The Valley of Decision

4.9.

It was the eve of the Duke’s birthday.  A cabinet council had been called in the morning, and his Highness’s ministers had submitted to him the revised draft of the constitution which was to be proclaimed on the morrow.

Throughout the conference, which was brief and formal, Odo had been conscious of a subtle change in the ministerial atmosphere.  Instead of the current of resistance against which he had grown used to forcing his way, he became aware of a tacit yielding to his will.  Trescorre had apparently withdrawn his opposition to the charter, and the other ministers had followed suit.  To Odo’s overwrought imagination there was something ominous in the change.  He had counted on the goad of opposition to fight off the fatal languor which he had learned to expect at such crises.  Now that he found there was to be no struggle he understood how largely his zeal had of late depended on such factitious incentives.  He felt an irrational longing to throw himself on the other side of the conflict, to tear in bits the paper awaiting his signature, and disown the policy which had dictated it.  But the tide of acquiescence on which he was afloat was no stagnant back-water of indifference, but the glassy reach just above the fall of a river.  The current was as swift as it was smooth, and he felt himself hurried forward to an end he could no longer escape.  He took the pen which Trescorre handed him, and signed the constitution.

The meeting over, he summoned Gamba.  He felt the need of such encouragement as the hunchback alone could give.  Fulvia’s enthusiasms were too unreal, too abstract.  She lived in a region of ideals, whence ugly facts were swept out by some process of mental housewifery which kept her world perpetually smiling and immaculate.  Gamba at least fed his convictions on facts.  If his outlook was narrow it was direct:  no roseate medium of fancy was interposed between his vision and the truth.

He stood listening thoughtfully while Odo poured forth his doubts.

“Your Highness may well hesitate,” he said at last.  “There are always more good reasons against a new state of things than for it.  I am not surprised that Count Trescorre appears to have withdrawn his opposition.  I believe he now honestly wishes your Highness to proclaim the constitution.”

Odo looked up in surprise.  “You do not mean that he has come to believe in it?”

Gamba smiled.  “Probably not in your Highness’s sense; but he may have found a use of his own for it.”

“What do you mean?” Odo asked.

“If he does not believe it will benefit the state he may think it will injure your Highness.”

“Ah—­” said the Duke slowly.

There was a pause, during which he was possessed by the same shuddering reluctance to fix his mind on the facts before him as when he had questioned the hunchback about Momola’s death.  He longed to cast the whole business aside, to be up and away from it, drawing breath in a new world where every air was not tainted with corruption.  He raised his head with an effort.

“You think, then, that the liberals are secretly acting against me in this matter?”

“I am persuaded of it, your Highness.”

Odo hesitated.  “You have always told me,” he began again, “that the love of dominion was your brother’s ruling passion.  If he really believes this movement will be popular with the people, why should he secretly oppose it, instead of making the most of his own share in it as the minister of a popular sovereign?”

“For several reasons,” Gamba answered promptly.  “In the first place, the reforms your Highness has introduced are not of his own choosing, and Trescorre has little sympathy with any policy he has not dictated.  In the second place, the powers and opportunities of a constitutional minister are too restricted to satisfy his appetite for rule; and thirdly—­” he paused a moment, as though doubtful how his words would be received—­ “I suspect Trescorre of having a private score against your Highness, which he would be glad to pay off publicly.”

Odo fell silent, yielding himself to a fresh current of thought.

“I know not what score he may have against me,” he said at length; “but what injures me must injure the state, and if Trescorre has any such motive for withdrawing his opposition, it must be because he believes the constitution will defeat its own ends.”

“He does believe that, assuredly; but he is not the only one of your Highness’s ministers that would ruin the state on the chance of finding an opportunity among the ruins.”

“That is as it may be,” said Odo with a touch of weariness.  “I have seen enough of human ambition to learn how limited and unimaginative a passion it is.  If it saw farther I should fear it more.  But if it is short-sighted it sees clearly at close range; and the motive you ascribe to Trescorre would imply that he believes the constitution will be a failure.”

“Without doubt, your Highness.  I am convinced that your ministers have done all they could to prevent the proclamation of the charter, and failing that, to thwart its workings if it be proclaimed.  In this they have gone hand in hand with the clergy, and their measures have been well taken.  But I do not believe that any state of mind produced by external influences can long withstand the natural drift of opinion; and your Highness may be sure that, though the talkers and writers are mostly against you in this matter, the mass of the people are with you.”

Odo answered with a despairing gesture.  “How can I be sure, when the people have no means of expressing their needs?  It is like trying to guess the wants of a deaf and dumb man!”

The hunchback flushed suddenly.  “The people will not always be deaf and dumb,” he said.  “Some day they will speak.”

“Not in my day,” said Odo wearily.  “And meanwhile we blunder on, without ever really knowing what incalculable instincts and prejudices are pitted against us.  You and your party tell me the people are sick of the burdens the clergy lay on them—­yet their blind devotion to the Church is manifest at every turn, and it did not need the business of the Virgin’s crown to show me how little reason and justice can avail against such influences.”

Gamba replied by an impatient gesture.  “As to the Virgin’s crown,” he said, “your Highness must have guessed it was one of the friars’ tricks:  a last expedient to turn the people against you.  I was not bred up by a priest for nothing; I know what past masters those gentry are in raising ghosts and reading portents.  They know the minds of the poor folk as the herdsman knows the habits of his cattle; and for generations they have used that knowledge to bring the people more completely under their control.”

“And what have we to oppose to such a power?” Odo exclaimed.  “We are fighting the battle of ideas against passions, of reflection against instinct; and you have but to look in the human heart to guess which side will win in such a struggle.  We have science and truth and common-sense with us, you say—­yes, but the Church has love and fear and tradition, and the solidarity of nigh two thousand years of dominion.”

Gamba listened in respectful silence; then he replied with a faint smile:  “All that your Highness says is true; but I beg leave to relate to your Highness a tale which I read lately in an old book of your library.  According to this story it appears that when the early Christians of Alexandria set out to destroy the pagan idols in the temples they were seized with great dread at sight of the god Serapis; for even those that did not believe in the old gods feared them, and none dared raise a hand against the sacred image.  But suddenly a soldier who was bolder than the rest flung his battle-axe at the figure—­and when it broke in pieces, there rushed out nothing worse than a great company of rats.”...

*

The Duke had promised to visit Fulvia that evening.  For several days his state of indecision had made him find pretexts for avoiding her; but now that the charter was signed and he had ordered its proclamation, he craved the contact of her unwavering faith.

He found her alone in the dusk of the convent parlour; but he had hardly crossed the threshold before he was aware of an indefinable change in his surroundings.  She advanced with an impulsiveness out of harmony with the usual tranquillity of their meetings, and he felt her hand tremble and burn in his.  In the twilight it seemed to him that her very dress had a warmer rustle and glimmer, that there emanated from her glance and movements some heady fragrance of a long-past summer.  He smiled to think that this phantom coquetry should have risen at the summons of an academic degree; but some deeper sense in him was stirred as by a vision of waste riches adrift on the dim seas of chance.

For a moment she sat silent, as in the days when they had been too near each other for many words; and there was something indescribably soothing in this dreamlike return to the past.  It was he who roused himself first.

“How young you look!” he said, giving involuntary utterance to his thought.

“Do I?” she answered gaily.  “I am glad of that, for I feel extraordinarily young tonight.  Perhaps it is because I have been thinking a great deal of the old days—­of Venice and Turin—­and of the high-road to Vercelli, for instance.”  She glanced at him with a smile.

“Do you know,” she went on, moving to a seat at his side, and laying a hand on the arm of his chair, “that there is one secret of mine you have never guessed in all these years?”

Odo returned her smile.  “What is it, I wonder?” he said.

She fixed him with bright bantering eyes.  “I knew why you deserted us at Vercelli.”  He uttered an exclamation, but she lifted a hand to his lips.  “Ah, how angry I was then—­but why be angry now?  It all happened so long ago; and if it had not happened—­who knows?—­perhaps you would never have pitied me enough to love me as you did.”  She laughed softly, reminiscently, leaning back as if to let the tide of memories ripple over her.  Then she raised her head suddenly, and said in a changed voice:  “Are your plans fixed for tomorrow?”

Odo glanced at her in surprise.  Her mind seemed to move as capriciously as Maria Clementina’s.

“The constitution is signed,” he answered, “and my ministers proclaim it tomorrow morning.”  He looked at her a moment, and lifted her hand to his lips.  “Everything has been done according to your wishes,” he said.

She drew away with a start, and he saw that she had turned pale.  “No, no—­not as I wish,” she murmured.  “It must not be because I wish—­” she broke off and her hand slipped from his.

“You have taught me to wish as you wish,” he answered gently.  “Surely you would not disown your pupil now?”

Her agitation increased.  “Do not call yourself that!” she exclaimed.  “Not even in jest.  What you have done has been done of your own choice—­because you thought it best for your people.  My nearness or absence could have made no difference.”

He looked at her with growing wonder.  “Why this sudden modesty?” he said with a smile.  “I thought you prided yourself on your share in the great work.”

She tried to force an answering smile, but the curve broke into a quiver of distress, and she came close to him, with a gesture that seemed to take flight from herself.

“Don’t say it, don’t say it!” she broke out.  “What right have they to call it my doing?  I but stood aside and watched you and gloried in you—­is there any guilt to a woman in that?” She clung to him a moment, hiding her face in his breast.

He loosened her arms gently, that he might draw back and look at her.  “Fulvia,” he asked, “what ails you?  You are not yourself tonight.  Has anything happened to distress you?  Have you been annoyed or alarmed in any way?—­It is not possible,” he broke off, “that Trescorre has been here—?”

She drew away, flushed and protesting.  “No, no,” she exclaimed.  “Why should Trescorre come here?  Why should you fancy that any one has been here?  I am excited, I know; I talk idly; but it is because I have been thinking too long of these things—­”

“Of what things?”

“Of what people say—­how can one help hearing that?” I sometimes fancy that the more withdrawn one lives the more distinctly one hears the outer noises.”

“But why should you heed the outer noises?  You have never done so before.”

“Perhaps I was wrong not to do so before.  Perhaps I should have listened sooner.  Perhaps others have seen—­understood—­sooner than I—­oh, the thought is intolerable!”

She moved a pace or two away, and then, regaining the mastery of her lips and eyes, turned to him with a show of calmness.

“Your heart was never in this charter—­” she began.

“Fulvia!” he cried protestingly; but she lifted a silencing hand.  “Ah, I have seen it—­I have felt it—­but I was never willing to own that you were right.  My pride in you blinded me, I suppose.  I could not bear to dream any fate for you but the greatest.  I saw you always leading events, rather than waiting on them.  But true greatness lies in the man, not in his actions.  Compromise, delay, renunciation—­these may be as heroic as conflict.  A woman’s vision is so narrow that I did not see this at first.  You have always told me that I looked only at one side of the question; but I see the other side now—­I see that you were right.”

Odo stood silent.  He had followed her with growing wonder.  A volte-face so little in keeping with her mental habits immediately struck him as a feint; yet so strangely did it accord with his own secret reluctances that these inclined him to let it pass unquestioned.

Some instinctive loyalty to his past checked the temptation.  “I am not sure that I understand you,” he said slowly.  “Have you lost faith in the ideas we have worked for?”

She hesitated, and he saw the struggle beneath her surface calmness.  “No, no,” she exclaimed quickly, “I have not lost faith in them—­”

“In me, then?”

She smiled with a disarming sadness.  “That would be so much simpler!” she murmured.

“What do you mean, then?” he urged.  “We must understand each other.”  He paused, and measured his words out slowly.  “Do you think it a mistake to proclaim the constitution tomorrow?”

Again her face was full of shadowy contradictions.  “I entreat you not to proclaim it tomorrow,” she said in a low voice.

Odo felt the blood drum in his ears.  Was not this the word for which he had waited?  But still some deeper instinct held him back, warning him, as it seemed, that to fall below his purpose at such a juncture was the only measurable failure.  He must know more before he yielded, see deeper into her heart and his; and each moment brought the clearer conviction that there was more to know and see.

“This is unlike you, Fulvia,” he said.  “You cannot make such a request on impulse.  You must have a reason.”

She smiled.  “You told me once that a woman’s reasons are only impulses in men’s clothes.”

But he was not to be diverted by this thrust.  “I shall think so now,” he said, “unless you can give me some better account of yours!”

She was silent, and he pressed on with a persistency for which he himself could hardly account:  “You must have a reason for this request.”

“I have one,” she said, dropping her attempts at evasion.

“And it is—?”

She paused again, with a look of appeal against which he had to stiffen himself.

“I do not believe the time has come,” she said at length.

“You think the people are not ready for the constitution?”

She answered with an effort:  “I think the people are not ready for it.”

He fell silent, and they sat facing each other, but with eyes apart.

“You have received this impression from Gamba, from Andreoni—­from the members of our party?” he asked.

She made no reply.

“Remember, Fulvia,” he went on almost sternly, “that this is the end for which we have worked together all these years—­the end for which we renounced each other and went forth in our youth, you to exile and I to an unwilling sovereignty.  It was because we loved this cause better than ourselves that we had strength to give up for it our personal hopes of happiness.  If we betray the cause from any merely personal motive we shall have fallen below our earlier selves.”  He waited again, but she was still silent.  “Can you swear to me,” he went on, “that no such motive influences you now?  That you honestly believe we have been deceived and mistaken?  That our years of faith and labour have been wasted, and that, if mankind is to be helped, it is to be in other ways and by other efforts than ours?”

He stood before her accusingly, almost, the passion of the long fight surging up in him as he felt the weapon drop from his hand.

Fulvia had sat motionless under his appeal; but as he paused she rose with an impulsive gesture.  “Oh, why do you torment me with questions?” she cried, half-sobbing.  “I venture to counsel a delay, and you arraign me as though I stood at the day of judgment!”

“It is our day of judgment,” he retorted.  “It is the day on which life confronts us with our own actions, and we must justify them or own ourselves deluded.”  He went up to her and caught her hands entreatingly.  “Fulvia,” he said, “I too have doubted, wavered—­and if you will give me one honest reason that is worthy of us both—­”

She broke from him to hide her weeping.  “Reasons! reasons!” she stammered.  “What does the heart know of reasons?  I ask a favour—­the first I ever asked of you—­and you answer it by haggling with me for reasons!”

Something in her voice and gesture was like a lightning-flash over a dark landscape.  In an instant he saw the pit at his feet.

“Some one has been with you.  Those words were not yours,” he cried.

She rallied instantly.  “That is a pretext for not heeding them!” she returned.

The lightning glared again.  He stepped close and faced her.

“The Duchess has been here,” he said.

She dropped into a chair and hid her face from him.  A wave of anger mounted from his heart, choking back his words and filling his brain with its fumes.  But as it subsided he felt himself suddenly cool, firm, attempered.  There could be no wavering, no self-questioning now.

“When did this happen?” he asked.

She shook her head despairingly.

“Fulvia,” he said, “if you will not speak I will speak for you.  I can guess what arguments were used—­what threats, even.  Were there threats?” burst from him in a fresh leap of anger.

She raised her head slowly.  “Threats would not have mattered,” she said.

“But your fears were played on—­your fears for my safety?—­Fulvia, answer me!” he insisted.

She rose suddenly and laid her arms about his shoulders, with a gesture half-tender, half-maternal.

“Oh,” she said, “why will you torture me?  I have borne much for our love’s sake, and would have borne this too—­in silence, like the rest—­but to speak of it is to relieve it; and my strength fails me!”

He held her hands fast, keeping his eyes on hers.  “No,” he said, “for your strength never failed you when there was any call on it; and our whole past calls on it now.  Rouse yourself, Fulvia:  look life in the face!  You were told there might be troubles tomorrow—­that I was in danger, perhaps?”

“There was worse—­there was worse,” she shuddered.

“Worse?”

“The blame was laid on me—­the responsibility.  Your love for me, my power over you, were accused.  The people hate me—­they hate you for loving me!  Oh, I have destroyed you!” she cried.

Odo felt a slow cold strength pouring into all his veins.  It was as though his enemies, in thinking to mix a mortal poison, had rendered him invulnerable.  He bent over her with great gentleness.

“Fulvia, this is madness,” he said.  “A moment’s thought must show you what passions are here at work.  Can you not rise above such fears?  No one can judge between us but ourselves.”

“Ah, but you do not know—­you will not understand.  Your life may be in danger!” she cried.

“I have been told that before,” he said contemptuously.  “It is a common trick of the political game.”

“This is no trick,” she exclaimed.  “I was made to see—­to understand—­and I swear to you that the danger is real.”

“And what if it were?  Is the Church to have all the martyrs?” said he gaily.  “Come, Fulvia, shake off such fancies.  My life is as safe as yours.  At worst there may be a little hissing to be faced.  That is easy enough compared to facing one’s own doubts.  And I have no doubts now—­that is all past, thank heaven!  I see the road straight before me—­as straight as when you showed it to me once before, years ago, in the inn-parlour at Peschiera.  You pointed the way to it then; surely you would not hold me back from it now?”

He took her in his arms and kissed her lips to silence.

“When we meet tomorrow,” he said, releasing her, “It will be as teacher and pupil, you in your doctor’s gown and I a learner at your feet.  Put your old faith in me into your argument, and we shall have all Pianura converted.”

He hastened away through the dim gardens, carrying a boy’s heart in his breast.