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BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 10
The University of Pianura was lodged in the ancient Signoria or Town
Hall of the free city; and here, on the afternoon of the Duke's
birthday, the civic dignitaries and the leading men of the learned
professions had assembled to see the doctorate conferred on the
Signorina Fulvia Vivaldi and on several less conspicuous candidates of
the other sex.
The city was again in gala dress. Early that morning the new
constitution had been proclaimed, with much firing of cannon and display
of official fireworks; but even these great news, and their attendant
manifestations, had failed to enliven the populace, who, instead of
filling the streets with their usual stir, hung massed at certain
points, as though curiously waiting on events. There are few sights more
ominous than that of a crowd thus observing itself, watching in
inconscient suspense for the unknown crisis which its own passions have
engendered.
It was known that his Highness, after the public banquet at the palace,
was to proceed in state to the University; and the throng was thick
about the palace gates and in the streets betwixt it and the Signoria.
Here the square was close-packed, and every window choked with gazers,
as the Duke's coach came in sight, escorted meagrely by his equerries
and the half-dozen light-horse that preceded him. The small escort, and
the marked absence of military display, perhaps disappointed the
splendour-loving crowd; and from this cause or another, scarce a cheer
was heard as his Highness descended from his coach, and walked up the
steps to the porch of ancient carved stone where the faculty awaited
him.
The hall was already filled with students and graduates, and with the
guests of the University. Through this grave assemblage the Duke passed
up to the row of armchairs beneath the dais at the farther end of the
room. Trescorre, who was to have attended his Highness, had excused
himself on the plea of indisposition, and only a few
gentlemen-in-waiting accompanied the Duke; but in the brown half-light
of the old Gothic hall their glittering uniforms contrasted brilliantly
with the black gowns of the students, and the sober broadcloth of the
learned professions. A discreet murmur of enthusiasm rose at their
approach, mounting almost to a cheer as the Duke bowed before taking his
seat; for the audience represented the class most in sympathy with his
policy and most confident of its success.
The meetings of the faculty were held in the great council-chamber where
the Rectors of the old free city had assembled; and such a setting was
regarded as peculiarly appropriate to the present occasion. The fact was
alluded to, with much wealth of historical and mythological analogy, by
the President, who opened the ceremonies with a polysyllabic Latin
oration, in which the Duke was compared to Apollo, Hercules and Jason,
as well as to the flower of sublunary heroes.
This feat of rhetoric over, the candidates were called on to advance and
receive their degrees. The men came first, profiting by the momentary
advantage of sex, but clearly aware of its inability to confer even
momentary importance in the eyes of the impatient audience. A pause
followed, and then Fulvia appeared. Against the red-robed faculty at the
back of the dais, she stood tall and slender in her black cap and gown.
The high windows of painted glass shed a paleness on her face, but her
carriage was light and assured as she advanced to the President and
knelt to receive her degree. The parchment was placed in her hand, the
furred hood laid on her shoulders; then, after another flourish of
rhetoric, she was led to the lectern from which her discourse was to be
delivered. Odo sat just below her, and as she took her place their eyes
met for an instant. He was caught up in the serene exaltation of her
look, as though she soared with him above wind and cloud to a region of
unshadowed calm; then her eyes fell and she began to speak.
She had a pretty mastery of Latin, and though she had never before
spoken in public, her poetical recitations, and the early habit of
intercourse with her father's friends, had given her a fair measure of
fluency and self-possession. These qualities were raised to eloquence by
the sweetness of her voice, and by the grave beauty which made the
academic gown seem her natural wear, rather than a travesty of learning.
Odo at first had some difficulty in fixing his attention on what she
said; and when he controlled his thoughts she was in the height of her
panegyric of constitutional liberty. She had begun slowly, almost
coldly; but now her theme possessed her. One by one she evoked the
familiar formulas with which his mind had once reverberated. They woke
no echo in him now; but he saw that she could still set them ringing
through the sensibilities of her hearers. As she stood there, a slight
impassioned figure, warming to her high argument, his sense of irony was
touched by the incongruity of her background. The wall behind her was
covered by an ancient fresco, fast fading under its touches of renewed
gilding, and representing the patron scholars of the mediaeval world:
the theologians, law-givers and logicians under whose protection the
free city had placed its budding liberties. There they sat, rigid and
sumptuous on their Gothic thrones: Origen, Zeno, David, Lycurgus,
Aristotle; listening in a kind of cataleptic helplessness to a
confession of faith that scattered their doctrines to the winds. As he
looked and listened, a weary sense of the reiterance of things came over
him. For what were these ancient manipulators of ideas, prestidigitators
of a vanished world of thought, but the forbears of the long line of
theorists of whom Fulvia was the last inconscient mouthpiece? The new
game was still played with the old counters, the new jugglers repeated
the old tricks; and the very words now poured out in defence of the new
cause were but mercenaries scarred in the service of its enemies. For
generations, for centuries, man had fought on; crying for liberty,
dreaming it was won, waking to find himself the slave of the new forces
he had generated, burning and being burnt for the same beliefs under
different guises, calling his instinct ideas and his ideas revelations;
destroying, rebuilding, falling, rising, mending broken weapons,
championing extinct illusions, mistaking his failures for achievements
and planting his flag on the ramparts as they fell. And as the vision of
this inveterate conflict rose before him, Odo saw that the beauty, the
power, the immortality, dwelt not in the idea but in the struggle for
it.
His resistance yielded as this sense stole over him, and with an almost
physical relief he felt himself drawn once more into the familiar
current of emotion. Yes, it was better after all to be one of that great
unconquerable army, though, like the Trojans fighting for a phantom
Helen, they might be doing battle for the shadow of a shade; better to
march in their ranks, endure with them, fight with them, fall with them,
than to miss the great enveloping sense of brotherhood that turned
defeat to victory.
As the conviction grew in him, Fulvia's words regained their lost
significance. Through the set mask of language the living thoughts
looked forth, old indeed as the world, but renewed with the new life of
every heart that bore them. She had left the abstract and dropped to
concrete issues: to the gift of the constitution, the benefits and
obligations it implied, the new relations it established between ruler
and subject and between man and man. Odo saw that she approached the
question without flinching. No trace remained of the trembling woman who
had clung to him the night before. Her old convictions repossessed her
and she soared above human fears.
So engrossed was he that he had been unaware of a growing murmur of
sound which seemed to be forcing its way from without through the walls
of the ancient building. As Fulvia's oration neared its end the murmur
rose to a roar. Startled faces were turned toward the doors of the
council-chamber, and one of the Duke's gentlemen left his seat and made
his way through the audience. Odo sat motionless, his eyes on Fulvia. He
noticed that her face paled as the sound reached her, but there was no
break in the voice with which she uttered the closing words of her
peroration. As she ended, the noise was momentarily drowned under a loud
burst of clapping; but this died in a hush of apprehension through which
the outer tumult became more ominously audible. The equerry reentered
the hall with a disordered countenance. He hastened to the Duke and
addressed him urgently.
"Your Highness," he said, "the crowd has thickened and wears an ugly
look. There are many friars abroad, and images of the Mountain Virgin
are being carried in procession. Will your Highness be pleased to remain
here while I summon an escort from the barracks?"
Odo was still watching Fulvia. She had received the applause of the
audience with a deep reverence, and was now in the act of withdrawing to
the inner room at the back of the dais. Her eyes met Odo's; she smiled
and the door closed on her. He turned to the equerry.
"There is no need of an escort," he said. "I trust my people if they do
not trust me."
"But, your Highness, the streets are full of demagogues who have been
haranguing the people since morning. The crowd is shouting against the
constitution and against the Signorina Vivaldi."
A flame of anger passed over the Duke's face; but he subdued it
instantly.
"Go to the Signorina Vivaldi," he said, pointing to the door by which
Fulvia had left the hall. "Assure her that there is no danger, but ask
her to remain where she is till the crowd disperses, and request the
faculty in my name to remain with her."
The equerry bowed, and hurried up the steps of the dais, while the Duke
signed to his other companions to precede him to the door of the hall.
As they walked down the long room, between the close-packed ranks of the
audience, the outer tumult surged threateningly toward them. Near the
doorway, another of the gentlemen-in-waiting was seen to speak with the
Duke.
"Your Highness," he said, "there is a private way at the back by which
you may yet leave the building unobserved."
"You appear to forget that I entered it publicly," said Odo.
"But, your Highness, we cannot answer for the consequences--"
The Duke signed to the ushers to throw open the doors. They obeyed, and
he stepped out into the stone vestibule preceding the porch. The
iron-barred outer doors of this vestibule were securely bolted, and the
porter hung back in affright at the order to unlock them.
"Your Highness, the people are raving mad," he said, flinging himself on
his knees.
Odo turned impatiently to his escort. "Unbar the doors, gentlemen," he
said. The blood was drumming in his ears, but his eye was clear and
steady, and he noted with curious detachment the comic agony of the fat
porter's face, and the strain and swell of the equerry's muscles as he
dragged back the ponderous bolts.
The doors swung open, and the Duke emerged. Below him, still with that
unimpaired distinctness of vision which seemed a part of his heightened
vitality, he saw a great gesticulating mass of people. They packed the
square so closely that their own numbers held them immovable, save for
their swaying arms and heads; and those whom the square could not
contain had climbed to porticoes, balconies and cornices, and massed
themselves in the neck of the adjoining streets. The handful of
light-horse who had escorted the Duke's carriage formed a single line at
the foot of the steps, so that the approach to the porch was still
clear; but it was plain that the crowd, with its next movement, would
break through this slender barrier and hem in the Duke.
At Odo's appearance the shouting had ceased and every eye was turned on
him. He stood there, a brilliant target, in his laced coat of
peach-coloured velvet, his breast covered with orders, a hand on his
jewelled sword-hilt. For a moment sovereign and subjects measured each
other; and in that moment Odo drank his deepest draught of life. He was
not thinking now of the constitution or its opponents. His present
business was to get down the steps and into the carriage, returning to
the palace as openly as he had come. He was conscious of neither pity
nor hatred for the throng in his path. For the moment he regarded them
merely as a natural force, to be fought against like storm or flood. His
clearest sensation was one of relief at having at last some material
obstacle to spend his strength against, instead of the impalpable powers
which had so long beset him. He felt, too, a boyish satisfaction at his
own steadiness of pulse and eye, at the absence of that fatal inertia
which he had come to dread. So clear was his mental horizon that it
embraced not only the present crisis, but a dozen incidents leading up
to it. He remembered that Trescorre had urged him to take a larger
escort, and that he had refused on the ground that any military display
might imply a doubt of his people. He was glad now that he had done so.
He would have hated to slink to his carriage behind a barrier of drawn
swords. He wanted no help to see him through this business. The blood
sang in his veins at the thought of facing it alone.
The silence lasted but a moment; then an image of the Mountain Virgin
was suddenly thrust in air, and a voice cried out: "Down with our Lady's
enemies! We want no laws against the friars!"
A howl caught up the words and tossed them to and fro above the seething
heads. Images of the Virgin, religious banners, the blue-and-white of
the Madonna's colours, suddenly canopied the crowd.
"We want the Barnabites back!" sang out another voice.
"Down with the free-thinkers!" yelled a hundred angry throats.
A stone or two sped through the air and struck the sculptures of the
porch.
"Your Highness!" cried the equerry who stood nearest, and would have
snatched the Duke back within doors.
For all answer, Odo stepped clear of the porch and advanced to the edge
of the steps. As he did so, a shower of missiles hummed about him, and a
stone struck him on the lip. The blood rushed to his head, and he swayed
in the sudden grip of anger; but he mastered himself and raised his lace
handkerchief to the cut.
His gentlemen had drawn their swords; but he signed to them to sheathe
again. His first thought was that he must somehow make the people hear
him. He lifted his hand and advanced a step; but as he did so a shot
rang out, followed by a loud cry. The lieutenant of the light-horse,
infuriated by the insult to his master, had drawn the pistol from his
holster and fired blindly into the crowd. His bullet had found a mark,
and the throng hissed and seethed about the spot where a man had fallen.
At the same instant Odo was aware of a commotion in the group behind
him, and with a great plunge of the heart he saw Fulvia at his side. She
still wore the academic dress, and her black gown detached itself
sharply against the bright colours of the ducal uniforms.
Groans and hisses received her, but the mob hung back, as though her
look had checked them. Then a voice shrieked out: "Down with the
atheist! We want no foreign witches!" and another caught it up with the
yell: "She poisoned the weaver's boy! Her father was hanged for
murdering Christian children!"
The cry set the crowd in motion again, and it rolled toward the line of
mounted soldiers at the foot of the steps. The men had their hands on
their holsters; but the Duke's call rang out: "No firing!" and drawing
their blades, they sat motionless to receive the shock.
It came, dashed against them and dispersed them. Only a few yards lay
now between the people and their sovereign. But at that moment another
shot was fired. This time it came from the thick of the crowd. The
equerries' swords leapt forth again, and they closed around the Duke and
Fulvia.
"Save yourself, sir! Back into the building!" one of the gentlemen
shouted; but Odo had no eyes for what was coming. For as the shot was
heard he had seen a change in Fulvia. A moment they had stood together,
smiling, undaunted, hands locked and wedded eyes, then he felt her
dissolve against him and drop between his arms.
A cry had gone out that the Duke was wounded, and a leaden silence fell
on the crowd. In that silence Odo knelt, lifting Fulvia's head to his
breast. No wound showed through her black gown. She lay as though
smitten by some invisible hand. So deep was the hush that her least
whisper must have reached him; but though he bent close no whisper came.
The invisible hand had struck the very source of life; and to these two,
in their moment of final reunion, with so much unsaid between them that
now at last they longed to say, there was left only the dumb communion
of fast-clouding eyes...
A clatter of cavalry was heard down the streets that led to the square.
The equerry sent to warn Fulvia had escaped from the back of the
building and hastened to the barracks to summon a regiment. But the
soldiery were no longer needed. The blind fury of the mob had died of
its own excess. The rumour that the Duke was hurt brought a chill
reaction of dismay, and the rioters were already scattering when the
cavalry came in sight. Their approach turned the slow dispersal to a
stampede. A few arrests were made, the remaining groups were charged by
the soldiers, and presently the square lay bare as a storm-swept plain,
though the people still hung on its outskirts, ready to disband at the
first threat of the troops.
It was on this solitude that the Duke looked out as he regained a sense
of his surroundings. Fulvia had been carried into the audience-chamber
and laid on the dais, her head resting on the velvet cushions of the
ducal chair. She had died instantly, shot through the heart, and the
surgeons summoned in haste had soon ceased from their ineffectual
efforts. For a long time Odo knelt beside her, unconscious of all but
that one wild moment when life at its highest had been dashed into the
gulf of death. Thought had ceased, and neither rage nor grief moved as
yet across the chaos of his being. All his life was in his eyes, as they
drew up, drop by drop, the precious essence of her loveliness. For she
had grown, beneath the simplifying hand of death, strangely yet most
humanly beautiful. Life had fallen from her like the husk from the
flower, and she wore the face of her first hopes. The transition had
been too swift for any backward look, any anguished rending of the
fibres, and he felt himself, not detached by the stroke, but caught up
with her into some great calm within the heart of change.
He knew not how he found himself once more on the steps above the
square. Below him his state carriage stood in the same place, flanked by
the regiment of cavalry. Down the narrow streets he saw the brooding
cloud of people, and the sight roused his blood. They were his enemies
now--he felt the warm hate in his veins. They were his enemies, and he
would face them openly. No closed chariot guarded by troops--he would
not have so much as a pane of glass between himself and his subjects. He
descended the steps, bade the colonel of the regiment dismount, and
sprang into his saddle. Then, at the head of his soldiers, at a
foot-pace, he rode back through the packed streets to the palace.
In the palace, courtyard and vestibule were thronged with courtiers and
lacqueys. He walked through them with his head high, the cut on his lip
like the mark of a hot iron in the dead whiteness of his face. At the
head of the great staircase Maria Clementina waited. She sprang forward,
distraught and trembling, her face as blanched as his.
"You are safe--you are safe--you are not hurt--" she stammered, catching
at his hands.
A shudder seized him as he put her aside.
"Odo! Odo!" she cried passionately, and made as though to bar his way.
He gave her a blind look and passed on down the long gallery to his
closet.
Content of BOOK IV - THE REWARD: CHAPTER 10 [Edith Wharton's novel: The Valley Of Decision]
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