He had grown up among people to whom such emotions were unknown. The old
Marquess's passion for his fields and woods was the love of the
agriculturist and the hunter, not that of the naturalist or the poet;
and the aristocracy of the cities regarded the country merely as so much
soil from which to draw their maintenance. The gentlefolk never absented
themselves from town but for a few weeks of autumn, when they went to
their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of
city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that
were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo's
tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every
shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would
have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting
Countess had received the handful of wind-flowers that, fresh from a
sunrise on the hills, he had laid one morning among her toilet-boxes.
The Countess Clarice had stared and laughed, and every one of his
acquaintance, Alfieri even, would have echoed her laugh; but one man at
least had felt the divine commotion of nature's touch, had felt and
interpreted it, in words as fresh as spring verdure, in the pages of a
volume that Odo now drew from his pocket.
"I longed to dream, but some unexpected spectacle continually distracted
me from my musings. Here immense rocks hung their ruinous masses above
my head; there the thick mist of roaring waterfalls enveloped me; or
some unceasing torrent tore open at my very feet an abyss into which the
gaze feared to plunge.
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