The man threw off his cloak and hat, dropped into a chair beside the desk, and hid his face in his hands.

4.9.

It was the eve of the Duke’s birthday.  A cabinet council had been called in the morning, and his Highness’s ministers had submitted to him the revised draft of the constitution which was to be proclaimed on the morrow.

Throughout the conference, which was brief and formal, Odo had been conscious of a subtle change in the ministerial atmosphere.  Instead of the current of resistance against which he had grown used to forcing his way, he became aware of a tacit yielding to his will.  Trescorre had apparently withdrawn his opposition to the charter, and the other ministers had followed suit.  To Odo’s overwrought imagination there was something ominous in the change.  He had counted on the goad of opposition to fight off the fatal languor which he had learned to expect at such crises.  Now that he found there was to be no struggle he understood how largely his zeal had of late depended on such factitious incentives.  He felt an irrational longing to throw himself on the other side of the conflict, to tear in bits the paper awaiting his signature, and disown the policy which had dictated it.  But the tide of acquiescence on which he was afloat was no stagnant back-water of indifference, but the glassy reach just above the fall of a river.  The current was as swift as it was smooth, and he felt himself hurried forward to an end he could no longer escape.  He took the pen which Trescorre handed him, and signed the constitution.

The meeting over, he summoned Gamba.  He felt the need of such encouragement as the hunchback alone could give.  Fulvia’s enthusiasms were too unreal, too abstract.  She lived in a region of ideals, whence ugly facts were swept out by some process of mental housewifery which kept her world perpetually smiling and immaculate.  Gamba at least fed his convictions on facts.  If his outlook was narrow it was direct:  no roseate medium of fancy was interposed between his vision and the truth.

He stood listening thoughtfully while Odo poured forth his doubts.

“Your Highness may well hesitate,” he said at last.  “There are always more good reasons against a new state of things than for it.  I am not surprised that Count Trescorre appears to have withdrawn his opposition.  I believe he now honestly wishes your Highness to proclaim the constitution.”

Odo looked up in surprise.  “You do not mean that he has come to believe in it?”

Gamba smiled.  “Probably not in your Highness’s sense; but he may have found a use of his own for it.”

“What do you mean?” Odo asked.

“If he does not believe it will benefit the state he may think it will injure your Highness.”

“Ah—­” said the Duke slowly.

There was a pause, during which he was possessed by the same shuddering reluctance to fix his mind on the facts before him as when he had questioned the hunchback about Momola’s death.  He longed to cast the whole business aside, to be up and away from it, drawing breath in a new world where every air was not tainted with corruption.  He raised his head with an effort.