Edith Wharton - Novel 02
THE VALLEY OF DECISION
BY
EDITH
WHARTON
Author
of "A Gift from the Grave," "Crucial Instances," etc.
"Multitudes,
multitudes in the valley of decision."
TO
MY FRIENDS
PAUL AND MINNIE BOURGET
IN REMEMBRANCE OF
ITALIAN DAYS TOGETHER.
CONTENTS.
Author of "A Gift from the Grave,"
"Crucial Instances," etc.
BOOK I.
THE OLD ORDER.
1.1.
1.2.
1.3.
1.4.
1.5.
1.6.
1.7.
1.8.
1.9.
BOOK II.
THE NEW LIGHT.
2.1.
2.2.
2.3.
2.4.
2.5.
2.6.
2.7.
2.8.
MIRANDOLINA'S STORY.
2.9.
2.10.
2.11.
2.12.
2.13.
2.14.
2.15.
BOOK III.
THE CHOICE.
3.1.
3.2.
3.3.
3.4.
3.5.
3.6.
3.7.
BOOK IV.
THE REWARD.
4.1.
4.2.
4.3.
4.4.
4.5.
4.6.
4.7.
4.8.
4.9.
4.10.
4.11.
THE OLD ORDER.
Prima
che incontro alla festosa fronte
I lugubri suoi lampi il
ver baleni.
It
was very still in the small neglected chapel. The noises of the farm came
faintly through closed doors—voices shouting at the oxen in the lower fields,
the querulous bark of the old house-dog, and Filomena's angry calls to the
little white-faced foundling in the kitchen.
The
February day was closing, and a ray of sunshine, slanting through a slit in the
chapel wall, brought out the vision of a pale haloed head floating against the
dusky background of the chancel like a water-lily on its leaf. The face was
that of the saint of Assisi—a sunken ravaged countenance, lit with an ecstasy
of suffering that seemed not so much to reflect the anguish of the Christ at
whose feet the saint knelt, as the mute pain of all poor down-trodden folk on
earth.
When
the small Odo Valsecca—the only frequenter of the chapel—had been taunted by
the farmer's wife for being a beggar's brat, or when his ears were tingling
from the heavy hand of the farmer's son, he found a melancholy kinship in that
suffering face; but since he had fighting blood in him too, coming on the
mother's side of the rude Piedmontese stock of the Marquesses di Donnaz, there
were other moods when he turned instead to the stout Saint George in gold
armour, just discernible through the grime and dust of the opposite wall.
The
chapel of Pontesordo was indeed as wonderful a storybook as fate ever unrolled
before the eyes of a neglected and solitary child. For a hundred years or more
Pontesordo, a fortified manor of the Dukes of Pianura, had been used as a
farmhouse; and the chapel was never opened save when, on Easter Sunday, a
priest came from the town to say mass. At other times it stood abandoned,
cobwebs curtaining the narrow windows, farm tools leaning against the walls,
and the dust deep on the sea-gods and acanthus volutes of the altar. The manor
of Pontesordo was very old. The country people said that the great warlock
Virgil, whose dwelling-place was at Mantua, had once shut himself up for a year
in the topmost chamber of the keep, engaged in unholy researches; and another
legend related that Alda, wife of an early lord of Pianura, had thrown herself
from its battlements to escape the pursuit of the terrible Ezzelino. The chapel
adjoined this keep, and Filomena, the farmer's wife, told Odo that it was even
older than the tower and that the walls had been painted by early martyrs who
had concealed themselves there from the persecutions of the pagan emperors.
On
such questions a child of Odo's age could obviously have no pronounced opinion,
the less so as Filomena's facts varied according to the seasons or her mood, so
that on a day of east wind or when the worms were not hatching well, she had
been known to affirm that the pagans had painted the chapel under Virgil's
instruction, to commemorate the Christians they had tortured. In spite of the
distance to which these conflicting statements seemed to relegate them, Odo
somehow felt as though these pale strange people—youths with ardent faces under
their small round caps, damsels with wheat-coloured hair and boys no bigger
than himself, holding spotted dogs in leash—were younger and nearer to him than
the dwellers on the farm: Jacopone the farmer, the shrill Filomena, who was
Odo's foster-mother, the hulking bully their son and the abate who once a week
came out from Pianura to give Odo religious instruction and who dismissed his
questions with the invariable exhortation not to pry into matters that were
beyond his years. Odo had loved the pictures in the chapel all the better since
the abate, with a shrug, had told him they were
nothing but old rubbish, the work of the barbarians.
Life
at Pontesordo was in truth not very pleasant for an ardent and sensitive little
boy of nine, whose remote connection with the reigning line of Pianura did not
preserve him from wearing torn clothes and eating black bread and beans out of
an earthen bowl on the kitchen doorstep.
"Go
ask your mother for new clothes!" Filomena would snap at him, when his
toes came through his shoes and the rents in his jacket-sleeves had spread
beyond darning. "These you are wearing are my Giannozzo's, as you well
know, and every rag on your back is mine, if there were any law for poor folk,
for not a copper of pay for your keep or a stitch of clothing
for your body have we had these two years come Assumption—. What's that?
You can't ask your mother, you say, because she never comes here? True enough—fine
ladies let their brats live in cow-dung, but they must have Indian carpets
under their own feet. Well, ask the abate, then—he has lace ruffles to his coat
and a naked woman painted on his snuff box—What? He
only holds his hands up when you ask? Well, then, go ask your friends on the
chapel-walls—maybe they'll give you a pair of shoes—though Saint Francis, for
that matter, was the father of the discalced, and would doubtless tell you to
go without!" And she would add with a coarse laugh: "Don't you know
that the discalced are shod with gold?"
It
was after such a scene that the beggar-noble, as they called him at Pontesordo,
would steal away to the chapel and, seating himself on
an upturned basket or a heap of pumpkins, gaze long into the face of the mournful
saint.
There
was nothing unusual in Odo's lot. It was that of many children in the
eighteenth century, especially those whose parents were cadets of noble houses,
with an appanage barely sufficient to keep their wives and themselves in court
finery, much less to pay their debts and clothe and educate their children. All
over Italy at that moment, had Odo Valsecca but known it, were lads whose
ancestors, like his own, had been dukes and crusaders, but who, none the less,
were faring, as he fared, on black bread and hard blows, and the
half-comprehended taunts of unpaid foster-parents. Many, doubtless, there were
who cared little enough, as long as they might play morro with the farmer's
lads and ride the colt bare-back through the pasture and go bird-netting and
frog-hunting with the village children; but some perhaps, like Odo, suffered in
a dumb animal way, without understanding why life was so hard on little boys.
Odo,
for his part, had small taste for the sports in which Gianozzo and the village
lads took pleasure. He shrank from any amusement associated with the
frightening or hurting of animals, and his bosom swelled with the fine
gentleman's scorn of the clowns who got their fun in so coarse a way. Now and
then he found a moment's glee in a sharp tussle with one of the younger
children who had been tormenting a frog or a beetle; but he was still too young
for real fighting, and could only hang on the outskirts when the bigger boys
closed, and think how some day he would be at them and break their lubberly
heads. There were thus many hours when he turned to the silent consolations of
the chapel. So familiar had he grown with the images on its walls that he had a
name for every one: the King, the Knight, the Lady, the children with
guinea-pigs, basilisks and leopards, and lastly the Friend, as he called Saint
Francis. An almond-faced lady on a white palfrey with gold trappings
represented his mother, whom he had seen too seldom for any distinct image to
interfere with the illusion; a knight in damascened armour and scarlet cloak
was the valiant captain, his father, who held a commission in the ducal army;
and a proud young man in diadem and ermine, attended by a retinue of pages,
stood for his cousin, the reigning Duke of Pianura.
A
mist, as usual at that hour, was rising from the marshes between Pontesordo and
Pianura, and the light soon ebbed from the saint's face, leaving the chapel in
obscurity. Odo had crept there that afternoon with a keener sense than usual of
the fact that life was hard on little boys; and though he was cold and hungry
and half afraid, the solitude in which he cowered seemed more endurable than
the noisy kitchen where, at that hour, the farm hands were gathering for their
polenta, and Filomena was screaming at the frightened orphan who carried the
dishes to the table. He knew, of course, that life at Pontesordo would not last
for ever—that in time he would grow up and be mysteriously transformed into a
young gentleman with a sword and laced coat, who would go to court and perhaps
be an officer in the Duke's army or in that of some neighbouring prince; but,
viewed from the lowliness of his nine years, that dazzling prospect was too
remote to yield much solace for the cuffs and sneers, the ragged shoes and sour
bread of the present. The fog outside had thickened, and the face of Odo's
friend was now discernible only as a spot of pallor in the surrounding dimness.
Even he seemed farther away than usual, withdrawn into the fog as into that
mist of indifference which lay all about Odo's hot and eager spirit. The child
sat down among the gourds and medlars on the muddy floor and hid his face
against his knees.
He
had sat there a long time when the noise of wheels and the crack of a
postillion's whip roused the dogs chained in the stable. Odo's heart began to
beat. What could the sounds mean? It was as though the flood-tide of the
unknown were rising about him and bursting open the
chapel door to pour in on his loneliness. It was, in fact, Filomena who opened
the door, crying out to him in an odd Easter Sunday voice, the voice she used
when she had on her silk neckerchief and gold chain or when she was talking to
the bailiff.
Odo
sprang up and hid his face in her lap. She seemed, of a sudden, nearer to him
than any one else—a last barrier between himself and the mystery that awaited
him outside.
"Come,
you poor sparrow," she said, dragging him across the threshold of the
chapel, "the abate is here asking for you;"
and she crossed herself, as though she had named a saint.
Odo
pulled away from her with a last wistful glance at Saint Francis, who looked
back at him in an ecstasy of commiseration.
"Come,
come," Filomena repeated, dropping to her ordinary key as she felt the
resistance of the little boy's hand. "Have you no heart, you wicked child? But, to be sure, the poor innocent doesn't
know! Come cavaliere, your illustrious mother waits."
"My mother?" The blood rushed to his face; and she
had called him "cavaliere"!
"Not
here, my poor lamb! The abate is here; don't you see
the lights of the carriage? There, there, go to him.
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