himself, with his predatory profile outlined by some early Tuscan hand against the turrets of his impregnable fortress.  Odo lingered long on this image, but it was not till he stood beneath Piero della Francesca’s portrait of the first Duke that he felt the thrill of kindred instincts.  In this grave face, with its sensuous mouth and melancholy speculative eyes, he recognised the mingled strain of impressionability and unrest that had reached such diverse issues in his cousin and himself.  The great Duke of the “Golden Age,” in his Titianesque brocade, the statuette of a naked faun at his elbow, and a faun-like smile on his own ruddy lips, represented another aspect of the ancestral spirit:  the rounded temperament of an age of Cyrenaicism, in which every moment was a ripe fruit sunned on all sides.  A little farther on, the shadow of the Council of Trent began to fall on the ducal faces, as the uniform blackness of the Spanish habit replaced the sumptuous colours of the Renaissance.  Here was the persecuting Bishop, Paul IV.’s ally against the Spaniards, painted by Caravaggio in hauberk and mailed gloves, with his motto—­Etiam cum gladio—­surmounting the episcopal chair; there the Duke who, after a life of hard warfare and stern piety, had resigned his office to his son and died in the “angelica vestis” of the tertiary order; and the “beatified” Duchess who had sold her jewels to buy corn for the poor during the famine of 1670, and had worn a hair-shirt under a corset that seemed stiff enough to serve all the purposes of bodily mortification.  So the file descended, the colours fading, the shadows deepening, till it reached a baby porporato of the last century, who had donned the cardinal’s habit at four, and stood rigid and a little pale in his red robes and lace, with a crucifix and a skull on the table to which the top of his berretta hardly reached.

It seemed to Odo as he gazed on the long line of faces as though their owners had entered one by one into a narrowing defile, where the sun rose later and set earlier on each successive traveller; and in every countenance, from that of the first Duke to that of his own peruked and cuirassed grandfather, he discerned the same symptom of decadency:  that duality of will which, in a delicately-tempered race, is the fatal fruit of an undisturbed pre-eminence.  They had ruled too long and enjoyed too much; and the poor creature he had just left to his dismal scruples and forebodings seemed the mere empty husk of long-exhausted passions.

2.11.

The Duchess was lodged in the Borromini wing of the palace, and thither
Odo was conducted that evening.

To eyes accustomed to such ceremonial there was no great novelty in the troop of powdered servants, the major-domo in his short cloak and chain, and the florid splendour of the long suite of rooms, decorated in a style that already appeared over-charged to the more fastidious taste of the day.  Odo’s curiosity centred chiefly in the persons peopling this scene, whose conflicting interests and passions formed, as it were, the framework of the social structure of Pianura, so that there was not a labourer in the mulberry-orchards or a weaver in the silk-looms but depended for his crust of black bread and the leaking roof over his head on the private whim of some member of that brilliant company.