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BOOK I - THE OLD ORDER: CHAPTER 4
1.4.
Lying that night at Pavia, the travellers set forward next morning for
the city of Vercelli. The road, though it ran for the most part through
flat mulberry orchards and rice-fields reflecting the pale blue sky in
their sodden channels, would yet have appeared diverting enough to Odo,
had his mother been in the mood to reply to his questions; for whether
their carriage overtook a party of strolling jugglers, travelling in a
roofed-in waggon, with the younger children of the company running
alongside in threadbare tights and trunkhose decked with tinsel; or
whether they drove through a village market-place, where yellow earthen
crocks and gaudy Indian cottons, brass pails and braziers and platters
of bluish pewter, filled the stalls with a medley of colour--at every
turn was something that excited the boy's wonder; but Donna Laura, who
had fallen into a depression of spirits, lamenting the cold, her
misfortunes and the discomfort of the journey, was at no more pains than
the abate to satisfy the promptings of his curiosity.
Odo had indeed met but one person who cared to listen to him, and that
was the strange hunchback who had called himself Brutus. Remembering how
entertainingly this odd guide had explained all the wonders of the ducal
grounds, Odo began to regret that he had not asked his mother to let him
have Brutus for a body-servant. Meanwhile no one attended to his
questions and the hours were beginning to seem long when, on the third
day, they set out from Vercelli toward the hills. The cold increased as
they rose; and Odo, though he had often wished to see the mountains, was
yet dismayed at the gloomy and menacing aspect of the region on which
they were entering. Leafless woods, prodigious boulders and white
torrents foaming and roaring seemed a poor exchange for the
pleasantly-ordered gardens of Pianura. Here were no violets and cowslips
in bloom; hardly a green blade pierced the sodden roadside, and
snowdrifts lingered in the shaded hollows.
Donna Laura's loudly expressed fear of robbers seemed to increase the
loneliness of the way, which now traversed tracts of naked moorland, now
plunged again into forest, with no sign of habitation but here and there
a cowherd's hut under the trees or a chapel standing apart on some
grassy eminence. When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind
swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed
every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and cold
at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted
from his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorway
set in battlemented walls. He was carried into a hall lit with smoky
oil-lamps and hung with armour and torn banners.
Here, among a group of rough-looking servants, a tall old man in a
nightcap and furred gown was giving orders in a loud passionate voice.
This personage, who was of a choleric complexion, with a face like
mottled red marble, seized Odo by the wrist and led him up a flight of
stairs so worn and slippery that he tripped at every step; thence down a
corridor and into a gloomy apartment where three ladies shivered about a
table set with candles. Bidden by the old gentleman to salute his
grandmother and great-aunts, Odo bowed over three wrinkled hands, one
fat and soft as a toad's stomach, the others yellow and dry as
lemon-skins. His mother embraced the ladies in the same humble manner,
and the Marquess, first furiously calling for supper, thrust Odo down on
a stool in the ingle.
From this point of observation the child, now vividly awake, noted the
hangings of faded tapestry that heaved in the draught, the ceiling of
beams and the stone floor strewn with rushes. The candle-light
flickering on the faces of his aged relatives showed his grandmother to
be a pale heavy-cheeked person with little watchful black eyes which she
dropped at her husband's approach; while the two great-aunts, seated
side by side in high-backed chairs with their feet on braziers, reminded
Odo of the narrow elongated saints squeezed into the niches of a
church-door. The old Marchioness wore the high coif and veil of the
previous century; the aunts, who, as Odo afterwards learned, were
canonesses of a noble order, were habited in a semi-conventual dress,
with crosses hanging on their bosoms; and none spoke but when the
Marquess addressed them.
Their timidity appeared to infect Odo's mother, who, from her habitual
volubility of temper, sank to a mood of like submissiveness. A supper of
venison and goat's cheese was not designed to restore her spirits, and
when at length she and Odo had withdrawn to their cavernous bedchamber,
she flung herself weeping on the bed and declared she must die if she
remained long in this prison.
Falling asleep under such influences, it was the more wonderful to Odo
to wake with the sun on his counterpane, a sweet noise of streams
through the casement and the joyous barking of hounds in the castle
court. From the window-seat he looked out on a scene extraordinarily
novel to his lowland eyes. The chamber commanded the wooded steep below
the castle, with a stream looping its base; beyond, the pastures sloped
pleasantly under walnut trees, with here and there a clearing ploughed
for the spring crops and a sunny ledge or two planted with vines. Above
this pastoral landscape, bare crags upheld a snowpeak; and, as if to
lend a human interest to the scene, the old Marquess, his flintlock on
his shoulder, his dogs and beaters at his heels, now rode across the
valley.
Wonder succeeded to wonder that first morning; for there was the castle
to be seen, with the kennels and stables roughly kept, but full of dogs
and horses; and Odo, in the Marquess's absence, was left free to visit
every nook of his new home. Pontesordo, though perhaps as ancient as
Donnaz, was but a fortified manor in the plain; but here was the
turreted border castle, bristling at the head of the gorge like the
fangs in a boar's throat: its walls overhung by machicolations, its
portcullis still dropped at nightfall, and the loud stream forming a
natural moat at its base. Through the desert spaces of this great
structure Odo wandered at will, losing himself in its network of bare
chambers, some now put to domestic uses, with smoked meats hanging from
the rafters, cheeses ranged on shelves and farmer's implements stacked
on the floor; others abandoned to bats and spiders, with slit-like
openings choked by a growth of wild cherries, and little animals
scurrying into their holes as Odo opened the unused doors. At the next
turn he mounted by a winding stair to the platform behind the
battlements, whence he could look down on the inner court, where horses
were being groomed, dogs fed, harnesses mended, and platters of smoking
food carried from the kitchen to the pantry; or, leaning another way,
discovered, between the cliff and the rampart a tiny walled garden with
fruit-trees and a sundial.
The ladies kept to themselves in a corner of the castle, where the rooms
were hung with tapestry and a few straight-backed chairs stood about the
hearth; but even here no fires were suffered till nightfall, nor was
there so much as a carpet in the castle. Odo's grandmother, the old
Marchioness, a heavy woman who would doubtless have enjoyed her ease in
a cushioned seat, was afoot all day attending to her household; for
besides the dairy and the bakehouse and the stillroom where fruits were
stewed and pastes prepared, there was the great spinning-room full of
distaffs and looms, where the women spun and wove all the linen used in
the castle and the coarse stuffs worn by its inmates; with workshops for
the cobbler and tailor who clothed and shod the Marquess and his
household. All these the Marchioness must visit, and attend to her
devotions between; the ladies being governed by a dark-faced priest,
their chaplain and director, who kept them perpetually running along the
cold stone corridors to the chapel in a distant wing, where they knelt
without so much as a brazier to warm them or a cushion to their knees.
As to the chapel, though larger and loftier than that of Pontesordo,
with a fine carved and painted tabernacle and many silver candlesticks,
it seemed to Odo, by reason of its bare walls, much less beautiful than
that deserted oratory; nor did he, amid all the novelty of his
surroundings, cease to regret the companionship of his familiar images.
His delight was the greater, therefore, when, exploring a part of the
castle now quite abandoned, he came one day on a vaulted chamber used as
a kind of granary, where, under layers of dirt and cobwebs, lovely
countenances flowered from the walls. The scenes depicted differed
indeed from those of Pontesordo, being less animated and homely and more
difficult for a child to interpret; for here were naked laurel-crowned
knights on prancing horses, nimble goat-faced creatures grouped in
adoration round a smoking altar and youths piping to saffron-haired
damsels on grass-banks set with poplars. The very strangeness of the
fable set forth perhaps engaged the child's fancy; or the benignant
mildness of the countenances, so unlike the eager individual faces of
the earlier artist; for he returned again and again to gaze unweariedly
on the inhabitants of that tranquil grassy world, studying every inch of
the walls and with much awe and fruitless speculation deciphering on the
hem of a floating drapery the inscription: Bernardinus Lovinus pinxit.
His impatience to know more of the history of these paintings led him to
question an old man, half house-servant, half huntsman, now too infirm
for service and often to be found sunning himself in the court with an
old hound's chin on his knee. The old man, whose name was Bruno, told
him the room in question had been painted for the Marquess Gualberto di
Donnaz, who had fought under the Duke of Milan hundreds of years before:
a splendid and hospitable noble, patron of learning and the arts, who
had brought the great Milanese painter to Donnaz and kept him there a
whole summer adorning the banqueting-room. "But I advise you, little
master," Bruno added, "not to talk too loudly of your discovery; for we
live in changed days, do you see, and it seems those are pagan sorcerers
and witches painted on the wall, and because of that, and their
nakedness, the chaplain has forbidden all the young boys and wenches
about the place to set foot there; and the Marchioness herself, I'm
told, doesn't enter without leave."
This was the more puzzling to Odo that he had seen so many naked pagans,
in colours and marble, at his cousin's palace of Pianura, where they
were praised as the chief ornament of that sumptuous fabric; but he kept
Bruno's warning in mind and so timed his visits that they escaped the
chaplain's observation. Whether this touch of mystery added charm to the
paintings; or whether there was already forming in him what afterward
became an instinctive resistance to many of the dictates of his age;
certain it is that, even after he had been privileged to admire the
stupendous works of the Caracci at Parma and of the immortal Giulio
Romano at Mantua, Odo's fancy always turned with peculiar fondness to
the clear-limbed youths moving in that world of untroubled beauty.
Odo, the day after his arrival at Donnaz, learned that the chaplain was
to be his governor; and he was not long in discovering that the system
of that ecclesiastic bore no resemblance to the desultory methods of his
former pedagogue. It was not that Don Gervaso was a man of superior
acquirements: in writing, ciphering and the rudiments of Latin he seemed
little likely to carry Odo farther than the other; but in religious
instruction he suffered no negligence or inattention. His piety was of a
stamp so different from the abate's that it vivified the theological
abstractions over which Odo had formerly languished, infusing a
passionate meaning into the formulas of the textbooks. His discourse
breathed the same spirit, and had his religion been warmed by
imagination or tempered by charity the child had been a ductile
substance in his hands; but the shadow of the Council of Trent still
hung over the Church in Savoy, making its approach almost as sombre and
forbidding as that of the Calvinist heresy. As it was, the fascination
that drew Odo to the divine teachings was counteracted by a depressing
awe: he trembled in God's presence almost as much as in his
grandfather's, and with the same despair of discovering what course of
action was most likely to call down the impending wrath. The beauty of
the Church's offices, now for the first time revealed to him in the
well-ordered services of the chapel, was doubly moving in contrast with
the rude life at Donnaz; but his confessions tortured him and the
penances which the chaplain inflicted abased without reforming his
spirit.
Next to the mass, the books Don Gervaso lent him were his chief
pleasure: the Lives of the Saints, Cardinal Bellarmine's Fables and The
Mirror of true Penitence. The Lives of the Saints fed at once his
imagination and his heart, and over the story of Saint Francis, now
first made known to him, he trembled with delicious sympathy. The
longing to found a hermitage like the Portiuncula among the savage rocks
of Donnaz, and live there in gentle communion with plants and animals,
alternated in him with the martial ambition to ride forth against the
Church's enemies, as his ancestors had ridden against the bloody and
pestilent Waldenses; but whether his piety took the passive or the
aggressive form, it always shrank from the subtleties of doctrine. To
live like the saints, rather than to reason like the fathers, was his
ideal of Christian conduct; if indeed a vague pity for suffering
creatures and animals was not the source of his monastic yearnings, and
a desire to see strange countries the secret of his zeal against the
infidel.
The chaplain, though reproving his lukewarmness in matters of dogma,
could not but commend his devotion to the saints; and one day his
grandmother, to reward him for some act of piety, informed him with
tears of joy that he was destined for holy orders, and that she had good
hopes of living to see him a bishop. This news had hardly the intended
effect; for Odo's dream was of the saint's halo rather than the bishop's
mitre; and throwing himself on his knees before the old Marquess, who
was present, he besought that he might be allowed to join the Franciscan
order. The Marquess at this flew into so furious a rage, cursing the
meddlesomeness of women and the chaplain's bigotry, that the ladies
burst into tears and Odo's swelling zeal turned small. There was indeed
but one person in the castle who seemed not to regard its master's
violences, and that was the dark-faced chaplain, who, when the Marquess
had paused out of breath, tranquilly returned that nothing could make
him repent of having brought a soul to Christ, and that, as to the
cavaliere Odo, if his maker designed him for a religious, the Pope
himself could not cross his vocation.
"Ay, ay! vocation," snarled the Marquess. "You and the women here shut
the child up between you and stuff his ears full of monkish stories and
miracles and the Lord knows what, and then talk of the simpleton's
vocation. His vocation, nom de Dieu, is to be an abbot first, and then a
monsignore, and then a bishop, if he can--and to the devil with your
cowls and cloisters!" And he gave orders that Odo should hunt with him
next morning.
The chaplain smiled. "Hubert was a huntsman," said he, "and yet he died
a saint."
From that time forth the old Marquess kept Odo oftener at his side,
making his grandson ride with him about his estates and on such
hunting-parties as were not beyond the boy's strength. The domain of
Donnaz included many a mile of vine and forest, over which, till the
fifteenth century, its lords had ruled as sovereign Marquesses. They
still retained a part of their feudal privileges, and Odo's grandfather,
tenacious of these dwindling rights, was for ever engaged in vain
contests with his peasantry. To see these poor creatures cursed and
brow-beaten, their least offences punished, their few claims disputed,
must have turned Odo's fear of his grandfather to hatred, had he not
observed that the old man gave with one hand what he took with the
other, so that, in his dealings with his people, he resembled one of
those torrents which now devastate and now enrich their banks. The
Marquess, in fact, while he held obstinately to his fishing rights,
prosecuted poachers, enforced the corvee and took toll at every ford,
yet laboured to improve his lands, exterminated the wild beasts that
preyed on them, helped his peasants in sickness, nourished them in old
age and governed them with a paternal tyranny doubtless less
insufferable than the negligence of the great land-owners who lived at
court.
To Odo, however, these rides among the tenantry were less agreeable than
the hunting-expeditions which carried them up the mountain in the
solitude of morning. Here the wild freshness of the scene and the
exhilaration of pursuit roused the fighting strain in the boy's blood,
and so stirred his memory with tales of prowess that sometimes, as they
climbed the stony defiles in the clear shadow before sunrise, he fancied
himself riding forth to exterminate the Waldenses who, according to the
chaplain, still lurked like basilisks and dragons in the recesses of the
mountains. Certain it is that his rides with the old Marquess, if they
inflamed his zeal against heresy, cooled the ardour of his monastic
vocation; and if he pondered on his future, it was to reflect that
doubtless he would some day be a bishop, and that bishops were
territorial lords, we might hunt the wolf and boar in their own domains.
Content of BOOK I - THE OLD ORDER: CHAPTER 4 [Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision]
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