To see these poor creatures cursed and
brow-beaten, their least offences punished, their few claims disputed,
must have turned Odo's fear of his grandfather to hatred, had he not
observed that the old man gave with one hand what he took with the
other, so that, in his dealings with his people, he resembled one of
those torrents which now devastate and now enrich their banks. The
Marquess, in fact, while he held obstinately to his fishing rights,
prosecuted poachers, enforced the corvee and took toll at every ford,
yet laboured to improve his lands, exterminated the wild beasts that
preyed on them, helped his peasants in sickness, nourished them in old
age and governed them with a paternal tyranny doubtless less
insufferable than the negligence of the great land-owners who lived at
court.
To Odo, however, these rides among the tenantry were less agreeable than
the hunting-expeditions which carried them up the mountain in the
solitude of morning. Here the wild freshness of the scene and the
exhilaration of pursuit roused the fighting strain in the boy's blood,
and so stirred his memory with tales of prowess that sometimes, as they
climbed the stony defiles in the clear shadow before sunrise, he fancied
himself riding forth to exterminate the Waldenses who, according to the
chaplain, still lurked like basilisks and dragons in the recesses of the
mountains. Certain it is that his rides with the old Marquess, if they
inflamed his zeal against heresy, cooled the ardour of his monastic
vocation; and if he pondered on his future, it was to reflect that
doubtless he would some day be a bishop, and that bishops were
territorial lords, we might hunt the wolf and boar in their own domains.
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