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BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 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.
Content of BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 4 [Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision]
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