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The Strolling Saint; being the confessions of the high and mighty Agostino D'Anguissola, tyrant of Mondolfo and Lord of Carmina, in the state of Piacenza

by Rafael Sabatini · English · Gutenberg #3423 · 662,782 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Strolling Saint; being the confessions of the high and mighty Agostino D'Anguissola, tyrant of Mondolfo and Lord of Carmina, in the state of Piacenza

Author: Rafael Sabatini


        
Release date: September 1, 2002 [eBook #3423]
                Most recently updated: January 27, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3423

Credits: John Stuart Middleton, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STROLLING SAINT; BEING THE CONFESSIONS OF THE HIGH AND MIGHTY AGOSTINO D'ANGUISSOLA, TYRANT OF MONDOLFO AND LORD OF CARMINA, IN THE STATE OF PIACENZA ***




THE STROLLING SAINT

Being the Confessions of the High & Mighty Agostino D'Anguissola Tyrant
of Mondolfo & Lord of Carmina, in the State of Piacenza

By Raphael Sabatini


CONTENTS



     BOOK ONE

     THE OBLATE


     CHAPTER

         I.  NOMEN ET OMEN

        II.  GINO FALCONE

       III.  THE PIETISTIC THRALL

        IV.  LUISINA

         V.  REBELLION

        VI.  FRA GERVASIO



     BOOK TWO

     GIULIANA


         I.  THE HOUSE OF ASTORRE FIFANTI

        II.  HUMANITIES

       III.  PREUX-CHEVALIER

        IV.  MY LORD GAMBARA CLEARS THE GROUND

         V.  PABULUM ACHERONTIS

        VI.  THE IRON GIRDLE



     BOOK THREE

     THE WILDERNESS


         I.  THE HOME-COMING

        II.  THE CAPTAIN OF JUSTICE

       III.  GAMBARA'S INTERESTS

        IV.  THE ANCHORITE OF MONTE ORSARO

         V.  THE RENUNCIATION

        VI.  HYPNEROTOMACHIA

       VII.  INTRUDERS

      VIII.  THE VISION

        IX.  THE ICONOCLAST



     BOOK FOUR

     THE WORLD


         I.  PAGLIANO

        II.  THE GOVERNOR OF MILAN

       III.  PIER LUIGI FARNESE

        IV.  MADONNA BIANCA

         V.  THE WARNING

        VI.  THE TALONS OF THE HOLY OFFICE

       VII.  THE PAPAL BULL

      VIII.  THE THIRD DEGREE

        IX.  THE RETURN

         X.  THE NUPTIALS OF BIANCA

        XI.  THE PENANCE

       XII.  BLOOD

      XIII.  THE OVERTHROW

       XIV.  THE CITATION

        XV.  THE WILL OF HEAVEN




BOOK I. THE OBLATE



CHAPTER I. NOMEN ET OMEN


In seeking other than in myself--as men will--the causes of my
tribulations, I have often inclined to lay the blame of much of the ill
that befell me, and the ill that in my sinful life I did to others, upon
those who held my mother at the baptismal font and concerted that she
should bear the name of Monica.

There are in life many things which, in themselves, seeming to the
vulgar and the heedless to be trivial and without consequence, may yet
be causes pregnant of terrible effects, mainsprings of Destiny itself.
Amid such portentous trifles I would number the names so heedlessly
bestowed upon us.

It surprises me that in none of the philosophic writings of the learned
scholars of antiquity can I find that this matter of names has been
touched upon, much less given the importance of which I account it to be
deserving.

Possibly it is because no one of them ever suffered, as I have suffered,
from the consequences of a name. Had it but been so, they might in their
weighty and impressive manner have set down a lesson on the subject,
and so relieved me--who am all-conscious of my shortcomings in this
direction-from the necessity of repairing that omission out of my own
experience.

Let it then, even at this late hour, be considered what a subtle
influence for good or ill, what a very mould of character may lie within
a name.

To the dull clod of earth, perhaps, or, again, to the truly
strong-minded nature that is beyond such influences, it can matter
little that he be called Alexander or Achilles; and once there was a man
named Judas who fell so far short of the noble associations of that name
that he has changed for all time the very sound and meaning of it.

But to him who has been endowed with imagination--that greatest boon and
greatest affliction of mankind--or whose nature is such as to crave for
models, the name he bears may become a thing portentous by the images
it conjures up of some mighty dead who bore it erstwhile and whose life
inspires to emulation.

Whatever may be accounted the general value of this premiss, at least as
it concerns my mother I shall hope to prove it apt.

They named her Monica. Why the name was chosen I have never learnt; but
I do not conceive that there was any reason for the choice other than
the taste of her parents in the matter of sounds. It is a pleasing
enough name, euphoniously considered, and beyond that--as is so commonly
the case--no considerations were taken into account.

To her, however, at once imaginative and of a feeble and dependent
spirit, the name was fateful. St. Monica was made the special object of
her devotions in girlhood, and remained so later when she became a wife.
The Life of St. Monica was the most soiled and fingered portion of an
old manuscript collection of the life histories of a score or so of
saints that was one of her dearest possessions. To render herself worthy
of the name she bore, to model her life upon that of the sainted woman
who had sorrowed and rejoiced so much in her famous offspring, became
the obsession of my mother's soul. And but that St. Monica had wed and
borne a son, I do not believe that my mother would ever have adventured
herself within the bonds of wedlock.

How often in the stressful, stormy hours of my most unhappy youth did I
not wish that she had preferred the virginal life of the cloister, and
thus spared me the heavy burden of an existence which her unholy and
mistaken saintliness went so near to laying waste!

I like to think that in the days when my father wooed her, she forgot
for a spell in the strong arms of that fierce ghibelline the pattern
upon which it had become her wont to weave her life; so that in all
that drab, sackcloth tissue there was embroidered at least one warm and
brilliant little wedge of colour; so that in all that desert waste, in
all that parched aridity of her existence, there was at least one little
patch of garden-land, fragrant, fruitful, and cool.

I like to think it, for at best such a spell must have been brief
indeed; and for that I pity her--I, who once blamed her so very
bitterly. Before ever I was born it must have ceased; whilst still she
bore me she put from her lips the cup that holds the warm and
potent wine of life, and turned her once more to her fasting, her
contemplations, and her prayers.

That was in the year in which the battle of Pavia was fought and won by
the Emperor. My father, who had raised a condotta to lend a hand in the
expulsion of the French, was left for dead upon that glorious field.
Afterwards he was found still living, but upon the very edge and border
of Eternity; and when the news of it was borne to my mother I have
little doubt but that she imagined it to be a visitation--a punishment
upon her for having strayed for that brief season of her adolescence
from the narrow flinty path that she had erst claimed to tread in the
footsteps of Holy Monica.

How much the love of my father may still have swayed her I do not know.
But to me it seems that in what next she did there was more of duty,
more of penitence, more of reparation for the sin of having been a woman
as God made her, than of love. Indeed, I almost know this to be so. In
delicate health as she was, she bade her people prepare a litter for
her, and so she had herself carried into Piacenza, to the Church of St.
Augustine. There, having confessed and received the Sacrament, upon her
knees before a minor altar consecrated to St. Monica, she made solemn
vow that if my father's life was spared she would devote the unborn
child she carried to the service of God and Holy Church.

Two months thereafter word was brought her that my father, his recovery
by now well-nigh complete, was making his way home.

On the morrow was I born--a votive offering, an oblate, ere yet I had
drawn the breath of life.

It has oft diverted me to conjecture what would have chanced had I been
born a girl--since that could have afforded her no proper parallel. In
the circumstance that I was a boy, I have no faintest doubt but that she
saw a Sign, for she was given to seeing signs in the slightest and most
natural happenings. It was as it should be; it was as it had been with
the Sainted Monica in whose ways she strove, poor thing, to walk. Monica
had borne a son, and he had been named Augustine. It was very well. My
name, too, should be Augustine, that I might walk in the ways of that
other Augustine, that great theologian whose mother's name was Monica.

And even as the influence of her name had been my mother's guide, so was
the influence of my name to exert its sway upon me. It was made to do
so. Ere I could read for myself, the life of that great saint--with such
castrations as my tender years demanded--was told me and repeated until
I knew by heart its every incident and act. Anon his writings were my
school-books. His De Civitate Dei and De Vita Beata were the paps at
which I suckled my earliest mental nourishment.

And even to-day, after all the tragedy and sin and turbulence of my
life, that was intended to have been so different, it is from
his Confessions that I have gathered inspiration to set down my
own--although betwixt the two you may discern little indeed that is
comparable.

I was prenatally made a votive offering for the preservation of my
father's life, for his restoration to my mother safe and sound. That
restoration she had, as you have seen; and yet, had she been other than
she was, she must have accounted herself cheated of her bargain in the
end. For betwixt my father and my mother I became from my earliest years
a subject of contentions that drove them far asunder and set them almost
in enmity the one against the other.

I was his only son, heir to the noble lordships of Mondolfo and Carmina.
Was it likely, then, that he should sacrifice me willingly to the
seclusion of the cloister, whilst our lordship passed into the hands of
our renegade, guelphic cousin, Cosimo d'Anguissola of Codogno?

I can picture his outbursts at the very thought of it; I can hear
him reasoning, upbraiding, storming. But he was as an ocean of energy
hurling himself against the impassive rock of my mother's pietistic
obstinacy. She had vowed me to the service of Holy Church, and she would
suffer tribulation and death so that her vow should be fulfilled. And
hers was a manner against which that strong man, my father, never
could prevail. She would stand before him white-faced and mute, never
presuming to return an answer to his pleading or to enter into argument.

“I have vowed,” she would say, just once; and thereafter, avoiding his
fiery glance, she would bow her head meekly, fold her hands, the very
incarnation of long-suffering and martyrdom.

Anon, as the storm of his anger crashed about her, two glistening lines
would appear upon her pallid face, and her tears--horrid, silent weeping
that brought no trace of emotion to her countenance--showered down. At
that he would fling out of her presence and away, cursing the day in
which he had mated with a fool.

His hatred of these moods of hers, of the vow she had made which bade
fair to deprive him of his son, drove him ere long to hatred of the
cause of it all. A ghibelline by inheritance, he was not long in
becoming an utter infidel, at war with Rome and the Pontifical sway.
Nor was he one to content himself with passive enmity. He must be up and
doing, seeking the destruction of the thing he hated. And so it befell
that upon the death of Pope Clement (the second Medici Pontiff),
profiting by the weak condition from which the papal army had not yet
recovered since the Emperor's invasion and the sack of Rome, my father
raised an army and attempted to shatter the ancient yoke which Julius II
had imposed upon Parma and Piacenza when he took them from the State of
Milan.

A little lad of seven was I at the time, and well do I remember the
martial stir and bustle there was about our citadel of Mondolfo, the
armed multitudes that thronged the fortress that was our home, or
drilled and manoeuvred upon the green plains beyond the river.

I was all wonder-stricken and fascinated by the sight. My blood was
quickened by the brazen notes of their trumpets, and to balance a pike
in my hands was to procure me the oddest and most exquisite thrills that
I had known. But my mother, perceiving with alarm the delight afforded
me by such warlike matters, withdrew me so that I might see as little as
possible of it all.

And there followed scenes between her and my father of which hazy
impressions linger in my memory. No longer was she a mute statue,
enduring with fearful stoicism his harsh upbraidings. She was turned
into a suppliant, now fierce, now lachrymose; by her prayers, by her
prophecies of the evil that must attend his ungodly aims, she strove
with all her poor, feeble might to turn him from the path of revolt to
which he had set his foot.

And he would listen now in silence, his face grim and sardonic; and when
from very weariness the flow of her inspired oratory began to falter, he
would deliver ever the same answer.

“It is you who have driven me to this; and this is no more than a
beginning. You have made a vow--an outrageous votive offering of
something that is not yours to bestow. That vow you cannot break, you
say. Be it so. But I must seek a remedy elsewhere. To save my son from
the Church to which you would doom him, I will, ere I have done, tear
down the Church and make an end of it in Italy.”

And at that she would shrivel up before him with a little moan of
horror, taking her poor white face in her hands.

“Blasphemer!” she would cry in mingled terror and aversion, and upon
that word--the “Amen” to all their conferences in those last days they
spent together--she would turn, and dragging me with her, all stunned
and bewildered by something beyond my understanding, she would hurry
me to the chapel of the citadel, and there, before the high altar,
prostrate herself and spend long hours in awful sobbing intercessions.

And so the gulf between them widened until the day of his departure.

I was not present at their parting. What farewells may have been spoken
between them, what premonitions may have troubled one or the other that
they were destined never to meet again, I do not know.

I remember being rudely awakened one dark morning early in the year,
and lifted from my bed by arms to whose clasp I never failed to thrill.
Close to mine was pressed a hot, dark, shaven hawk-face; a pair of
great eyes, humid with tears, considered me passionately. Then a ringing
voice--that commanding voice that was my father's--spoke to Falcone, the
man-at-arms who attended him and who ever acted as his equerry.

“Shall we take him with us to the wars, Falcone?”

My little arms went round his neck and tightened there convulsively
until the steel rim of his gorget bit into them.

“Take me!” I sobbed. “Take me!”

He laughed for answer, with something of exultation in his voice. He
swung me to his shoulder, and held me poised there, looking up at me.
And then he laughed again.

“Dost hear the whelp?” he cried to Falcone. “Still with his milk-teeth
in his head, and already does he yelp for battle!”

Then he looked up at me again, and swore one of his great oaths.

“I can trust you, son of mine,” he laughed. “They'll never make a
shaveling of you. When your thews are grown it will not be on thuribles
they'll spend their strength, or I'm a liar else. Be patient yet awhile,
and we shall ride together, never doubt it.”

With that he pulled me down again to kiss me, and he clasped me to his
breast so that the studs of his armour remained stamped upon my tender
flesh after he had departed.

The next instant he was gone, and I lay weeping, a very lonely little
child.

But in the revolt that he led he had not reckoned upon the might and
vigour of the new Farnese Pontiff. He had conceived, perhaps, that one
pope must be as supine as another, and that Paul III would prove no more
redoubtable than Clement VIII. To his bitter cost did he discover his
mistake. Beyond the Po he was surprised by the Pontifical army under
Ferrante Orsini, and there his force was cut to pieces.

My father himself escaped and with him some other gentlemen of Piacenza,
notably one of the scions of the great house of Pallavicini, who took a
wound in the leg which left him lame for life, so that ever after he was
known as Pallavicini il Zopo.

They were all under the pope's ban, outlaws with a price upon the head
of each, hunted and harried from State to State by the papal emissaries,
so that my father never more dared set foot in Mondolfo, or, indeed,
within the State of Piacenza, which had been rudely punished for the
insubordination it had permitted to be reared upon its soil.

And Mondolfo went near to suffering confiscation. Assuredly it would
have suffered it but for the influence exerted on my mother's and my own
behalf by her brother, the powerful Cardinal of San Paulo in Carcere,
seconded by that guelphic cousin of my father's, Cosimo d'Anguissola,
who, after me, was heir to Mondolfo, and had, therefore, good reason not
to see it confiscated to the Holy See.

Thus it fell out that we were left in peace and not made to suffer from
my father's rebellion. For that, he himself should suffer when taken.
But taken he never was. From time to time we had news of him. Now he was
in Venice, now in Milan, now in Naples; but never long in any place for
his safety's sake. And then one night, six years later, a scarred and
grizzled veteran, coming none knew whence, dropped from exhaustion in
the courtyard of our citadel, whither he had struggled. Some went to
minister to him, and amongst these there was a groom who recognized him.

“It is Messer Falcone!” he cried, and ran to bear the news to my mother,
with whom I was at table at the time. With us, too, was Fra Gervasio,
our chaplain.

It was grim news that old Falcone brought us. He had never quitted my
father in those six weary years of wandering until now that my father
was beyond the need of his or any other's service.

There had been a rising and a bloody battle at Perugia, Falcone informed
us. An attempt had been made to overthrow the rule there of Pier Luigi
Farnese, Duke of Castro, the pope's own abominable son. For some months
my father had been enjoying the shelter of the Perugians, and he had
repaid their hospitality by joining them and bearing arms with them in
the ill-starred blow they struck for liberty. They had been crushed in
the encounter by the troops of Pier Luigi, and my father had been among
the slain.

And well was it for him that he came by so fine and merciful an end,
thought I, when I had heard the tale of horrors that had been undergone
by the unfortunates who had fallen into the hands of Farnese.

My mother heard him to the end without any sign of emotion. She
sat there, cold and impassive as a thing of marble, what time Fra
Gervasio--who was my father's foster-brother, as you shall presently
learn more fully--sank his head upon his arm and wept like a child to
hear the piteous tale of it. And whether from force of example, whether
from the memories that came to me so poignantly in that moment of a fine
strong man with a brown, shaven face and a jovial, mighty voice, who had
promised me that one day we should ride together, I fell a-weeping too.

When the tale was done, my mother coldly gave orders that Falcone be
cared for, and went to pray, taking me with her.

Oftentimes since have I wondered what was the tenour of her prayers that
night. Were they for the rest of the great turbulent soul that was
gone forth in sin, in arms against the Holy Church, excommunicate and
foredoomed to Hell? Or were they of thanksgiving that at last she was
completely mistress of my destinies, her mind at rest, since no longer
need she fear opposition to her wishes concerning me? I do not know, nor
will I do her the possible injustice that I should were I to guess.




CHAPTER II. GINO FALCONE


When I think of my mother now I do not see her as she appeared in any
of the scenes that already I have set down. There is one picture of her
that is burnt as with an acid upon my memory, a picture which the mere
mention of her name, the mere thought of her, never fails to evoke like
a ghost before me. I see her always as she appeared one evening when she
came suddenly and without warning upon Falcone and me in the armoury of
the citadel.

I see her again, a tall, slight, graceful woman, her oval face of the
translucent pallor of wax, framed in a nun-like coif, over which was
thrown a long black veil that fell to her waist and there joined the
black unrelieved draperies that she always wore. This sable garb was no
mere mourning for my father. His death had made as little change in
her apparel as in her general life. It had been ever thus as far as my
memory can travel; always had her raiment been the same, those trailing
funereal draperies. Again I see them, and that pallid face with its
sunken eyes, around which there were great brown patches that seemed to
intensify the depth at which they were set and the sombre lustre of them
on the rare occasions when she raised them; those slim, wax-like hands,
with a chaplet of beads entwined about the left wrist and hanging thence
to a silver crucifix at the end.

She moved almost silently, as a ghost; and where she passed she seemed
to leave a trail of sorrow and sadness in her wake, just as a worldly
woman leaves a trail of perfume.

Thus looked she when she came upon us there that evening, and thus will
she live for ever in my memory, for that was the first time that I knew
rebellion against the yoke she was imposing upon me; the first time that
our wills clashed, hers and mine; and as a consequence, maybe, was it
the first time that I considered her with purpose and defined her to
myself.

The thing befell some three months after the coming of Falcone to
Mondolfo.

That the old man-at-arms should have exerted a strong attraction upon
my young mind, you will readily understand. His intimate connection with
that dimly remembered father, who stood secretly in my imagination in
the position that my mother would have had St. Augustine occupy, drew me
to his equerry like metal to a lodestone.

And this attraction was reciprocal. Of his own accord old Falcone sought
me out, lingering in my neighbourhood at first like a dog that looks for
a kindly word. He had not long to wait. Daily we had our meetings and
our talks and daily did these grow in length; and they were stolen hours
of which I said no word to my mother, nor did others for a season, so
that all was well.

Our talks were naturally of my father, and it was through Falcone that
I came to know something of the greatness of that noble-souled, valiant
gentleman, whom the old servant painted for me as one who combined with
the courage of the lion the wiliness of the fox.

He discoursed of their feats of arms together, he described charges
of horse that set my nerves a-tingle as in fancy I heard the blare
of trumpets and the deafening thunder of hooves upon the turf. Of
escalades, of surprises, of breaches stormed, of camisades and ambushes,
of dark treacheries and great heroisms did he descant to fire my
youthful fancy, to fill me first with delight, and then with frenzy when
I came to think that in all these things my life must have no part, that
for me another road was set--a grey, gloomy road at the end of which was
dangled a reward which did not greatly interest me.

And then one day from fighting as an endeavour, as a pitting of force
against force and astuteness against astuteness, he came to talk of
fighting as an art.

It was from old Falcone that first I heard of Marozzo, that
miracle-worker in weapons, that master at whose academy in Bologna the
craft of swordsmanship was to be acquired, so that from fighting with
his irons as a beast with its claws, by sheer brute strength and brute
instinct, man might by practised skill and knowledge gain advantages
against which mere strength must spend itself in vain.

What he told me amazed me beyond anything that I had ever heard, even
from himself, and what he told me he illustrated, flinging himself into
the poises taught by Marozzo that I might appreciate the marvellous
science of the thing.

Thus was it that for the first time I made the acquaintance--an
acquaintance held by few men in those days--of those marvellous guards
of Marozzo's devising; Falcone showed me the difference between the
mandritto and the roverso, the false edge and the true, the stramazone
and the tondo; and he left me spellbound by that marvellous guard
appropriately called by Marozzo the iron girdle--a low guard on the
level of the waist, which on the very parry gives an opening for the
point, so that in one movement you may ward and strike.

At last, when I questioned him, he admitted that during their
wanderings, my father, with that recklessness that alternated curiously
with his caution, had ventured into the city of Bologna notwithstanding
that it was a Papal fief, for the sole purpose of studying with Marozzo
that Falcone himself had daily accompanied him, witnessed the lessons,
and afterwards practised with my father, so that he had come to learn
most of the secrets that Marozzo taught.

One day, at last, very timidly, like one who, whilst overconscious of
his utter unworthiness, ventures to crave a boon which he knows himself
without the right to expect, I asked Falcone would he show me something
of Marozzo's art with real weapons.

I had feared a rebuff. I had thought that even old Falcone might laugh
at one predestined to the study of theology, desiring to enter into the
mysteries of sword-craft. But my fears were far indeed from having a
foundation. There was no laughter in the equerry's grey eyes, whilst
the smile upon his lips was a smile of gladness, of eagerness, almost of
thankfulness to see me so set.

And so it came to pass that daily thereafter did we practise for an hour
or so in the armoury with sword and buckler, and with every lesson
my proficiency with the iron grew in a manner that Falcone termed
prodigious, swearing that I was born to the sword, that the knack of it
was in the very blood of me.

It may be that affection for me caused him to overrate the progress that
I made and the aptitude I showed; it may even be that what he said was
no more than the good-natured flattery of one who loved me and would
have me take pleasure in myself. And yet when I look back at the lad I
was, I incline to think that he spoke no more than sober truth.

I have alluded to the curious, almost inexplicable delight it afforded
me to feel in my hands the balance of a pike for the first time. Fain
would I tell you something of all that I felt when first my fingers
closed about a sword-hilt, the forefinger passed over the quillons in
the new manner, as Falcone showed me. But it defies all power of words.
The sweet seduction of its balance, the white gleaming beauty of the
blade, were things that thrilled me with something akin to the thrill of
the first kiss of passion. It was not quite the same, I know; yet I can
think of nothing else in life that is worthy of being compared with it.

I was at the time a lad in my thirteenth year, but I was well-grown and
strong beyond my age, despite the fact that my mother had restrained me
from all those exercises of horsemanship, of arms, and of wrestling by
which boys of my years attain development. I stood almost as tall then
as Falcone himself--who was accounted of a good height--and if my
reach fell something short of his, I made up for this by the youthful
quickness of my movements; so that soon--unless out of good nature he
refrained from exerting his full vigour--I found myself Falcone's match.

Fra Gervasio, who was then my tutor, and with whom my mornings were
spent in perfecting my Latin and giving me the rudiments of Greek, soon
had his suspicions of where the hour of the siesta was spent by me with
old Falcone. But the good, saintly man held his peace, a matter which at
that time intrigued me. Others there were, however, who thought well to
bear the tale of our doings to my mother, and thus it happened that she
came upon us that day in the armoury, each of us in shirt and breeches
at sword-and-target play.

We fell apart upon her entrance, each with a guilty feeling, like
children caught in a forbidden orchard, for all that Falcone held
himself proudly erect, his grizzled head thrown back, his eyes cold and
hard.

A long while it seemed ere she spoke, and once or twice I shot her a
furtive comprehensive glance, and saw her as I shall ever see her to my
dying day.

Her eyes were upon me. I do not believe that she gave Falcone a single
thought at first. It was at me only that she looked, and with such a
sorrow in her glance to see me so vigorous and lusty, as surely could
not have been fetched there by the sight of my corpse itself. Her lips
moved awhile in silence; and whether she was at her everlasting prayers,
or whether she was endeavouring to speak but could not for emotion, I do
not know. At last her voice came, laden with a chill reproach.

“Agostino!” she said, and waited as if for some answer from me.

It was in that instant that rebellion stirred in me. Her coming had
turned me cold, for all that my body was overheated from the exercise
and I was sweating furiously. Now, at the sound of her voice, something
of the injustice that oppressed me, something of the unreasoning bigotry
that chained and fettered me, stood clear before my mental vision
for the first time. It warmed me again with the warmth of sullen
indignation. I returned her no answer beyond a curtly respectful
invitation that she should speak her mind, couched--as had been her
reproof--in a single word of address.

“Madonna?” I challenged, and emulating something of old Falcone's
attitude, I drew myself erect, flung back my head, and brought my eyes
to the level of her own by an effort of will such as I had never yet
exerted.

It was, I think, the bravest thing I ever did. I felt, in doing it, as
one feels who has nerved himself to enter fire. And when the thing was
done, the ease of it surprised me. There followed no catastrophe such as
I expected. Before my glance, grown suddenly so very bold, her own eyes
drooped and fell away as was her habit. She spoke thereafter without
looking at me, in that cold, emotionless voice that was peculiar to her
always, the voice of one in whom the founts of all that is sweet and
tolerant and tender in life are for ever frozen.

“What are you doing with weapons, Agostino?” she asked me.

“As you see, madam mother, I am at practice,” I answered, and out of
the corner of my eye I caught the grim approving twitch of old Falcone's
lips.

“At practice?” she echoed, dully as one who does not understand. Then
very slowly she shook her sorrowful head. “Men practise what they must
one day perform, Agostino. To your books, then, and leave swords for
bloody men, nor ever let me see you again with weapons in your hands if
you respect me.”

“Had you not come hither, madam mother, you had been spared the sight
to-day,” I answered with some lingering spark of my rebellious fire
still smouldering.

“It was God's will that I should come to set a term to such vanities
before they take too strong a hold upon you,” answered she. “Lay down
those weapons.”

Had she been angry, I think I could have withstood her. Anger in her at
such a time must have been as steel upon the flint of my own nature. But
against that incarnation of sorrow and sadness, my purpose, my strength
of character were turned to water. By similar means had she ever
prevailed with my poor father. And I had, too, the habit of obedience
which is not so lightly broken as I had at first accounted possible.

Sullenly then I set down my sword upon a bench that stood against the
wall, and my target with it. As I turned aside to do so, her gloomy eyes
were poised for an instant upon Falcone, who stood grim and silent. Then
they were lowered again ere she began to address him.

“You have done very ill, Falcone,” said she. “You have abused my trust
in you, and you have sought to pervert my son and to lead him into ways
of evil.”

He started under that reproof like a fiery stallion under the spur. His
face flushed scarlet. The habit of obedience may have been strong in
Falcone too; but it was obedience to men; with women he had never had
much to do, old warrior though he was. Moreover, in this he felt that an
affront had been put upon the memory of Giovanni d'Anguissola, who was
my father and who went nigh to being Falcone's god. And this his answer
plainly showed.

“The ways into which I lead your son, Madonna,” said he in a low voice
that boomed up and echoed in the groined ceiling overhead, “are the
ways that were trod by my lord his father. And who says that the ways
of Giovanni d'Anguissola were evil ways lies foully, be he man or
woman, patrician or villein, pope or devil.” And upon that he paused
magnificently, his eyes aflash.

She shuddered under his rough speech. Then answered without looking up,
and with no trace of anger in her voice:

“You are restored to health and strength by now, Messer Falcone. The
seneschal shall have orders to pay you ten gold ducats in discharge of
all that may be still your due from us. See that by night you have left
Mondolfo.”

And then, without changing her deadly inflection, or even making a
noticeable pause, “Come, Agostino,” she commanded.

But I did not move. Her words had fixed me there with horror. I heard
from Falcone a sound that was between a growl and a sob. I dared not
look at him, but the eye of my fancy saw him standing rigid, pale, and
self-contained.

What would he do, what would he say? Oh, she had done a cruel, a
bitterly cruel wrong. This poor old warrior, all scarred and patched
from wounds that he had taken in my father's service, to be turned
away in his old age, as we should not have turned away a dog! It was a
monstrous thing. Mondolfo was his home. The Anguissola were his family,
and their honour was his honour, since as a villein he had no honour of
his own. To cast him out thus!

All this flashed through my anguished mind in one brief throb of time,
as I waited, marvelling what he would do, what say, in answer to that
dismissal.

He would not plead, or else I did not know him; and I was sure of that,
without knowing what else there was that must make it impossible for old
Falcone to stoop to ask a favour of my mother.

Awhile he just stood there, his wits overthrown by sheer surprise. And
then, when at last he moved, the thing he did was the last thing that
I had looked for. Not to her did he turn; not to her, but to me, and he
dropped on one knee before me.

“My lord!” he cried, and before he added another word I knew already
what else he was about to say. For never yet had I been so addressed in
my lordship of Mondolfo. To all there I was just the Madonnino. But to
Falcone, in that supreme hour of his need, I was become his lord.

“My lord,” he said, then. “Is it your wish that I should go?”

I drew back, still wrought upon by my surprise; and then my mother's
voice came cold and acid.

“The Madonnino's wish is not concerned in this, Mester Falcone. It is I
who order your departure.”

Falcone did not answer her; he affected not to hear her, and continued
to address himself to me.

“You are the master here, my lord,” he urged. “You are the law in
Mondolfo. You carry life and death in your right hand, and against your
will no man or woman in your lordship can prevail.”

He spoke the truth, a mighty truth which had stood like a mountain
before me all these months, yet which I had not seen.

“I shall go or remain as you decree, my lord,” he added; and then,
almost in a snarl of defiance, “I obey none other,” he concluded, “nor
pope nor devil.”

“Agostino, I am waiting for you,” came my mother's voice from the
doorway.

Something had me by the throat. It was Temptation, and old Falcone
was the tempter. More than that was he--though how much more I did not
dream, nor with what authority he acted there. He was the Mentor who
showed me the road to freedom and to manhood; he showed me how at a blow
I might shiver the chains that held me, and shake them from me like the
cobwebs that they were. He tested me, too; tried my courage and my
will; and to my undoing was it that he found me wanting in that hour. My
regrets for him went near to giving me the resolution that I lacked. Yet
even these fell short.

I would to God I had given heed to him. I would to God I had flung
back my head and told my mother--as he prompted me--that I was lord of
Mondolfo, and that Falcone must remain since I so willed it.

I strove to do so out of my love for him rather than out of any such
fine spirit as he sought to inspire in me. Had I succeeded I had
established my dominion, I had become arbiter of my fate; and how much
of misery, of anguish, and of sin might I not thereafter have been
spared!

The hour was crucial, though I knew it not. I stood at a parting of
ways; yet for lack of courage I hesitated to take the road to which so
invitingly he beckoned me.

And then, before I could make any answer such as I desired, such as I
strove to make, my mother spoke again, and by her tone, which had grown
faltering and tearful--as was her wont in the old days when she ruled
my father--she riveted anew the fetters I was endeavouring with all the
strength of my poor young soul to snap.

“Tell him, Agostino, that your will is as your mother's. Tell him so and
come. I am waiting for you.”

I stifled a groan, and let my arms fall limply to my sides. I was a
weakling and contemptible. I realized it. And yet to-day when I look
back I see how vast a strength I should have needed. I was but thirteen
and of a spirit that had been cowed by her, and was held under her
thrall.

“I... I am sorry, Falcone,” I faltered, and there were tears in my eyes.

I shrugged again--shrugged in token of my despair and grief and
impotence--and I moved down the long room towards the door where my
mother waited.

I did not dare to bestow another look upon that poor broken old warrior,
that faithful, lifelong servant, turned thus cruelly upon the world by a
woman whom bigotry had sapped of all human feelings and a boy who was a
coward masquerading under a great name.

I heard his gasping sob, and the sound smote upon my heart and hurt me
as if it had been iron. I had failed him. He must suffer more in the
knowledge of my unworthiness to be called the son of that master whom he
had worshipped than in the destitution that might await him.

I reached the door.

“My lord! My lord!” he cried after me despairingly. On the very
threshold I stood arrested by that heartbroken cry of his. I half
turned.

“Falcone... “ I began.

And then my mother's white hand fell upon my wrist.

“Come, my son,” she said, once more impassive.

Nervelessly I obeyed her, and as I passed out I heard Falcone's voice
crying:

“My lord, my lord! God help me, and God help you!” An hour later he
had left the citadel, and on the stones of the courtyard lay ten golden
ducats which he had scattered there, and which not one of the greedy
grooms or serving-men could take courage to pick up, so fearful a curse
had old Falcone laid upon that money when he cast it from him.




CHAPTER III. THE PIETISTIC THRALL


That evening my mother talked to me at longer length than I remember her
ever to have done before.

It may be that she feared lest Gino Falcone should have aroused in me
notions which it was best to lull back at once into slumber. It may be
that she, too, had felt something of the crucial quality of that moment
in the armoury, just as she must have perceived my first hesitation to
obey her slightest word, whence came her resolve to check this mutiny
ere it should spread and become too big for her.

We sat in the room that was called her private dining-room, but which,
in fact, was all things to her save the chamber in which she slept.

The fine apartments through which I had strayed as a little lad in my
father's day, the handsome lofty chambers, with their frescoed ceilings,
their walls hung with costly tapestries, many of which had come from the
looms of Flanders, their floors of wood mosaics, and their great carved
movables, had been shut up these many years.

For my mother's claustral needs sufficient was provided by the alcove
in which she slept, the private chapel of the citadel in which she would
spend long hours, and this private dining-room where we now sat. Into
the spacious gardens of the castle she would seldom wander, into
our town of Mondolfo never. Not since my father's departure upon his
ill-starred rebellion had she set foot across the drawbridge.

“Tell me whom you go with, and I will tell you what you are,” says the
proverb. “Show me your dwelling, and I shall see your character,” say I.

And surely never was there a chamber so permeated by the nature of its
tenant as that private dining-room of my mother's.

It was a narrow room in the shape of a small parallelogram, with the
windows set high up near the timbered, whitewashed ceiling, so that it
was impossible either to look in or to look out, as is sometimes the
case with the windows of a chapel.

On the white space of wall that faced the door hung a great wooden
Crucifix, very rudely carved by one who either knew nothing of anatomy,
or else--as is more probable--was utterly unable to set down his
knowledge upon timber. The crudely tinted figure would be perhaps half
the natural size of a man; and it was the most repulsive and hideous
representation of the Tragedy of Golgotha that I have ever seen. It
filled one with a horror which was far indeed removed from the pious
horror which that Symbol is intended to arouse in every true believer.
It emphasized all the ghastly ugliness of death upon that most barbarous
of gallows, without any suggestion of the beauty and immensity of the
Divine Martyrdom of Him Who in the likeness of the sinful flesh was
Alone without sin.

And to me the ghastliest and most pitiful thing of all was an artifice
which its maker had introduced for the purpose of conveying some
suggestion of the supernatural to that mangled, malformed, less than
human representation. Into the place of the wound made by the spear of
Longinus, he had introduced a strip of crystal which caught the light at
certain angles--more particularly when there were lighted tapers in the
room--so that in reflecting this it seemed to shed forth luminous rays.

An odd thing was that my mother--who looked upon that Crucifix with eyes
that were very different from mine--would be at pains in the evening
when lights were fetched to set a taper at such an angle as was best
calculated to produce the effect upon which the sculptor had counted.
What satisfaction it can have been to her to see reflected from that
glazed wound the light which she herself had provided for the purpose,
I am lost to think. And yet I am assured that she would contemplate that
shining effluence in a sort of ecstatic awe, accounting it something
very near akin to miracle.

Under this Crucifix hung a little alabaster font of holy-water, into
the back of which was stuck a withered, yellow branch of palm, which was
renewed on each Palm Sunday. Before it was set a praying-stool of plain
oak, without any cushion to mitigate its harshness to the knees.

In the corner of the room stood a tall, spare, square cupboard,
capacious but very plain, in which the necessaries of the table were
disposed. In the opposite corner there was another smaller cupboard with
a sort of writing-pulpit beneath. Here my mother kept the accounts of
her household, her books of recipes, her homely medicines and the heavy
devotional tomes and lesser volumes--mostly manuscript--out of which she
nourished her poor starving soul.

Amongst these was the Treatise of the Mental Sufferings of Christ--the
book of the Blessed Battista of Varano, Princess of Camerino, who
founded the convent of Poor Clares in that city--a book whose almost
blasphemous presumption fired the train of my earliest misgivings.

Another was The Spiritual Combat, that queer yet able book of the cleric
Scupoli--described as the “aureo libro,” dedicated “Al Supremo Capitano
e Gloriosissimo Trionfatore, Gesu Cristo, Figliuolo di Maria,” and this
dedication in the form of a letter to Our Saviour, signed, “Your most
humble servant, purchased with Your Blood.” 1

     1 This work, which achieved a great vogue and of which
     several editions were issued down to 1750, was first printed
     in 1589. Clearly, however, MS. copies were in existence
     earlier, and it is to one of these that Agostino here
     refers.


Down the middle of the chamber ran a long square-ended table of oak,
very plain like all the rest of the room's scant furnishings. At the
head of this table was an arm-chair for my mother, of bare wood without
any cushion to relieve its hardness, whilst on either side of the board
stood a few lesser chairs for those who habitually dined there. These
were, besides myself, Fra Gervasio, my tutor; Messer Giorgio, the
castellan, a bald-headed old man long since past the fighting age
and who in times of stress would have been as useful for purposes of
defending Mondolfo as Lorenza, my mother's elderly woman, who sat below
him at the board; he was toothless, bowed, and decrepit, but he was very
devout--as he had need to be, seeing that he was half dead already--and
this counted with my mother above any other virtue.2

2 Virtu is the word used by Agostino, and it is susceptible to a wider
translation than that which the English language affords, comprising as
it does a sense of courage and address at arms. Indeed, it is not clear
that Agostino is not playing here upon the double meaning of the word.


The last of the four who habitually sat with us was Giojoso, the
seneschal, a lantern-jawed fellow with black, beetling brows, about whom
the only joyous thing was his misnomer of a name.

Of the table that we kept, beyond noting that the fare was ever of a
lenten kind and that the wine was watered, I will but mention that my
mother did not observe the barrier of the salt. There was no sitting
above it or below at our board, as, from time immemorial, is the
universal custom in feudal homes. That her having abolished it was an
act of humility on her part there can be little doubt, although this was
a subject upon which she never expressed herself in my hearing.

The walls of that room were whitewashed and bare.

The floor was of stone overlain by a carpet of rushes that was changed
no oftener than once a week.

From what I have told you, you may picture something of the chill gloom
of the place, something of the pietism which hung upon the very air of
that apartment in which so much of my early youth was spent. And it had,
too, an odour that is peculiarly full of character, the smell which
is never absent from a sacristy and rarely from conventual chambers; a
smell difficult to define, faint and yet tenuously pungent, and like
no other smell in all the world that I have ever known. It is a musty
odour, an odour of staleness which perhaps an open window and the fresh
air of heaven might relieve but could not dissipate; and to this is wed,
but so subtly that it would be impossible to say which is predominant,
the slight, sickly aroma of wax.

We supped there that night in silence at about the hour that poor Gino
Falcone would be taking his departure. Silence was habitual with us at
meal-times, eating being performed--like everything else in that drab
household--as a sort of devotional act. Occasionally the silence would
be relieved by readings aloud from some pious work, undertaken at my
mother's bidding by one or another of the amanuenses.

But on the night in question there was just silence, broken chiefly by
the toothless slobber of the castellan over the soft meats that were
especially prepared for him. And there was something of grimness in
that silence; for none--and Fra Gervasio less than any--approved the
unchristian thing that out of excess of Christianity my mother had done
in driving old Falcone forth.

Myself, I could not eat at all. My misery choked me. The thought of that
old servitor whom I had loved being sent a wanderer and destitute, and
all through my own weakness, all because I had failed him in his need,
just as I had failed myself, was anguish to me. My lip would quiver at
the thought, and it was with difficulty that I repressed my tears.

At last that hideous repast came to an end in prayers of thanksgiving
whose immoderate length was out of all proportion to the fare provided.

The castellan shuffled forth upon the arm of the seneschal; Lorenza
followed at a sign from my mother, and we three--Gervasio, my mother,
and I--were left alone.

And here let me say a word of Fra Gervasio. He was, as I have already
written, my father's foster-brother. That is to say, he was the child
of a sturdy peasant-woman of the Val di Taro, from whose lusty, healthy
breast my father had suckled the first of that fine strength that had
been his own.

He was older than my father by a month or so, and as often happens in
such cases, he was brought to Mondolfo to be first my father's playmate,
and later, no doubt, to have followed him as a man-at-arms. But a chill
that he took in his tenth year as a result of a long winter immersion in
the icy waters of the Taro laid him at the point of death, and left
him thereafter of a rather weak and sickly nature. But he was quick
and intelligent, and was admitted to learn his letters with my father,
whence it ensued that he developed a taste for study. Seeing that by
his health he was debarred from the hardy open life of a soldier, his
scholarly aptitude was encouraged, and it was decided that he should
follow a clerical career.

He had entered the order of St. Francis; but after some years at
the Convent of Aguilona, his health having been indifferent and the
conventual rules too rigorous for his condition, he was given licence
to become the chaplain of Mondolfo. Here he had received the kindliest
treatment at the hands of my father, who entertained for his sometime
playmate a very real affection.

He was a tall, gaunt man with a sweet, kindly face, reflecting his
sweet, kindly nature; he had deep-set, dark eyes, very gentle in their
gaze, a tender mouth that was a little drawn by lines of suffering and
an upright wrinkle, deep as a gash, between his brows at the root of his
long, slender nose.

He it was that night who broke the silence that endured even after the
others had departed. He spoke at first as if communing with himself,
like a man who thinks aloud; and between his thumb and his long
forefinger, I remember that he kneaded a crumb of bread upon which his
eyes were intent.

“Gino Falcone is an old man, and he was my lord's best-loved servant. He
would have died for my lord, and joyfully; and now he is turned adrift,
to die to no purpose. Ah, well.” He heaved a deep sigh and fell silent,
whilst I--the pent-up anguish in me suddenly released to hear my
thoughts thus expressed--fell soundlessly to weeping.

“Do you reprove me, Fra Gervasio?” quoth my mother, quite emotionless.

The monk pushed back his stool and rose ere he replied. “I must,” he
said, “or I am unworthy of the scapulary I wear. I must reprove this
unchristian act, or else am I no true servant of my Master.”

She crossed herself with her thumb-nail upon the brow and upon the lips,
to repress all evil thoughts and evil words--an unfailing sign that she
was stirred to anger and sought to combat the sin of it. Then she spoke,
meekly enough, in the same cold, level voice.

“I think it is you who are at fault,” she told him, “when you call
unchristian an act which was necessary to secure this child to Christ.”

He smiled a sad little smile. “Yet even so, it were well you should
proceed with caution and with authority; and in this you have none.”

It was her turn to smile, the palest, ghostliest of smiles, and even for
so much she must have been oddly moved. “I think I have,” said she, and
quoted, “'If thy right hand offend thee, hack it off.'”

I saw a hot flush mount to the friar's prominent cheek-bones. Indeed, he
was a very human man under his conventual robe, with swift stirrings
of passion which the long habit of repression had not yet succeeded
in extinguishing. He cast his eyes to the ceiling in such a glance of
despair as left me thoughtful. It was as an invocation to Heaven to
look down upon the obstinate, ignorant folly of this woman who accounted
herself wise and who so garbled the Divine teaching as to blaspheme with
complacency.

I know that now; at the time I was not quite so clear-sighted as to read
the full message of that glance.

Her audacity was as the audacity of fools. Where wisdom, full-fledged,
might have halted, trembling, she swept resolutely onward. Before her
stood this friar, this teacher and interpreter, this man of holy life
who was accounted profoundly learned in the Divinities; and he told her
that she had done an evil thing. Yet out of the tiny pittance of her
knowledge and her little intellectual sight--which was no better than a
blindness--must she confidently tell him that he was at fault.

Argument was impossible between him and her. Thus much I saw, and I
feared an explosion of the wrath of which I perceived in him the signs.
But he quelled it. Yet his voice rumbled thunderously upon his next
words.

“It matters something that Gino Falcone should not starve,” he said.

“It matters more that my son should not be damned,” she answered him,
and with that answer left him weapon-less, for against the armour of a
crassness so dense and one-ideaed there are no weapons that can prevail.

“Listen,” she said, and her eyes, raised for a moment, comprehended both
of us in their glance. “There is something that it were best I tell you,
that once for all you may fathom the depth of my purpose for Agostino
here. My lord his father was a man of blood and strife...”

“And so were many whose names stand to-day upon the roll of saints and
are its glory,” answered the friar with quick asperity.

“But they did not raise their arms against the Holy Church and against
Christ's Own most holy Vicar, as did he,” she reminded him sorrowfully.
“The sword is an ill thing save when it is wielded in a holy cause. In
my lord's hands, wielded in the unholiest of all causes, it became a
thing accursed. But God's anger overtook him and laid him low at Perugia
in all the strength and vigour that had made him arrogant as Lucifer. It
was perhaps well for all of us that it so befell.”

“Madonna!” cried Gervasio in stern horror.

But she went on quite heedless of him. “Best of all was it for me, since
I was spared the harshest duty that can be imposed upon a woman and a
wife. It was necessary that he should expiate the evil he had wrought;
moreover, his life was become a menace to my child's salvation. It was
his wish to make of Agostino such another as himself, to lead his only
son adown the path of Hell. It was my duty to my God and to my son to
shield this boy. And to accomplish that I would have delivered up his
father to the papal emissaries who sought him.”

“Ah, never that!” the friar protested. “You could never have done that!”

“Could I not? I tell you it was as good as done. I tell you that the
thing was planned. I took counsel with my confessor, and he showed me my
plain duty.”

She paused a moment, whilst we stared, Fra Gervasio white-faced and with
mouth that gaped in sheer horror.

“For years had he eluded the long arm of the pope's justice,” she
resumed. “And during those years he had never ceased to plot and
plan the overthrow of the Pontifical dominion. He was blinded by his
arrogance to think that he could stand against the hosts of Heaven. His
stubbornness in sin had made him mad. Quem Deus vult perdere...” And
she waved one of her emaciated hands, leaving the quotation unfinished.
“Heaven showed me the way, chose me for Its instrument. I sent him word,
offering him shelter here at Mondolfo where none would look to find him,
assuming it to be the last place to which he would adventure. He was to
have come when death took him on the field of Perugia.”

There was something here that I did not understand at all. And in like
case, it seemed, was Fra Gervasio, for he passed a hand over his brow,
as if to clear thence some veils that clogged his understanding.

“He was to have come?” he echoed. “To shelter?” he asked.

“Nay,” said she quietly, “to death. The papal emissaries had knowledge
of it and would have been here to await him.”

“You would have betrayed him?” Fra Gervasio's voice was hoarse, his eyes
were burning sombrely.

“I would have saved my son,” said she, with quiet satisfaction, in a
tone that revealed how incontestably right she conceived herself to be.

He stood there, and he seemed taller and more gaunt than usual, for he
had drawn himself erect to the full of his great height--and he was a
man who usually went bowed. His hands were clenched and the knuckles
showed blue-white like marble. His face was very pale and in his temple
a little pulse was throbbing visibly. He swayed slightly upon his
feet, and the sight of him frightened me a little. He seemed so full of
terrible potentialities.

When I think of vengeance, I picture to myself Fra Gervasio as I beheld
him in that hour. Nothing that he could have done would have surprised
me. Had he fallen upon my mother then, and torn her limb from limb,
it would have been no more than from the sight of him I might have
expected.

I have said that nothing that he could have done would have surprised
me. Rather should I have said that nothing would have surprised me save
the thing he did.

Whilst a man might have counted ten stood he so--she seeing nothing of
the strange transfiguration that had come over him, for her eyes were
downcast as ever. Then quite slowly, his hands unclenched, his arms
fell limply to his sides, his head sank forward upon his breast, and his
figure bowed itself lower than was usual. Quite suddenly, quite softly,
almost as a man who swoons, he sank down again into the chair from which
he had risen.

He set his elbows on the table, and took his head in his hands. A groan
escaped him. She heard it, and looked at him in her furtive way.

“You are moved by this knowledge, Fra Gervasio,” she said and sighed. “I
have told you this--and you, Agostino--that you may know how deep, how
ineradicable is my purpose. You were a votive offering, Agostino;
you were vowed to the service of God that your father's life might be
spared, years ago, ere you were born. From the very edge of death was
your father brought back to life and strength. He would have used that
life and that strength to cheat God of the price of His boon to me.”

“And if,” Fra Gervasio questioned almost fiercely, “Agostino in the end
should have no vocation, should have no call to such a life?”

She looked at him very wistfully, almost pityingly. “How should that
be?” she asked. “He was offered to God. And that God accepted the gift,
He showed when He gave Giovanni back to life. How, then, could it come
to pass that Agostino should have no call? Would God reject that which
He had accepted?”

Fra Gervasio rose again. “You go too deep for me, Madonna,” he said
bitterly. “It is not for me to speak of my gifts save reverently and in
profound and humble gratitude for that grace by which God bestowed them
upon me. But I am accounted something of a casuist. I am a doctor of
theology and of canon law, and but for the weak state of my health I
should be sitting to-day in the chair of canon law at the University of
Pavia. And yet, Madonna, the things you tell me with such assurance make
a mock of everything I have ever learnt.”

Even I, lad as I was, perceived the bitter irony in which he spoke. Not
so she. I vow she flushed under what she accounted his praise of her
wisdom and divine revelation; for vanity is the last human weakness to
be discarded. Then she seemed to recollect herself. She bowed her head
very reverently.

“It is God's grace that reveals to me the truth,” she said.

He fell back a step in his amazement at having been so thoroughly
misunderstood. Then he drew away from the table. He looked at her as
he would speak, but checked on the thought. He turned, and so, without
another word, departed, and left us sitting there together.

It was then that we had our talk; or, rather, that she talked, whilst I
sat listening. And presently as I listened, I came gradually once more
under the spell of which I had more than once that day been on the point
of casting off the yoke.

For, after all, you are to discern in what I have written here, between
what were my feelings at the time and what are my criticisms of to-day
in the light of the riper knowledge to which I have come. The handling
of a sword had thrilled me strangely, as I have shown. Yet was I ready
to believe that such a thrill was but a lure of Satan's, as my mother
assured me. In deeper matters she might harbour error, as Fra Gervasio's
irony had shown me that he believed. But we went that night into no
great depths.

She spent an hour or so in vague discourse upon the joys of Paradise, in
showing me the folly of jeopardizing them for the sake of the fleeting
vanities of this ephemeral world. She dealt at length upon the love of
God for us, and the love which we should bear to Him, and she read to
me passages from the book of the Blessed Varano and from Scupoli to add
point to her teachings upon the beauty and nobility of a life that
is devoted to God's service--the only service of this world in which
nobility can exist.

And then she added little stories of martyrs who had suffered for the
faith, of the tortures to which they had been subjected, and of the
happiness they had felt in actual suffering, of the joy that their very
torments had brought them, borne up as they were by their faith and the
strength of their love of God.

There was in all this nothing that was new to me, nothing that I did
not freely accept and implicitly believe without pausing to judge or
criticize. And yet, it was shrewd of her to have plied me then as
she did; for thereby, beyond doubt, she checked me upon the point of
self-questioning to which that day's happenings were urging me, and she
brought me once more obediently to heel and caused me to fix my eyes
more firmly than ever beyond the things of this world and upon the
glories of the next which I was to make my goal and aim.

Thus came I back within the toils from which I had been for a moment
tempted to escape; and what is more, my imagination fired to some touch
of ecstasy by those tales of sainted martyrs, I returned willingly to
the pietistic thrall, to be held in it more firmly than ever yet before.

We parted as we always parted, and when I had kissed her cold hand I
went my way to bed. And if I knelt that night to pray that God might
watch over poor errant Falcone, it was to the end that Falcone might be
brought to see the sin and error of his ways and win to the grace of a
happy death when his hour came.




CHAPTER IV. LUISINA


Of the four years that followed little mention need be made in these
pages, save for one incident whose importance is derived entirely from
that which subsequently befell, for at the time it had no meaning for
me. Yet since later it was to have much, it is fitting that it should be
recorded here.

It happened that a month or so after old Falcone had left us there
wandered one noontide into the outer courtyard of the castle two pilgrim
fathers, on their way--as they announced--from Milan to visit the Holy
House at Loreto.

It was my mother's custom to receive all pilgrim wayfarers and beggars
in this courtyard at noontide twice in each week to bestow upon them
food and alms. Rarely was she, herself, present at that alms-giving;
more rarely still was I. It was Fra Gervasio who discharged the office
of almoner on the Countess of Mondolfo's behalf. Occasionally the whines
and snarls of the motley crowd that gathered there--for they were not
infrequently quarrelsome--reached us in the maschio tower where we had
our apartments. But on the day of which I speak I chanced to stand in
the pillared gallery above the courtyard, watching the heaving, surging
human mass below, for the concourse was greater than usual.

Cripples there were of every sort, and all in rags; some with twisted,
withered limbs, others with mere stumps where limbs had been lopped off,
others again--and there were many of these--with hideous running
sores, some of which no doubt would be counterfeit--as I now know--and
contrived with poultices of salt for the purpose of exciting charity
in the piteous. All were dishevelled, unkempt, ragged, dirty, and,
doubtless, verminous. Most were greedy and wolfish as they thrust one
another aside to reach Fra Gervasio, as if they feared that the supply
of alms and food should be exhausted ere their turn arrived. Amongst
them there was commonly a small sprinkling of mendicant friars, some of
these, perhaps, just the hypocrite rogues that I have since discovered
many of them to be, though at the time all who wore the scapulary were
holy men in my innocent eyes. They were mostly, or so they pretended,
bent upon pilgrimages to distant parts, living upon such alms as they
could gather on their way.

On the steps of the chapel Fra Gervasio would stand--gaunt and
impassive--with his posse of attendant grooms behind him. One of the
latter, standing nearest to our almoner, held a great sack of broken
bread; another presented a wooden, trough-like platter filled with
slices of meat, and a third dispensed out of horn cups a poor, thin, and
rather sour, but very wholesome wine, which he drew from the skins that
were his charge.

From one to the other were the beggars passed on by Fra Gervasio, and
lastly came they back to him, to receive from his hands a piece of
money--a grosso, of which he held the bag himself.

On the day of which I write, as I stood there gazing down upon that mass
of misery, marvelling perhaps a little upon the inequality of fortune,
and wondering vaguely what God could be about to inflict so much
suffering upon certain of His creatures, to cause one to be born into
purple and another into rags, my eyes were drawn by the insistent stare
of two monks who stood at the back of the crowd with their shoulders to
the wall.

They were both tall men, and they stood with their cowls over their
tonsures, in the conventual attitude, their hands tucked away into the
ample sleeves of their brown habits. One of this twain was broader than
his companion and very erect of carriage, such as was unusual in a monk.
His mouth and the half of his face were covered by a thick brown beard,
and athwart his countenance, from under the left eye across his nose and
cheek, ran a great livid scar to lose itself in the beard towards the
right jaw. His deep-set eyes regarded me so intently that I coloured
uncomfortably under their gaze; for accustomed as I was to seclusion, I
was easily abashed. I turned away and went slowly along the gallery to
the end; and yet I had a feeling that those eyes were following me, and,
indeed, casting a swift glance over my shoulder ere I went indoors, I
saw that this was so.

That evening at supper I chanced to mention the matter to Fra Gervasio.

“There was a big bearded capuchin in the yard at alms-time to-day--” I
was beginning, when the friar's knife clattered from his hand, and he
looked at me with eyes of positive fear out of a face from which the
last drop of blood had abruptly receded. I checked my inquiry at the
sight of him thus suddenly disordered, whilst my mother, who, as usual,
observed nothing, made a foolish comment.

“The little brothers are never absent, Agostino.”

“This brother was a big brother,” said I.

“It is not seemly to make jest of holy men,” she reproved me in her
chilling voice.

“I had no thought to jest,” I answered soberly. “I should never
have remarked this friar but that he gazed upon me with so great an
intentness--so great that I was unable to bear it.”

It was her turn to betray emotion. She looked at me full and long--for
once--and very searchingly. She, too, had grown paler than was her
habit.

“Agostino, what do you tell me?” quoth she, and her voice quivered.

Now here was a deal of pother about a capuchin who had stared at the
Madonnino of Anguissola! The matter was out of all proportion to the
stir it made, and I conveyed in my next words some notion of that
opinion.

But she stared wistfully. “Never think it, Agostino,” she besought me.
“You know not what it may import.” And then she turned to Fra Gervasio.
“Who was this mendicant?” she asked.

He had by now recovered from his erstwhile confusion. But he was still
pale, and I observed that his hand trembled.

“He must have been one of the two little brothers of St. Francis on
their way, they said, from Milan to Loreto on a pilgrimage.”

“Not those you told me are resting here until to-morrow?”

From his face I saw that he would have denied it had it lain within his
power to utter a deliberate falsehood.

“They are the same,” he answered in a low voice.

She rose. “I must see this friar,” she announced, and never in all my
life had I beheld in her such a display of emotion.

“In the morning, then,” said Fra Gervasio. “It is after sunset,” he
explained. “They have retired, and their rule...” He left the sentence
unfinished, but he had said enough to be understood by her.

She sank back to her chair, folded her hands in her lap and fell into
meditation. The faintest of flushes crept into her wax-like cheeks.

“If it should be a sign!” she murmured raptly, and then she turned again
to Fra Gervasio. “You heard Agostino say that he could not bear this
friar's gaze. You remember, brother, how a pilgrim appeared near San
Rufino to the nurse of Saint Francis, and took from her arms the child
that he might bless it ere once more he vanished? If this should be a
sign such as that!”

She clasped her hands together fervently. “I must see this friar ere he
departs again,” she said to the staring, dumbfounded Fra Gervasio.

At last, then, I understood her emotion. All her life she had prayed
for a sign of grace for herself or for me, and she believed that here at
last was something that might well be discovered upon inquiry to be
an answer to her prayer. This capuchin who had stared at me from
the courtyard became at once to her mind--so ill-balanced upon such
matters--a supernatural visitant, harbinger, as it were, of my future
saintly glory.

But though she rose betimes upon the morrow, to see the holy man ere he
fared forth again, she was not early enough. In the courtyard whither
she descended to make her way to the outhouse where the two were lodged,
she met Fra Gervasio, who was astir before her.

“The friar?” she cried anxiously, filled already with forebodings. “The
holy man?”

Gervasio stood before her, pale and trembling. “You are too late,
Madonna. Already he is gone.”

She observed his agitation now, and beheld in it a reflection of her
own, springing from the selfsame causes. “Oh, it was a sign indeed!”
 she exclaimed. “And you have come to realize it, too, I see.” Next, in a
burst of gratitude that was almost pitiful upon such slight foundation,
“Oh, blessed Agostino!” she cried out.

Then the momentary exaltation fell from that woman of sorrows. “This but
makes my burden heavier, my responsibility greater,” she wailed. “God
help me bear it!”

Thus passed that incident so trifling in itself and so misunderstood by
her. But it was never forgotten, and from time to time she would allude
to it as the sign which had been vouchsafed me and for which great
should be my thankfulness and my joy.

Save for that, in the four years that followed, time flowed an
uneventful course within the four walls of the big citadel--for beyond
those four walls I was never once permitted to set foot; and although
from time to time I heard rumours of doings in the town itself, of the
affairs of the State whereof I was by right of birth the tyrant, and
of the greater business of the big world beyond, yet so trained and
schooled was I that I had no great desire for a nearer acquaintance with
that world.

A certain curiosity did at times beset me, spurred not so much by the
little that I heard as by things that I read in such histories as my
studies demanded I should read. For even the lives of saints, and
Holy Writ itself, afford their student glimpses of the world. But this
curiosity I came to look upon as a lure of the flesh, and to resist.
Blessed are they who are out of all contact with the world, since to
them salvation comes more easily; so I believed implicitly, as I was
taught by my mother and by Fra Gervasio at my mother's bidding.

And as the years passed under such influences as had been at work upon
me from the cradle, influences which had known no check save that brief
one afforded by Gino Falcone, I became perforce devout and pious from
very inclination.

Joyous transports were afforded me by the study of the life of that
Saint Luigi of the noble Mantuan House of Gonzaga--in whom I saw an
ideal to be emulated, since he seemed to me to be much in my own case
and of my own estate--who had counted the illusory greatness of this
world well lost so that he might win the bliss of Paradise. Similarly
did I take delight in the Life, written by Tommaso da Celano, of that
blessed son of Pietro Bernardone, the merchant of Assisi, that Francis
who became the Troubadour of the Lord and sang so sweetly the praises
of His Creation. My heart would swell within me and I would weep hot and
very bitter tears over the narrative of the early and sinful part of his
life, as we may weep to see a beloved brother beset by deadly perils.
And greater, hence, was the joy, the exultation, and finally the sweet
peace and comfort that I gathered from the tale of his conversion, of
his wondrous works, and of the Three Companions.

In these pages--so lively was my young imagination and so wrought
upon by what I read--I suffered with him again his agonies of hope, I
thrilled with some of the joy of his stupendous ecstasies, and I almost
envied him the signal mark of Heavenly grace that had imprinted the
stigmata upon his living body.

All that concerned him, too, I read: his Little Flowers, his Testament,
The Mirror of Perfection; but my greatest delight was derived from his
Song of the Creatures, which I learnt by heart.

Oftentimes since have I wondered and sought to determine whether it was
the piety of those lauds that charmed me spiritually, or an appeal to
my senses made by the beauty of the lines and the imagery which the
Assisian used in his writings.

Similarly I am at a loss to determine whether the pleasure I took in
reading of the joyous, perfumed life of that other stigmatized saint,
the blessed Catherine of Siena, was not a sensuous pleasure rather than
the soul-ecstasy I supposed it at the time.

And as I wept over the early sins of St. Francis, so too did I weep over
the rhapsodical Confessions of St. Augustine, that mighty theologian
after whom I had been named, and whose works--after those concerning St.
Francis--exerted a great influence upon me in those early days.

Thus did I grow in grace until Fra Gervasio, who watched me narrowly and
anxiously, seemed more at ease, setting aside the doubts that earlier
had tormented him lest I should be forced upon a life for which I had no
vocation. He grew more tender and loving towards me, as if something of
pity lurked within the strong affection in which he held me.

And, meanwhile, as I grew in grace of spirit, so too did I grow in
grace of body, waxing tall and very strong, which would have been nowise
surprising but that those nurtured as was I are seldom lusty. The mind
feeding overmuch upon the growing body is apt to sap its strength
and vigour, besides which there was the circumstance that I continued
throughout those years a life almost of confinement, deprived of all the
exercises by which youth is brought to its fine flower of strength.

As I was approaching my eighteenth year there befell another incident,
which, trivial in itself, yet has its place in my development and so
should have its place within these confessions. Nor did I judge it
trivial at the time--nor were trivial the things that followed out
of it--trivial though it may seem to me to-day as I look back upon it
through all the murk of later life.

Giojoso, the seneschal, of whom I have spoken, had a son, a great
raw-boned lad whom he would have trained as an amanuensis, but who was
one of Nature's dunces out of which there is nothing useful to be made.
He was strong-limbed, however, and he was given odd menial duties to
perform about the castle. But these he shirked where possible, as he had
shirked his lessons in earlier days.

Now it happened that I was walking one spring morning--it was in May
of that year '44 of which I am now writing--on the upper of the
three spacious terraces that formed the castle garden. It was but an
indifferently tended place, and yet perhaps the more agreeable on that
account, since Nature had been allowed to have her prodigal, luxuriant
way. It is true that the great boxwood hedges needed trimming, and that
weeds were sprouting between the stones of the flights of steps that led
from terrace to terrace; but the place was gay and fragrant with wild
blossoms, and the great trees afforded generous shade, and the long rank
grass beneath them made a pleasant couch to lie on during the heat of
the day in summer. The lowest terrace of all was in better case. It was
a well-planted and well-tended orchard, where I got many a colic in my
earlier days from a gluttony of figs and peaches whose complete ripening
I was too impatient to await.

I walked there, then, one morning quite early on the upper terrace
immediately under the castle wall, and alternately I read from the De
Civitate Dei which I had brought with me, alternately mused upon the
matter of my reading. Suddenly I was disturbed by a sound of voices just
below me.

The boxwood hedge, being twice my height and fully two feet thick,
entirely screened the speakers from my sight.

There were two voices, and one of these, angry and threatening, I
recognized for that of Rinolfo--Messer Giojoso's graceless son; the
other, a fresh young feminine voice, was entirely unknown to me; indeed
it was the first girl's voice I could recall having heard in all my
eighteen years, and the sound was as pleasantly strange as it was
strangely pleasant.

I stood quite still, to listen to its expostulations.

“You are a cruel fellow, Ser Rinolfo, and Madonna the Countess shall be
told of this.”

There followed a crackling of twigs and a rush of heavy feet.

“You shall have something else of which to tell Madonna's beatitude,”
 threatened the harsh voice of Rinolfo.

That and his advances were answered by a frightened screech, a screech
that moved rapidly to the right as it was emitted. There came more
snapping of twigs, a light scurrying sound followed by a heavier one,
and lastly a panting of breath and a soft pattering of running feet upon
the steps that led up to the terrace where I walked.

I moved forward rapidly to the opening in the hedge where these steps
debouched, and no sooner had I appeared there than a soft, lithe body
hurtled against me so suddenly that my arms mechanically went round it,
my right hand still holding the De Civitate Dei, forefinger enclosed
within its pages to mark the place.

Two moist dark eyes looked up appealingly into mine out of a frightened
but very winsome, sun-tinted face.

“O Madonnino!” she panted. “Protect me! Save me!”

Below us, checked midway in his furious ascent, halted Rinolfo, his big
face red with anger, scowling up at me in sudden doubt and resentment.

The situation was not only extraordinary in itself, but singularly
disturbing to me. Who the girl was, or whence she came, I had no thought
or notion as I surveyed her. She would be of about my own age, or
perhaps a little younger, and from her garb it was plain that she
belonged to the peasant class. She wore a spotless bodice of white
linen, which but indifferently concealed the ripening swell of her young
breast. Her petticoat, of dark red homespun, stopped short above her
bare brown ankles, and her little feet were naked. Her brown hair, long
and abundant, was still fastened at the nape of her slim neck, but fell
loose beyond that, having been disturbed, no doubt, in her scuffle with
Rinolfo. Her little mouth was deeply red and it held strong young teeth
that were as white as milk.

I have since wondered whether she was as beautiful as I deemed her in
that moment. For it must be remembered that mine was the case of the son
of Filippo Balducci--related by Messer Boccaccio in the merry tales
of his Decamerone 1--who had come to years of adolescence without ever
having beheld womanhood, so that the first sight of it in the streets
of Florence affected him so oddly that he vexed his sire with foolish
questions and still more foolish prayers.

     1 In the Introduction to the Fourth Day.


So was it now with me. In all my eighteen years I had by my mother's
careful contriving never set eyes upon a woman of an age inferior to her
own. And--consider me foolish if you will but so it is--I do not think
that it had occurred to me that they existed, or else, if they did, that
in youth they differed materially from what in age I found them. Thus I
had come to look upon women as just feeble, timid creatures, over-prone
to gossip, tears, and lamentations, and good for very little that I
could perceive.

I had been unable to understand for what reason it was that San Luigi of
Gonzaga had from years of discretion never allowed his eyes to rest upon
a woman; nor could I see wherein lay the special merit attributed to
this. And certain passages in the Confessions of St. Augustine and
in the early life of St. Francis of Assisi bewildered me and left me
puzzled.

But now, quite suddenly, it was as if revelation had come to me. It was
as if the Book of Life had at last been opened for me, and at a glance
I had read one of its dazzling pages. So that whether this brown peasant
girl was beautiful or not, beautiful she seemed to me with the radiant
beauty that is attributed to the angels of Paradise. Nor did I doubt
that she would be as holy, for to see in beauty a mark of divine favour
is not peculiar only to the ancient Greeks.

And because of the appeal of this beauty--real or supposed--I was very
ready with my protection, since I felt that protection must carry
with it certain rights of ownership which must be very sweet and were
certainly desired.

Holding her, therefore, within the shelter of my arms, where in her
heedless innocence she had flung herself, and by very instinct stroking
with one hand her little brown head to soothe her fears, I became
truculent for the first time in my new-found manhood, and boldly
challenged her pursuer.

“What is this, Rinolfo?” I demanded. “Why do you plague her?”

“She broke up my snares,” he answered sullenly, “and let the birds go
free.”

“What snares? What birds?” quoth I.

“He is a cruel beast,” she shrilled. “And he will lie to you,
Madonnino.”

“If he does I'll break the bones of his body,” I promised in a tone
entirely new to me. And then to him--“The truth now, poltroon!” I
admonished him.

At last I got the story out of them: how Rinolfo had scattered grain
in a little clearing in the garden, and all about it had set twigs that
were heavily smeared with viscum; that he set this trap almost daily,
and daily took a great number of birds whose necks he wrung and had them
cooked for him with rice by his silly mother; that it was a sin in any
case to take little birds by such cowardly means, but that since amongst
these birds there were larks and thrushes and plump blackbirds and other
sweet musicians of the air, whose innocent lives were spent in singing
the praises of God, his sin became a hideous sacrilege.

Finally I learnt that coming that morning upon half a score of poor
fluttering terrified birds held fast in Rinolfo's viscous snares, the
little girl had given them their liberty and had set about breaking
up the springes. At this occupation he had caught her, and there is no
doubt that he would have taken a rude vengeance but for the sanctuary
which she had found in me.

And when I had heard, behold me for the first time indulging the
prerogative that was mine by right of birth, and dispensing justice at
Mondolfo like the lord of life and death that I was there.

“You, Rinolfo,” I said, “will set no more snares here at Mondolfo, nor
will you ever again enter these gardens under pain of my displeasure and
its consequences. And as for this child, if you dare to molest her for
what has happened now, or if you venture so much as to lay a finger upon
her at any time and I have word of it, I shall deal with you as with a
felon. Now go.”

He went straight to his father, the seneschal, with a lying tale of my
having threatened him with violence and forbidden him ever to enter the
garden again because he had caught me there with Luisina--as the child
was called--in my arms. And Messer Giojoso, full of parental indignation
at this gross treatment of his child, and outraged chastity at
the notion of a young man of churchly aims, as were mine, being in
perversive dalliance with that peasant-wench, repaired straight to
my mother with the story of it, which I doubt not lost nothing by its
repetition.

Meanwhile I abode there with Luisina. I was in no haste to let her go.
Her presence pleased me in some subtle, quite indefinable manner; and my
sense of beauty, which, always strong, had hitherto lain dormant within
me, was awake at last and was finding nourishment in the graces of her.

I sat down upon the topmost of the terrace steps, and made her sit
beside me. This she did after some demur about the honour of it and her
own unworthiness, objections which I brushed peremptorily aside.

So we sat there on that May morning, quite close together, for which
there was, after all, no need, seeing that the steps were of a noble
width. At our feet spread the garden away down the flight of terraces
to end in the castle's grey, buttressed wall. But from where we sat we
could look beyond this, our glance meeting the landscape a mile or so
away with the waters of the Taro glittering in the sunshine, and the
Apennines, all hazy, for an ultimate background.

I took her hand, which she relinquished to me quite freely and frankly
with an innocence as great as my own; and I asked her who she was and
how she came to Mondolfo. It was then that I learnt that her name was
Luisina, that she was the daughter of one of the women employed in the
castle kitchen, who had brought her to help there a week ago from Borgo
Taro, where she had been living with an aunt.

To-day the notion of the Tyrant of Mondolfo sitting--almost coram
populo--on the steps of the garden of his castle, clasping the hand of
the daughter of one of his scullions, is grotesque and humiliating. At
the time the thought never presented itself to me at all, and had it
done so it would have troubled me no whit. She was my first glimpse
of fresh young maidenhood, and I was filled with pleasant interest and
desirous of more acquaintance with this phenomenon. Beyond that I did
not go.

I told her frankly that she was very beautiful. Whereupon she looked at
me with suddenly startled eyes that were full of fearful questionings,
and made to draw her hand from mine. Unable to understand her fears, and
seeking to reassure her, to convince her that in me she had a friend,
one who would ever protect her from the brutalities of all the Rinolfos
in the world, I put an arm about her shoulders and drew her closer to
me, gently and protectingly.

She suffered it very stonily, like a poor fascinated thing that is
robbed by fear of its power to resist the evil that it feels enfolding
it.

“O Madonnino!” she whispered fearfully, and sighed. “Nay, you must not.
It... it is not good.”

“Not good?” quoth I, and it was just so that that fool of a son of
Balducci's must have protested in the story when he was told by his
father that it was not good to look on women. “Nay, now, but it is good
to me.”

“And they say you are to be a priest,” she added, which seemed to me a
very foolish and inconsequent thing to add.

“Well, then? And what of that?” I asked.

She looked at me again with those timid eyes of hers. “You should be at
your studies,” said she.

“I am,” said I, and smiled. “I am studying a new subject.”

“Madonnino, it is not a subject whose study makes good priests,” she
announced, and puzzled me again by the foolish inconsequence of her
words.

Already, indeed, she began to disappoint me. Saving my mother--whom I
did not presume to judge at all, and who seemed a being altogether
apart from what little humanity I had known until then--I had found
that foolishness was as natural to women as its bleat to a sheep or its
cackle to a goose; and in this opinion I had been warmly confirmed by
Fra Gervasio. Now here in Luisina I had imagined at first that I had
discovered a phase of womanhood unsuspected and exceptional. She was
driving me to conclude, however, that I had been mistaken, and that
here was just a pretty husk containing a very trivial spirit, whose
companionship must prove a dull affair when custom should have staled
the first impression of her fresh young beauty.

It is plain now that I did her an injustice, for there was about her
words none of the inconsequence I imagined. The fault was in myself and
in the profound ignorance of the ways of men and women which went hand
in hand with my deep but ineffectual learning in the ways of saints.

Our entertainment, however, was not destined to go further. For at the
moment in which I puzzled over her words and sought to attach to them
some intelligent meaning, there broke from behind us a scream that flung
us apart, as startled as if we had been conscious indeed of guilt.

We looked round to find that it had been uttered by my mother. Not ten
yards away she stood, a tall black figure against the grey background
of the lichened wall, with Giojoso in attendance and Rinolfo slinking
behind his father, leering.




CHAPTER V. REBELLION


The sight of my mother startled me more than I can say. It filled me
with a positive dread of things indefinable. Never before had I seen
her coldly placid countenance so strangely disordered, and her unwonted
aspect it must have been that wrought so potently upon me.

No longer was she the sorrowful spectre, white-faced, with downcast eyes
and level, almost inanimate, tones. Her cheeks were flushed unnaturally,
her lips were quivering, and angry fires were smouldering in her
deep-set eyes.

Swiftly she came down to us, seeming almost to glide over the ground.
Not me she addressed, but poor Luisina; and her voice was hoarse with an
awful anger.

“Who are you, wench?” quoth she. “What make you here in Mondolfo?”

Luisina had risen and stood swaying there, very white and with averted
eyes, her hands clasping and unclasping. Her lips moved; but she was
too terrified to answer. It was Giojoso who stepped forward to inform my
mother of the girl's name and condition. And upon learning it her anger
seemed to increase.

“A kitchen-wench!” she cried. “O horror!”

And quite suddenly, as if by inspiration, scarce knowing what I said or
that I spoke at all, I answered her out of the store of the theological
learning with which she had had me stuffed.

“We are all equals in the sight of God, madam mother.”

She flashed me a glance of anger, of pious anger than which none can be
more terrible.

“Blasphemer!” she denounced me. “What has God to do with this?”

She waited for no answer, rightly judging, perhaps, that I had none to
offer.

“And as for that wanton,” she commanded, turning fiercely to Giojoso,
“let her be whipped hence and out of the town of Mondolfo. Set the
grooms to it.”

But upon that command of hers I leapt of a sudden to my feet, a
tightening about my heart, and beset by a certain breathlessness that
turned me pale.

Here again, it seemed, was to be repeated--though with methods a
thousand times more barbarous and harsh--the wrong that was done years
ago in the case of poor Gino Falcone. And the reason for it in this
instance was not even dimly apparent to me. Falcone I had loved; indeed,
in my eighteen years of life he was the only human being who had knocked
for admission upon the portals of my heart. Him they had driven forth.
And now, here was a child--the fairest creature of God's that until that
hour I had beheld, whose companionship seemed to me a thing sweet and
desirable, and whom I felt that I might love as I had loved Falcone.
Her too they would drive forth, and with a brutality and cruelty that
revolted me.

Later I was to perceive the reasons better, and much food for reflection
was I to derive from realizing that there are no spirits so vengeful, so
fierce, so utterly intolerant, ungovernable, and feral as the spirits of
the devout when they conceive themselves justified to anger.

All the sweet teaching of Charity and brotherly love and patience is
jettisoned, and by the most amazing paradox that Christianity has ever
known, Catholic burns heretic, and heretic butchers Catholic, all for
the love of Christ; and each glories devoutly in the deed, never heeding
the blasphemy of his belief that thus he obeys the sweet and gentle
mandates of the God Incarnate.

Thus, then, my mother now, commanding that hideous deed with a mind at
peace in pharisaic self-righteousness.

But not again would I stand by as I had stood by in the case of Falcone,
and let her cruel, pietistic will be done. I had grown since then, and I
had ripened more than I was aware. It remained for this moment to reveal
to me the extent. Besides, the subtle influence of sex--all unconscious
of it as I was--stirred me now to prove my new-found manhood.

“Stay!” I said to Giojoso, and in uttering the command I grew very cold
and steady, and my breathing resumed the normal.

He checked in the act of turning away to do my mother's hideous bidding.

“You will give Madonna's order to the grooms, Ser Giojoso, as you have
been bidden. But you will add from me that if there is one amongst them
dares to obey it and to lay be it so much as a finger upon Luisina, him
will I kill with these two hands.”

Never was consternation more profound than that which I flung amongst
them by those words. Giojoso fell to trembling; behind him, Rinolfo, the
cause of all this garboil, stared with round big eyes; whilst my mother,
all a-quiver, clutched at her bosom and looked at me fearfully, but
spoke no word.

I smiled upon them, towering there, conscious and glad of my height for
the first time in my life.

“Well?” I demanded of Giojoso. “For what do you wait? About it, sir, and
do as my mother has commanded you.”

He turned to her, all bent and grovelling, arms outstretched in
ludicrous bewilderment, every line of him beseeching guidance along this
path so suddenly grown thorny.

“Ma--madonna!” he stammered.

She swallowed hard, and spoke at last.

“Do you defy my will, Agostino?”

“On the contrary, madam mother, I am enforcing it. Your will shall be
done; your order shall be given. I insist upon it. But it shall lie with
the discretion of the grooms whether they obey you. Am I to blame if
they turn cowards?”

O, I had found myself at last, and I was making a furious, joyous use of
the discovery.

“That... that were to make a mock of me and my authority,” she protested.
She was still rather helpless, rather breathless and confused, like one
who has suddenly been hurled into cold water.

“If you fear that, madam, perhaps you had better countermand your
order.”

“Is the girl to remain in Mondolfo against my wishes? Are you so... so
lost to shame?” A returning note of warmth in her accents warned me that
she was collecting herself to deal with the situation.

“Nay,” said I, and I looked at Luisina, who stood there so pale and
tearful. “I think that for her own sake, poor maid, it were better that
she went, since you desire it. But she shall not be whipped hence like a
stray dog.”

“Come, child,” I said to her, as gently as I could. “Go pack, and quit
this home of misery. And be easy. For if any man in Mondolfo attempts to
hasten your going, he shall reckon with me.”

I laid a hand for an instant in kindliness and friendliness upon her
shoulder. “Poor little Luisina,” said I, sighing. But she shrank and
trembled under my touch. “Pity me a little, for they will not permit me
any friends, and who is friendless is indeed pitiful.”

And then, whether the phrase touched her, so that her simple little
nature was roused and she shook off what self-control she had ever
learnt, or whether she felt secure enough in my protection to dare
proclaim her mind before them all, she caught my hand, and, stooping,
kissed it.

“O Madonnino!” she faltered, and her tears showered upon that hand of
mine. “God reward you your sweet thought for me. I shall pray for you,
Madonnino.”

“Do, Luisina,” said I. “I begin to think I need it.”

“Indeed, indeed!” said my mother very sombrely. And as she spoke,
Luisina, as if her fears were reawakened, turned suddenly and went
quickly along the terrace, past Rinolfo, who in that moment smiled
viciously, and round the angle of the wall.

“What... what are my orders, Madonna?” quoth the wretched seneschal,
reminding her that all had not yet been resolved.

She lowered her eyes to the ground, and folded her hands. She was by now
quite composed again, her habitual sorrowful self.

“Let be,” she said. “Let the wench depart. So that she goes we may count
ourselves fortunate.”

“Fortunate, I think, is she,” said I. “Fortunate to return to the world
beyond all this--the world of life and love that God made and that St.
Francis praises. I do not think he would have praised Mondolfo, for I
greatly doubt that God had a hand in making it as it is to-day. It is
too... too arid.”

O, my mood was finely rebellious that May morning.

“Are you mad, Agostino?” gasped my mother.

“I think that I am growing sane,” said I very sadly. She flashed me one
of her rare glances, and I saw her lips tighten.

“We must talk,” she said. “That girl...” And then she checked. “Come
with me,” she bade me.

But in that moment I remembered something, and I turned aside to look
for my friend Rinolfo. He was moving stealthily away, following the road
Luisina had taken. The conviction that he went to plague and jeer at
her, to exult over her expulsion from Mondolfo, kindled my anger all
anew.

“Stay! You there! Rinolfo!” I called.

He halted in his strides, and looked over his shoulder, impudently.

I had never yet been paid by any the deference that was my due. Indeed,
I think that among the grooms and serving-men at Mondolfo I must have
been held in a certain measure of contempt, as one who would never come
to more manhood than that of the cassock.

“Come here,” I bade him, and as he appeared to hesitate I had to repeat
the order more peremptorily. At last he turned and came.

“What now, Agostino?” cried my mother, setting a pale hand upon my
sleeve

But I was all intent upon that lout, who stood there before me shifting
uneasily upon his feet, his air mutinous and sullen. Over his shoulder I
had a glimpse of his father's yellow face, wide-eyed with alarm.

“I think you smiled just now,” said I.

“Heh! By Bacchus!” said he impudently, as who would say: “How could I
help smiling?”

“Will you tell me why you smiled?” I asked him.

“Heh! By Bacchus!” said he again, and shrugged to give his insolence a
barb.

“Will you answer me?” I roared, and under my display of anger he looked
truculent, and thus exhausted the last remnant of my patience.

“Agostino!” came my mothers voice in remonstrance, and such is the power
of habit that for a moment it controlled me and subdued my violence.

Nevertheless I went on, “You smiled to see your spite succeed. You
smiled to see that poor child driven hence by your contriving; you
smiled to see your broken snares avenged. And you were following after
her no doubt to tell her all this and to smile again. This is all so, it
is not?”

“Heh! By Bacchus!” said he for the third time, and at that my patience
gave out utterly. Ere any could stop me I had seized him by throat and
belt and shaken him savagely.

“Will you answer me like a fool?” I cried. “Must you be taught sense and
a proper respect of me?”

“Agostino! Agostino!” wailed my mother. “Help, Ser Giojoso! Do you not
see that he is mad!”

I do not believe that it was in my mind to do the fellow any grievous
hurt. But he was so ill-advised in that moment as to attempt to defend
himself. He rashly struck at one of the arms that held him, and by the
act drove me into a fury ungovernable.

“You dog!” I snarled at him from between clenched teeth. “Would you
raise your hand to me? Am I your lord, or am I dirt of your own kind?
Go learn submission.” And I flung him almost headlong down the flight of
steps.

There were twelve of them and all of stone with edges still sharp enough
though blunted here and there by time. The fool had never suspected in
me the awful strength which until that hour I had never suspected in
myself. Else, perhaps, there had been fewer insolent shrugs, fewer
foolish answers, and, last of all, no attempt to defy me physically.

He screamed as I flung him; my mother screamed; and Giojoso screamed.

After that there was a panic-stricken silence whilst he went thudding
and bumping to the bottom of the flight. I did not greatly care if I
killed him. But he was fortunate enough to get no worse hurt than a
broken leg, which should keep him out of mischief for a season and teach
him respect for me for all time.

His father scuttled down the steps to the assistance of that precious
son, who lay moaning where he had fallen, the angle at which the half of
one of his legs stood to the rest of it, plainly announcing the nature
of his punishment.

My mother swept me indoors, loading me with reproaches as we went. She
dispatched some to help Giojoso, others she sent in urgent quest of Fra
Gervasio, me she hurried along to her private dining-room. I went very
obediently, and even a little fearfully now that my passion had fallen
from me.

There, in that cheerless room, which not even the splashes of sunlight
falling from the high-placed windows upon the whitewashed wall could
help to gladden, I stood a little sullenly what time she first upbraided
me and then wept bitterly, sitting in her high-backed chair at the
table's head.

At last Gervasio came, anxious and flurried, for already he had heard
some rumour of what had chanced. His keen eyes went from me to my mother
and then back again to me.

“What has happened?” he asked.

“What has not happened?” wailed my mother. “Agostino is possessed.”

He knit his brows. “Possessed?” quoth he.

“Ay, possessed--possessed of devils. He has been violent. He has broken
poor Rinolfo's leg.”

“Ah!” said Gervasio, and turned to me frowning with full tutorial
sternness. “And what have you to say, Agostino?”

“Why, that I am sorry,” answered I, rebellious once more. “I had hoped
to break his dirty neck.”

“You hear him!” cried my mother. “It is the end of the world, Gervasio.
The boy is possessed, I say.”

“What was the cause of your quarrel?” quoth the friar, his manner still
more stern.

“Quarrel?” quoth I, throwing back my head and snorting audibly. “I do
not quarrel with Rinolfos. I chastise them when they are insolent or
displease me. This one did both.”

He halted before me, erect and very stern--indeed almost threatening.
And I began to grow afraid; for, after all, I had a kindness for
Gervasio, and I would not willingly engage in a quarrel with him. Yet
here I was determined to carry through this thing as I had begun it.

It was my mother who saved the situation.

“Alas!” she moaned, “there is wicked blood in him. He has the abominable
pride that was the ruin and downfall of his father.”

Now that was not the way to make an ally of Fra Gervasio. It did the
very opposite. It set him instantly on my side, in antagonism to
the abuser of my father's memory, a memory which he, poor man, still
secretly revered.

The sternness fell away from him. He looked at her and sighed. Then,
with bowed head, and hands clasped behind him, he moved away from me a
little.

“Do not let us judge rashly,” he said. “Perhaps Agostino received some
provocation. Let us hear...”

“O, you shall hear,” she promised tearfully, exultant to prove him
wrong. “You shall hear a yet worse abomination that was the cause of
it.”

And out she poured the story that Rinolfo and his father had run to
tell her--of how I had shown the fellow violence in the first instance
because he had surprised me with Luisina in my arms.

The friar's face grew dark and grave as he listened. But ere she had
quite done, unable longer to contain myself, I interrupted.

“In that he lied like the muckworm that he is,” I exclaimed. “And it
increases my regrets that I did not break his neck as I intended.”

“He lied?” quoth she, her eyes wide open in amazement--not at the fact,
but at the audacity of what she conceived my falsehood.

“It is not impossible,” said Fra Gervasio. “What is your story,
Agostino?”

I told it--how the child out of a very gentle and Christian pity had
released the poor birds that were taken in Rinolfo's limed twigs, and
how in a fury he had made to beat her, so that she had fled to me for
shelter and protection; and how, thereupon, I had bidden him begone out
of that garden, and never set foot in it again.

“And now,” I ended, “you know all the violence that I showed him, and
the reason for it. If you say that I did wrong, I warn you that I shall
not believe you.”

“Indeed...” began the friar with a faint smile of friendliness. But my
mother interrupted him, betwixt sorrow and anger.

“He lies, Gervasio. He lies shamelessly. O, into what a morass of sin
has he not fallen, and every moment he goes deeper! Have I not said that
he is possessed? We shall need the exorcist.”

“We shall indeed, madam mother, to clear your mind of foolishness,” I
answered hotly, for it stung me to the soul to be branded thus a liar,
to have my word discredited by that of a lout such as Rinolfo.

She rose a sombre pillar of indignation. “Agostino, I am your mother,”
 she reminded me.

“Let us thank God that for that, at least, you cannot blame me,”
 answered I, utterly reckless now.

The answer crushed her back into her chair. She looked appealingly at
Fra Gervasio, who stood glum and frowning. “Is he... is he perchance
bewitched?” she asked the friar, quite seriously. “Do you think that any
spells might have.”

He interrupted her with a wave of the hand and an impatient snort

“We are at cross purposes here,” he said. “Agostino does not lie. For
that I will answer.”

“But, Fra Gervasio, I tell you that I saw them--that I saw them with
these two eyes--sitting together on the terrace steps, and he had his
arm about her. Yet he denies it shamelessly to my face.”

“Said I ever a word of that?” I appealed me to the friar. “Why, that was
after Rinolfo left us. My tale never got so far. It is quite true. I did
sit beside her. The child was troubled. I comforted her. Where was the
harm?”

“The harm?” quoth he. “And you had your arm about her--and you to be a
priest one day?”

“And why not, pray?” quoth I. “Is this some new sin that you have
discovered--or that you have kept hidden from me until now? To
console the afflicted is an ordination of Mother Church; to love our
fellow-creatures an ordination of our Blessed Lord Himself. I was
performing both. Am I to be abused for that?”

He looked at me very searchingly, seeking in my countenance--as I
now know--some trace of irony or guile. Finding none, he turned to my
mother. He was very solemn.

“Madonna,” he said quietly, “I think that Agostino is nearer to being a
saint than either you or I will ever get.”

She looked at him, first in surprise, then very sadly. Slowly she shook
her head. “Unhappily for him there is another arbiter of saintship, Who
sees deeper than do you, Gervasio.”

He bowed his head. “Better not to look deep enough than to do as you
seem in danger of doing, Madonna, and by looking too deep imagine things
which do not exist.”

“Ah, you will defend him against reason even,” she complained. “His
anger exists. His thirst to kill--to stamp himself with the brand of
Cain--exists. He confesses that himself. His insubordination to me you
have seen for yourself; and that again is sin, for it is ordained that
we shall honour our parents.

“O!” she moaned. “My authority is all gone. He is beyond my control. He
has shaken off the reins by which I sought to guide him.”

“You had done well to have taken my advice a year ago, Madonna. Even now
it is not too late. Let him go to Pavia, to the Sapienza, to study his
humanities.”

“Out into the world!” she cried in horror. “O, no, no! I have sheltered
him here so carefully!”

“Yet you cannot shelter him for ever,” said he. “He must go out into the
world some day.”

“He need not,” she faltered. “If the call were strong enough within him,
a convent...” She left her sentence unfinished, and looked at me.

“Go, Agostino,” she bade me. “Fra Gervasio and I must talk.”

I went reluctantly, since in the matter of their talk none could have
had a greater interest than I, seeing that my fate stood in the balance
of it. But I went, none the less, and her last words to me as I was
departing were an injunction that I should spend the time until I should
take up my studies for the day with Fra Gervasio in seeking forgiveness
for the morning's sins and grace to do better in the future.




CHAPTER VI. FRA GERVASIO


I did not again see my mother that day, nor did she sup with us that
evening. I was told by Fra Gervasio that on my account was she in
retreat, praying for light and guidance in the thing that must be
determined concerning me.

I withdrew early to my little bedroom overlooking the gardens, a room
that had more the air of a monastic cell than a bedchamber fitting the
estate of the Lord of Mondolfo. The walls were whitewashed, and besides
the crucifix that hung over my bed, their only decoration was a crude
painting of St. Augustine disputing with the little boy on the seashore.

For bed I had a plain hard pallet, and the room contained, in addition,
a wooden chair, a stool upon which was set a steel basin with its ewer
for my ablutions, and a cupboard for the few sombre black garments I
possessed--for the amiable vanity of raiment usual in young men of my
years had never yet assailed me; I had none to emulate in that respect.

I got me to bed, blew out my taper, and composed myself to sleep. But
sleep was playing truant from me. Long I lay there surveying the events
of that day--the day in which I had embarked upon the discovery of
myself; the most stirring day that I had yet lived; the day in which,
although I scarcely realized it, if at all, I had at once tasted love
and battle, the strongest meats that are in the dish of life.

For some hours, I think, had I lain there, reflecting and putting
together pieces of the riddle of existence, when my door was softly
opened, and I started up in bed to behold Fra Gervasio bearing a taper
which he sheltered with one hand, so that the light of it was thrown
upwards into his pale, gaunt face.

Seeing me astir he came forward and closed the door.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Sh!” he admonished me, a finger to his lips. He advanced to my side,
set down the taper on the chair, and seated himself upon the edge of my
bed.

“Lie down again, my son,” he bade me. “I have something to say to you.”

He paused a moment, whilst I settled down again and drew the coverlet to
my chin not without a certain premonition of important things to come.

“Madonna has decided,” he informed me then. “She fears that having once
resisted her authority, you are now utterly beyond her control; and that
to keep you here would be bad for yourself and for her. Therefore she
has resolved that to-morrow you leave Mondolfo.”

A faint excitement began to stir in me. To leave Mondolfo--to go
out into that world of which I had read so much; to mingle with my
fellow-man, with youths of my own age, perhaps with maidens like
Luisina, to see cities and the ways of cities; here indeed was matter
for excitement. Yet it was an excitement not altogether pleasurable;
for with my very natural curiosity, and with my eagerness to have it
gratified, were blended certain fears imbibed from the only quality of
reading that had been mine.

The world was an evil place in which temptations seethed, and through
which it was difficult to come unscathed. Therefore, I feared the world
and the adventuring beyond the shelter of the walls of the castle of
Mondolfo; and yet I desired to judge for myself the evil of which I
read, the evil which in moments of doubt I even permitted myself to
question.

My reasoning followed the syllogism that God being good and God having
created the world, it was not possible that the creation should be evil.
It was well enough to say that the devil was loose in it. But that was
not to say that the devil had created it; and it would be necessary to
prove this ere it could be established that it was evil in itself--as
many theologians appeared to seek to show--and a place to be avoided.

Such was the question that very frequently arose in my mind, ultimately
to be dismissed as a lure of Satan's to imperil my poor soul. It battled
for existence now amid my fears; and it gained some little ascendancy.

“And whither am I to go?” I asked. “To Pavia, or to the University of
Bologna?”

“Had my advice been heeded,” said he, “one or the other would have been
your goal. But your mother took counsel with Messer Arcolano.”

He shrugged, and there was contempt in the lines of his mouth. He
distrusted Arcolano, the regular cleric who was my mother's confessor
and spiritual adviser, exerting over her a very considerable influence.
She, herself, had admitted that it was this Arcolano who had induced
her to that horrid traffic in my father's life and liberty which she was
mercifully spared from putting into effect.

“Messer Arcolano,” he resumed after a pause, “has a good friend in
Piacenza, a pedagogue, a doctor of civil and canon law, a man who, he
says, is very learned and very pious, named Astorre Fifanti. I have
heard of this Fifanti, and I do not at all agree with Messer Arcolano. I
have said so. But your mother...” He broke off. “It is decided that you
go to him at once, to take up your study of the humanities under his
tutelage, and that you abide with him until you are of an age for
ordination, which your mother hopes will be very soon. Indeed, it is
her wish that you should enter the subdeaconate in the autumn, and your
novitiate next year, to fit you for the habit of St. Augustine.”

He fell silent, adding no comment of any sort, as if he waited to hear
what of my own accord I might have to urge. But my mind was incapable
of travelling beyond the fact that I was to go out into the world
to-morrow.

The circumstance that I should become a monk was no departure from the
idea to which I had been trained, although explicitly no more than my
mere priesthood had been spoken of. So I lay there without thinking of
any words in which to answer him.

Gervasio considered me steadily, and sighed a little. “Agostino,” he
said presently, “you are upon the eve of taking a great step, a step
whose import you may never fully have considered. I have been your
tutor, and your rearing has been my charge. That charge I have
faithfully carried out as was ordained me, but not as I would have
carried it out had I been free to follow my heart and my conscience in
the matter.

“The idea of your ultimate priesthood has been so fostered in your mind
that you may well have come to believe that to be a priest is your own
inherent desire. I would have you consider it well now that the time
approaches for a step which is irrevocable.”

His words and his manner startled me alike.

“How?” I cried. “Do you say that it might be better if I did not seek
ordination? What better can the world offer than the priesthood? Have
you not, yourself, taught me that it is man's noblest calling?”

“To be a good priest, fulfilling all the teachings of the Master,
becoming in your turn His mouthpiece, living a life of self-abnegation,
of self-sacrifice and purity,” he answered slowly, “that is the noblest
thing a man can be. But to be a bad priest--there are other ways of
being damned less hurtful to the Church.”

“To be a bad priest?” quoth I. “Is it possible to be a bad priest?”

“It is not only possible, my son, but in these days it is very frequent.
Many men, Agostino, enter the Church out of motives of self-seeking.
Through such as these Rome has come to be spoken of as the Necropolis
of the Living. Others, Agostino--and these are men most worthy of
pity--enter the Church because they are driven to it in youth by
ill-advised parents. I would not have you one of these, my son.”

I stared at him, my amazement ever growing. “Do you... do you think I am
in danger of it?” I asked.

“That is a question you must answer for yourself. No man can know what
is in another's heart. I have trained you as I was bidden train you. I
have seen you devout, increasing in piety, and yet...” He paused, and
looked at me again. “It may be that this is no more than the fruit
of your training; it may be that your piety and devotion are purely
intellectual. It is very often so. Men know the precepts of religion
as a lawyer knows the law. It no more follows out of that that they are
religious--though they conceive that it does--than it follows that a
lawyer is law-abiding. It is in the acts of their lives that we must
seek their real natures, and no single act of your life, Agostino, has
yet given sign that the call is in your heart.

“To-day, for instance, at what is almost your first contact with the
world, you indulge your human feelings to commit a violence; that you
did not kill is as much an accident as that you broke Rinolfo's leg. I
do not say that you did a very sinful thing. In a worldly youth of your
years the provocation you received would have more than justified
your action. But not in one who aims at a life of humility and
self-forgetfulness such as the priesthood imposes.”

“And yet,” said I, “I heard you tell my mother below stairs that I was
nearer sainthood than either of you.”

He smiled sadly, and shook his head. “They were rash words, Agostino. I
mistook ignorance for purity--a common error. I have pondered it since,
and my reflection brings me to utter what in this household amounts to
treason.”

“I do not understand,” I confessed.

“My duty to your mother I have discharged more faithfully perhaps than I
had the right to do. My duty to my God I am discharging now, although
to you I may rather appear as an advocatus diaboli. This duty is to warn
you; to bid you consider well the step you are to take.

“Listen, Agostino. I am speaking to you out of the bitter experience of
a very cruel life. I would not have you tread the path I have trodden.
It seldom leads to happiness in this world or the next; it seldom leads
anywhere but straight to Hell.”

He paused, and I looked into his haggard face in utter stupefaction
to hear such words from the lips of one whom I had ever looked upon as
goodness incarnate.

“Had I not known that some day I must speak to you as I am speaking now,
I had long since abandoned a task which I did not consider good. But I
feared to leave you. I feared that if I were removed my place might be
taken by some time-server who to earn a livelihood would tutor you as
your mother would have you tutored, and thrust you forth without warning
upon the life to which you have been vowed.

“Once, years ago, I was on the point of resisting your mother.” He
passed a hand wearily across his brow. “It was on the night that Gino
Falcone left us, driven forth by her because she accounted it her duty.
Do you remember, Agostino?”

“O, I remember!” I answered.

“That night,” he pursued, “I was angered--righteously angered to see
so wicked and unchristian an act performed in blasphemous
self-righteousness. I was on the point of denouncing the deed as it
deserved, of denouncing your mother for it to her face. And then I
remembered you. I remembered the love I had borne your father, and my
duty to him, to see that no such wrong was done you in the end as that
which I feared. I reflected that if I spoke the words that were burning
my tongue for utterance, I should go as Gino Falcone had gone.

“Not that the going mattered. I could better save my soul elsewhere than
here in this atmosphere of Christianity misunderstood; and there
are always convents of my order to afford me shelter. But your being
abandoned mattered; and I felt that if I went, abandoned you would be to
the influences that drove and moulded you without consideration for
your nature and your inborn inclinations. Therefore I remained, and left
Falcone's cause unchampioned. Later I was to learn that he had found a
friend, and that he was... that he was being cared for.”

“By whom?” quoth I, more interested perhaps in this than in anything
that he had yet said.

“By one who was your father's friend,” he said, after a moment's
hesitation, “a soldier of fortune by name of Galeotto--a leader of free
lances who goes by the name of Il Gran Galeotto. But let that be. I want
to tell you of myself, that you may judge with what authority I speak.

“I was destined,” Agostino, for a soldier's life in the following of my
valiant foster-brother, your father. Had I preserved the strength of
my early youth, undoubtedly a soldier's harness would be strapped here
to-day in the place of this scapulary. But it happened that an illness
left me sickly and ailing, and unfitted me utterly for such a life.
Similarly it unfitted me for the labour of the fields, so that I
threatened to become a useless burden upon my parents, who were
peasant-folk. To avoid this they determined to make a monk of me; they
offered me to God because they found me unfitted for the service of man;
and, poor, simple, self-deluded folk, they accounted that in doing so
they did a good and pious thing.

“I showed aptitude in learning; I became interested in the things I
studied; I was absorbed by them in fact, and never gave a thought to the
future; I submitted without question to the wishes of my parents, and
before I awakened to a sense of what was done and what I was, myself, I
was in orders.”

He sank his voice impressively as he concluded--“For ten years
thereafter, Agostino, I wore a hair-shirt day and night, and for girdle
a knotted length of whip-cord in which were embedded thorns that stung
and chafed me and tore my body. For ten years, then, I never knew bodily
ease or proper rest at night. Only thus could I bring into subjection my
rebellious flesh, and save myself from the way of ordinary men which to
me must have been a path of sacrilege and sin. I was devout. Had I not
been devout and strong in my devotion I could never have endured what
I was forced to endure as the alternative to damnation, because without
consideration for my nature I had been ordained a priest.

“Consider this, Agostino; consider it well. I would not have you go that
way, nor feel the need to drive yourself from temptation by such a spur.
Because I know--I say it in all humility, Agostino, I hope, and thanking
God for the exceptional grace He vouchsafed me to support me--that for
one priest without vocation who can quench temptation by such agonizing
means, a hundred perish, which is bad; and by the scandal of their
example they drive many from the Church and set a weapon in the hands of
her enemies, which is a still heavier reckoning to meet hereafter.”

A spell of silence followed. I was strangely moved by his tale,
strangely impressed by the warning that I perceived in it. And yet my
confidence, I think, was all unshaken.

And when presently he rose, took up his taper, and stood by my bedside
to ask me once again did I believe myself to be called, I showed my
confidence in my answer.

“It is my hope and prayer that I am called, indeed,” I said. “The life
that will best prepare me for the world to come is the life I would
follow.”

He looked at me long and sadly. “You must do as your heart bids you,” he
sighed. “And when you have seen the world, your heart will have learnt
to speak to you more plainly.” And upon that he left me.

Next day I set out.

My leave-takings were brief. My mother shed some tears and many prayers
over me at parting. Not that she was moved to any grief at losing me.
That were a grief I should respect and the memory of which I should
treasure as a sacred thing. Her tears were tears of dread lest,
surrounded by perils in the world, I should succumb and thus falsify her
vows.

She, herself, confessed it in the valedictory words she addressed to me.
Words that left the conviction clear upon my mind that the fulfilment
of her vow was the only thing concerning me that mattered. To the price
that later might be paid for it I cannot think that she ever gave a
single thought.

Tears there were too in the eyes of Fra Gervasio. My mother had suffered
me to do no more than kiss her hand--as was my custom. But the friar
took me to his bosom, and held me tight a moment in his long arms.

“Remember!” he murmured huskily and impressively. And then, putting me
from him, “God help and guide you, my son,” were his last words.

I went down the steps into the courtyard where most of the servants were
gathered to see their lord's departure, whilst Messer Arcolano, who was
to go with me, paused to assure my mother of the care that he would have
of me, and to receive her final commands concerning me.

Four men, mounted and armed, stood waiting to escort us, and with
them were three mules, one for Arcolano, one for myself, and the third
already laden with my baggage.

A servant held my stirrup, and I swung myself up into the saddle, with
which I was but indifferently acquainted. Then Arcolano mounted too,
puffing over the effort, for he was a corpulent, rubicund man with the
fattest hands I have ever seen.

I touched my mule with the whip, and the beast began to move. Arcolano
ambled beside me; and behind us, abreast, came the men-at-arms. Thus
we rode down towards the gateway, and as we went the servants murmured
their valedictory words.

“A safe journey, Madonnino!”

“A good return, Madonnino!”

I smiled back at them, and in the eyes of more than one I detected a
look of commiseration.

Once I turned, when the end of the quadrangle was reached, and I waved
my cap to my mother and Fra Gervasio, who stood upon the steps where I
had left them. The friar responded by waving back to me. But my mother
made no sign. Likely enough her eyes were upon the ground again already

Her unresponsiveness almost angered me. I felt that a man had the right
to some slight display of tenderness from the woman who had borne him.
Her frigidity wounded me. It wounded me the more in comparison with the
affectionate clasp of old Gervasio's arms. With a knot in my throat I
passed from the sunlight of the courtyard into the gloom of the gateway,
and out again beyond, upon the drawbridge. Our hooves thudded briskly
upon the timbers, and then with a sharper note upon the cobbles beyond.

I was outside the walls of the castle for the first time. Before me the
long, rudely paved street of the borgo sloped away to the market-place
of the town of Mondolfo. Beyond that lay the world, itself--all at my
feet, as I imagined.

The knot in my throat was dissolved. My pulses quickened with
anticipation. I dug my heels into the mule's belly and pushed on, the
portly cleric at my side.

And thus I left my home and the gloomy, sorrowful influence of my most
dolorous mother.






BOOK II. GIULIANA




CHAPTER I. THE HOUSE OF ASTORRE FIFANTI. Let me not follow in too close
detail the incidents of that journey lest I be in danger of becoming
tedious. In themselves they contained laughable matter enough, but in
the mere relation they may seem dull.

Down the borgo, ahead of us, ran the rumour that here was the Madonnino
of Mondolfo, and the excitement that the announcement caused was
something at which I did not know whether to be flattered or offended.

The houses gave up their inhabitants, and all stood at gaze as we
passed, to behold for the first time this lord of theirs of whom they
had heard Heaven knows what stories--for where there are elements of
mystery human invention can be very active.

At first so many eyes confused me; so that I kept my own steadily upon
the glossy neck of my mule. Very soon, however, growing accustomed to
being stared at, I lost some of my shyness, and now it was that I became
a trouble to Messer Arcolano. For as I looked about me there were a
hundred things to hold my attention and to call for inquiry and nearer
inspection.

We had come by this into the market-place, and it chanced that it was a
market-day and that the square was thronged with peasants from the Val
di Taro who had come to sell their produce and to buy their necessaries.

I was for halting at each booth and inspecting the wares, and each time
that I made as if to do so, the obsequious peasantry fell away before
me, making way invitingly. But Messer Arcolano urged me along, saying
that we had far to go, and that in Piacenza there were better shops and
that I should have more time to view them.

Then it was the fountain with its surmounting statues that caught my
eye--Durfreno's arresting, vigorous group of the Laocoon--and I must
draw rein and cry out in my amazement at so wonderful a piece of work,
plaguing Arcolano with a score of questions concerning the identity of
the main figure and how he came beset by so monstrous a reptile, and
whether he had succeeded in the end in his attempt to strangle it.

Arcolano, out of patience by now, answered me shortly that the reptile
was the sculptor's pious symbolization of sin, which St. Hercules was
overcoming.

I am by no means sure that such was not indeed his own conception of the
matter, and that there did not exist in his mind some confusion as to
whether the pagan demigod had a place in the Calendar or not. For he was
an uncultured, plebeian fellow, and what my mother should have found
in him to induce her to prefer him for her confessor and spiritual
counsellor to the learned Fra Gervasio is one more of the many mysteries
which an attempt to understand her must ever present to me.

Then there were the young peasant girls who thronged about and stood in
groups, blushing furiously under my glance, which Arcolano vainly
bade me lower. A score of times did it seem to me that one of these
brown-legged, lithe, comely creatures was my little Luisina; and more
than once I was on the point of addressing one or another, to discover
my mistake and be admonished for my astounding frivolousness by Messer
Arcolano.

And when once or twice I returned the friendly laughter of these girls,
whilst the grinning serving-men behind me would nudge one another and
wink to see me--as they thought--so very far off the road to priesthood
to which I was vowed, hot anathema poured from the fat cleric's lips,
and he urged me roughly to go faster.

His tortures ended at last when we came into the open country. We rode
in silence for a mile or two, I being full of thought of all that I had
seen, and infected a little by the fever of life through which I had
just passed. At last, I remember that I turned to Arcolano, who was
riding with the ears of his mule in line with my saddle-bow, and asked
him to point out to me where my dominions ended.

The meek question provoked an astonishingly churlish answer. I was
shortly bidden to give my mind to other than worldly things; and with
that he began a homily, which lasted for many a weary mile, upon the
vanities of the world and the glories of Paradise--a homily of the very
tritest, upon subjects whereupon I, myself, could have dilated to better
purpose than could His Ignorance.

The distance from Mondolfo to Piacenza is a good eight leagues, and
though we had set out very early, it was past noon before we caught our
first glimpse of the city by the Po, lying low as it does in the vast
Aemilian plain, and Arcolano set himself to name to me this church and
that whose spires stood out against the cobalt background of the sky.

An hour or so after our first glimpse of the city, our weary beasts
brought us up to the Gate of San Lazzaro. But we did not enter, as I
had hoped. Messer Arcolano had had enough of me and my questions at
Mondolfo, and he was not minded to expose himself to worse behaviour on
my part in the more interesting thoroughfares of this great city.

So we passed it by, and rode under the very walls by way of an avenue
of flowering chestnuts, round to the northern side, until we emerged
suddenly upon the sands of Po, and I had my first view at close quarters
of that mighty river flowing gently about the islands, all thick with
willows, that seemed to float upon its gleaming waters.

Fishermen were at work in a boat out in mid-stream, heaving their nets
to the sound of the oddest cantilena, and I was all for pausing there
to watch their operations. But Arcolano urged me onward with that
impatience of his which took no account of my very natural curiosity.
Presently I drew rein again with exclamations of delight and surprise to
see the wonderful bridge of boats that spanned the river a little higher
up.

But we had reached our destination. Arcolano called a halt at the gates
of a villa that stood a little way back from the road on slightly rising
ground near the Fodesta Gate. He bade one of the grooms get down and
open, and presently we ambled up a short avenue between tall banks of
laurel, to the steps of the villa itself.

It was a house of fair proportions, though to me at the time, accustomed
to the vast spaces of Mondolfo, it seemed the merest hut. It was painted
white, and it had green Venetian shutters which gave it a cool and
pleasant air; and through one of the open windows floated a sound of
merry voices, in which a woman's laugh was predominant.

The double doors stood open and through these there emerged a moment
after our halting a tall, thin man whose restless eyes surveyed us
swiftly, whose thin-lipped mouth smiled a greeting to Messer Arcolano
in the pause he made before hurrying down the steps with a slip-slop of
ill-fitting shoes.

This was Messer Astorre Fifanti, the pedant under whom I was to study,
and with whom I was to take up my residence for some months to come.

Seeing in him one who was to be set in authority over me, I surveyed him
with the profoundest interest, and from that instant I disliked him.

He was, as I have said, a tall, thin man; and he had long hands
that were very big and bony in the knuckles. Indeed they looked like
monstrous skeleton hands with a glove of skin stretched over them. He
was quite bald, save for a curly grizzled fringe that surrounded the
back of his head, on a level with his enormous ears, and his forehead
ran up to the summit of his egg-shaped head. His nose was pendulous and
his eyes were closely set, with too crafty a look for honesty. He wore
no beard, and his leathery cheeks were blue from the razor. His age
may have been fifty; his air was mean and sycophantic. Finally he was
dressed in a black gaberdine that descended to his knees, and he ended
in a pair of the leanest shanks and largest feet conceivable.

To greet us he fawned and washed his bony hands in the air.

“You have made a safe journey, then,” he purred. “Benedicamus Dominum!”

“Deo gratias!” rumbled the fat priest, as he heaved his rotundity from
the saddle with the assistance of one of the grooms.

They shook hands, and Fifanti turned to survey me for the second time.

“And this is my noble charge!” said he. “Salve! Be welcome to my house,
Messer Agostino.”

I got to earth, accepted his proffered hand, and thanked him.

Meanwhile the grooms were unpacking my baggage, and from the house came
hurrying an elderly servant to receive it and convey it within doors.

I stood there a little awkwardly, shifting from leg to leg, what time
Doctor Fifanti pressed Arcolano to come within and rest; he spoke, too,
of some Vesuvian wine that had been sent him from the South and upon
which he desired the priest's rare judgment.

Arcolano hesitated, and his gluttonous mouth quivered and twitched. But
he excused himself in the end. He must on. He had business to discharge
in the town, and he must return at once and render an account of our
safe journey to the Countess at Mondolfo. If he tarried now it would
grow late ere he reached Mondolfo, and late travelling pleased him not
at all. As it was his bones would be weary and his flesh tender from so
much riding; but he would offer it up to Heaven for his sins.

And when the too-amiable Fifanti had protested how little there could
be the need in the case of one so saintly as Messer Arcolano, the
priest made his farewells. He gave me his blessing and enjoined upon me
obedience to one who stood to me in loco parentis, heaved himself back
on to his mule, and departed with the grooms at his heels.

Then Doctor Fifanti set a bony hand upon my shoulder, and opined that
after my journey I must be in need of refreshment; and with that he led
me within doors, assuring me that in his house the needs of the body
were as closely cared for as the needs of the mind.

“For an empty belly,” he ended with his odious, sycophantic geniality,
“makes an empty heart and an empty head.”

We passed through a hall that was prettily paved in mosaics, into a
chamber of good proportions, which seemed gay to me after the gloom by
which I had been surrounded.

The ceiling was painted blue and flecked with golden stars, whilst the
walls were hung with deep blue tapestries on which was figured in grey
and brownish red a scene which, I was subsequently to learn, represented
the metamorphosis of Actaeon. At the moment I did not look too closely.
The figures of Diana in her bath with her plump attendant nymphs caused
me quickly to withdraw my bashful eyes.

A good-sized table stood in the middle of the floor, bearing, upon a
broad strip of embroidered white napery, sparkling crystal and silver,
vessels of wine and platters of early fruits. About it sat a very noble
company of some half-dozen men and two very resplendent women. One of
these was slight and little, very dark and vivacious with eyes full of
a malicious humour. The other, of very noble proportions, of a fine,
willowy height, with coiled ropes of hair of a colour such as I had
never dreamed could be found upon human being. It was ruddy and glowed
like metal. Her face and neck--and of the latter there was a very
considerable display--were of the warm pale tint of old ivory. She had
large, low-lidded eyes, which lent her face a languid air. Her brow was
low and broad, and her lips of a most startling red against the pallor
of the rest.

She rose instantly upon my entrance, and came towards me with a slow
smile, holding out her hand, and murmuring words of most courteous
welcome.

“This, Ser Agostino,” said Fifanti, “is my wife.”

Had he announced her to be his daughter it would have been more credible
on the score of their respective years, though equally incredible on the
score of their respective personalities.

I gaped foolishly in my amazement, a little dazzled, too, by the
effulgence of her eyes, which were now raised to the level of my own. I
lowered my glance abashed, and answered her as courteously as I could.
Then she led me to the table, and presented me to the company, naming
each to me.

The first was a slim and very dainty young gentleman in a scarlet
walking-suit, over which he wore a long scarlet mantle. A gold cross was
suspended from his neck by a massive chain of gold. He was delicately
featured, with a little pointed beard, tiny mustachios, and long, fair
hair that fell in waves about his effeminate face. He had the whitest
of hands, very delicately veined in blue, and it was--as I soon
observed--his habit to carry them raised, so that the blood might not
flow into them to coarsen their beauty. Attached to his left wrist by a
fine chain was a gold pomander-ball of the size of a small apple, very
beautifully chiselled. Upon one of his fingers he wore the enormous
sapphire ring of his rank.

That he was a prince of the Church I saw for myself; but I was far from
being prepared for the revelation of his true eminence--never dreaming
that a man of the humble position of Doctor Fifanti would entertain a
guest so exalted.

He was no less a person than the Lord Egidio Oberto Gambara, Cardinal of
Brescia, Governor of Piacenza and Papal Legate to Cisalpine Gaul.

The revelation of the identity of this elegant, effeminate, perfumed
personage was a shock to me; for it was not thus by much that I had
pictured the representative of our Holy Father the Pope.

He smiled upon me amiably and something wearily, the satiate smile of
the man of the world, and he languidly held out to me the hand bearing
his ring. I knelt to kiss it, overawed by his ecclesiastical rank,
however little awed by the man within it.

As I rose again he looked up at me considering my inches.

“Why,” said he, “here is a fine soldier lost to glory.” And as he spoke,
he half turned to a young man who sat beside him, a man at whom I was
eager to take a fuller look, for his face was most strangely familiar to
me.

He was tall and graceful, very beautifully dressed in purple and gold,
and his blue-black hair was held in a net or coif of finest gold thread.
His garments clung as tightly and smoothly as if he had been kneaded
into them--as, indeed, he had. But it was his face that held my eyes. It
was a sun-tanned, shaven hawk-face with black level brows, black eyes,
and a strong jaw, handsome save for something displeasing in the lines
of the mouth, something sardonic, proud, and contemptuous.

The Cardinal addressed him. “You breed fine fellows in your family,
Cosimo,” were the words with which he startled me, and then I knew where
I had seen that face before. In my mirror.

He was as like me--save that he was blacker and not so tall--as if he
had been own brother to me instead of merely cousin as I knew at once
he was. For he must be that guelphic Anguissola renegade who served
the Pope and was high in favour with Farnese, and Captain of Justice in
Piacenza. In age he may have been some seven or eight years older than
myself.

I stared at him now with interest, and I found attractions in him, the
chief of which was his likeness to my father. So must my father have
looked when he was this fellow's age. He returned my glance with a smile
that did not improve his countenance, so contemptuously languid was it,
so very supercilious.

“You may stare, cousin,” said he, “for I think I do you the honour to be
something like you.”

“You will find him,” lisped the Cardinal to me, “the most
self-complacent dog in Italy. When he sees in you a likeness to himself
he flatters himself grossly, which, as you know him better, you will
discover to be his inveterate habit. He is his own most assiduous
courtier.” And my Lord Gambara sank back into his chair, languishing,
the pomander to his nostrils.

All laughed, and Messer Cosimo with them, still considering me.

But Messer Fifanti's wife had yet to make me known to three others who
sat there, beside the little sloe-eyed lady. This last was a cousin of
her own--Donna Leocadia degli Allogati, whom I saw now for the first and
last time.

The three remaining men of the company are of little interest save one,
whose name was to be well known--nay, was well known already, though not
to one who had lived in such seclusion as mine.

This was that fine poet Annibale Caro, whom I have heard judged to be
all but the equal of the great Petrarca himself. A man who had less the
air of a poet it would not be easy to conceive. He was of middle height
and of a habit of body inclining to portliness, and his age may have
been forty. His face was bearded, ruddy, and small-featured, and there
was about him an air of smug prosperity; he was dressed with care, but
he had none of the splendour of the Cardinal or my cousin. Let me add
that he was secretary to the Duke Pier Luigi Farnese, and that he was
here in Piacenza on a mission to the Governor in which his master's
interests were concerned.

The other two who completed that company are of no account, and indeed
their names escape me, though I seem to remember that one was named
Pacini and that he was said to be a philosopher of considerable parts.

Bidden to table by Messer Fifanti, I took the chair he offered me beside
his lady, and presently came the old servant whom already I had seen,
bearing meat for me. I was hungry, and I fell to with zest, what time
a pleasant ripple of talk ran round the board. Facing me sat my cousin,
and I never observed until my hunger was become less clamorous with what
an insistence he regarded me. At last, however, our eyes met across the
board. He smiled that crooked, somewhat unpleasant smile of his.

“And so, Ser Agostino, they are to make a priest of you?” said he.

“God pleasing,” I answered soberly, and perhaps shortly.

“And if his brains at all resemble his body,” lisped the
Cardinal-legate, “you may live to see an Anguissola Pope, my Cosimo.”

My stare must have betrayed my amazement at such words. “Not so,
magnificent,” I made answer. “I am destined for the life monastic.”

“Monastic!” quoth he, in a sort of horror, and looking as if a bad smell
had suddenly been thrust under his nose. He shrugged and pouted and
had fresh recourse to his pomander. “O, well! Friars have become popes
before to-day.”

“I am to enter the hermit order of St. Augustine,” I again corrected.

“Ah!” said Caro, in his big, full voice. “He aspires not to Rome but to
Heaven, my lord.”

“Then what the devil does he in your house, Fifanti?” quoth the
Cardinal. “Are you to teach him sanctity?”

And the table shook with laughter at a jest I did not understand any
more than I understood my Lord Cardinal.

Messer Fifanti, sitting at the table-head, shot me a glance of anxious
inquiry; he smiled foolishly, and washed his hands in the air again, his
mind fumbling for an answer that should turn aside that barbed jest. But
he was forestalled by my cousin Cosimo.

“The teaching might come more aptly from Monna Giuliana,” said he, and
smiled very boldly across at Fifanti's lady who sat beside me, whilst a
frown grew upon the prodigious brow of the pedant.

“Indeed, indeed,” the Cardinal murmured, considering her through
half-closed eyes, “there is no man but may enter Paradise at her
bidding.” And he sighed furiously, whilst she chid him for his boldness;
and for all that much of what they said was in a language that might
have been unknown to me, yet was I lost in amazement to see a prelate
made so free with. She turned to me, and the glory of her eyes fell
about my soul like an effulgence.

“Do not heed them, Ser Agostino. They are profane and wicked men,”
 she said, “and if you aspire to holiness, the less you see of them the
better will it be for you.”

I did not doubt it, yet I dared not make so bold as to confess it, and I
wondered why they should laugh to hear her earnest censure of them.

“It is a thorny path, this path of holiness,” said the Cardinal sighing.

“Your excellency has been told so, we assume,” quoth Caro, who had a
very bitter tongue for one who looked so well-nourished and contented.

“I might have found it so for myself but that my lot has been cast among
sinners,” answered the Cardinal, comprehending the company in his glance
and gesture. “As it is, I do what I can to mend their lot.”

“Now here is gallantry of a different sort!” cried the little Leocadia
with a giggle.

“O, as to that,” quoth Cosimo, showing his fine teeth in a smile, “there
is a proverb as to the gallantry of priests. It is like the love of
women, which again is like water in a basket--as soon in as out.” And
his eyes hung upon Giuliana.

“When you are the basket, sir captain, shall anyone blame the women?”
 she countered with her lazy insolence.

“Body of God!” cried the Cardinal, and laughed wholeheartedly, whilst
my cousin scowled. “There you have the truth, Cosimo, and the truth is
better than proverbs.”

“It is unlucky to speak of the dead at table,” put in Caro.

“And who spoke of the dead, Messer Annibale?” quoth Leocadia.

“Did not my Lord Cardinal mention Truth?” answered the brutal poet.

“You are a derider--a gross sinner,” said the Cardinal languidly. “Stick
to your verses, man, and leave Truth alone.”

“Agreed--if your excellency will stick to Truth and quit writing verses.
I offer the compact in the interest of humanity, which will be the
gainer.”

The company shook with laughter at this direct and offensive hit. But my
Lord Gambara seemed nowise incensed. Indeed, I was beginning to conclude
that the man had a sweetness and tolerance of nature that bordered on
the saintly.

He sipped his wine thoughtfully, and held it up to the light so that the
deep ruby of it sparkled in the Venetian crystal.

“You remind me that I have written a new song,” said he.

“Then have I sinned indeed,” groaned Caro.

But Gambara, disregarding the interruption, his glass still raised, his
mild eyes upon the wine, began to recite:

     “Bacchus saepe visitans
      Mulierum genus
      Facit eas subditas
      Tibi, O tu Venus!”

Without completely understanding it, yet scandalized beyond measure at
as much as I understood, to hear such sentiments upon his priestly lips,
I stared at him in candid horror.

But he got no farther. Caro smote the table with his fist.

“When wrote you that, my lord?” he cried.

“When?” quoth the Cardinal, frowning at the interruption. “Why,
yestereve.”

“Ha!” It was something between a bark and a laugh from Messer Caro. “In
that case, my lord, memory usurped the place of invention. That song was
sung at Pavia when I was a student--which is more years ago than I care
to think of.”

The Cardinal smiled upon him, unabashed. “And what then, pray? Can we
avoid these things? Why, the very Virgil whom you plagiarize so freely
was himself a plagiarist.”

Now this, as you may well conceive, provoked a discussion about the
board, in which all joined, not excepting Fifanti's lady and Donna
Leocadia.

I listened in some amazement and deep interest to matters that were
entirely strange to me, to the arguing of mysteries which seemed to
me--even from what I heard of them--to be strangely attractive.

Anon Fifanti joined in the discussion, and I observed how as soon as he
began to speak they all fell silent, all listened to him as to a master,
what time he delivered himself of his opinions and criticisms of this
Virgil, with a force, a lucidity and an eloquence that revealed his
learning even to one so ignorant as myself.

He was listened to with deference by all, if we except perhaps my Lord
Gambara, who had no respect for anything and who preferred to whisper
to Leocadia under cover of his hand, ogling her what time she simpered.
Once or twice Monna Giuliana flashed him an unfriendly glance, and this
I accounted natural, deeming that she resented this lack of attention to
the erudite dissertation of her husband.

But as for the others, they were attentive, as I have said, and even
Messer Caro, who at the time--as I gathered then--was engaged upon
a translation of Virgil into Tuscan, and who, therefore, might be
accounted something of an authority, held his peace and listened what
time the doctor reasoned and discoursed.

Fifanti's mean, sycophantic air fell away from him as by magic. Warmed
by his subject and his enthusiasm he seemed suddenly ennobled, and I
found him less antipathic; indeed, I began to see something admirable in
the man, some of that divine quality that only deep culture and learning
can impart.

I conceived that now, at last, I held the explanation of how it came to
pass that so distinguished a company frequented his house and gathered
on such familiar terms about his board.

And I began to be less amazed at the circumstance that he should possess
for wife so beautiful and superb a creature as Madonna Giuliana. I
thought that I obtained glimpses of the charm which that elderly man
might be able to exert upon a fine and cultured young nature with
aspirations for things above the commonplace.




CHAPTER II. HUMANITIES


As the days passed and swelled into weeks, and these, in their turn,
accumulated into months, I grew rapidly learned in worldly matters at
Doctor Fifanti's house.

The curriculum I now pursued was so vastly different from that which my
mother had bidden Fra Gervasio to set me, and my acquaintance with the
profane writers advanced so swiftly once it was engaged upon, that I
acquired knowledge as a weed grows.

Fifanti flung into strange passions when he discovered the extent of my
ignorance and the amazing circumstance that whilst Fra Gervasio had made
of me a fluent Latin scholar, he had kept me in utter ignorance of the
classic writers, and almost in as great an ignorance of history itself.
This the pedant set himself at once to redress, and amongst the earliest
works he gave me as preparation were Latin translations of Thucydides
and Herodotus which I devoured--especially the glowing pages of the
latter--at a speed that alarmed my tutor.

But mere studiousness was not my spur, as he imagined. I was enthralled
by the novelty of the matters that I read, so different from all those
with which I had been allowed to become acquainted hitherto.

There followed Tacitus, and after him Cicero and Livy, which latter two
I found less arresting; then came Lucretius, and his De Rerum Naturae
proved a succulent dish to my inquisitive appetite.

But the cream and glory of the ancient writers I had yet to taste. My
first acquaintance with the poets came from the translation of Virgil
upon which Messer Caro was at the time engaged. He had definitely taken
up his residence in Piacenza, whither it was said that Farnese, his
master, who was to be made our Duke, would shortly come. And in the
interval of labouring for Farnese, as Caro was doing, he would toil at
his translation, and from time to time he would bring sheaves of his
manuscript to the doctor's house, to read what he had accomplished.

He came, I remember, one languid afternoon in August, when I had been
with Messer Fifanti for close upon three months, during which time my
mind had gradually, yet swiftly, been opening out like a bud under the
sunlight of much new learning. We sat in the fine garden behind the
house, on the lawn, in the shade of mulberry trees laden with yellow
translucent fruit, by a pond that was all afloat with water-lilies.

There was a crescent-shaped seat of hewn marble, over which Messer
Gambara, who was with us, had thrown his scarlet cardinal's cloak, the
day being oppressively hot. He was as usual in plain, walking clothes,
and save for the ring on his finger and the cross on his breast, you
had never conceived him an ecclesiastic. He sat near his cloak, upon
the marble seat, and beside him sat Monna Giuliana, who was all in white
save for the gold girdle at her waist.

Caro, himself, stood to read, his bulky manuscript in his hands. Against
the sundial, facing the poet, leaned the tall figure of Messer Fifanti,
his bald head uncovered and shining humidly, his eyes ever and anon
stealing a look at his splendid wife where she sat so demurely at the
prelate's side.

Myself, I lay on the grass near the pond, my hand trailing in the cool
water, and at first I was not greatly interested. The heat of the day
and the circumstance that we had dined, when played upon by the poet's
booming and somewhat monotonous voice, had a lulling effect from which
I was in danger of falling asleep. But anon, as the narrative warmed
and quickened, the danger was well overpast. I was very wide-awake, my
pulses throbbing, my imagination all on fire. I sat up and listened
with an enthralled attention, unconscious of everything and everybody,
unconscious even of the very voice of the reader, intent only upon the
amazing, tragic matter that he read.

For it happened that this was the Fourth Book of the Aeneid, and the
most lamentable, heartrending story of Dido's love for Aeneas, of his
desertion of her, of her grief and death upon the funeral pyre.

It held me spellbound. It was more real then anything that I had ever
read or heard; and the fate of Dido moved me as if I had known and loved
her; so that long ere Messer Caro came to an end I was weeping freely in
a most exquisite misery.

Thereafter I was as one who has tasted strong wine and finds his thirst
fired by it. Within a week I had read the Aeneid through, and was
reading it a second time. Then came the Comedies of Terence, the
Metamorphoses of Ovid, Martial, and the Satires of Juvenal. And
with those my transformation was complete. No longer could I find
satisfaction in the writings of the fathers of the church, or in
contemplating the lives of the saints, after the pageantries which the
eyes of my soul had looked upon in the profane authors.

What instructions my mother supposed Fifanti to have received concerning
me from Arcolano, I cannot think. But certain it is that she could never
have dreamed under what influences I was so soon to come, no more than
she could conceive what havoc they played with all that hitherto I had
learnt and with the resolutions that I had formed--and that she had
formed for me--concerning the future.

All this reading perturbed me very oddly, as one is perturbed who having
long dwelt in darkness is suddenly brought into the sunlight and dazzled
by it, so that, grown conscious of his sight, he is more effectively
blinded than he was before. For the process that should have been a
gradual one from tender years was carried through in what amounted to
little more than a few weeks.

My Lord Gambara took an odd interest in me. He was something of
a philosopher in his trivial way; something of a student of his
fellow-man; and he looked upon me as an odd human growth that was being
subjected to an unusual experiment. I think he took a certain delight in
helping that experiment forward; and certain it is that he had more to
do with the debauching of my mind than any other, or than any reading
that I did.

It was not that he told me more than elsewhere I could have learnt; it
was the cynical manner in which he conveyed his information. He had a
way of telling me of monstrous things as if they were purely normal and
natural to a properly focussed eye, and as if any monstrousness they
might present to me were due to some distortion imparted to them solely
by the imperfection of my intellectual vision.

Thus it was from him that I learnt certain unsuspected things concerning
Pier Luigi Farnese, who, it was said, was coming to be our Duke, and on
whose behalf the Emperor was being importuned to invest him in the Duchy
of Parma and Piacenza.

One day as we walked together in the garden--my Lord Gambara and I--I
asked him plainly what was Messer Farnese's claim.

“His claim?” quoth he, checking, to give me a long, cool stare. He
laughed shortly and resumed his pacing, I keeping step with him. “Why,
is he not the Pope's son, and is not that claim enough?”

“The Pope's son!” I exclaimed. “But how is it possible that the Holy
Father should have a son?”

“How is it possible?” he echoed mockingly. “Why, I will tell you, sir.
When our present Holy Father went as Cardinal-legate to the Mark of
Ancona, he met there a certain lady whose name was Lola, who pleased
him, and who was pleased with him. Alessandro Farnese was a handsome
man, Ser Agostino. She bore him three children, of whom one is dead,
another is Madonna Costanza, who is wed to Sforza of Santafiora, and the
third--who really happens to have been the first-born--is Messer Pier
Luigi, present Duke of Castro and future Duke of Piacenza.”

It was some time ere I could speak.

“But his vows, then?” I exclaimed at last.

“Ah! His vows!” said the Cardinal-legate. “True, there were his vows.
I had forgotten that. No doubt he did the same.” And he smiled
sardonically, sniffing at his pomander-ball.

From that beginning in a fresh branch of knowledge much followed
quickly. Under my questionings, Messer Gambara very readily made me
acquainted through his unsparing eyes with that cesspool that was known
as the Roman Curia. And my horror, my disillusionment increased at every
word he said.

I learnt from him that Pope Paul III was no exception to the rule, no
such scandal as I had imagined; that his own elevation to the purple was
due in origin to the favour which his sister, the beautiful Giulia, had
found in the eyes of the Borgia Pope, some fifty years ago. Through him
I came to know the Sacred College as it really was; not the very home
and fount of Christianity, as I had deemed it, controlled and guided
by men of a sublime saintliness of ways, but a gathering of ambitious
worldlings, who had become so brazen in their greed of temporal power
that they did not even trouble to cloak the sin and evil in which they
lived; men in whom the spirit that had actuated those saints the study
of whose lives had been my early delight, lived no more than it might
live in the bosom of a harlot.

I said so to him one day in a wild, furious access of boldness, in one
of those passionate outbursts that are begotten of illusions blighted.

He heard me through quite calmly, without the least trace of anger,
smiling ever his quiet mocking smile, and plucking at his little, auburn
beard.

“You are wrong, I think,” he said. “Say that the Church has fallen
a prey to self-seekers who have entered it under the cloak of the
priesthood. What then? In their hands the Church has been enriched. She
has gained power, which she must retain. And that is to the Church's
good.”

“And what of the scandal of it?” I stormed.

“O, as to that--why, boy, have you never read Boccaccio?”

“Never,” said I.

“Read him, then,” he urged me. “He will teach you much that you need
to know. And read in particular the story of Abraam, the Jew, who upon
visiting Rome was so scandalized by the licence and luxury of the
clergy that he straightway had himself baptized and became a Christian,
accounting that a religion that could survive such wiles of Satan to
destroy it must indeed be the true religion, divinely inspired.” He
laughed his little cynical laugh to see my confusion increased by that
bitter paradox.

It is little wonder that I was all bewildered, that I was like some poor
mariner upon unknown waters, without stars or compass.

Thus that summer ebbed slowly, and the time of my projected minor
ordination approached. Messer Gambara's visits to Fifanti's grew more
and more frequent, until they became a daily occurrence; and now my
cousin Cosimo came oftener too. But it was their custom to come in the
forenoon, when I was at work with Fifanti. And often I observed the
doctor to be oddly preoccupied, and to spend much time in creeping to
the window that was all wreathed in clematis, and in peeping through
that purple-decked green curtain into the garden where his excellency
and Cosimo walked with Monna Giuliana.

When both visitors were there his anxiety seemed less. But if only
one were present he would give himself no peace. And once when Messer
Gambara and she went together within doors, he abruptly interrupted my
studies, saying that it was enough for that day; and he went below to
join them.

Half a year earlier I should have had no solution for his strange
behaviour. But I had learnt enough of the world by now to perceive what
maggot was stirring in that egg-shaped head. Yet I blushed for him, and
for his foul and unworthy suspicions. As soon would I have suspected the
painted Madonna from the brush of Raffaele Santi that I had seen over
the high altar of the Church of San Sisto, as suspect the beautiful
and noble-souled Giuliana of giving that old pedant cause for his
uneasiness. Still, I conceived that this was the penalty that such a
withered growth of humanity must pay for having presumed to marry a
young wife.

We were much together in those days, Monna Giuliana and I. Our intimacy
had grown over a little incident that it were well I should mention.

A young painter, Gianantonio Regillo, better known to the world as Il
Pordenone, had come to Piacenza that summer to decorate the Church
of Santa Maria della Campagna. He came furnished with letters to the
Governor, and Gambara had brought him to Fifanti's villa. From Monna
Giuliana the young painter heard the curious story of my having been
vowed prenatally to the cloister by my mother, learnt her name and mine,
and the hope that was entertained that I should walk in the ways of St.
Augustine after whom I had been christened.

It happened that he was about to paint a picture of St. Augustine, as a
fresco for the chapel of the Magi of the church I have named. And having
seen me and heard that story of mine, he conceived the curious notion
of using me as the model for the figure of the saint. I consented, and
daily for a week he came to us in the afternoons to paint; and all the
time Monna Giuliana would be with us, deeply interested in his work.

That picture he eventually transferred to his fresco, and there--O
bitter irony!--you may see me to this day, as the saint in whose ways it
was desired that I should follow.

Monna Giuliana and I would linger together in talk after the painter had
gone; and this would be at about the time that I had my first lessons
of Curial life from my Lord Gambara. You will remember that he mentioned
Boccaccio to me, and I chanced to ask her was there in the library a
copy of that author's tales.

“Has that wicked priest bidden you to read them?” she inquired, 'twixt
seriousness and mockery, her dark eyes upon me in one of those glances
that never left me easy.

I told her what had passed; and with a sigh and a comment that I would
get an indigestion from so much mental nourishment as I was consuming,
she led me to the little library to find the book.

Messer Fifanti's was a very choice collection of works, and every one
in manuscript; for the doctor was something of an idealist, and greatly
averse to the printing-press and the wide dissemination of books to
which it led. Out of his opposition to the machine grew a dislike to
its productions, which he denounced as vulgar; and not even their
comparative cheapness and the fact that, when all was said, he was a man
of limited means, would induce him to harbour a single volume that was
so produced.

Along the shelves she sought, and finally drew down four heavy tomes.
Turning the pages of the first, she found there, with a readiness that
argued a good acquaintance with the work, the story of Abraam the Jew,
which I desired to read as it had been set down. She bade me read it
aloud, which I did, she seated in the window, listening to me.

At first I read with some constraint and shyness, but presently warming
to my task and growing interested, I became animated and vivacious in my
manner, so that when I ceased I saw her sitting there, her hands clasped
about one knee, her eyes upon my face, her lips parted a little, the
very picture of interest.

And with that it happened that we established a custom, and very often,
almost daily, after dinner, we would repair together to the library, and
I--who hitherto had no acquaintance with any save Latin works--began to
make and soon to widen my knowledge of our Tuscan writers. We varied our
reading. We dipped into our poets. Dante we read, and Petrarca, and both
we loved, though better than the works of either--and this for the sake
of the swift movement and action that is in his narrative, though his
melodies, I realized, were not so pure--the Orlando of Ariosto.

Sometimes we would be joined by Fifanti himself; but he never stayed
very long. He had an old-fashioned contempt for writings in what he
called the “dialettale,” and he loved the solemn injuvenations of
the Latin tongue. Soon, as he listened, he would begin to yawn, and
presently grunt and rise and depart, flinging a contemptuous word at
the matter of my reading, and telling me at times that I might find more
profitable amusement.

But I persisted in it, guided ever by Fifanti's lady. And whatever
we read by way of divergence, ever and anon we would come back to the
stilted, lucid, vivid pages of Boccaccio.

One day I chanced upon the tragical story of “Isabetta and the Pot of
Basil,” and whilst I read I was conscious that she had moved from where
she had been sitting and had come to stand behind my chair. And when I
reached the point at which the heart-broken Isabetta takes the head of
her murdered lover to her room, a tear fell suddenly upon my hand.

I stopped, and looked up at Giuliana. She smiled at me through unshed
tears that magnified her matchless eyes.

“I will read no more,” I said. “It is too sad.”

“Ah, no!” she begged. “Read on, Agostino! I love its sadness.”

So I read on to the story's cruel end, and when it was done I sat quite
still, myself a little moved by the tragedy of it, whilst Giuliana
continued to lean against my chair. I was moved, too, in another way;
curiously and unaccountably; and I could scarcely have defined what it
was that moved me.

I sought to break the spell of it, and turned the pages. “Let me read
something else,” said I. “Something more gay, to dispel the sadness of
this.”

But her hand fell suddenly upon mine, enclasping and holding it. “Ah,
no!” she begged me gently. “Give me the book. Let us read no more
to-day.”

I was trembling under her touch--trembling, my every nerve a-quiver and
my breath shortened--and suddenly there flashed through my mind a line
of Dante's in the story of Paolo and Francesca:

     “Quel giorno piu non vi leggemo avanti.”

Giuliana's words: “Let us read no more to-day”--had seemed an echo of
that line, and the echo made me of a sudden conscious of an unsuspected
parallel. All at once our position seemed to me strangely similar to
that of the ill-starred lovers of Rimini.

But the next moment I was sane again. She had withdrawn her hand, and
had taken the volume to restore it to its shelf.

Ah, no! At Rimini there had been two fools. Here there was but one. Let
me make an end of him by persuading him of his folly.

Yet Giuliana did nothing to assist me in that task. She returned from
the book-shelf, and in passing lightly swept her fingers over my hair.

“Come, Agostino; let us walk in the garden,” said she.

We went, my mood now overpast. I was as sober and self-contained as
was my habit. And soon thereafter came my Lord Gambara--a rare thing to
happen in the afternoon.

Awhile the three of us were together in the garden, talking of trivial
matters. Then she fell to wrangling with him concerning something that
Caro had written and of which she had the manuscript. In the end she
begged me would I go seek the writing in her chamber. I went, and hunted
where she had bidden me and elsewhere, and spent a good ten minutes
vainly in the task. Chagrined that I could not discover the thing, I
went into the library, thinking that it might be there.

Doctor Fifanti was writing busily at the table when I intruded. He
looked up, thrusting his horn-rimmed spectacles high upon his peaked
forehead.

“What the devil!” quoth he very testily. “I thought you were in the
garden with Madonna Giuliana.”

“My Lord Gambara is there,” said I.

He crimsoned and banged the table with his bony hand. “Do I not know
that?” he roared, though I could see no reason for all this heat. “And
why are you not with them?”

You are not to suppose that I was still the meek, sheepish lad who had
come to Piacenza three months ago. I had not been learning my world and
discovering Man to no purpose all this while.

“It has yet to be explained to me,” said I, “under what obligation I
am to be anywhere but where I please. That firstly. Secondly--but of
infinitely lesser moment--Monna Giuliana has sent me for the manuscript
of Messer Caro's Gigli d'Oro.”

I know not whether it was my cool, firm tones that quieted him. But
quiet he became.

“I... I was vexed by your interruption,” he said lamely, to explain his
late choler. “Here is the thing. I found it here when I came. Messer
Caro might discover better employment for his leisure. But there,
there”--he seemed in sudden haste again. “Take it to her in God's name.
She will be impatient.” I thought he sneered. “O, she will praise your
diligence,” he added, and this time I was sure that he sneered.

I took it, thanked him, and left the room intrigued. And when I rejoined
them, and handed her the manuscript, the odd thing was that the subject
of their discourse having meanwhile shifted, it no longer interested
her, and she never once opened the pages she had been in such haste to
have me procure.

This, too, was puzzling, even to one who was beginning to know his world

But I was not done with riddles. For presently out came Fifanti himself,
looking, if possible, yellower and more sour and lean than usual. He
was arrayed in his long, rusty gown, and there were the usual shabby
slippers on his long, lean feet. He was ever a man of most indifferent
personal habits.

“Ah, Astorre,” his wife greeted him. “My Lord Cardinal brings you good
tidings.”

“Does he so?” quoth Fifanti, sourly as I thought; and he looked at
the legate as though his excellency were the very reverse of a happy
harbinger.

“You will rejoice, I think, doctor,” said the smiling prelate, “to hear
that I have letters from my Lord Pier Luigi appointing you one of the
ducal secretaries. And this, I doubt not, will be followed, on his
coming hither, by an appointment to his council. Meanwhile, the stipend
is three hundred ducats, and the work is light.”

There followed a long and baffling silence, during which the doctor grew
first red, then pale, then red again, and Messer Gambara stood with his
scarlet cloak sweeping about his shapely limbs, sniffing his pomander
and smiling almost insolently into the other's face; and some of the
insolence of his look, I thought, was reflected upon the pale, placid
countenance of Giuliana.

At last, Fifanti spoke, his little eyes narrowing.

“It is too much for my poor deserts,” he said curtly.

“You are too humble,” said the prelate. “Your loyalty to the House of
Farnese, and the hospitality which I, its deputy, have received...”

“Hospitality!” barked Fifanti, and looked very oddly at Giuliana; so
oddly that a faint colour began to creep into her cheeks. “You would pay
for that?” he questioned, half mockingly. “Oh, but for that a stipend of
three hundred ducats is too little.”

And all the time his eyes were upon his wife, and I saw her stiffen as
if she had been struck.

But the Cardinal laughed outright. “Come now, you use me with an amiable
frankness,” he said. “The stipend shall be doubled when you join the
council.”

“Doubled?” he said. “Six hundred...?” He checked. The sum was vast. I
saw greed creep into his little eyes. What had troubled him hitherto,
I could not fathom even yet. He washed his bony hands in the air, and
looked at his wife again. “It... it is a fair price, no doubt, my lord,”
 said he, his tone contemptuous.

“The Duke shall be informed of the value of your learning,” lisped the
Cardinal.

Fifanti knit his brows. “The value of my learning?” he echoed, as if
slowly puzzled. “My learning? Oh! Is that in question?”

“Why else should we give you the appointment?” smiled the Cardinal, with
a smile that was full of significance.

“It is what the town will be asking, no doubt,” said Messer Fifanti. “I
hope you will be able to satisfy its curiosity, my lord.”

And on that he turned, and stalked off again, very white and trembling,
as I could perceive.

My Lord Gambara laughed carelessly again, and over the pale face of
Monna Giuliana there stole a slow smile, the memory of which was to be
hateful to me soon, but which at the moment went to increase my already
profound mystification.




CHAPTER III. PREUX-CHEVALIER


In the days that followed I found Messer Fifanti in queerer moods than
ever. Ever impatient, he would be easily moved to anger now, and not
a day passed but he stormed at me over the Greek with which, under his
guidance, I was wrestling.

And with Giuliana his manner was the oddest thing conceivable; at times
he was mocking as an ape, at times his manner had in it a suggestion of
the serpent; more rarely he was his usual, vulturine self. He watched
her curiously, ever between anger and derision, to all of which she
presented a calm front and a patience almost saintly. He was as a man
with some mighty burden on his mind, undecided whether he shall bear it
or cast it off.

Her patience moved me most oddly to pity; and pity for so beautiful a
creature is Satan's most subtle snare, especially when you consider
what a power her beauty had to move me as I had already discovered to
my erstwhile terror. She confided in me a little in those days, but ever
with a most saintly resignation. She had been sold into wedlock, she
admitted, with a man who might have been her father, and she confessed
to finding her lot a cruel one; but confessed it with the air of one who
intends none the less to bear her cross with fortitude.

And then, one day, I did a very foolish thing. We had been reading
together, she and I, as was become our custom. She had fetched me a
volume of the lascivious verse of Panormitano, and we sat side by side
on the marble seat in the garden what time I read to her, her shoulder
touching mine, the fragrance of her all about me.

She wore, I remember, a clinging gown of russet silk, which did rare
justice to the splendid beauty of her, and her heavy ruddy hair was
confined in a golden net that was set with gems--a gift from my Lord
Gambara. Concerning this same gift words had passed but yesterday
between Giuliana and her husband; and I deemed the doctor's anger to be
the fruit of a base and unworthy mind.

I read, curiously enthralled--though whether by the beauty of the lines
or the beauty of the woman there beside me I could not then have told
you.

Presently she checked me. “Leave now Panormitano,” she said. “Here is
something else upon which you shall give me your judgment.” And she set
before me a sheet upon which there was a sonnet writ in her own hand,
which was as beautiful as any copyist's that I have ever seen.

I read the poem. It was the tenderest and saddest little cry from a
heart that ached and starved for an ideal love; and good as the manner
seemed, the matter itself it was that chiefly moved me. At my admission
of its moving quality her white hand closed over mine as it had done
that day in the library when we had read of “Isabetta and the Pot of
Basil.” Her hand was warm, but not warm enough to burn me as it did.

“Ah, thanks, Agostino,” she murmured. “Your praise is sweet to me. The
verses are my own.”

I was dumbfounded at this fresh and more intimate glimpse of her. The
beauty of her body was there for all to see and worship; but here was my
first glimpse of the rare beauties of her mind. In what words I should
have answered her I do not know, for at that moment we suffered an
interruption.

Sudden and harsh as the crackling of a twig came from behind us the
voice of Messer Fifanti. “What do you read?”

We started apart, and turned.

Either he, of set purpose, had crept up behind us so softly that we
should not suspect his approach, or else so engrossed were we that our
ears had been deafened for the time. He stood there now in his untidy
gown of black, and there was a leer of mockery on his long, white face.
Slowly he put a lean arm between us, and took the sheet in his bony
claw.

He peered at it very closely, being without glasses, and screwed his
eyes up until they all but disappeared.

Thus he stood, and slowly read, whilst I looked on a trifle uneasy, and
Giuliana's face wore an odd look of fear, her bosom heaving unsteadily
in its russet sheath.

He sniffed contemptuously when he had read, and looked at me.

“Have I not bidden you leave the vulgarities of dialect to the vulgar?”
 quoth he. “Is there not enough written for you in Latin, that you
must be wasting your time and perverting your senses with such poor
illiterate gibberish as this? And what is it that you have there?” He
took the book. “Panormitano!” he roared. “Now, there's a fitting author
for a saint in embryo! There's a fine preparation for the cloister!”

He turned to Giuliana. He put forward his hand and touched her bare
shoulder with his hideous forefinger. She cringed under the touch as if
it were barbed.

“There is not the need that you should render yourself his preceptress,”
 he said, with his deadly smile.

“I do not,” she replied indignantly. “Agostino has a taste for letters,
and...”

“Tcha! Tcha!” he interrupted, tapping her shoulder sharply. “I had
no thought for letters. There is my Lord Gambara, and there is Messer
Cosimo d'Anguissola, and there is Messer Caro. There is even Pordenone,
the painter.” His lips writhed over their names. “You have friends
enough, I think. Leave, then, Ser Agostino here. Do not dispute him with
God to whom he has been vowed.”

She rose in a fine anger, and stood quivering there, magnificently tall,
and Juno, I imagined, must have looked to the poets as she looked then
to me.

“This is too much!” she cried.

“It is, madam,” he snapped. “I agree with you.” She considered him with
eyes that held a loathing and contempt unutterable. Then she looked
at me, and shrugged her shoulders as who would say: “You see how I am
used!” Lastly she turned, and took her way across the lawn towards the
house.

There was a little silence between us after she had gone. I was on fire
with indignation, and yet I could think of no words in which I might
express it, realizing how utterly I lacked the right to be angry with a
husband for the manner in which he chose to treat his wife.

At last, pondering me very gravely, he spoke.

“It were best you read no more with Madonna Giuliana,” he said slowly.
“Her tastes are not the tastes that become a man who is about to enter
holy orders.” He closed the book, which hitherto he had held open;
closed it with an angry snap, and held it out to me.

“Restore it to its shelf,” he bade me.

I took it, and quite submissively I went to do his bidding. But to gain
the library I had to pass the door of Giuliana's room. It stood open,
and Giuliana herself in the doorway. We looked at each other, and seeing
her so sorrowful, with tears in her great dark eyes, I stepped forward
to speak, to utter something of the deep sympathy that stirred me.

She stretched forth a hand to me. I took it and held it tight, looking
up into her eyes.

“Dear Agostino!” she murmured in gratitude for my sympathy; and I,
distraught, inflamed by tone and look, answered by uttering her name for
the first time.

“Giuliana!”

Having uttered it I dared not look at her. But I stooped to kiss the
hand which she had left in mine. And having kissed it I started upright
and made to advance again; but she snatched her hand from my clasp and
waved me away, at once so imperiously and beseechingly that I turned and
went to shut myself in the library with my bewilderment.

For full two days thereafter, for no reason that I could clearly give,
I avoided her, and save at table and in her husband's presence we were
never once together.

The repasts were sullen things at which there was little said, Madonna
sitting in a frozen dignity, and the doctor, a silent man at all times,
being now utterly and forbiddingly mute.

But once my Lord Gambara supped with us, and he was light and trivial
as ever, an incarnation of frivolity and questionable jests, apparently
entirely unconscious of Fifanti's chill reserve and frequent sneers.
Indeed, I greatly marvelled that a man of my Lord Gambara's eminence and
Governor of Piacenza should so very amiably endure the boorishness of
that pedant.

Explanation was about to be afforded me.

On the third day, as we were dining, Giuliana announced that she was
going afoot into the town, and solicited my escort. It was an honour
that never before had been offered me. I reddened violently, but
accepted it, and soon thereafter we set out, just she and I together.

We went by way of the Fodesta Gate, and passed the old Castle of Sant'
Antonio, then in ruins--for Gambara was demolishing it and employing
the material to construct a barrack for the Pontifical troops that
garrisoned Piacenza. And presently we came upon the works of this new
building, and stepped out into mid-street to avoid the scaffoldings, and
so pursued our way into the city's main square--the Piazza del Commune,
overshadowed by the red-and-white bulk of the Communal Palace. This
was a noble building, rather in the Saracenic manner, borrowing a very
warlike air from the pointed battlements that crowned it.

Near the Duomo we came upon a great concourse of people who were staring
up at the iron cage attached to the square tower of the belfry near its
summit. In this cage there was what appeared at first to be a heap of
rags, but which presently resolved itself into a human shape, crouching
in that narrow, cruel space, exposed there to the pitiless beating of
the sun, and suffering Heaven alone can say what agonies. The murmuring
crowd looked up in mingled fear and sympathy.

He had been there since last night, a peasant girl informed us, and he
had been confined there by order of my Lord the Cardinal-legate for the
odious sin of sacrilege.

“What!” I cried out, in such a tone of astonished indignation that Monna
Giuliana seized my arm and pressed it to enjoin prudence.

It was not until she had made her purchases in a shop under the Duomo
and we were returning home that I touched upon the matter. She chid me
for the lack of caution that might have led me into some unpardonable
indiscretions but for her warning.

“But the very thought of such a man as my Lord Gambara torturing a poor
wretch for sacrilege!” I cried. “It is grotesque; it is ludicrous; it is
infamous!”

“Not so loud,” she laughed. “You are being stared at.” And then she
delivered herself of an amazing piece of casuistry. “If a man being
a sinner himself, shall on that account refrain from punishing sin in
others, then is he twice a sinner.”

“It was my Lord Gambara taught you that,” said I, and involuntarily I
sneered.

She considered me with a very searching look.

“Now, what precisely do you mean, Agostino?”

“Why, that it is by just such sophistries that the Cardinal-legate seeks
to cloak the disorders of his life. 'Video meliora proboque, deteriora
sequor?' is his philosophy. If he would encage the most sacrilegious
fellow in Piacenza, let him encage himself.”

“You do not love him?” said she.

“O--as to that--as a man he is well enough. But as an ecclesiastic...O,
but there!” I broke off shortly, and laughed. “The devil take Messer
Gambara!”

She smiled. “It is greatly to be feared that he will.”

But my Lord Gambara was not so lightly to be dismissed that afternoon.
As we were passing the Porta Fodesta, a little group of country-folk
that had gathered there fell away before us, all eyes upon the dazzling
beauty of Giuliana--as, indeed, had been the case ever since we had come
into the town, so that I had been singularly and sweetly proud of being
her escort. I had been conscious of the envious glances that many a
tall fellow had sent after me, though, after all, theirs was but as the
jealousy of Phoebus for Adonis.

Wherever we had passed and eyes had followed us, men and women had
fallen to whispering and pointing after us. And so did they now, here at
the Fodesta Gate, but with this difference, that, at last, I overheard
for once what was said, for there was one who did not whisper.

“There goes the leman of my Lord Gambara,” quoth a gruff, sneering
voice, “the light of love of the saintly legate who is starving Domenico
to death in a cage for the sin of sacrilege.”

Not a doubt but that he would have added more, but that at that moment
a woman's shrill voice drowned his utterance. “Silence, Giuffre!” she
admonished him fearfully. “Silence, on your life!”

I had halted in my stride, suddenly cold from head to foot, as on that
day when I had flung Rinolfo from top to bottom of the terrace steps
at Mondolfo. It happened that I wore a sword for the first time in my
life--a matter from which I gathered great satisfaction--having been
adjudged worthy of the honour by virtue that I was to be Madonna's
escort. To the hilt I now set hand impetuously, and would have turned to
strike that foul slanderer dead, but that Giuliana restrained me, a wild
alarm in her eyes.

“Come!” she panted in a whisper. “Come away!”

So imperious was the command that it conveyed to my mind some notion of
the folly I should commit did I not obey it. I saw at once that did
I make an ensample of this scurrilous scandalmonger I should thereby
render her the talk of that vile town. So I went on, but very white and
stiff, and breathing somewhat hard; for pent-up passion is an evil thing
to house.

Thus came we out of the town and to the shady banks of the gleaming
Po. And then, at last, when we were quite alone, and within two hundred
yards of Fifanti's house, I broke at last the silence.

I had been thinking very busily, and the peasant's words had illumined
for me a score of little obscure matters, had explained to me the queer
behaviour and the odd speeches of Fifanti himself since that evening in
the garden when the Cardinal-legate had announced to him his appointment
as ducal secretary. I checked now in my stride, and turned to face her.

“Was it true?” I asked, rendered brutally direct by a queer pain I felt
as a result of my thinking.

She looked up into my face so sadly and wistfully that my suspicions
fell from me upon the instant, and I reddened from shame at having
harboured them.

“Agostino!” she cried, such a poor little cry of pain that I set my
teeth hard and bowed my head in self-contempt.

Then I looked at her again.

“Yet the foul suspicion of that lout is shared by your husband himself,”
 said I.

“The foul suspicion--yes,” she answered, her eyes downcast, her cheeks
faintly tinted. And then, quite suddenly, she moved forward. “Come,” she
bade me. “You are being foolish.”

“I shall be mad,” said I, “ere I have done with this.” And I fell into
step again beside her. “If I could not avenge you there, I can avenge
you here.” And I pointed to the house. “I can smite this rumour at its
foulest point.”

Her hand fell on my arm. “What would you do?” she cried.

“Bid your husband retract and sue to you for pardon, or else tear out
his lying throat,” I answered, for I was in a great rage by now.

She stiffened suddenly. “You go too fast, Messer Agostino,” said she.
“And you are over-eager to enter into that which does not concern you.
I do not know that I have given you the right to demand of my husband
reason of the manner in which he deals with me. It is a thing that
touches only my husband and myself.”

I was abashed; I was humiliated; I was nigh to tears. I choked it all
down, and I strode on beside her, my rage smouldering within me. But it
was flaring up again by the time we reached the house with no more words
spoken between us. She went to her room without another glance at me,
and I repaired straight in quest of Fifanti.

I found him in the library. He had locked himself in, as was his
frequent habit when at his studies, but he opened to my knock. I stalked
in, unbuckled my sword, and set it in a corner. Then I turned to him.

“You are doing your wife a shameful wrong, sir doctor,” said I, with all
the directness of youth and indiscretion.

He stared at me as if I had struck him--as he might have stared, rather,
at a child who had struck him, undecided whether to strike back for the
child's good, or to be amused and smile.

“Ah!” he said at last. “She has been talking to you?” And he clasped his
hands behind him and stood before me, his head thrust forward, his legs
wide apart, his long gown, which was open, clinging to his ankles.

“No,” said I. “I have been thinking.”

“In that case nothing will surprise me,” he said in his sour,
contemptuous manner. “And so you have concluded...?”

“That you are harbouring an infamous suspicion.”

“Your assurance that it is infamous would offend me did it not comfort
me,” he sneered. “And what, pray, is this suspicion?

“You suspect that... that--O God! I can't utter the thing.”

“Take courage,” he mocked me. And he thrust his head farther forward. He
looked singularly like a vulture in that moment.

“You suspect that Messer Gambara... that Messer Gambara and Madonna...
that...” I clenched my hands together, and looked into his leering face.
“You understand me well enough,” I cried, almost angrily.

He looked at me seriously now, a cold glitter in his small eyes.

“I wonder do you understand yourself?” he asked. “I think not. I think
not. Since God has made you a fool, it but remains for man to make you a
priest, and thus complete God's work.”

“You cannot move me by your taunts,” I said. “You have a foul mind,
Messer Fifanti.”

He approached me slowly, his untidily shod feet slip-slopping on the
wooden floor.

“Because,” said he, “I suspect that Messer Gambara... that Messer Gambara
and Madonna... that... You understand me,” he mocked me, with a mimicry of
my own confusion. “And what affair may it be of yours whom I suspect or
of what I suspect them where my own are concerned?”

“It is my affair, as it is the affair of every man who would be
accounted gentle, to defend the honour of a pure and saintly lady from
the foul aspersions of slander.”

“Knight-errantry, by the Host!” quoth he, and his brows shot up on
his steep brow. Then they came down again to scowl. “No doubt, my
preux-chevalier, you will have definite knowledge of the groundlessness
of these same slanders,” he said, moving backwards, away from me,
towards the door; and as he moved now his feet made no sound, though I
did not yet notice this nor, indeed, his movement at all.

“Knowledge?” I roared at him. “What knowledge can you need beyond what
is afforded by her face? Look in it, Messer Fifanti, if you would see
innocence and purity and chastity! Look in it!”

“Very well,” said he. “Let us look in it.”

And quite suddenly he pulled the door open to disclose Giuliana standing
there, erect but in a listening attitude.

“Look in it!” he mocked me, and waved one of his bony hands towards that
perfect countenance.

There was shame and confusion in her face, and some anger. But she
turned without a word, and went quickly down the passage, followed by
his evil, cackling laugh.

Then he looked at me quite solemnly. “I think,” said he, “you had best
get to your studies. You will find more than enough to engage you there.
Leave my affairs to me, boy.”

There was almost a menace in his voice, and after what had happened it
was impossible to pursue the matter.

Sheepishly, overwhelmed with confusion, I went out--a knight-errant with
a shorn crest.




CHAPTER IV. MY LORD GAMBARA CLEARS THE GROUND


I had angered her! Worse; I had exposed her to humiliation at the hands
of that unworthy animal who soiled her in thought with the slime of
his suspicions. Through me she had been put to the shameful need of
listening at a door, and had been subjected to the ignominy of being so
discovered. Through me she had been mocked and derided!

It was all anguish to me. For her there was no shame, no humiliation, no
pain I would not suffer, and take joy in the suffering so that it be for
her. But to have submitted that sweet, angelic woman to suffering--to
have incurred her just anger! Woe me!

I came to the table that evening full of uneasiness, very unhappy,
feeling it an effort to bring myself into her presence and endure be it
her regard or her neglect. To my relief she sent word that she was not
well and would keep her chamber; and Fifanti smiled oddly as he stroked
his blue chin and gave me a sidelong glance. We ate in silence, and when
the meal was done, I departed, still without a word to my preceptor, and
went to shut myself up again in my room.

I slept ill that night, and very early next morning I was astir. I went
down into the garden somewhere about the hour of sunrise, through the
wet grass that was all scintillant with dew. On the marble bench by the
pond, where the water-lilies were now rotting, I flung myself down, and
there was I found a half-hour later by Giuliana herself.

She stole up gently behind me, and all absorbed and moody as I was, I
had no knowledge of her presence until her crisp boyish voice startled
me out of my musings.

“Of what do we brood here so early, sir saint?” quoth she.

I turned to meet her laughing eyes. “You... you can forgive me?” I
faltered foolishly.

She pouted tenderly. “Should I not forgive one who has acted foolishly
out of love for me?”

“It was, it was...” I cried; and there stopped, all confused, feeling
myself growing red under her lazy glance.

“I know it was,” she answered. She set her elbows on the seat's tall
back until I could feel her sweet breath upon my brow. “And should I
bear you a resentment, then? My poor Agostino, have I no heart to feel?
Am I but a cold, reasoning intelligence like that thing my husband?
O God! To have been mated to that withered pedant! To have been
sacrificed, to have been sold into such bondage! Me miserable!”

“Giuliana!” I murmured soothingly, yet agonized myself.

“Could none have foretold me that you must come some day?”

“Hush!” I implored her. “What are you saying?”

But though I begged her to be silent, my soul was avid for more such
words from her--from her, the most perfect and beautiful of women.

“Why should I not?” said she. “Is truth ever to be stifled? Ever?”

I was mad, I know--quite mad. Her words had made me so. And when, to ask
me that insistent question, she brought her face still nearer, I flung
down the reins of my unreason and let it ride amain upon its desperate,
reckless course. In short, I too leaned forward, I leaned forward, and I
kissed her full upon those scarlet, parted lips.

I kissed her, and fell back with a cry that was of anguish almost--so
poignantly had the sweet, fierce pain of that kiss run through my every
fibre. And as I cried out, so too did she, stepping back, her hands
suddenly to her face. But the next moment she was peering 

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