Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

sir,” said the other laughing, “I understand it is only an Embassage from some neighboring state; but when our good people are in their Easter mood they are ready to take a mail-coach for Elijah’s chariot and their wives’ scolding for the Gift of Tongues.”

      Odo spent a restless night face to face with his first humiliation. Though the girl’s rebuff had cut him to the quick, it was the vision of the havoc his folly had wrought that stood between him and sleep. To have endangered the liberty, the very life, perhaps, of a man he loved and venerated, and who had welcomed him without heed of personal risk, this indeed was bitter to his youthful self-sufficiency. The thought of Giannone’s fate was like a cold clutch at his heart; nor was there any balm in knowing that it was at Fulvia’s request he had been so freely welcomed; for he was persuaded that, whatever her previous feeling might have been, the scene just enacted must render him forever odious to her. Turn whither it would, his tossing vanity found no repose; and dawn rose for him on a thorny waste of disillusionment.

      Cantapresto broke in early on this vigil, flushed with the importance of a letter from the Countess Valdù. The lady summoned her son to dinner, “to meet an old friend and distinguished visitor”; and a verbal message bade Odo come early and wear his new uniform. He was too well acquainted with his mother’s exaggerations to attach much importance to the summons; but being glad of an excuse to escape his daily visit at the Palazzo Tournanches, he sent Donna Laura word that he would wait on her at two.

      On the very threshold of Casa Valdù, Odo perceived that unwonted preparations were afoot. The shabby liveries of the servants had been refurbished and the marble floor newly scoured; and he found his mother seated in the drawing-room, an apartment never unshrouded save on the most ceremonious occasions. As to Donna Laura, she had undergone the same process of renovation, and with more striking results. It seemed to Odo, when she met him sparkling under her rouge and powder, as though some withered flower had been dipped in water, regaining for the moment a languid semblance of freshness. Her eyes shone, her hand trembled under his lips, and the diamonds rose and fell on her eager bosom.

      “You are late!” she tenderly reproached him; and before he had time to reply, the double doors were thrown open, and the major-domo announced in an awed voice: “His excellency Count Lelio Trescorre.”

      Odo turned with a start. To his mind, already crowded with a confusion of thoughts, the name summoned a throng of memories. He saw again his mother’s apartments at Pianura, and the handsome youth with lace ruffles and a clouded amber cane, who came and went among her other visitors with an air of such superiority, and who rode beside the travelling-carriage on the first stage of their journey to Donnaz. To that handsome youth the gentleman just announced bore the likeness of the finished portrait to the sketch. He was a man of about two-and-thirty, of the middle height, with a delicate dark face and an air of arrogance not unbecomingly allied to an insinuating courtesy of address. His dress of sombre velvet, with a star on the breast, and a profusion of the finest lace, suggested the desire to add dignity and weight to his appearance without renouncing the softer ambitions of his age.

      He received with a smile Donna Laura’s agitated phrases of welcome. “I come,” said he kissing her hand, “in my private character, not as the Envoy of Pianura, but as the friend and servant of the Countess Valdù; and I trust,” he added turning to Odo, “of the Cavaliere Valsecca also.”

      Odo bowed in silence.

      “You may have heard,” Trescorre continued, addressing him in the same engaging tone, “that I am come to Turin on a mission from his Highness to the court of Savoy: a trifling matter of boundary-lines and customs, which I undertook at the Duke’s desire, the more readily, it must be owned, since it gave me the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with friends whom absence has not taught me to forget.” He smiled again at Donna Laura, who blushed like a girl.

      The curiosity which Trescorre’s words excited was lost to Odo in the painful impression produced by his mother’s agitation. To see her, a woman already past her youth, and aged by her very efforts to preserve it, trembling and bridling under the cool eye of masculine indifference, was a spectacle the more humiliating that he was too young to be moved by its human and pathetic side. He recalled once seeing a memento mori of delicately-tinted ivory, which represented a girl’s head, one side all dewy freshness, the other touched with death; and it seemed to him that his mother’s face resembled this tragic toy, the side her mirror reflected being still rosy with youth, while that which others saw was already a ruin. His heart burned with disgust as he followed Donna Laura and Trescorre into the dining-room, which had been set out with all the family plate, and decked with rare fruits and flowers. The Countess had excused her husband on the plea of his official duties, and the three sat down alone to a meal composed of the costliest delicacies.

      Their guest, who ate little and drank less, entertained them with the latest news of Pianura, touching discreetly on the growing estrangement between the Duke and Duchess, and speaking with becoming gravity of the heir’s weak health. It was clear that the speaker, without filling an official position at the court, was already deep in the Duke’s counsels, and perhaps also in the Duchess’s; and Odo guessed under his smiling indiscretions the cool aim of the man who never wastes a shot.

      Toward the close of the meal, when the servants had withdrawn, he turned to Odo with a graver manner. “You have perhaps guessed, cavaliere,” he said, “that in venturing to claim the Countess’s hospitality in so private a manner, I had in mind the wish to open myself to you more freely than would be possible at court.” He paused a moment, as though to emphasize his words; and Odo fancied he cultivated the trick of deliberate speaking to counteract his natural arrogance of manner. “The time has come,” he went on, “when it seems desirable that you should be more familiar with the state of affairs at Pianura. For some years it seemed likely that the Duchess would give his Highness another son; but circumstances now appear to preclude that hope; and it is the general opinion of the court physicians that the young prince has not many years to live.” He paused again, fixing his eyes on Odo’s flushed face. “The Duke,” he continued, “has shown a natural reluctance to face a situation so painful both to his heart and his ambitions; but his feelings as a parent have yielded to his duty as a sovereign, and he recognizes the fact that you should have an early opportunity of acquainting yourself more nearly with the affairs of the Duchy, and also of seeing something of the other courts of Italy. I am persuaded,” he added, “that, young as you are, I need not point out to you on what slight contingencies all human fortunes hang, and how completely the heir’s recovery or the birth of another prince must change the aspect of your future. You have, I am sure, the heart to face such chances with becoming equanimity, and to carry the weight of conditional honors without any undue faith in their permanence.”

      The admonition was so lightly uttered that it seemed rather a tribute to Odo’s good sense than a warning to his inexperience; and indeed it was difficult for him, in spite of an instinctive aversion to the man, to quarrel with anything in his address or language. Trescorre in fact possessed the art of putting younger men at their ease, while appearing as an equal among his elders: a gift doubtless developed by the circumstances of court life, and the need of at once commanding respect and disarming diffidence.

      He took leave upon his last words, declaring, in reply to the Countess’s protests, that he had promised to accompany the court that afternoon to Stupinigi. “But I hope,” he added, turning to Odo, “to continue our talk at greater length, if you will favor me with a visit to-morrow at my lodgings.”

      No sooner was the door closed on her illustrious visitor than Donna Laura flung herself on Odo’s bosom.

      “I always knew it,” she cried, “my dearest; but, oh, that I should live to see the day!” and she wept and clung to him with a thousand endearments, from the nature of which he gathered that she already beheld him on the throne of Pianura. To his laughing reminder of the distance that still separated him from that dizzy eminence, she made answer that there was far more than he knew, that the Duke had fallen into all manner of excesses which had already gravely impaired his health, and that for her part she only hoped her son, when raised to a station so far above her own, would not forget the tenderness with which she had ever