The Valley of Decision. Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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-coloured 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, when the hunchback, laughing at his amazement, led him down the terrace steps.

      It was Odo's lot in after years to walk the alleys of many a splendid garden, and to pace, often wearily enough, the paths along which he was now led; but never after did he renew the first enchanted impression of mystery and brightness that remained with him as the most vivid emotion of his childhood.

      Though it was February the season was so soft that the orange and lemon trees had been put out in their earthen vases before the lemon-house, and the beds in the parterres were full of violets, daffodils and auriculas; but the scent of the orange-blossoms and the bright colours of the flowers moved Odo less than the noble ordonnance of the pleached alleys, each terminated by a statue or a marble seat; and when he came to the grotto where, amid rearing sea-horses and Tritons, a cascade poured from the grove above, his wonder passed into such delicious awe as hung him speechless on the hunchback's hand.

      "Eh," said the latter with a sneer, "it's a finer garden than we have at our family palace. Do you know what's planted there?" he asked, turning suddenly on the little boy. "Dead bodies, cavaliere! Rows and rows of them; the bodies of my brothers and sisters, the Innocents who die like flies every year of the cholera and the measles and the putrid fever." He saw the terror in Odo's face and added in a gentler tone: "Eh, don't cry, cavaliere; they sleep better in those beds than in any others they're like to lie on. Come, come, and I'll show your excellency the aviaries."

      From the aviaries they passed to the Chinese pavilion, where the Duke supped on summer evenings, and thence to the bowling-alley, the fish-stew and the fruit-garden. At every step some fresh surprise arrested Odo; but the terrible vision of that other garden planted with the dead bodies of the Innocents robbed the spectacle of its brightness, dulled the plumage of the birds behind their gilt wires and cast a deeper shade over the beech-grove, where figures of goat-faced men lurked balefully in the twilight. Odo was glad when they left the blackness of this grove for the open walks, where gardeners were working and he had the reassurance of the sky. The hunchback, who seemed sorry that he had frightened him, told him many curious stories about the marble images that adorned the walks; and pausing suddenly before one of a naked man with a knife in his hand, cried out in a frenzy: "This is my namesake, Brutus!" But when Odo would have asked if the naked man was a kinsman, the boy hurried him on, saying only: "You'll read of him some day in Plutarch."

      1.3.

      Odo, next morning, under the hunchback's guidance, continued his exploration of the palace. His mother seemed glad to be rid of him, and Vanna packing him off early, with the warning that he was not to fall into the fishponds or get himself trampled by the horses, he guessed, with a thrill, that he had leave to visit the stables. Here in fact the two boys were soon making their way among the crowd of grooms and strappers in the yard, seeing the Duke's carriage-horses groomed, and the Duchess's cream-coloured hackney saddled for her ride in the chase; and at length, after much lingering and gazing, going on to the harness-rooms and coach-house. The state-carriages, with their carved and gilt wheels, their panels gay with flushed divinities and their stupendous velvet hammer-cloths edged with bullion, held Odo spellbound. He had a born taste for splendour, and the thought that he might one day sit in one of these glittering vehicles puffed his breast with pride and made him address the hunchback with sudden condescension. "When I'm a man I shall ride in these carriages," he said; whereat the other laughed and returned good-humouredly: "Eh, that's not so much to boast of, cavaliere; I shall ride in a carriage one of these days myself." Odo stared, not over-pleased, and the boy added: "When I'm carried to the churchyard, I mean," with a chuckle of relish at the joke.

      From the stables they passed СКАЧАТЬ