..
Odo remained a month at Donnaz. His grandfather's happiness in his
presence would in itself have sufficed to detain him, apart from his
natural tenderness for old scenes and associations. It was one of the
compensations of his rapidly travelling imagination that the past, from
each new vantage-ground of sensation, acquired a fascination which to
the more sober-footed fancy only the perspective of years can give.
Life, in childhood, is a picture-book of which the text is
undecipherable; and the youth now revisiting the unchanged setting of
his boyhood was spelling out for the first time the legend beneath the
picture.
The old Marquess, though broken in body, still ruled his household from
his seat beside the hearth. The failure of bodily activity seemed to
have doubled his moral vigour, and the walls shook with the vehemence of
his commands. The Marchioness was sunk in a state of placid apathy from
which only her husband's outbursts roused her; one of the canonesses was
dead, and the other, drier and more shrivelled than ever, pined in her
corner like a statue whose mate is broken. Bruno was dead too; his old
dog's bones had long since enriched a corner of the vineyard; and some
of the younger lads that Odo had known about the place were grown to
sober-faced men with wives and children.
Don Gervaso was still chaplain of Donnaz; and Odo saw with surprise that
the grave ecclesiastic who had formerly seemed an old man to him was in
fact scarce past the middle age.
Pages:
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169