“Your Highness,” he said, “consider what this means. We hold the state in our hands. If you are against us you are powerless. If you are with us we can promise you more power than you ever dreamed of possessing.”
The Duke looked at him with a musing smile. “It is as though you offered me gold in a desert island,” he said. “Do not waste such poor bribes on me. I care for no power but the power to wipe out the work of these last years. Failing that, I want nothing that you or any other man can give.”
Gamba was silent a moment. He turned aside into the embrasure of the window, and when he spoke again it was in a voice broken with grief.
“Your Highness,” he said, “if your choice is made, ours is made also. It is a hard choice, but these are fratricidal hours. We have come to the parting of the ways.”
The Duke made no sign, and Gamba went on with gathering anguish: “We would have gone to the world’s end with your Highness for our leader!”
“With a leader whom you could lead,” Odo interposed. He went up to Gamba and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Speak out, man,” he said. “Say what you were sent to say. Am I a prisoner?”
The hunchback burst into tears. Odo, with his arms crossed, stood leaning against the window. The other’s anguish seemed to deepen his detachment.
“Your Highness—your Highness—” Gamba stammered.
The Duke made an impatient gesture. “Come, make an end,” he said.
Gamba fell back with a profound bow.
“We do not ask the surrender of your Highness’s person,” he said.
“Not even that?” Odo returned with a faint sneer.
Gamba flushed to the temples, but the retort died on his lips.
“Your Highness,” he said, scarce above a whisper, “the gates are guarded; but the word for tonight is ‘Humilitas.’” He knelt and kissed Odo’s hand. Then he rose and passed out of the room…
***
Before dawn the Duke left the palace. The high emotions of the night had ebbed. He saw himself now, in the ironic light of morning, as a fugitive too harmless to be worth pursuing. His enemies had let him keep his sword because they had no cause to fear it. Alone he passed through the gardens of the palace, and out into the desert darkness of the streets.
Skirting the wall of the Benedictine convent where Fulvia had lodged, he gained a street leading to the marketplace. In the pallor of the waning night the ancient monuments of his race stood up mournful and deserted as a line of tombs. The city seemed a grave-yard and he the ineffectual ghost of its dead past. He reached the gates and gave the watchword. The gates were guarded, as he had been advised; but the captain of the watch let him pass without show of hesitation or curiosity. Though he made no effort at disguise he went forth unrecognised, and the city closed her doors on him as carelessly as on any passing wanderer.
Beyond the gates a lad from the ducal stables waited with a horse. Odo sprang into the saddle and rode on toward Pontesordo. The darkness was growing thinner, and the meagre details of the landscape, with its huddled farmhouses and mulberry-orchards, began to define themselves as he advanced. To his left the field stretched, grey and sodden; ahead, on his right, hung the dark woods of the ducal chase. Presently a bend of the road brought him within sight of the keep of Pontesordo. His way led past it, toward Valsecca; but some obscure instinct laid a detaining hand on him, and at the cross-roads he bent to the right and rode across the marshland to the old manor-house.
The farmyard lay hushed and deserted. The peasants who lived there would soon be afoot; but for the moment Odo had the place to himself. He tethered his horse to a gate-post and walked across the rough cobblestones to the chapel. Its floor was still heaped with farm-tools and dried vegetables, and in the dimness a heavier veil of dust seemed to obscure the painted walls. Odo advanced, picking his way among broken ploughshares and stacks of maize, till he stood near the old marble altar, with its sea-gods and acanthus volutes. The place laid its tranquillising hush on him, and he knelt on the step beneath the altar.
Something stirred in him as he knelt there—a prayer, yet not a prayer—a reaching out, obscure and inarticulate, toward all that had survived of his early hopes and faiths, a loosening of old founts of pity, a longing to be somehow, somewhere reunited to his old belief in life.
How long he knelt he knew not; but when he looked up the chapel was full of a pale light, and in the first shaft of the sunrise the face of Saint Francis shone out on him…He went forth into the daybreak and rode away toward Piedmont.
End of Project Gutenberg’s Etext The Valley Of Decision, by Edith Wharton