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The Valley Of Decision

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Valley Of Decision




"Cavaliere, a boat waits at the landing below the tanners' lane. The
shortest way to it is through the gardens and your excellency will find
the gate beyond the Chinese pavilion unlocked."

He had vanished before Odo could look round. The latter still wavered;
but as he did so he caught Trescorre's face through the crowd. The
minister's eye was fixed on him; and the discovery was enough to make
him plunge through the narrow wake left by Cantapresto's retreat.

Odo made his way unhindered to the ante-room, which was also thronged,
ecclesiastics, servants and even beggars from the courtyard jostling
each other in their struggle to see what was going forward. The
confusion favoured his escape, and a moment later he was hastening down
the tapestry gallery and through the vacant corridors of the palace. He
was familiar with half-a-dozen short-cuts across this network of
passages; but in his bewilderment he pressed on down the great stairs
and across the echoing guard-room that opened on the terrace. A drowsy
sentinel challenged him; and on Odo's explaining that he sought to
leave, and not to enter, the palace, replied that he had his Highness's
orders to let no one out that night. For a moment Odo was at a loss;
then he remembered his passport. It seemed to him an interminable time
before the sentinel had scrutinised it by the light of a guttering
candle, and to his surprise he found himself in a cold sweat of fear.
The rattle of the storm simulated footsteps at his heels and he felt the
blind rage of a man within shot of invisible foes.

The passport restored, he plunged out into the night. It was pitch-black
in the gardens and the rain drove down with the guttural rush of a
midsummer storm. So fierce was its fall that it seemed to suck up the
earth in its black eddies, and he felt himself swept along over a
heaving hissing surface, with wet boughs lashing out at him as he fled.
From one terrace to another he dropped to lower depths of buffeting
dripping darkness, till he found his hand on the gate-latch and swung to
the black lane below the wall. Thence on a run he wound to the tanners'
quarter by the river: a district commonly as foul-tongued as it was
ill-favoured, but tonight clean-purged of both evils by the vehement
sweep of the storm. Here he groped his way among slippery places and
past huddled out-buildings to the piles of the wharf. The rain was now
subdued to a noiseless vertical descent, through which he could hear the
tap of the river against the piles. Scarce knowing what he fled or
whither he was flying, he let himself down the steps and found the flat
of a boat's bottom underfoot. A boatman, distinguishable only as a black
bulk in the stern, steadied his descent with outstretched hand; then the
bow swung round, and after a labouring stroke or two they caught the
current and were swept down through the rushing darkness.



BOOK III. THE CHOICE.


The Vision touched him on the lips and said:
Hereafter thou shalt eat me in thy bread,
Drink me in all thy kisses, feel my hand
Steal 'twixt thy palm and Joy's, and see me stand
Watchful at every crossing of the ways,
The insatiate lover of thy nights and days.


3.1.

It was at Naples, some two years later, that the circumstances of his
flight were recalled to Odo Valsecca by the sound of a voice which at
once mysteriously connected itself with the incidents of that wild
night.

He was seated with a party of gentlemen in the saloon of Sir William
Hamilton's famous villa of Posilipo, where they were sipping the
ambassador's iced sherbet and examining certain engraved gems and
burial-urns recently taken from the excavations. The scene was such as
always appealed to Odo's fancy: the spacious room, luxuriously fitted
with carpets and curtains in the English style, and opening on a
prospect of classical beauty and antique renown; in his hands the rarest
specimens of that buried art which, like some belated golden harvest,
was now everywhere thrusting itself through the Neapolitan soil; and
about him men of taste and understanding, discussing the historic or
mythological meaning of the objects before them, and quoting Homer or
Horace in corroboration of their guesses.

Several visitors had joined the party since Odo's entrance; and it was
from a group of these later arrivals that the voice had reached him. He
looked round and saw a man of refined and scholarly appearance, dressed
en abbe, as was the general habit in Rome and Naples, and holding in one
hand the celebrated blue vase cut in cameo which Sir William had
recently purchased from the Barberini family.

"These reliefs," the stranger was saying, "whether cut in the substance
itself, or afterward affixed to the glass, certainly belong to the
Grecian period of cameo-work, and recall by the purity of their design
the finest carvings of Dioskorides." His beautifully-modulated Italian
was tinged by a slight foreign accent, which seemed to connect him still
more definitely with the episode his voice recalled. Odo turned to a
gentleman at his side and asked the speaker's name.

"That," was the reply, "is the abate de Crucis, a scholar and
cognoscente, as you perceive, and at present attached to the household
of the Papal Nuncio."

Instantly Odo beheld the tumultuous scene in the Duke's apartments, and
heard the indictment of Heiligenstern falling in tranquil accents from
the very lips which were now, in the same tone, discussing the date of a
Greek cameo vase. Even in that moment of disorder he had been struck by
the voice and aspect of the agent of the Holy Office, and by a singular
distinction that seemed to set the man himself above the coil of
passions in which his action was involved. To Odo's spontaneous yet
reflective temper there was something peculiarly impressive in the kind
of detachment which implies, not obtuseness or indifference, but a
higher sensitiveness disciplined by choice. Now he felt a renewed pang
of regret that such qualities should be found in the service of the
opposition; but the feeling was not incompatible with a wish to be more
nearly acquainted with their possessor.

The two years elapsing since Odo's departure from Pianura had widened if
they had not lifted his outlook. If he had lost something of his early
enthusiasm he had exchanged it for a larger experience of cities and
men, and for the self-command born of varied intercourse. He had reached
a point where he was able to survey his past dispassionately and to
disentangle the threads of the intrigue in which he had so nearly lost
his footing. The actual circumstances of his escape were still wrapped
in mystery: he could only conjecture that the Duchess, foreseeing the
course events would take, had planned with Cantapresto to save him in
spite of himself. His nocturnal flight down the river had carried him to
Ponte di Po, the point where the Piana flows into the Po, the latter
river forming for a few miles the southern frontier of the duchy. Here
his passport had taken him safely past the customs-officer, and
following the indications of the boatman, he had found, outside the
miserable village clustered about the customs, a travelling-chaise which
brought him before the next night-fall to Monte Alloro.

Of the real danger from which this timely retreat had removed him,
Gamba's subsequent letters had brought ample proof. It was indeed mainly
against himself that both parties, perhaps jointly, had directed their
attack; designing to take him in the toils ostensibly prepared for the
Illuminati. His evasion known, the Holy Office had contented itself with
imprisoning Heiligenstern in one of the Papal fortresses near the
Adriatic, while his mistress, though bred in the Greek confession, was
confined in a convent of the Sepolte Vive and his Oriental servant sent
to the Duke's galleys. As to those suspected of affiliations with the
forbidden sect, fines and penances were imposed on a few of the least
conspicuous, while the chief offenders, either from motives of policy or
thanks to their superior adroitness, were suffered to escape without a
reprimand. After this, Gamba's letters reported, the duchy had lapsed
into its former state of quiescence. Prince Ferrante had been seriously
ailing since the night of the electrical treatment, but the Pope having
sent his private physician to Pianura, the boy had rallied under the
latter's care. The Duke, as was natural, had suffered an acute relapse
of piety, spending his time in expiatory pilgrimages to the various
votive churches of the duchy, and declining to transact any public
business till he should have compiled with his own hand a calendar of
the lives of the saints, with the initial letters painted in miniature,
which he designed to present to his Holiness at Easter.

Meanwhile Odo, at Monte Alloro, found himself in surroundings so
different from those he had left that it seemed incredible they should
exist in the same world. The Duke of Monte Alloro was that rare survival
of a stronger age, a cynic. In a period of sentimental optimism, of
fervid enthusiasms and tearful philanthropy, he represented the
pleasure-loving prince of the Renaissance, crushing his people with
taxes but dazzling them with festivities; infuriating them by his
disregard of the public welfare, but fascinating them by his good looks,
his tolerance of old abuses, his ridicule of the monks, and by the
careless libertinage which had founded the fortunes of more than one
middle-class husband and father--for the Duke always paid well for what
he appropriated. He had grown old in his pleasant sins, and these, as
such raiment will, had grown old and dingy with him; but if no longer
splendid he was still splendour-loving, and drew to his court the most
brilliant adventurers of Italy. Spite of his preference for such
company, he had a nobler side, the ruins of a fine but uncultivated
intelligence, and a taste for all that was young, generous and high in
looks and courage. He was at once drawn to Odo, who instinctively
addressed himself to these qualities, and whose conversation and manners
threw into relief the vulgarity of the old Duke's cronies. The latter
was the shrewd enough to enjoy the contrast at the expense of his
sycophants' vanity; and the cavaliere Valsecca was for a while the
reigning favourite. It would have been hard to say whether his patron
was most tickled by his zeal for economic reforms, or by his faith in
the perfectibility of man. Both these articles of Odo's creed drew tears
of enjoyment from the old Duke's puffy eyes; and he was never tired of
declaring that only his hatred for his nephew of Pianura induced him to
accord his protection to so dangerous an enemy of society.

Odo at first fancied that it was in response to a mere whim of the
Duke's that he had been despatched to Monte Alloro; but he soon
perceived that the invitation had been inspired by Maria Clementina's
wish. Some three months after Odo's arrival, Cantapresto suddenly
appeared with a packet of letters from the Duchess. Among them her
Highness had included a few lines to Odo, whom she briefly adjured not
to return to Pianura, but to comply in all things with her uncle's
desires. Soon after this the old Duke sent for Odo, and asked him how
his present mode of life agreed with his tastes. Odo, who had learned
that frankness was the surest way to the Duke's favour, replied that,
while nothing could be more agreeable than the circumstances of his
sojourn at Monte Alloro, he must own to a wish to travel when the
occasion offered.

"Why, this is as I fancied," replied the Duke, who held in his hand an
open letter on which Odo recognised Maria Clementina's seal. "We have
always," he continued, "spoken plainly with each other, and I will not
conceal from you that it is for your best interests that you should
remain away from Pianura for the present. The Duke, as you doubtless
divine, is anxious for your return, and her Highness, for that very
reason, is urgent that you should prolong your absence. It is notorious
that the Duke soon wearies of those about him, and that your best chance
of regaining his favour is to keep out of his reach and let your enemies
hang themselves in the noose they have prepared for you. For my part, I
am always glad to do an ill-turn to that snivelling friar, my nephew,
and the more so when I can seriously oblige a friend; and, as you have
perhaps guessed, the Duke dares not ask for your return while I show a
fancy for your company. But this," added he with an ironical twinkle,
"is a tame place for a young man of your missionary temper, and I have a
mind to send you on a visit to that arch-tyrant Ferdinand of Naples, in
whose dominions a man may yet burn for heresy or be drawn and quartered
for poaching on a nobleman's preserves. I am advised that some rare
treasures have lately been taken from the excavations there and I should
be glad if you would oblige me by acquiring a few for my gallery. I will
give you letters to a cognoscente of my acquaintance, who will put his
experience at the disposal of your excellent taste, and the funds at
your service will, I hope, enable you to outbid the English brigands
who, as the Romans say, would carry off the Colosseum if it were
portable."

In all this Odo discerned Maria Clementina's hand, and an instinctive
resistance made him hang back upon his patron's proposal. But the only
alternative was to return to Pianura; and every letter from Gamba urged
on him (for the very reasons the Duke had given) the duty of keeping out
of reach as the surest means of saving himself and the cause to which he
was pledged. Nothing remained but a graceful acquiescence; and early the
next spring he started for Naples.

His first impulse had been to send Cantapresto back to the Duchess. He
knew that he owed his escape me grave difficulties to the soprano's
prompt action on the night of Heiligenstern's arrest; but he was equally
sure that such action might not always be as favourable to his plans. It
was plain that Cantapresto was paid to spy on him, and that whenever
Odo's intentions clashed with those of his would-be protectors the
soprano would side with the latter. But there was something in the air
of Monte Alloro which dispelled such considerations, or at least
weakened the impulse to act on them. Cantapresto as usual had attracted
notice at court. His glibness and versatility amused the Duke, and to
Odo he was as difficult to put off as a bad habit. He had become so
accomplished a servant that he seemed a sixth sense of his master's; and
when the latter prepared to start on his travels Cantapresto took his
usual seat in the chaise.

To a traveller of Odo's temper there could be few more agreeable
journeys than the one on which he was setting out, and the Duke being in
no haste to have his commission executed, his messenger had full leisure
to enjoy every stage of the way. He profited by this to visit several of
the small principalities north of the Apennines before turning toward
Genoa, whence he was to take ship for the South. When he left Monte
Alloro the land had worn the bleached face of February, and it was
amazing to his northern-bred eyes to find himself, on the sea-coast, in
the full exuberance of summer. Seated by this halcyon shore, Genoa, in
its carved and frescoed splendour, just then celebrating with the
customary gorgeous ritual the accession of a new Doge, seemed to Odo
like the richly-inlaid frame of some Renaissance "triumph." But the
splendid houses with their marble peristyles, and the painted villas in
their orange-groves along the shore, housed a dull and narrow-minded
society, content to amass wealth and play biribi under the eyes of their
ancestral Vandykes, without any concern as to the questions agitating
the world. A kind of fat commercial dulness, a lack of that personal
distinction which justifies magnificence, seemed to Odo the prevailing
note of the place; nor was he sorry when his packet set sail for Naples.

Here indeed he found all the vivacity that Genoa lacked. Few cities
could at first acquaintance be more engaging to the stranger. Dull and
brown as it appeared after the rich tints of Genoa, yet so gloriously
did sea and land embrace it, so lavishly the sun gild and the moon
silver it, that it seemed steeped in the surrounding hues of nature. And
what a nature to eyes subdued to the sober tints of the north! Its
spectacular quality--that studied sequence of effects ranging from the
translucent outline of Capri and the fantastically blue mountains of the
coast, to Vesuvius lifting its torch above the plain--this prodigal
response to fancy's claims suggested the boundless invention of some
great scenic artist, some Olympian Veronese with sea and sky for a
palette. And then the city itself, huddled between bay and mountains,
and seething and bubbling like a Titan's cauldron! Here was life at its
source, not checked, directed, utilised, but gushing forth
uncontrollably through every fissure of the brown walls and reeking
streets--love and hatred, mirth and folly, impudence and greed, going
naked and unashamed as the lazzaroni on the quays. The variegated
surface of it all was fascinating to Odo. It set free his powers of
purely physical enjoyment, keeping all deeper sensations in abeyance.
These, however, presently found satisfaction in that other hidden beauty
of which city and plain were but the sumptuous drapery. It is hardly too
much to say that to the trained eyes of the day the visible Naples
hardly existed, so absorbed were they in the perusal of her buried past.
The fever of excavation was on every one. No social or political problem
could find a hearing while the subject of the last coin or bas-relief
from Pompeii or Herculanaeum remained undecided. Odo, at first an amused
spectator, gradually found himself engrossed in the fierce quarrels
raging over the date of an intaglio or the myth represented on an
amphora. The intrinsic beauty of the objects, and the light they shed on
one of the most brilliant phases of human history, were in fact
sufficient to justify the prevailing ardour; and the reconstructive
habit he had acquired from Crescenti lent a living interest to the
driest discussion between rival collectors.

Gradually other influences reasserted themselves. At the house of Sir
William Hamilton, then the centre of the most polished society in
Naples, he met not only artists and archeologists, but men of letters
and of affairs. Among these, he was peculiarly drawn to the two
distinguished economists, the abate Galiani and the cavaliere
Filangieri, in whose company he enjoyed for the first time sound
learning unhampered by pedantry. The lively Galiani proved that social
tastes and a broad wit are not incompatible with more serious interests;
and Filangieri threw the charm of a graceful personality over any topic
he discussed. In the latter, indeed, courtly, young and romantic, a
thinker whose intellectual acuteness was steeped in moral emotion, Odo
beheld the type of the new chivalry, an ideal leader of the campaign
against social injustice. Filangieri represented the extremest optimism
of the day. His sense of existing abuses was only equalled by his faith
in their speedy amendment. Love was to cure all evils: the love of man
for man, the effusive all-embracing sympathy of the school of the
Vicaire Savoyard, was to purge the emotions by tenderness and pity. In
Gamba, the victim of the conditions he denounced, the sense of present
hardship prevailed over the faith in future improvement; while
Filangieri's social superiority mitigated his view of the evils and
magnified the efficacy of the proposed remedies. Odo's days passed
agreeably in such intercourse, or in the excitement of excursions to the
ruined cities; and as the court and the higher society of Naples offered
little to engage him, he gradually restricted himself to the small
circle of chosen spirits gathered at the villa Hamilton. To these he
fancied the abate de Crucis might prove an interesting addition; and the
desire to learn something of this problematic person induced him to quit
the villa at the moment when the abate took leave.

They found themselves together on the threshold; and Odo, recalling to
the other the circumstances of their first meeting, proposed that they
should dismiss their carriages and regain the city on foot. De Crucis
readily consented; and they were soon descending the hill of Posilipo.
Here and there a turn in the road brought them to an open space whence
they commanded the bay from Procida to Sorrento, with Capri afloat in
liquid gold and the long blue shadow of Vesuvius stretching like a
menace toward the city. The spectacle was one of which Odo never
wearied; but today it barely diverted him from the charms of his
companion's talk. The abate de Crucis had that quality of repressed
enthusiasm, of an intellectual sensibility tempered by self-possession,
which exercises the strongest attraction over a mind not yet master of
itself. Though all he said had a personal note he seemed to withhold
himself even in the moment of greatest expansion: like some prince who
should enrich his favourites from the public treasury but keep his
private fortune unimpaired. In the course of their conversation Odo
learned that though of Austrian birth his companion was of mingled
English and Florentine parentage: a fact perhaps explaining the mixture
of urbanity and reserve that lent such charm to his manner. He told Odo
that his connection with the Holy Office had been only temporary, and
that, having contracted a severe cold the previous winter in Germany, he
had accepted a secretaryship in the service of the Papal Nuncio in order
to enjoy the benefits of a mild climate. "By profession," he added, "I
am a pedagogue, and shall soon travel to Rome, where I have been called
by Prince Bracciano to act as governor to his son; and meanwhile I am
taking advantage of my residence here to indulge my taste for
antiquarian studies."

He went on to praise the company they had just left, declaring that he
knew no better way for a young man to form his mind than by frequenting
the society of men of conflicting views and equal capacity. "Nothing,"
said he, "is more injurious to the growth of character than to be
secluded from argument and opposition; as nothing is healthier than to
be obliged to find good reasons for one's beliefs on pain of
surrendering them."

"But," said Odo, struck with this declaration, "to a man of your cloth
there is one belief which never surrenders to reason."

The other smiled. "True," he agreed; "but I often marvel to see how
little our opponents know of that belief. The wisest of them seem in the
case of those children at our country fairs who gape at the incredible
things depicted on the curtains of the booths, without asking themselves
whether the reality matches its presentment. The weakness of human
nature has compelled us to paint the outer curtain of the sanctuary in
gaudy colours, and the malicious fancy of our enemies has given a
monstrous outline to these pictures; but what are such vanities to one
who has passed beyond, and beheld the beauty of the King's daughter, all
glorious within?"

As though unwilling to linger on such grave topics, he turned the talk
to the scene at their feet, questioning Odo as to the impression Naples
had made on him. He listened courteously to the young man's comments on
the wretched state of the peasantry, the extravagances of the court and
nobility and the judicial corruption which made the lower classes submit
to any injustice rather than seek redress through the courts. De Crucis
agreed with him in the main, admitting that the monopoly of corn, the
maintenance of feudal rights and the King's indifference to the graver
duties of his rank placed the kingdom of Naples far below such states as
Tuscany or Venetia; "though," he added, "I think our economists, in
praising one state at the expense of another, too often overlook those
differences of character and climate that must ever make it impossible
to govern different races in the same manner. Our peasants have a blunt
saying: Cut off the dog's tail and he is still a dog; and so I suspect
the most enlightened rule would hardly bring this prompt and choleric
people, living on a volcanic soil amid a teeming vegetation, into any
resemblance with the clear-headed Tuscan or the gentle and dignified
Roman."

As he spoke they emerged upon the Chiaia, where at that hour the quality
took the air in their carriages, while the lower classes thronged the
footway. A more vivacious scene no city of Europe could present. The
gilt coaches drawn by six or eight of the lively Neapolitan horses,
decked with plumes and artificial flowers and preceded by running
footmen who beat the foot-passengers aside with long staves; the
richly-dressed ladies seated in this never-ending file of carriages,
bejewelled like miraculous images and languidly bowing to their friends;
the throngs of citizens and their wives in holiday dress; the sellers of
sherbet, ices and pastry bearing their trays and barrels through the
crowd with strange cries and the jingling of bells; the friars of every
order in their various habits, the street-musicians, the half-naked
lazzaroni, cripples and beggars, who fringed the throng like the line of
scum edging a fair lake;--this medley of sound and colour, which in fact
resembled some sudden growth of the fiery soil, was an expressive
comment on the abate's words.

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