Part 24 (1/2)
Odo handed him the coat-of-arms. ”Can you tell me what this is?” he asked carelessly. ”I picked it up here a moment ago.”
The other turned it over and stared. ”Why,” said he, ”that's off the harness of the gentleman that supped here last night--the same that went on later to Peschiera.”
Odo proceeded to question him about the mule-tracks over Monte Baldo, and having bidden him saddle the horses in half an hour, crossed the courtyard and re-entered the inn. A grey light was already falling through the windows, and he mounted the stairs and knocked on the door which he thought must be Fulvia's. Her voice bade him enter and he found her seated fully dressed beside the window. She rose with a smile and he saw that she had regained her usual self-possession.
”Do we set out at once?” she asked.
”There is no great haste,” he answered. ”You must eat first, and by that time the horses will be saddled.”
”As you please,” she returned, with a readiness in which he divined the wish to make amends for her wilfulness the previous night. Her eyes and cheeks glowed with an excitement which counterfeited the effects of a night's rest, and he thought he had never seen her more radiant. She approached the table on which the wine and bread had been placed, and drew another chair beside her own.
”Will you not share with me?” she asked, filling a gla.s.s for him.
He took it from her with a smile. ”I have good news for you,” he said, holding out the bit of silver which he had brought from the stable.
She examined it wonderingly. ”What does this mean?” she asked, looking up at him.
”That it is I who am being followed--and not you.”
She started and the ornament slipped from her hand.
”You?” she faltered with a quick change of colour.
”This coat-of-arms,” he explained, ”dropped from the harness of the traveller who left the inn just before our arrival last night.”
”Well--” she said, still without understanding; ”and do you know the coat?”
Odo smiled. ”It is mine,” he answered; ”and the crown is my cousin's.
The traveller must have been a messenger of the Duke's.”
She stood leaning against the seat from which she had risen, one hand still grasping it while the other hung inert. Her lips parted but she did not speak. Her pallor troubled Odo and he went up to her and took her hand.
”Do you not understand,” he said gently, ”that there is no farther cause for alarm? I have no reason to think that the Duke's messenger is in pursuit of me; but should he be so, and should he overtake us, he has no authority over you and no reason for betraying you to your enemies.”
The blood poured back to her face. ”Me! My enemies!” she stammered. ”It is not of them I think.” She raised her head and faced him in a glow.
For a moment he stood stupidly gazing at her; then the mist lifted and through it he saw a great light.
The landlord's knock warned them that their horses waited, and they rode out in the grey morning. The world about them still lay in shade, and as they climbed the wooded defile above the valley Odo was reminded of the days at Donnaz when he had ridden up the mountain in the same early light. Never since then had he felt, as he did now, the boy's easy kins.h.i.+p with the unexpected, the sense that no encounter could be too wonderful to fit in with the mere wonder of living.
To avoid the road to Peschiera they had resolved to cross the Monte Baldo by a mule-track which should bring them out at one of the villages on the eastern sh.o.r.e of Garda; and the search for this path led them up through steep rain-scented woods where they had to part the wet boughs as they pa.s.sed. From time to time they regained the highway and rode abreast, almost silent at first with the weight of their new nearness, and then breaking into talk that was the mere overflow of what they were thinking. There was in truth more to be felt between them than to be said; since, as each was aware, the new light that suffused the present left the future as obscure as before. But what mattered, when the hour was theirs? The narrow kingdom of today is better worth ruling over than the widest past or future; but not more than once does a man hold its fugitive sceptre. The past, however, was theirs also: a past so transformed that he must revisit it with her, joyously confronting her new self with the image of her that met them at each turn. Then he had himself to trace in her memories, his transfigured likeness to linger over in the Narcissus-mirror of her faith in him. This interchange of recollections served them as well as any outspoken expression of feeling, and the most commonplace allusion was charged with happy meanings.
Arabia Petraea had been an Eden to such travellers; how much more the happy slopes they were now descending! All the afternoon their path wound down the western incline of Monte Baldo, first under huge olives, then through thickets of laurel and acacia, to emerge on a lower level of lemon and orange groves, with the blue lake showing through a diaper of golden-fruited boughs. Fulvia, to whom this clear-cut southern foliage was as new as the pure intensity of light that bathed it, seemed to herself to be moving through the landscape of a dream. It was as though nature had been remodelled, transformed almost, under the touch of their love: as though they had found their way to the Hesperian glades in which poets and painters placed the legendary lovers of antiquity.
Such feelings were intensified by the strangeness of the situation. In Italy the young girls of the middle cla.s.s, though seemingly allowed a greater freedom of intercourse than the daughters of n.o.blemen, were in reality as strictly guarded. Though, like Fulvia, they might converse with the elderly merchants or scholars frequenting the family table, they were never alone in the company of men, and the high standard of conduct prevailing in the bourgeoisie forbade all thought of clandestine intercourse. This was especially true of the families of men of letters, where the liberal education of the young girls, and their habit of a.s.sociating as equals with men of serious and cultivated minds, gave them a self-possession disconcerting to the young blood accustomed to conquer with a glance. These girls as a rule, were married early to men of their own standing, and though the cicisbeo was not unknown after marriage he was not an authorised member of the household. Fulvia, indeed, belonged to the cla.s.s most inaccessible to men of Odo's rank: the only cla.s.s in Italy in which the wife's fidelity was as much esteemed as the innocence of the girl. Such principles had long been ridiculed by persons of quality and satirised by poets and playwrights.
From Aristophanes to Beaumarchais the cheated husband and the outwitted guardian had been the figures on which the dramatist relied for his comic effects. Even the miser tricked out of his savings was a shade less ridiculous, less grotesquely deserving of his fate, than the husband defrauded of his wife's affection. The plausible adulteress and the adroit seducer had a recognised claim on the sympathy of the public.
But the inevitable reaction was at hand; and the new teachers to whom Odo's contemporaries were beginning to listen had thrown a strangely poetic light over the dull figures of the domestic virtues. Faithfulness to the family sanct.i.ties, reverence for the marriage tie, courage to sacrifice the loftiest pa.s.sion to the most plodding duty: these were qualities to touch the fancy of a generation sated with derision. If love as a sentiment was the discovery of the medieval poets, love as a moral emotion might be called that of the eighteenth-century philosophers, who, for all their celebration of free unions and fatal pa.s.sions, were really on the side of the angels, were fighting the battle of the spiritual against the sensual, of conscience against appet.i.te.
The imperceptible action of these new influences formed the real barrier between Odo and Fulvia. The girl stood for the embodiment of the purifying emotions that were to renew the world. Her candour, her unapproachableness, her simple trust in him, were a part of the magic light which the new idealism had shed over the old social structure. His was, in short, a love large enough to include other emotions: a widening rather than a contraction of the emotional range. Youth and propinquity have before now broken down stronger defences; but Fulvia's situation was an unspoken appeal to her lover's forbearance. The sense that her safety depended on him kept his sentimental impulses in check and made the happiness of the moment seem, in its exquisite unreality, a mere dreamlike interlude between the facts of life.