He received with a smile Donna Laura's agitated phrases of welcome. "I
come," said he kissing her hand, "in my private character, not as the
Envoy of Pianura, but as the friend and servant of the Countess Valdu;
and I trust," he added turning to Odo, "of the Cavaliere Valsecca also."
Odo bowed in silence.
"You may have heard," Trescorre continued, addressing him in the same
engaging tone, "that I am come to Turin on a mission from his Highness
to the court of Savoy: a trifling matter of boundary-lines and customs,
which I undertook at the Duke's desire, the more readily, it must be
owned, since it gave me the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with
friends whom absence has not taught me to forget." He smiled again at
Donna Laura, who blushed like a girl.
The curiosity which Trescorre's words excited was lost to Odo in the
painful impression produced by his mother's agitation. To see her, a
woman already past her youth, and aged by her very efforts to preserve
it, trembling and bridling under the cool eye of masculine indifference,
was a spectacle the more humiliating that he was too young to be moved
by its human and pathetic side. He recalled once seeing a memento mori
of delicately-tinted ivory, which represented a girl's head, one side
all dewy freshness, the other touched with death; and it seemed to him
that his mother's face resembled this tragic toy, the side her mirror
reflected being still rosy with youth, while that which others saw was
already a ruin.
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