The Valley of Decision

by Edith Wharton

  Vivaldi, doubtless from motives of prudence, had not named the friend with whom he and Fulvia were to take shelter; nor did Odo even know in what quarter of the city to seek them. To question the police was to risk their last chance of safety; and for the same reason he dared not enquire of the posting-master whether any travellers had set out that morning for Lombardy. His natural activity of mind was hampered by a leaden sense of remissness. With what anguish of spirit must Vivaldi and Fulvia have awaited him in that hour of dawn behind the convent! What thoughts must have visited the girl’s mind as day broadened, the city woke, and peril pressed on them with every voice and eye! And when at length they saw that he had failed them, which way did their hunted footsteps turn? Perhaps they dared not go back to the friend who had taken them in for the night. Perhaps even now they wandered through the streets, fearing arrest if they revealed themselves by venturing to engage a carriage, at every turn of his thoughts Odo was mocked by some vision of disaster; and an hour of perplexity yielded no happier expedient than that of repairing to the meeting-place behind the Umiliati. It was a deserted lane with few passers; and after vainly questioning the blank wall of the convent and the gates of a sinister-looking almshouse that faced it, he retraced his steps to the inn.

  He spent a day of futile research and bitter thoughts, now straying forth in the hope of meeting Vivaldi, now hastening back to the Three Crowns on the chance that some message might await him. He dared not let his mind rest on what might have befallen his friends; yet the alternative of contemplating his own course was scarcely more endurable.

  Nightfall brought the conviction that the Professor and Fulvia had passed beyond his reach. It was clear that if they were still in Vercelli they did not mean to make their presence known to him, while in the event of their escape he was without means of tracing them farther.

  He knew indeed that their destination was Milan, but, should they reach there safely, what hope was there of finding them in a city of strangers? By a stroke of folly he had cut himself off from all communication with them, and his misery was enhanced by the discovery of his weakness. He who had fed his fancy on high visions, cherishing in himself the latent patriot and hero, had been driven by a girl’s caprice to break the first law of manliness and honour! The event had already justified her; and in a flash of self-contempt he saw himself as she no doubt beheld him—the fribble preying like a summer insect on the slow growths of difficult years…

  In bitterness of spirit he set out the next morning for Pianura. A half-melancholy interest drew him back to the scene of his lonely childhood, and he had started early in order to push on that night to Pontesordo. At Valsecca, the regular posting-station between Vercelli and Pianura, he sent Cantapresto forward to the capital, and in a stormy yellow twilight drove alone across the waste land that dipped to the marshes. On his right the woods of the ducal chase hung black against the sky; and presently he saw ahead of him the old square keep, with a flight of swallows circling low about its walls.

  In the muddy farmyard a young man was belabouring a donkey laden with mulberry-shoots. He stared for a moment at Odo’s approach and then sullenly returned to his task.

  Odo sprang out into the mud. “Why do you beat the brute?” said he indignantly. The other turned a dull face on him and he recognised his old enemy Giannozzo.

  “Giannozzo,” he cried, “don’t you know me? I am the Cavaliere Valsecca, whose ears you used to box when you were a lad. Must you always be pummelling something, that you can’t let that poor brute alone at the end of its day’s work?”

  Giannozzo, dropping his staff, stammered out that he craved his excellency’s pardon for not knowing him, but that as for the ass it was a stubborn devil that would not have carried Jesus Christ without gibbing.

  “The beast is tired and hungry,” cried Odo, his old compassion for the sufferings of the farm-animals suddenly reviving. “How many hours have you worked it without rest or food?”

  “No more than I have worked myself,” said Giannozzo sulkily; “and as for its being hungry, why should it fare better than its masters?”

  Their words had called out of the house a lean bent woman, whose shrivelled skin showed through the rents in her unbleached shift. At sight of Odo she pushed Giannozzo aside and hurried forward to ask how she might serve the gentleman.

  “With supper and a bed, my good Filomena,” said Odo; and she flung herself at his feet with a cry.

  “Saints of heaven, that I should not have known his excellency! But I am half blind with the fever, and who could have dreamed of such an honour?” She clung to his knees in the mud, kissing his hands and calling down blessings on him. “And as for you, Giannozzo, you curd-faced fool, quick, see that his excellency’s horses are stabled and go call your father from the cow-house while I prepare his excellency’s supper. And fetch me in a faggot to light the fire in the bailiff’s parlour.”

  Odo followed her into the kitchen, where he had so often crouched in a corner to eat his polenta out of reach of her vigorous arm. The roof seemed lower and more smoke-blackened than ever, but the hearth was cold, and he noticed that no supper was laid. Filomena led him into the bailiff’s parlour, where a mortal chill seized him. Cobwebs hung from the walls, the window-panes were broken and caked with grime, and the few green twigs which Giannozzo presently threw on the hearth poured a cloud of smoke into the cold heavy air.

  There was a long delay while supper was preparing, and when at length Filomena appeared, it was only to produce, with many excuses, a loaf of vetch-bread, a bit of cheese and some dried quinces. There was nothing else in the house, she declared: not so much as a bit of lard to make soup with, a handful of pasti or a flask of wine. In the old days, as his excellency might remember, they had eaten a bit of meat on Sundays, and drunk aquarolle with their supper; but since the new taxes it was as much as the farmers could do to feed their cattle, without having a scrap to spare for themselves. Jacopone, she continued, was bent double with the rheumatism, and had not been able to drive a plough or to work in the mulberries for over two years. He and the farm-lads sat in the cow-stables when their work was over, for the sake of the heat, and she carried their black bread out there to them: a cold supper tasted better in a warm place, and as his excellency knew, all the windows in the house were unglazed save in the bailiff’s parlour. Her man would be in presently to pay his duty to his excellency; but he had grown dull-witted since the rheumatism took him, and his excellency must not take it ill if his talk was a little childish.

  Thereupon Filomena excused herself, that she might put a clean shirt on Jacopone, and Odo was left to his melancholy musings. His mind had of late run much on economic abuses; but what was any philandering with reform to this close contact with misery? It was as though white hungry faces had suddenly stared in at the windows of his brightly-lit life.

  What did these people care for education, enlightenment, the religion of humanity? What they wanted was fodder for their cattle, a bit of meat on Sundays and a faggot on the hearth.

  Filomena presently returned with her husband; but Jacopone had shrunk into a crippled tremulous old man, who pulled a vague forelock at Odo without sign of recognition. Filomena, it was clear, was master at Pontesordo; for though Giannozzo was a man grown, and did a man’s work, he still danced to the tune of his mother’s tongue. It was from her that Odo, shivering over the smoky hearth, gathered the details of their wretched state. Pontesordo being a part of the ducal domain, they had led in their old days an easier life than their neighbours; but the new taxes had stripped them as bare as a mulberry-tree in June.

  “How is a Christian to live, excellency, with the salt-tax doubled, so that the cows go dry for want of it; with half a zecchin on every pair of oxen, a stajo of wheat and two fowls to the parish, and not so much as a bite of grass allowed on the Duke’s lands? In his late Highness’s day the poor folk were allowed to graze their cattle on the borders of the chase; but now a man dare not pluck a handful of weeds there, or so m
uch as pick up a fallen twig; though the deer may trample his young wheat, and feed off the patch of beans at his very door. They do say the Duchess has a kind heart, and gives away money to the townsfolk; but we country-people who spend our lives raising fodder for her game never hear of her Highness but when one of her game-keepers comes down on us for poaching or stealing wood.—Yes, by the saints, and it was her Highness who sent a neighbour’s lad to the galleys last year for felling a tree in the chase; a good lad as ever dug furrow, but he lacked wood for a new ploughshare, and how in God’s name was he to plough his field without it?”

  So she went on, like a torrent after the spring rains; but when he named Momola she fell silent, and Giannozzo, looking sideways, drummed with his heel on the floor.

  Odo glanced from one to the other. “She’s dead, then?” he cried.

  Filomena opened deprecating palms. “Can one tell, excellency? It may be she is off with the gypsies.”

  “The gypsies? How long since?”

  “Giannozzo,” cried his mother, as he stood glowering, “go see that the stable is locked and his excellency’s horses bedded down.” He slunk out and she began to gather up the remains of Odo’s meagre supper.

  “But you must remember when this happened.”

  “Holy Mother! It was the year we had frost in April and lost our hatching for want of leaves. But as for that child of ingratitude, one day she was here, the next she was gone—clean gone, as a nut drops from the tree—and I that had given the blood of my veins to nourish her!

  Since then, God is my witness, we have had nothing but misfortune. The next year it was the weevils in the wheat; and so it goes.”

  Odo was silent, seeing it was vain to press her. He fancied that the girl must have died—of neglect perhaps, or ill usage—and that they feared to own it. His heart swelled, but not against them: they seemed to him no more accountable than cowed hunger-driven animals.

  He tossed impatiently on the hard bed Filomena had made up for him in the bailiff’s parlour, and was afoot again with the first light.

  Stepping out into the farmyard he looked abroad over the flat grey face of the land. Around the keep stretched the new-ploughed fields and the pollarded mulberry orchards; but these, with the clustered hovels of the village, formed a mere islet in the surrounding waste of marsh and woodland. The scene symbolised fitly enough of social conditions of the country: the over-crowded peasantry huddled on their scant patches of arable ground, while miles of barren land represented the feudal rights that hemmed them in on every side.

  Odo walked across the yard to the chapel. On the threshold he stumbled over a heap of mulberry-shoots and a broken ploughshare. Twilight held the place; but as he stood there the frescoes started out in the slant of the sunrise like dead faces floating to the surface of a river. Dead faces, yes: plaintive spectres of his childish fears and longings, lost in the harsh daylight of experience. He had forgotten the very dreams they stood for: Lethe flowed between and only one voice reached across the torrent. It was that of Saint Francis, lover of the poor…

  The morning was hot as Odo drove toward Pianura, and limping ahead of him in the midday glare he presently saw the figure of a humpbacked man in a decent black dress and three-cornered hat. There was something familiar in the man’s gait, and in the shape of his large head, poised on narrow stooping shoulders, and as the carriage drew abreast of him, Odo, leaning from the window, cried out, “Brutus—this must be Brutus!”

  “Your excellency has the advantage of me,” said the hunchback, turning on him a thin face lit by the keen eyes that had once searched his childish soul.

  Odo met the rebuff with a smile. “Does that,” said he, “prevent my suggesting that you might continue your way more comfortably in my carriage? The road is hot and dusty, and, as you see, I am in want of company.”

  The pedestrian, who seemed unprepared for this affable rejoinder, had the sheepish air of a man whose rudeness has missed the mark.

  “Why, sir,” said he, recovering himself, “comfort is all a matter of habit, and I daresay the jolting of your carriage might seem to me more unpleasant than the heat and dust of the road, to which necessity has long since accustomed me.”

  “In that case,” returned Odo with increasing amusement, “you will have the additional merit of sacrificing your pleasure to add to mine.”

  The hunchback stared. “And what have you or yours ever done for me,” he retorted, “that I should sacrifice to your pleasure even the wretched privilege of being dusted by the wheels of your coach?”

  “Why, that,” replied Odo, “is a question I can scarce answer till you give me the opportunity of naming myself.—If you are indeed Carlo Gamba,” he continued, “I am your old friend and companion Odo Valsecca.”

  The hunchback started. “The Cavaliere Valsecca!” he cried. “I had heard that you were expected.” He stood gazing at Odo. “Our next Duke!” he muttered.

  Odo smiled. “I had rather,” he said, “that my past commended me than my future. It is more than doubtful if I am ever able to offer you a seat in the Duke’s carriage; but Odo Valsecca’s is very much at your service.”

  Gamba bowed with a kind of awkward dignity. “I am grateful for a friend’s kindness,” he said, “but I do not ride in a nobleman’s carriage.”

  “There,” returned Odo with perfect good-humour, “you have had advantage of ME; for I can no more escape doing so than you can escape spending your life in the company of an ill-tempered man.” And courteously lifting his hat he called to the postillion to drive on.

  The hunchback at this, flushing red, laid a hand on the carriage door.

  “Sir,” said he, “I freely own myself in the wrong; but a smooth temper was not one of the blessings my unknown parents bequeathed to me; and I confess I had heard of you as one little concerned with your inferiors except as they might chance to serve your pleasure.”

  It was Odo’s turn to colour. “Look,” said he, “at the fallibility of rumour; for I had heard of you as something of a philosopher, and here I find you not only taking a man’s character on hearsay but denying him the chance to prove you mistaken!”

  “I deny it no longer,” said Gamba stepping into the coach; “but as to philosophy, the only claim I can make to it is that of being by birth a peripatetic.”

  His dignity appeased, the hunchback proved himself a most engaging companion, and as the carriage lumbered slowly toward Pianura he had time not only to recount his own history but to satisfy Odo as to many points of the life awaiting him.

  Gamba, it appeared, owed his early schooling to a Jesuit priest who, visiting the foundling asylum, had been struck by the child’s quickness, and had taken him home and bred him to be a clerk. The priest’s death left his charge adrift, with a smattering of scholarship above his station, and none to whom he could turn for protection. For a while he had lived, as he said, like a street-cat, picking up a meal where he could, and sleeping in church porches and under street-arcades, till one of the Duke’s servants took pity on him and he was suffered to hang about the palace and earn his keep by doing the lacquey’s errands. The Duke’s attention having been called to him as a lad of parts, his Highness had given him to the Marquess of Cerveno, in whose service he remained till shortly before that young nobleman’s death. The hunchback passed hastily over this period; but his reticence was lit by the angry flash of his eyes. After the Marquess’s death he had lived for a while from hand to mouth, copying music, writing poetry for weddings and funerals, doing pen-and-ink portraits at a scudo apiece, and putting his hand to any honest job that came his way. Count Trescorre, who now and then showed a fitful recognition of the tie that was supposed to connect them, at length heard of the case to which he was come and offered him a trifling pension. This the hunchback refused, asking instead to be given some fixed employment. Trescorre then obtained his appointment as assistant to the Duke’s librarian, a good old priest engrossed in compiling the early history of Pianura from the ducal archives
; and this post Gamba had now filled for two years.

  “It must,” said Odo, “be one singularly congenial to you, if, as I have heard, you are of a studious habit. Though I suppose,” he tentatively added, “the library is not likely to be rich in works of the new scientific and philosophic schools.”

  His companion received this observation in silence; and after a moment Odo continued: “I have a motive in asking, since I have been somewhat deeply engaged in the study of these writers, and my dearest wish is to continue while in Pianura my examination of their theories, and if possible to become acquainted with any who share their views.”

  He was not insensible of the risk of thus opening himself to a stranger; but the sense of peril made him the more eager to proclaim himself on the side of the cause he seemed to have deserted.

  Gamba turned as he spoke, and their eyes met in one of those revealing glances that lay the foundations of friendship.

  “I fear, Cavaliere,” said the hunchback with a smile, “that you will find both branches of investigation somewhat difficult to pursue in Pianura; for the Church takes care that neither the philosophers nor their books shall gain a footing in our most Christian state. Indeed,”

  he added, “not only must the library be free from heretical works, but the librarian clear of heretical leanings; and since you have honoured me with your confidence I will own that, the court having got wind of my supposed tendency to liberalism, I live in daily expectation of dismissal. For the moment they are content to keep their spies on me; but were it not for the protection of the good abate, my superior, I should long since have been turned out.”

  “And why,” asked Odo, “do you speak of the court and the Church as one?”

  “Because, sir, in our virtuous duchy the terms are interchangeable. The Duke is in fact so zealous a son of the Church that if the latter showed any leniency to sinners the secular arm would promptly repair her negligence. His Highness, as you may have heard, is ruled by his confessor, an adroit Dominican. The confessor, it is true, has two rivals, the Countess Belverde, a lady distinguished for her piety, and a German astrologer or alchemist, lately come to Pianura, and calling himself a descendant of the Egyptian priesthood and an adept of the higher or secret doctrines of Neoplatonism. These three, however, though ostensibly rivals for the Duke’s favour, live on such good terms with one another that they are suspected of having entered into a secret partnership; while some regard them all as the emissaries of the Jesuits, who, since the suppression of the Society, are known to have kept a footing in Pianura, as in most of the Italian states. As to the Duke, the death of the Marquess of Cerveno, the failing health of the little prince, and his own strange physical infirmities, have so preyed on his mind that he is the victim of any who are unscrupulous enough to trade on the fears of a diseased imagination. His counsellors, however divided in doctrine, have at least one end in common; and that is, to keep the light of reason out of the darkened chamber in which they have confined him; and with such a ruler and such principles of government, you may fancy that poor philosophy has not where to lay her head.”