William Shakespeare - "A Midsumer Night's Dream"

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The Valley Of Decision

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Valley Of Decision




"There, go with him; he won't eat you," said Vanna, giving him a push as
she hurried away; and Odo, trembling a little, laid his hand in the
boy's. "Where do you come from?" he faltered, looking up into his
companion's face.

The boy laughed and the blood rose to his high cheekbones. "I?--From the
Innocenti, if your Excellency knows where that is," said he.

Odo's face lit up. "Of course I do," he cried, reassured. "I know a girl
who comes from there--the Momola at Pontesordo."

"Ah, indeed?" said the boy with a queer look. "Well, she's my sister,
then. Give her my compliments when you see her, cavaliere. Oh, we're a
large family, we are!"

Odo's perplexity was returning. "Are you really Momola's brother?" he
asked.

"Eh, in a way--we're children of the same house."

"But you live in the palace, don't you?" Odo persisted, his curiosity
surmounting his fear. "Are you a servant of my mother's?"

"I'm the servant of your illustrious mother's servants; the abatino of
the waiting-women. I write their love-letters, do you see, cavaliere, I
carry their rubbish to the pawnbroker's when their sweethearts have bled
them of their savings; I clean the birdcages and feed the monkeys, and
do the steward's accounts when he's drunk, and sleep on a bench in the
portico and steal my food from the pantry...and my father very likely
goes in velvet and carries a sword at his side."

The boy's voice had grown shrill, and his eyes blazed like an owl's in
the dark. Odo would have given the world to be back in his corner, but
he was ashamed to betray his lack of heart; and to give himself courage
he asked haughtily: "And what is your name, boy?"

The hunchback gave him a gleaming look. "Call me Brutus," he cried, "for
Brutus killed a tyrant." He gave Odo's hand a pull. "Come along," said
he, "and I'll show you his statue in the garden--Brutus's statue in a
prince's garden, mind you!" And as the little boy trotted at his side
down the long corridors he kept repeating under his breath in a kind of
angry sing-song, "For Brutus killed a tyrant."

The sense of strangeness inspired by his odd companion soon gave way in
Odo's mind to emotions of delight and wonder. He was, even at that age,
unusually sensitive to external impressions, and when the hunchback,
after descending many stairs and winding through endless back-passages,
at length led him out on a terrace above the gardens, the beauty of the
sight swelled his little heart to bursting.

A Duke of Pianura had, some hundred years earlier, caused a great wing
to be added to his palace by the eminent architect Carlo Borromini, and
this accomplished designer had at the same time replanted and enlarged
the ducal gardens. To Odo, who had never seen plantations more artful
than the vineyards and mulberry orchards about Pontesordo, these
perspectives of clipped beech and yew, these knots of box filled in with
multi-coloured sand, appeared, with the fountains, colonnades and
trellised arbours surmounted by globes of glass, to represent the very
pattern and Paradise of gardens. It seemed indeed too beautiful to be
real, and he trembled, as he sometimes did at the music of the Easter
mass, when the hunchback, laughing at his amazement, led him down the
terrace steps.

It was Odo's lot in after years to walk the alleys of many a splendid
garden, and to pace, often wearily enough, the paths along which he was
now led; but never after did he renew the first enchanted impression of
mystery and brightness that remained with him as the most vivid emotion
of his childhood.

Though it was February the season was so soft that the orange and lemon
trees had been put out in their earthen vases before the lemon-house,
and the beds in the parterres were full of violets, daffodils and
auriculas; but the scent of the orange-blossoms and the bright colours
of the flowers moved Odo less than the noble ordonnance of the pleached
alleys, each terminated by a statue or a marble seat; and when he came
to the grotto where, amid rearing sea-horses and Tritons, a cascade
poured from the grove above, his wonder passed into such delicious awe
as hung him speechless on the hunchback's hand.

"Eh," said the latter with a sneer, "it's a finer garden than we have at
our family palace. Do you know what's planted there?" he asked, turning
suddenly on the little boy. "Dead bodies, cavaliere! Rows and rows of
them; the bodies of my brothers and sisters, the Innocents who die like
flies every year of the cholera and the measles and the putrid fever."
He saw the terror in Odo's face and added in a gentler tone: "Eh, don't
cry, cavaliere; they sleep better in those beds than in any others
they're like to lie on. Come, come, and I'll show your excellency the
aviaries."

From the aviaries they passed to the Chinese pavilion, where the Duke
supped on summer evenings, and thence to the bowling-alley, the
fish-stew and the fruit-garden. At every step some fresh surprise
arrested Odo; but the terrible vision of that other garden planted with
the dead bodies of the Innocents robbed the spectacle of its brightness,
dulled the plumage of the birds behind their gilt wires and cast a
deeper shade over the beech-grove, where figures of goat-faced men
lurked balefully in the twilight. Odo was glad when they left the
blackness of this grove for the open walks, where gardeners were working
and he had the reassurance of the sky. The hunchback, who seemed sorry
that he had frightened him, told him many curious stories about the
marble images that adorned the walks; and pausing suddenly before one of
a naked man with a knife in his hand, cried out in a frenzy: "This is my
namesake, Brutus!" But when Odo would have asked if the naked man was a
kinsman, the boy hurried him on, saying only: "You'll read of him some
day in Plutarch."


1.3.

Odo, next morning, under the hunchback's guidance, continued his
exploration of the palace. His mother seemed glad to be rid of him, and
Vanna packing him off early, with the warning that he was not to fall
into the fishponds or get himself trampled by the horses, he guessed,
with a thrill, that he had leave to visit the stables. Here in fact the
two boys were soon making their way among the crowd of grooms and
strappers in the yard, seeing the Duke's carriage-horses groomed, and
the Duchess's cream-coloured hackney saddled for her ride in the chase;
and at length, after much lingering and gazing, going on to the
harness-rooms and coach-house. The state-carriages, with their carved
and gilt wheels, their panels gay with flushed divinities and their
stupendous velvet hammer-cloths edged with bullion, held Odo spellbound.
He had a born taste for splendour, and the thought that he might one day
sit in one of these glittering vehicles puffed his breast with pride and
made him address the hunchback with sudden condescension. "When I'm a
man I shall ride in these carriages," he said; whereat the other laughed
and returned good-humouredly: "Eh, that's not so much to boast of,
cavaliere; I shall ride in a carriage one of these days myself." Odo
stared, not over-pleased, and the boy added: "When I'm carried to the
churchyard, I mean," with a chuckle of relish at the joke.

From the stables they passed to the riding-school, with its open
galleries supported on twisted columns, where the duke's gentlemen
managed their horses and took their exercise in bad weather. Several
rode there that morning; and among them, on a fine Arab, Odo recognised
the young man in black velvet who was so often in Donna Laura's
apartments.

"Who's that?" he whispered, pulling the hunchback's sleeve, as the
gentleman, just below them, made his horse execute a brilliant balotade.

"That? Bless the innocent! Why, the Count Lelio Trescorre, your
illustrious mother's cavaliere servente."

Odo was puzzled, but some instinct of reserve withheld him from further
questions. The hunchback, however, had no such scruples. "They do say,
though," he went on, "that her Highness has her eye on him, and in that
case I'll wager your illustrious mamma has no more chance than a sparrow
against a hawk."

The boy's words were incomprehensible, but the vague sense that some
danger might be threatening his mother's friend made Odo whisper: "What
would her Highness do to him?"

"Make him a prime-minister, cavaliere," the hunchback laughed.

Odo's guide, it appeared, was not privileged to conduct him through the
state apartments of the palace, and the little boy had now been four
days under the ducal roof without catching so much as a glimpse of his
sovereign and cousin. The very next morning, however, Vanna swept him
from his trundle-bed with the announcement that he was to be received by
the Duke that day, and that the tailor was now waiting to try on his
court dress. He found his mother propped against her pillows, drinking
chocolate, feeding her pet monkey and giving agitated directions to the
maidservants on their knees before the open carriage-trunks. Her
excellency informed Odo that she had that moment received an express
from his grandfather, the old Marquess di Donnaz; that they were to
start next morning for the castle of Donnaz, and that he was to be
presented to the Duke as soon as his Highness had risen from dinner. A
plump purse lay on the coverlet, and her countenance wore an air of
kindness and animation which, together with the prospect of wearing a
court dress and travelling to his grandfather's castle in the mountains,
so worked on Odo's spirits that, forgetting the abate's instructions, he
sprang to her with an eager caress.

"Child, child," was her only rebuke; and she added, with a tap on his
cheek: "It is lucky I shall have a sword to protect me."

Long before the hour Odo was buttoned into his embroidered coat and
waistcoat. He would have on the sword at once, and when they sat down to
dinner, though his mother pressed him to eat with more concern than she
had before shown, it went hard with him to put his weapon aside, and he
cast longing eyes at the corner where it lay. At length a chamberlain
summoned them and they set out down the corridors, attended by two
servants. Odo held his head high, with one hand leading Donna Laura (for
he would not appear to be led by her) while the other fingered his
sword. The deformed beggars who always lurked about the great staircase
fawned on them as they passed, and on a landing they crossed the
humpbacked boy, who grinned mockingly at Odo; but the latter, with his
chin up, would not so much as glance at him.

A master of ceremonies in short black cloak and gold chain received them
in the antechamber of the Duchess's apartments, where the court played
lansquenet after dinner; the doors of her Highness's closet were thrown
open, and Odo, now glad enough to cling to his mother's hand, found
himself in a tall room, with gods and goddesses in the clouds overhead
and personages as supra-terrestrial seated in gilt armchairs about a
smoking brazier. Before one of these, to whom Donna Laura swept
successive curtsies in advancing, the frightened cavaliere found himself
dragged with his sword between his legs. He ducked his head like the old
drake diving for worms in the puddle at the farm, and when at last he
dared look up, it was to see an odd sallow face, half-smothered in an
immense wig, bowing back at him with infinite ceremony--and Odo's heart
sank to think that this was his sovereign.

The Duke was in fact a sickly narrow-faced young man with thick
obstinate lips and a slight lameness that made his walk ungainly; but
though no way resembling the ermine-cloaked king of the chapel at
Pontesordo, he yet knew how to put on a certain majesty with his state
wig and his orders. As for the newly married Duchess, who sat at the
other end of the cabinet caressing a toy spaniel, she was scant fourteen
and looked a mere child in her great hoop and jewelled stomacher. Her
wonderful fair hair, drawn over a cushion and lightly powdered, was
twisted with pearls and roses, and her cheeks excessively rouged, in the
French fashion; so that as she arose on the approach of the visitors she
looked to Odo for all the world like the wooden Virgin hung with votive
offerings in the parish church at Pontesordo. Though they were but three
months married the Duke, it was rumoured, was never with her, preferring
the company of the young Marquess of Cerveno, his cousin and
heir-presumptive, a pale boy scented with musk and painted like a
comedian, whom his Highness would never suffer away from him and who now
leaned with an impertinent air against the back of the ducal armchair.

On the other side of the brazier sat the dowager Duchess, the Duke's
grandmother, an old lady so high and forbidding of aspect that Odo cast
but one look at her face, which was yellow and wrinkled as a medlar, and
surmounted, in the Spanish style, with black veils and a high coif. What
these alarming personages said and did, the child could never recall;
nor were his own actions clear to him, except for a furtive caress that
he remembered giving the spaniel as he kissed the Duchess's hand;
whereupon her Highness snatched up the pampered animal and walked away
with a pout of anger. Odo noticed that her angry look followed him as he
and Donna Laura withdrew; but the next moment he heard the Duke's voice
and saw his Highness limping after them.

"You must have a furred cloak for your journey, cousin," said he
awkwardly, pressing something in the hand of Odo's mother, who broke
into fresh compliments and curtsies, while the Duke, with a finger on
his thick lip, withdrew hastily into the closet.

The next morning early they set out on their journey. There had been
frost in the night and a cold sun sparkled on the palace windows and on
the marble church-fronts as their carriage lumbered through the streets,
now full of noise and animation. It was Odo's first glimpse of the town
by daylight, and he clapped his hands with delight at sight of the
people picking their way across the reeking gutters, the asses laden
with milk and vegetables, the servant-girls bargaining at the
provision-stalls, the shop-keepers' wives going to mass in pattens and
hoods, with scaldini in their muffs, the dark recessed openings in the
palace basements, where fruit sellers, wine-merchants and coppersmiths
displayed their wares, the pedlars hawking books and toys, and here and
there a gentleman in a sedan chair returning flushed and disordered from
a night at bassett or faro. The travelling-carriage was escorted by
half-a-dozen of the Duke's troopers and Don Lelio rode at the door
followed by two grooms. He wore a furred coat and boots, and never, to
Odo, had he appeared more proud and splendid; but Donna Laura had hardly
a word for him, and he rode with the set air of a man who acquits
himself of a troublesome duty.

Outside the gates the spectacle seemed tame in comparison; for the road
bent toward Pontesordo, and Odo was familiar enough with the look of the
bare fields, set here and there with oak-copses to which the leaves
still clung. As the carriage skirted the marsh his mother raised the
windows, exclaiming that they must not expose themselves to the
pestilent air; and though Odo was not yet addicted to general
reflections, he could not but wonder that she should display such dread
of an atmosphere she had let him breathe since his birth. He knew of
course that the sunset vapours on the marsh were unhealthy: everybody on
the farm had a touch of the ague, and it was a saying in the village
that no one lived at Pontesordo who could buy an ass to carry him away;
but that Donna Laura, in skirting the place on a clear morning of frost,
should show such fear of infection, gave a sinister emphasis to the
ill-repute of the region.

The thought, he knew not why, turned his mind to Momola, who often on
damp evenings sat shaking and burning in the kitchen corner. He
reflected with a pang that he might never see her again, and leaning
forward he strained his eyes for a glimpse of Pontesordo. They were
passing through a patch of oaks; but where these ended the country
opened, and beyond a belt of osiers and the mottled faded stretches of
the marsh the keep stood up like a beckoning finger. Odo cried out as
though in answer to its call; but that moment the road turned a knoll
and bent across rising ground toward an unfamiliar region.

"Thank God!" cried his mother, lowering the window, "we're rid of that
poison and can breath the air."

As the keep vanished Odo reproached himself for not having begged a pair
of shoes for Momola. He had felt very sorry for her since the hunchback
had spoken so strangely of life at the foundling hospital; and he had a
sudden vision of her bare feet, pinched with cold and cut with the
pebbles of the yard, perpetually running across the damp stone floors,
with Filomena crying after her : "Hasten then, child of iniquity! You
are slower than a day without bread!" He had almost resolved to speak of
the foundling to his mother, who still seemed in a condescending humour;
but his attention was unexpectedly distracted by a troop of Egyptians,
who came along the road leading a dancing bear; and hardly had these
passed when the chariot of an itinerant dentist engaged him. The whole
way, indeed, was alive with such surprises; and at Valsecca, where they
dined, they found the yard of the inn crowded with the sumpter-mules and
servants of a cardinal travelling to Rome, who was to lie there that
night and whose bedstead and saucepans had preceded him.

Here, after dinner, Don Lelio took leave of Odo's mother, with small
show of regret on either side; the lady high and sarcastic, the
gentleman sullen and polite; and both, as it seemed, easier when the
business was despatched and the Count's foot in the stirrup. He had so
far taken little notice of Odo, but he now bent from the saddle and
tapped the boy's cheek, saying in his cold way: "In a few years I shall
see you at court;" and with that rode away toward Pianura.


1.4.

Lying that night at Pavia, the travellers set forward next morning for
the city of Vercelli. The road, though it ran for the most part through
flat mulberry orchards and rice-fields reflecting the pale blue sky in
their sodden channels, would yet have appeared diverting enough to Odo,
had his mother been in the mood to reply to his questions; for whether
their carriage overtook a party of strolling jugglers, travelling in a
roofed-in waggon, with the younger children of the company running
alongside in threadbare tights and trunkhose decked with tinsel; or
whether they drove through a village market-place, where yellow earthen
crocks and gaudy Indian cottons, brass pails and braziers and platters
of bluish pewter, filled the stalls with a medley of colour--at every
turn was something that excited the boy's wonder; but Donna Laura, who
had fallen into a depression of spirits, lamenting the cold, her
misfortunes and the discomfort of the journey, was at no more pains than
the abate to satisfy the promptings of his curiosity.

Odo had indeed met but one person who cared to listen to him, and that
was the strange hunchback who had called himself Brutus. Remembering how
entertainingly this odd guide had explained all the wonders of the ducal
grounds, Odo began to regret that he had not asked his mother to let him
have Brutus for a body-servant. Meanwhile no one attended to his
questions and the hours were beginning to seem long when, on the third
day, they set out from Vercelli toward the hills. The cold increased as
they rose; and Odo, though he had often wished to see the mountains, was
yet dismayed at the gloomy and menacing aspect of the region on which
they were entering. Leafless woods, prodigious boulders and white
torrents foaming and roaring seemed a poor exchange for the
pleasantly-ordered gardens of Pianura. Here were no violets and cowslips
in bloom; hardly a green blade pierced the sodden roadside, and
snowdrifts lingered in the shaded hollows.

Donna Laura's loudly expressed fear of robbers seemed to increase the
loneliness of the way, which now traversed tracts of naked moorland, now
plunged again into forest, with no sign of habitation but here and there
a cowherd's hut under the trees or a chapel standing apart on some
grassy eminence. When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind
swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed
every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and cold
at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted
from his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorway
set in battlemented walls. He was carried into a hall lit with smoky
oil-lamps and hung with armour and torn banners.

Here, among a group of rough-looking servants, a tall old man in a
nightcap and furred gown was giving orders in a loud passionate voice.
This personage, who was of a choleric complexion, with a face like
mottled red marble, seized Odo by the wrist and led him up a flight of
stairs so worn and slippery that he tripped at every step; thence down a
corridor and into a gloomy apartment where three ladies shivered about a
table set with candles. Bidden by the old gentleman to salute his
grandmother and great-aunts, Odo bowed over three wrinkled hands, one
fat and soft as a toad's stomach, the others yellow and dry as
lemon-skins. His mother embraced the ladies in the same humble manner,
and the Marquess, first furiously calling for supper, thrust Odo down on
a stool in the ingle.

From this point of observation the child, now vividly awake, noted the
hangings of faded tapestry that heaved in the draught, the ceiling of
beams and the stone floor strewn with rushes. The candle-light
flickering on the faces of his aged relatives showed his grandmother to
be a pale heavy-cheeked person with little watchful black eyes which she
dropped at her husband's approach; while the two great-aunts, seated
side by side in high-backed chairs with their feet on braziers, reminded
Odo of the narrow elongated saints squeezed into the niches of a
church-door. The old Marchioness wore the high coif and veil of the
previous century; the aunts, who, as Odo afterwards learned, were
canonesses of a noble order, were habited in a semi-conventual dress,
with crosses hanging on their bosoms; and none spoke but when the
Marquess addressed them.

Their timidity appeared to infect Odo's mother, who, from her habitual
volubility of temper, sank to a mood of like submissiveness. A supper of
venison and goat's cheese was not designed to restore her spirits, and
when at length she and Odo had withdrawn to their cavernous bedchamber,
she flung herself weeping on the bed and declared she must die if she
remained long in this prison.

Falling asleep under such influences, it was the more wonderful to Odo
to wake with the sun on his counterpane, a sweet noise of streams
through the casement and the joyous barking of hounds in the castle
court. From the window-seat he looked out on a scene extraordinarily
novel to his lowland eyes. The chamber commanded the wooded steep below
the castle, with a stream looping its base; beyond, the pastures sloped
pleasantly under walnut trees, with here and there a clearing ploughed
for the spring crops and a sunny ledge or two planted with vines. Above
this pastoral landscape, bare crags upheld a snowpeak; and, as if to
lend a human interest to the scene, the old Marquess, his flintlock on
his shoulder, his dogs and beaters at his heels, now rode across the
valley.

Wonder succeeded to wonder that first morning; for there was the castle
to be seen, with the kennels and stables roughly kept, but full of dogs
and horses; and Odo, in the Marquess's absence, was left free to visit
every nook of his new home. Pontesordo, though perhaps as ancient as
Donnaz, was but a fortified manor in the plain; but here was the
turreted border castle, bristling at the head of the gorge like the
fangs in a boar's throat: its walls overhung by machicolations, its
portcullis still dropped at nightfall, and the loud stream forming a
natural moat at its base. Through the desert spaces of this great
structure Odo wandered at will, losing himself in its network of bare
chambers, some now put to domestic uses, with smoked meats hanging from
the rafters, cheeses ranged on shelves and farmer's implements stacked
on the floor; others abandoned to bats and spiders, with slit-like
openings choked by a growth of wild cherries, and little animals
scurrying into their holes as Odo opened the unused doors. At the next
turn he mounted by a winding stair to the platform behind the
battlements, whence he could look down on the inner court, where horses
were being groomed, dogs fed, harnesses mended, and platters of smoking
food carried from the kitchen to the pantry; or, leaning another way,
discovered, between the cliff and the rampart a tiny walled garden with
fruit-trees and a sundial.

The ladies kept to themselves in a corner of the castle, where the rooms
were hung with tapestry and a few straight-backed chairs stood about the
hearth; but even here no fires were suffered till nightfall, nor was
there so much as a carpet in the castle. Odo's grandmother, the old
Marchioness, a heavy woman who would doubtless have enjoyed her ease in
a cushioned seat, was afoot all day attending to her household; for
besides the dairy and the bakehouse and the stillroom where fruits were
stewed and pastes prepared, there was the great spinning-room full of
distaffs and looms, where the women spun and wove all the linen used in
the castle and the coarse stuffs worn by its inmates; with workshops for
the cobbler and tailor who clothed and shod the Marquess and his
household. All these the Marchioness must visit, and attend to her
devotions between; the ladies being governed by a dark-faced priest,
their chaplain and director, who kept them perpetually running along the
cold stone corridors to the chapel in a distant wing, where they knelt
without so much as a brazier to warm them or a cushion to their knees.
As to the chapel, though larger and loftier than that of Pontesordo,
with a fine carved and painted tabernacle and many silver candlesticks,
it seemed to Odo, by reason of its bare walls, much less beautiful than
that deserted oratory; nor did he, amid all the novelty of his
surroundings, cease to regret the companionship of his familiar images.

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