The Valley of Decision | Page 4

ORDER.
Prima che incontro alla festosa fronte I lugubri suoi lampi il ver baleni.
1.1.
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