Odo bowed in silence.
“You may have heard,” Trescorre continued, addressing him in the same engaging tone, “that I am come to Turin on a mission from his Highness to the court of Savoy: a trifling matter of boundary-lines and customs, which I undertook at the Duke’s desire, the more readily, it must be owned, since it gave me the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with friends whom absence has not taught me to forget.” He smiled again at Donna Laura, who blushed like a girl.
The curiosity which Trescorre’s words excited was lost to Odo in the painful impression produced by his mother’s agitation. To see her, a woman already past her youth, and aged by her very efforts to preserve it, trembling and bridling under the cool eye of masculine indifference, was a spectacle the more humiliating that he was too young to be moved by its human and pathetic side. He recalled once seeing a memento mori of delicately-tinted ivory, which represented a girl’s head, one side all dewy freshness, the other touched with death; and it seemed to him that his mother’s face resembled this tragic toy, the side her mirror reflected being still rosy with youth, while that which others saw was already a ruin. His heart burned with disgust as he followed Donna Laura and Trescorre into the dining-room, which had been set out with all the family plate, and decked with rare fruits and flowers. The Countess had excused her husband on the plea of his official duties, and the three sat down alone to a meal composed of the costliest delicacies.
Their guest, who ate little and drank less, entertained them with the latest news of Pianura, touching discreetly on the growing estrangement between the Duke and Duchess, and speaking with becoming gravity of the heir’s weak health. It was clear that the speaker, without filling an official position at the court, was already deep in the Duke’s counsels, and perhaps also in the Duchess’s; and Odo guessed under his smiling indiscretions the cool aim of the man who never wastes a shot.
Toward the close of the meal, when the servants had withdrawn, he turned to Odo with a graver manner. “You have perhaps guessed, cavaliere,” he said, “that in venturing to claim the Countess’s hospitality in so private a manner, I had in mind the wish to open myself to you more freely than would be possible at court.” He paused a moment, as though to emphasise his words; and Odo fancied he cultivated the trick of deliberate speaking to counteract his natural arrogance of manner. “The time has come,” he went on, “when it seems desirable that you should be more familiar with the state of affairs at Pianura. For some years it seemed likely that the Duchess would give his Highness another son; but circumstances now appear to preclude that hope; and it is the general opinion of the court physicians that the young prince has not many years to live.” He paused again, fixing his eyes on Odo’s flushed face. “The Duke,” he continued, “has shown a natural reluctance to face a situation so painful both to his heart and his ambitions; but his feelings as a parent have yielded to his duty as a sovereign, and he recognises the fact that you should have an early opportunity of acquainting yourself more nearly with the affairs of the duchy, and also of seeing something of the other courts of Italy. I am persuaded,” he added, “that, young as you are, I need not point out to you on what slight contingencies all human fortunes hang, and how completely the heir’s recovery or the birth of another prince must change the aspect of your future. You have, I am sure, the heart to face such chances with becoming equanimity, and to carry the weight of conditional honours without any undue faith in their permanence.”
The admonition was so lightly uttered that it seemed rather a tribute to Odo’s good sense than a warning to his inexperience; and indeed it was difficult for him, in spite of an instinctive aversion to the man, to quarrel with anything in his address or language. Trescorre in fact possessed the art of putting younger men at their ease, while appearing as an equal among his elders: a gift doubtless developed by the circumstances of court life, and the need of at once commanding respect and disarming diffidence.
He took leave upon his last words, declaring, in reply to the Countess’s protests, that he had promised to accompany the court that afternoon to Stupinigi. “But I hope,” he added, turning to Odo, “to continue our talk at greater length, if you will favour me with a visit tomorrow at my lodgings.”
No sooner was the door closed on her illustrious visitor than Donna Laura flung herself on Odo’s bosom.
“I always knew it,” she cried, “my dearest; but, oh, that I should live to see the day!” and she wept and clung to him with a thousand endearments, from the nature of which he gathered that she already beheld him on the throne of Pianura. To his laughing reminder of the distance that still separated him from that dizzy eminence, she made answer that there was far more than he knew, that the Duke had fallen into all manner of excesses which had already gravely impaired his health, and that for her part she only hoped her son, when raised to a station so far above her own, would not forget the tenderness with which she had ever cherished him, or the fact that Count Valdu’s financial situation was one quite unworthy the stepfather of a reigning prince.
Escaping at length from this parody of his own sensations, Odo found himself in a tumult of mind that solitude served only to increase.
Events had so pressed upon him within the last few days that at times he was reduced to a passive sense of spectatorship, an inability to regard himself as the centre of so many converging purposes. It was clear that Trescorre’s mission was mainly a pretext for seeing the Duke’s young kinsman; and that some special motive must have impelled the Duke to show such sudden concern for his cousin’s welfare. Trescorre need hardly have cautioned Odo against fixing his hopes on the succession. The Duke himself was a man not above five-and-thirty, and more than one chance stood between Odo and the duchy; nor was it this contingency that set his pulses beating, but rather the promise of an immediate change in his condition. The Duke wished him to travel, to visit the different courts of Italy: what was the prospect of ruling over a stagnant principality to this near vision of the world and the glories thereof, suddenly discovered from the golden height of opportunity? Save for a few weeks of autumn villeggiatura at some neighbouring chase or vineyard, Odo had not left Turin for nine years. He had come there a child and had grown to manhood among the same narrow influences and surroundings. To be turned loose on the world at two-and-twenty, with such an arrears of experience to his credit, was to enter on a richer inheritance than any duchy; and in Odo’s case the joy of the adventure was doubled by its timeliness. That fate should thus break at a stroke the meshes of habit, should stoop to play the advocate of his secret inclinations, seemed to promise him the complicity of the gods. Once in a lifetime, chance will thus snap the toils of a man’s making; and it is instructive to see the poor puppet adore the power that connives at his evasion…
Trescorre remained a week in Turin; and Odo saw him daily at court, at his lodgings, or in company. The little sovereignty of Pianura being an important factor in the game of political equilibrium, her envoy was sure of a flattering reception from the neighbouring powers; and Trescorre’s person and address must have commended him to the most fastidious company. He continued to pay particular attention to Odo, and the rumour was soon abroad that the Cavaliere Valsecca had been sent for to visit his cousin, the reigning Duke; a rumour which, combined with Donna Laura’s confidential hints, made Odo the centre of much feminine solicitude, and roused the Countess Clarice to a vivid sense of her rights. These circumstances, and his own tendency to drift on the current of sensation, had carried Odo more easily than he could have hoped past the painful episode of the Professor’s garden. He was still tormented by the sense of his inability to right so grave a wrong; but he found solace in the thought that his absence was after all the best reparation he could make.