Lying that night at Pavia, the travellers set forward next morning forthe city of Vercelli. The road, though it ran for the most part throughflat mulberry orchards and rice-fields reflecting the pale blue sky intheir sodden channels, would yet have appeared diverting enough to Odo,had his mother been in the mood to reply to his questions; for whethertheir carriage overtook a party of strolling jugglers, travelling in aroofed-in waggon, with the younger children of the company runningalongside in threadbare tights and trunkhose decked with tinsel; orwhether they drove through a village market-place, where yellow earthencrocks and gaudy Indian cottons, brass pails and braziers and plattersof bluish pewter, filled the stalls with a medley of colour--at everyturn was something that excited the boy's wonder; but Donna Laura, whohad fallen into a depression of spirits, lamenting the cold, hermisfortunes and the discomfort of the journey, was at no more pains thanthe abate to satisfy the promptings of his curiosity.
Odo had indeed met but one person who cared to listen to him, and thatwas the strange hunchback who had called himself Brutus. Remembering howentertainingly this odd guide had explained all the wonders of the ducalgrounds, Odo began to regret that he had not asked his mother to let himhave Brutus for a body-servant. Meanwhile no one attended to hisquestions and the hours were beginning to seem long when, on the thirdday, they set out from Vercelli toward the hills. The cold increased asthey rose; and Odo, though he had often wished to see the mountains, wasyet dismayed at the gloomy and menacing aspect of the region on whichthey were entering. Leafless woods, prodigious boulders and whitetorrents foaming and roaring seemed a poor exchange for thepleasantly-ordered gardens of Pianura. Here were no violets and cowslipsin bloom; hardly a green blade pierced the sodden roadside, andsnowdrifts lingered in the shaded hollows.
Donna Laura's loudly expressed fear of robbers seemed to increase theloneliness of the way, which now traversed tracts of naked moorland, nowplunged again into forest, with no sign of habitation but here and therea cowherd's hut under the trees or a chapel standing apart on somegrassy eminence. When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging windswept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemedevery moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and coldat last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being liftedfrom his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorwayset in battlemented walls. He was carried into a hall lit with smokyoil-lamps and hung with armour and torn banners.
Here, among a group of rough-looking servants, a tall old man in anightcap and furred gown was giving orders in a loud passionate voice.
This personage, who was of a choleric complexion, with a face likemottled red marble, seized Odo by the wrist and led him up a flight ofstairs so worn and slippery that he tripped at every step; thence down acorridor and into a gloomy apartment where three ladies shivered about atable set with candles. Bidden by the old gentleman to salute hisgrandmother and great-aunts, Odo bowed over three wrinkled hands, onefat and soft as a toad's stomach, the others yellow and dry aslemon-skins. His mother embraced the ladies in the same humble manner,and the Marquess, first furiously calling for supper, thrust Odo down ona stool in the ingle.
From this point of observation the child, now vividly awake, noted thehangings of faded tapestry that heaved in the draught, the ceiling ofbeams and the stone floor strewn with rushes. The candle-lightflickering on the faces of his aged relatives showed his grandmother tobe a pale heavy-cheeked person with little watchful black eyes which shedropped at her husband's approach; while the two great-aunts, seatedside by side in high-backed chairs with their feet on braziers, remindedOdo of the narrow elongated saints squeezed into the niches of achurch-door. The old Marchioness wore the high coif and veil of theprevious century; the aunts, who, as Odo afterwards learned, werecanonesses of a noble order, were habited in a semi-conventual dress,with crosses hanging on their bosoms; and none spoke but when theMarquess addressed them.
Their timidity appeared to infect Odo's mother, who, from her habitualvolubility of temper, sank to a mood of like submissiveness. A supper ofvenison and goat's cheese was not designed to restore her spirits, andwhen at length she and Odo had withdrawn to their cavernous bedchamber,she flung herself weeping on the bed and declared she must die if sheremained long in this prison.
Falling asleep under such influences, it was the more wonderful to Odoto wake with the sun on his counterpane, a sweet noise of streamsthrough the casement and the joyous barking of hounds in the castlecourt. From the window-seat he looked out on a scene extraordinarilynovel to his lowland eyes. The chamber commanded the wooded steep belowthe castle, with a stream looping its base; beyond, the pastures slopedpleasantly under walnut trees, with here and there a clearing ploughedfor the spring crops and a sunny ledge or two planted with vines. Abovethis pastoral landscape, bare crags upheld a snowpeak; and, as if tolend a human interest to the scene, the old Marquess, his flintlock onhis shoulder, his dogs and beaters at his heels, now rode across thevalley.
Wonder succeeded to wonder that first morning; for there was the castleto be seen, with the kennels and stables roughly kept, but full of dogsand horses; and Odo, in the Marquess's absence, was left free to visitevery nook of his new home. Pontesordo, though perhaps as ancient asDonnaz, was but a fortified manor in the plain; but here was theturreted border castle, bristling at the head of the gorge like thefangs in a boar's throat: its walls overhung by machicolations, itsportcullis still dropped at nightfall, and the loud stream forming anatural moat at its base. Through the desert spaces of this greatstructure Odo wandered at will, losing himself in its network of barechambers, some now put to domestic uses, with smoked meats hanging fromthe rafters, cheeses ranged on shelves and farmer's implements stackedon the floor; others abandoned to bats and spiders, with slit-likeopenings choked by a growth of wild cherries, and little animalsscurrying into their holes as Odo opened the unused doors. At the nextturn he mounted by a winding stair to the platform behind thebattlements, whence he could look down on the inner court, where horseswere being groomed, dogs fed, harnesses mended, and platters of smokingfood carried from the kitchen to the pantry; or, leaning another way,discovered, between the cliff and the rampart a tiny walled garden withfruit-trees and a sundial.
The ladies kept to themselves in a corner of the castle, where the roomswere hung with tapestry and a few straight-backed chairs stood about thehearth; but even here no fires were suffered till nightfall, nor wasthere so much as a carpet in the castle. Odo's grandmother, the oldMarchioness, a heavy woman who would doubtless have enjoyed her ease ina cushioned seat, was afoot all day attending to her household; forbesides the dairy and the bakehouse and the stillroom where fruits werestewed and pastes prepared, there was the great spinning-room full ofdistaffs and looms, where the women spun and wove all the linen used inthe castle and the coarse stuffs worn by its inmates; with workshops forthe cobbler and tailor who clothed and shod the Marquess and hishousehold. All these the Marchioness must visit, and attend to herdevotions between; the ladies being governed by a dark-faced priest,their chaplain and director, who kept them perpetually running along thecold stone corridors to the chapel in a distant wing, where they kneltwithout so much as a brazier to warm them or a cushion to their knees.
As to the chapel, though larger and loftier than that of Pontesordo,with a fine carved and painted tabernacle and many silver candlesticks,it seemed to Odo, by reason of its bare walls, much less beautiful thanthat deserted oratory; nor did he, amid all the novelty of hissurroundings, cease to regret the companionship of his familiar images.
His delight was the greater, therefore, when, exploring a part of thecastle now quite abandoned, he came one day on a vaulted chamber used asa kind of granary, where, under layers of dirt and cobwebs, lovelycountenances flowered from the walls. The scenes depicted differedindeed from those of Pontesordo, being less animated and homely and moredifficult for a child to interpret; for here were naked laurel-crownedknights on prancing horses, nimble goat-faced creatures grouped inadoration round a smoking altar and youths piping to saffron-haireddamsels on grass-banks set with poplars. The very strangeness of thefable set forth perhaps engaged the child's fancy; or the benignantmildness of the countenances, so unlike the eager individual faces ofthe earlier artist; for he returned again and again to gaze unweariedlyon the inhabitants of that tranquil grassy world, studying every inch ofthe walls and with much awe and fruitless speculation deciphering on thehem of a floating drapery the inscription: Bernardinus Lovinus pinxit.
His impatience to know more of the history of these paintings led him toquestion an old man, half house-servant, half huntsman, now too infirmfor service and often to be found sunning himself in the court with anold hound's chin on his knee. The old man, whose name was Bruno, toldhim the room in question had been painted for the Marquess Gualberto diDonnaz, who had fought under the Duke of Milan hundreds of years before:
a splendid and hospitable noble, patron of learning and the arts, whohad brought the great Milanese painter to Donnaz and kept him there awhole summer adorning the banqueting-room. "But I advise you, littlemaster," Bruno added, "not to talk too loudly of your discovery; for welive in changed days, do you see, and it seems those are pagan sorcerersand witches painted on the wall, and because of that, and theirnakedness, the chaplain has forbidden all the young boys and wenchesabout the place to set foot there; and the Marchioness herself, I'mtold, doesn't enter without leave."This was the more puzzling to Odo that he had seen so many naked pagans,in colours and marble, at his cousin's palace of Pianura, where theywere praised as the chief ornament of that sumptuous fabric; but he keptBruno's warning in mind and so timed his visits that they escaped thechaplain's observation. Whether this touch of mystery added charm to thepaintings; or whether there was already forming in him what afterwardbecame an instinctive resistance to many of the dictates of his age;certain it is that, even after he had been privileged to admire thestupendous works of the Caracci at Parma and of the immortal GiulioRomano at Mantua, Odo's fancy always turned with peculiar fondness tothe clear-limbed youths moving in that world of untroubled beauty.
Odo, the day after his arrival at Donnaz, learned that the chaplain wasto be his governor; and he was not long in discovering that the systemof that ecclesiastic bore no resemblance to the desultory methods of hisformer pedagogue. It was not that Don Gervaso was a man of superioracquirements: in writing, ciphering and the rudiments of Latin he seemedlittle likely to carry Odo farther than the other; but in religiousinstruction he suffered no negligence or inattention. His piety was of astamp so different from the abate's that it vivified the theologicalabstractions over which Odo had formerly languished, infusing apassionate meaning into the formulas of the textbooks. His discoursebreathed the same spirit, and had his religion been warmed byimagination or tempered by charity the child had been a ductilesubstance in his hands; but the shadow of the Council of Trent stillhung over the Church in Savoy, making its approach almost as sombre andforbidding as that of the Calvinist heresy. As it was, the fascinationthat drew Odo to the divine teachings was counteracted by a depressingawe: he trembled in God's presence almost as much as in hisgrandfather's, and with the same despair of discovering what course ofaction was most likely to call down the impending wrath. The beauty ofthe Church's offices, now for the first time revealed to him in thewell-ordered services of the chapel, was doubly moving in contrast withthe rude life at Donnaz; but his confessions tortured him and thepenances which the chaplain inflicted abased without reforming hisspirit.
Next to the mass, the books Don Gervaso lent him were his chiefpleasure: the Lives of the Saints, Cardinal Bellarmine's Fables and TheMirror of true Penitence. The Lives of the Saints fed at once hisimagination and his heart, and over the story of Saint Francis, nowfirst made known to him, he trembled with delicious sympathy. Thelonging to found a hermitage like the Portiuncula among the savage rocksof Donnaz, and live there in gentle communion with plants and animals,alternated in him with the martial ambition to ride forth against theChurch's enemies, as his ancestors had ridden against the bloody andpestilent Waldenses; but whether his piety took the passive or theaggressive form, it always shrank from the subtleties of doctrine. Tolive like the saints, rather than to reason like the fathers, was hisideal of Christian conduct; if indeed a vague pity for sufferingcreatures and animals was not the source of his monastic yearnings, anda desire to see strange countries the secret of his zeal against theinfidel.
The chaplain, though reproving his lukewarmness in matters of dogma,could not but commend his devotion to the saints; and one day hisgrandmother, to reward him for some act of piety, informed him withtears of joy that he was destined for holy orders, and that she had goodhopes of living to see him a bishop. This news had hardly the intendedeffect; for Odo's dream was of the saint's halo rather than the bishop'smitre; and throwing himself on his knees before the old Marquess, whowas present, he besought that he might be allowed to join the Franciscanorder. The Marquess at this flew into so furious a rage, cursing themeddlesomeness of women and the chaplain's bigotry, that the ladiesburst into tears and Odo's swelling zeal turned small. There was indeedbut one person in the castle who seemed not to regard its master'sviolences, and that was the dark-faced chaplain, who, when the Marquesshad paused out of breath, tranquilly returned that nothing could makehim repent of having brought a soul to Christ, and that, as to thecavaliere Odo, if his maker designed him for a religious, the Popehimself could not cross his vocation.
"Ay, ay! vocation," snarled the Marquess. "You and the women here shutthe child up between you and stuff his ears full of monkish stories andmiracles and the Lord knows what, and then talk of the simpleton'svocation. His vocation, nom de Dieu, is to be an abbot first, and then amonsignore, and then a bishop, if he can--and to the devil with yourcowls and cloisters!" And he gave orders that Odo should hunt with himnext morning.
The chaplain smiled. "Hubert was a huntsman," said he, "and yet he dieda 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 suchhunting-parties as were not beyond the boy's strength. The domain ofDonnaz included many a mile of vine and forest, over which, till thefifteenth century, its lords had ruled as sovereign Marquesses. Theystill retained a part of their feudal privileges, and Odo's grandfather,tenacious of these dwindling rights, was for ever engaged in vaincontests with his peasantry. To see these poor creatures cursed andbrow-beaten, their least offences punished, their few claims disputed,must have turned Odo's fear of his grandfather to hatred, had he notobserved that the old man gave with one hand what he took with theother, so that, in his dealings with his people, he resembled one ofthose torrents which now devastate and now enrich their banks. TheMarquess, in fact, while he held obstinately to his fishing rights,prosecuted poachers, enforced the corvee and took toll at every ford,yet laboured to improve his lands, exterminated the wild beasts thatpreyed on them, helped his peasants in sickness, nourished them in oldage and governed them with a paternal tyranny doubtless lessinsufferable than the negligence of the great land-owners who lived atcourt.
To Odo, however, these rides among the tenantry were less agreeable thanthe hunting-expeditions which carried them up the mountain in thesolitude of morning. Here the wild freshness of the scene and theexhilaration of pursuit roused the fighting strain in the boy's blood,and so stirred his memory with tales of prowess that sometimes, as theyclimbed the stony defiles in the clear shadow before sunrise, he fanciedhimself riding forth to exterminate the Waldenses who, according to thechaplain, still lurked like basilisks and dragons in the recesses of themountains. Certain it is that his rides with the old Marquess, if theyinflamed his zeal against heresy, cooled the ardour of his monasticvocation; and if he pondered on his future, it was to reflect thatdoubtless he would some day be a bishop, and that bishops wereterritorial lords, we might hunt the wolf and boar in their own domains.