The Duke had promised to visit Fulvia that evening. For several days his state of indecision had made him find pretexts for avoiding her; but now that the charter was signed and he had ordered its proclamation, he craved the contact of her unwavering faith.
He found her alone in the dusk of the convent parlour; but he had hardly crossed the threshold before he was aware of an indefinable change in his surroundings. She advanced with an impulsiveness out of harmony with the usual tranquillity of their meetings, and he felt her hand tremble and burn in his. In the twilight it seemed to him that her very dress had a warmer rustle and glimmer, that there emanated from her glance and movements some heady fragrance of a long-past summer. He smiled to think that this phantom coquetry should have risen at the summons of an academic degree; but some deeper sense in him was stirred as by a vision of waste riches adrift on the dim seas of chance.
For a moment she sat silent, as in the days when they had been too near each other for many words; and there was something indescribably soothing in this dreamlike return to the past. It was he who roused himself first.
"How young you look!" he said, giving involuntary utterance to his thought.
"Do I?" she answered gaily. "I am glad of that, for I feel extraordinarily young tonight. Perhaps it is because I have been thinking a great deal of the old days--of Venice and Turin--and of the high-road to Vercelli, for instance." She glanced at him with a smile.
"Do you know," she went on, moving to a seat at his side, and laying a hand on the arm of his chair, "that there is one secret of mine you have never guessed in all these years?"
Odo returned her smile. "What is it, I wonder?" he said.
She fixed him with bright bantering eyes. "I knew why you deserted us at Vercelli." He uttered an exclamation, but she lifted a hand to his lips.
"Ah, how angry I was then--but why be angry now? It all happened so long ago; and if it had not happened--who knows?--perhaps you would never have pitied me enough to love me as you did." She laughed softly, reminiscently, leaning back as if to let the tide of memories ripple over her. Then she raised her head suddenly, and said in a changed voice: "Are your plans fixed for tomorrow?"
Odo glanced at her in surprise. Her mind seemed to move as capriciously as Maria Clementina"s.
"The const.i.tution is signed," he answered, "and my ministers proclaim it tomorrow morning." He looked at her a moment, and lifted her hand to his lips. "Everything has been done according to your wishes," he said.
She drew away with a start, and he saw that she had turned pale. "No, no--not as I wish," she murmured. "It must not be because _I_ wish--"
she broke off and her hand slipped from his.
"You have taught me to wish as you wish," he answered gently. "Surely you would not disown your pupil now?"
Her agitation increased. "Do not call yourself that!" she exclaimed.
"Not even in jest. What you have done has been done of your own choice--because you thought it best for your people. My nearness or absence could have made no difference."
He looked at her with growing wonder. "Why this sudden modesty?" he said with a smile. "I thought you prided yourself on your share in the great work."
She tried to force an answering smile, but the curve broke into a quiver of distress, and she came close to him, with a gesture that seemed to take flight from herself.
"Don"t say it, don"t say it!" she broke out. "What right have they to call it my doing? I but stood aside and watched you and gloried in you--is there any guilt to a woman in THAT?" She clung to him a moment, hiding her face in his breast.
He loosened her arms gently, that he might draw back and look at her.
"Fulvia," he asked, "what ails you? You are not yourself tonight. Has anything happened to distress you? Have you been annoyed or alarmed in any way?--It is not possible," he broke off, "that Trescorre has been here--?"
She drew away, flushed and protesting. "No, no," she exclaimed. "Why should Trescorre come here? Why should you fancy that any one has been here? I am excited, I know; I talk idly; but it is because I have been thinking too long of these things--"
"Of what things?"
"Of what people say--how can one help hearing that? I sometimes fancy that the more withdrawn one lives the more distinctly one hears the outer noises."
"But why should you heed the outer noises? You have never done so before."
"Perhaps I was wrong not to do so before. Perhaps I should have listened sooner. Perhaps others have seen--understood--sooner than I--oh, the thought is intolerable!"
She moved a pace or two away, and then, regaining the mastery of her lips and eyes, turned to him with a show of calmness.
"Your heart was never in this charter--" she began.
"Fulvia!" he cried protestingly; but she lifted a silencing hand. "Ah, I have seen it--I have felt it--but I was never willing to own that you were right. My pride in you blinded me, I suppose. I could not bear to dream any fate for you but the greatest. I saw you always leading events, rather than waiting on them. But true greatness lies in the man, not in his actions. Compromise, delay, renunciation--these may be as heroic as conflict. A woman"s vision is so narrow that I did not see this at first. You have always told me that I looked only at one side of the question; but I see the other side now--I see that you were right."
Odo stood silent. He had followed her with growing wonder. A volte-face so little in keeping with her mental habits immediately struck him as a feint; yet so strangely did it accord with his own secret reluctances that these inclined him to let it pa.s.s unquestioned.
Some instinctive loyalty to his past checked the temptation. "I am not sure that I understand you," he said slowly. "Have you lost faith in the ideas we have worked for?"
She hesitated, and he saw the struggle beneath her surface calmness.
"No, no," she exclaimed quickly, "I have not lost faith in them--"
"In me, then?"
She smiled with a disarming sadness. "That would be so much simpler!"
she murmured.
"What do you mean, then?" he urged. "We must understand each other." He paused, and measured his words out slowly. "Do you think it a mistake to proclaim the const.i.tution tomorrow?"
Again her face was full of shadowy contradictions. "I entreat you not to proclaim it tomorrow," she said in a low voice.
Odo felt the blood drum in his ears. Was not this the word for which he had waited? But still some deeper instinct held him back, warning him, as it seemed, that to fall below his purpose at such a juncture was the only measurable failure. He must know more before he yielded, see deeper into her heart and his; and each moment brought the clearer conviction that there was more to know and see.
"This is unlike you, Fulvia," he said. "You cannot make such a request on impulse. You must have a reason."
She smiled. "You told me once that a woman"s reasons are only impulses in men"s clothes."
But he was not to be diverted by this thrust. "I shall think so now," he said, "unless you can give me some better account of yours!"
She was silent, and he pressed on with a persistency for which he himself could hardly account: "You must have a reason for this request."
"I have one," she said, dropping her attempts at evasion.
"And it is--?"
She paused again, with a look of appeal against which he had to stiffen himself.
"I do not believe the time has come," she said at length.
"You think the people are not ready for the const.i.tution?"
She answered with an effort: "I think the people are not ready for it."
He fell silent, and they sat facing each other, but with eyes apart.
"You have received this impression from Gamba, from Andreoni--from the members of our party?" he asked.
She made no reply.
"Remember, Fulvia," he went on almost sternly, "that this is the end for which we have worked together all these years--the end for which we renounced each other and went forth in our youth, you to exile and I to an unwilling sovereignty. It was because we loved this cause better than ourselves that we had strength to give up for it our personal hopes of happiness. If we betray the cause from any merely personal motive we shall have fallen below our earlier selves." He waited again, but she was still silent. "Can you swear to me," he went on, "that no such motive influences you now? That you honestly believe we have been deceived and mistaken? That our years of faith and labour have been wasted, and that, if mankind is to be helped, it is to be in other ways and by other efforts than ours?"