4.6.

Fulvia, in the twilight, sat awaiting the Duke.

The room in which she sat looked out on a stone-flagged cloister enclosing a plot of ground planted with yews; and at the farther end of this cloister a door communicated by a covered way with the ducal gardens.  The house had formed a part of the convent of the Perpetual Adoration, which had been sold by the nuns when they moved to the new buildings the late Duke had given them.  A portion had been torn down to make way for the Marquess of Cerveno’s palace, and in the remaining fragment, a low building wedged between high walls, Fulvia had found a lodging.  Her whole dwelling consisted of the Abbess’s parlour, in which she now sat, and the two or three adjoining cells.  The tall presses in the parlour had been filled with her father’s books, and surmounted by his globes and other scientific instruments.  But for this the apartment remained as unadorned as in her predecessor’s day; and Fulvia, in her austere black gown, with a lawn kerchief folded over her breast, and the unpowdered hair drawn back from her pale face, might herself have passed for the head of a religious community.

She cultivated with almost morbid care this severity of dress and surroundings.  There were moments when she could hardly tolerate the pale autumnal beauty which her glass reflected, when even this phantom of youth and radiance became a stumbling-block to her spiritual pride.  She was not ashamed of being the Duke of Pianura’s mistress; but she had a horror of being thought like the mistresses of other princes.  She loathed all that the position represented in men’s minds; she had refused all that, according to the conventions of the day, it entitled her to claim:  wealth, patronage, and the rank and estates which it was customary for the sovereign to confer.  She had taken nothing from Odo but his love, and the little house in which he had lodged her.

Three years had passed since Fulvia’s flight to Pianura.  From the moment when she and Odo had stood face to face again, it had been clear to him that he could never give her up, to her that she could never leave him.  Fate seemed to have thrown them together in derision of their long struggle, and both felt that lassitude of the will which is the reaction from vain endeavour.  The discovery that he needed her, that the task for which he had given her up could after all not be accomplished without her, served to overcome her last resistance.  If the end for which both strove could best be attained together—­if he needed the aid of her unfaltering faith as much as she needed that of his wealth and power—­why should any personal scruple stand between them?  Why should she who had given all else to the cause—­ease, fortune, safety, and even the happiness that lay in her hand—­hesitate to make the final sacrifice of a private ideal?  According to the standards of her day there was no dishonour to a woman in being the mistress of a man whose rank forbade his marrying her:  the dishonour lay in the conduct which had come to be associated with such relations.  Under the old dispensation the influence of the prince’s mistress had stood for the last excesses of moral and political corruption; why might it not, under the new law, come to represent as unlimited a power for good?