J. S. Fletcher - "The Paradise Mystery"

Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett] - "Time and the Gods"

Charles Kingsley - "The Water Babies"

Charlotte Yonge - "The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations"

The Valley Of Decision

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Valley Of Decision




His delight was the greater, therefore, when, exploring a part of the
castle now quite abandoned, he came one day on a vaulted chamber used as
a kind of granary, where, under layers of dirt and cobwebs, lovely
countenances flowered from the walls. The scenes depicted differed
indeed from those of Pontesordo, being less animated and homely and more
difficult for a child to interpret; for here were naked laurel-crowned
knights on prancing horses, nimble goat-faced creatures grouped in
adoration round a smoking altar and youths piping to saffron-haired
damsels on grass-banks set with poplars. The very strangeness of the
fable set forth perhaps engaged the child's fancy; or the benignant
mildness of the countenances, so unlike the eager individual faces of
the earlier artist; for he returned again and again to gaze unweariedly
on the inhabitants of that tranquil grassy world, studying every inch of
the walls and with much awe and fruitless speculation deciphering on the
hem of a floating drapery the inscription: Bernardinus Lovinus pinxit.

His impatience to know more of the history of these paintings led him to
question an old man, half house-servant, half huntsman, now too infirm
for service and often to be found sunning himself in the court with an
old hound's chin on his knee. The old man, whose name was Bruno, told
him the room in question had been painted for the Marquess Gualberto di
Donnaz, who had fought under the Duke of Milan hundreds of years before:
a splendid and hospitable noble, patron of learning and the arts, who
had brought the great Milanese painter to Donnaz and kept him there a
whole summer adorning the banqueting-room. "But I advise you, little
master," Bruno added, "not to talk too loudly of your discovery; for we
live in changed days, do you see, and it seems those are pagan sorcerers
and witches painted on the wall, and because of that, and their
nakedness, the chaplain has forbidden all the young boys and wenches
about the place to set foot there; and the Marchioness herself, I'm
told, doesn't enter without leave."

This was the more puzzling to Odo that he had seen so many naked pagans,
in colours and marble, at his cousin's palace of Pianura, where they
were praised as the chief ornament of that sumptuous fabric; but he kept
Bruno's warning in mind and so timed his visits that they escaped the
chaplain's observation. Whether this touch of mystery added charm to the
paintings; or whether there was already forming in him what afterward
became an instinctive resistance to many of the dictates of his age;
certain it is that, even after he had been privileged to admire the
stupendous works of the Caracci at Parma and of the immortal Giulio
Romano at Mantua, Odo's fancy always turned with peculiar fondness to
the clear-limbed youths moving in that world of untroubled beauty.

Odo, the day after his arrival at Donnaz, learned that the chaplain was
to be his governor; and he was not long in discovering that the system
of that ecclesiastic bore no resemblance to the desultory methods of his
former pedagogue. It was not that Don Gervaso was a man of superior
acquirements: in writing, ciphering and the rudiments of Latin he seemed
little likely to carry Odo farther than the other; but in religious
instruction he suffered no negligence or inattention. His piety was of a
stamp so different from the abate's that it vivified the theological
abstractions over which Odo had formerly languished, infusing a
passionate meaning into the formulas of the textbooks. His discourse
breathed the same spirit, and had his religion been warmed by
imagination or tempered by charity the child had been a ductile
substance in his hands; but the shadow of the Council of Trent still
hung over the Church in Savoy, making its approach almost as sombre and
forbidding as that of the Calvinist heresy. As it was, the fascination
that drew Odo to the divine teachings was counteracted by a depressing
awe: he trembled in God's presence almost as much as in his
grandfather's, and with the same despair of discovering what course of
action was most likely to call down the impending wrath. The beauty of
the Church's offices, now for the first time revealed to him in the
well-ordered services of the chapel, was doubly moving in contrast with
the rude life at Donnaz; but his confessions tortured him and the
penances which the chaplain inflicted abased without reforming his
spirit.

Next to the mass, the books Don Gervaso lent him were his chief
pleasure: the Lives of the Saints, Cardinal Bellarmine's Fables and The
Mirror of true Penitence. The Lives of the Saints fed at once his
imagination and his heart, and over the story of Saint Francis, now
first made known to him, he trembled with delicious sympathy. The
longing to found a hermitage like the Portiuncula among the savage rocks
of Donnaz, and live there in gentle communion with plants and animals,
alternated in him with the martial ambition to ride forth against the
Church's enemies, as his ancestors had ridden against the bloody and
pestilent Waldenses; but whether his piety took the passive or the
aggressive form, it always shrank from the subtleties of doctrine. To
live like the saints, rather than to reason like the fathers, was his
ideal of Christian conduct; if indeed a vague pity for suffering
creatures and animals was not the source of his monastic yearnings, and
a desire to see strange countries the secret of his zeal against the
infidel.

The chaplain, though reproving his lukewarmness in matters of dogma,
could not but commend his devotion to the saints; and one day his
grandmother, to reward him for some act of piety, informed him with
tears of joy that he was destined for holy orders, and that she had good
hopes of living to see him a bishop. This news had hardly the intended
effect; for Odo's dream was of the saint's halo rather than the bishop's
mitre; and throwing himself on his knees before the old Marquess, who
was present, he besought that he might be allowed to join the Franciscan
order. The Marquess at this flew into so furious a rage, cursing the
meddlesomeness of women and the chaplain's bigotry, that the ladies
burst into tears and Odo's swelling zeal turned small. There was indeed
but one person in the castle who seemed not to regard its master's
violences, and that was the dark-faced chaplain, who, when the Marquess
had paused out of breath, tranquilly returned that nothing could make
him repent of having brought a soul to Christ, and that, as to the
cavaliere Odo, if his maker designed him for a religious, the Pope
himself could not cross his vocation.

"Ay, ay! vocation," snarled the Marquess. "You and the women here shut
the child up between you and stuff his ears full of monkish stories and
miracles and the Lord knows what, and then talk of the simpleton's
vocation. His vocation, nom de Dieu, is to be an abbot first, and then a
monsignore, and then a bishop, if he can--and to the devil with your
cowls and cloisters!" And he gave orders that Odo should hunt with him
next morning.

The chaplain smiled. "Hubert was a huntsman," said he, "and yet he died
a saint."

From that time forth the old Marquess kept Odo oftener at his side,
making his grandson ride with him about his estates and on such
hunting-parties as were not beyond the boy's strength. The domain of
Donnaz included many a mile of vine and forest, over which, till the
fifteenth century, its lords had ruled as sovereign Marquesses. They
still retained a part of their feudal privileges, and Odo's grandfather,
tenacious of these dwindling rights, was for ever engaged in vain
contests with his peasantry. To see these poor creatures cursed and
brow-beaten, their least offences punished, their few claims disputed,
must have turned Odo's fear of his grandfather to hatred, had he not
observed that the old man gave with one hand what he took with the
other, so that, in his dealings with his people, he resembled one of
those torrents which now devastate and now enrich their banks. The
Marquess, in fact, while he held obstinately to his fishing rights,
prosecuted poachers, enforced the corvee and took toll at every ford,
yet laboured to improve his lands, exterminated the wild beasts that
preyed on them, helped his peasants in sickness, nourished them in old
age and governed them with a paternal tyranny doubtless less
insufferable than the negligence of the great land-owners who lived at
court.

To Odo, however, these rides among the tenantry were less agreeable than
the hunting-expeditions which carried them up the mountain in the
solitude of morning. Here the wild freshness of the scene and the
exhilaration of pursuit roused the fighting strain in the boy's blood,
and so stirred his memory with tales of prowess that sometimes, as they
climbed the stony defiles in the clear shadow before sunrise, he fancied
himself riding forth to exterminate the Waldenses who, according to the
chaplain, still lurked like basilisks and dragons in the recesses of the
mountains. Certain it is that his rides with the old Marquess, if they
inflamed his zeal against heresy, cooled the ardour of his monastic
vocation; and if he pondered on his future, it was to reflect that
doubtless he would some day be a bishop, and that bishops were
territorial lords, we might hunt the wolf and boar in their own domains.


1.5.

Reluctantly, every year about the Epiphany, the old Marquess rode down
from Donnaz to spend two months in Turin. It was a service exacted by
King Charles Emanuel, who viewed with a jealous eye those of his nobles
inclined to absent themselves from court and rewarded their presence
with privileges and preferments. At the same time the two canonesses
descended to their abbey in the plain, and thus with the closing in of
winter the old Marchioness, Odo and his mother were left alone in the
castle.

To the Marchioness this was an agreeable period of spiritual compunction
and bodily repose; but to Donna Laura a season of despair. The poor
lady, who had been early removed from the rough life at Donnaz to the
luxurious court of Pianura, and was yet in the fulness of youth and
vivacity, could not resign herself to an existence no better, as she
declared, than that of any herdsman's wife upon the mountains. Here was
neither music nor cards, scandal nor love-making; no news of the
fashions, no visits from silk-mercers or jewellers, no Monsu to curl her
hair and tempt her with new lotions, or so much as a strolling
soothsayer or juggler to lighten the dullness of the long afternoons.
The only visitors to the castle were the mendicant friars drawn thither
by the Marchioness's pious repute; and though Donna Laura disdained not
to call these to her chamber and question them for news, yet their
country-side scandals were no more to her fancy than the two-penny wares
of the chapmen who unpacked their baubles on the kitchen hearth.

She pined for some word of Pianura; but when a young abate, who had
touched there on his way from Tuscany, called for a night at the castle
to pay his duty to Don Gervaso, the word he brought with him of the
birth of an heir to the duchy was so little to Donna Laura's humour that
she sprang up from the supper-table, and crying out to the astonished
Odo, "Ah, now you are for the Church indeed," withdrew in disorder to
her chamber. The abate, who ascribed her commotion to a sudden seizure,
continued to retail the news of Pianura, and Odo, listening with his
elders, learned that Count Lelio Trescorre had been appointed Master of
the Horse, to the indignation of the Bishop, who desired the place for
his nephew, Don Serafino; that the Duke and Duchess were never together;
that the Duchess was suspected of being in secret correspondence with
the Austrians, and that the young Marquess of Cerveno was gone to the
baths of Lucca to recover from an attack of tertian fever contracted the
previous autumn at the Duke's hunting-lodge near Pontesordo. Odo
listened for some mention of his humpbacked friend, or of Momola the
foundling; but the abate's talk kept a higher level and no one less than
a cavaliere figured on his lips. He was the only visitor of quality who
came that winter to Donnaz, and after his departure a fixed gloom
settled on Donna Laura's spirits. Dusk at that season fell early in the
gorge, fierce winds blew off the glaciers, and Donna Laura sat shivering
and lamenting on one side of the hearth, while the old Marchioness, on
the other, strained her eyes over an embroidery in which the pattern
repeated itself like the invocations of a litany, and Don Gervaso, near
the smoking oil-lamp, read aloud from the Glories of Mary or the Way of
Perfection of Saint Theresa.

On such evenings Odo, stealing from the tapestry parlour, would seek out
Bruno, who sat by the kitchen hearth with the old hound's nose at his
feet. The kitchen, indeed, on winter nights, was the pleasantest place
in the castle. The fire-light from its great stone chimney shone on the
strings of maize and bunches of dried vegetables that hung from the roof
and on the copper kettles and saucepans ranged along the wall. The wind
raged against the shutters of the unglazed windows, and the
maid-servants, distaff in hand, crowded closer to the blaze, listening
to the songs of some wandering fiddler or to the stories of a
ruddy-nosed Capuchin monk who was being regaled, by the steward's
orders, on a supper of tripe and mulled wine. The Capuchin's tales, told
in the Piedmontese jargon, and seasoned with strange allusions and
boisterous laughter, were of little interest to Odo, who would creep
into the ingle beside Bruno and beg for some story of his ancestors. The
old man was never weary of rehearsing the feats and gestures of the
lords of Donnaz, and Odo heard again and again how they had fought the
savage Switzers north of the Alps and the Dauphin's men in the west; how
they had marched with Savoy against Montferrat and with France against
the Republic of Genoa. Better still he liked to hear of the Marquess
Gualberto, who had been the Duke of Milan's ally and had brought home
the great Milanese painter to adorn his banqueting-room at Donnaz. The
lords of Donnaz had never been noted for learning, and Odo's grandfather
was fond of declaring that a nobleman need not be a scholar; but the
great Marquess Gualberto, if himself unlettered, had been the patron of
poets and painters and had kept learned clerks to write down the annals
of his house on parchment painted by the monks. These annals were locked
in the archives, under Don Gervaso's care; but Odo learned from the old
servant that some of the great Marquess's books had lain for years on an
upper shelf in the vestry off the chapel; and here one day, with Bruno's
aid, the little boy dislodged from a corner behind the missals and
altar-books certain sheepskin volumes clasped in blackened silver. The
comeliest of these, which bore on their title-page a dolphin curled
about an anchor, were printed in unknown characters; but on opening the
smaller volumes Odo felt the same joyous catching of the breath as when
he had stepped out on the garden-terrace at Pianura. For here indeed
were gates leading to a land of delectation: the country of the giant
Morgante, the enchanted island of Avillion, the court of the Soldan and
the King's palace at Camelot.

In this region Odo spent many blissful hours. His fancy ranged in the
wake of heroes and adventurers who, for all he knew, might still be
feasting and fighting north of the Alps, or might any day with a blast
of their magic horns summon the porter to the gates of Donnaz. Foremost
among them, a figure towering above even Rinaldo, Arthur and the Emperor
Frederic, was that Conrad, father of Conradin, whose sayings are set
down in the old story-book of the Cento Novelle, "the flower of gentle
speech." There was one tale of King Conrad that the boy never forgot:
how the King, in his youth, had always about him a company of twelve
lads of his own age; how when Conrad did wrong, his governors, instead
of punishing him, beat his twelve companions; and how, on the young
King's asking what the lads were being punished for, the pedagogues
replied:

"For your Majesty's offences."

"And why do you punish my companions instead of me?"

"Because you are our lord and master," he was told.

At this the King fell to thinking, and thereafter, it is said, in pity
for those who must suffer in his stead he set close watch on himself,
lest his sinning should work harm to others. This was the story of King
Conrad; and much as Odo loved the clash of arms and joyous feats of
paladins rescuing fair maids in battle, yet Conrad's seemed to him, even
then, a braver deed than these.

In March of the second year the old Marquess, returning from Turin, was
accompanied, to the surprise of all, by the fantastical figure of an
elderly gentleman in the richest travelling dress, with one of the new
French toupets, a thin wrinkled painted face, and emitting with every
movement a prodigious odour of millefleurs. This visitor, who was
attended by his French barber and two or three liveried servants, the
Marquess introduced as the lord of Valdu, a neighbouring seigneurie of
no great account. Though his lands marched with the Marquess's, it was
years since the Count had visited Donnaz, being one of the King's
chamberlains and always in attendance on his Majesty; and it was amazing
to see with what smirks and grimaces, and ejaculations in Piedmontese
French, he complimented the Marchioness on her appearance, and exclaimed
at the magnificence of the castle, which must doubtless have appeared to
him little better than a cattle-grange. His talk was unintelligible to
Odo, but there was no mistaking the nature of the glances he fixed on
Donna Laura, who, having fled to her room on his approach, presently
descended in a ravishing new sacque, with an air of extreme surprise,
and her hair curled (as Odo afterward learned) by the Count's own
barber.

Odo had never seen his mother look handsomer. She sparkled at the
Count's compliments, embraced her father, playfully readjusted her
mother's coif, and in the prettiest way made their excuses to the Count
for the cold draughts and bare floors of the castle. "For having lived
at court myself," said she, "I know to what your excellency is
accustomed, and can the better value your condescension in exposing
yourself, at this rigorous season, to the hardships of our
mountain-top."

The Marquess at this began to look black, but seeing the Count's
pleasure in the compliment, contented himself with calling out for
dinner, which, said he, with all respect to their visitor, would stay
his stomach better than the French kick-shaws at his Majesty's table.
Whether the Count was of the same mind, it was impossible to say, though
Odo could not help observing that the stewed venison and spiced boar's
flesh seemed to present certain obstacles either to his jaws or his
palate, and that his appetite lingered on the fried chicken-livers and
tunny-fish in oil; but he cast such looks at Donna Laura as seemed to
declare that for her sake he would willingly have risked his teeth on
the very cobblestones of the court. Knowing how she pined for company,
Odo was not surprised at his mother's complaisance; yet wondered to see
the smile with which she presently received the Count's half-bantering
disparagement of Pianura. For the duchy, by his showing, was a place of
small consequence, an asylum of superannuated fashions; whereas no
Frenchman of quality ever visited Turin without exclaiming on its
resemblance to Paris, and vowing that none who had the entree of
Stupinigi need cross the Alps to see Versailles. As to the Marquess's
depriving the court of Donna Laura's presence, their guest protested
against it as an act of overt disloyalty to the sovereign; and what most
surprised Odo, who had often heard his grandfather declaim against the
Count as a cheap jackanapes that hung about the court for what he could
make at play, was the indulgence with which the Marquess received his
visitor's sallies. Father and daughter in fact vied in amenities to the
Count. The fire was kept alight all day in his rooms, his Monsu waited
on with singular civility by the steward, and Donna Laura's own woman
sent down by her mistress to prepare his morning chocolate.

Next day it was agreed the gentlemen should ride to Valdu; but its lord
being as stiff-jointed as a marionette, Donna Laura, with charming tact,
begged to be of the party, and thus enabled him to attend her in her
litter. The Marquess thereupon called on Odo to ride with him; and
setting forth across the mountain they descended by a long defile to the
half-ruined village of Valdu. Here, for the first time, Odo saw the
spectacle of a neglected estate, its last penny wrung from it for the
absent master's pleasure by a bailiff who was expected to extract his
pay from the sale of clandestine concessions to the tenants. Riding
beside the Marquess, who swore under his breath at the ravages of the
undyked stream and the sight of good arable land run wild and choked
with underbrush, the little boy obtained a precocious insight into the
evils of a system which had long outlived its purpose, and the idea of
feudalism was ever afterward embodied for him in his glimpse of the
peasants of Valdu looking up sullenly from their work as their suzerain
and protector thrust an unfamiliar painted smile between the curtains of
his litter.

What his grandfather thought of Valdu (to which the Count on the way
home referred with smirking apologies as the mountain-lair of his
barbarous ancestors) was patent enough even to Odo's undeveloped
perceptions; but it would have required a more experienced understanding
to detect the motive that led the Marquess, scarce two days after their
visit, to accord his daughter's hand to the Count. Odo felt a shock of
dismay on learning that his beautiful mother was to become the property
of an old gentleman whom he guessed to be of his grandfather's age, and
whose enamoured grimaces recalled the antics of her favourite monkey,
and the boy's face reflected the blush of embarrassment with which Donna
Laura imparted the news; but the children of that day were trained to a
passive acquiescence, and had she informed him that she was to be
chained in the keep on bread and water, Odo would have accepted the fact
with equal philosophy. Three weeks afterward his mother and the old
Count were married in the chapel of Donnaz, and Donna Laura, with many
tears and embraces, set out for Turin, taking her monkey but leaving her
son behind. It was not till later that Odo learned of the social usage
which compelled young widows to choose between remarriage and the
cloister; and his subsequent views were unconsciously tinged by the
remembrance of his mother's melancholy bridal.

Her departure left no traces but were speedily repaired by the coming of
spring. The sun growing warmer, and the close season putting an end to
the Marquess's hunting, it was now Odo's chief pleasure to carry his
books to the walled garden between the castle and the southern face of
the cliff. This small enclosure, probably a survival of medieval
horticulture, had along the upper ledge of its wall a grass walk
commanding the flow of the stream, and an angle turret that turned one
slit to the valley, the other to the garden lying below like a tranquil
well of scent and brightness: its box trees clipped to the shape of
peacocks and lions, its clove pinks and simples set in a border of
thrift, and a pear tree basking on its sunny wall. These pleasant
spaces, which Odo had to himself save when the canonesses walked there
to recite their rosary, he peopled with the knights and ladies of the
novelle, and the fantastic beings of Pulci's epic: there walked the Fay
Morgana, Regulus the loyal knight, the giant Morgante, Trajan the just
Emperor and the proud figure of King Conrad; so that, escaping thither
from the after-dinner dullness of the tapestry parlour, the boy seemed
to pass from the most oppressive solitude to a world of warmth and
fellowship.


1.6.

Odo, who, like all neglected children, was quick to note in the
demeanour of his elders any hint of a change in his own condition, had
been keenly conscious of the effect produced at Donnaz by the news of
the Duchess of Pianura's deliverance. Guided perhaps by his mother's
exclamation, he noticed an added zeal in Don Gervaso's teachings and an
unction in the manner of his aunts and grandmother, who embraced him as
though they were handling a relic; while the old Marquess, though he
took his grandson seldomer on his rides, would sit staring at him with a
frowning tenderness that once found vent in the growl--"Morbleu, but
he's too good for the tonsure!" All this made it clear to Odo that he
was indeed meant for the Church, and he learned without surprise that
the following spring he was to be sent to the seminary at Asti.

With a view to prepare him for this change, the canonesses suggested his
attending them that year on their annual pilgrimage to the sanctuary of
Oropa. Thither, for every feast of the Assumption, these pious ladies
travelled in their litter; and Odo had heard from them many tales of the
miraculous Black Virgin who drew thousands to her shrine among the
mountains. They set forth in August, two days before the feast,
ascending through chestnut groves to the region of bare rocks; thence
downward across torrents hung with white acacia and along park-like
grassy levels deep in shade. The lively air, the murmur of verdure, the
perfume of mown grass in the meadows and the sweet call of the cuckoos
from every thicket made an enchantment of the way; but Odo's pleasure
redoubled when, gaining the high-road to Oropa, they mingled with the
long train of devotees ascending from the plain. Here were pilgrims of
every condition, from the noble lady of Turin or Asti (for it was the
favourite pilgrimage of the Sardinian court), attended by her physician
and her cicisbeo, to the half-naked goatherd of Val Sesia or Salluzzo;
the cheerful farmers of the Milanese, with their wives, in silver
necklaces and hairpins, riding pillion on plump white asses; sick
persons travelling in closed litters or carried on hand-stretchers;
crippled beggars obtruding their deformities; confraternities of hooded
penitents, Franciscans, Capuchins and Poor Clares in dusty companies;
jugglers, pedlars, Egyptians and sellers of drugs and amulets. From
among these, as the canonesses' litter jogged along, an odd figure
advanced toward Odo, who had obtained leave to do the last mile of the
journey on foot. This was a plump abate in tattered ecclesiastical
dress, his shoes white as a miller's and the perspiration streaking his
face as he laboured along in the dust. He accosted Odo in a soft shrill
voice, begging leave to walk beside the young cavaliere, whom he had
more than once had the honour of seeing at Pianura; and, in reply to the
boy's surprised glance, added, with a swelling of the chest and an
absurd gesture of self-introduction, "But perhaps the cavaliere is not
too young to have heard of the illustrious Cantapresto, late primo
soprano of the ducal theatre of Pianura?"

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