Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

of commiseration.

      “Come, come,” Filomena repeated, dropping to her ordinary key as she felt the resistance of the little boy’s hand. “Have you no heart, you wicked child? But, to be sure, the poor innocent doesn’t know! Come, cavaliere, your illustrious mother waits.”

      “My mother?” The blood rushed to his face; and she had called him cavaliere!

      “Not here, my poor lamb. The abate is here; don’t you see the lights of the carriage? There, there—go to him. I haven’t told him, your reverence; it’s my silly tender-heartedness that won’t let me. He’s always been like one of my own creatures to me—” and she confounded Odo by bursting into tears.

      The abate stood on the door-step. He was a tall stout man with a hooked nose and lace ruffles. His nostrils were stained with snuff and he took a pinch from a tortoiseshell box set with the miniature of a lady; then he looked down at Odo and shrugged his shoulders.

      Odo was growing sick with apprehension. It was two days before the appointed time for his weekly instruction and he had not prepared his catechism. He had not even thought of it—and the abate could use the cane. Odo stood silent and envied girls, who are not disgraced by crying. The tears were in his throat, but he had fixed principles about crying. It was his opinion that a little boy who was a cavaliere might weep when he was angry or sorry, but never when he was afraid; so he held his head high and put his hand to his side, as though to rest it on his sword.

      The abate sneezed and tapped his snuff-box. “Come, come, cavaliere, you must be brave; you must be a man; you have duties, you have responsibilities. It’s your duty to console your mother—the poor lady is plunged in despair. Eh? What’s that? You haven’t told him? Cavaliere, your illustrious father is no more.”

      Odo stared a moment without understanding; then his grief burst from him in a great sob and he hid himself against Filomena’s apron, weeping for the father in damascened armor and scarlet cloak.

      “Come, come,” said the abate impatiently. “Is supper laid? for we must be gone as soon as the mist rises.” He took the little boy by the hand. “Would it not distract your mind to recite the catechism?” he enquired.

      “No, no,” cried Odo with redoubled sobs.

      “Well, then, as you will. What a madman!” he exclaimed to Filomena. “I warrant it hasn’t seen its father three times in its life.—Come in, cavaliere, come to supper.”

      Filomena had laid a table in the stone chamber known as the bailiff’s parlor; and thither the abate dragged his charge and set him down before the coarse tablecloth covered with earthen platters. A tallow dip threw its flare on the abate’s big aquiline face as he sat opposite Odo, gulping the hastily prepared frittura and the thick purple wine in its wicker flask. Odo could eat nothing. The tears still ran down his cheeks and his whole soul was possessed by the longing to steal back and see whether the figure of the knight in the scarlet cloak had vanished from the chapel-wall. The abate ate in silence, gobbling his food like the old black pig in the yard; when he had finished he stood up, exclaiming, “Death comes to us all, as the hawk said to the chicken! You must be a man, cavaliere;” then he stepped into the kitchen and called out for the horses to be put to. The farm-hands had slunk away to one of the outhouses and Filomena and Jacopone stood bowing and curtsying as the carriage drew up at the kitchen-door. In a corner of the big vaulted room the little foundling was washing the dishes, heaping the scraps in a bowl for herself and the fowls. Odo ran back and touched her arm. She gave a start and looked at him with frightened eyes. He had nothing to give her, but he said, “Good-bye, Momola,” and he thought to himself that when he was grown-up and had a sword he would surely come back and bring her a pair of shoes and a panettone. The abate was calling him and the next moment he found himself lifted into the carriage, amid the blessings and lamentations of his foster-parents; and with a great baying of dogs and clacking of whipcord the horses clattered out of the farm-yard and turned their heads toward Pianura.

      The mist had rolled back and fields and vineyards lay bare to the winter moon. The way was lonely, for it skirted the marsh, where no one lived; and only here and there the tall black shadow of a crucifix ate into the whiteness of the road. Shreds of vapor still hung about the hollows, but beyond these fold on fold of translucent hills melted into a sky dewy with stars. Odo cowered in his corner, staring out awestruck at the unrolling of the strange white landscape. He had seldom been out at night and never in a carriage; and there was something terrifying to him in this flight through the silent moon-washed fields, where no oxen moved in the furrows, no peasants pruned the mulberries and not a goat’s bell tinkled among the oaks. He felt himself alone in a ghostly world from which even the animals had vanished, and at last he averted his eyes from the dreadful scene and sat watching the abate, who had fixed a reading-lamp at his back, and whose hooked-nosed shadow, as the springs jolted him up and down, danced overhead like the huge threatening Pulcinella at the fair of Pontesordo.

      —————

II.

      The gleam of a lantern woke Odo. The horses had stopped at the gates of Pianura, and the abate giving the pass-word, the carriage rolled under the gate-house and continued its way over the loud cobble-stones of the ducal streets. These streets were so dark, being lit but by some lantern projecting here and there from the angle of a wall, or by the flare of an oil-lamp under a shrine, that Odo, leaning eagerly out, could only now and then catch a sculptured palace-window, the grinning mask on the keystone of an archway, or the gleaming yellowish façade of a church inlaid with marbles. Once or twice an uncurtained window showed a group of men drinking about a wine-shop table, or an artisan bending over his work by the light of a tallow-dip; but for the most part doors and windows were barred and the streets disturbed only by the watchman’s cry or by a flash of light and noise as a sedan-chair passed with its escort of link-men and servants. All this was amazing enough to the sleepy eyes of the little boy so unexpectedly translated from the solitude of Pontesordo; but when the carriage turned under another arch and drew up before the doorway of a great building ablaze with lights, the pressure of accumulated emotions made him fling his arms about his preceptor’s neck.

      “Courage, cavaliere, courage! You have duties, you have responsibilities,” the abate admonished him; and Odo, choking back his fright, suffered himself to be lifted out by one of the lacqueys grouped about the door. The abate, who carried a much lower crest than at Pontesordo, and seemed far more anxious to please the servants than they to oblige him, led the way up a shining marble staircase, where beggars whined on the landings and powdered footmen in the ducal livery were running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke’s palace, had vaguely imagined that his father’s death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance-music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father’s death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards, and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bed-chamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper.

      “Mamma! Mamma!” he cried springing forward in a passion of tears.

      The lady, who was young, pale and handsome, pushed back her chair with a warning hand.

      “Child,” she exclaimed, “your shoes are covered with mud; and, good heavens, how you smell of the stable! Abate, is it thus you teach your pupil to approach me?”

      “Madam, I am abashed by the cavaliere’s temerity. But in truth I believe excessive grief has clouded his wits—’t is inconceivable how he mourns his father!”

      Donna Laura’s eyebrows rose in a faint smile. “May he never have worse to grieve for!” said she in French; then, extending her scented hand to the little boy, she added solemnly, “My son, we have suffered an irreparable loss.”