



Produced by Sue Asscher.  HTML version by Al Haines.










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
n