The Valley of Decision

1.2.

The gleam of a lantern woke Odo.  The horses had stopped at the gates of Pianura, and the abate giving the pass-word, the carriage rolled under the gatehouse and continued its way over the loud cobble-stones of the ducal streets.  These streets were so dark, being lit but by some lantern projecting here and there from the angle of a wall, or by the flare of an oil-lamp under a shrine, that Odo, leaning eagerly out, could only now and then catch a sculptured palace-window, the grinning mask on the keystone of an archway, or the gleaming yellowish facade of a church inlaid with marbles.  Once or twice an uncurtained window showed a group of men drinking about a wineshop table, or an artisan bending over his work by the light of a tallow dip; but for the most part doors and windows were barred and the streets disturbed only by the watchman’s cry or by a flash of light and noise as a sedan chair passed with its escort of linkmen and servants.  All this was amazing enough to the sleepy eyes of the little boy so unexpectedly translated from the solitude of Pontesordo; but when the carriage turned under another arch and drew up before the doorway of a great building ablaze with lights, the pressure of accumulated emotions made him fling his arms about his preceptor’s neck.

“Courage, cavaliere, courage!  You have duties, you have responsibilities,” the abate admonished him; and Odo, choking back his fright, suffered himself to be lifted out by one of the lacqueys grouped about the door.  The abate, who carried a much lower crest than at Pontesordo, and seemed far more anxious to please the servants than they to oblige him, led the way up a shining marble staircase where beggars whined on the landings and powdered footmen in the ducal livery were running to and fro with trays of refreshments.  Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke’s palace, had vaguely imagined that his father’s death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors.  The thought that his father’s death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper.

“Mamma!  Mamma!” he cried, springing forward in a passion of tears.

The lady, who was young, pale and handsome, pushed back her chair with a warning hand.

“Child,” she exclaimed, “your shoes are covered with mud; and, good heavens, how you smell of the stable!  Abate, is it thus you teach your pupil to approach me?”

“Madam, I am abashed by the cavaliere’s temerity.  But in truth I believe excessive grief has clouded his wits—­’tis inconceivable how he mourns his father!”

Donna Laura’s eyebrows rose in a faint smile.  “May he never have worse to grieve for!” said she in French; then, extending her scented hand to the little boy, she added solemnly:  “My son, we have suffered an irreparable loss.”

Odo, abashed by her rebuke and the abate’s apology, had drawn his heels together in a rustic version of the low bow with which the children of that day were taught to approach their parents.

“Holy Virgin!” said his mother with a laugh, “I perceive they have no dancing-master at Pontesordo.  Cavaliere, you may kiss my hand.  So—­that’s better; we shall make a gentleman of you yet.  But what makes your face so wet?  Ah, crying, to be sure.  Mother of God! as for crying, there’s enough to cry about.”  She put the child aside and turned to the preceptor.  “The Duke refuses to pay,” she said with a shrug of despair.

“Good heavens!” lamented the abate, raising his hands.  “And Don Lelio?” he faltered.

She shrugged again, impatiently.  “As great a gambler as my husband.  They’re all alike, abate:  six times since last Easter has the bill been sent to me for that trifle of a turquoise buckle he made such a to-do about giving me.”  She rose and began to pace the room in disorder.  “I’m a ruined woman,” she cried, “and it’s a disgrace for the Duke to refuse me.”

The abate raised an admonishing finger.  “Excellency…excellency…”

She glanced over her shoulder.

“Eh?  You’re right.  Everything is heard here.  But who’s to pay for my mourning the saints alone know!  I sent an express this morning to my father, but you know my brothers bleed him like leeches.  I could have got this easily enough from the Duke a year ago—­it’s his marriage has made him so stiff.  That little white-faced fool—­she hates me because Lelio won’t look at her, and she thinks it’s my fault.  As if I cared whom he looks at!  Sometimes I think he has money put away…all I want is two hundred ducats…a woman of my rank!” She turned suddenly on Odo, who stood, very small and frightened, in the corner to which she had pushed him.  “What are you staring at, child?  Eh! the monkey is dropping with sleep.  Look at his eyes, abate!  Here, Vanna, Tonina, to bed with him; he may sleep with you in my dressing-closet, Tonina.  Go with her, child, go; but for God’s sake wake him if he snores.  I’m too ill to have my rest disturbed.”  And she lifted a pomander to her nostrils.

The next few days dwelt in Odo’s memory as a blur of strange sights and sounds.  The super-acute state of his perceptions was succeeded after a night’s sleep by the natural passivity with which children accept the improbable, so that he passed from one novel impression to another as easily and with the same exhilaration as if he had been listening to a fairy tale.  Solitude and neglect had no surprises for him, and it seemed natural enough that his mother and her maids should be too busy to remember his presence.

For the first day or two he sat unnoticed on his little stool in a corner of his mother’s room, while packing-chests were dragged in, wardrobes emptied, mantua-makers and milliners consulted, and troublesome creditors dismissed with abuse, or even blows, by the servants lounging in the ante-chamber.  Donna Laura continued to show the liveliest symptoms of concern, but the child perceived her distress to be but indirectly connected with the loss she had suffered, and he had seen enough of poverty at the farm to guess that the need of money was somehow at the bottom of her troubles.  How any one could be in want, who slept between damask curtains and lived on sweet cakes and chocolate, it exceeded his fancy to conceive; yet there were times when his mother’s voice had the same frightened angry sound as Filomena’s on the days when the bailiff went over the accounts at Pontesordo.

Her excellency’s rooms, during these days, were always crowded, for besides the dressmakers and other merchants there was the hairdresser, or French Monsu—­a loud, important figure, with a bag full of cosmetics and curling-irons—­the abate, always running in and out with messages and letters, and taking no more notice of Odo than if he had never seen him, and a succession of ladies brimming with condolences, and each followed by a servant who swelled the noisy crowd of card-playing lacqueys in the ante-chamber.

Through all these figures came and went another, to Odo the most noticeable,—­that of a handsome young man with a high manner, dressed always in black, but with an excess of lace ruffles and jewels, a clouded amber head to his cane, and red heels to his shoes.  This young gentleman, whose age could not have been more than twenty, and who had the coldest insolent air, was treated with profound respect by all but Donna Laura, who was for ever quarrelling with him when he was present, yet could not support his absence without lamentations and alarm.  The abate appeared to act as messenger between the two, and when he came to say that the Count rode with the court, or was engaged to sup with the Prime Minister, or had business on his father’s estate in the country, the lady would openly yield to her distress, crying out that she knew well enough what his excuses meant:  that she was the most cruelly outraged of women, and that he treated her no better than a husband.

For two days Odo languished in his corner, whisked by the women’s skirts, smothered under the hoops and falbalas which the dressmakers unpacked from their cases, fed at irregular hours, and faring on the whole no better than at Pontesordo.  The third morning, Vanna, who seemed the most good-natured of the women, cried out on his pale looks when she brought him his cup of chocolate.  “I declare,” she exclaimed, “the child has had no air since he came in from the farm.  What does your excellency say?  Shall the hunchback take him for a walk in the gardens?”

To this her excellency, who sat at her toilet under the hair-dresser’s hands, irritably replied that she had not slept all night and was in no state to be tormented about such trifles, but that the child might go where he pleased.

Odo, who was very weary of his corner, sprang up readily enough when Vanna, at this, beckoned him to the inner ante-chamber.  Here, where persons of a certain condition waited (the outer being given over to servants and tradesmen), they found a lean humpbacked boy, shabbily dressed in darned stockings and a faded coat, but with an extraordinary keen pale face that at once attracted and frightened the child.

“There, go with him; he won’t eat you,” said Vanna, giving him a push as she hurried away; and Odo, trembling a little, laid his hand in the boy’s.  “Where do you come from?” he faltered, looking up into his companion’s face.

The boy laughed and the blood rose to his high cheekbones.  “I?—­From the Innocenti, if your Excellency knows where that is,” said he.

Odo’s face lit up.  “Of course I do,” he cried, reassured.  “I know a girl who comes from there—­the Momola at Pontesordo.”

“Ah, indeed?” said the boy with a queer look.  “Well, she’s my sister, then.  Give her my compliments when you see her, cavaliere.  Oh, we’re a large family, we are!”

Odo’s perplexity was returning.  “Are you really Momola’s brother?” he asked.

“Eh, in a way—­we’re children of the same house.”

“But you live in the palace, don’t you?” Odo persisted, his curiosity surmounting his fear.  “Are you a servant of my mother’s?”

“I’m the servant of your illustrious mother’s servants; the abatino of the waiting-women.  I write their love-letters, do you see, cavaliere, I carry their rubbish to the pawnbroker’s when their sweethearts have bled them of their savings; I clean the birdcages and feed the monkeys, and do the steward’s accounts when he’s drunk, and sleep on a bench in the portico and steal my food from the pantry…and my father very likely goes in velvet and carries a sword at his side.”

The boy’s voice had grown shrill, and his eyes blazed like an owl’s in the dark.  Odo would have given the world to be back in his corner, but he was ashamed to betray his lack of heart; and to give himself courage he asked haughtily:  “And what is your name, boy?”

The hunchback gave him a gleaming look.  “Call me Brutus,” he cried, “for Brutus killed a tyrant.”  He gave Odo’s hand a pull.  “Come along,” said he, “and I’ll show you his statue in the garden—­Brutus’s statue in a prince’s garden, mind you!” And as the little boy trotted at his side down the long corridors he kept repeating under his breath in a kind of angry sing-song, “For Brutus killed a tyrant.”

The sense of strangeness inspired by his odd companion soon gave way in Odo’s mind to emotions of delight and wonder.  He was, even at that age, unusually sensitive to external impressions, and when the hunchback, after descending many stairs and winding through endless back-passages, at length led him out on a terrace above the gardens, the beauty of the sight swelled his little heart to bursting.

A Duke of Pianura had, some hundred years earlier, caused a great wing to be added to his palace by the eminent architect Carlo Borromini, and this accomplished designer had at the same time replanted and enlarged the ducal gardens.  To Odo, who had never seen plantations more artful than the vineyards and mulberry orchards about Pontesordo, these perspectives of clipped beech and yew, these knots of box filled in with multi-coloured sand, appeared, with the fountains, colonnades and trellised arbours surmounted by globes of glass, to represent the very pattern and Paradise of gardens.  It seemed indeed too beautiful to be real, and he trembled, as he sometimes did at the music of the Easter mass, when the hunchback, laughing at his amazement, led him down the terrace steps.

It was Odo’s lot in after years to walk the alleys of many a splendid garden, and to pace, often wearily enough, the paths along which he was now led; but never after did he renew the first enchanted impression of mystery and brightness that remained with him as the most vivid emotion of his childhood.

Though it was February the season was so soft that the orange and lemon trees had been put out in their earthen vases before the lemon-house, and the beds in the parterres were full of violets, daffodils and auriculas; but the scent of the orange-blossoms and the bright colours of the flowers moved Odo less than the noble ordonnance of the pleached alleys, each terminated by a statue or a marble seat; and when he came to the grotto where, amid rearing sea-horses and Tritons, a cascade poured from the grove above, his wonder passed into such delicious awe as hung him speechless on the hunchback’s hand.

“Eh,” said the latter with a sneer, “it’s a finer garden than we have at our family palace.  Do you know what’s planted there?” he asked, turning suddenly on the little boy.  “Dead bodies, cavaliere!  Rows and rows of them; the bodies of my brothers and sisters, the Innocents who die like flies every year of the cholera and the measles and the putrid fever.”  He saw the terror in Odo’s face and added in a gentler tone:  “Eh, don’t cry, cavaliere; they sleep better in those beds than in any others they’re like to lie on.  Come, come, and I’ll show your excellency the aviaries.”

From the aviaries they passed to the Chinese pavilion, where the Duke supped on summer evenings, and thence to the bowling-alley, the fish-stew and the fruit-garden.  At every step some fresh surprise arrested Odo; but the terrible vision of that other garden planted with the dead bodies of the Innocents robbed the spectacle of its brightness, dulled the plumage of the birds behind their gilt wires and cast a deeper shade over the beech-grove, where figures of goat-faced men lurked balefully in the twilight.  Odo was glad when they left the blackness of this grove for the open walks, where gardeners were working and he had the reassurance of the sky.  The hunchback, who seemed sorry that he had frightened him, told him many curious stories about the marble images that adorned the walks; and pausing suddenly before one of a naked man with a knife in his hand, cried out in a frenzy:  “This is my namesake, Brutus!” But when Odo would have asked if the naked man was a kinsman, the boy hurried him on, saying only:  “You’ll read of him some day in Plutarch.”