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BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 2
Odo, on his return to Pianura, had taken it for granted that de Crucis
would remain in his service.
There had been little talk between the two on the way. The one was deep
in his own wretchedness, and the other had too fine a tact to intrude on
it; but Odo felt the nearness of that penetrating sympathy which was
almost a gift of divination. He was glad to have de Crucis at his side
at a moment when any other companionship had been intolerable; and in
the egotism of his misery he imagined that he could dispose as he
pleased of his friend's future.
After the little Prince's death, however, de Crucis had at once asked
permission to leave Pianura. He was perhaps not displeased by Odo's
expressions of surprise and disappointment; but they did not alter his
decision. He reminded the new Duke that he had been called to Pianura as
governor to the late heir, and that, death having cut short his task, he
had now no farther pretext for remaining.
Odo listened with a strange sense of loneliness. The responsibilities of
his new state weighed heavily on the musing speculative side of his
nature. Face to face with the sudden summons to action, with the
necessity for prompt and not too-curious choice of means and method, he
felt a stealing apathy of the will, an inclination toward the subtle
duality of judgment that had so often weakened and diffused his
energies. At such a crisis it seemed to him that, de Crucis gone, he
remained without a friend. He urged the abate to reconsider his
decision, begging him to choose a post about his person.
De Crucis shook his head.
"The offer," said he, "is more tempting to me than your Highness can
guess; but my business here is at an end, and must be taken up
elsewhere. My calling is that of a pedagogue. When I was summoned to
take charge of Prince Ferrante's education I gave up my position in the
household of Prince Bracciano not only because I believed that I could
make myself more useful in training a future sovereign than the son of a
private nobleman, but also," he added with a smile, "because I was
curious to visit a state of which your Highness had so often spoken, and
because I believed that my residence here might enable me to be of
service to your Highness. In this I was not mistaken; and I will gladly
remain in Pianura long enough to give your Highness such counsels as my
experience suggests; but that business discharged, I must ask leave to
go."
From this position no entreaties could move him; and so fixed was his
resolve that it confirmed the idea that he was still a secret agent of
the Jesuits. Strangely enough, this did not prejudice Odo, who was more
than ever under the spell of de Crucis's personal influence. Though Odo
had been acquainted with many professed philosophers he had never met
among them a character so nearly resembling the old stoical ideal of
temperance and serenity, and he could never be long with de Crucis
without reflecting that the training which could form and nourish so
noble a nature must be other than the world conceived it.
De Crucis, however, frankly pointed out that his former connection with
the Jesuits was too well known in Pianura not to be an obstacle in the
way of his usefulness.
"I own," said he, "that before the late Duke's death I exerted such
influence as I possessed to bring about your Highness's appointment as
regent; but the very connections that favoured me with your predecessor
must stand in the way of my serving your Highness. Nothing could be more
fatal to your prospects than to have it said that you had chosen a
former Jesuit as your advisor. In the present juncture of affairs it is
needful that you should appear to be in sympathy with the liberals, and
that whatever reforms you attempt should seem the result of popular
pressure rather than of your own free choice. Such an attitude may not
flatter the sovereign's pride, and is in fact merely a higher form of
expediency; but it is one which the proudest monarchs of Europe are
finding themselves constrained to take if they would preserve their
power and use it effectually."
Soon afterward de Crucis left Pianura; but before leaving he imparted to
Odo the result of his observations while in the late Duke's service. De
Crucis's view was that of the more thoughtful men of his day who had not
broken with the Church, yet were conscious that the whole social system
of Europe was in need of renovation. The movement of ideas in France,
and their rapid transformation into legislative measures of unforeseen
importance, had as yet made little impression in Italy; and the clergy
in particular lived in serene unconsciousness of any impending change.
De Crucis, however, had been much in France, and had frequented the
French churchmen, who (save in the highest ranks of the hierarchy) were
keenly alive to the need of reform, and ready, in many instances, to
sacrifice their own privileges in the public cause. These men, living in
their provincial cures or abbeys, were necessarily in closer contact
with the people, better acquainted with their needs and more competent
to relieve them, than the city demagogues theorising in Parisian
coffee-houses on the Rights of Man and the Code of Nature. But the voice
of the demagogues carried farther than that of the clergy; and such
revolutionary notions as crossed the Alps had more to do with the
founding of future Utopias than with the remedy of present evils.
Even in France the temperate counsels of the clergy were being overruled
by the sentimental imprudences of the nobles and by the bluster of the
politicians. It was to put Odo on his guard against these two influences
that de Crucis was chiefly anxious; but the intelligent cooperation of
the clergy was sadly lacking in his administrative scheme. He knew that
Odo could not count on the support of the Church party, and that he must
make what use he could of the liberals in his attempts at reform. The
clergy of Pianura had been in power too long to believe in the necessity
of conceding anything to the new spirit; and since the banishment of the
Society of Jesus the presumption of the other orders had increased
instead of diminishing. The priests, whatever their failings, had
attached the needy by a lavish bounty; and they had a powerful auxiliary
in the Madonna of the Mountain, who drew pilgrims from all parts of
Italy and thus contributed to the material welfare of the state as well
as to its spiritual privileges. To the common people their Virgin was
not only a protection against disease and famine, but a kind of oracle,
who by divers signs and tokens gave evidence of divine approval or
displeasure; and it was naturally to the priests that the faithful
looked for a reading of these phenomena. This gave the clergy a powerful
hold on the religious sensibilities of the people; and more than once
the manifest disapproval of the Mountain Madonna had turned the scales
against some economic measure which threatened the rights of her augurs.
De Crucis understood the force of these traditional influences; but Odo,
in common with the more cultivated men of his day, had lived too long in
an atmosphere of polite scepticism to measure the profound hold of
religion on the consciousness of the people. Christ had been so long
banished from the drawing-room that it was has hard to believe that He
still ruled in field and vineyard. To men of Odo's stamp the piety of
the masses was a mere superficial growth, a kind of mental mould to be
dried off by the first beams of knowledge. He did not conceive it as a
habit of thought so old that it had become instinctive, so closely
intertwined with every sense that to hope to eradicate it was like
trying to drain all the blood from a man's body without killing him. He
knew nothing of the unwearied workings of that power, patient as a
natural force, which, to reach spirits darkened by ignorance and eyes
dulled by toil, had stooped to a thousand disguises, humble, tender and
grotesque--peopling the earth with a new race of avenging or protecting
deities, guarding the babe in the cradle and the cattle in the stalls,
blessing the good man's vineyard or blighting the crops of the
blasphemer, guiding the lonely traveller over torrents and precipices,
smoothing the sea and hushing the whirlwind, praying with the mother
over her sick child, and watching beside the dead in plague-house and
lazaret and galley--entering into every joy and grief of the obscurest
consciousness, penetrating to depths of misery which no human compassion
ever reached, and redressing by a prompt and summary justice wrongs of
which no human legislation took account.
Odo's first act after his accession had been to recall the political
offenders banished by his predecessor; and so general was the custom of
marking the opening of a new reign by an amnesty to political exiles,
that Trescorre offered no opposition to the measure. Andreoni and his
friends at once returned to Pianura, and Gamba at the same time emerged
from his mysterious hiding-place. He was the only one of the group who
struck Odo as having any administrative capacity; yet he was more likely
to be of use as a pamphleteer than as an office-holder. As to the other
philosophers, they were what their name implied: thoughtful and
high-minded men, with a generous conception of their civic duties, and a
noble readiness to fulfil them at any cost, but untrained to action, and
totally ignorant of the complex science of government.
Odo found the hunchback changed. He had withered like Trescorre, but
under the harsher blight of physical privations; and his tongue had an
added bitterness. He replied evasively to all enquiries as to what had
become of him during his absence from Pianura; but on Odo's asking for
news of Momola and the child he said coldly: "They are both dead."
"Dead?" Odo exclaimed. "Together?"
"There was scarce an hour between them," Gamba answered. "She said she
must keep alive as long as the boy needed her--after that she turned on
her side and died."
"But of what disorder? How came they to sicken at the same time?"
The hunchback stood silent, his eyes on the ground. Suddenly he raised
them and looked full at the Duke.
"Those that saw them called it the plague."
"The plague? Good God!" Odo slowly returned his stare. "Is it
possible--" he paused--"that she too was at the feast of the Madonna?"
"She was there, but it was not there that she contracted the distemper."
"Not there--?"
"No; for she dragged herself from her bed to go."
There was another silence. The hunchback had lowered his eyes. The Duke
sat motionless, resting his head on his hand. Suddenly he made a gesture
of dismissal...
Two months after his state entry into Pianura Odo married his cousin's
widow.
It surprised him, in looking back, to see how completely the thought of
Maria Clementina had passed out of his life, how wholly he had ceased to
reckon with her as one of the factors in his destiny. At her child's
death-bed he had seen in her only the stricken mother, centred in her
loss, and recalling, in an agony of tears, the little prince's prophetic
vision of the winged playmates who came to him carrying toys from
Paradise. After Prince Ferrante's death she had gone on a long visit to
her uncle of Monte Alloro; and since her return to Pianura she had lived
in the dower-house, refusing Odo's offer of a palace in the town. She
had first shown herself to the public on the day of the state entry; and
now, her year of widowhood over, she was again the consort of a reigning
Duke of Pianura.
No one was more ignorant than her husband of the motives determining her
act. As Duchess of Monte Alloro she might have enjoyed the wealth and
independence which her uncle's death had bestowed on her, but in
marrying again she resigned the right to her new possessions, which
became vested in the crown of Pianura. Was it love that had prompted the
sacrifice? As she stood beside him on the altar steps of the Cathedral,
as she rode home beside him between their shouting subjects, Odo asked
himself the question again and again. The years had dealt lightly with
her, and she had crossed the threshold of the thirties with the assured
step of a woman who has no cause to fear what awaits her. But her blood
no longer spoke her thoughts, and the transparence of youth had changed
to a brilliant density. He could not penetrate beneath the surface of
her smile: she seemed to him like a beautiful toy which might conceal a
lacerating weapon.
Meanwhile between himself and any better understanding of her stood the
remembrance of their talk in the hunting-lodge of Pontesordo. What she
had offered then he had refused to take: was she the woman to forget
such a refusal? Was it not rather to keep its memory alive that she had
married him? Or was she but the flighty girl he had once imagined her,
driven hither and thither by spasmodic impulses, and incapable of
consistent action, whether for good or ill? The barrier of their
past--of all that lay unsaid and undone between them--so completely cut
her off from him that he had, in her presence, the strange sensation of
a man who believes himself to be alone yet feels that he is
watched...The first months of their marriage were oppressed by this
sense of constraint; but gradually habit bridged the distance between
them and he found himself at once nearer to her and less acutely aware
of her. In the second year an heir was born and died; and the hopes and
grief thus shared drew them insensibly into the relation of the ordinary
husband and wife, knitted together at the roots in spite of superficial
divergencies.
In his passionate need of sympathy and counsel Odo longed to make the
most of this enforced community of interests. Already his first zeal was
flagging, his belief in his mission wavering: he needed the
encouragement of a kindred faith. He had no hope of finding in Maria
Clementina that pure passion for justice which seemed to him the noblest
ardour of the soul. He had read it in one woman's eyes, but these had
long been turned from him. Unconsciously perhaps he counted rather on
his wife's less generous qualities: the passion for dominion, the blind
arrogance of temper that, for the mere pleasure of making her power
felt, had so often drawn her into public affairs. Might not this waste
force--which implied, after all, a certain prodigality of courage--be
used for good as well as evil? Might not his influence make of the
undisciplined creature at his side an unconscious instrument in the
great work of order and reconstruction?
His first appeal to her brought the answer. At his request his ministers
had drawn up a plan of financial reorganisation, which should include
the two duchies; for Monte Alloro, though wealthier than Pianura, was in
even greater need of fiscal reform. As a first step towards replenishing
the treasury the Duke had declared himself ready to limit his private
expenditure to a fixed sum; and he now asked the Duchess to pledge
herself in the same manner. Maria Clementina, since her uncle's death,
had been in receipt of a third of the annual revenues of Monte Alloro.
This should have enabled her to pay her debts and put some dignity and
order into her establishment; but the first year's income had gone in
the building of a villa on the Piana, in imitation of the country-seats
along the Brenta; the second was spent in establishing a menagerie of
wild animals like that of the French Queen at Versailles; and rumour had
it that the Duchess carried her imitation of her royal cousin so far as
to be involved in an ugly quarrel with her jewellers about a necklace
for which she owed a thousand ducats.
All these reports had of course reached Odo; but he still hoped that an
appeal to her love of dominion might prove stronger than the habit of
self-indulgence. He said to himself that nothing had ever been done to
rouse her ambition, that hitherto, if she had meddled in politics, it
had been merely from thwarted vanity or the desire to gratify some
personal spite. Now he hoped to take her by higher passions, and by
associating her with his own schemes to utilise her dormant energies.
For the first moments she listened with the strained fixity of a child;
then her attention flickered and died out. The life-long habit of
referring every question to a personal standpoint made it difficult for
her to follow a general argument, and she leaned back with the resigned
eyelids of piety under the pulpit. Odo, resolved to be patient, and
seeing that the subject was too large for her, tried to take it apart,
putting it before her bit by bit, and at such an angle that she should
catch her own reflection in it. He thought to take her by the Austrian
side, touching on the well-known antagonism between Vienna and Rome, on
the reforms of the Tuscan Grand-Duke, on the Emperor Joseph's open
defiance of the Church's feudal claims. But she scented a personal
application.
"My cousin the Emperor should be a priest himself," she shrugged, "for
he belongs to the preaching order. He never goes to France but he gives
the poor Queen such a scolding that her eyes are red for a week. Has
Joseph been trying to set our house in order?"
Discouraged, but more than ever bent on patience, he tried the chord of
vanity, of her love of popularity. The people called her the beautiful
Duchess--why not let history name her the great? But the mention of
history was unfortunate. It reminded her of her lesson-books, and of the
stupid Greeks and Romans, whose dates she could never recall. She hoped
she should never be anything so dull as an historical personage! And
besides, greatness was for the men--it was enough for a princess to be
virtuous. And she looked as edifying as her own epitaph.
He caught this up and tried to make her distinguish between the public
and the private virtues. But the word "responsibility" slipped from him
and he felt her stiffen. This was preaching, and she hated preaching
even more than history. Her attention strayed again and he rallied his
forces in a last appeal. But he knew it was a lost battle: every
argument broke against the close front of her indifference. He was
talking a language she had never learned--it was all as remote from her
as Church Latin. A princess did not need to know Latin. She let her eye
linger suggestively on the clock. It was a fine hunting morning, and she
had meant to kill a stag in the Caccia del Vescovo.
When he began to sum up, and the question narrowed to a direct appeal,
her eyes left the clock and returned to him. Now she was listening. He
pressed on to the matter of retrenchment. Would she join him, would she
help to make the great work possible? At first she seemed hardly to
understand; but as his meaning grew clear to her--"Is the money no
longer ours?" she exclaimed.
He hesitated. "I suppose it is as much ours as ever," he said.
"And how much is that?" she asked impatiently.
"It is ours as a trust for our people."
She stared in honest wonder. These were new signs in her heaven.
"A trust? A trust? I am not sure that I know what that means. Is the
money ours or theirs?"
He hesitated. "In strict honour, it is ours only as long as we spend it
for their benefit."
She turned aside to examine an enamelled patch-box by Van Blarenberghe
which the court jeweller had newly received from Paris. When she raised
her eyes she said: "And if we do not spend it for their benefit--?"
Odo glanced about the room. He looked at the delicate adornment of the
walls, the curtains of Lyons damask, the crystal girandoles, the toys in
porcelain of Saxony and Sevres, in bronze and ivory and Chinese lacquer,
crowding the tables and cabinets of inlaid wood. Overhead floated a rosy
allegory by Luca Giordano; underfoot lay a carpet of the royal
manufactory of France; and through the open windows he heard the plash
of the garden fountains and saw the alignment of the long green alleys
set with the statues of Roman patriots.
"Then," said he--and the words sounded strangely in his own ears--"then
they may take it from us some day--and all this with it, to the very toy
you are playing with."
She rose, and from her fullest height dropped a brilliant smile on him;
then her eyes turned to the portrait of the great fighting Duke set in
the monumental stucchi of the chimney-piece.
"If you take after your ancestors you will know how to defend it," she
said.
Content of BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 2 [Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision]
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