Trescorre had asked permission to wait on him before
he slept; and he knew that the prime minister would
be kept late by his conference with the secret police,
whose nightly report could not be handed in till the
festivities were over. Meanwhile Odo was in no
mood for sleep. He sat alone in the closet, still
hung with saints’ images and jewelled reliquaries,
where his cousin had so often given him audience, and
whence, through the open door, he could see the embroidered
curtains and plumed baldachin of the state bed which
was presently to receive him. All day his heart
had beat with high ambitions; but now a weight sank
upon his spirit. The reaction from the tumultuous
welcome of the streets to the closely-guarded silence
of the palace made him feel how unreal was the fancied
union between himself and his people, how insuperable
the distance that tradition and habit had placed between
them. In the narrow closet where his predecessor
had taken refuge from the detested task of reigning,
the new Duke felt the same moral lassitude steal over
him. How was such a puny will as his to contend
against the great forces of greed and prejudice?
All the influences arrayed against him—tradition,
superstition, the lust of power, the arrogance of
race—seemed concentrated in the atmosphere
of that silent room, with its guarded threshold, its
pious relics, and lying on the desk in the embrasure
of the window, the manuscript litany which the late
Duke had not lived to complete.
Oppressed by his surroundings, Odo rose and entered
the bed-chamber. A lamp burned before the image
of the Madonna at the head of the bed, and two lighted
flambeaux flanked the picture of the Last Judgment
on the opposite wall. Odo remembered the look
of terror which the Duke had fixed on the picture
during their first strange conversation. A praying-stool
stood beneath it, and it was said that here, rather
than before the Virgin’s image, the melancholy
prince performed his private devotions. The horrors
of the scene were depicted with a childish minuteness
of detail, as though the painter had sought to produce
an impression of moral anguish by the accumulation
of physical sufferings; and just such puerile images
of the wrath to come may have haunted the mysterious
recesses of the Duke’s imagination. Crescenti
had told Odo how the dying man’s thoughts had
seemed to centre upon this dreadful subject, and how
again and again, amid his ravings, he had cried out
that the picture must be burned, as though the sight
of it was become intolerable to him.
Odo’s own mind, across which the events and
emotions of the day still threw the fantastic shadows
of an expiring illumination, was wrought to the highest
state of impressionability. He saw in a flash
all that the picture must have symbolised to his cousin’s
fancy; and in his desire to reconstruct that dying
vision of fleshly retribution, he stepped close to
the diptych, resting a knee on the stool beneath it.
As he did so, the picture suddenly opened, disclosing
the inner panel. Odo caught up one of the flambeaux,
and in its light, as on a sunlit wave, there stepped
forth to him the lost Venus of Giorgione.
