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BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 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.
Content of BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 6 [Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision]
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