The joy of reprisals lasted no longer than a summer storm. To hurt, tosilence, to destroy, was too easy to be satisfying. The passions of hisancestors burned low in Odo's breast: though he felt Bracciaforte's furyin his veins he could taste no answering gratification of revenge. Andthe spirit on which he would have spent his hatred was not here orthere, as an embodied faction, but everywhere as an intangibleinfluence. The acqua tofana of his enemies had pervaded every fibre ofthe state.
The mist of anguish lifted, he saw himself alone among ruins. For amoment Fulvia's glowing faith had hung between him and a final vision ofthe truth; and as his convictions weakened he had replaced them with animmense pity, an all-sufficing hope. Sentimental verbiage: he saw itclearly now. He had been the dupe of the old word-jugglery which wasforever confounding fact and fancy in men's minds. For it wasessentially an age of words: the world was drunk with them, as it hadonce been drunk with action; and the former was the deadlier drug of thetwo. He looked about him languidly, letting the facts of life filterslowly through his faculties. The sources of energy were so benumbed inhim that he felt like a man whom long disease had reduced tohelplessness and who must laboriously begin his bodily education again.
Hate was the only passion which survived, and that was but a deafintransitive emotion coiled in his nature's depths.
Sickness at last brought its obliteration. He sank into gulfs ofweakness and oblivion, and when the rise of the tide floated him back tolife, it was to a life as faint and colourless as infancy. Colourlesstoo were the boundaries on which he looked out: the narrow enclosure ofwhite walls, opening on a slit of pale spring landscape. His hands laybefore him, white and helpless on the white coverlet of his bed. Heraised his eyes and saw de Crucis at his side. Then he began toremember. There had been preceding intervals of consciousness, and inone of them, in answer perhaps to some vaguely-uttered wish for lightand air, he had been carried out of the palace and the city to theBenedictine monastery on its wooded knoll beyond the Piana. Then theveil had dropped again, and his spirit had wandered in a dim place ofshades. There was a faint sweetness in coming back at last to familiarsights and sounds. They no longer hurt like pressure on an aching nerve:
they seemed rather, now, the touch of a reassuring hand.
As the contact with life became closer and more sustained he began towatch himself curiously, wondering what instincts and habits of thoughtwould survive his long mental death. It was with a bitter, almostpitiable disappointment that he found the old man growing again in him.
Life, with a mocking hand, brought him the cast-off vesture of his past,and he felt himself gradually compressed again into the old passions andprejudices. Yet he wore them with a difference--they were a crampinggarment rather than a living sheath. He had brought back from his lonelyvoyagings a sense of estrangement deeper than any surface-affinity withthings.
As his physical strength returned, and he was able to leave his room andwalk through the long corridors to the outer air, he felt the old spellwhich the life of Monte Cassino had cast on him. The quiet garden, withits clumps of box and lavender between paths converging to the statue ofSaint Benedict; the cloisters paved with the monks' nameless graves; thetraces of devotional painting left here and there on the weather-beatenwalls, like fragments of prayer in a world-worn mind: these formed acircle of tranquillising influences in which he could graduallyreacquire the habit of living.
He had never deceived himself as to the cause of the riots. He knew fromGamba and Andreoni that the liberals and the court, for once working inunison, had provoked the blind outburst of fanaticism which a rasherjudgment might have ascribed to the clergy. The Dominicans, bigoted andeager for power, had been ready enough to serve such an end, and some ofthe begging orders had furnished the necessary points of contact withthe people; but the movement was at bottom purely political, andrepresented the resistance of the privileged classes to any attack ontheir inherited rights.
As such, he could no longer regard it as completely unreasonable. He wasbeginning to feel the social and political significance of those oldrestrictions and barriers against which his early zeal had tilted.
Certainly in the ideal state the rights and obligations of the differentclasses would be more evenly adjusted. But the ideal state was a figmentof the brain. The real one, as Crescenti had long ago pointed out, wasthe gradual and heterogeneous product of remote social conditions,wherein every seeming inconsistency had its roots in some bygone need,and the character of each class, with its special passions, ignorancesand prejudices, was the sum total of influences so ingrown andinveterate that they had become a law of thought. All this, however,seemed rather matter for philosophic musing than for definite action.
His predominant feeling was still that of remoteness from the immediateissues of life: the soeva indignatio had been succeeded by a great calm.
The soothing influences of the monastic life had doubtless helped totide him over the stormy passage of returning consciousness. Hissensitiveness to these influences inclined him for the first time toconsider them analytically. Hitherto he had regarded the Church as askilfully-adjusted engine, the product of human passions scientificallycombined to obtain the greatest sum of tangible results. Now he saw thathe had never penetrated beneath the surface. For the Church whichgrasped, contrived, calculated, struggled for temporal possessions andused material weapons against spiritual foes--this outer Church wasnothing more than the body, which, like any other animal body, had tocare for its own gross needs, nourish, clothe, defend itself, fight fora footing among the material resistances of life--while the soul, theinner animating principle, might dwell aloof from all these things, in aclear medium of its own.
To this soul of the Church his daily life now brought him close. He feltit in the ordered beneficence of the great community, in the simplicityof its external life and the richness and suavity of its innerrelations. No alliance based on material interests, no love of powerworking toward a common end, could have created that harmony of thoughtand act which was reflected in every face about him. Each of these menseemed to have FOUND OUT SOMETHING of which he was still ignorant.
What it was, de Crucis tried to tell him as they paced the cloisterstogether or sat in the warm stillness of the budding garden. At thefirst news of the Duke's illness the Jesuit had hastened to Pianura. Nocompanionship could have been so satisfying to Odo. De Crucis's mentalattitude toward mankind might have been defined as an illuminatedcharity. To love men, or to understand them, is not as unusual as to doboth together; and it was the intellectual acuteness of his friend'sjudgments that made their Christian amenity so seductive to Odo.
"The highest claim of Christianity," the Jesuit said one morning, asthey sat on a worn stone bench at the end of the sunny vine-walk, "isthat it has come nearer to solving the problem of men's relations toeach other than any system invented by themselves. This, after all, isthe secret principle of the Church's vitality. She gave a spiritualcharter of equality to mankind long before the philosophers thought ofgiving them a material one. If, all the while, she has been fighting fordominion, arrogating to herself special privileges, struggling topreserve the old lines of social and legal demarcation, it has beenbecause for nigh two thousand years she has cherished in her breast theone free city of the spirit, because to guard its liberties she has hadto defend and strengthen her own position. I do not ask you to considerwhence comes this insight into the needs of man, this mysterious powerover him; I ask you simply to confess them in their results. I am not ofthose who believe that God permits good to come to mankind through onechannel only, and I doubt not that now and in times past the thinkerswhom your Highness follows have done much to raise the condition oftheir fellows; but I would have you observe that, where they have doneso, it has been because, at bottom, their aims coincided with theChurch's. The deeper you probe into her secret sources of power, themore you find there, in the germ if you will, but still potentiallyactive, all those humanising energies which work together for thelifting of the race. In her wisdom and her patience she may have seenfit to withhold their expression, to let them seek another outlet; butthey are there, stored in her consciousness like the archetypes of thePlatonists in the Universal Mind. It is the knowledge of this, the sureknowledge of it, which creates the atmosphere of serenity that you feelabout you. From the tilling of the vineyards, or the dressing of abeggar's sores, to the loftiest and most complicated intellectual labourimposed on him, each brother knows that his daily task is part of agreat scheme of action, working ever from imperfection to perfection,from human incompleteness to the divine completion. This sense of being,not straws on a blind wind of chance, but units in an ordered force,gives to the humblest Christian an individual security and dignity whichkings on their thrones might envy.
"But not only does the Church anticipate every tendency of mankind;alone of all powers she knows how to control and direct the passions sheexcites. This it is which makes her an auxiliary that no temporal princecan well despise. It is in this aspect that I would have your Highnessconsider her. Do not underrate her power because it seems based on thecommoner instincts rather than on the higher faculties of man. That isone of the sources of her strength. She can support her claims by reasonand argument, but it is because her work, like that of her divineFounder, lies chiefly among those who can neither reason nor argue, thatshe chooses to rest her appeal on the simplest and most universalemotions. As, in our towns, the streets are lit mainly by the tapersbefore the shrines of the saints, so the way of life would be dark tothe great multitude of men but for the light of faith burning withinthem..."Meanwhile the shufflings of destiny had brought to Trescorre the prizefor which he waited. During the Duke's illness he had been appointedregent of Pianura, and his sovereign's reluctance to take up the caresof government had now left him for six months in authority. The dayafter the proclaiming of the constitution Odo had withdrawn hissignature from it, on the ground that the concessions it contained wereinopportune. The functions of government went on again in the old way.
The old abuses persisted, the old offences were condoned: it was asthough the apathy of the sovereign had been communicated to his people.
Centuries of submission were in their blood, and for two generationsthere had been no warfare south of the Alps.
For the moment men's minds were turned to the great events going forwardin France. It had not yet occurred to the Italians that the recoil ofthese events might be felt among themselves. They were simply amusedspectators, roused at last to the significance of the show, but neverdreaming that they might soon be called from the wings to thefootlights. To de Crucis, however, the possibility of such a call wasalready present, and it was he who pressed the Duke to return to hispost. A deep reluctance held Odo back. He would have liked to linger onin the monastery, leading the tranquil yet busy life of the monks, andtrying to read the baffling riddle of its completeness. At that momentit seemed to him of vastly more importance to discover the exact natureof the soul--whether it was in fact a metaphysical entity, as these menbelieved, or a mere secretion of the brain, as he had been taught tothink--than to go back and govern his people. For what mattered therest, if he had been mistaken about the soul?
With a start he realised that he was going as his cousin had gone--thatthis was but another form of the fatal lethargy that hung upon his race.
An effort of the will drew him back to Pianura, and made him resume thesemblance of authority; but it carried him no farther. Trescorreostensibly became prime minister, and in reality remained the head ofthe state. The Duke was present at the cabinet meetings but took no partin the direction of affairs. His mind was lost in a maze of metaphysicalspeculations; and even these served him merely as somecunningly-contrived toy with which to trick his leisure.
His revocation of the charter had necessarily separated him from Gambaand the advanced liberals. He knew that the hunchback, ever scornful ofexpediency, charged him with disloyalty to the people; but such chargescould no longer wound. The events following the Duke's birthday hadserved to crystallise the schemes of the little liberal group, and theynow formed a campaign of active opposition to the government, attackingit by means of pamphlets and lampoons, and by such public speaking asthe police allowed. The new professors of the University, ardently insympathy with the constitutional movement, used their lectures as meansof political teaching, and the old stronghold of dogma became the centreof destructive criticism. But as yet these ideas formed but a singlelive point in the general numbness.
Two years passed in this way. North of the Alps, all Europe wasconvulsed, while Italy was still but a sleeper who tosses in his sleep.
In the two Sicilies, the arrogance and perfidy of the government gave afew martyrs to the cause, and in Bologna there was a brief revolutionaryoutbreak; but for the most part the Italian states were sinking intoinanition. Venice, by recalling her fleet from Greece, let fall thedominion of the sea. Twenty years earlier Genoa had basely yieldedCorsica to France. The Pope condemned the French for their outrages onreligion, and his subjects murdered Basseville, the agent of the newrepublic. The sympathies and impulses of the various states were ascontradictory as they were ineffectual.
Meanwhile, in France, Europe was trying to solve at a stroke theproblems of a thousand years. All the repressed passions whichcivilisation had sought, however imperfectly, to curb, stalked abroaddestructive as flood and fire. The great generation of theEncyclopaedists had passed away, and the teachings of Rousseau hadprevailed over those of Montesquieu and Voltaire. The sober sense of theeconomists was swept aside by the sound and fury of the demagogues, andFrance was become a very Babel of tongues. The old malady of words hadswept over the world like a pestilence.
To the little Italian courts, still dozing in fancied security under thewing of Bourbon and Hapsburg suzerains, these rumours were borne by thewild flight of emigres--dead leaves loosened by the first blast of thestorm. Month by month they poured across the Alps in ever-increasingnumbers, bringing confused contradictory tales of anarchy and outrage.
Among those whom chance thus carried to Pianura were certain familiarsof the Duke's earlier life--the Count Alfieri and his royal mistress,flying from Paris, and arriving breathless with the tale of theirprivate injuries. To the poet of revolt this sudden realisation of hisdoctrines seemed in fact a purely personal outrage. It was as though aman writing an epic poem on an earthquake should suddenly find himselfengulphed. To Alfieri the downfall of the French monarchy and thetriumph of democratic ideas meant simply that his French investments hadshrunk to nothing, and that he, the greatest poet of the age, had beenobliged, at an immense s............