Odo had appointed to leave Turin some two weeks after Trescorre'sdeparture; but the preparations for a young gentleman's travels were inthose days a momentous business, and one not to be discharged withoutvexatious postponements. The travelling-carriage must be purchased andfitted out, the gold-mounted dressing-case selected and engraved withthe owner's arms, servants engaged and provided with liveries, and thenoble tourist's own wardrobe stocked with an assortment of costumessuited to the vicissitudes of travel and the requirements of court life.
Odo's impatience to be gone increased with every delay, and at length hedetermined to go forward at all adventure, leaving Cantapresto toconclude the preparations and overtake him later. It had been agreedwith Trescorre that Odo, on his way to Pianura, should visit hisgrandfather, the old Marquess, whose increasing infirmities had for someyears past imprisoned him on his estates, and accordingly about theAscension he set out in the saddle for Donnaz, attended only by oneservant, and having appointed that Cantapresto should meet him with thecarriage at Ivrea.
The morning broke cloudy as he rode out of the gates. Beyond the suburbsa few drops fell, and as he pressed forward the country lay before himin the emerald freshness of a spring rain, vivid strips of vineyardalternating with silvery bands of oats, the domes of the walnut-treesdripping above the roadside, and the poplars along the water-courses allslanting one way in the soft continuous downpour. He had left Turin inthat mood of clinging melancholy which waits on the most hopefuldepartures, and the landscape seemed an image of anticipations cloudedwith regret. He had had a stormy but tender parting with Clarice, whoseefforts to act the forsaken Ariadne were somewhat marred by herirrepressible pride in her lover's prospects, and whose last word hadcharged him to bring her back one of the rare lap-dogs bred by the monksof Bologna. Seen down the lengthening vista of separation even Clariceseemed regrettable; and Odo would have been glad to let his mind lingeron their farewells. But another thought importuned him. He had leftTurin without news of Vivaldi or Fulvia, and without having doneanything to conjure the peril to which his rashness had exposed them.
More than once he had been about to reveal his trouble to Alfieri; butshame restrained him when he remembered that it was Alfieri who hadvouched for his discretion. After his conversation with Trescorre he hadtried to find some way of sending a word of warning to Vivaldi; but hehad no messenger whom he could trust; and would not Vivaldi justlyresent a warning from such a source? He felt himself the prisoner of hisown folly, and as he rode along the wet country roads an invisiblegaoler seemed to spur beside him.
The clouds lifted at noon; and leaving the plain he mounted into a worldsparkling with sunshine and quivering with new-fed streams. The firstbreath of mountain-air lifted the mist from his spirit, and he began tofeel himself a boy again as he entered the high gorges in the cold lightafter sunset. It was about the full of the moon, and in his impatienceto reach Donnaz he resolved to push on after nightfall. The forest wasstill thinly-leaved, and the rustle of wind in the branches and thenoise of the torrents recalled his first approach to the castle, in thewild winter twilight. The way lay in darkness till the moon rose, andonce or twice he took a wrong turn and found himself engaged in someovergrown woodland track; but he soon regained the high-road, and hisservant, a young fellow of indomitable cheerfulness, took the edge offtheir solitude by frequent snatches of song. At length the moon rose,and toward midnight Odo, spurring out of a dark glen, found himself atthe opening of the valley of Donnaz. A cold radiance bathed the familiarpastures, the houses of the village along the stream, and the turretsand crenellations of the castle at the head of the gorge. The air wasbitter, and the horses' hoofs struck sharply on the road as they trottedpast the slumbering houses and halted at the gateway through which Odohad first been carried as a sleepy child. It was long before thetravellers' knock was answered, but a bewildered porter at lengthadmitted them, and Odo cried out when he recognised in the man's facethe features of one of the lads who had taught him to play pallone inthe castle court.
Within doors all were abed; but the cavaliere was expected, and supperlaid for him in the very chamber where he had slept as a lad. The sightof so much that was strange and yet familiar--of the old stone walls,the banners, the flaring lamps and worn slippery stairs--all so muchbarer, smaller, more dilapidated than he had remembered--stirred thedeep springs of his piety for inanimate things, and he was seized with afancy to snatch up a light and explore the recesses of the castle. Buthe had been in the saddle since dawn, and the keen air and the longhours of riding were in his blood. They weighted his lids, relaxed hislimbs, and gently divesting him of his hopes and fears, pressed him downin the deep sepulchre of a dreamless sleep...
Odo remained a month at Donnaz. His grandfather's happiness in hispresence would in itself have sufficed to detain him, apart from hisnatural tenderness for old scenes and associations. It was one of thecompensations of his rapidly travelling imagination that the past, fromeach new vantage-ground of sensation, acquired a fascination which tothe more sober-footed fancy only the perspective of years can give.
Life, in childhood, is a picture-book of which the text isundecipherable; and the youth now revisiting the unchanged setting ofhis boyhood was spelling out for the first time the legend beneath thepicture.
The old Marquess, though broken in body, still ruled his household fromhis seat beside the hearth. The failure of bodily activity seemed tohave doubled his moral vigour, and the walls shook with the vehemence ofhis commands. The Marchioness was sunk in a state of placid apathy fromwhich only her husband's outbursts roused her; one of the canonesses wasdead, and the other, drier and more shrivelled than ever, pined in hercorner like a statue whose mate is broken. Bruno was dead too; his olddog's bones had long since enriched a corner of the vineyard; and someof the younger lads that Odo had known about the place were grown tosober-faced men with wives and children.
Don Gervaso was still chaplain of Donnaz; and Odo saw with surprise thatthe grave ecclesiastic who had formerly seemed an old man to him was infact scarce past the middle age. In general aspect he was unchanged; buthis countenance had darkened, and what Odo had once taken for harshnessof manner he now perceived to be a natural melancholy. The young man hadnot been long at Donnaz without discovering that in that little world ofcrystallised traditions the chaplain was the only person conscious ofthe new forces abroad. It had never occurred to the Marquess thatanything short of a cataclysm such as it would be blasphemy to predictcould change the divinely established order whereby the territorial lordtook tithes from his peasantry and pastured his game on their crops. Thehierarchy which rested on the bowed back of the toiling serf andculminated in the figure of the heaven-sent King seemed to him asimmutable as the everlasting hills. The men of his generation had notlearned that it was built on a human foundation and that a suddenmovement of the underlying mass might shake the structure to itspinnacle. The Marquess, who, like Donna Laura, already beheld Odo on thethrone of Pianura, was prodigal of counsels which showed a touchinginability to discern the new aspect under which old difficulties werelikely to present themselves. That a ruler should be brave, prudent,personally abstemious, and nobly lavish in his official display; that heshould repress any attempts on the privileges of the Church, while atthe same time protecting his authority from the encroachments of theHoly See; these axioms seemed to the old man to sum up the sovereign'sduty to the state. The relation, to his mind, remained a distinctlypersonal and paternal one; and Odo's attempts to put before him the newtheory of government, as a service performed by the ruler in theinterest of the ruled, resulted only in stirring up the old sediment ofabsolutism which generations of feudal power had deposited in the Donnazblood.
Only the chaplain pe............