At the Duke's express wish, Odo was to lodge in the palace; and when heentered the courtyard he found Cantapresto waiting to lead him to hisapartment.
The rooms assigned to him lay at the end of one of the wings overlookingthe gardens; and as he mounted the great stairway and walked down thecorridors with their frescoed walls and busts of Roman emperors herecalled the far-off night when he had passed through the same scenes asa frightened awe-struck child. Where he had then beheld a supernaturalfabric, peopled with divinities of bronze and marble, and glowing withlight and colour, he now saw a many-corridored palace, stately indeed,and full of a faded splendour, but dull and antiquated in comparisonwith the new-fangled elegance of the Sardinian court. Yet at every turnsome object thrilled the fibres of old association or pride of race.
Here he traversed a gallery hung with the portraits of his line; therecaught a glimpse of the pages' antechamber through which he and hismother had been led when they waited on the Duke; and from the windowsof his closet he overlooked the alleys and terraces where he hadwandered with the hunchback.
One of the Duke's pages came to say that his Highness would receive thecavaliere when the court rose from dinner; and finding himself with twohours on his hands, Odo determined to await his kinsman's summons in thegarden. Thither he presently repaired; and was soon, with a mournfulpleasure, retracing the paths he had first explored in such an ecstasyof wonder. The pleached walks and parterres were in all the freshness ofJune. Roses and jasmine mingled on the terrace-walls, citron-treesingeniously grafted with red and white carnations stood in Faenza jarsbefore the lemon-house, and marble nymphs and fauns peeped from thicketsof flowering camellias. A noise of childish voices presently attractedOdo, and following a tunnel of clipped limes he came out on a theatrecut in the turf and set about with statues of Apollo and the Muses. Ahandful of boys in military dress were performing a series of evolutionsin the centre of this space; and facing them stood a child of about tenyears, in a Colonel's uniform covered with orders, his hair curled andpowdered, a paste-board sword in his hand, and his frail body supportedon one side by a turbaned dwarf, and on the other by an ecclesiastic whowas evidently his governor. The child, as Odo approached, was callingout his orders to his regiment in a weak shrill voice, moving now here,now there on his booted tottering legs, as his two supporters guidedhim, and painfully trying to flourish the paper weapon that was tooheavy for his nerveless wrist. Behind this strange group stood anotherfigure, that of a tall heavy man, richly dressed, with a curiousOriental-looking order on his breast and a veiled somnolent eye which hekept fixed on the little prince.
Odo had been about to advance and do homage to his cousin; but a signfrom the man in the background arrested him. The manoeuvres were soonover, the heir was lifted into a little gilded chariot drawn by whitegoats, his regiment formed in line and saluted him, and he disappeareddown one of the alleys with his attendants.
This ceremony over, the tall man advanced to Odo with a bow and askedpardon for the liberty he had taken.
"You are doubtless," said he, "his Highness's cousin, the CavaliereValsecca; and my excuse for intruding between yourself and the prince isthat I am the Duke's physician, Count Heiligenstern, and that the heiris at present undergoing a course of treatment under my care. Hishealth, as you probably know, has long been a cause of anxiety to hisillustrious parents, and when I was summoned to Pianura the College ofPhysicians had given up all hope of saving him. Since my coming,however, I flatter myself that a marked change is perceptible. My methodis that of invigorating the blood by exciting the passions most likelyto produce a generous vital ardour. Thus, by organising these juvenilemanoeuvres, I arouse the prince's martial zeal; by encouraging him tostudy the history of his ancestors, I evoke his political ambition; bycausing him to be led about the gardens on a pony, accompanied by aminiature pack of Maltese dogs in pursuit of a tame doe, I stimulate thepassion of the chase; but it is essential to my system that one emotionshould not violently counteract another, and I am therefore obliged toprotect my noble patient from the sudden intrusion of new impressions."This explanation, delivered in a sententious tone, and with a strongGerman accent, seemed to Odo no more than a learned travesty of thefamiliar and pathetic expedient of distracting a sick child by thepretence of manly diversions. He was struck, however, by the physician'saspect, and would have engaged him in talk had not one of the Duke'sgentlemen appeared with the announcement that his Highness would bepleased to receive the Cavaliere Valsecca.
Like most dwellings of its kind in Italy, the palace of Pianuraresembled one of those shells which reveal by their outer convolutionsthe gradual development of the creature housed within. For two or threegenerations after Bracciaforte, the terrible founder of the line, hadmade himself master of the republic, his descendants had clung to theold brick fortress or rocca which the great condottiere had heldsuccessfully against the burghers' arquebuses and the battering-rams ofrival adventurers, and which still glassed its battlements in the slowwaters of the Piana beside the city wall. It was Ascanio, the firstDuke, the correspondent of Politian and Castiglione, who, finding theancestral lair too cramped for the court of a humanist prince, hadsummoned Luciano da Laurana to build a palace better fitted to hisstate. Duke Ascanio, in bronze by Verocchio, still looked up with pridefrom the palace-square at the brick and terra-cotta facade with itsfruit-wreathed arches crowned by imperial profiles; but a later princefound the small rooms and intricate passages of Laurana's structureinadequate to the pomp of an ally of Leo X., and Vignola added the stateapartments, the sculpture gallery and the libraries.
The palace now passed for one of the wonders of Italy. The Duke's guest,the witty and learned Aretino, celebrated it in verse, his friendCardinal Bembo in prose; Correggio painted the walls of one room, GuilioRomano the ceiling of another. It seemed that magnificence could go nofarther, till the seventeenth century brought to the throne a Duke whoasked himself how a self-respecting prince could live without a theatre,a riding-school and an additional wing to lodge the ever-growing trainof court officials who had by this time replaced the feudal men-at-arms.
He answered the question by laying an extra tax on his people andinviting to Pianura the great Roman architect Carlo Borromini, whoregretfully admitted that his illustrious patron was on the whole lessroyally housed than their Highnesses of Mantua and Parma. Within fiveyears the "cavallerizza," the theatre and the gardens flung defiance atthese aspiring potentates; and again Pianura took precedence of herrivals. The present Duke's father had expressed the most recent tendencyof the race by the erection of a chapel in the florid Jesuit style; andthe group of buildings thus chronicled in rich durable lines the varyingpassions and ambitions of three hundred years of power.
As Odo followed his guide toward the Duke's apartments he remarked achange in the aspect of the palace. Where formerly the corridors hadbeen thronged with pages, lacqueys and gaily-dressed cavaliers andladies, only a few ecclesiastics now glided by: here a Monsignore inermine and lace rochet, attended by his chaplain and secretaries, therea cowled Dominican or a sober-looking secular priest. The Duke waslodged in the oldest portion of the palace, and Odo, who had nevervisited these apartments, looked with interest at the projectingsculptured chimney and vaulted ceiling of the pages' ante-chamber, whichhad formerly been the guardroom and was still hung with panoplies.
Thence he was led into a gallery lined with scriptural tapestries andfurnished in the heavy style of the seventeenth century. Here he waiteda few moments, hearing the sound of conversation in the room beyond;then the door of this apartment opened, and a handsome Dominican passedout, followed by a page who invited Odo to step into the Duke's cabinet.
This was a very small room, completely panelled in delicate wood-carvingtouched with gold. Over this panelling, regardless of the beauty of itsdesign, had been hung a mass of reliquaries and small devotionalbas-reliefs and paintings, making the room appear more like the chapelof a wonder-working saint than a prince's closet. Here again Odo foundhimself alone; but the page presently returned to say that his Highnesswas not well and begged the cavaliere to wait on him in his bed-chamber.
The most conspicuous object in this room was a great bedstead raised ona dais. The plumed posts and sumptuous hangings of the bed gave it analtar-like air, and the Duke himself, who lay between the curtains, hiswig replaced by a nightcap, a scapular about his neck, and hisshrivelled body wrapped in a brocaded dressing-gown, looked more like arelic than a man. His heavy under-lip trembled slightly as he offeredhis hand to Odo's salute.
"You find me, cousin," said he after a brief greeting, "much troubled bya question that has of late incessantly disturbed my rest--can the soul,after full intuition of God, be polluted by the sins of the body?" heclutched Odo's hand in his burning grasp. "Is it possible that there arehuman beings so heedless of their doom that they can go about theirearthly pleasures with this awful problem unsolved? Oh, why has not somePope decided it? Why has God left this hideous uncertainty hanging overus? You know the doctrine of Plotinus--'he who has access to God leavesthe virtues behind him as the images of the gods are left in the outertemple.' Many of the fathers believed that the Neoplatonists werepermitted to foreshadow in their teachings the revelation of Christ; buton these occult points much doubt remains, and though certain of thegreat theologians have inclined to this interpretation, there are otherswho hold that it leans to the heresy of Quietism."Odo, who had inferred in the Duke's ............