Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

the little prince’s ill-health, or to some political anxiety, was at a loss how to reply to this strange appeal; but after a moment he said, “I have heard that your Highness’s director is a man of great learning and discrimination. Can he not help your Highness to some decision on this point?”

      The Duke glanced at him suspiciously. “Father Ignazio,” said he, “is in fact well-versed in theology; but there are certain doctrines inaccessible to all but a few who have received the direct illumination of heaven, and on this point I cannot feel that his judgment is final.” He wiped the dampness from his sallow forehead and pressed the scapular to his lips. “May you never know,” he cried, “the agony of a father whose child is dying, of a sovereign who longs to labor for the welfare of his people, but who is racked by the thought that, in giving his mind to temporal duties and domestic affections while such spiritual difficulties are still unsolved, he may be preparing for himself an eternity of torture such as that—” and he pointed to an old and blackened picture of the Last Judgment that hung on the opposite wall.

      Odo tried to frame a soothing rejoinder; but the Duke passionately interrupted him. “Alas, cousin, no rest is possible for one who has attained the rapture of the Beatific Vision, yet who trembles lest the mere mechanical indulgence of the senses may still subject him to the common penalty of sin! As a man who has devoted himself to the study of theology is privileged to argue on questions forbidden to the vulgar, so surely fasting, maceration and ecstasy must liberate the body from the bondage of prescribed morality. Shall no distinction be recognized between my conduct and that of the common sot or debauchee whose soul lies in blind subjection to his lower instincts? I who have labored early and late to remove temptation from my people—who have punished offences against conduct as unsparingly as spiritual error—I who have not scrupled to destroy every picture in my galleries that contained a nude figure or a wanton attitude—I who have been blessed from childhood by tokens of divine favor and miraculous intervention—can I doubt that I have earned the privileges of that higher state in which the soul is no longer responsible for the failings of the body? And yet—and yet—what if I were mistaken?” he moaned. “What if my advisers have deceived me? Si autem et sic impius sum, quare frustra laboravi?” And he sank back on his pillows limp as an empty glove.

      Alarmed at his disorder, Odo stood irresolute whether to call for help; but as he hesitated the Duke feebly drew from his bosom a gold key attached to a slender Venetian chain.

      “This,” said he, “unlocks the small tortoiseshell cabinet yonder. In it you will find a phial of clear liquor, a few drops of which will restore me. ‘Tis an essence distilled by the Benedictine nuns of the Perpetual Adoration, and peculiarly effective in accesses of spiritual disturbance.”

      Odo complied, and having poured the liquor into a glass, held it to his cousin’s lips. In a moment the Duke’s eye revived and he began to speak in a weak but composed voice, with an air of dignity in singular contrast to his previous self-abandonment. “I am,” said he, “unhappily subject to such seizures after any prolonged exertion, and a conversation I have just had with my director has left me in no fit state to receive you. The cares of government sit heavy on one who has scarce health enough for the duties of a private station; and were it not for my son I should long since have withdrawn to the shelter of the monastic life.” He paused and looked at Odo with a melancholy kindness. “In you,” said he, “the native weakness of our complexion appears to have been tempered by the blood of your mother’s house, and your countenance gives every promise of health and vivacity.”

      He broke off with a sigh and continued in a more authoritative tone: “You have learned from Count Trescorre my motive in summoning you to Pianura. My son’s health causes me the liveliest concern, my own is subject to such seizures as you have just witnessed. I cannot think that, in this age of infidelity and disorder, God can design to deprive a Christian state of a line of sovereigns uniformly zealous in the defence of truth; but the purposes of Heaven are inscrutable, as the recent suppression of the Society of Jesus has most strangely proved; and should our dynasty be extinguished I am consoled by the thought that the rule will pass to one of our house. Of this I shall have more to say to you in future. Meanwhile your first business is to acquaint yourself with your new surroundings. The Duchess holds a circle this evening, where you will meet the court; but I must advise you that the persons her Highness favors with her intimacy are not those best qualified to guide and instruct a young man in your position. These you will meet at the house of the Countess Belverde, one of the Duchess’s ladies, a woman of sound judgment and scrupulous piety, who gathers about her all our most learned men and saintly ecclesiastics. Count Trescorre will instruct you in all that becomes your position at court, and my director, Father Ignazio, will aid you in the selection of a confessor. As to the Bishop, a most worthy and conversable prelate, to whom I would have you show all due regard, his zeal in spiritual matters is not as great as I could wish, and in private talk he indulges in a laxity of opinion against which I cannot too emphatically warn you. Happily, however, Pianura offers other opportunities of edification. Father Ignazio is a man of wide learning and inflexible doctrine, and in several of our monasteries, notably that of the Barnabites, you will find examples of sanctity and wisdom such as a young man may well devoutly consider. Our convents also are distinguished for the severity of their rule and the spiritual privileges accorded them. The Carmelites have every reason to hope for the beatification of their aged Prioress, and among the nuns of the Perpetual Adoration is one who has recently received the ineffable grace of the vulnus divinum. In the conversation of these saintly nuns, and of the holy abbot of the Barnabites, you will find the surest safeguard against those errors and temptations that beset your age.” He leaned back with a gesture of dismissal; but added, reddening slightly, as Odo prepared to withdraw: “You will oblige me, cousin, when you meet my physician, Count Heiligenstern, by not touching on the matter of the restorative you have seen me take.”

      Odo left his cousin’s presence with a feeling of deep discouragement. To a spirit aware of the new influences abroad, and fresh from contact with evils rooted in the very foundations of the existing system, there was a peculiar irony in being advised to seek guidance and instruction in the society of ecstatic nuns and cloistered theologians. The Duke, with his sickly soul agrope in a maze of Neoplatonism and probabilism, while his people groaned under unjust taxes, while knowledge and intellectual liberty languished in a kind of moral pest-house, seemed to Odo like a ruler who, in time of famine, should keep the royal granaries locked and spend his days praying for the succor that his own hand might have dispensed.

      In the tapestry room one of his Highness’s gentlemen waited to reconduct Odo. Their way lay through the portrait gallery of which he had previously caught a glimpse, and here he begged his guide to leave him. He felt a sudden desire to meet his unknown ancestors face to face, and to trace the tendencies which, from the grim Bracciaforte and the stately sceptical humanist of Leo’s age, had mysteriously forced the race into its ever-narrowing mould. The dusky canvases, hung high in tarnished escutcheoned frames, presented a continuous chronicle of the line, from Bracciaforte himself, with his predatory profile outlined by some early Tuscan hand against the turrets of his impregnable fortress. Odo lingered long on this image, but it was not till he stood beneath Piero della Francesca’s portrait of the first Duke that he felt the thrill of kindred instincts. In this grave face, with its sensuous mouth and melancholy speculative eyes, he recognized the mingled strain of impressionability and unrest that had reached such diverse issues in his cousin and himself. The great Duke of the “Golden Age,” in his Titianesque brocade, the statuette of a naked faun at his elbow, and a faun-like smile on his own ruddy lips, represented another aspect of the ancestral spirit: the rounded temperament of an age of Cyrenaicism, in which every moment was a ripe fruit sunned on all sides. A little farther on, the shadow of the Council of Trent began to fall on the ducal faces, as the uniform blackness of the Spanish habit replaced the sumptuous colors of the Renaissance. Here was the persecuting Bishop, Paul IV’s ally against the Spaniards, painted by Caravaggio in hauberk and mailed gloves, with his motto—Etiam cum gladio —surmounting the episcopal chair; there the Duke who, after a life of hard warfare and stern piety, had resigned his office to his son and died in the “angelica vestis” of the tertiary order; and the “beatified” Duchess who had sold her jewels to buy corn for the poor during the famine of 1670, and had worn a hair-shirt under a corset