Part 6 (1/2)
”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 G.o.ddess'--”
”You ended the last letter with 'throned G.o.ddess.'”
”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 n.o.bility 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!”
2.2.
As an infusion of fresh blood to Odo were Alfieri's meteoric returns to Turin. Life moved languidly in the strait-laced city, even to a young gentleman a-tiptoe for adventure and framed to elicit it as the hazel-wand draws water. Not that vulgar distractions were lacking. The town, as Cantapresto had long since advised him, had its secret leniencies, its posterns opening on clandestine pleasure; but there was that in Odo which early turned him from such cheap counterfeits of living. He accepted the diversions of his age, but with a clear sense of their worth; and the youth who calls his pleasures by their true name has learned the secret of resisting them.
Alfieri's coming set deeper springs in motion. His follies and extravagances were on a less provincial scale than those of Odo's daily a.s.sociates. The breath of a freer life clung to him and his allusions were so many glimpses into a larger world. His political theories were but the enlargement of his private grievances, but the mere play of criticism on accepted inst.i.tutions was an exercise more novel and exhilirating than the wildest ride on one of his half-tamed thorough-breds. Still chiefly a man of pleasure, and the slave, as always, of some rash infatuation, Alfieri was already shaking off the intellectual torpor of his youth; and the first stirrings of his curiosity roused an answering pa.s.sion in Odo. Their tastes were indeed divergent, for to that external beauty which was to Odo the very bloom of life, Alfieri remained insensible; while of its imaginative counterpart, its prolongation in the realm of thought and emotion, he had but the most limited conception. But his love of ringing deeds woke the chivalrous strain in Odo, and his vague celebration of Liberty, that unknown G.o.ddess to whom altars were everywhere building, chimed with the other's scorn of oppression and injustice. So far, it is true, their companions.h.i.+p had been mainly one of pleasure; but the temper of both gave their follies that provisional character which saves them from vulgarity.
Odo, who had slept late on the morning after his friend's return, was waked by the pompous mouthing of certain lines just then on every lip in Italy:--
Meet was it that, its ancient seats forsaking, An Empire should set forth with dauntless sail, And braving tempests and the deep's betrayal, Break down the barriers of inviolate worlds-- That Cortez and Pizarro should esteem The blood of man a trivial sacrifice When, flinging down from their ancestral thrones Incas and Mexicans of royal line, They wrecked two kingdoms to refresh thy palate--
They were the verses in which the abate Parini, in his satire of The Morning, apostrophizes the cup of chocolate which the lacquey presents to his master. Cantapresto had in fact just entered with a cup of this beverage, and Alfieri, who stood at his friend's bedside with unpowdered locks and a fas.h.i.+onable undress of Parisian cut, s.n.a.t.c.hing the tray from the soprano's hands presented it to Odo in an att.i.tude of mock servility.