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Updated: May 17, 2025
The Duchess, her boy still clasped against her, remained proudly seated; but her eyes met Odo's in a glance of terrified entreaty, and at the same instant he felt a clutch on his sleeve and heard Cantapresto's whisper. "Cavaliere, a boat waits at the landing below the tanners' lane.
Odo's imagination had been profoundly stirred by what he had heard and seen at the meeting of the Honey-Bees. That impatience with the vanity of his own pursuits and with the injustice of existing conditions, which hovered like a phantom at the feast of life, had at last found form and utterance.
She moved across the room, carrying her head high and advancing tranquilly to Odo's side. Even in that moment of confused emotions he was struck by the nobility of her gait and gesture. She turned to de Crucis, and Odo had the immediate intuition that she had recognised him. "Will you let me speak a word privately to the cavaliere Valsecca?" she said. The other bowed silently and turned away.
She received Fulvia with a tender wonder, as at some supernatural presence descending into her life, too much awed, till the first embraces were over, to risk any conjecture as to Odo's presence.
This ecclesiastic was engaged in conversation with the Prime Minister, Count Pievepelago, a small feeble mannikin covered with gold lace and orders. The deference with which the latter followed the Dominican's discourse excited Odo's attention; but it was soon diverted by the approach of a lady who joined herself to the group with an air of discreet familiarity.
To this quarter Odo Valsecca was allotted; though it was understood that on leaving the Academy he was to enter the Sardinian service. It was customary for a young gentleman of Odo's rank to be attended at the Academy not only by a body-servant but by a private governor or pedant, whose business it was to overlook his studies, attend him abroad, and have an eye to the society he frequented.
The words burned themselves into Odo's heart like some mystic writing on the walls of memory, long afterward to start into fiery meaning. At the time he felt only that the priest spoke with a power and dignity no human authority could give; and for a moment all the stored influences of his faith reached out to him from the dimly-gleaming altar. The next sun rose on a new world.
To a traveller of Odo's temper there could be few more agreeable journeys than the one on which he was setting out, and the Duke being in no haste to have his commission executed, his messenger had full leisure to enjoy every stage of the way.
Certain it is that, in the interchange of their daily comradeship, the elder gave his friend much that he was himself unconscious of possessing, and perhaps first saw reflected in Odo's more vivid sensibility an outline of the formless ideals coiled in the depths of his own sluggish nature.
Odo's glimpse of the square at Oropa told him that here was a band of strolling players such as Cantapresto had talked of on the ride back to Donnaz. Don Gervaso's instructions and the old Marchioness's warning against the theatre were present enough in the boy's mind to add a touch of awe to the curiosity with which he observed these strange objects of the Church's reprobation.
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