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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.

BOOK I. THE OLD ORDER.

BOOK II. THE NEW LIGHT.

BOOK III. THE CHOICE.

BOOK IV. THE REWARD.



BOOK I.

THE OLD 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- 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. I haven't told him, your
reverence; it's my silly tender-heartedness that won't let me. He's
always been like one of my own creatures to me--" and she confounded Odo
by bursting into tears.

The abate stood on the doorstep. He was a tall stout man with a hooked
nose and lace ruffles. His nostrils were stained with snuff and he took
a pinch from a tortoise-shell box set with the miniature of a lady; then
he looked down at Odo and shrugged his shoulders.

Odo was growing sick with apprehension. It was two days before the
appointed time for his weekly instruction and he had not prepared his
catechism. He had not even thought of it--and the abate could use the
cane. Odo stood silent and envied girls, who are not disgraced by
crying. The tears were in his throat, but he had fixed principles about
crying. It was his opinion that a little boy who was a cavaliere might
weep when he was angry or sorry, but never when he was afraid; so he
held his head high and put his hand to his side, as though to rest it on
his sword.

The abate sneezed and tapped his snuff-box.

"Come, come, cavaliere, you must be brave--you must be a man; you have
duties, you have responsibilities. It's your duty to console your
mother--the poor lady is plunged in despair. Eh? What's that? You
haven't told him? Cavaliere, your illustrious father is no more."

Odo stared a moment without understanding; then his grief burst from him
in a great sob, and he hid himself against Filomena's apron, weeping for
the father in damascened armour and scarlet cloak.

"Come, come," said the abate impatiently. "Is supper laid? for we must
be gone as soon as the mist rises." He took the little boy by the hand.
"Would it not distract your mind to recite the catechism?" he inquired.

"No, no!" cried Odo with redoubled sobs.

"Well, then, as you will. What a madman!" he exclaimed to Filomena. "I
warrant it hasn't seen its father three times in its life. Come in,
cavaliere; come to supper."

Filomena had laid a table in the stone chamber known as the bailiff's
parlour, and thither the abate dragged his charge and set him down
before the coarse tablecloth covered with earthen platters. A tallow dip
threw its flare on the abate's big aquiline face as he sat opposite Odo,
gulping the hastily prepared frittura and the thick purple wine in its
wicker flask. Odo could eat nothing. The tears still ran down his cheeks
and his whole soul was possessed by the longing to steal back and see
whether the figure of the knight in the scarlet cloak had vanished from
the chapel wall. The abate sat in silence, gobbling his food like the
old black pig in the yard. When he had finished he stood up, exclaiming:
"Death comes to us all, as the hawk said to the chicken. You must be a
man, cavaliere." Then he stepped into the kitchen, and called out for
the horses to be put to.

The farm hands had slunk away to one of the outhouses, and Filomena and
Jacopone stood bowing and curtseying 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 cried, springing forward in a passion of tears.

The lady, who was young, pale and handsome, pushed back her chair with a
warning hand.

"Child," she exclaimed, "your shoes are covered with mud; and, good
heavens, how you smell of the stable! Abate, is it thus you teach your
pupil to approach me?"

"Madam, I am abashed by the cavaliere's temerity. But in truth I believe
excessive grief has clouded his wits--'tis inconceivable how he mourns
his father!"

Donna Laura's eyebrows rose in a faint smile. "May he never have worse
to grieve for!" said she in French; then, extending her scented hand to
the little boy, she added solemnly: "My son, we have suffered an
irreparable loss."

Odo, abashed by her rebuke and the abate's apology, had drawn his heels
together in a rustic version of the low bow with which the children of
that day were taught to approach their parents.

"Holy Virgin!" said his mother with a laugh, "I perceive they have no
dancing-master at Pontesordo. Cavaliere, you may kiss my hand.
So--that's better; we shall make a gentleman of you yet. But what makes
your face so wet? Ah, crying, to be sure. Mother of God! as for crying,
there's enough to cry about." She put the child aside and turned to the
preceptor. "The Duke refuses to pay," she said with a shrug of despair.

"Good heavens!" lamented the abate, raising his hands. "And Don Lelio?"
he faltered.

She shrugged again, impatiently. "As great a gambler as my husband.
They're all alike, abate: six times since last Easter has the bill been
sent to me for that trifle of a turquoise buckle he made such a to-do
about giving me." She rose and began to pace the room in disorder. "I'm
a ruined woman," she cried, "and it's a disgrace for the Duke to refuse
me."

The abate raised an admonishing finger. "Excellency...excellency..."

She glanced over her shoulder.

"Eh? You're right. Everything is heard here. But who's to pay for my
mourning the saints alone know! I sent an express this morning to my
father, but you know my brothers bleed him like leeches. I could have
got this easily enough from the Duke a year ago--it's his marriage has
made him so stiff. That little white-faced fool--she hates me because
Lelio won't look at her, and she thinks it's my fault. As if I cared
whom he looks at! Sometimes I think he has money put away...all I want
is two hundred ducats...a woman of my rank!" She turned suddenly on Odo,
who stood, very small and frightened, in the corner to which she had
pushed him. "What are you staring at, child? Eh! the monkey is dropping
with sleep. Look at his eyes, abate! Here, Vanna, Tonina, to bed with
him; he may sleep with you in my dressing-closet, Tonina. Go with her,
child, go; but for God's sake wake him if he snores. I'm too ill to have
my rest disturbed." And she lifted a pomander to her nostrils.

The next few days dwelt in Odo's memory as a blur of strange sights and
sounds. The super-acute state of his perceptions was succeeded after a
night's sleep by the natural passivity with which children accept the
improbable, so that he passed from one novel impression to another as
easily and with the same exhilaration as if he had been listening to a
fairy tale. Solitude and neglect had no surprises for him, and it seemed
natural enough that his mother and her maids should be too busy to
remember his presence.

For the first day or two he sat unnoticed on his little stool in a
corner of his mother's room, while packing-chests were dragged in,
wardrobes emptied, mantua-makers and milliners consulted, and
troublesome creditors dismissed with abuse, or even blows, by the
servants lounging in the ante-chamber. Donna Laura continued to show the
liveliest symptoms of concern, but the child perceived her distress to
be but indirectly connected with the loss she had suffered, and he had
seen enough of poverty at the farm to guess that the need of money was
somehow at the bottom of her troubles. How any one could be in want, who
slept between damask curtains and lived on sweet cakes and chocolate, it
exceeded his fancy to conceive; yet there were times when his mother's
voice had the same frightened angry sound as Filomena's on the days when
the bailiff went over the accounts at Pontesordo.

Her excellency's rooms, during these days, were always crowded, for
besides the dressmakers and other merchants there was the hairdresser,
or French Monsu--a loud, important figure, with a bag full of cosmetics
and curling-irons--the abate, always running in and out with messages
and letters, and taking no more notice of Odo than if he had never seen
him, and a succession of ladies brimming with condolences, and each
followed by a servant who swelled the noisy crowd of card-playing
lacqueys in the ante-chamber.

Through all these figures came and went another, to Odo the most
noticeable,--that of a handsome young man with a high manner, dressed
always in black, but with an excess of lace ruffles and jewels, a
clouded amber head to his cane, and red heels to his shoes. This young
gentleman, whose age could not have been more than twenty, and who had
the coldest insolent air, was treated with profound respect by all but
Donna Laura, who was for ever quarrelling with him when he was present,
yet could not support his absence without lamentations and alarm. The
abate appeared to act as messenger between the two, and when he came to
say that the Count rode with the court, or was engaged to sup with the
Prime Minister, or had business on his father's estate in the country,
the lady would openly yield to her distress, crying out that she knew
well enough what his excuses meant: that she was the most cruelly
outraged of women, and that he treated her no better than a husband.

For two days Odo languished in his corner, whisked by the women's
skirts, smothered under the hoops and falbalas which the dressmakers
unpacked from their cases, fed at irregular hours, and faring on the
whole no better than at Pontesordo. The third morning, Vanna, who seemed
the most good-natured of the women, cried out on his pale looks when she
brought him his cup of chocolate. "I declare," she exclaimed, "the child
has had no air since he came in from the farm. What does your excellency
say? Shall the hunchback take him for a walk in the gardens?"

To this her excellency, who sat at her toilet under the hair-dresser's
hands, irritably replied that she had not slept all night and was in no
state to be tormented about such trifles, but that the child might go
where he pleased.

Odo, who was very weary of his corner, sprang up readily enough when
Vanna, at this, beckoned him to the inner ante-chamber. Here, where
persons of a certain condition waited (the outer being given over to
servants and tradesmen), they found a lean humpbacked boy, shabbily
dressed in darned stockings and a faded coat, but with an extraordinary
keen pale face that at once attracted and frightened the child.

"There, go with him; he won't eat you," said Vanna, giving him a push as
she hurried away; and Odo, trembling a little, laid his hand in the
boy's. "Where do you come from?" he faltered, looking up into his
companion's face.

The boy laughed and the blood rose to his high cheekbones. "I?--From the
Innocenti, if your Excellency knows where that is," said he.

Odo's face lit up. "Of course I do," he cried, reassured. "I know a girl
who comes from there--the Momola at Pontesordo."

"Ah, indeed?" said the boy with a queer look. "Well, she's my sister,
then. Give her my compliments when you see her, cavaliere. Oh, we're a
large family, we are!"

Odo's perplexity was returning. "Are you really Momola's brother?" he
asked.

"Eh, in a way--we're children of the same house."

"But you live in the palace, don't you?" Odo persisted, his curiosity
surmounting his fear. "Are you a servant of my mother's?"

"I'm the servant of your illustrious mother's servants; the abatino of
the waiting-women. I write their love-letters, do you see, cavaliere, I
carry their rubbish to the pawnbroker's when their sweethearts have bled
them of their savings; I clean the birdcages and feed the monkeys, and
do the steward's accounts when he's drunk, and sleep on a bench in the
portico and steal my food from the pantry...and my father very likely
goes in velvet and carries a sword at his side."

The boy's voice had grown shrill, and his eyes blazed like an owl's in
the dark. Odo would have given the world to be back in his corner, but
he was ashamed to betray his lack of heart; and to give himself courage
he asked haughtily: "And what is your name, boy?"

The hunchback gave him a gleaming look. "Call me Brutus," he cried, "for
Brutus killed a tyrant." He gave Odo's hand a pull. "Come along," said
he, "and I'll show you his statue in the garden--Brutus's statue in a
prince's garden, mind you!" And as the little boy trotted at his side
down the long corridors he kept repeating under his breath in a kind of
angry sing-song, "For Brutus killed a tyrant."

The sense of strangeness inspired by his odd companion soon gave way in
Odo's mind to emotions of delight and wonder. He was, even at that age,
unusually sensitive to external impressions, and when the hunchback,
after descending many stairs and winding through endless back-passages,
at length led him out on a terrace above the gardens, the beauty of the
sight swelled his little heart to bursting.

A Duke of Pianura had, some hundred years earlier, caused a great wing
to be added to his palace by the eminent architect Carlo Borromini, and
this accomplished designer had at the same time replanted and enlarged
the ducal gardens. To Odo, who had never seen plantations more artful
than the vineyards and mulberry orchards about Pontesordo, these
perspectives of clipped beech and yew, these knots of box filled in with
multi- sand, appeared, with the fountains, colonnades and
trellised arbours surmounted by globes of glass, to represent the very
pattern and Paradise of gardens. It seemed indeed too beautiful to be
real, and he trembled, as he sometimes did at the music of the Easter
mass