The Valley of Decision

2.1.

One afternoon of April in the year 1774, Odo Valsecca, riding down the hillside below the church of the Superga, had reined in his horse at a point where a group of Spanish chestnuts overhung the way.  The air was light and pure, the shady turf invited him, and dismounting he bid his servant lead the horses to the wayside inn half way down the slope.

The spot he had chosen, though secluded as some nook above the gorge of Donnaz, commanded a view of the Po rolling at his feet like a flood of yellowish metal, and beyond, outspread in clear spring sunshine, the great city in the bosom of the plain.  The spectacle was fair enough to touch any fancy:  brown domes and facades set in new-leaved gardens and surrounded by vineyards extending to the nearest acclivities; country-houses glancing through the fresh green of planes and willows; monastery-walls cresting the higher ridges; and westward the Po winding in sunlit curves toward the Alps.

Odo had lost none of his sensitiveness to such impressions; but the sway of another mood turned his eye from the outstretched beauty of the city to the vernal solitude about him.  It was the season when old memories of Donnaz worked in his blood; when the banks and hedges of the fresh hill-country about Turin cheated him with a breath of budding beech-groves and the fragrance of crushed fern in the glens of the high Pennine valleys.  It was a mere waft, perhaps, from some clod of loosened earth, or the touch of cool elastic moss as he flung himself face downward under the trees; but the savour, the contact filled his nostrils with mountain air and his eyes with dim-branched distances.  At Donnaz the slow motions of the northern spring had endeared to him all those sweet incipiencies preceding the full choral burst of leaf and flower:  the mauve mist over bare woodlands, the wet black gleams in frost-bound hollows, the thrust of fronds through withered bracken, the primrose-patches spreading like pale sunshine along wintry lanes.  He had always felt a sympathy for these delicate unnoted changes; but the feeling which had formerly been like the blind stir of sap in a plant was now a conscious sensation that groped for speech and understanding.

He had grown up among people to whom such emotions were unknown.  The old Marquess’s passion for his fields and woods was the love of the agriculturist and the hunter, not that of the naturalist or the poet; and the aristocracy of the cities regarded the country merely as so much soil from which to draw their maintenance.  The gentlefolk never absented themselves from town but for a few weeks of autumn, when they went to their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres.  Odo’s tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting Countess had received the handful of wind-flowers that, fresh from a sunrise on the hills, he had laid one morning among her toilet-boxes.  The Countess Clarice had stared and laughed, and every one of his acquaintance, Alfieri even, would have echoed her laugh; but one man at least had felt the divine commotion of nature’s touch, had felt and interpreted it, in words as fresh as spring verdure, in the pages of a volume that Odo now drew from his pocket.

“I longed to dream, but some unexpected spectacle continually distracted me from my musings.  Here immense rocks hung their ruinous masses above my head; there the thick mist of roaring waterfalls enveloped me; or some unceasing torrent tore open at my very feet an abyss into which the gaze feared to plunge.  Sometimes I was lost in the twilight of a thick wood; sometimes, on emerging from a dark ravine, my eyes were charmed by the sight of an open meadow…Nature seemed to revel in unwonted contrasts; such varieties of aspect had she united in one spot.  Here was an eastern prospect bright with spring flowers, while autumn fruits ripened to the south and the northern face of the scene was still locked in wintry frosts…Add to this the different angles at which the peaks took the light, the chiaroscuro of sun and shade, and the variations of light resulting from it at morning and evening…sum up the impressions I have tried to describe and you will be able to form an idea of the enchanting situation in which I found myself…The scene has indeed a magical, a supernatural quality, which so ravishes the spirit and senses that one seems to lose all exact notion of one’s surroundings and identity.”

This was a new language to eighteenth-century readers.  Already it had swept through the length and breadth of France, like a spring storm-wind bursting open doors and windows, and filling close candle-lit rooms with wet gusts and the scent of beaten blossoms; but south of the Alps the new ideas travelled slowly, and the Piedmontese were as yet scarce aware of the man who had written thus of their own mountains.  It was true that, some thirty years earlier, in one of the very monasteries on which Odo now looked down, a Swiss vagrant called Rousseau had embraced the true faith with the most moving signs of edification; but the rescue of Helvetian heretics was a favourite occupation of the Turinese nobility and it is doubtful if any recalled the name of the strange proselyte who had hastened to signalise his conversion by robbing his employers and slandering an innocent maid-servant.  Odo in fact owed his first acquaintance with the French writers to Alfieri, who, in the intervals of his wandering over Europe, now and then reappeared in Turin laden with the latest novelties in Transalpine literature and haberdashery.  What his eccentric friend failed to provide, Odo had little difficulty in obtaining for himself; for though most of the new writers were on the Index, and the Sardinian censorship was notoriously severe, there was never yet a barrier that could keep out books, and Cantapresto was a skilled purveyor of contraband dainties.  Odo had thus acquainted himself with the lighter literature of England and France; and though he had read but few philosophical treatises, was yet dimly aware of the new standpoint from which, north of the Alps, men were beginning to test the accepted forms of thought.  The first disturbance of his childish faith, and the coincident reading of the Lettres Philosophiques, had been followed by a period of moral perturbation, during which he suffered from that sense of bewilderment, of inability to classify the phenomena of life, that is one of the keenest trials of inexperience.  Youth and nature had their way with him, however, and a wholesome reaction of indifference set in.  The invisible world of thought and conduct had been the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself and the distant heights of speculation.  The old doubts, the old dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment of life.  Some day, no doubt, the intellectual curiosity and the moral disquietude would revive; but what he wanted now were books which appealed not to his reason but to his emotions, which reflected as in a mirror the rich and varied life of the senses:  books that were warm to the touch, like the little volume in his hand.

For it was not only of nature that the book spoke.  Amid scenes of such rustic freshness were set human passions as fresh and natural:  a great romantic love, subdued to duty, yet breaking forth again and again as young shoots spring from the root of a felled tree.  To eighteenth-century readers such a picture of life was as new as its setting.  Duty, in that day, to people of quality, meant the observance of certain fixed conventions:  the correct stepping of a moral minuet; as an inner obligation, as a voluntary tribute to Diderot’s “divinity on earth,” it had hardly yet drawn breath.  To depict a personal relation so much purer and more profound than any form of sentiment then in fashion, and then to subordinate it, unflinchingly, to the ideal of those larger relations that link the individual to the group—­this was a stroke of originality for which it would be hard to find a parallel in modern fiction.  Here at last was an answer to the blind impulses agrope in Odo’s breast—­the loosening of those springs of emotion that gushed forth in such fresh contrast to the stagnant rills of the sentimental pleasure-garden.  To renounce a Julie would be more thrilling than—­

Odo, with a sigh, thrust the book in his pocket and rose to his feet.  It was the hour of the promenade at the Valentino and he had promised the Countess Clarice to attend her.  The old high-roofed palace of the French princess lay below him, in its gardens along the river:  he could figure, as he looked down on it, the throng of carriages and chairs, the modishly dressed riders, the pedestrians crowding the footpath to watch the quality go by.  The vision of all that noise and glitter deepened the sweetness of the woodland hush.  He sighed again.  Suddenly voices sounded in the road below—­a man’s speech flecked with girlish laughter.  Odo hung back listening:  the girl’s voice rang like a bird-call through his rustling fancies.  Presently she came in sight:  a slender black-mantled figure hung on the arm of an elderly man in the sober dress of one of the learned professions—­a physician or a lawyer, Odo guessed.  Their being afoot, and the style of the man’s dress, showed that they were of the middle class; their demeanour, that they were father and daughter.  The girl moved with a light forward flowing of her whole body that seemed the pledge of grace in every limb:  of her face Odo had but a bright glimpse in the eclipse of her flapping hat-brim.  She stood under his tree unheeded; but as they rose abreast of him the girl paused and dropped her companion’s arm.

“Look!  The cherry flowers!” she cried, and stretched her arms to a white gush of blossoms above the wall across the road.  The movement tilted back her hat, and Odo caught her small fine profile, wide-browed as the head on some Sicilian coin, with a little harp-shaped ear bedded in dark ripples.

“Oh,” she wailed, straining on tiptoe, “I can’t reach them!”

Her father smiled.  “May temptation,” said he philosophically, “always hang as far out of your reach.”

“Temptation?” she echoed.

“Is it not theft you’re bent on?”

“Theft?  This is a monk’s orchard, not a peasant’s plot.”

“Confiscation, then,” he humorously conceded.

“Since they pay no taxes on their cherries they might at least,” she argued, “spare a few to us poor taxpayers.”

“Ah,” said her father, “I want to tax their cherries, not to gather them.”  He slipped a hand through her arm.  “Come, child,” said he, “does not the philosopher tell us that he who enjoys a thing possesses it?  The flowers are yours already!”

“Oh, are they?” she retorted.  “Then why doesn’t the loaf in the baker’s window feed the beggar that looks in at it?”

“Casuist!” he cried and drew her up the bend of the road.

Odo stood gazing after them.  Their words, their aspect, seemed an echo of his reading.  The father in his plain broadcloth and square-buckled shoes, the daughter with her unpowdered hair and spreading hat, might have stepped from the pages of the romance.  What a breath of freshness they brought with them!  The girl’s cheek was clear as the cherry-blossoms, and with what lovely freedom did she move!  Thus Julie might have led Saint Preux through her “Elysium.”  Odo crossed the road and, breaking one of the blossoming twigs, thrust it in the breast of his uniform.  Then he walked down the hill to the inn where the horses waited.  Half an hour later he rode up to the house where he lodged in the Piazza San Carlo.

In the archway Cantapresto, heavy with a nine years’ accretion of fat, laid an admonishing hand on his bridle.

“Cavaliere, the Countess’s black boy—­”

“Well?”

“Three several times has battered the door down with a missive.”

“Well?”

“The last time, I shook him off with the message that you would be there before him.”

“Be where?”

“At the Valentino; but that was an hour ago!”

Odo slipped from the saddle.

“I must dress first.  Call a chair; or no—­write a letter for me first.  Let Antonio carry it.”

The ex-soprano, wheezing under the double burden of flesh and consequence, had painfully laboured after Odo up the high stone flights to that young gentleman’s modest lodgings, and they stood together in a study lined with books and hung with prints and casts from the antique.  Odo threw off his dusty coat and called the servant to remove his boots.

“Will you read the lady’s letters, cavaliere?” Cantapresto asked, obsequiously offering them on a lacquered tray.

“No—­no:  write first.  Begin ’My angelic lady’—­”

“You began the last letter in those terms, cavaliere,” his scribe reminded him with suspended pen.

“The devil!  Well, then—­wait.  ’Throned goddess’—­”

“You ended the last letter with ‘throned goddess.’”

“Curse the last letter!  Why did you send it?” Odo sprang up and slipped his arms into the dress-tunic his servant had brought him.  “Write anything.  Say that I am suddenly summoned by—­”

“By the Count Alfieri?” Cantapresto suggested.

“Count Alfieri?  Is he here?  He has returned?”

“He arrived an hour ago, cavaliere.  He sent you this Moorish scimitar with his compliments.  I understand he comes recently from Spain.”

“Imbecile, not to have told me before!  Quick, Antonio—­my gloves, my sword.”  Odo, flushed and animated, buckled his sword-belt with impatient hands.  “Write anything—­anything to free my evening.  Tomorrow morning—­tomorrow morning I shall wait on the lady.  Let Antonio carry her a nosegay with my compliments.  Did you see him Cantapresto?  Was he in good health?  Does he sup at home?  He left no message?  Quick, Antonio, a chair!” he cried with his hand on the door.

Odo had acquired, at twenty-two, a nobility of carriage not incompatible with the boyish candour of his gaze, and becomingly set off by the brilliant dress-uniform of a lieutenant in one of the provincial regiments.  He was tall and fair, and a certain languor of complexion, inherited from his father’s house, was corrected in him by the vivacity of the Donnaz blood.  This now sparkled in his grey eye, and gave a glow to his cheek, as he stepped across the threshold, treading on a sprig of cherry-blossom that had dropped unnoticed to the floor.

Cantapresto, looking after him, caught sight of the flowers and kicked them aside with a contemptuous toe.  “I sometimes think he botanises,” he murmured with a shrug.  “The Lord knows what queer notions he gets out of all these books!”