But to Odo
the voice was mute, the divinity wrapped in darkness; and he remembered
reading in some Latin author that the ancient oracles had ceased to
speak when their questioners lost faith in them. He knew not whether his
own faith was lost; he felt only that it had put forth on a sea of
difficulties across which he saw the light of no divine command.
In this mood there was no more help to be obtained from Don Gervaso than
from the Marquess. Odo's last days at Donnaz were clouded by a sense of
the deep estrangement between himself and that life of which the outward
aspect was so curiously unchanged. His past seemed to look at him with
unrecognising eyes, to bar the door against his knock; and he rode away
saddened by that sense of isolation which follows the first encounter
with a forgotten self.
At Ivrea the sight of Cantapresto and the travelling-carriage roused him
as from a waking dream. Here, at his beck were the genial realities of
life, embodied, humorously enough, in the bustling figure which for so
many years had played a kind of comic accompaniment to his experiences.
Cantapresto was in a fever of expectation. To set forth on the road
again, after nine years of well-fed monotony, and under conditions so
favourable to his physical well-being, was to drink the wine of romance
from a golden cup. Odo was at the age when the spirit lies as naturally
open to the variations of mood as a lake to the shifting of the breeze;
and Cantapresto's exuberant humour, and the novel details of their
travelling equipment, had soon effaced the graver influences of Donnaz.
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