Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

said. “Do you never weary of it?”

      “An old story?” she exclaimed. “I thought it had been the newest in the world. Is it not being written, chapter by chapter, before our very eyes?”

      Odo laid the treatise aside. “Are you never afraid to turn the next page?” he asked.

      “Afraid? Afraid of what?”

      “That it may be written in blood.”

      She uttered a quick exclamation; then her face hardened, and she said in a low tone: “De Crucis has been with you.”

      He made the half-resigned, half-impatient gesture of the man who feels himself drawn into a familiar argument from which there is no issue.

      “He left yesterday for Germany.”

      “He was here too long!” she said, with an uncontrollable escape of bitterness.

      Odo sighed. “If you would but let me bring him to you, you would see that his influence over me is not what you think it.”

      She was silent a moment; then she said: “You are tired to-night. Let us not talk of these things.”

      “As you please,” he answered, with an air of relief; and she rose and went to the harpsichord.

      She played softly, with a veiled touch, gliding from one crepuscular melody to another, till the room was filled with drifts of sound that seemed like the voice of its own shadows. There had been times when he could have yielded himself to this languid tide of music, letting it loosen the ties of thought till he floated out into the soothing dimness of sensation; but now the present held him. To Fulvia, too, he knew the music was but a forced interlude, a mechanical refuge from thought. She had deliberately narrowed their intercourse to one central idea; and it was her punishment that silence had come to be merely an intensified expression of this idea.

      When she turned to Odo she saw the same consciousness in his face. It was useless for them to talk of other things. With a pang of unreasoning regret she felt that she had become to him the embodiment of a single thought—a formula, rather than a woman.

      “Tell me what you have been doing,” she said.

      The question was a relief. At once he began to speak of his work. All his thoughts, all his time, were given to the constitution which was to define the powers of Church and state. The difficulties increased as the work advanced; but the gravest difficulty was one of which he dared not tell her: his own growing distrust of the ideas for which he labored. He was too keenly aware of the difference in their mental operations. With Fulvia, ideas were either rejected or at once converted into principles; with himself, they remained stored in the mind, serving rather as commentaries on life than as incentives to action. This perpetual accessibility to new impressions was a quality she could not understand, or could conceive of only as a weakness. Her own mind was like a garden in which nothing is ever transplanted. She allowed for no intermediate stages between error and dogma, for no shifting of the bounds of conviction; and this security gave her the singleness of purpose in which he found himself more and more deficient.

      Odo remembered that he had once thought her nearness would dispel his hesitations. At first it had been so; but gradually the contact with her fixed enthusiasms had set up within him an opposing sense of the claims she ignored. The element of dogmatism in her faith showed the discouraging sameness of the human mind. He perceived that to a spirit like Fulvia’s it might become possible to shed blood in the cause of tolerance.

      The rapid march of events in France had necessarily produced an opposite effect on minds so differently constituted. To Fulvia the year had been a year of victory, a glorious affirmation of her political creed. Step by step she had seen, as in some old allegorical painting, error fly before the shafts of truth. Where Odo beheld a conflagration she saw a sunrise; and all that was bare and cold in her own life was warmed and transfigured by that ineffable brightness.

      She listened patiently while he enlarged on the difficulties of the case. The constitution was framed in all its details, but with its completion he felt more than ever doubtful of the wisdom of granting it. He would have welcomed any postponement that did not seem an admission of fear. He dreaded the inevitable break with the clergy, not so much because of the consequent danger to his own authority, as because he was increasingly conscious of the newness and clumsiness of the instrument with which he proposed to replace their tried and complex system. He mentioned to Fulvia the rumors of popular disaffection; but she swept them aside with a smile.

      “The people mistrust you,” she said. “And what does that mean? That you have given your enemies time to work on their credulity. The longer you delay the more opposition you will encounter. Father Ignazio would rather destroy the state than let it be saved by any hand but his.”

      Odo reflected. “Of all my enemies,” he said, “Father Ignazio is the one I most respect, because he is the most sincere.”

      “He is the most dangerous, then,” she returned. “A fanatic is always more powerful than a knave.”

      He was struck with her undiminished faith in the sufficiency of such generalizations. Did she really think that to solve such a problem it was only necessary to define it? The contact with her unfaltering assurance would once have given him a momentary glow; but now it left him cold.

      She was speaking more urgently. “Surely,” she said, “the noblest use a man can make of his own freedom is to set others free. My father said it was the only justification of kingship.”

      He glanced at her half-sadly. “Do you still fancy that kings are free? I am bound hand and foot.”

      “So was my father,” she flashed back at him; “but he had the Promethean spirit.”

      She colored at her own quickness, but Odo took the thrust tranquilly.

      “Yes,” he said, “your father had the Promethean spirit: I have not. The flesh that is daily torn from me does not grow again.”

      “Your courage is as great as his,” she exclaimed, her tenderness in arms.

      “No,” he answered, “for his was hopeful.” There was a pause, and then he began to speak of the day’s work.

      All the afternoon he had been in consultation with Crescenti, whose vast historical knowledge was of service in determining many disputed points in the tenure of land. The librarian was in sympathy with any measures tending to relieve the condition of the peasantry; yet he was almost as strongly opposed as Trescorre to any reproduction of the Tuscan constitution.

      “He is afraid!” broke from Fulvia. She admired and respected Crescenti, yet she had never fully trusted him. The taint of ecclesiasticism was on him.

      Odo smiled. “He has never been afraid of facing the charge of Jansenism,” he replied. “All his life he has stood in open opposition to the Church party.”

      “It is one thing to criticise their dogmas, another to attack their privileges. At such a time he is bound to remember that he is a priest—that he is one of them.”

      “Yet, as you have often pointed out, it is to the clergy that France in great measure owes her release from feudalism.”

      She smiled coldly. “France would have won her cause without the clergy!”

      “This is not France, then,” he said with a sigh. After a moment he began again: “Can you not see that any reform which aims at reducing the power of the clergy must be more easily and successfully carried out if they can be induced to take part in it? That, in short, we need them at this moment as we have never needed them before? The example of France ought at least to show you that.”

      “The example of France shows me that, to gain a point in such a struggle, any means must be used! In France, as you say, the clergy were with the people—here they are against them. Where persuasion fails coercion must be used!”

      Odo smiled faintly. “You might have borrowed that from their own armory,”