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BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 11
The joy of reprisals lasted no longer than a summer storm. To hurt, to
silence, to destroy, was too easy to be satisfying. The passions of his
ancestors burned low in Odo's breast: though he felt Bracciaforte's fury
in his veins he could taste no answering gratification of revenge. And
the spirit on which he would have spent his hatred was not here or
there, as an embodied faction, but everywhere as an intangible
influence. The acqua tofana of his enemies had pervaded every fibre of
the state.
The mist of anguish lifted, he saw himself alone among ruins. For a
moment Fulvia's glowing faith had hung between him and a final vision of
the truth; and as his convictions weakened he had replaced them with an
immense pity, an all-sufficing hope. Sentimental verbiage: he saw it
clearly now. He had been the dupe of the old word-jugglery which was
forever confounding fact and fancy in men's minds. For it was
essentially an age of words: the world was drunk with them, as it had
once been drunk with action; and the former was the deadlier drug of the
two. He looked about him languidly, letting the facts of life filter
slowly through his faculties. The sources of energy were so benumbed in
him that he felt like a man whom long disease had reduced to
helplessness and who must laboriously begin his bodily education again.
Hate was the only passion which survived, and that was but a deaf
intransitive emotion coiled in his nature's depths.
Sickness at last brought its obliteration. He sank into gulfs of
weakness and oblivion, and when the rise of the tide floated him back to
life, it was to a life as faint and colourless as infancy. Colourless
too were the boundaries on which he looked out: the narrow enclosure of
white walls, opening on a slit of pale spring landscape. His hands lay
before him, white and helpless on the white coverlet of his bed. He
raised his eyes and saw de Crucis at his side. Then he began to
remember. There had been preceding intervals of consciousness, and in
one of them, in answer perhaps to some vaguely-uttered wish for light
and air, he had been carried out of the palace and the city to the
Benedictine monastery on its wooded knoll beyond the Piana. Then the
veil had dropped again, and his spirit had wandered in a dim place of
shades. There was a faint sweetness in coming back at last to familiar
sights and sounds. They no longer hurt like pressure on an aching nerve:
they seemed rather, now, the touch of a reassuring hand.
As the contact with life became closer and more sustained he began to
watch himself curiously, wondering what instincts and habits of thought
would survive his long mental death. It was with a bitter, almost
pitiable disappointment that he found the old man growing again in him.
Life, with a mocking hand, brought him the cast-off vesture of his past,
and he felt himself gradually compressed again into the old passions and
prejudices. Yet he wore them with a difference--they were a cramping
garment rather than a living sheath. He had brought back from his lonely
voyagings a sense of estrangement deeper than any surface-affinity with
things.
As his physical strength returned, and he was able to leave his room and
walk through the long corridors to the outer air, he felt the old spell
which the life of Monte Cassino had cast on him. The quiet garden, with
its clumps of box and lavender between paths converging to the statue of
Saint Benedict; the cloisters paved with the monks' nameless graves; the
traces of devotional painting left here and there on the weather-beaten
walls, like fragments of prayer in a world-worn mind: these formed a
circle of tranquillising influences in which he could gradually
reacquire the habit of living.
He had never deceived himself as to the cause of the riots. He knew from
Gamba and Andreoni that the liberals and the court, for once working in
unison, had provoked the blind outburst of fanaticism which a rasher
judgment might have ascribed to the clergy. The Dominicans, bigoted and
eager for power, had been ready enough to serve such an end, and some of
the begging orders had furnished the necessary points of contact with
the people; but the movement was at bottom purely political, and
represented the resistance of the privileged classes to any attack on
their inherited rights.
As such, he could no longer regard it as completely unreasonable. He was
beginning to feel the social and political significance of those old
restrictions and barriers against which his early zeal had tilted.
Certainly in the ideal state the rights and obligations of the different
classes would be more evenly adjusted. But the ideal state was a figment
of the brain. The real one, as Crescenti had long ago pointed out, was
the gradual and heterogeneous product of remote social conditions,
wherein every seeming inconsistency had its roots in some bygone need,
and the character of each class, with its special passions, ignorances
and prejudices, was the sum total of influences so ingrown and
inveterate that they had become a law of thought. All this, however,
seemed rather matter for philosophic musing than for definite action.
His predominant feeling was still that of remoteness from the immediate
issues of life: the soeva indignatio had been succeeded by a great calm.
The soothing influences of the monastic life had doubtless helped to
tide him over the stormy passage of returning consciousness. His
sensitiveness to these influences inclined him for the first time to
consider them analytically. Hitherto he had regarded the Church as a
skilfully-adjusted engine, the product of human passions scientifically
combined to obtain the greatest sum of tangible results. Now he saw that
he had never penetrated beneath the surface. For the Church which
grasped, contrived, calculated, struggled for temporal possessions and
used material weapons against spiritual foes--this outer Church was
nothing more than the body, which, like any other animal body, had to
care for its own gross needs, nourish, clothe, defend itself, fight for
a footing among the material resistances of life--while the soul, the
inner animating principle, might dwell aloof from all these things, in a
clear medium of its own.
To this soul of the Church his daily life now brought him close. He felt
it in the ordered beneficence of the great community, in the simplicity
of its external life and the richness and suavity of its inner
relations. No alliance based on material interests, no love of power
working toward a common end, could have created that harmony of thought
and act which was reflected in every face about him. Each of these men
seemed to have FOUND OUT SOMETHING of which he was still ignorant.
What it was, de Crucis tried to tell him as they paced the cloisters
together or sat in the warm stillness of the budding garden. At the
first news of the Duke's illness the Jesuit had hastened to Pianura. No
companionship could have been so satisfying to Odo. De Crucis's mental
attitude toward mankind might have been defined as an illuminated
charity. To love men, or to understand them, is not as unusual as to do
both together; and it was the intellectual acuteness of his friend's
judgments that made their Christian amenity so seductive to Odo.
"The highest claim of Christianity," the Jesuit said one morning, as
they sat on a worn stone bench at the end of the sunny vine-walk, "is
that it has come nearer to solving the problem of men's relations to
each other than any system invented by themselves. This, after all, is
the secret principle of the Church's vitality. She gave a spiritual
charter of equality to mankind long before the philosophers thought of
giving them a material one. If, all the while, she has been fighting for
dominion, arrogating to herself special privileges, struggling to
preserve the old lines of social and legal demarcation, it has been
because for nigh two thousand years she has cherished in her breast the
one free city of the spirit, because to guard its liberties she has had
to defend and strengthen her own position. I do not ask you to consider
whence comes this insight into the needs of man, this mysterious power
over him; I ask you simply to confess them in their results. I am not of
those who believe that God permits good to come to mankind through one
channel only, and I doubt not that now and in times past the thinkers
whom your Highness follows have done much to raise the condition of
their fellows; but I would have you observe that, where they have done
so, it has been because, at bottom, their aims coincided with the
Church's. The deeper you probe into her secret sources of power, the
more you find there, in the germ if you will, but still potentially
active, all those humanising energies which work together for the
lifting of the race. In her wisdom and her patience she may have seen
fit to withhold their expression, to let them seek another outlet; but
they are there, stored in her consciousness like the archetypes of the
Platonists in the Universal Mind. It is the knowledge of this, the sure
knowledge of it, which creates the atmosphere of serenity that you feel
about you. From the tilling of the vineyards, or the dressing of a
beggar's sores, to the loftiest and most complicated intellectual labour
imposed on him, each brother knows that his daily task is part of a
great scheme of action, working ever from imperfection to perfection,
from human incompleteness to the divine completion. This sense of being,
not straws on a blind wind of chance, but units in an ordered force,
gives to the humblest Christian an individual security and dignity which
kings on their thrones might envy.
"But not only does the Church anticipate every tendency of mankind;
alone of all powers she knows how to control and direct the passions she
excites. This it is which makes her an auxiliary that no temporal prince
can well despise. It is in this aspect that I would have your Highness
consider her. Do not underrate her power because it seems based on the
commoner instincts rather than on the higher faculties of man. That is
one of the sources of her strength. She can support her claims by reason
and argument, but it is because her work, like that of her divine
Founder, lies chiefly among those who can neither reason nor argue, that
she chooses to rest her appeal on the simplest and most universal
emotions. As, in our towns, the streets are lit mainly by the tapers
before the shrines of the saints, so the way of life would be dark to
the great multitude of men but for the light of faith burning within
them..."
Meanwhile the shufflings of destiny had brought to Trescorre the prize
for which he waited. During the Duke's illness he had been appointed
regent of Pianura, and his sovereign's reluctance to take up the cares
of government had now left him for six months in authority. The day
after the proclaiming of the constitution Odo had withdrawn his
signature from it, on the ground that the concessions it contained were
inopportune. The functions of government went on again in the old way.
The old abuses persisted, the old offences were condoned: it was as
though the apathy of the sovereign had been communicated to his people.
Centuries of submission were in their blood, and for two generations
there had been no warfare south of the Alps.
For the moment men's minds were turned to the great events going forward
in France. It had not yet occurred to the Italians that the recoil of
these events might be felt among themselves. They were simply amused
spectators, roused at last to the significance of the show, but never
dreaming that they might soon be called from the wings to the
footlights. To de Crucis, however, the possibility of such a call was
already present, and it was he who pressed the Duke to return to his
post. A deep reluctance held Odo back. He would have liked to linger on
in the monastery, leading the tranquil yet busy life of the monks, and
trying to read the baffling riddle of its completeness. At that moment
it seemed to him of vastly more importance to discover the exact nature
of the soul--whether it was in fact a metaphysical entity, as these men
believed, or a mere secretion of the brain, as he had been taught to
think--than to go back and govern his people. For what mattered the
rest, if he had been mistaken about the soul?
With a start he realised that he was going as his cousin had gone--that
this was but another form of the fatal lethargy that hung upon his race.
An effort of the will drew him back to Pianura, and made him resume the
semblance of authority; but it carried him no farther. Trescorre
ostensibly became prime minister, and in reality remained the head of
the state. The Duke was present at the cabinet meetings but took no part
in the direction of affairs. His mind was lost in a maze of metaphysical
speculations; and even these served him merely as some
cunningly-contrived toy with which to trick his leisure.
His revocation of the charter had necessarily separated him from Gamba
and the advanced liberals. He knew that the hunchback, ever scornful of
expediency, charged him with disloyalty to the people; but such charges
could no longer wound. The events following the Duke's birthday had
served to crystallise the schemes of the little liberal group, and they
now formed a campaign of active opposition to the government, attacking
it by means of pamphlets and lampoons, and by such public speaking as
the police allowed. The new professors of the University, ardently in
sympathy with the constitutional movement, used their lectures as means
of political teaching, and the old stronghold of dogma became the centre
of destructive criticism. But as yet these ideas formed but a single
live point in the general numbness.
Two years passed in this way. North of the Alps, all Europe was
convulsed, while Italy was still but a sleeper who tosses in his sleep.
In the two Sicilies, the arrogance and perfidy of the government gave a
few martyrs to the cause, and in Bologna there was a brief revolutionary
outbreak; but for the most part the Italian states were sinking into
inanition. Venice, by recalling her fleet from Greece, let fall the
dominion of the sea. Twenty years earlier Genoa had basely yielded
Corsica to France. The Pope condemned the French for their outrages on
religion, and his subjects murdered Basseville, the agent of the new
republic. The sympathies and impulses of the various states were as
contradictory as they were ineffectual.
Meanwhile, in France, Europe was trying to solve at a stroke the
problems of a thousand years. All the repressed passions which
civilisation had sought, however imperfectly, to curb, stalked abroad
destructive as flood and fire. The great generation of the
Encyclopaedists had passed away, and the teachings of Rousseau had
prevailed over those of Montesquieu and Voltaire. The sober sense of the
economists was swept aside by the sound and fury of the demagogues, and
France was become a very Babel of tongues. The old malady of words had
swept over the world like a pestilence.
To the little Italian courts, still dozing in fancied security under the
wing of Bourbon and Hapsburg suzerains, these rumours were borne by the
wild flight of emigres--dead leaves loosened by the first blast of the
storm. Month by month they poured across the Alps in ever-increasing
numbers, bringing confused contradictory tales of anarchy and outrage.
Among those whom chance thus carried to Pianura were certain familiars
of the Duke's earlier life--the Count Alfieri and his royal mistress,
flying from Paris, and arriving breathless with the tale of their
private injuries. To the poet of revolt this sudden realisation of his
doctrines seemed in fact a purely personal outrage. It was as though a
man writing an epic poem on an earthquake should suddenly find himself
engulphed. To Alfieri the downfall of the French monarchy and the
triumph of democratic ideas meant simply that his French investments had
shrunk to nothing, and that he, the greatest poet of the age, had been
obliged, at an immense sacrifice of personal dignity, to plead with a
drunken mob for leave to escape from Paris. To the wider aspect of the
"tragic farce," as he called it, his eyes remained obstinately closed.
He viewed the whole revolutionary movement as a conspiracy against his
comfort, and boasted that during his enforced residence in France he had
not so much as exchanged a word with one of the "French slaves,
instigators of false liberty," who, by trying to put into action the
principles taught in his previous works, had so grievously interfered
with the composition of fresh masterpieces.
The royal pretensions of the Countess of Albany--pretentions affirmed
rather than abated as the tide of revolution rose--made it impossible
that she should be received at the court of Pianura; but the Duke found
a mild entertainment in Alfieri's company. The poet's revulsion of
feeling seemed to Odo like the ironic laughter of the fates. His
thoughts returned to the midnight meetings of the Honey Bees, and to the
first vision of that face which men had lain down their lives to see.
Men had looked on that face since then, and its horror was reflected in
their own.
Other fugitives to Pianura brought another impression of events--that
comic note which life, the supreme dramatic artist, never omits from her
tragedies. These were the Duke's old friend the Marquis de Coeur-Volant,
fleeing from his chateau as the peasants put the torch to it, and
arriving in Pianura destitute, gouty and middle-aged, but imperturbable
and epigrammatic as ever. With him came his Marquise, a dark-eyed lady,
stout to unwieldiness and much given to devotion, in whom it was
whispered (though he introduced her as the daughter of a Venetian
Senator) that a reminiscent eye might still detect the outline of the
gracefullest Columbine who had ever flitted across the Italian stage.
These visitors were lodged by the Duke's kindness in the Palazzo
Cerveno, near the ducal residence; and though the ladies of Pianura were
inclined to look askance on the Marquise's genealogy, yet his Highness's
condescension, and her own edifying piety, had soon allayed these
scruples, and the salon of Madame de Coeur-Volant became the rival of
Madame d'Albany's.
It was, in fact, the more entertaining of the two; for, in spite of his
lady's austere views, the Marquis retained that gift of social
flexibility that was already becoming the tradition of a happier day. To
the Marquis, indeed, the revolution was execrable not so much because of
the hardships it inflicted, as because it was the forerunner of social
dissolution--the breaking-up of the regime which had made manners the
highest morality, and conversation the chief end of man. He could have
lived gaily on a crust in good company and amid smiling faces; but the
social deficiencies of Pianura were more difficult to endure than any
material privation. In Italy, as the Marquis had more than once
remarked, people loved, gambled, wrote poetry, and patronised the arts;
but, alas, they did not converse. Coeur-Volant could not conceal from
his Highness that there was no conversation in Pianura; but he did his
best to fill the void by the constant exercise of his own gift in that
direction, and to Odo at least his talk seemed as good as it was
copious. Misfortune had given a finer savour to the Marquis's
philosophy, and there was a kind of heroic grace in his undisturbed
cultivation of the amenities.
While the Marquis was struggling to preserve the conversational art, and
Alfieri planning the savage revenge of the Misogallo, the course of
affairs in France had gained a wilder impetus. The abolition of the
nobility, the flight and capture of the King, his enforced declaration
of war against Austria, the massacres of Avignon, the sack of the
Tuileries--such events seemed incredible enough till the next had
crowded them out of mind. The new year rose in blood and mounted to a
bloodier noon. All the old defences were falling. Religion, monarchy,
law, were sucked down into the whirlpool of liberated passions. Across
that sanguinary scene passed, like a mocking ghost, the philosophers'
vision of the perfectibility of man. Man was free at last--freer than
his would-be liberators had ever dreamed of making him--and he used his
freedom like a beast. For the multitude had risen--that multitude which
no man could number, which even the demagogues who ranted in its name
had never seriously reckoned with--that dim, grovelling
indistinguishable mass on which the whole social structure rested. It
was as though the very soil moved, rising in mountains or yawning in
chasms about the feet of those who had so long securely battened on it.
The earth shook, the sun and moon were darkened, and the people, the
terrible unknown people, had put in the sickle to the harvest.
Italy roused herself at last. The emissaries of the new France were
swarming across the Alps, pervading the peninsula as the Jesuits had
once pervaded Europe; and in the mind of a young general of the
republican army visions of Italian conquest were already forming. In
Pianura the revolutionary agents found a strong republican party headed
by Gamba and his friends, and a government weakened by debt and
dissensions. The air was thick with intrigue. The little army could no
longer be counted on, and a prolonged bread-riot had driven Trescorre
out of the ministry and compelled the Duke to appoint Andreoni in his
place. Behind Andreoni stood Gamba and the radicals. There could be no
doubt which way the fortunes of the duchy tended. The Duke's would-be
protectors, Austria and the Holy See, were too busy organising the hasty
coalition of the powers to come to his aid, had he cared to call on
them. But to do so would have been but another way of annihilation. To
preserve the individuality of his state, or to merge it in the vision of
a United Italy, seemed to him the only alternatives worth fighting for.
The former was a futile dream, the latter seemed for a brief moment
possible. Piedmont, ever loyal to the monarchical principle, was calling
on her sister states to arm themselves against the French invasion. But
the response was reluctant and uncertain. Private ambitions and petty
jealousies hampered every attempt at union. Austria, the Bourbons and
the Holy See held the Italian principalities in a network of conflicting
interests and obligations that rendered free action impossible. Sadly
Victor Amadeus armed himself alone against the enemy.
Under such conditions Odo could do little to direct the course of
events. They had passed into more powerful hands than his. But he could
at least declare himself for or against the mighty impulse which was
behind them. The ideas he had striven for had triumphed at last, and his
surest hold on authority was to share openly in their triumph. A
profound horror dragged him back. The new principles were not those for
which he had striven. The goddess of the new worship was but a bloody
Maenad who had borrowed the attributes of freedom. He could not bow the
knee in such a charnel-house. Tranquilly, resolutely, he took up the
policy of repression. He knew the attempt was foredoomed to failure, but
that made no difference now: he was simply acting out the inevitable.
The last act came with unexpected suddenness. The Duke woke one morning
to find the citadel in the possession of the people. The impregnable
stronghold of Bracciaforte was in the hands of the serfs whose fathers
had toiled to build it, and the last descendant of Bracciaforte was
virtually a prisoner in his palace. The revolution took place quietly,
without violence or bloodshed. Andreoni waited on the Duke, and a
cabinet-council was summoned. The ministers affected to have yielded
reluctantly to popular pressure. All they asked was a constitution and
the assurance that no resistance would be offered to the French.
The Duke requested a few hours for deliberation. Left alone, he summoned
the Duchess's chamberlain. The ducal pair no longer met save on
occasions of state: they had not exchanged a word since the death of
Fulvia Vivaldi. Odo sent word to her Highness that he could no longer
answer for her security while she remained in the duchy, and that he
begged her to leave immediately for Vienna. She replied that she was
obliged for his warning, but that while he remained in Pianura her place
was at his side. It was the answer he had expected--he had never doubted
her courage--but it was essential to his course that she should leave
the duchy without delay, and after a moment's reflection he wrote a
letter in which he informed her that he must insist on her obedience. No
answer was returned, but he learned that she had turned white, and
tearing the letter in shreds had called for her travelling-carriage
within the hour. He sent to enquire when he might take leave of her, but
she excused herself on the plea of indisposition, and before nightfall
he heard the departing rattle of her wheels.
He immediately summoned Andreoni and announced his unconditional refusal
of the terms proposed to him. He would not give a constitution or
promise allegiance to the French. The minister withdrew, and Odo was
left alone. He had dismissed his gentlemen, and as he sat in his closet
a sense of deathlike isolation came over him. Never had the palace
seemed so silent or so vast. He had not a friend to turn to. De Crucis
was in Germany, and Trescorre, it was reported, had privately attended
the Duchess in her flight. The waves of destiny seemed closing over Odo,
and the circumstances of his past rose, poignant and vivid, before his
drowning sight.
And suddenly, in that moment of failure and abandonment, it seemed to
him again that life was worth the living. His indifference fell from him
like a garment. The old passion of action awoke and he felt a new warmth
in his breast. After all, the struggle was not yet over: though Piedmont
had called in vain on the Italian states, an Italian sword might still
be drawn in her service. If his people would not follow him against
France he could still march against her alone. Old memories hummed in
him at the thought. He recalled how his Piedmontese ancestors had gone
forth against the same foe, and the stout Donnaz blood began to bubble
in his veins.
A knock roused him and Gamba entered by the private way. His appearance
was not unexpected to Odo, and served only to reinforce his new-found
energy. He felt that the issue was at hand. As he expected, Gamba had
been sent to put before him more forcibly and unceremoniously the veiled
threat of the ministers. But the hunchback had come also to plead with
his master in his own name, and in the name of the ideas for which they
had once laboured together. He could not believe that the Duke's
reaction was more than momentary. He could not calculate the strength of
the old associations which, now that the tide had set the other way,
were dragging Odo back to the beliefs and traditions of his caste.
The Duke listened in silence; then he said: "Discussion is idle. I have
no answer to give but that which I have already given." He rose from his
seat in token of dismissal.
The moment was painful to both men. Gamba drew nearer and fell at the
Duke's feet.
"Your Highness," he said, "consider what this means. We hold the state
in our hands. If you are against us you are powerless. If you are with
us we can promise you more power than you ever dreamed of possessing."
The Duke looked at him with a musing smile. "It is as though you offered
me gold in a desert island," he said. "Do not waste such poor bribes on
me. I care for no power but the power to wipe out the work of these last
years. Failing that, I want nothing that you or any other man can give."
Gamba was silent a moment. He turned aside into the embrasure of the
window, and when he spoke again it was in a voice broken with grief.
"Your Highness," he said, "if your choice is made, ours is made also. It
is a hard choice, but these are fratricidal hours. We have come to the
parting of the ways."
The Duke made no sign, and Gamba went on with gathering anguish: "We
would have gone to the world's end with your Highness for our leader!"
"With a leader whom you could lead," Odo interposed. He went up to Gamba
and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Speak out, man," he said. "Say what
you were sent to say. Am I a prisoner?"
The hunchback burst into tears. Odo, with his arms crossed, stood
leaning against the window. The other's anguish seemed to deepen his
detachment.
"Your Highness--your Highness--" Gamba stammered.
The Duke made an impatient gesture. "Come, make an end," he said.
Gamba fell back with a profound bow.
"We do not ask the surrender of your Highness's person," he said.
"Not even that?" Odo returned with a faint sneer.
Gamba flushed to the temples, but the retort died on his lips.
"Your Highness," he said, scarce above a whisper, "the gates are
guarded; but the word for tonight is 'Humilitas.'" He knelt and kissed
Odo's hand. Then he rose and passed out of the room...
***
Before dawn the Duke left the palace. The high emotions of the night had
ebbed. He saw himself now, in the ironic light of morning, as a fugitive
too harmless to be worth pursuing. His enemies had let him keep his
sword because they had no cause to fear it. Alone he passed through the
gardens of the palace, and out into the desert darkness of the streets.
Skirting the wall of the Benedictine convent where Fulvia had lodged, he
gained a street leading to the marketplace. In the pallor of the waning
night the ancient monuments of his race stood up mournful and deserted
as a line of tombs. The city seemed a grave-yard and he the ineffectual
ghost of its dead past. He reached the gates and gave the watchword. The
gates were guarded, as he had been advised; but the captain of the watch
let him pass without show of hesitation or curiosity. Though he made no
effort at disguise he went forth unrecognised, and the city closed her
doors on him as carelessly as on any passing wanderer.
Beyond the gates a lad from the ducal stables waited with a horse. Odo
sprang into the saddle and rode on toward Pontesordo. The darkness was
growing thinner, and the meagre details of the landscape, with its
huddled farm-houses and mulberry-orchards, began to define themselves as
he advanced. To his left the field stretched, grey and sodden; ahead, on
his right, hung the dark woods of the ducal chase. Presently a bend of
the road brought him within sight of the keep of Pontesordo. His way led
past it, toward Valsecca; but some obscure instinct laid a detaining
hand on him, and at the cross-roads he bent to the right and rode across
the marshland to the old manor-house.
The farmyard lay hushed and deserted. The peasants who lived there would
soon be afoot; but for the moment Odo had the place to himself. He
tethered his horse to a gate-post and walked across the rough
cobble-stones to the chapel. Its floor was still heaped with farm-tools
and dried vegetables, and in the dimness a heavier veil of dust seemed
to obscure the painted walls. Odo advanced, picking his way among broken
ploughshares and stacks of maize, till he stood near the old marble
altar, with its sea-gods and acanthus volutes. The place laid its
tranquillising hush on him, and he knelt on the step beneath the altar.
Something stirred in him as he knelt there--a prayer, yet not a
prayer--a reaching out, obscure and inarticulate, toward all that had
survived of his early hopes and faiths, a loosening of old founts of
pity, a longing to be somehow, somewhere reunited to his old belief in
life.
How long he knelt he knew not; but when he looked up the chapel was full
of a pale light, and in the first shaft of the sunrise the face of Saint
Francis shone out on him...He went forth into the daybreak and rode away
toward Piedmont.
Content of BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 11
-THE END-
Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision
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