Odo, on his return to Pianura, had taken it for granted that de Cruciswould remain in his service.
There had been little talk between the two on the way. The one was deepin his own wretchedness, and the other had too fine a tact to intrude onit; but Odo felt the nearness of that penetrating sympathy which wasalmost a gift of divination. He was glad to have de Crucis at his sideat a moment when any other companionship had been intolerable; and inthe egotism of his misery he imagined that he could dispose as hepleased of his friend's future.
After the little Prince's death, however, de Crucis had at once askedpermission to leave Pianura. He was perhaps not displeased by Odo'sexpressions of surprise and disappointment; but they did not alter hisdecision. He reminded the new Duke that he had been called to Pianura asgovernor to the late heir, and that, death having cut short his task, hehad now no farther pretext for remaining.
Odo listened with a strange sense of loneliness. The responsibilities ofhis new state weighed heavily on the musing speculative side of hisnature. Face to face with the sudden summons to action, with thenecessity for prompt and not too-curious choice of means and method, hefelt a stealing apathy of the will, an inclination toward the subtleduality of judgment that had so often weakened and diffused hisenergies. At such a crisis it seemed to him that, de Crucis gone, heremained without a friend. He urged the abate to reconsider hisdecision, begging him to choose a post about his person.
De Crucis shook his head.
"The offer," said he, "is more tempting to me than your Highness canguess; but my business here is at an end, and must be taken upelsewhere. My calling is that of a pedagogue. When I was summoned totake charge of Prince Ferrante's education I gave up my position in thehousehold of Prince Bracciano not only because I believed that I couldmake myself more useful in training a future sovereign than the son of aprivate nobleman, but also," he added with a smile, "because I wascurious to visit a state of which your Highness had so often spoken, andbecause I believed that my residence here might enable me to be ofservice to your Highness. In this I was not mistaken; and I will gladlyremain in Pianura long enough to give your Highness such counsels as myexperience suggests; but that business discharged, I must ask leave togo."From this position no entreaties could move him; and so fixed was hisresolve that it confirmed the idea that he was still a secret agent ofthe Jesuits. Strangely enough, this did not prejudice Odo, who was morethan ever under the spell of de Crucis's personal influence. Though Odohad been acquainted with many professed philosophers he had never metamong them a character so nearly resembling the old stoical ideal oftemperance and serenity, and he could never be long with de Cruciswithout reflecting that the training which could form and nourish sonoble a nature must be other than the world conceived it.
De Crucis, however, frankly pointed out that his former connection withthe Jesuits was too well known in Pianura not to be an obstacle in theway of his usefulness.
"I own," said he, "that before the late Duke's death I exerted suchinfluence as I possessed to bring about your Highness's appointment asregent; but the very connections that favoured me with your predecessormust stand in the way of my serving your Highness. Nothing could be morefatal to your prospects than to have it said that you had chosen aformer Jesuit as your advisor. In the present juncture of affairs it isneedful that you should appear to be in sympathy with the liberals, andthat whatever reforms you attempt should seem the result of popularpressure rather than of your own free choice. Such an attitude may notflatter the sovereign's pride, and is in fact merely a higher form ofexpediency; but it is one which the proudest monarchs of Europe arefinding themselves constrained to take if they would preserve theirpower and use it effectually."Soon afterward de Crucis left Pianura; but before leaving he imparted toOdo the result of his observations while in the late Duke's service. DeCrucis's view was that of the more thoughtful men of his day who had notbroken with the Church, yet were conscious that the whole social systemof Europe was in need of renovation. The movement of ideas in France,and their rapid transformation into legislative measures of unforeseenimportance, had as yet made little impression in Italy; and the clergyin particular lived in serene unconsciousness of any impending change.
De Crucis, however, had been much in France, and had frequented theFrench churchmen, who (save in the highest ranks of the hierarchy) werekeenly alive to the need of reform, and ready, in many instances, tosacrifice their own privileges in the public cause. These men, living intheir provincial cures or abbeys, were necessarily in closer contactwith the people, better acquainted with their needs and more competentto relieve them, than the city demagogues theorising in Parisiancoffee-houses on the Rights of Man and the Code of Nature. But the voiceof the demagogues carried farther than that of the clergy; and suchrevolutionary notions as crossed the Alps had more to do with thefounding of future Utopias than with the remedy of present evils.
Even in France the temperate counsels of the clergy were being overruledby the sentimental imprudences of the nobles and by the bluster of thepoliticians. It was to put Odo on his guard against these two influencesthat de Crucis was chiefly anxious; but the intelligent cooperation ofthe clergy was sadly lacking in his administrative scheme. He knew thatOdo could not count on the support of the Church party, and that he mustmake what use he could of the liberals in his attempts at reform. Theclergy of Pianura had been in power too long to believe in the necessityof conceding anything to the new spirit; and since the banishment of theSociety of Jesus the presumption of the other orders had increasedinstead of diminishing. The priests, whatever their failings, hadattached the needy by a lavish bounty; and they had a powerful auxiliaryin the Madonna of the Mountain, who drew pilgrims from all parts ofItaly and thus contributed to the material welfare of the state as wellas to its spiritual privileges. To the common people their Virgin wasnot only a protection against disease and famine, but a kind of oracle,who by divers signs and tokens gave evidence of divine approval ordispleasure; and it was naturally to the priests that the faithfullooked for a reading of these phenomena. This gave the clergy a powerfulhold on the religious sensibilities of the people; and more than oncethe manifest disapproval of the Mountain Madonna had turned the scalesagainst some economic measure which threatened the rights of her augurs.
De Crucis understood the force of these traditional influences; but Odo,in common with the more cultivated men of his day, had lived too long inan atmosphere of polite scepticism to measure the profound hold ofreligion on the consciousness of the people. Christ had been so longbanished from the drawing-room that it was has hard to believe that Hestill ruled in field and vineyard. To men of Odo's stamp the piety ofthe masses was a mere superficial growth, a kind of mental mould to bedried off by the first beams of knowledge. He did not conceive it as ahabit of thought so old that it had become instinctive, so closelyintertwined with every sense that to hope to eradicate it was liketrying to drain all the blood from a man's body without killing him. Heknew nothing of the unwearied workings of that power, patient as anatural force, which, to reach spirits darkened by ignorance and eyesdulled by toil, had stooped to a thousand disguises, humble, tender andgrotesque--peopling the earth with a new race of avenging or protectingdeities, guarding the babe in the cradle and the cattle in the stalls,blessing the good man's vineyard or blighting the crops of theblasphemer, guiding the lonely traveller over torrents and precipices,smoothing the sea and hushing the whirlwind, praying with the motherover her sick child, and watching beside the dead in plague-house andlazaret and galley--entering into every joy and grief of the obscurestconsciousness, penetrating to depths of misery which no human compassionever reached, and redressing by a prompt and summary justice wrongs ofwhich no human legislation took account.
Odo's first act after his accession had been to recall the politicaloffenders banished by his predecessor; and so general was the custom ofmarking the opening of a new reign by an amnesty to political exiles,that Trescorre offered no opposition to the measure. Andreoni and hisfriends at once returned to Pianura, and Gamba at the same time emergedfrom his mysterious hiding-place. He was the only one of the group whostruck Odo as having any administrative capacity; yet he was more likelyto be of use as a pamphleteer than as an office-holder. As to the otherphilosophers, they were what their name implied: thoughtful andhigh-minded men, with a generous conception of their civic duties, and anoble readiness to fulfil them at any cost, but untrained to action, andtotally ignorant of the complex science of government.
Odo found the hunchback changed. He had withered like Trescorre, butunder the harsher blight of physical privations; and his tongue had anadded bitterness. He replied evasively to all enquiries as to what hadbecome of him during his absence from Pianura; but on Odo's asking fornews of Momola and the child he said coldly: "They are both dead.""Dead?" Odo exclaimed. "Together?""There was scarce an hour between them," Gamba answered. "She said shemust keep alive as long as the boy needed her--after that she turned onher side and died.""But of what disorder? How came they to sicken at the same time?"The hunchback stood silent, his eyes on the ground. Suddenly he raisedthem and looked full at the Duke.
"Those that saw them called it the plague.""The plague? Good God!" ............