I advise you, little
master," Bruno added, "not to talk too loudly of your discovery; for we
live in changed days, do you see, and it seems those are pagan sorcerers
and witches painted on the wall, and because of that, and their
nakedness, the chaplain has forbidden all the young boys and wenches
about the place to set foot there; and the Marchioness herself, I'm
told, doesn't enter without leave."

This was the more puzzling to Odo that he had seen so many naked pagans,
in colours and marble, at his cousin's palace of Pianura, where they
were praised as the chief ornament of that sumptuous fabric; but he kept
Bruno's warning in mind and so timed his visits that they escaped the
chaplain's observation. Whether this touch of mystery added charm to the
paintings; or whether there was already forming in him what afterward
became an instinctive resistance to many of the dictates of his age;
certain it is that, even after he had been privileged to admire the
stupendous works of the Caracci at Parma and of the immortal Giulio
Romano at Mantua, Odo's fancy always turned with peculiar fondness to
the clear-limbed youths moving in that world of untroubled beauty.

Odo, the day after his arrival at Donnaz, learned that the chaplain was
to be his governor; and he was not long in discovering that the system
of that ecclesiastic bore no resemblance to the desultory methods of his
former pedagogue. It was not that Don Gervaso was a man of superior
acquirements: in writing, ciphering and the rudiments of Latin he seemed
little likely to carry Odo farther than the other; but in religious
instruction he suffered no negligence or inattention. His piety was of a
stamp so different from the abate's that it vivified the theological
abstractions over which Odo had formerly languished, infusing a
passionate meaning into the formulas of the textbooks. His discourse
breathed the same spirit, and had his religion been warmed by
imagination or tempered by charity the child had been a ductile
substance in his hands; but the shadow of the Council of Trent still
hung over the Church in Savoy, making its approach almost as sombre and
forbidding as that of the Calvinist heresy. As it was, the fascination
that drew Odo to the divine teachings was counteracted by a depressing
awe: he trembled in God's presence almost as much as in his
grandfather's, and with the same despair of discovering what course of
action was most likely to call down the impendi