Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

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 forever 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 corvée and took toll at every ford, yet labored 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 landowners 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 ardor 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, who might hunt the wolf and boar in their own domains.

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V.

      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 Emmanuel, 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 Monsù to curl her hair and tempt her with new lotions, or so much as a strolling soothsayer or juggler to lighten the dulness 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 humor 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 designed 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 parlor, 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 firelight from its great stone chimney shone on the strings of maize and bunches of dried vegetables that