The Valley of Decision | Page 7

as the carriage drew up at
the kitchen door. In a corner of the big vaulted room the little foundling
was washing the dishes, heaping the scraps in a bowl for herself and the
fowls. Odo ran back and touched her arm. She gave a start and looked
at him with frightened eyes. He had nothing to give her, but he said:
"Good-bye, Momola"; and he thought to himself that when he was
grown up and had a sword he would surely come back and bring her a
pair of shoes and a panettone. The abate was calling him, and the next
moment he found himself lifted into the carriage, amid the blessings
and lamentations of his foster-parents; and with a great baying of dogs
and clacking of whipcord the horses clattered out of the farmyard, and
turned their heads toward Pianura.
The mist had rolled back and fields and vineyards lay bare to the winter

moon. The way was lonely, for it skirted the marsh, where no one lived;
and only here and there the tall black shadow of a crucifix ate into the
whiteness of the road. Shreds of vapour still hung about the hollows,
but beyond these fold on fold of translucent hills melted into a sky
dewy with stars. Odo cowered in his corner, staring out awestruck at
the unrolling of the strange white landscape. He had seldom been out at
night, and never in a carriage; and there was something terrifying to
him in this flight through the silent moon-washed fields, where no oxen
moved in the furrows, no peasants pruned the mulberries, and not a
goat's bell tinkled among the oaks. He felt himself alone in a ghostly
world from which even the animals had vanished, and at last he averted
his eyes from the dreadful scene and sat watching the abate, who had
fixed a reading-lamp at his back, and whose hooked-nosed shadow, as
the springs jolted him up and down, danced overhead like the huge
Pulcinella at the fair of Pontesordo.
1.2.
The gleam of a lantern woke Odo. The horses had stopped at the gates
of Pianura, and the abate giving the pass-word, the carriage rolled
under the gatehouse and continued its way over the loud cobble-stones
of the ducal streets. These streets were so dark, being lit but by some
lantern projecting here and there from the angle of a wall, or by the
flare of an oil-lamp under a shrine, that Odo, leaning eagerly out, could
only now and then catch a sculptured palace-window, the grinning
mask on the keystone of an archway, or the gleaming yellowish facade
of a church inlaid with marbles. Once or twice an uncurtained window
showed a group of men drinking about a wineshop table, or an artisan
bending over his work by the light of a tallow dip; but for the most part
doors and windows were barred and the streets disturbed only by the
watchman's cry or by a flash of light and noise as a sedan chair passed
with its escort of linkmen and servants. All this was amazing enough to
the sleepy eyes of the little boy so unexpectedly translated from the
solitude of Pontesordo; but when the carriage turned under another arch
and drew up before the doorway of a great building ablaze with lights,
the pressure of accumulated emotions made him fling his arms about
his preceptor's neck.
"Courage, cavaliere, courage! You have duties, you have
responsibilities," the abate admonished him; and Odo, choking back his

fright, suffered himself to be lifted out by one of the lacqueys grouped
about the door. The abate, who carried a much lower crest than at
Pontesordo, and seemed far more anxious to please the servants than
they to oblige him, led the way up a shining marble staircase where
beggars whined on the landings and powdered footmen in the ducal
livery were running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who
knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined
that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence
and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of
stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of
dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the
antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no
difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more
astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that
these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms
where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women
rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in
which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper.
"Mamma! Mamma!" he