Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

the outer gates of the monastery. This space was set in beech-woods, amid which gleamed the white-pillared chapels of the Way of the Cross; and the devouter pilgrims, dispersed beneath the trees, were ascending from one chapel to another, preparatory to entering the church. The quadrangle itself was crowded with people, and the sellers of votive offerings, in their booths roofed with acacia-boughs, were driving a noisy trade in scapulars and Agnus Deis, images of the Black Virgin of Oropa, silver hearts and crosses, and phials of Jordan water warranted to effect the immediate conversion of Jews and heretics. In one corner a Carmelite missionary had set up his portable pulpit and, crucifix in hand, was exhorting the crowd; in another, an improvisatore intoned canticles to the miraculous Virgin; a barefoot friar sat selling indulgences at the monastery gate, and pedlars with trays of rosaries and religious prints pushed their way among the pilgrims. Young women of less pious aspect solicited the attention of the better-dressed travellers, and jugglers, mountebanks and quacks of every description hung on the outskirts of the square. The sight speedily turned Odo’s thoughts from his late companion, and the litter coming to a halt he was leaning forward to observe the antics of a tumbler who had spread his carpet beneath the trees, when the abate’s face suddenly rose to the surface of the throng and his hand thrust a crumpled paper between the curtains of the litter. Odo was quick-witted enough to capture this missive without attracting the notice of his grand-aunts, and stealing a glance at it he read—“Cavaliere, I starve. When the illustrious ladies descend, for Christ’s sake beg a scudo of them for the unhappy Cantapresto.”

      By this the litter had disengaged itself and was moving toward the outer gates. Odo, aware of the disfavor with which the theatre was viewed at Donnaz, and unable to guess how far the soprano’s present habit would be held to palliate the scandal of his former connection, was perplexed how to communicate his petition to the canonesses. A moment later, however, the question solved itself; for as the aunts descended at the door of the Rector’s lodging the porter, running to meet them, stumbled on a black mass under the arcade, and raised the cry that here was a man dropped dead. A crowd gathering, some one called out that it was an ecclesiastic had fallen; whereat the great-aunts were hurrying forward when Odo whispered the eldest, Donna Livia, that the sick man was indeed an abate from Pianura. Donna Livia immediately bid her servants lift him into the porter’s lodge, where, with the administering of spirits, the poor soprano presently revived and cast a drowning glance about the chamber.

      “Eight years ago, illustrious ladies,” he gurgled, “I had nearly died one night of a surfeit of ortolans; and now it is of a surfeit of emptiness that I am perishing.”

      The ladies at this, with exclamations of pity, called on the lay-brothers for broth and cordials, and bidding the porter inquire more particularly into the history of the unhappy ecclesiastic, hastened away with Odo to the Rector’s parlor.

      Next morning betimes all were afoot for the procession, which the canonesses were to witness from the monastery windows. The apothecary had brought word that the abate, whose seizure was indeed the result of hunger, was still too weak to rise; and Donna Livia, eager to open her devotions with an act of pity, pressed a sequin in the man’s hand and bid him spare no care for the sufferer’s comfort.

      This sent Odo in a cheerful mood to the red-hung windows, whence, peering between the folds of his aunts’ gala habits, he admired the great court enclosed in nobly-ordered cloisters and strewn with fresh herbs and flowers. Thence one of the Rector’s chaplains conducted them to the church, placing them, in company with the monastery’s other noble guests, in a tribune constructed above the choir. It was Odo’s first sight of a great religious ceremony, and as he looked down on the church glimmering with votive offerings and gold-fringed draperies, and seen through rolling incense in which the altar-candles swam like stars reflected in a river, he felt an almost sensual thrill of pleasure at the thought that his life was to be passed amid scenes of such mystic beauty. The sweet singing of the choir raised his spirit to a higher view of the scene; and the sight of the huddled misery on the floor of the church revived in him the old longing for the Franciscan cowl.

      From these raptures he was speedily diverted by the sight awaiting him at the conclusion of the mass. Hardly had the spectators returned to the Rector’s windows when, the doors of the church swinging open, a procession headed by the Rector himself descended the steps and began to make the circuit of the court. Odo’s eyes swam with the splendor of this burst of banners, images and jewelled reliquaries, surmounting the long train of tonsured heads and bathed in a light almost blinding after the mild penumbra of the church. As the monks advanced, the pilgrims, pouring after them, filled the court with a dark undulating mass through which the procession wound like a ray of sunlight down the brown bosom of a torrent. Branches of oleander swung in air, devout cries hailed the approach of the Black Madonna’s canopy, and hoarse voices swelled to a roar the measured litanies of the friars.

      The ceremonies over, Odo, with the canonesses, set out to visit the chapels studding the beech-knoll above the monastic buildings. Passing out of Juvara’s great portico they stood a moment above the grassy common, which presented a scene in curious contrast to that they had just quitted. Here refreshment-booths had been set up, musicians were fiddling, jugglers unrolling their carpets, dentists shouting out the merits of their panaceas, and light women drinking with the liveried servants of the nobility. The very cripples who had groaned the loudest in church now rollicked with the mountebanks and dancers; and no trace remained of the celebration just concluded but the medals and relics strung about the necks of those engaged in these gross diversions.

      It was strange to pass from this scene to the solitude of the grove where, in a twilight rustling with streams, the chapels lifted their white porches. Peering through the grated door of each little edifice, Odo beheld within a group of terra-cotta figures representing some scene of the Passion—here a Last Supper, with a tigerish Judas and a Saint John resting his yellow curls on his Master’s bosom, there an Entombment or a group of stricken Maries. These figures, though rudely modelled and daubed with bright colors, yet, by a vivacity of attitude and gesture which the mystery of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he gazed through the chapel-gratings, that those long-distant episodes of the divine tragedy had been here preserved in some miraculous state of suspended animation, and as he climbed from one shrine to another he had the sense of treading the actual stones of Gethsemane and Calvary.

      As was usual with him the impressions of the moment had effaced those preceding it, and it was almost with surprise that, at the Rector’s door, he beheld the primo soprano of Pianura totter forth to the litter and offer his knee as a step for the canonesses. The charitable ladies cried out on him for this imprudence, and his pallor still giving evidence of distress, he was bidden to wait on them after supper with his story. He presented himself promptly in the parlor, and being questioned as to his condition at once rashly proclaimed his former connection with the ducal theatre of Pianura. No avowal could have been more disastrous to his cause. The canonesses crossed themselves with horror, and the abate, seeing his mistake, hastened to repair it by exclaiming—“What! ladies, would you punish me for following a vocation to which my frivolous parents condemned me when I was too young to resist their purpose? And have not my subsequent sufferings, my penances and pilgrimages, and the state to which they have reduced me, sufficiently effaced the record of an involuntary error?”

      Seeing the effect of this appeal the abate made haste to follow up his advantage. “Ah, illustrious ladies,” he cried, “am I not a living example of the fate of those who leave all to follow righteousness? For while I remained on the stage, among the most dissolute surroundings, fortune showered me with every benefit she heaps on her favorites. I had my seat at every table in Pianura; the Duke’s chair to carry me to the theatre; and more money than I could devise how to spend; while now that I have resigned my calling to embrace the religious life, you see me reduced to begging a crust from the very mendicants I formerly nourished. For,” said he, moved to tears by his own recital, “my superfluity was always spent in buying the prayers of the unfortunate; and to judge how I was esteemed by those acquainted with my private behavior,