The Valley of Decision

2.10.

At the Duke’s express wish, Odo was to lodge in the palace; and when he entered the courtyard he found Cantapresto waiting to lead him to his apartment.

The rooms assigned to him lay at the end of one of the wings overlooking the gardens; and as he mounted the great stairway and walked down the corridors with their frescoed walls and busts of Roman emperors he recalled the far-off night when he had passed through the same scenes as a frightened awe-struck child.  Where he had then beheld a supernatural fabric, peopled with divinities of bronze and marble, and glowing with light and colour, he now saw a many-corridored palace, stately indeed, and full of a faded splendour, but dull and antiquated in comparison with the new-fangled elegance of the Sardinian court.  Yet at every turn some object thrilled the fibres of old association or pride of race.  Here he traversed a gallery hung with the portraits of his line; there caught a glimpse of the pages’ antechamber through which he and his mother had been led when they waited on the Duke; and from the windows of his closet he overlooked the alleys and terraces where he had wandered with the hunchback.

One of the Duke’s pages came to say that his Highness would receive the cavaliere when the court rose from dinner; and finding himself with two hours on his hands, Odo determined to await his kinsman’s summons in the garden.  Thither he presently repaired; and was soon, with a mournful pleasure, retracing the paths he had first explored in such an ecstasy of wonder.  The pleached walks and parterres were in all the freshness of June.  Roses and jasmine mingled on the terrace-walls, citron-trees ingeniously grafted with red and white carnations stood in Faenza jars before the lemon-house, and marble nymphs and fauns peeped from thickets of flowering camellias.  A noise of childish voices presently attracted Odo, and following a tunnel of clipped limes he came out on a theatre cut in the turf and set about with statues of Apollo and the Muses.  A handful of boys in military dress were performing a series of evolutions in the centre of this space; and facing them stood a child of about ten years, in a Colonel’s uniform covered with orders, his hair curled and powdered, a paste-board sword in his hand, and his frail body supported on one side by a turbaned dwarf, and on the other by an ecclesiastic who was evidently his governor.  The child, as Odo approached, was calling out his orders to his regiment in a weak shrill voice, moving now here, now there on his booted tottering legs, as his two supporters guided him, and painfully trying to flourish the paper weapon that was too heavy for his nerveless wrist.  Behind this strange group stood another figure, that of a tall heavy man, richly dressed, with a curious Oriental-looking order on his breast and a veiled somnolent eye which he kept fixed on the little prince.

Odo had been about to advance and do homage to his cousin; but a sign from the man in the background arrested him.  The manoeuvres were soon over, the heir was lifted into a little gilded chariot drawn by white goats, his regiment formed in line and saluted him, and he disappeared down one of the alleys with his attendants.

This ceremony over, the tall man advanced to Odo with a bow and asked pardon for the liberty he had taken.

“You are doubtless,” said he, “his Highness’s cousin, the Cavaliere Valsecca; and my excuse for intruding between yourself and the prince is that I am the Duke’s physician, Count Heiligenstern, and that the heir is at present undergoing a course of treatment under my care.  His health, as you probably know, has long been a cause of anxiety to his illustrious parents, and when I was summoned to Pianura the College of Physicians had given up all hope of saving him.  Since my coming, however, I flatter myself that a marked change is perceptible.  My method is that of invigorating the blood by exciting the passions most likely to produce a generous vital ardour.  Thus, by organising these juvenile manoeuvres, I arouse the prince’s martial zeal; by encouraging him to study the history of his ancestors, I evoke his political ambition; by causing him to be led about the gardens on a pony, accompanied by a miniature pack of Maltese dogs in pursuit of a tame doe, I stimulate the passion of the chase; but it is essential to my system that one emotion should not violently counteract another, and I am therefore obliged to protect my noble patient from the sudden intrusion of new impressions.”

This explanation, delivered in a sententious tone, and with a strong German accent, seemed to Odo no more than a learned travesty of the familiar and pathetic expedient of distracting a sick child by the pretence of manly diversions.  He was struck, however, by the physician’s aspect, and would have engaged him in talk had not one of the Duke’s gentlemen appeared with the announcement that his Highness would be pleased to receive the Cavaliere Valsecca.

Like most dwellings of its kind in Italy, the palace of Pianura resembled one of those shells which reveal by their outer convolutions the gradual development of the creature housed within.  For two or three generations after Bracciaforte, the terrible founder of the line, had made himself master of the republic, his descendants had clung to the old brick fortress or rocca which the great condottiere had held successfully against the burghers’ arquebuses and the battering-rams of rival adventurers, and which still glassed its battlements in the slow waters of the Piana beside the city wall.  It was Ascanio, the first Duke, the correspondent of Politian and Castiglione, who, finding the ancestral lair too cramped for the court of a humanist prince, had summoned Luciano da Laurana to build a palace better fitted to his state.  Duke Ascanio, in bronze by Verocchio, still looked up with pride from the palace-square at the brick and terra-cotta facade with its fruit-wreathed arches crowned by imperial profiles; but a later prince found the small rooms and intricate passages of Laurana’s structure inadequate to the pomp of an ally of Leo X., and Vignola added the state apartments, 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 friend Cardinal Bembo in prose; Correggio painted the walls of one room, Guilio Romano the ceiling of another.  It seemed that magnificence could go no farther, till the seventeenth century brought to the throne a Duke who asked himself how a self-respecting prince could live without a theatre, a riding-school and an additional wing to lodge the ever-growing train of 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 and inviting to Pianura the great Roman architect Carlo Borromini, who regretfully admitted that his illustrious patron was on the whole less royally housed than their Highnesses of Mantua and Parma.  Within five years the “cavallerizza,” the theatre and the gardens flung defiance at these aspiring potentates; and again Pianura took precedence of her rivals.  The present Duke’s father had expressed the most recent tendency of the race by the erection of a chapel in the florid Jesuit style; and the group of buildings thus chronicled in rich durable lines the varying passions and ambitions of three hundred years of power.

As Odo followed his guide toward the Duke’s apartments he remarked a change in the aspect of the palace.  Where formerly the corridors had been thronged with pages, lacqueys and gaily-dressed cavaliers and ladies, only a few ecclesiastics now glided by:  here a Monsignore in ermine and lace rochet, attended by his chaplain and secretaries, there a cowled Dominican or a sober-looking secular priest.  The Duke was lodged in the oldest portion of the palace, and Odo, who had never visited these apartments, looked with interest at the projecting sculptured chimney and vaulted ceiling of the pages’ ante-chamber, which had formerly been the guardroom and was still hung with panoplies.  Thence he was led into a gallery lined with scriptural tapestries and furnished in the heavy style of the seventeenth century.  Here he waited a few moments, hearing the sound of conversation in the room beyond; then the door of this apartment opened, and a handsome Dominican passed out, 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-carving touched with gold.  Over this panelling, regardless of the beauty of its design, had been hung a mass of reliquaries and small devotional bas-reliefs and paintings, making the room appear more like the chapel of a wonder-working saint than a prince’s closet.  Here again Odo found himself alone; but the page presently returned to say that his Highness was 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 on a dais.  The plumed posts and sumptuous hangings of the bed gave it an altar-like air, and the Duke himself, who lay between the curtains, his wig replaced by a nightcap, a scapular about his neck, and his shrivelled body wrapped in a brocaded dressing-gown, looked more like a relic than a man.  His heavy under-lip trembled slightly as he offered his hand to Odo’s salute.

“You find me, cousin,” said he after a brief greeting, “much troubled by a 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?” he clutched Odo’s hand in his burning grasp.  “Is it possible that there are human beings so heedless of their doom that they can go about their earthly pleasures with this awful problem unsolved?  Oh, why has not some Pope decided it?  Why has God left this hideous uncertainty hanging over us?  You know the doctrine of Plotinus—­’he who has access to God leaves the virtues behind him as the images of the gods are left in the outer temple.’  Many of the fathers believed that the Neoplatonists were permitted to foreshadow in their teachings the revelation of Christ; but on these occult points much doubt remains, and though certain of the great theologians have inclined to this interpretation, there are others who hold that it leans to the heresy of Quietism.”

Odo, who had inferred in the Duke’s opening words an allusion to the little prince’s ill-health, or to some political anxiety, was at a loss how to reply to this strange appeal; but after a moment he said, “I have heard that your Highness’s director is a man of great learning and discrimination.  Can he not help your Highness to some decision on this point?”

The Duke glanced at him suspiciously.  “Father Ignazio,” said he, “is in fact well-versed in theology; but there are certain doctrines inaccessible to all but a few who have received the direct illumination of heaven, and on this point I cannot feel that his judgment is final.”  He wiped the dampness from his sallow forehead and pressed the scapular to his lips.  “May you never know,” he cried, “the agony of a father whose child is dying, of a sovereign who longs to labour for the welfare of his people, but who is racked by the thought that in giving his mind to temporal duties and domestic affections while such spiritual difficulties are still unsolved, he may be preparing for himself an eternity of torture such as that—­” and he pointed to an old and blackened picture of the Last Judgment that hung on the opposite wall.

Odo tried to frame a soothing rejoinder; but the Duke passionately interrupted him.  “Alas, cousin, no rest is possible for one who has attained the rapture of the Beatific Vision, yet who trembles lest the mere mechanical indulgence of the senses may still subject him to the common penalty of sin!  As a man who has devoted himself to the study of theology is privileged to argue on questions forbidden to the vulgar, so surely fasting, maceration and ecstasy must liberate the body from the bondage of prescribed morality.  Shall no distinction be recognised between my conduct and that of the common sot or debauchee whose soul lies in blind subjection to his lower instincts?  I, who have laboured early and late to remove temptation from my people—­who have punished offences against conduct as unsparingly as spiritual error—­I, who have not scrupled to destroy every picture in my galleries that contained a nude figure or a wanton attitude—­I, who have been blessed from childhood by tokens of divine favour and miraculous intervention—­can I doubt that I have earned the privileges of that higher state in which the soul is no longer responsible for the failings of the body?  And yet—­and yet—­what if I were mistaken?” he moaned.  “What if my advisors have deceived me?  Si autem et sic impius sum, quare frustra laboravi?” And he sank back on his pillows limp as an empty glove.

Alarmed at his disorder, Odo stood irresolute whether to call for help; but as he hesitated the Duke feebly drew from his bosom a gold key attached to a slender Venetian chain.

“This,” said he, “unlocks the small tortoise-shell cabinet yonder.  In it you will find a phial of clear liquor, a few drops of which will restore me.  ’Tis an essence distilled by the Benedictine nuns of the Perpetual Adoration and peculiarly effective in accesses of spiritual disturbance.”

Odo complied, and having poured the liquor into a glass, held it to his cousin’s lips.  In a moment the Duke’s eye revived and he began to speak in a weak but composed voice, with an air of dignity in singular contrast to his previous self-abandonment.  “I am,” said he, “unhappily subject to such seizures after any prolonged exertion, and a conversation I have just had with my director has left me in no fit state to receive you.  The cares of government sit heavy on one who has scarce health enough for the duties of a private station; and were it not for my son I should long since have withdrawn to the shelter of the monastic life.”  He paused and looked at Odo with a melancholy kindness.  “In you,” said he, “the native weakness of our complexion appears to have been tempered by the blood of your mother’s house, and your countenance gives every promise of health and vivacity.”

He broke off with a sigh and continued in a more authoritative tone:  “You have learned from Count Trescorre my motive in summoning you to Pianura.  My son’s health causes me the liveliest concern, my own is subject to such seizures as you have just witnessed.  I cannot think that, in this age of infidelity and disorder, God can design to deprive a Christian state of a line of sovereigns uniformly zealous in the defence of truth; but the purposes of Heaven are inscrutable, as the recent suppression of the Society of Jesus has most strangely proved; and should our dynasty be extinguished I am consoled by the thought that the rule will pass to one of our house.  Of this I shall have more to say to you in future.  Meanwhile your first business is to acquaint yourself with your new surroundings.  The Duchess holds a circle this evening, where you will meet the court; but I must advise you that the persons her Highness favours with her intimacy are not those best qualified to guide and instruct a young man in your position.  These you will meet at the house of the Countess Belverde, one of the Duchess’s ladies, a woman of sound judgment and scrupulous piety, who gathers about her all our most learned and saintly ecclesiastics.  Count Trescorre will instruct you in all that becomes your position at court, and my director, Father Ignazio, will aid you in the selection of a confessor.  As to the Bishop, a most worthy and conversable prelate, to whom I would have you show all due regard, his zeal in spiritual matters is not as great as I could wish, and in private talk he indulges in a laxity of opinion against which I cannot too emphatically warn you.  Happily, however, Pianura offers other opportunities of edification.  Father Ignazio is a man of wide learning and inflexible doctrine, and in several of our monasteries, notably that of the Barnabites, you will find examples of sanctity and wisdom such as a young man may well devoutly consider.  Our convents also are distinguished for the severity of their rule and the spiritual privileges accorded them.  The Carmelites have every reason to hope for the beatification of their aged Prioress, and among the nuns of the Perpetual Adoration is one who has recently received the ineffable grace of the vulnus divinum.  In the conversation of these saintly nuns, and of the holy Abbot of the Barnabites, you will find the surest safeguard against those errors and temptations that beset your age.”  He leaned back with a gesture of dismissal; but added, reddening slightly, as Odo prepared to withdraw:  “You will oblige me, cousin, when you meet my physician, Count Heiligenstern, by not touching on the matter of the restorative you have seen me take.”

Odo left his cousin’s presence with a feeling of deep discouragement.  To a spirit aware of the new influences abroad, and fresh from contact with evils rooted in the very foundations of the existing system, there was a peculiar irony in being advised to seek guidance and instruction in the society of ecstatic nuns and cloistered theologians.  The Duke, with his sickly soul agrope in a maze of Neoplatonism and probabilism, while his people groaned under unjust taxes, while knowledge and intellectual liberty languished in a kind of moral pest-house, seemed to Odo like a ruler who, in time of famine, should keep the royal granaries locked and spend his days praying for the succour that his own hand might have dispensed.

In the tapestry room one of his Highness’s gentlemen waited to reconduct Odo.  Their way lay through the portrait gallery of which he had previously caught a glimpse, and here he begged his guide to leave him.  He felt a sudden desire to meet his unknown ancestors face to face, and to trace the tendencies which, from the grim Bracciaforte and the stately sceptical humanist of Leo’s age, had mysteriously forced the race into its ever-narrowing mould.  The dusky canvases, hung high in tarnished escutcheoned frames, presented a continuous chronicle of the line, from Bracciaforte himself, with his predatory profile outlined by some early Tuscan hand against the turrets of his impregnable fortress.  Odo lingered long on this image, but it was not till he stood beneath Piero della Francesca’s portrait of the first Duke that he felt the thrill of kindred instincts.  In this grave face, with its sensuous mouth and melancholy speculative eyes, he recognised the mingled strain of impressionability and unrest that had reached such diverse issues in his cousin and himself.  The great Duke of the “Golden Age,” in his Titianesque brocade, the statuette of a naked faun at his elbow, and a faun-like smile on his own ruddy lips, represented another aspect of the ancestral spirit:  the rounded temperament of an age of Cyrenaicism, in which every moment was a ripe fruit sunned on all sides.  A little farther on, the shadow of the Council of Trent began to fall on the ducal faces, as the uniform blackness of the Spanish habit replaced the sumptuous colours of the Renaissance.  Here was the persecuting Bishop, Paul IV.’s ally against the Spaniards, painted by Caravaggio in hauberk and mailed gloves, with his motto—­Etiam cum gladio—­surmounting the episcopal chair; there the Duke who, after a life of hard warfare and stern piety, had resigned his office to his son and died in the “angelica vestis” of the tertiary order; and the “beatified” Duchess who had sold her jewels to buy corn for the poor during the famine of 1670, and had worn a hair-shirt under a corset that seemed stiff enough to serve all the purposes of bodily mortification.  So the file descended, the colours fading, the shadows deepening, till it reached a baby porporato of the last century, who had donned the cardinal’s habit at four, and stood rigid and a little pale in his red robes and lace, with a crucifix and a skull on the table to which the top of his berretta hardly reached.

It seemed to Odo as he gazed on the long line of faces as though their owners had entered one by one into a narrowing defile, where the sun rose later and set earlier on each successive traveller; and in every countenance, from that of the first Duke to that of his own peruked and cuirassed grandfather, he discerned the same symptom of decadency:  that duality of will which, in a delicately-tempered race, is the fatal fruit of an undisturbed pre-eminence.  They had ruled too long and enjoyed too much; and the poor creature he had just left to his dismal scruples and forebodings seemed the mere empty husk of long-exhausted passions.