Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

purveyor of contraband dainties. Odo had thus acquainted himself with the lighter literature of England and France; and though he had read but few philosophical treatises, was yet dimly aware of the new standpoint from which, north of the Alps, men were beginning to test the accepted forms of thought. The first disturbance of his childish faith, and the coincident reading of the Lettres Philosophiques, had been followed by a period of moral perturbation, during which he suffered from that sense of bewilderment, of inability to classify the phenomena of life, that is one of the keenest trials of inexperience. Youth and nature had their way with him, however, and a wholesome reaction of indifference set in. The invisible world of thought and conduct had been the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself and the distant heights of speculation. The old doubts, the old dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment of life. Some day, no doubt, the intellectual curiosity and the moral disquietude would revive; but what he wanted now were books which appealed not to his reason but to his emotions, which reflected as in a mirror the rich and varied life of the senses: books that were warm to the touch, like the little volume in his hand.

      For it was not only of nature that the book spoke. Amid scenes of such rustic freshness were set human passions as fresh and natural: a great romantic love, subdued to duty, yet breaking forth again and again as young shoots spring from the root of a felled tree. To eighteenth-century readers such a picture of life was as new as its setting. Duty, in that day, to people of quality, meant the observance of certain fixed conventions: the correct stepping of a moral minuet; as an inner obligation, as a voluntary tribute to Diderot’s “divinity on earth”, it had hardly yet drawn breath. To depict a personal relation so much purer and more profound than any form of sentiment then in fashion, and then to subordinate it, unflinchingly, to the ideal of those larger relations that link the individual to the group—this was a stroke of originality for which it would be hard to find a parallel in modern fiction. Here at last was an answer to the blind impulses agrope in Odo’s breast—the loosening of those springs of emotion that gushed forth in such fresh contrast to the stagnant rills of the sentimental pleasure-garden. To renounce a Julie would be more thrilling than—

      Odo, with a sigh, thrust the book in his pocket and rose to his feet. It was the hour of the promenade at the Valentino and he had promised the Countess Clarice to attend her. The old high-roofed palace of the French princess lay below him, in its gardens along the river: he could figure, as he looked down on it, the throng of carriages and chairs, the modishly dressed riders, the pedestrians crowding the foot-path to watch the quality go by. The vision of all that noise and glitter deepened the sweetness of the woodland hush. He sighed again. Suddenly voices sounded in the road below—a man’s speech flecked with girlish laughter. Odo hung back listening: the girl’s voice rang like a bird-call through his rustling fancies. Presently she came in sight: a slender black-mantled figure hung on the arm of an elderly man in the sober dress of one of the learned professions—a physician or a lawyer, Odo guessed. Their being afoot, and the style of the man’s dress, showed that they were of the middle class; their demeanor, that they were father and daughter. The girl moved with a light forward flowing of her whole body that seemed the pledge of grace in every limb: of her face Odo had but a bright glimpse in the eclipse of her flapping hat-brim. He stood under his tree unheeded; but as they rose abreast of him the girl paused and dropped her companion’s arm.

      “Look! The cherry flowers!” she cried, and stretched her arms to a white gush of blossoms above the wall across the road. The movement tilted back her hat, and Odo caught her small fine profile, wide-browed as the head on some Sicilian coin, with a little harp-shaped ear bedded in dark ripples.

      “Oh,” she wailed, straining on tiptoe, “I can’t reach them!”

      Her father smiled. “May temptation,” said he philosophically, “always hang as far out of your reach.”

      “Temptation?” she echoed.

      “Is it not theft you’re bent on?”

      “Theft? This is a monks’ orchard, not a peasant’s plot.”

      “Confiscation, then,” he humorously conceded.

      “Since they pay no taxes on their cherries they might at least,” she argued, “spare a few to us poor tax-payers.”

      “Ah,” said her father, “I want to tax their cherries, not to gather them.” He slipped a hand through her arm. “Come, child,” said he, “does not the philosopher tell us that he who enjoys a thing possesses it? The flowers are yours already!”

      “Oh, are they?” she retorted. “Then why doesn’t the loaf in the baker’s window feed the beggar that looks in at it?”

      “Casuist!” he cried and drew her up the bend of the road.

      Odo stood gazing after them. Their words, their aspect, seemed an echo of his reading. The father in his plain broadcloth and square-buckled shoes, the daughter with her unpowdered hair and spreading hat, might have stepped from the pages of the romance. What a breath of freshness they brought with them! The girl’s cheek was clear as the cherry-blossoms, and with what lovely freedom did she move! Thus Julie might have led Saint Preux through her “Elysium”. Odo crossed the road and, breaking one of the blossoming twigs, thrust it in the breast of his uniform. Then he walked down the hill to the inn where the horses waited. Half an hour later he rode up to the house where he lodged in the Piazza San Carlo.

      In the archway Cantapresto, heavy with a nine years’ accretion of fat, laid an admonishing hand on his bridle.

      “Cavaliere, the Countess’s black boy—”

      “Well?”

      “Three several times has battered the door down with a missive.”

      “Well?”

      “The last time, I shook him off with the message that you would be there before him.”

      “Be where?”

      “At the Valentino; but that was an hour ago!”

      Odo slipped from the saddle.

      “I must dress first. Call a chair; or no—write a letter for me first. Let Antonio carry it.”

      The ex-soprano, wheezing under the double burden of flesh and consequence, had painfully labored after Odo up the high stone flights to that young gentleman’s modest lodgings, and they stood together in a study lined with books and hung with prints and casts from the antique. Odo threw off his dusty coat and called the servant to remove his boots.

      “Will you read the lady’s letters, cavaliere?” Cantapresto asked, obsequiously offering them on a lacquered tray.

      “No—no: write first. Begin ‘My angelic lady’—”

      “You began the last letter in those terms, cavaliere,” his scribe reminded him with suspended pen.

      “The devil! Well, then—wait. ‘Throned goddess’—”

      “You ended the last letter with ‘throned goddess.’”

      “Curse the last letter! Why did you send it?” Odo sprang up and slipped his arms into the dress-tunic his servant had brought him. “Write anything. Say that I am suddenly summoned by—”

      “By the Count Alfieri?” Cantapresto suggested.

      “Count Alfieri? Is he here? He has returned?”

      “He arrived an hour ago, cavaliere. He sent you this Moorish scimitar with his compliments. I understand he comes recently from Spain.”

      “Imbecile, not to have told me before! Quick, Antonio—my gloves, my sword.” Odo, flushed and animated, buckled his sword-belt with impatient hands. “Write anything—anything to free my evening. To-morrow morning—to-morrow morning I shall wait on the lady. Let Antonio carry