Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

who was willing to discuss politics, and his clear view of affairs excited Odo’s admiration if not his concurrence. Odo’s was in fact one of those dual visions which instinctively see both sides of a case and take the defence of the less popular. Gamba’s principles were dear to him; but he did not therefore believe in the personal baseness of every opponent of the cause. He had refrained from mentioning the hunchback to his supposed brother; but the latter, in one of their talks, brought forward Gamba’s name, without reference to the relationship, but with high praise for the young librarian’s parts. This, at the moment, put Odo on his guard; but Trescorre having one day begged him to give Gamba warning of some petty danger that threatened him from the clerical side, it became difficult not to believe in an interest so attested; the more so as Trescorre let it be seen that Gamba’s political views were not such as to detract from his sympathy.

      “The fellow’s brains,” said he, “would be of infinite use to me; but perhaps he serves us best at a distance. All I ask is that he shall not risk himself too near Father Ignazio’s talons, for he would be a pretty morsel to throw to the Holy Office, and the weak point of such a man’s position is that, however dangerous in life, he can threaten no one from the grave.”

      Odo reported this to Gamba, who heard with a two-edged smile. “Yes,” was his comment, “he fears me enough to want to see me safe in his fold.”

      Odo flushed at the implication. “And why not?” said he. “Could you not serve the cause better by attaching yourself openly to the liberals than by lurking in the ditch to throw mud at both parties?”

      “The liberals!” sneered Gamba. “Where are they? And what have they done? It was they who drove out the Jesuits; but to whom did the Society’s lands go? To the Duke, every acre of them! And the peasantry suffered far less under the fathers, who were good agriculturists, than under the Duke, who is too busy with monks and astrologers to give his mind to irrigation or the reclaiming of waste land. As to the University, who replaced the Jesuits there? Professors from Padua or Pavia? Heaven forbid! But holy Barnabites that have scarce Latin enough to spell out the Lives of the Saints! The Jesuits at least gave a good education to the upper classes; but now the young noblemen are as ignorant as peasants.”

      Trescorre received at his house, besides the court functionaries, all the liberal faction and the Duchess’s personal friends. He kept a lavish state, but lacking the Bishop’s social gifts, was less successful in fusing the different elements of his circle. The Duke, for the first few weeks after his kinsman’s arrival, received no company, and did not even appear in the Belverde’s drawing-rooms; but Odo deemed it none the less politic to show himself there without delay.

      The new Marchioness of Boscofolto lived in one of the finest palaces of Pianura, but prodigality was the least of her failings, and the meagreness of her hospitality was an unfailing source of epigram to the drawing-rooms of the opposition. True, she kept open table for half the clergy in the town (omitting, of course, those worldly ecclesiastics who frequented the episcopal palace), but it was whispered that she had persuaded her cook to take half wages in return for the privilege of victualling such holy men, and that the same argument enabled her to obtain her provisions below the market price. In her outer antechamber the servants yawned dismally over a cold brazier, without so much as a game of cards to divert them, and the long enfilade of saloons leading to her drawing-room was so scantily lit that her guests could scarce recognize each other in passing. In the room where she sat, a tall crucifix of ebony and gold stood at her elbow and a holy-water cup encrusted with jewels hung on the wall at her side. A dozen or more ecclesiastics were always gathered in stiff seats about the hearth; and the aspect of the apartment, and the Marchioness’s semi-monastic costume, justified the nickname of “the sacristy,” which the Duchess had bestowed on her rival’s drawing-room.

      Around the small fire on this cheerless hearth the fortunes of the state were discussed and directed, benefices disposed of, court appointments debated, and reputations made and unmade in tones that suggested the low drone of a group of canons intoning the psalter in an empty cathedral. The Marchioness, who appeared as eager as the others to win Odo to her party, received him with every mark of consideration and pressed him to accompany her on a visit to her brother, the Abbot of the Barnabites: an invitation which he accepted with the more readiness as he had not forgotten the part played by that religious in the adventure of Mirandolina of Chioggia.

      He found the Abbot a man with a bland intriguing eye and centuries of pious leisure in his voice. He received his visitors in a room hung with smoky pictures of the Spanish school, showing Saint Jerome in the wilderness, the death of Saint Peter Martyr, and other sanguinary passages in the lives of the saints; and Odo, seated among such surroundings, and hearing the Abbot deplore the loose lives and religious negligence of certain members of the court, could scarce repress a smile as the thought of Mirandolina flitted through his mind.

      “She must,” he reflected, “have found this a sad change from the Bishop’s palace;” and admired with what philosophy she had passed from one protector to the other.

      Life in Pianura, after the first few weeks, seemed on the whole a tame business to a youth of his appetite; and he secretly longed for a pretext to resume his travels. None, however, seemed likely to offer; for it was clear that the Duke, in the interval of more pressing concerns, wished to study and observe his kinsman. When sufficiently recovered from the effects of the pilgrimage, he sent for Odo and questioned him closely as to the way in which he had spent his time since coming to Pianura, the acquaintances he had formed and the churches he had frequented. Odo prudently dwelt on the lofty tone of the Belverde’s circle, and on the privilege he had enjoyed in attending her on a visit to the holy Abbot of the Barnabites; touching more lightly on his connection with the Bishop, and omitting all mention of Gamba and Crescenti. The Duke assumed a listening air, but it was clear that he could not put off his private thoughts long enough to give an open mind to other matters; and Odo felt that he was nowhere so secure as in his cousin’s company. He remembered, however, that the Duke had plenty of eyes to replace his own, and that a secret which was safe in his actual presence might be in mortal danger on his threshold.

      His Highness on this occasion was pleased to inform his kinsman that he had ordered Count Trescorre to place at the young man’s disposal an income enabling him to keep a carriage and pair, four saddle-horses and five servants. It was scant measure for an heir-presumptive, and Odo wondered if the Belverde had had a hand in the apportionment; but his indifference to such matters (for though personally fastidious he cared little for display) enabled him to show such gratitude that the Duke, fancying he might have been content with less, had nearly withdrawn two of the saddle-horses. This becoming behavior greatly advanced the young man in the esteem of his Highness, who accorded him on the spot the petites entrées of the ducal apartments. It was a privilege Odo had no mind to abuse; for if life moved slowly in the Belverde’s circle it was at a standstill in the Duke’s. His Highness never went abroad but to serve mass in some church (his almost daily practice) or to visit one of the numerous monasteries within the city. From Ash Wednesday to Easter Monday it was his custom to transact no public or private business. During this time he received none of his ministers, and saw his son but for a few moments once a day; while in Holy Week he made a retreat with the Barnabites, the Belverde withdrawing for the same period to the convent of the Perpetual Adoration.

      Odo, as his new life took shape, found his chief interest in the society of Crescenti and Gamba. In the Duchess’s company he might have lost all taste for soberer pleasures, but that his political sympathies wore a girl’s reproachful shape. Ever at his side, more vividly than in the body, Fulvia Vivaldi became the symbol of his best aims and deepest failure. Sometimes, indeed, her look drove him forth in the Duchess’s train, but more often, drawing him from the crowd of pleasure-seekers, beckoned the way to solitude and study. Under Crescenti’s tuition he began the reading of Dante, who just then, after generations of neglect, was once more lifting his voice above the crowd of minor singers. The mighty verse swept Odo out to open seas of thought, and from his vision of that earlier Italy, hapless, bleeding, but alive and breast to breast with the foe, he drew the presage of his country’s resurrection.

      Passing from this high music to the company of Gamba and his friends was like leaving a church where the penitential