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BOOK II - THE NEW LIGHT: CHAPTER 6
Odo had appointed to leave Turin some two weeks after Trescorre's
departure; but the preparations for a young gentleman's travels were in
those days a momentous business, and one not to be discharged without
vexatious postponements. The travelling-carriage must be purchased and
fitted out, the gold-mounted dressing-case selected and engraved with
the owner's arms, servants engaged and provided with liveries, and the
noble tourist's own wardrobe stocked with an assortment of costumes
suited to the vicissitudes of travel and the requirements of court life.
Odo's impatience to be gone increased with every delay, and at length he
determined to go forward at all adventure, leaving Cantapresto to
conclude the preparations and overtake him later. It had been agreed
with Trescorre that Odo, on his way to Pianura, should visit his
grandfather, the old Marquess, whose increasing infirmities had for some
years past imprisoned him on his estates, and accordingly about the
Ascension he set out in the saddle for Donnaz, attended only by one
servant, and having appointed that Cantapresto should meet him with the
carriage at Ivrea.
The morning broke cloudy as he rode out of the gates. Beyond the suburbs
a few drops fell, and as he pressed forward the country lay before him
in the emerald freshness of a spring rain, vivid strips of vineyard
alternating with silvery bands of oats, the domes of the walnut-trees
dripping above the roadside, and the poplars along the water-courses all
slanting one way in the soft continuous downpour. He had left Turin in
that mood of clinging melancholy which waits on the most hopeful
departures, and the landscape seemed an image of anticipations clouded
with regret. He had had a stormy but tender parting with Clarice, whose
efforts to act the forsaken Ariadne were somewhat marred by her
irrepressible pride in her lover's prospects, and whose last word had
charged him to bring her back one of the rare lap-dogs bred by the monks
of Bologna. Seen down the lengthening vista of separation even Clarice
seemed regrettable; and Odo would have been glad to let his mind linger
on their farewells. But another thought importuned him. He had left
Turin without news of Vivaldi or Fulvia, and without having done
anything to conjure the peril to which his rashness had exposed them.
More than once he had been about to reveal his trouble to Alfieri; but
shame restrained him when he remembered that it was Alfieri who had
vouched for his discretion. After his conversation with Trescorre he had
tried to find some way of sending a word of warning to Vivaldi; but he
had no messenger whom he could trust; and would not Vivaldi justly
resent a warning from such a source? He felt himself the prisoner of his
own folly, and as he rode along the wet country roads an invisible
gaoler seemed to spur beside him.
The clouds lifted at noon; and leaving the plain he mounted into a world
sparkling with sunshine and quivering with new-fed streams. The first
breath of mountain-air lifted the mist from his spirit, and he began to
feel himself a boy again as he entered the high gorges in the cold light
after sunset. It was about the full of the moon, and in his impatience
to reach Donnaz he resolved to push on after nightfall. The forest was
still thinly-leaved, and the rustle of wind in the branches and the
noise of the torrents recalled his first approach to the castle, in the
wild winter twilight. The way lay in darkness till the moon rose, and
once or twice he took a wrong turn and found himself engaged in some
overgrown woodland track; but he soon regained the high-road, and his
servant, a young fellow of indomitable cheerfulness, took the edge off
their solitude by frequent snatches of song. At length the moon rose,
and toward midnight Odo, spurring out of a dark glen, found himself at
the opening of the valley of Donnaz. A cold radiance bathed the familiar
pastures, the houses of the village along the stream, and the turrets
and crenellations of the castle at the head of the gorge. The air was
bitter, and the horses' hoofs struck sharply on the road as they trotted
past the slumbering houses and halted at the gateway through which Odo
had first been carried as a sleepy child. It was long before the
travellers' knock was answered, but a bewildered porter at length
admitted them, and Odo cried out when he recognised in the man's face
the features of one of the lads who had taught him to play pallone in
the castle court.
Within doors all were abed; but the cavaliere was expected, and supper
laid for him in the very chamber where he had slept as a lad. The sight
of so much that was strange and yet familiar--of the old stone walls,
the banners, the flaring lamps and worn slippery stairs--all so much
barer, smaller, more dilapidated than he had remembered--stirred the
deep springs of his piety for inanimate things, and he was seized with a
fancy to snatch up a light and explore the recesses of the castle. But
he had been in the saddle since dawn, and the keen air and the long
hours of riding were in his blood. They weighted his lids, relaxed his
limbs, and gently divesting him of his hopes and fears, pressed him down
in the deep sepulchre of a dreamless sleep...
Odo remained a month at Donnaz. His grandfather's happiness in his
presence would in itself have sufficed to detain him, apart from his
natural tenderness for old scenes and associations. It was one of the
compensations of his rapidly travelling imagination that the past, from
each new vantage-ground of sensation, acquired a fascination which to
the more sober-footed fancy only the perspective of years can give.
Life, in childhood, is a picture-book of which the text is
undecipherable; and the youth now revisiting the unchanged setting of
his boyhood was spelling out for the first time the legend beneath the
picture.
The old Marquess, though broken in body, still ruled his household from
his seat beside the hearth. The failure of bodily activity seemed to
have doubled his moral vigour, and the walls shook with the vehemence of
his commands. The Marchioness was sunk in a state of placid apathy from
which only her husband's outbursts roused her; one of the canonesses was
dead, and the other, drier and more shrivelled than ever, pined in her
corner like a statue whose mate is broken. Bruno was dead too; his old
dog's bones had long since enriched a corner of the vineyard; and some
of the younger lads that Odo had known about the place were grown to
sober-faced men with wives and children.
Don Gervaso was still chaplain of Donnaz; and Odo saw with surprise that
the grave ecclesiastic who had formerly seemed an old man to him was in
fact scarce past the middle age. In general aspect he was unchanged; but
his countenance had darkened, and what Odo had once taken for harshness
of manner he now perceived to be a natural melancholy. The young man had
not been long at Donnaz without discovering that in that little world of
crystallised traditions the chaplain was the only person conscious of
the new forces abroad. It had never occurred to the Marquess that
anything short of a cataclysm such as it would be blasphemy to predict
could change the divinely established order whereby the territorial lord
took tithes from his peasantry and pastured his game on their crops. The
hierarchy which rested on the bowed back of the toiling serf and
culminated in the figure of the heaven-sent King seemed to him as
immutable as the everlasting hills. The men of his generation had not
learned that it was built on a human foundation and that a sudden
movement of the underlying mass might shake the structure to its
pinnacle. The Marquess, who, like Donna Laura, already beheld Odo on the
throne of Pianura, was prodigal of counsels which showed a touching
inability to discern the new aspect under which old difficulties were
likely to present themselves. That a ruler should be brave, prudent,
personally abstemious, and nobly lavish in his official display; that he
should repress any attempts on the privileges of the Church, while at
the same time protecting his authority from the encroachments of the
Holy See; these axioms seemed to the old man to sum up the sovereign's
duty to the state. The relation, to his mind, remained a distinctly
personal and paternal one; and Odo's attempts to put before him the new
theory of government, as a service performed by the ruler in the
interest of the ruled, resulted only in stirring up the old sediment of
absolutism which generations of feudal power had deposited in the Donnaz
blood.
Only the chaplain perceived what new agencies were at work; but even he
looked on as a watcher from a distant tower, who sees opposing armies
far below him in the night, without being able to follow their movements
or guess which way the battle goes.
"The days," he said to Odo, "are evil. The Church's enemies, the
basilisks and dragons of unbelief and license, are stirring in their old
lairs, the dark places of the human spirit. It is time that a fresh
purification by blood should cleanse the earth of its sins. That hour
has already come in France, where the blood of heretics has lately
fertilised the soil of faith; it will come here, as surely as I now
stand before you; and till it comes the faithful can only weary heaven
with their entreaties, if haply thereby they may mitigate the evil. I
shall remain here," he continued, "while the Marquess needs me; but that
task discharged, I intend to retire to one of the contemplative orders,
and with my soul perpetually uplifted like the arms of Moses, wear out
my life in prayer for those whom the latter days shall overtake."
Odo had listened in silence; but after a moment he said: "My father,
among those who have called in to question the old order of things there
are many animated by no mere desire for change, no idle inclination to
pry into the divine mysteries, but who earnestly long to ease the burden
of mankind and let light into what you have called the dark places of
the spirit. How is it, they ask, that though Christ came to save the
poor and the humble, it is on them that life presses most heavily after
eighteen hundred years of His rule? All cannot be well in a world where
such contradictions exist, and what if some of the worst abuses of the
age have found lodgment in the very ramparts that faith has built
against them?"
Don Gervaso's face grew stern and his eyes rested sadly on Odo. "You
speak," said he, "of bringing light into dark places; but what light is
there on earth save that which is shed by the Cross, and where shall
they find guidance who close their eyes to that divine illumination?"
"But is there not," Odo rejoined, "a divine illumination within each of
us, the light of truth which we must follow at any cost--or have the
worst evils and abuses only to take refuge in the Church to find
sanctuary there, as malefactors find it?"
The chaplain shook his head. "It is as I feared," he said, "and Satan
has spread his subtlest snare for you; for if he tempts some in the
guise of sensual pleasure, or of dark fears and spiritual abandonment,
it is said that to those he most thirsts to destroy he appears in the
likeness of their Saviour. You tell me it is to right the wrongs of the
poor and the humble that your new friends, the philosophers, have
assailed the authority of Christ. I have only one answer to make:
Christ, as you said just now, died for the poor--how many of your
philosophers would do as much? Because men hunger and thirst, is that a
sign that He has forsaken them? And since when have earthly privileges
been the token of His favour? May He not rather have designed that, by
continual sufferings and privations, they shall lay up for themselves
treasures in Heaven such as your eyes and mine shall never see or our
ears hear? And how dare you assume that any temporal advantages could
atone for that of which your teachings must deprive them--the heavenly
consolations of the love of Christ?"
Odo listened with a sense of deepening discouragement. "But is it
necessary," he urged, "to confound Christ with His ministers, the law
with its exponents? May not men preserve their hope of heaven and yet
lead more endurable lives on earth?"
"Ah, my child, beware, for this is the heresy of private judgment, which
has already drawn down thousands into the pit. It is one of the most
insidious errors in which the spirit of evil has ever masqueraded; for
it is based on the fallacy that we, blind creatures of a day, and
ourselves in the meshes of sin, can penetrate the counsels of the
Eternal, and test the balances of the heavenly Justice. I tremble to
think into what an abyss your noblest impulses may fling you, if you
abandon yourself to such illusions; and more especially if it pleases
God to place in your hands a small measure of that authority of which He
is the supreme repository.--When I took leave of you here nine years
since," Don Gervaso continued in a gentler tone, "we prayed together in
the chapel; and I ask you, before setting out on your new life, to
return there with me and lay your doubts and difficulties before Him who
alone is able to still the stormy waves of the soul."
Odo, touched by the appeal, accompanied him to the chapel, and knelt on
the steps whence his young spirit had once soared upward on the heavenly
pleadings of the Mass. The chapel was as carefully tended as ever; and
amid the comely appointments of the altar shone forth that Presence
which speaks to men of an act of love perpetually renewed. But to Odo
the voice was mute, the divinity wrapped in darkness; and he remembered
reading in some Latin author that the ancient oracles had ceased to
speak when their questioners lost faith in them. He knew not whether his
own faith was lost; he felt only that it had put forth on a sea of
difficulties across which he saw the light of no divine command.
In this mood there was no more help to be obtained from Don Gervaso than
from the Marquess. Odo's last days at Donnaz were clouded by a sense of
the deep estrangement between himself and that life of which the outward
aspect was so curiously unchanged. His past seemed to look at him with
unrecognising eyes, to bar the door against his knock; and he rode away
saddened by that sense of isolation which follows the first encounter
with a forgotten self.
At Ivrea the sight of Cantapresto and the travelling-carriage roused him
as from a waking dream. Here, at his beck were the genial realities of
life, embodied, humorously enough, in the bustling figure which for so
many years had played a kind of comic accompaniment to his experiences.
Cantapresto was in a fever of expectation. To set forth on the road
again, after nine years of well-fed monotony, and under conditions so
favourable to his physical well-being, was to drink the wine of romance
from a golden cup. Odo was at the age when the spirit lies as naturally
open to the variations of mood as a lake to the shifting of the breeze;
and Cantapresto's exuberant humour, and the novel details of their
travelling equipment, had soon effaced the graver influences of Donnaz.
Life stretched before him alluring and various as the open road; and his
pulses danced to the tune of the postillion's whip as the carriage
rattled out of the gates.
It was a bright morning and the plain lay beneath them like a planted
garden, in all the flourish and verdure of June; but the roads being
deep in mire, and unrepaired after the ravages of the winter, it was
past noon before they reached the foot of the hills. Here matters were
little better, for the highway was ploughed deep by the wheels of the
numberless vans and coaches journeying from one town to another during
the Whitsun holidays, so that even a young gentleman travelling post
must resign himself to a plebeian rate of progression. Odo at first was
too much pleased with the novelty of the scene to quarrel with any
incidental annoyances; but as the afternoon wore on the way began to
seem long, and he was just giving utterance to his impatience when
Cantapresto, putting his head out of the window, announced in a tone of
pious satisfaction that just ahead of them were a party of travellers in
far worse case than themselves. Odo, leaning out, saw that, a dozen
yards ahead, a modest chaise of antique pattern had in fact come to
grief by the roadside. He called to his postillion to hurry forward, and
they were soon abreast of the wreck, about which several people were
grouped in anxious colloquy. Odo sprang out to offer his services; but
as he alit he felt Cantapresto's hand on his sleeve.
"Cavaliere," the soprano whispered, "these are plainly people of no
condition, and we have yet a good seven miles to Vercelli, where all the
inns will be crowded for the Whitsun fair. Believe me, it were better to
go forward."
Odo advanced without heeding this admonition; but a moment later he had
almost regretted his action; for in the centre of the group about the
chaise stood the two persons whom, of all the world, he was at that
moment least wishful of meeting.
Content of BOOK II - THE NEW LIGHT: CHAPTER 6 [Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision]
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