The new Duke sat in his closet. The walls had been stripped of theirpious relics and lined with books, and above the fireplace hung theVenus of Giorgione, liberated at last from her long imprisonment. Thewindows stood open, admitting the soft September air. Twilight hadfallen on the gardens, and through it a young moon floated above thecypresses.
On just such an evening three years earlier he had ridden down the slopeof the Monte Baldo with Fulvia Vivaldi at his side. How often, since, hehad relived the incidents of that night! With singular precision theysucceeded each other in his thoughts. He felt the wild sweep of thestorm across the lake, the warmth of her nearness, the sense of hercomplete trust in him; then their arrival at the inn, the dazzle oflight as they crossed the threshold, and de Crucis confronting themwithin. He heard her voice pleading with him in every accent that prideand tenderness and a noble loyalty could command; he felt her willslowly dominating his, like a supernatural power forcing him into hisdestined path; he felt--and with how profound an irony of spirit!--thepassion of self-dedication in which he had taken up his task.
He had known moments of happiness since; moments when he believed inhimself and in his calling, and felt himself indeed the man she thoughthim. That was in the exaltation of the first months, when hisopportunities had seemed as boundless as his dreams, and he had not yetlearned that the sovereign's power may be a kind of spiritual prison tothe man. Since then, indeed, he had known another kind of happiness, hadbeen aware of a secret voice whispering within him that she was rightand had chosen wisely for him; but this was when he had realised that helived in a prison, and had begun to admire the sumptuous adornment ofits walls. For a while the mere external show of power amused him, andhis imagination was charmed by the historic dignity of his surroundings.
In such a setting, against the background of such a past, it seemed easyto play the benefactor and friend of the people. His sensibility wastouched by the contrast, and he saw himself as a picturesque figurelinking the new dreams of liberty and equality to the feudal traditionsof a thousand years. But this masquerading soon ceased to divert him.
The round of court ceremonial wearied him, and books and art lost theirfascination. The more he varied his amusements the more monotonous theybecame, the more he crowded his life with petty duties the more empty ofachievement it seemed.
At first he had hoped to bury his personal disappointments in the taskof reconstructing his little state; but on every side he felt a muteresistance to his efforts. The philosophical faction had indeed pouredforth pamphlets celebrating his reforms, and comparing his reign to thereturn of the Golden Age. But it was not for the philosophers that helaboured; and the benefits of free speech, a free press, a seculareducation did not, after all, reach those over whom his heart yearned.
It was the people he longed to serve; and the people were hungry, werefever-stricken, were crushed with tithes and taxes. It was hopeless totry to reach them by the diffusion of popular knowledge. They must firstbe fed and clothed; and before they could be fed and clothed the chainsof feudalism must be broken.
Men like Gamba and Andreoni saw this clearly enough; but it was not fromthem that help could come. The nobility and clergy must be coaxed orcoerced into sympathy with the new movement; and to accomplish thisexceeded Odo's powers. In France, the revolt from feudalism had foundsome of its boldest leaders in the very class that had most to lose bythe change; but in Italy fewer causes were at work to set suchdisinterested passions in motion. South of the Alps liberalism wasmerely one of the new fashions from France: the men ran after thepamphlets from Paris as the women ran after the cosmetics; and thepolitics went no deeper than the powder. Even among the freestintellects liberalism resulted in a new way of thinking rather in a newway of living. Nowhere among the better classes was there any desire toattack existing institutions. The Church had never troubled the Latinconsciousness. The Renaissance had taught cultivated Italians how tolive at peace with a creed in which they no longer believed; and theireasy-going scepticism was combined with a traditional conviction thatthe priest knew better than any one how to deal with the poor, and thatthe clergy were of distinct use in relieving the individual conscienceof its obligation to its fellows.
It was against such deep-seated habits of thought that Odo had tostruggle. Centuries of fierce individualism, or of sullen apathy under aforeign rule, had left the Italians incapable of any concerted politicalaction; but suspicion, avarice and vanity, combined with a lurking fearof the Church, united all parties in a kind of passive opposition toreform. Thus the Duke's resolve to put the University under laydirection had excited the enmity of the Barnabites, who had been at itshead since the suppression of the Society of Jesus; his efforts topartition among the peasantry the Caccia del Vescovo, that great wastedomain of the see of Pianura, had roused a storm of fear among all wholaid claim to feudal rights; and his own personal attempts atretrenchment, which necessitated the suppression of numerous courtoffices, had done more than anything else to increase his unpopularity.
Even the people, in whose behalf these sacrifices were made, lookedaskance at his diminished state, and showed a perverse sympathy with thedispossessed officials who had taken so picturesque a part in the publicceremonials of the court. All Odo's philosophy could not fortify himagainst such disillusionments. He felt the lack of Fulvia'sunquestioning faith not only in the abstract beauty of the new idealsbut in their immediate adaptability to the complex conditions of life.
Only a woman's convictions, nourished on sentiment and self-sacrifice,could burn with that clear unwavering flame: his own beliefs were at themercy of every wind of doubt or ingratitude that blew across hisunsheltered sensibilities.
It was more than a year since he had had news of Fulvia. For a whilethey had exchanged letters, and it had been a consolation to tell her ofhis struggles and experiments, of his many failures and few results. Shehad encouraged him to continue the struggle, had analysed his variousplans of reform, and had given her enthusiastic support to thepartitioning of the Bishop's fief and the secularisation of theUniversity. Her own life, she said, was too uneventful to write of; butshe spoke of the kindness of her hosts, the Professor and his wife, ofthe simple unceremonious way of living in the old Calvinist city, and ofthe number of distinguished persons drawn thither by its atmosphere ofintellectual and social freedom.
Odo suspected a certain colourlessness in the life she depicted. Thetone of her letters was too uniformly cheerful not to suggest a lack ofemotional variety; and he knew that Fulvia's nature, however much shefancied it under the rule of reason, was in reality fed by profoundcurrents of feeling. Something of her old ardour reappeared when shewrote of the possibility of publishing her father's book. Her friends inGeneva, having heard of her difficulty with the Dutch publisher, hadundertaken to vindicate her claims; and they had every hope that thematter would be successfully concluded. The joy of renewed activity withwhich this letter glowed would have communicated itself to Odo had hereceived it at a different time; but it came on the day of his marriage,and since then he had never written to her.
Now he felt a sudden longing to break the silence between them, andseating himself at his desk he began to write. A moment later there wasa knock on the door and one of his gentlemen entered. The Count VittorioAlfieri, with a dozen horses and as many servants, was newly arrived atthe Golden Cross, and desired to know when he might have the honour ofwaiting on his Highness.
Odo felt the sudden glow of pleasure that the news of Alfieri's comingalways brought. Here was a friend at last! He forgot the constraint oftheir last meeting in Florence, and remembered only the happyinterchange of ideas and emotions that had been one of the quickeninginfluences of his youth.
Alfieri, in the intervening years, was grown to be one of the foremostfigures in Italy. His love for the Countess of Albany, persistingthrough the vicissitudes of her tragic marriage, had rallied thescattered forces of his nature. Ambitious to excel for her sake, to showhimself worthy of such a love, he had at last shaken off the strangetorpor of his youth, and revealed himself as the poet for whom Italywaited. In ten months of feverish effort he had poured forth fourteentragedies--among them the Antigone, the Virginia, and the Conjuration ofthe Pazzi. Italy started up at the sound of a new voice vibrating withpassions she had long since unlearned. Since Filicaja's thrilling appealto his enslaved country no poet had challenged the old Roman spiritwhich Petrarch had striven to rouse. While the literati were busydiscussing Alfieri's blank verse, while the grammarians wrangled overhis syntax and ridiculed his solecisms, the public, heedless of suchniceties, was glowing with the new wine which he had poured into the oldvessels of classic story. "Liberty" was the cry that rang on the lips ofall his heroes, in accents so new and stirring that his audience neverwearied of its repetition. It was no secret that his stories of ancientGreece and Rome were but allegories meant to teach the love of freedom;yet the Antigone had been performed in the private theatre of theSpanish Ambassador at Rome, the Virginia had been received with applauseon the public boards at Turin, and after the usual difficulties with thecensorship the happy author had actually succeeded in publishing hisplays at Siena. These volumes were already in Odo's hands, and amanuscript copy of the Odes to Free America was being circulated amongthe liberals in Pianura, and had been brought to his notice by Andreoni.
To those hopeful spirits who looked for the near approach of a happierera, Alfieri was the inspired spokesman of reform, the heaven-sentprophet who was to lead his country out of bondage. The eyes of theItalian reformers were fixed with passionate eagerness on the course ofevents in England and France. The conclusion of peace between Englandand America, recently celebrated in Alfieri's fifth Ode, seemed to themost sceptical convincing proof that the rights of man were destined toa speedy triumph throughout the civilised world. It was not of a unitedItaly that these enthusiasts dreamed. They were not so much patriots asphilanthropists; for the teachings of Rousseau and his school, whileintensifying the love of man for man, had proportionately weakened thesense of patriotism, of the intere............