, and it had been a consolation to tell her of

his struggles and experiments, of his many failures and few results. She

had encouraged him to continue the struggle, had analysed his various

plans of reform, and had given her enthusiastic support to the

partitioning of the Bishop's fief and the secularisation of the

University. Her own life, she said, was too uneventful to write of; but

she spoke of the kindness of her hosts, the Professor and his wife, of

the simple unceremonious way of living in the old Calvinist city, and of

the number of distinguished persons drawn thither by its atmosphere of

intellectual and social freedom.

Odo suspected a certain colourlessness in the life she depicted. The

tone of her letters was too uniformly cheerful not to suggest a lack of

emotional variety; and he knew that Fulvia's nature, however much she

fancied it under the rule of reason, was in reality fed by profound

currents of feeling. Something of her old ardour reappeared when she

wrote of the possibility of publishing her father's book. Her friends in

Geneva, having heard of her difficulty with the Dutch publisher, had

undertaken to vindicate her claims; and they had every hope that the

matter would be successfully concluded. The joy of renewed activity with

which this letter glowed would have communicated itself to Odo had he

received it at a different time; but it came on the day of his marriage,

and since then he had never written to her.

Now he felt a sudden longing to break the silence between them, and

seating himself at his desk he began to write. A moment later there was

a knock on the door and one of his gentlemen entered. The Count Vittorio

Alfieri, with a dozen horses and as many servants, was newly arrived at

the Golden Cross, and desired to know when he might have the honour of

waiting on his Highness.

Odo felt the sudden glow of pleasure that the news of Alfieri's coming

always brought. Here was a friend at last! He forgot the constraint of

their last meeting in Florence, and remembered only the happy

interchange of ideas and emotions that had been one of the quickening

influences of his youth.

Alfieri, in the intervening years, was grown to be one of the foremost

figures in Italy. His love for the Countess of Albany, persisting

through the vicissitudes of her tragic marriage, had rallied the

scattered forces of his nature. Ambitious to excel for her sake, to show

himself worthy of such a love, he had at last shaken off the strange

torpor of his youth, and revealed himself as the poet for whom Italy

waited. In ten months of feverish effort he had poured forth fourteen

tragedies--among them the Antigone, the Virginia, and the Conjuration of

the Pazzi. Italy started up at the sound of a new voice vibrating with

passions she had long since unlearned. Since Filicaja's thrilling appeal

to his enslaved country no poet had challenged the old Roman spirit

which Petrarch had striven to rouse. While the literati were busy

discussing Alfieri's blank verse, while the grammarians wrangled over

his syntax and ridiculed his solecisms, the public, heedless of such

niceties, was glowing with the new wine which he had poured into the old

vessels of classic story. "Liberty" was the cry that rang on the lips of

all his heroes, in accents so new and stirring that his audience never

wearied of its repetition. It was no secret that his stories of ancient

Greece and Rome were but allegories meant to teach the love of freedom;

yet the Antigone had been performed in the private theatre of the

Spanish Ambassador at Rome, the Virginia had been received with applause

on the public boards at Turin, and after the usual difficulties with the

censorship the happy author had actually succeeded in publishing his

plays at Siena. These volumes were already in Odo's hands, and a

manuscript copy of the Odes to Free America was being circulated among

the liberals in Pianura, and had been brought to his notice by Andreoni.

To those hopeful spirits who looked for the near approach of a happier

era, Alfieri was the inspired spokesman of reform, the heaven-sent

prophet who was to lead his country out of bondage. The eyes of the

Italian reformers were fixed with passionate eagerness on the course of

events in England and France. The conclusion of peace between England

and America, recently celebrated in Alfieri's fifth Ode, seemed to the

most sceptical convincing proof that the rights of man were destined to

a speedy triumph throughout the civilised world. It was not of a united

Italy that these enthusiasts dreamed. They were not so much patriots as

philanthropists; for the teachings of Rousseau and his school, while

intensifying the love of man for man, had proportionately weakened the

sense of patriotism, of the interets du clocher. The new man prided

himself on being a citizen of the world, on sympathising as warmly with

the poetic savage of Peru as with his own prosaic and narrow-minded

neighbours. Indeed, the prevalent belief that the savage's mode of life

was much nearer the truth than that of civilised Europeans, made it

appear superfluous to enter into the grievances and difficulties of what

was but a passing phase of human development. To cast off clothes and

codes, and live in a peaceful socialism "under the amiable reign of

Truth and Nature," seemed on the whole much easier than to undertake the

systematic reform of existing abuses.

To such dreamers--whose ideas were those of the majority of intelligent

men in France and Italy--Alfieri's high-sounding tirades embodied the

noblest of political creeds; and even the soberer judgment of statesmen

and men of affairs was captivated by the grandeur of his verse and the

heroic audacity of his theme. For the first time in centuries the

Italian Muse spoke with the voice of a man; and every man's heart in

Italy sprang up at the call.

In the midst of these triumphs, fate in the shape of Cardinal York had

momentarily separated Alfieri from his mistress, despatching the

too-tender Countess to a discreet retreat in Alsace, and signifying to

her turbulent adorer that he was not to follow her. Distracted by this

prohibition, Alfieri had resumed the nomadic habits of his youth, now

wandering from one Italian city to another, now pushing as far as Paris,

which he hated but was always revisiting, now dashing across the Channel

to buy thoroughbreds in England--for his passion for horses was

unabated. He was lately returned from such an expedition, having led his

cavalcade across the Alps in person, with a boyish delight in the

astonishment which this fantastic exploit excited.

The meeting between the two friends was all that Odo could have wished.

Though affecting to scorn the courts of princes, Alfieri was not averse

to showing himself there as the poet of the democracy, and to hearing

his heroes mouth their tyrannicidal speeches on the boards of royal and

ducal stages. He had lately made some stay in Milan, where he had

arrived in time to see his Antigone performed before the vice-regal

court, and to be enthusiastically acclaimed as the high-priest of

liberty by a community living placidly under the Austrian yoke. Alfieri

was not the man to be struck by such incongruities. It was his fate to

formulate creeds in which he had no faith: to recreate the political

ideals of Italy while bitterly opposed to any actual effort at reform,

and to be regarded as the mouthpiece of the Revolution while he

execrated the Revolution with the whole force of his traditional

instincts. As usual he was too deeply engrossed in his own affairs to

feel much interest in any others; but it was enough for Odo to clasp the

hand of the man who had given a voice to the highest aspirations of his

countrymen. The poet gave more than he could expect from the friend; and

he was satisfied to listen to Alfieri's account of his triumphs,

interspersed with bitter diatribes against the public whose applause he

courted, and the Pope to whom, on bended knee, he had offered a copy of

his plays.

Odo eagerly pressed Alfieri to remain in Pianura, offering to put one of

the ducal villas at his disposal, and suggesting that the Virginia

should be performed before the court on the Duchess's birthday.

"It is true," he said, "that we can offer you but an indifferent company

of actors; but it might be possible to obtain one or two of the leading

tragedians from Turin or Milan, so that the principal parts should at

least be worthily filled."

Alfieri replied with a contemptuous gesture. "Your Highness, our leading

tragedians are monkeys trained to dance to the tune of Goldoni and

Metastasio. The best are no better than the worst. We have no tragedians

in Italy because--hitherto--we have had no tragic dramatist." He drew

himself up and thrust a hand in his bosom. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "if I

could see the part of Virginia acted by the lady who recently recited,

before a small company in Milan, my Odes to Free America! There indeed

were fire, sublimity and passion! And the countenance had not lost its

freshness, the eye its lustre. But," he suddenly added, "your Highness

knows of whom I speak. The lady is Fulvia Vivaldi, the daughter of the

philosopher at whose feet we sat in our youth."

Fulvia Vivaldi! Odo raised his head with a start. She had left Geneva

then, had returned to Italy. The Alps no longer divided them--a scant

day's journey would bring him to her side! It was strange how the mere

thought seemed to fill the room with her presence. He felt her in the

quickened beat of his pulses, in the sudden lightness of the air, in a

lifting and widening of the very bounds of thought.

From Alfieri he learned that she had lived for some months in the

household of the distinguished naturalist, Count Castiglione, with whose

daughter's education she was charged. In such surroundings her wit and

learning could not fail to attract the best company of Milan, and she

was become one of the most noted figures of the capital. There had been

some talk of offering her the chair of poetry at the Brera; but the

report of her liberal views had deterred the faculty. Meanwhile the very

fact that she represented the new school of thought gave an added zest

to her conversation in a society which made up for its mild servitude

under the Austrian by much talk of liberalism and independence. The

Signorina Vivaldi became the fashion. The literati celebrated her

scholarship, the sonneteers her eloquence and beauty; and no foreigner

on the grand tour was content to leave Milan without having beheld the

fair prodigy and heard her recite Petrarch's Ode to Italy, or the latest

elegy of Pindamonte.

Odo scarce knew with what feelings he listened. He could not but

acknowledge that such a life was better suited to one of Fulvia's gifts

and ambitions than the humdrum existence of a Swiss town; yet his first

sensation was one of obscure jealousy, of reluctance to think of her as

having definitely broken with the past. He had pictured her as adrift,

like himself, on a dark sea of uncertainties; and to learn that she had

found a safe anchorage was almost to feel himself deserted.

The court was soon busy with preparations for the coming performance. A

celebrated actress from Venice was engaged to play the part of Virginia,

and the rehearsals went rapidly forward under the noble author's

supervision. At last the great day arrived, and for the first time in

the history of the little theatre, operetta and pastoral were replaced

by the buskined Muse of tragedy. The court and all the nobility were

present, and though it was no longer thought becoming for ecclesiastics

to visit the theatre, the easy-going Bishop appeared in a side-box in

company with his chaplains and the Vicar-general.

The performance was brilliantly successful. Frantic applause greeted the

tirades of the young Icilius. Every outburst against the abuse of

privileges and the insolence of the patricians was acclaimed by

ministers and courtiers, and the loudest in approval were the Marquess

Pievepelago, the recognised representative of the clericals, the

Marchioness of Boscofolto, whose harsh enforcement of her feudal rights

was among the bitterest grievances of the peasantry, and the good

Bishop, who had lately roused himself from his habitual indolence to

oppose the threatened annexation of the Caccia del Vescovo. One and all

proclaimed their ardent sympathy with the proletariat, their scorn of

tyranny and extortion in high places; and if the Marchioness, on her

return home, ordered one of her linkmen to be flogged for having trod on

her gown; if Pievepelago the next morning refused to give audience to a

poor devil of a pamphleteer that was come to ask his intercession with

the Holy Office; if the Bishop at the same moment concluded the purchase

of six able-bodied Turks from the galleys of his Serenity the Doge of

Genoa--it is probable that, like the illustrious author of the drama,

all were unconscious of any incongruity between their sentiments and

actions.

As to Odo, seated in the state box, with Maria Clementina at his side,

and the court dignitaries grouped in the background, he had not listened

to a dozen lines before all sense of his surroundings vanished and he

became the passive instrument on which the poet played his mighty

harmonies. All the incidental difficulties of life, all the vacillations

of an unsatisfied spirit, were consumed in that energising emotion which

seemed to leave every faculty stripped for action. Profounder meaning

and more subtle music he had found in the great poets of the past; but

here was an appeal to the immediate needs of the hour, uttered in notes

as thrilling as a trumpet-call, and brought home to every sense by the

vivid imagery of the stage. Once more he felt the old ardour of belief

that Fulvia's nearness had fanned in him. His convictions had flagged

rather than his courage: now they started up as at her summons, and he

heard the ring of her voice in every line.

He left the theatre still vibrating with this new inrush of life, and

jealous of any interruption that should check it. The Duchess's birthday

was being celebrated by illuminations and fireworks, and throngs of

merry-makers filled the moonlit streets; but Odo, after appearing for a

moment at his wife's side on the balcony above the public square,

withdrew quietly to his own apartments. The casement of his closet stood

wide, and he leaned against the window-frame, looking out on the silent

radiance of the gardens. As he stood there he saw two figures flit

across the farther end of one of the long alleys. The moonlight

surrendered them for a moment, the shade almost instantly reclaiming

them--strayed revellers, doubtless, escaping from the lights and music

of the Duchess's circle.

A knock roused the Duke and he remembered that he had bidden Gamba wait

on him after the performance. He had been curious to hear what

impression Alfieri's drama had produced upon the hunchback; but now any

interruption seemed unwelcome, and he turned to Gamba with a gesture of

dismissal.

The latter however remained on the threshold.

"Your Highness," he said, "the bookseller Andreoni craves the privilege

of an audience."

"Andreoni? At this hour?"

"For reasons so urgent that he makes no doubt of your Highness's

consent; and to prove his good faith, and the need of presenting himself

at so undue an hour, and in this private manner, he charged me to give

this to your Highness."

He laid in the Duke's hand a small object in blackened silver, which on

nearer inspection proved to be the ducal coat-of-arms.

Odo stood gazing fixedly at this mysterious token, which seemed to come

as an answer to his inmost thoughts. His heart beat high with confused

hopes and fears, and he could hardly control the voice in which he

answered: "Bid Andreoni come to me."

4.4.

The bookseller began by excusing himself for the liberty he had taken.

He explained that the Signorina Fulvia Vivaldi, in whose behalf he came,

was in urgent need of aid, and had begged him to wait on the Duke as

soon as the court had risen from the play.

"She is in Pianura, then?" Odo exclaimed.

"Since yesterday, your Highness. Three days since she was ordered by the

police to leave Milan within twenty-four hours, and she came at once to

Pianura, knowing that my wife and I would gladly receive her. But today

we learned that the Holy Office was advised of her presence here, and of

the reason of her banishment from Lombardy; and this fresh danger has

forced her to implore your Highness's protection."

Andreoni went on to explain that the publication of her father's book

was the immediate cause of Fulvia's persecution. The Origin of

Civilisation, which had been printed some months previously in

Amsterdam, had stirred Italy more profoundly than any book since

Beccaria's great work on Crime and Punishment. The author's historical

investigations were but a pretext for the development of his political

theories, which were set forth with singular daring and audacity, and

supported by all the arguments that his long study of the past

commanded. The temperate and judicial tone which he had succeeded in

preserving enhanced the effect of his arraignment of Church and state,

and while his immense erudition commended his work to the learned, its

directness of style gave it an immediate popularity with the general

reader. It was an age when every book or pamphlet bearing on the great

question of personal liberty was eagerly devoured by an insatiable

public; and a few weeks after Vivaldi's volume had been smuggled into

Italy it was the talk of every club and coffee-house from Calabria to

Piedmont. The inevitable result soon followed. The Holy Office got wind

of the business, and the book was at once put on the Index. In Naples

and Bologna it was publicly burned, and in Modena a professor of the

University who was found to have a copy in his possession was fined and

removed from his chair.

In Milan, where the strong liberal faction among the nobility, and the

comparative leniency of the Austrian rule, permitted a more unrestrained

discussion of political questions, the Origin of Civilisation was

received with open enthusiasm, and the story of the difficulties that

Fulvia had encountered in its publication made her the heroine of the

moment. She had never concealed her devotion to her father's doctrines,

and in the first glow of filial pride she may have yielded too openly to

the desire to propagate them. Certain it is that she began to be looked

on as having shared in the writing of the book, or as being at least an

active exponent of its principles. Even in Lombardy it was not well to

be too openly associated with the authorship of a condemned book; and

Fulvia was suddenly advised by the police that her presence in Milan was

no longer acceptable to the government.

The news excited great indignation among her friends, and Count

Castiglione and several other gentlemen of rank hastened to intervene in

her behalf; but the governor declared himself unwilling to take issue

with the Holy Office on a doctrinal point, and privately added that it

would be well for the Signorina Vivaldi to withdraw from Lombardy before

the clergy brought any direct charge against her. To ignore this hint

would have been to risk not only her own safety but that of the

gentlemen who had befriended her; and Fulvia at once set out for

Pianura, the only place in Italy where she could count on friendship and

protection.

Andreoni and his wife would gladly have given her a home; but on

learning that the Holy Office was on her track, she had refused to

compromise them by remaining under their roof, and had insisted that

Andreoni should wait on the Duke and obtain a safe-conduct for her that

very night.

Odo listened to this story with an agitation compounded of strangely

contradictory sensations. To learn that Fulvia, at the very moment when

he had pictured her as separated from him by the happiness and security

of her life, was in reality a proscribed wanderer with none but himself

to turn to, filled him with a confused sense of happiness; but the

discovery that, in his own dominions, the political refugee was not safe

from the threats of the Holy Office, excited a different emotion. All

these considerations, however, were subordinate to the thought that he

must see Fulvia at once. It was impossible to summon her to the palace

at that hour, or even to secure her safety till morning, without

compromising Andreoni by calling attention to the fact that a suspected

person was under his roof; and for a moment Odo was at a loss how to

detain her in Pianura without seeming to go counter to her wishes.

Suddenly he remembered that Gamba was fertile in expedients, and calling

in the hunchback, asked what plan he could devise. Gamba, after a

moment's reflection, drew a key from his pocket.

"May it please your Highness," he said, "this unlocks the door of the

hunting-lodge at Pontesordo. The place has been deserted these many

years, because of its bad name, and I have more than once found it a

convenient shelter when I had reasons for wishing to be private. At this

season there is no fear of poison from the marshes, and if your Highness

desires I will see that the lady finds her way there before sunrise."

The sun had hardly risen the next morning when the Duke himself set

forth. He rode alone, dressed like one of his own esquires, and gave the

word unremarked to the sleepy sentinel at the gate. As it closed behind

him and he set out down the long road that led to the chase, it seemed

to him that the morning solitude was thronged with spectral memories.

Melancholy and fanciful they flitted before him, now in the guise of

Cerveno and Momola, now of Maria Clementina and himself. Every detail of

the scene was interwoven with the fibres of early association, from the

far off years when, as a lonely child on the farm at Pontesordo, he had

gazed across the marsh at the mysterious woodlands of the chase, to the

later day when, in the deserted hunting-lodge, the Duchess had flung her

whip at the face in the Venice mirror.

He pressed forward impatiently, and presently the lodge rose before him

in its grassy solitude. The level sunbeams had not yet penetrated the

surrounding palisade of boughs, and the house lay in a chill twilight

that seemed an emanation from its mouldering walls. As Odo approached,

Gamba appeared from the shadow and took his horse; and the next moment

he had pushed open the door, and stood in Fulvia's presence.

She was seated at the farther end of the room, and as she rose to meet

him it chanced that her head, enveloped in its black travelling-hood,

was relieved for a moment against the tarnished background of the broken

mirror. The impression struck a chill to his heart; but it was replaced

by a glow of boyish happiness as their eyes met and he felt her hands in

his.

For a moment all his thoughts were lost in the mere sense of her

nearness. She seemed simply an enveloping atmosphere in which he drew

fresh breath; but gradually her outline emerged from this haze of

feeling, and he found himself looking at her with the wondering gaze of

a stranger. She had been a girl of sixteen when they first met. Twelve

years had passed since then, and she was now a woman of twenty-eight,

belonging to a race in which beauty ripens early and as soon declines.

But some happy property of nature--whether the rare mould of her

features or the gift of the spirit that informed them--had held her

loveliness intact, preserving the clear lines of youth after its bloom

was gone, and making her seem like a lover's memory of herself. So she

appeared at first, a bright imponderable presence gliding toward him out

of the past; but as her hands lay in his the warm current of life was

renewed between them, and the woman dispossessed the shade.

4.5.

Unpublished fragment from Mr. Arthur Young's diary of his travels in

Italy in the year 1789.

October 1st.

Having agreed with a vetturino to carry me to Pianura, set out this

morning from Mantua. The country mostly arable, with rows of elm and

maple pollard. Dined at Casal Maggiore, in an infamous filthy inn. At

dinner was joined by a gentleman who had taken the other seat in the

vettura as far as Pianura. We engaged in conversation and I found him a

man of lively intelligence and the most polished address. Though dressed

in the foreign style, en abbe, he spoke English with as much fluency as

myself, and but for the philosophical tone of his remarks I had taken

him for an ecclesiastic. Altogether a striking and somewhat perplexing

character: able, keen, intelligent, evidently used to the best company,

yet acquainted with the condition of the people, the methods of farming,

and other economical subjects such as are seldom thought worthy of

attention among Italians of quality.

It appeared he was newly from France, where he had been as much struck

as myself by the general state of ferment. Though owning that there was

much reason for discontent, and that the conduct of the court and

ministers was blind and infatuated beyond belief, he yet declared

himself gravely apprehensive of the future, saying that the people knew

not what they wanted, and were unwilling to listen to those that might

have proved their best advisors. Whether by this he meant the clergy I

know not; though I observed he spoke favourably of that body in France,

pointing out that, long before the recent agitations, they had defended

the civil rights of the Third Estate, and citing many cases in which the

country curates had shown themselves the truest friends of the people: a

fact my own observation hath confirmed.

I remarked to him that I was surprised to find how little talk there was

in Italy of the distracted conditions in France; and this though the

country is overrun with French refugees, or emigres, as they call

themselves, who bring with them reports that might well excite the alarm

of neighbouring governments. He said he had remarked the same

indifference, but that this was consonant with the Italian character,

which never looked to the morrow; and he added that the mild disposition

of the people, and their profound respect for religion, were sufficient

assurance against any political excess.

To this I could not forbear replying that I could not regard as excesses

the just protests of the poor against the unlawful tyranny of the

privileged classes, nor forbear to hail with joy the dawn of that light

of freedom which hath already shed so sublime an effulgence on the wilds

of the New World. The abate took this in good part, though I could see

he was not wholly of my way of thinking; but he declared that in his

opinion different races needed different laws, and that the sturdy and

temperate American colonists were fitted to enjoy a greater measure of

political freedom than the more volatile French and Italians--as though

liberty were not destined by the Creator to be equally shared by all

mankind! (Footnote: I let this passage stand, though the late unhappy

events in France have, alas! proved that my friend the abate was nearer

right than myself. June, 1794.)

In the afternoon through a poor country to Ponte di Po, a miserable

village on the borders of the duchy, where we lay, not slept, in our

clothes, at the worst inn I have yet encountered. Here our luggage was

plumbed for Pianura. The impertinence of the petty sovereigns to

travellers in Italy is often intolerable, and the customs officers show

the utmost insolence in the search for seditious pamphlets and other

contraband articles; but here I was agreeably surprised by the courtesy

of the officials and the despatch with which our luggage was examined.

On my remarking this, my companion replied that the Duke of Pianura was

a man of liberal views, anxious to encourage foreigners to visit his

state, and the last to put petty obstacles in the way of travel. I

answered, this was the report I had heard of him; and it was in the hope

of learning something more of the reforms he was said to have effected,

that I had turned aside to visit the duchy. My companion replied that

his Highness had in fact introduced some innovations in the government;

but that changes which seemed the most beneficial in one direction often

worked mischief in another, so that the wisest ruler was perhaps not he

that did the greatest amount of good, but he that was cause of the

fewest evils.

The 2nd.

From Ponte di Po to Pianura the most convenient way is by water; but the

river Piana being greatly swollen by the late rains, my friend, who

seems well-acquainted with the country, proposed driving thither: a

suggestion I readily accepted, as it gave me a good opportunity to study

the roads and farms of the duchy.

Crossing the Piana, drove near four hours over horrible roads across

waste land, thinly wooded, without houses or cultivation. On my

expressing surprise that the territory of so enlightened a prince would

lie thus neglected, the abate said this land was a fief of the see of

Pianura, and that the Duke was desirous of annexing it to the duchy. I

asked if it were true that his Highness had given his people a

constitution modelled on that of the Duke of Tuscany. He said he had

heard the report; but that for his part he must deplore any measure

tending to debar the clergy from the possession of land. Seeing my

surprise, he explained that, in Italy at least, the religious orders

were far better landlords than the great nobles or the petty sovereigns,

who, being for the most part absent from their estates, left their

peasantry to be pillaged by rapacious middlemen and stewards: an

argument I have heard advanced by other travellers, and have myself had

frequent occasion to corroborate.

On leaving the Bishop's domain, remarked an improvement in the roads.

Flat land, well irrigated, and divided as usual into small holdings. The

pernicious metayer system exists everywhere, but I am told the Duke is

opposed to it, though it is upheld not only by the landed class, but by

the numerous economists that write on agriculture from their closets,

but would doubtless be sorely puzzled to distinguish a beet-root from a

turnip.

The 3rd.

Set out early to visit Pianura. The city clean and well-kept. The Duke

has introduced street-lamps, such as are used in Turin, and the pavement

is remarkably fair and even. Few beggars are to be seen and the people

have a thriving look. Visited the Cathedral and Baptistery, in the

Gothic style, more curious than beautiful; also the Duke's picture

gallery.

Learning that the Duchess was to ride out in the afternoon, had the

curiosity to walk abroad to see her. A good view of her as she left the

palace. Though no longer in her first youth she is one of the handsomest

women I have seen. Remarked a decided likeness to the Queen of France,

though the eye and smile are less engaging. The people in the streets

received her sullenly, and I am told her debts and disorders are the

scandal of the town. She has, of course, her cicisbeo, and the Duke is

the devoted slave of a learned lady, who is said to exert an unlimited

influence over him, and to have done much to better the condition of the

people. A new part for a prince's mistress to play!

In the evening to the theatre, a handsome building, well-lit with wax,

where Cimarosa's Due Baroni was agreeably sung.

The 4th.

My lord Hervey, in Florence, having favoured me with a letter to Count

Trescorre, the Duke's prime minister, I waited on that gentleman

yesterday. His excellency received me politely and assured me that he

knew me by reputation and would do all he could to put me in the way of

investigating the agricultural conditions of the duchy. Contrary to the

Italian custom, he invited me to dine with him the next day. As a rule

these great nobles do not open their doors to foreigners, however well

recommended.

Visited, by appointment, the press of the celebrated Andreoni, who was

banished during the late Duke's reign for suspected liberal tendencies,

but is now restored to favour and placed at the head of the Royal

Typography. Signor Andreoni received me with every mark of esteem, and

after having shown me some of the finest examples of his work--such as

the Pindar, the Lucretius and the Dante--accompanied me to a

neighbouring coffee-house, where I was introduced to several lovers of

agriculture. Here I learned some particulars of the Duke's attempted

reforms. He has undertaken the work of draining the vast marsh of

Pontesordo, to the west of the city, notorious for its mal'aria; has

renounced the monopoly of corn and tobacco; has taken the University out

of the hands of the Barnabites, and introduced the teaching of the

physical sciences, formerly prohibited by the Church; has spent since

his accession near 200,000 liv. on improving the roads throughout the

duchy, and is now engaged in framing a constitution which shall deprive

the clergy of the greatest part of their privileges and confirm the

sovereign's right to annex ecclesiastical territory for the benefit of

the people.

In spite of these radical measures, his Highness is not popular with the

masses. He is accused of irreligion by the monks that he has removed

from the University, and his mistress, the daughter of a noted

free-thinker who was driven from Piedmont by the Inquisition, is said to

have an unholy influence over him. I am told these rumours are

diligently fomented by the late Duke's minister, now Prior of the

Dominican monastery, a man of bigoted views but great astuteness. The

truth is, the people are so completely under the influence of the friars

that a word is enough to turn them against their truest benefactors.

In the afternoon I was setting out to visit the Bishop's gallery when

Count Trescorre's secretary waited on me with an invitation to inspect

the estates of the Marchioness of Boscofolto: an offer I readily

accepted--for what are the masterpieces of Raphael or Cleomenes to the

sight of a good turnip field or of a well-kept dairy?

I had heard of Boscofolto, which was given by the late Duke to his

mistress, as one of the most productive estates of the duchy; but great

was my disappointment on beholding it. Fine gardens there are, to be

sure, clipt walks, leaden statues, and water-works; but as for the

farms, all is dirt, neglect, disorder. Spite of the lady's wealth, all

are let out alla meta, and farmed on principles that would disgrace a

savage. The spade used instead of the plough, the hedges neglected,

mole-casts in the pastures, good land run to waste, the peasants

starving and indebted--where, with a little thrift and humanity, all had

been smiling plenty! Learned that on the owner's death this great

property reverts to the Barnabites.

From Boscofolto to the church of the Madonna del Monte, where is one of

their wonder-working images, said to be annually visited by close on

thirty thousand pilgrims; but there is always some exaggeration in such

figures. A fine building, richly adorned, and hung with an extraordinary

number of votive offerings: silver arms, legs, hearts, wax images, and

paintings. Some of these latter are clearly the work of village artists,

and depict the miraculous escape of the peasantry from various

calamities, and the preservation of their crops from floods, drought,

lightning and so forth. These poor wretches had done more to better

their crops by spending their savings in good ploughshares and harrows

than by hanging gew-gaws on a wooden idol.

The Rector received us civilly and showed us the treasury, full of

jewels and costly plate, and the buildings where the pilgrims are

lodged. Learned that the Giubileo or centenary festival of the Madonna

is shortly to be celebrated with great pomp. The poorer classes delight

in these ceremonies, and I am told this is to surpass all previous ones,

the clergy intending to work on the superstitions of the people and thus

turn them against the new charter. It is said the Duke hopes to

counteract these designs by offering a jewelled diadem to the Virgin;

but this will no doubt do him a bad turn with the esprits libres. These

little states are as full of intrigues as a foul fruit of maggots.

The 5th.

To dinner at Count Trescorre's where, as usual, I was the

plainest-dressed man in the company. Have long since ceased to be

concerned by this: why should a mere English farmer compete in elegance

with these Monsignori and Illustrissimi? Surprised to find among the

company my travelling-companion of the other day. Learned that he is the

abate de Crucis, a personal friend of the Duke's. He greeted me

cordially, and on hearing my name, said that he was acquainted with my

works in the translation of Mons. Freville, and now understood how it

was that I had got the better of him in our farming disputations on the

way hither.

Was surprised to be told by Count Trescorre that the Duke desired me to

wait on him that evening. Though in general not ambitious of such

honours, yet in this case nothing could be more gratifying.

The 6th.

Yesterday evening to the palace, where his Highness received me with

great affability. He was in his private apartments, with the abate de

Crucis and several other learned men; among them the famous abate

Crescenti, librarian to his Highness and author of the celebrated

Chronicles of the Italian States. Happy indeed is the prince who

surrounds himself with scholars instead of courtiers! Yet I cannot say

that the impression his Highness produced on me was one of HAPPINESS.

His countenance is sad, almost careworn, though with a smile of engaging

sweetness; his manner affable without condescension, and open without

familiarity. I am told he is oppressed by the cares of his station; and

from a certain irresolution of voice and eye, that bespeaks not so much

weakness as a speculative cast of mind, I can believe him less fitted

for active government than for the meditations of the closet. He

appears, however, zealous to perform his duties; questioned me eagerly

about my impressions of Italy, and showed a flattering familiarity with

my works, and a desire to profit by what he was pleased to call my

exceptional knowledge of agriculture. I thought I perceived in him a

sincere wish to study the welfare of his people; but was disappointed to

find among his chosen associates not one practical farmer or economist,

but only the usual closet-theorists that are too busy planning Utopias

to think of planting turnips.

The 7th.

Visited his Highness's estate at Valsecca. Here he has converted a

handsome seat into a school of agriculture, tearing down an immense

orangery to plant mulberries, and replacing costly gardens and statuary

by well-tilled fields: a good example to his wealthy subjects.

Unfortunately his bailiff is not what we should call a practical farmer;

and many acres of valuable ground are given up to a botanic garden,

where exotic plants are grown at great expense, and rather for curiosity

than use: a common error of noble agriculturists.

In the afternoon with the abate de Crucis to the Benedictine monastery,

a league beyond the city. Here I saw the best farming in the duchy. The

Prior received us politely and conversed with intelligence on drainage,

crops and irrigation. I urged on him the cultivation of turnips and he

appeared struck by my arguments. The tenants on this great estate

appeared better housed and fed than any I have seen in Pianura. The

monks have a school of agriculture, less pretentious but better-managed

than the Duke's. Some of them study physics and chemistry, and there are

good chirurgeons among them, who care for the poor without pay. The aged

and infirm peasants are housed in a neat almshouse, and the sick nursed

in a clean well-built lazaret. Altogether an agreeable picture of rural

prosperity, though I had rather it had been the result of FREE LABOUR

than of MONASTIC BOUNTY.

The 8th.

By appointment, to the Duke's Egeria. This lady, the Signorina F.V.,

having heard that I was in Pianura, had desired the Signor Andreoni to

bring me to her.

I had expected a female of the loud declamatory type: something of the

Corilla Olimpica order; but in this was agreeably disappointed. The

Signorina V. is modestly lodged, lives in the frugal style of the middle

class, and refuses to accept a title, though she is thus debarred from

going to court. Were it not indiscreet to speculate on a lady's age, I

should put hers at somewhat above thirty. Though without the Duchess's

commanding elegance she has, I believe, more beauty of a quiet sort: a

countenance at once soft and animated, agreeably tinged with melancholy,

yet lit up by the incessant play of thought and emotion that succeed

each other in her talk. Better conversation I never heard; and can

heartily confirm the assurances of those who had told me that the lady

was as agreeable in discourse as learned in the closet. (Footnote: It

has before now been observed that the FREE and VOLATILE manners of

foreign ladies tend to blind the English traveller to the inferiority of

their PHYSICAL charms. Note by a Female Friend of the Author.)

On entering, found a numerous company assembled to compliment my hostess

on her recent appointment as doctor of the University. This is an honour

not uncommonly conferred in Italy, where female learning, perhaps from

its rarity, is highly esteemed; but I am told the ladies thus

distinguished seldom speak in public, though their degree entitles them

to a chair in the University. In the Signorina V.'s society I found the

most advanced reformers of the duchy: among others Signor Gamba, the

famous pamphleteer, author of a remarkable treatise on taxation, which

had nearly cost him his liberty under the late Duke's reign. He is a man

of extreme views and sarcastic tongue, with an irritability of manner

that is perhaps the result of bodily infirmities. His ideas, I am told,

have much weight with the fair doctoress; and in the lampoons of the day

the new constitution is said to be the offspring of their amours, and to

have inherited its father's deformity.

The company presently withdrawing, my hostess pressed me to remain. She

was eager for news from France, spoke admiringly of the new

constitution, and recited in a moving manner an Ode of her own

composition on the Fall of the Bastille. Though living so retired she

makes no secret of her connection with the Duke; said he had told her of

his conversation with me, and asked what I thought of his plan for

draining the marsh of Pontesordo. On my attempting to reply to this in

detail, I saw that, like some of the most accomplished of her sex, she

was impatient of minutiae, and preferred general ideas to particular

instances; but when the talk turned on the rights of the people I was

struck by the energy and justice of her remarks, and by a tone of

resolution and courage that made me to say to myself: "Here is the hand

that rules the state."

She questioned me earnestly about the state of affairs in France, begged

me to lend her what pamphlets I could procure, and while making no

secret of her republican sympathies, expressed herself with a moderation

not always found in her sex. Of the clergy alone she appeared

intolerant: a fact hardly to be wondered at, considering the persecution

to which she and her father have been subjected. She detained me near

two hours in such discourse, and on my taking leave asked with some show

of feeling what I, as a practical economist, would advise the Duke to do

for the benefit of his people; to which I replied, "Plant turnips,

madam!" and she laughed heartily, and said no doubt I was right. But I

fear all the heads here are too full of fine theories to condescend to

such simple improvements...

4.6.

Fulvia, in the twilight, sat awaiting the Duke.

The room in which she sat looked out on a stone-flagged cloister

enclosing a plot of ground planted with yews; and at the farther end of

this cloister a door communicated by a covered way with the ducal

gardens. The house had formed a part of the convent of the Perpetual

Adoration, which had been sold by the nuns when they moved to the new

buildings the late Duke had given them. A portion had been torn down to

make way for the Marquess of Cerveno's palace, and in the remaining

fragment, a low building wedged between high walls, Fulvia had found a

lodging. Her whole dwelling consisted of the Abbess's parlour, in which

she now sat, and the two or three adjoining cells. The tall presses in

the parlour had been filled with her father's books, and surmounted by

his globes and other scientific instruments. But for this the apartment

remained as unadorned as in her predecessor's day; and Fulvia, in her

austere black gown, with a lawn kerchief folded over her breast, and the

unpowdered hair drawn back from her pale face, might herself have passed

for the head of a religious community.

She cultivated with almost morbid care this severity of dress and

surroundings. There were moments when she could hardly tolerate the pale

autumnal beauty which her glass reflected, when even this phantom of

youth and radiance became a stumbling-block to her spiritual pride. She

was not ashamed of being the Duke of Pianura's mistress; but she had a

horror of being thought like the mistresses of other princes. She

loathed all that the position represented in men's minds; she had

refused all that, according to the conventions of the day, it entitled

her to claim: wealth, patronage, and the rank and estates which it was

customary for the sovereign to confer. She had taken nothing from Odo

but his love, and the little house in which he had lodged her.

Three years had passed since Fulvia's flight to Pianura. From the moment

when she and Odo had stood face to face again, it had been clear to him

that he could never give her up, to her that she could never leave him.

Fate seemed to have thrown them together in derision of their long

struggle, and both felt that lassitude of the will which is the reaction

from vain endeavour. The discovery that he needed her, that the task for

which he had given her up could after all not be accomplished without

her, served to overcome her last resistance. If the end for which both

strove could best be attained together--if he needed the aid of her

unfaltering faith as much as she needed that of his wealth and

power--why should any personal scruple stand between them? Why should

she who had given all else to the cause--ease, fortune, safety, and even

the happiness that lay in her hand--hesitate to make the final sacrifice

of a private ideal? According to the standards of her day there was no

dishonour to a woman in being the mistress of a man whose rank forbade

his marrying her: the dishonour lay in the conduct which had come to be

associated with such relations. Under the old dispensation the influence

of the prince's mistress had stood for the last excesses of moral and

political corruption; why might it not, under the new law, come to

represent as unlimited a power for good?

So love, the casuist, argued; and during those first months, when

happiness seemed at last its own justification, Fulvia lived in every

fibre. But always, even then, she was on the defensive against that

higher tribunal which her own conception of life had created. In spite

of herself she was a child of the new era, of the universal reaction

against the falseness and egotism of the old social code. A standard of

conduct regulated by the needs of the race rather than by individual

passion, a conception of each existence as a link in the great chain of

human endeavour, had slowly shaped itself out of the wild theories and

vague "codes" of the eighteenth-century moralists; and with this sense

of the sacramental nature of human ties, came a renewed reverence for

moral and physical purity.

Fulvia was of those who require that their lives shall be an affirmation

of themselves; and the lack of inner harmony drove her to seek some

outward expression of her ideals. She threw herself with renewed passion

into the political struggle. The best, the only justification of her

power, was to use it boldly, openly, for the good of the people. All the

repressed forces of her nature were poured into this single channel. She

had no desire to conceal her situation, to disguise her influence over

Odo. She wished it rather to be so visible a factor in his relations

with his people that she should come to be regarded as the ultimate

pledge of his good faith. But, like all the casuistical virtues, this

position had the rigidity of something created to fit a special case;

and the result was a fixity of attitude, which spread benumbingly over

her whole nature. She was conscious of the change, yet dared not

struggle against it, since to do so was to confess the weakness of her

case. She had chosen to be regarded as a symbol rather than a woman, and

there were moments when she felt as isolated from life as some marble

allegory in its niche above the market-place.

It was the desire to associate herself with the Duke's public life that

had induced her, after much hesitation, to accept the degree which the

University had conferred on her. She had shared eagerly in the work of

reconstructing the University, and had been the means of drawing to

Pianura several teachers of distinction from Padua and Pavia. It was her

dream to build up a seat of learning which should attract students from

all parts of Italy; and though many young men of good family had

withdrawn from the classes when the Barnabites were dispossessed, she

was confident that they would soon be replaced by scholars from other

states. She was resolved to identify herself openly with the educational

reform which seemed to her one of the most important steps toward civic

emancipation; and she had therefore acceded to the request of the

faculty that, on receiving her degree, she should sustain a thesis

before the University. This ceremony was to take place a few days hence,

on the Duke's birthday; and, as the new charter was to be proclaimed on

the same day, Fulvia had chosen as the subject of her discourse the

Constitution recently promulgated in France.

She pushed aside the bundle of political pamphlets which she had been

studying, and sat looking out at the strip of garden beyond the arches

of the cloister. The narrow horizon bounded by convent walls symbolised

fitly enough the life she had chosen to lead: a life of artificial

restraints and renunciations, passive, conventual almost, in which even

the central point of her love burned, now, with a calm devotional glow.

The door in the cloister opened and the Duke crossed the garden. He

walked slowly, with the listless step she had observed in him of late;

and as he entered she saw that he looked pale and weary.

"You have been at work again," she said. "A cabinet-meeting?"

"Yes," he answered, sinking into the Abbess's high carved chair.

He glanced musingly about the dim room, in which the shadow of the

cloister made an early dusk. Its atmosphere of monastic calm, of which

the significance did not escape him, fell soothingly on his spirit. It

simplified his relation to Fulvia by tacitly restricting it within the

bounds of a tranquil tenderness. Any other setting would have seemed

less in harmony with their fate.

Better, perhaps, than Fulvia, he knew what ailed them both. Happiness

had come to them, but it had come too late; it had come tinged with

disloyalty to their early ideals; it had come when delay and

disillusionment had imperceptibly weakened the springs of passion. For

it is the saddest thing about sorrow that it deadens the capacity for

happiness; and to Fulvia and Odo the joy they had renounced had returned

with an exile's alien face.

Seeing that he remained silent, she rose and lit the shaded lamp on the

table. He watched her as she moved across the room. Her step had lost

none of its flowing grace, of that harmonious impetus which years ago

had drawn his boyish fancy in its wake. As she bent above the lamp, the

circle of light threw her face into relief against the deepening shadows

of the room. She had changed, indeed, but as those change in whom the

springs of life are clear and abundant: it was a development rather than

a diminution. The old purity of outline remained; and deep below the

surface, but still visible sometimes to his lessening insight, the old

girlish spirit, radiant, tender and impetuous, stirred for a moment in

her eyes.

The lamplight fell on the pamphlets she had pushed aside. Odo picked one

up. "What are these?" he asked.

"They were sent to me by the English traveller whom Andreoni brought

here."

He turned a few pages. "The old story," he said. "Do you never weary of

it?"

"An old story?" she exclaimed. "I thought it had been the newest in the

world. Is it not being written, chapter by chapter, before our very

eyes?"

Odo laid the treatise aside. "Are you never afraid to turn the next

page?" he asked.

"Afraid? Afraid of what?"

"That it may be written in blood."

She uttered a quick exclamation; then her face hardened, and she said in

a low tone: "De Crucis has been with you."

He made the half-resigned, half-impatient gesture of the man who feels

himself drawn into a familiar argument from which there is no issue.

"He left yesterday for Germany."

"He was here too long!" she said, with an uncontrollable escape of

bitterness.

Odo sighed. "If you would but let me bring him to you, you would see

that his influence over me is not what you think it."

She was silent a moment; then she said: "You are tired tonight. Let us

not talk of these things."

"As you please," he answered, with an air of relief; and she rose and

went to the harpsichord.

She played softly, with a veiled touch, gliding from one crepuscular

melody to another, till the room was filled with drifts of sound that

seemed like the voice of its own shadows. There had been times when he

could have yielded himself to this languid tide of music, letting it

loosen the ties of thought till he floated out into the soothing dimness

of sensation; but now the present held him. To Fulvia, too, he knew the

music was but a forced interlude, a mechanical refuge from thought. She

had deliberately narrowed their intercourse to one central idea; and it

was her punishment that silence had come to be merely an intensified

expression of this idea.

When she turned to Odo she saw the same consciousness in his face. It

was useless for them to talk of other things. With a pang of unreasoning

regret she felt that she had become to him the embodiment of a single

thought--a formula, rather than a woman.

"Tell me what you have been doing," she said.

The question was a relief. At once he began to separation of his work.

All his thoughts, all his time, were given to the constitution which was

to define the powers of Church and state. The difficulties increased as

the work advanced; but the gravest difficulty was one of which he dared

not tell her: his own growing distrust of the ideas for which he

laboured. He was too keenly aware of the difference in their mental

operations. With Fulvia, ideas were either rejected or at once converted

into principles; with himself, they remained stored in the mind, serving

rather as commentaries on life than as incentives to action. This

perpetual accessibility to new impressions was a quality she could not

understand, or could conceive of only as a weakness. Her own mind was

like a garden in which nothing is ever transplanted. She allowed for no

intermediate stages between error and dogma, for no shifting of the

bounds of conviction; and this security gave her the singleness of

purpose in which he found himself more and more deficient.

Odo remembered that he had once thought her nearness would dispel his

hesitations. At first it had been so; but gradually the contact with her

fixed enthusiasms had set up within him an opposing sense of the claims

ignored. The element of dogmatism in her faith showed the discouraging

sameness of the human mind. He perceived that to a spirit like Fulvia's

it might become possible to shed blood in the cause of tolerance.

The rapid march of events in France had necessarily produced an opposite

effect on minds so differently constituted. To Fulvia the year had been

a year of victory, a glorious affirmation of her political creed. Step

by step she had seen, as in some old allegorical painting, error fly

before the shafts of truth. Where Odo beheld a conflagration she saw a

sunrise; and all that was bare and cold in her own life was warmed and

transfigured by that ineffable brightness.

She listened patiently while he enlarged on the difficulties of the

case. The constitution was framed in all its details, but with its

completion he felt more than ever doubtful of the wisdom of granting it.

He would have welcomed any postponement that did not seem an admission

of fear. He dreaded the inevitable break with the clergy, not so much

because of the consequent danger to his own authority, as because he was

increasingly conscious of the newness and clumsiness of the instrument

with which he proposed to replace their tried and complex system. He

mentioned to Fulvia the rumours of popular disaffection; but she swept

them aside with a smile.

"The people mistrust you," she said. "And what does that mean? That you

have given your enemies time to work on their credulity. The longer you

delay the more opposition you will encounter. Father Ignazio would

rather destroy the state than let it be saved by any hand but his."

Odo reflected. "Of all my enemies," he said, "Father Ignazio is the one

I most respect, because he is the most sincere."

"He is the most dangerous, then," she returned. "A fanatic is always

more powerful than a knave."

He was struck with her undiminished faith in the sufficiency of such

generalisations. Did she really think that to solve such a problem it

was only necessary to define it? The contact with her unfaltering

assurance would once have given him a momentary glow; but now it left

him cold.

She was speaking more urgently. "Surely," she said, "the noblest use a

man can make of his own freedom is to set others free. My father said it

was the only justification of kingship."

He glanced at her half-sadly. "Do you still fancy that kings are free? I

am bound hand and foot."

"So was my father," she flashed back at him; "but he had the Promethean

spirit."

She coloured at her own quickness, but Odo took the thrust tranquilly.

"Yes," he said, "your father had the Promethean spirit: I have not. The

flesh that is daily torn from me does not grow again."

"Your courage is as great as his," she exclaimed, her tenderness in

arms.

"No," he answered, "for his was hopeful." There was a pause, and then he

began to speak of the day's work.

All the afternoon he had been in consultation with Crescenti, whose vast

historical knowledge was of service in determining many disputed points

in the tenure of land. The librarian was in sympathy with any measures

tending to relieve the condition of the peasantry; yet he was almost as

strongly opposed as Trescorre to any reproduction of the Tuscan

constitution.

"He is afraid!" broke from Fulvia. She admired and respected Crescenti,

yet she had never fully trusted him. The taint of ecclesiasticism was on

him.

Odo smiled. "He has never been afraid of facing the charge of

Jansenism," he replied. "All his life he has stood in open opposition to

the Church party."

"It is one thing to criticise their dogmas, another to attack their

privileges. At such a time he is bound to remember that he is a

priest--that he is one of them."

"Yet, as you have often pointed out, it is to the clergy that France in

great measure owes her release from feudalism."

She smiled coldly. "France would have won her cause without the clergy!"

"This is not France, then," he said with a sigh. After a moment he began

again: "Can you not see that any reform which aims at reducing the power

of the clergy must be more easily and successfully carried out if they

can be induced to take part in it? That, in short, we need them at this

moment as we have never needed them before? The example of France ought

at least to show you that."

"The example of France shows me that, to gain a point in such a

struggle, any means must be used! In France, as you say, the clergy were

with the people--here they are against them. Where persuasion fails

coercion must be used!"

Odo smiled faintly. "You might have borrowed that from their own

armoury," he said.

She coloured at the sarcasm. "Why not?" she retorted. "Let them have a

taste of their own methods! They know the kind of pressure that makes

men yield--when they feel it they will know what to do."

He looked at her with astonishment. "This is Gamba's tone," he said. "I

have never heard you speak in this way before."

She coloured again; and now with a profound emotion. "Yes," she said,

"it is Gamba's tone. He and I speak for the same cause and with the same

voice. We are of the people and we speak for the people. Who are your

other counsellors? Priests and noblemen! It is natural enough that they

should wish to make their side of the question heard. Listen to them, if

you will--conciliate them, if you can! We need all the allies we can

win. Only do not fancy they are really speaking for the people. Do not

think it is the people's voice you hear. The people do not ask you to

weigh this claim against that, to look too curiously into the defects

and merits of every clause in their charter. All they ask is that the

charter should be given them!"

She spoke with the low-voiced passion that possessed her at such

moments. All acrimony had vanished from her tone. The expression of a

great conviction had swept aside every personal animosity, and cleared

the sources of her deepest feeling. Odo felt the pressure of her

emotion. He leaned to her and their hands met.

"It shall be given them," he said.

She lifted her face to his. It shone with a great light. Once before he

had seen it so illumined, but with how different a brightness! The

remembrance stirred in him some old habit of the senses. He bent over

and kissed her.

4.7.

Never before had Odo so keenly felt the difference between theoretical

visions of liberty and their practical application. His deepest

heart-searchings showed him as sincerely devoted as ever to the cause

which had enlisted his youth. He still longed above all things to serve

his fellows; but the conditions of such service were not what he had

dreamed. How different a calling it had been in Saint Francis's day,

when hearts inflamed with the new sense of brotherhood had but to set

forth on their simple mission of almsgiving and admonition! To love

one's neighbour had become a much more complex business, one that taxed

the intelligence as much as the heart, and in the course of which

feeling must be held in firm subjection to reason. He was discouraged by

Fulvia's inability to understand the change. Hers was the missionary

spirit; and he could not but reflect how much happier she would have

been as a nun in a charitable order, a unit in some organised system of

beneficence.

He too would have been happier to serve than to command! But it is not

given to the lovers of the Lady Poverty to choose their special rank in

her household. Don Gervaso's words came back to him with deepening

significance, and he thought how truly the old chaplain's prayer had

been fulfilled. Honour and power had come to him, and they had abased

him to the dust. The "Humilitas" of his fathers, woven, carved and

painted on every side, pursued him with an ironical reminder of his

impotence.

Fulvia had not been mistaken in attributing his depression of spirit to

de Crucis's visit. It was the first time that de Crucis had returned to

Pianura since the new Duke's accession. Odo had welcomed him eagerly,

had again pressed him to remain; but de Crucis was on his way to

Germany, bound on some business which could not be deferred. Odo, aware

of the renewed activity of the Jesuits, supposed that this business was

connected with the flight of the French refugees, many of whom were gone

to Coblentz; but on this point the abate was silent. Of the state of

affairs in France he spoke openly and despondently. The immoderate haste

with which the reforms had been granted filled him with fears for the

future. Odo knew that Crescenti shared these fears, and the judgment of

these two men, with whom he differed on fundamental principles, weighed

with him far more than the opinions of the party he was supposed to

represent. But he was in the case of many greater sovereigns of his day.

He had set free the waters of reform, and the frail bark of his

authority had been torn from its moorings and swept headlong into the

central current.