A long flight of
steps led up to his study, which on the farther side opened level with a
vine-shaded patch of herbs and damask roses in the projection of a
ruined bastion. This interior, the home of studious peace, was as
cheerful and well-ordered as its inmate's mind; and Odo, seated under
the vine pergola in the late summer light, and tasting the abate's Val
Pulicella while he turned over the warped pages of old codes and
chronicles, felt the stealing charm of a sequestered life.
He had learned from Gamba that Crescenti was a faithful parish priest as
well as an assiduous scholar, but he saw that the librarian's
beneficence took that purely personal form which may coexist with a
serene acceptance of the general evils underlying particular hardships.
His charities were performed in the old unquestioning spirit of the
Roman distribution of corn; and doubtless the good man who carries his
loaf of bread and his word of hope into his neighbour's hovel reaps a
more tangible return than the lonely thinker who schemes to undermine
the strongholds of injustice. Still there was a perplexing contrast
between the superficiality of Crescenti's moral judgments and the
breadth and penetration of his historic conceptions. Odo was too
inexperienced to reflect that a man's sense of the urgency of
improvement lies mainly in the line of his talent: as the merchant is
persuaded that the roads most in need of mending are those on which his
business makes him travel.
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