Spite of the Mountain Madonna's much-vaunted powers, the first effect ofthe pilgrimage was to provoke a serious indisposition in the Duke.
Exhausted by fasting and emotion, he withdrew to his apartments and forseveral days denied himself to all but Heiligenstern, who was suspectedby some of suffering his patient's disorder to run its course with aview to proving the futility of such remedies. This break in hisintercourse with his kinsman left Odo free to take the measure of hisnew surroundings. The company most naturally engaging him was that whichsurrounded the Duchess; but he soon wearied of the trivial diversions itoffered. It had ever been necessary to him that his pleasures shouldtouch the imagination as well as the senses; and with such refinement ofenjoyment the gallants of Pianura were unacquainted. Odo indeedperceived with a touch of amusement that, in a society where DonSerafino set the pace, he must needs lag behind his own lacquey.
Cantapresto had, in fact, been hailed by the Bishop's nephew with acordiality that proclaimed them old associates in folly; and thesoprano's manner seemed to declare that, if ever he had held the candlefor Don Serafino, he did not grudge the grease that might have droppedon his cassock. He was soon prime favourite and court buffoon in theDuchess's circle, organising pleasure-parties, composing scenarios forher Highness's private theatre, and producing at court any comedian orjuggler the report of whose ability reached him from the market-place.
Indefatigable in the contriving of such diversions, he soon virtuallypassed out of Odo's service into that of her Highness: a circumstancewhich the young man the less regretted as it left him freer to cultivatethe acquaintance of Gamba and his friends without exposing them toCantapresto's espionage.
Odo had felt himself specially drawn toward the abate Crescenti; and theafternoon after their first meeting he had repaired to the librarian'sdwelling. Crescenti was the priest of an ancient parish lying near thefortress; and his tiny house was wedged in an angle of the city walls,like a bird's nest in the mouth of a disused canon. A long flight ofsteps led up to his study, which on the farther side opened level with avine-shaded patch of herbs and damask roses in the projection of aruined bastion. This interior, the home of studious peace, was ascheerful and well-ordered as its inmate's mind; and Odo, seated underthe vine pergola in the late summer light, and tasting the abate's ValPulicella while he turned over the warped pages of old codes andchronicles, felt the stealing charm of a sequestered life.
He had learned from Gamba that Crescenti was a faithful parish priest aswell as an assiduous scholar, but he saw that the librarian'sbeneficence took that purely personal form which may coexist with aserene acceptance of the general evils underlying particular hardships.
His charities were performed in the old unquestioning spirit of theRoman distribution of corn; and doubtless the good man who carries hisloaf of bread and his word of hope into his neighbour's hovel reaps amore tangible return than the lonely thinker who schemes to underminethe strongholds of injustice. Still there was a perplexing contrastbetween the superficiality of Crescenti's moral judgments and thebreadth and penetration of his historic conceptions. Odo was tooinexperienced to reflect that a man's sense of the urgency ofimprovement lies mainly in the line of his talent: as the merchant ispersuaded that the roads most in need of mending are those on which hisbusiness makes him travel. Odo himself was already conscious of livingin a many-windowed house, with outlooks diverse enough to justify morethan one view of the universe; but he had no conception of thatconcentration of purpose that may make the mind's flight to its goal asdirect and unvarying as the course of a homing bird. The talk turning onGamba, Crescenti spoke of the help which the hunchback gave him in hiswork among the poor.
"His early hardships," said he, "have given him an insight intocharacter that my happier circumstances have denied me; and he has morethan once been the means of reclaiming some wretch that I despaired of.
Unhappily, his parts and learning are beyond his station, and will notlet him rest in the performance of his duties. His mind, I often tellhim, is like one of those inn parlours hung with elaborate maps of thethree Heretical Cities; whereas the only topography with which thevirtuous traveller need be acquainted is that of the Heavenly City towhich all our journeyings should tend. The soundness of his heartreassures me as to this distemper of the reason; but others are lessfamiliar with his good qualities and I tremble for the risks to whichhis rashness may expose him."The librarian went on to say that Gamba had a pretty poetical gift whichhe was suspected of employing in the composition of anonymous satires onthe court, the government and the Church. At that period every Italiantown was as full of lampoons as a marsh of mosquitoes, and it was asdifficult in the one case as the other for the sufferer to detect thespecific cause of his sting. The moment in Italy was a strange one. Thetide of reform had been turned back by the very act devised to hastenit: the suppression of the Society of Jesus. The shout of liberationthat rose over the downfall of the order had sunk to a guarded whisper.
The dark legend already forming around Ganganelli's death, the hint ofthat secret liquor distilled for the order's use in a certain convent ofPerugia, hung like a menace on the political horizon; and the disbandedSociety seemed to have tightened its hold on the public conscience as adying man's clutch closes on his victorious enemy.
So profoundly had the Jesuits impressed the world with the sense oftheir mysterious power that they were felt to be like one of thoseanimal organisms which, when torn apart, carry on a separate existencein every fragment. Ganganelli's bull had provided against their exertingany political influence, or controlling opinion as confessors or aspublic educators; but they were known to be everywhere in Italy, eitherhidden in other orders, or acting as lay agents of foreign powers, astutors in private families, or simply as secular priests. Even theconfiscation of their wealth did not seem to diminish the popular senseof their strength. Perhaps because that strength had never beencompletely explained, even by their immense temporal advantages, it wasfelt to be latent in themselves, and somehow capable of withstandingevery kind of external assault. They had moreover benefited by thereaction which always follows on the breaking up of any greatorganisation. Their detractors were already beginning to forget theirfaults and remember their merits. The people had been taught to hate theSociety as the possessor of wealth and privileges which should have beentheirs; but when the Society fell its possessions were absorbed by theother powers, and in many cases the people suffered from abuses andmaladministration which they had not known under their Jesuit landlords.
The aristocracy had always been in sympathy with the order, and in manystates the Jesuits had been banished simply as a measure of politicalexpediency, a sop to the restless masses. In these cases the latentpower of the order was concealed rather than diminished by the pretenceof a more liberal government, and everywhere, in one form or another,the unseen influence was felt to be on the watch for those who dared totriumph over it too soon.
Such conditions fostered the growth of social satire. Constructiveambition was forced back into its old disguises, and ridicule ofindividual weaknesses replaced the general attack on beliefs andinstitutions. Satirical poems in manuscript passed from hand to hand incoffee-houses, casinos and drawing-rooms, and every conspicuous incidentin social or political life was borne on a biting quatrain to theconfines of the state. The Duke's gift of Boscofolto to the CountessBelverde had stirred up a swarm of epigrams, and the most malignantamong them, Crescenti averred, were openly ascribed to Gamba.
"A few more imprudences," he added, "must cost him his post; and if yourexcellency has any influence with him I would urge its being used torestrain him from such excesses."Odo, on taking his leave of the librarian, ran across Gamba at the firststreet-corner; and they had not proceeded a dozen yards together whenthe eye of the Duke's kinsman fell on a snatch of doggerel scrawled inchalk on an adjacent wall.
"Beware (the quatrain ran) O virtuous wife or maid,Our ruler's fondness for the shade,Lest first he woo thee to the leafy gladeAnd then into the deeper wood persuade."This crude play on the Belverde's former title and the one she hadrecently acquired was signed "Carlo Gamba."Odo glanced curiously at the hunchback, who met the look with a composedsmile. "My enemies don't do me justice," said he; "I could do betterthan that if I tried;" and he effaced the words with a sweep of hisshabby sleeve.
Other lampoons of the same quality were continually cropping up on thewalls of Pianura, and the ducal police were kept as busy rubbing themout as a band of weeders digging docks out of a garden. The Duchess'sdebts, the Duke's devotions, the Belverde's extortions, Heiligenstern'smummery, and the political rivalry between Trescorre and the Dominican,were sauce to the citizen's daily bread; but there was nothing in thesepopular satires to suggest the hunchback's trenchant irony.
It was in the Bishop's palace that Odo read the first lampoon in whichhe recognised his friend's touch. In this society of polished di............