“The end?” he murmured. “Who knows what the end will be?”
“Do you still need to be told?” she exclaimed. “Must you always come to me to learn that you are in danger?”
“If the state is in danger the danger must be faced. The state exists for the people; if they do not need it, it has ceased to serve its purpose.”
She clasped her hands in an ecstasy of wonder. “Oh, fool, madman—but it is not of the state I speak! It is you who are in danger—you—you—you—”
He raised his head with an impatient gesture.
“I?” he said. “I had thought you meant a graver peril.”
She looked at him in silence. Her pride met his and thrilled with it; and for a moment the two were one.
“Odo!” she cried. She sank into a chair, and he went to her and took her hand.
“Such fears are worthy neither of us,” he said gravely.
“I am not ashamed of them,” she said. Her hand clung to him and she lifted her eyes to his face. “You will listen to me?” she whispered in a glow.
He drew back chilled. If only she had kept the feminine in abeyance! But sex was her only weapon.
“I have listened,” he said quietly. “And I thank you.”
“But you will not be counselled?”
“In the last issue one must be one’s own counsellor.”
Her face flamed. “If you were but that!” she tossed back at him.
The taunt struck him full. He knew that he should have let it lie; but he caught it up in spite of himself.
“Madam!” he said.
“I should have appealed to our sovereign, not to her servant!” she cried, dashing into the breach she had made.
He stood motionless, stunned almost. For what she had said was true. He was no longer the sovereign: the rule had passed out of his hands.
His silence frightened her. With an instinctive jealousy she saw that her words had started a train of thought in which she had no part. She felt herself ignored, abandoned; and all her passions rushed to the defence of her wounded vanity.
“Oh, believe me,” she cried, “I speak as your Duchess, not as your wife.
That is a name in which I should never dream of appealing to you. I have ever stood apart from your private pleasures, as became a woman of my house.” She faced him with a flash of the Austrian insolence. “But when I see the state drifting to ruin as the result of your caprice, when I see your own life endangered, your people turned against you, religion openly insulted, law and authority made the plaything of this—this—false atheistical creature, that has robbed me—robbed me of all—” She broke off helplessly and hid her face with a sob.
Odo stood speechless, spellbound. He could not mistake what had happened. The woman had surged to the surface at last—the real woman, passionate, self-centred, undisciplined, but so piteous, after all, in this sudden subjection to the one tenderness that survived in her. She loved him and was jealous of her rival. That was the instinct which had swept all others aside. At that moment she cared nothing for her safety or his. The state might perish if they but fell together. It was the distance between them that maddened her.
The tragic simplicity of the revelation left Odo silent. For a fantastic moment he yielded to the vision of what that waste power might have accomplished. Life seemed to him a confusion of roving force that met only to crash in ruins.
His silence drew her to her feet. She repossessed herself, throbbing but valiant.
“My fears for your Highness’s safety have led my speech astray. I have given your Highness the warning it was my duty to give. Beyond that I had no thought of trespassing.”
And still Odo was silent. A dozen answers struggled to his lips; but they were checked by the stealing sense of duality that so often paralysed his action. He had recovered his lucidity of vision, and his impulses faded before it like mist. He saw life again as it was, an incomplete and shabby business, a patchwork of torn and ravelled effort.
Everywhere the shears of Atropos were busy, and never could the cut threads be joined again.
He took his wife’s hand and bent over it ceremoniously. It lay in his like a stone.
4.8.
The jubilee of the Mountain Madonna fell on the feast of the Purification. It was mid-November, but with a sky of June. The autumn rains had ceased for the moment, and fields and orchards glistened with a late verdure.
Never had the faithful gathered in such numbers to do honour to the wonder-working Virgin. A widespread resistance to the influences of free thought and Jansenism was pouring fresh life into the old formulas of devotion. Though many motives combined to strengthen this movement, it was still mainly a simple expression of loyalty to old ideals, an instinctive rallying around a threatened cause. It is the honest conviction underlying all great popular impulses that gives them their real strength; and in this case the thousands of pilgrims flocking on foot to the mountain shrine embodied a greater moral force than the powerful ecclesiastics at whose call they had gathered.
The clergy themselves were come from all sides; while those that were unable to attend had sent costly gifts to the miraculous Virgin. The Bishops of Mantua, Modena, Vercelli and Cremona had travelled to Pianura in state, the people flocking out beyond the gates to welcome them. Four mitred Abbots, several Monsignori, and Priors, Rectors, Vicars-general and canons innumerable rode in the procession, followed on foot by the humble army of parish priests and by interminable confraternities of all orders.
The approach of the great dignitaries was hailed with enthusiasm by the crowds lining the roads. Even the Bishop of Pianura, never popular with the people, received an unwonted measure of applause, and the white-cowled Prior of the Dominicans, riding by stern and close-lipped as a monk of Zurbaran’s, was greeted with frenzied acclamations. The report that the Bishop and the heads of the religious houses in Pianura were to set free suppers for the pilgrims had doubtless quickened this outburst of piety; yet it was perhaps chiefly due to the sense of coming peril that had gradually permeated the dim consciousness of the crowd.
In the church, the glow of lights, the thrilling beauty of the music and the glitter of the priestly vestments were blent in a melting harmony of sound and colour. The shrine of the Madonna shone with unearthly radiance. Hundreds of candles formed an elongated nimbus about her hieratic figure, which was surmounted by the canopy of cloth-of-gold presented by the Duke of Modena. The Bishops of Vercelli and Cremona had offered a robe of silver brocade studded with coral and turquoises, the devout Princess Clotilda of Savoy an emerald necklace, the Bishop of Pianura a marvellous veil of rose-point made in a Flemish convent; while on the statue’s brow rested the Duke’s jewelled diadem.
The Duke himself, seated in his tribune above the choir, observed the scene with a renewed appreciation of the Church’s unfailing dramatic instinct. At first he saw in the spectacle only this outer and symbolic side, of which the mere sensuous beauty had always deeply moved him; but as he watched the effect produced on the great throng filling the aisles, he began to see that this external splendour was but the veil before the sanctuary, and to realise what de Crucis meant when he spoke of the deep hold of the Church upon the people. Every colour, every gesture, every word and note of music that made up the texture of the gorgeous ceremonial might indeed seem part of a long-studied and astutely-planned effect. Yet each had its root in some instinct of the heart, some natural development of the inner life, so that they were in fact not the cunningly-adjusted fragments of an arbitrary pattern but the inseparable fibres of a living organism. It was Odo’s misfortune to see too far ahead on the road along which his destiny was urging him. As he sat there, face to face with the people he was trying to lead, he heard above the music of the mass and the chant of the kneeling throng an echo of the question that Don Gervaso had once put to him:—“If you take Christ from the people, what have you to give them instead?”