CHAPTER I. PAGLIANO

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 up at the

windows of the house--those inscrutable eyes that looked upon our deed;

that looked and of which it was impossible to discern how much they

might have seen.

“If he should have seen us!” was her cry; and it moved me unpleasantly

that such should have been the first thought my kiss inspired in her.

“If he should have seen us! Gesu! I have enough to bear already!”

“I care not,” said I. “Let him see. I am not Messer Gambara. No man

shall put an insult upon you on my account, and live.”

I was become the very ranting, roaring, fire-breathing type of lover who

will slaughter a whole world to do pleasure to his mistress or to spare

her pain--I--I--I, Agostino d'Anguissola--who was to be ordained next

month and walk in the ways of St. Augustine!

Laugh as you read--for very pity, laugh!

“Nay, nay,” she reassured herself. “He will be still abed. He was

snoring when I left.” And she dismissed her fears, and looked at me

again, and returned to the matter of that kiss.

“What have you done to me, Agostino?”

I dropped my glance before her languid eyes. “What I have done to

no other woman yet,” I answered, a certain gloom creeping over the

exultation that still thrilled me. “O Giuliana, what have you done to

me? You have bewitched me; You have made me mad!” And I set my elbows on

my knees and took my head in my hands, and sat there, overwhelmed now by

the full consciousness of the irrevocable thing that I had done, a thing

that must brand my soul for ever, so it seemed.

To have kissed a maid would have been ill enough for one whose aims were

mine. But to kiss a wife, to become a cicisbeo! The thing assumed in my

mind proportions foolishly, extravagantly beyond its evil reality.

“You are cruel, Agostino,” she whispered behind me. She had come to lean

again upon the back of the bench. “Am I alone to blame? Can the iron

withstand the lodestone? Can the rain help falling upon the earth? Can

the stream flow other than downhill?” She sighed. “Woe me! It is I who

should be angered that you have made free of my lips. And yet I am here,

wooing you to forgive me for the sin that is your own.”

I cried out at that and turned to her again, and I was very white, I

know.

“You tempted me!” was my coward's cry.

“So said Adam once. Yet God thought otherwise, for Adam was as fully

punished as was Eve.” She smiled wistfully into my eyes, and my senses

reeled again. And then old Busio, the servant, came suddenly forth

from the house upon some domestic errand to Giuliana, and thus was that

situation mercifully brought to an end.

For the rest of the day I lived upon the memory of that morning,

reciting to myself each word that she had uttered, conjuring up in

memory the vision of her every look. And my absent-mindedness was

visible to Fifanti when I came to my studies with him later. He grew

more peevish with me than was habitual, dubbed me dunce and wooden-head,

and commended the wisdom of those who had determined upon a claustral

life for me, admitting that I knew enough Latin to enable me to

celebrate as well as another without too clear a knowledge of the

meaning of what I pattered. All of which was grossly untrue, for, as

none knew better than himself, the fluency of my Latin was above the

common wont of students. When I told him so, he delivered himself of his

opinion upon the common wont of students with all the sourness of his

crabbed nature.

“I'll write an ode for you upon any subject that you may set me,” I

challenged him.

“Then write one upon impudence,” said he. “It is a subject you should

understand.” And upon that he got up and flung out of the room in a pet

before I could think of an answer.

Left alone, I began an ode which should prove to him his lack of

justice. But I got no further than two lines of it. Then for a spell I

sat biting my quill, my mind and the eyes of my soul full of Giuliana.

Presently I began to write again. It was not an ode, but a prayer,

oddly profane--and it was in Italian, in the “dialettale” that provoked

Fifanti's sneers. How it ran I have forgotten these many years. But I

recall that in it I likened myself to a sailor navigating shoals and

besought the pharos of Giuliana's eyes to bring me safely through,

besought her to anoint me with her glance and so hearten me to brave the

dangers of that procellous sea.

I read it first with satisfaction, then with dismay as I realized to the

full its amorous meaning. Lastly I tore it up and went below to dine.

We were still at table when my Lord Gambara arrived. He came on

horseback attended by two grooms whom he left to await him. He was all

in black velvet, I remember, even to his thigh-boots which were laced

up the sides with gold, and on his breast gleamed a fine medallion of

diamonds. Of the prelate there was about him, as usual, nothing but the

scarlet cloak and the sapphire ring.

Fifanti rose and set a chair for him, smiling a crooked smile that

held more hostility than welcome. None the less did his excellency pay

Madonna Giuliana a thousand compliments as he took his seat, supremely

calm and easy in his manner. I watched him closely, and I watched

Giuliana, a queer fresh uneasiness pervading me.

The talk was trivial and chiefly concerned with the progress of the

barracks the legate was building and the fine new road from the middle

of the city to the Church of Santa Chiara, which he intended should

be called the Via Gambara, but which, despite his intentions, is known

to-day as the Stradone Farnese.

Presently my cousin arrived, full-armed and very martial by contrast

with the velvety Cardinal. He frowned to see Messer Gambara, then

effaced the frown and smiled as, one by one, he greeted us. Last of all

he turned to me.

“And how fares his saintliness?” quoth he.

“Indeed, none too saintly,” said I, speaking my thoughts aloud.

He laughed. “Why, then, the sooner we are in orders, the sooner shall we

be on the road to mending that. Is it not so, Messer Fifanti?

“His ordination will profit you, I nothing doubt,” said Fifanti, with

his habitual discourtesy and acidity. “So you do well to urge it.”

The answer put my cousin entirely out of countenance a moment. It was

a blunt way of reminding me that in this Cosimo I saw one who followed

after me in the heirship to Mondolfo, and in whose interests it was that

I should don the conventual scapulary.

I looked at Cosimo's haughty face and cruel mouth, and conjectured in

that hour whether I should have found him so very civil and pleasant a

cousin had things been other than they were.

O, a very serpent was Messer Fifanti; and I have since wondered whether

of intent he sought to sow in my heart hatred of my guelphic cousin,

that he might make of me a tool for his own service--as you shall come

to understand.

Meanwhile, Cosimo, having recovered, waved aside the imputation, and

smiled easily.

“Nay, there you wrong me. The Anguissola lose more than I shall gain by

Agostino's renunciation of the world. And I am sorry for it. You believe

me, cousin?”

I answered his courteous speech as it deserved, in very courteous terms.

This set a pleasanter humour upon all. Yet some restraint abode. Each

sat, it seemed, as a man upon his guard. My cousin watched Gambara's

every look whenever the latter turned to speak to Giuliana; the

Cardinal-legate did the like by him; and Messer Fifanti watched them

both.

And, meantime, Giuliana sat there, listening now to one, now to the

other, her lazy smile parting those scarlet lips--those lips that I had

kissed that morning--I, whom no one thought of watching!

And soon came Messer Annibale Caro, with lines from the last pages of

his translation oozing from him. And when presently Giuliana smote her

hands together in ecstatic pleasure at one of those same lines and

bade him repeat it to her, he swore roundly by all the gods that are

mentioned in Virgil that he would dedicate the work to her upon its

completion.

At this the surliness became general once more and my Lord Gambara

ventured the opinion--and there was a note of promise, almost of threat,

in his sleek tones--that the Duke would shortly be needing Messer Caro's

presence in Parma; whereupon Messer Caro cursed the Duke roundly and

with all a poet's volubility of invective.

They stayed late, each intent, no doubt, upon outstaying the others.

But since none would give way they were forced in the end to depart

together.

And whilst Messer Fifanti, as became a host, was seeing them to their

horses, I was left alone with Giuliana.

“Why do you suffer those men?” I asked her bluntly. Her delicate

brows were raised in surprise. “Why, what now? They are very pleasant

gentlemen, Agostino.”

“Too pleasant,” said I, and rising I crossed to the window whence I

could watch them getting to horse, all save Caro, who had come afoot.

“Too pleasant by much. That prelate out of Hell, now...”

“Sh!” she hissed at me, smiling, her hand raised. “Should he hear you,

he might send you to the cage for sacrilege. O Agostino!” she cried,

and the smiles all vanished from her face. “Will you grow cruel and

suspicious, too?”

I was disarmed. I realized my meanness and unworthiness.

“Have patience with me,” I implored her. “I... I am not myself to-day.”

I sighed ponderously, and fell silent as I watched them ride away. Yet

I hated them all; and most of all I hated the dainty, perfumed,

golden-headed Cardinal-legate.

He came again upon the morrow, and we learnt from the news of which

he was the bearer that he had carried out his threat concerning Messer

Caro. The poet was on his way to Parma, to Duke Pier Luigi, dispatched

thither on a mission of importance by the Cardinal. He spoke, too, of

sending my cousin to Perugia, where a strong hand was needed, as the

town showed signs of mutiny against the authority of the Holy See.

When he had departed, Messer Fifanti permitted himself one of his bitter

insinuations.

“He desires a clear field,” he said, smiling his cold smile upon

Giuliana. “It but remains for him to discover that his Duke has need of

me as well.”

He spoke of it as a possible contingency, but sarcastically, as men

speak of things too remote to be seriously considered. He was to

remember his words two days later when the very thing came to pass.

We were at breakfast when the blow fell.

There came a clatter of hooves under our windows, which stood open to

the tepid September morning, and soon there was old Busio ushering in

an officer of the Pontificals with a parchment tied in scarlet silk and

sealed with the arms of Piacenza.

Messer Fifanti took the package and weighed it in his hand, frowning.

Perhaps already some foreboding of the nature of its contents was in his

mind. Meanwhile, Giuliana poured wine for the officer, and Busio bore

him the cup upon a salver.

Fifanti ripped away silk and seals, and set himself to read. I can see

him now, standing near the window to which he had moved to gain a better

light, the parchment under his very nose, his short-sighted eyes screwed

up as he acquainted himself with the letter's contents. Then I saw him

turn a sickly leaden hue. He stared at the officer a moment and then at

Giuliana. But I do not think that he saw either of them. His look was

the blank look of one whose thoughts are very distant.

He thrust his hands behind him, and with head forward, in that curious

attitude so reminiscent of a bird of prey, he stepped slowly back to his

place at the table-head. Slowly his cheeks resumed their normal tint.

“Very well, sir,” he said, addressing the officer. “Inform his

excellency that I shall obey the summons of the Duke's magnificence

without delay.”

The officer bowed to Giuliana, took his leave, and went, old Busio

escorting him.

“A summons from the Duke?” cried Giuliana, and then the storm broke

“Ay,” he answered, grimly quiet, “a summons from the Duke.” And he

tossed it across the table to her.

I saw that fateful document float an instant in the air, and then,

thrown out of poise by the blob of wax, swoop slanting to her lap.

“It will come no doubt as a surprise to you,” he growled; and upon that

his hard-held passion burst all bonds that he could impose upon it.

His great bony fist crashed down upon the board and swept a precious

Venetian beaker to the ground, where it burst into a thousand atoms,

spreading red wine like a bloodstain upon the floor.

“Said I not that this rascal Cardinal would make a clear field for

himself? Said I not so?” He laughed shrill and fiercely. “He would send

your husband packing as he has sent his other rivals. O, there is a

stipend waiting--a stipend of three hundred ducats yearly that shall be

made into six hundred presently, and all for my complaisance, all that I

may be a joyous and content cornuto!”

He strode to the window cursing horribly, whilst Giuliana sat white of

face with lips compressed and heaving bosom, her eyes upon her plate.

“My Lord Cardinal and his Duke may take themselves together to Hell ere

I obey the summons that the one has sent me at the desire of the other.

Here I stay to guard what is my own.”

“You are a fool,” said Giuliana at length, “and a knave, too, for you

insult me without cause.”

“Without cause? O, without cause, eh? By the Host! Yet you would not

have me stay?”

“I would not have you gaoled, which is what will happen if you disobey

the Duke's magnificence,” said she.

“Gaoled?” quoth he, of a sudden trembling in the increasing intensity of

his passion. “Caged, perhaps--to die of hunger and thirst and exposure,

like that poor wretch Domenico who perished yesterday, at last, because

he dared to speak the truth. Gesu!” he groaned. “O, miserable me!” And

he sank into a chair.

But the next instant he was up again, and his long arms were waving

fiercely. “By the Eyes of God! They shall have cause to cage me. If I

am to be horned like a bull, I'll use those same horns. I'll gore their

vitals. O madam, since of your wantonness you inclined to harlotry, you

should have wedded another than Astorre Fifanti.”

It was too much. I leapt to my feet.

“Messer Fifanti,” I blazed at him. “I'll not remain to hear such words

addressed to this sweet lady.”

“Ah, yes,” he snarled, wheeling suddenly upon me as if he would strike

me. “I had forgot the champion, the preux-chevalier, the saint in

embryo! You will not remain to hear the truth, sir, eh?” And he strode,

mouthing, to the door, and flung it wide so that it crashed against the

wall. “This is your remedy. Get you hence! Go! What passes here concerns

you not. Go!” he roared like a mad beast, his rage a thing terrific.

I looked at him and from him to Giuliana, and my eyes most clearly

invited her to tell me how she would have me act.

“Indeed, you had best go, Agostino,” she answered sadly. “I shall bear

his insults easier if there be no witness. Yes, go.”

“Since it is your wish, Madonna,” I bowed to her, and very erect, very

defiant of mien, I went slowly past the livid Fifanti, and so out. I

heard the door slammed after me, and in the little hall I came upon

Busio, who was wringing his hand and looking very white. He ran to me.

“He will murder her, Messer Agostino,” moaned the old man. “He can be a

devil in his anger.”

“He is a devil always, in anger and out of it,” said I. “He needs an

exorcist. It is a task that I should relish. I'd beat the devils out of

him, Busio, and she would let me. Meanwhile, stay we here, and if she

needs our help, it shall be hers.”

I dropped on to the carved settle that stood there, old Busio standing

at my elbow, more tranquil now that there was help at hand for Madonna

in case of need. And through the door came the sound of his storming,

and presently the crash of more broken glassware, as once more he

thumped the table. For well-high half an hour his fury lasted, and it

was seldom that her voice was interposed. Once we heard her laugh, cold

and cutting as a sword's edge, and I shivered at the sound, for it was

not good to hear.

At last the door was opened and he came forth. His face was inflamed,

his eyes wild and blood-injected. He paused for a moment on the

threshold, but I do not think that he noticed us at first. He looked

back at her over his shoulder, still sitting at table, the outline of

her white-gowned body sharply defined against the deep blue tapestry of

the wall behind her.

“You are warned,” said he. “Do you heed the warning!” And he came

forward.

Perceiving me at last where I sat, he bared his broken teeth in a

snarling smile. But it was to Busio that he spoke. “Have my mule saddled

for me in an hour,” he said, and passed on and up the stairs to make

his preparations. It seemed, therefore, that she had conquered his

suspicions.

I went in to offer her comfort, for she was weeping and all shaken by

that cruel encounter. But she waved me away.

“Not now, Agostino. Not now,” she implored me. “Leave me to myself, my

friend.”

I had not been her friend had I not obeyed her without question.

CHAPTER V. PABULUM ACHERONTIS

It was late that afternoon when Astorre Fifanti set out. He addressed

a few brief words to me, informing me that he should return within four

days, betide what might, setting me tasks upon which I was meanwhile

to work, and bidding me keep the house and be circumspect during his

absence.

From the window of my room I saw the doctor get astride his mule. He

was girt with a big sword, but he still wore his long, absurd and shabby

gown and his loose, ill-fitting shoes, so that it was very likely that

the stirrup-leathers would engage his thoughts ere he had ridden far.

I saw him dig his heels into the beast's sides and go ambling down the

little avenue and out at the gate. In the road he drew rein, and stood

in talk some moments with a lad who idled there, a lad whom he was wont

to employ upon odd tasks about the garden and elsewhere.

This, Madonna also saw, for she was watching his departure from the

window of a room below. That she attached more importance to that little

circumstance than did I, I was to learn much later.

At last he pushed on, and I watched him as he dwindled down the long

grey road that wound along the river-side until in the end he was lost

to view--for all time, I hoped; and well had it been for me had my idle

hope been realized.

I supped alone that night with no other company than Busio's, who

ministered to my needs.

Madonna sent word that she would keep her chamber. When I had supped

and after night had fallen I went upstairs to the library, and, shutting

myself in, I attempted to read, lighted by the three beaks of the tall

brass lamp that stood upon the table. Being plagued by moths, I drew the

curtains close across the open window, and settled down to wrestle with

the opening lines of the [Title in Greek] of Aeschylus.

But my thoughts wandered from the doings of the son of Iapetus, until at

last I flung down the book and sat back in my chair all lost in thought,

in doubt, and in conjecture. I became seriously introspective. I made an

examination not only of conscience, but of heart and mind, and I found

that I had gone woefully astray from the path that had been prepared for

me. Very late I sat there and sought to determine upon what I should do.

Suddenly, like a manna to my starving soul, came the memory of the last

talk I had with Fra Gervasio and the solemn warning he had given me.

That memory inspired me rightly. To-morrow--despite Messer Fifanti's

orders--I would take horse and ride to Mondolfo, there to confess

myself to Fra Gervasio and to be guided by his counsel. My mother's vows

concerning me I saw in their true light. They were not binding upon me;

indeed, I should be doing a hideous wrong were I to follow them against

my inclinations. I must not damn my soul for anything that my mother had

vowed or ever I was born, however much she might account that it would

be no more than filial piety so to do.

I was easier in mind after my resolve was taken, and I allowed that

mind of mine to stray thereafter as it listed. It took to thoughts of

Giuliana--Giuliana for whom I ached in every nerve, although I still

sought to conceal from myself the true cause of my suffering. Better

a thousand times had I envisaged that sinful fact and wrestled with it

boldly. Thus should I have had a chance of conquering myself and winning

clear of all the horror that lay before me.

That I was weak and irresolute at such a time, when I most needed

strength, I still think to-day--when I can take a calm survey of

all--was the fault of the outrageous rearing that was mine. At Mondolfo

they had so nurtured me and so sheltered me from the stinging blasts of

the world that I was grown into a very ripe and succulent fruit for the

Devil's mouth. The things to whose temptation usage would have rendered

me in some degree immune were irresistible to one who had been tutored

as had I.

Let youth know wickedness, lest when wickedness seeks a man out in his

riper years he shall be fooled and conquered by the beauteous garb in

which the Devil has the cunning to array it.

And yet to pretend that I was entirely innocent of where I stood and in

what perils were to play the hypocrite. Largely I knew; just as I knew

that lacking strength to resist, I must seek safety in flight. And

to-morrow I would go. That point was settled, and the page, meanwhile,

turned down. And for to-night I delivered myself up to the savouring of

this hunger that was upon me.

And then, towards the third hour of night, as I still sat there, the

door was very gently opened, and I beheld Giuliana standing before me.

She detached from the black background of the passage, and the light of

my three-beaked lamp set her ruddy hair aglow so that it seemed there

was a luminous nimbus all about her head. For a moment this gave colour

to my fancy that I beheld a vision evoked by the too great intentness

of my thoughts. The pale face seemed so transparent, the white robe was

almost diaphanous, and the great dark eyes looked so sad and wistful.

Only in the vivid scarlet of her lips was there life and blood.

I stared at her. “Giuliana!” I murmured.

“Why do you sit so late?” she asked me, and closed the door as she

spoke.

“I have been thinking, Giuliana,” I answered wearily, and I passed a

hand over my brow to find it moist and clammy. “To-morrow I go hence.”

She started round and her eyes grew distended, her hand clutched her

breast. “You go hence?” she cried, a note as of fear in her deep voice.

“Hence? Whither?”

“Back to Mondolfo, to tell my mother that her dream is at an end.”

She came slowly towards me. “And... and then?” she asked.

“And then? I do not know. What God wills. But the scapulary is not for

me. I am unworthy. I have no call. This I now know. And sooner than

be such a priest as Messer Gambara--of whom there are too many in the

Church to-day--I will find some other way of serving God.”

“Since... since when have you thought thus?”

“Since this morning, when I kissed you,” I answered fiercely.

She sank into a chair beyond the table and stretched a hand across it to

me, inviting the clasp of mine. “But if this is so, why leave us?”

“Because I am afraid,” I answered. “Because... O God! Giuliana, do you

not see?” And I sank my head into my hands.

Steps shuffled along the corridor. I looked up sharply. She set a finger

to her lips. There fell a knock, and old Busio stood before us.

“Madonna,” he announced, “my Lord the Cardinal-legate is below and asks

for you.”

I started up as if I had been stung. So! At this hour! Then Messer

Fifanti's suspicions did not entirely lack for grounds.

Giuliana flashed me a glance ere she made answer.

“You will tell my Lord Gambara that I have retired for the night and

that... But stay!” She caught up a quill and dipped it in the ink-horn,

drew paper to herself, and swiftly wrote three lines; then dusted it

with sand, and proffered that brief epistle to the servant.

“Give this to my lord.”

Busio took the note, bowed, and departed.

After the door had closed a silence followed, in which I paced the room

in long strides, aflame now with the all-consuming fire of jealousy.

I do believe that Satan had set all the legions of hell to achieve my

overthrow that night. Naught more had been needed to undo me than this

spur of jealousy. It brought me now to her side. I stood over her,

looking down at her between tenderness and fierceness, she returning my

glance with such a look as may haunt the eyes of sacrificial victims.

“Why dared he come?” I asked.

“Perhaps... perhaps some affair connected with Astorre...” she faltered.

I sneered. “That would be natural seeing that he has sent Astorre to

Parma.”

“If there was aught else, I am no party to it,” she assured me.

How could I do other than believe her? How could I gauge the turpitude

of that beauty's mind--I, all unversed in the wiles that Satan teaches

women? How could I have guessed that when she saw Fifanti speak to that

lad at the gate that afternoon she had feared that he had set a spy upon

the house, and that fearing this she had bidden the Cardinal begone? I

knew it later. But not then.

“Will you swear that it is as you say?” I asked her, white with passion.

As I have said, I was standing over her and very close. Her answer now

was suddenly to rise. Like a snake came she gliding upwards into my arms

until she lay against my breast, her face upturned, her eyes languidly

veiled, her lips a-pout.

“Can you do me so great a wrong, thinking you love me, knowing that I

love you?” she asked me.

For an instant we swayed together in that sweetly hideous embrace. I was

as a man sapped of all strength by some portentous struggle. I trembled

from head to foot. I cried out once--a despairing prayer for help,

I think it was--and then I seemed to plunge headlong down through an

immensity of space until my lips found hers. The ecstasy, the living

fire, the anguish, and the torture of it have left their indelible scars

upon my memory. Even as I write the cruelly sweet poignancy of that

moment is with me again--though very hateful now.

Thus I, blindly and recklessly, under the sway and thrall of that

terrific and overpowering temptation. And then there leapt in my mind a

glimmer of returning consciousness: a glimmer that grew rapidly to be

a blazing light in which I saw revealed the hideousness of the thing I

did. I tore myself away from her in that second of revulsion and hurled

her from me, fiercely and violently, so that, staggering to the seat

from which she had risen, she fell into it rather than sat down.

And whilst, breathless with parted lips and galloping bosom, she

observed me, something near akin to terror in her eyes, I stamped about

that room and raved and heaped abuse and recriminations upon myself,

ending by going down upon my knees to her, imploring her forgiveness for

the thing I had done--believing like a fatuous fool that it was all my

doing--and imploring her still more passionately to leave me and to go.

She set a trembling hand upon my head; she took my chin in the other,

and raised my face until she could look into it.

“If it be your will--if it will bring you peace and happiness, I will

leave you now and never see you more. But are you not deluded, my

Agostino?”

And then, as if her self-control gave way, she fell to weeping.

“And what of me if you go? What of me wedded to that monster, to that

cruel and inhuman pedant who tortures and insults me as you have seen?”

“Beloved, will another wrong cure the wrong of that?” I pleaded. “O, if

you love me, go--go, leave me. It is too late--too late!”

I drew away from her touch, and crossed the room to fling myself upon

the window-seat. For a space we sat apart thus, panting like wrestlers

who have flung away from each other. At length--“Listen, Giuliana,” I

said more calmly. “Were I to heed you, were I to obey my own desires, I

should bid you come away with me from this to-morrow.”

“If you but would!” she sighed. “You would be taking me out of hell.”

“Into another worse,” I countered swiftly. “I should do you such a wrong

as naught could ever right again.”

She looked at me for a spell in silence. Her back was to the light and

her face in shadow, so that I could not read what passed there. Then,

very slowly, like one utterly weary, she got to her feet.

“I will do your will, beloved; but I do it not for the wrong that I

should suffer--for that I should count no wrong--but for the wrong that

I should be doing you.”

She paused as if for an answer. I had none for her. I raised my arms,

then let them fall again, and bowed my head. I heard the gentle rustle

of her robe, and I looked up to see her staggering towards the door, her

arms in front of her like one who is blind. She reached it, pulled it

open, and from the threshold gave me one last ineffable look of her

great eyes, heavy now with tears. Then the door closed again, and I was

alone.

From my heart there rose a great surge of thankfulness. I fell upon my

knees and prayed. For an hour at least I must have knelt there, seeking

grace and strength; and comforted at last, my calm restored, I rose, and

went to the window. I drew back the curtains, and leaned out to breathe

the physical calm of that tepid September night.

And presently out of the gloom a great grey shape came winging towards

the window, the heavy pinions moving ponderously with their uncanny

sough. It was an owl attracted by the light. Before that bird of evil

omen, that harbinger of death, I drew back and crossed myself. I had a

sight of its sphinx-like face and round, impassive eyes ere it circled

to melt again into the darkness, startled by any sudden movement. I

closed the window and left the room.

Very softly I crept down the passage towards my chamber, leaving the

light burning in the library, for it was not my habit to extinguish it,

and I gave no thought to the lateness of the hour.

Midway down the passage I halted. I was level with Giuliana's door, and

from under it there came a slender blade of light. But it was not this

that checked me. She was singing, Such a pitiful little heartbroken song

it was:

“Amor mi muojo; mi muojo amore mio!”

ran its last line.

I leaned against the wall, and a sob broke from me. Then, in an instant,

the passage was flooded with light, and in the open doorway Giuliana

stood all white before me, her arms held out.

CHAPTER VI. THE IRON GIRDLE

From the distance, drawing rapidly nearer and ringing sharply in the

stillness of the night, came the clatter of a mule's hooves.

But, though heard, it was scarcely heard consciously, and it certainly

went unheeded until it was beneath the window and ceasing at the door.

Giuliana's fingers locked themselves upon my arm in a grip of fear.

“Who comes?” she asked, below her breath, fearfully. I sprang from the

bed and crouched, listening, by the window, and so lost precious time.

Out of the darkness Giuliana's voice spoke again, hoarsely now and

trembling.

“It will be Astorre,” she said, with conviction. “At this hour it can

be none else. I suspected when I saw him talking to that boy at the gate

this afternoon that he was setting a spy upon me, to warn him wherever

he was lurking, did the need arise.”

“But how should the boy know...?” I began, when she interrupted me

almost impatiently.

“The boy saw Messer Gambara ride up. He waited for no more, but went at

once to warn Astorre. He has been long in coming,” she added in the tone

of one who is still searching for the exact explanation of the thing

that is happening. And then, suddenly and very urgently, “Go, go--go

quickly!” she bade me.

As in the dark I was groping my way towards the door she spoke again:

“Why does he not knock? For what does he wait?” Immediately, from

the stairs, came a terrific answer to her question--the unmistakable,

slip-slopping footstep of the doctor.

I halted, and for an instant stood powerless to move. How he had entered

I could not guess, nor did I ever discover. Sufficient was the awful

fact that he was in.

I was ice-cold from head to foot. Then I was all on fire and groping

forward once more whilst those footsteps, sinister and menacing as the

very steps of Doom, came higher and nearer.

At last I found the door and wrenched it open. I stayed to close it

after me, and already at the end of the passage beat the reflection of

the light Fifanti carried. A second I stood there hesitating which way

to turn. My first thought was to gain my own chamber. But to attempt it

were assuredly to run into his arms. So I turned, and went as swiftly

and stealthily as possible towards the library.

I was all but in when he turned the corner of the passage, and so caught

sight of me before I had closed the door.

I stood in the library, where the lamp still burned, sweating, panting,

and trembling. For even as he had had a glimpse of me, so had I had a

glimpse of him, and the sight was terrifying to one in my situation.

I had seen, his tall, gaunt figure bending forward in his eager, angry

haste. In one hand he carried a lanthorn; a naked sword in the other.

His face was malign and ghastly, and his bald, egg-like head shone

yellow. The fleeting glimpse he had of me drew from him a sound between

a roar and a snarl, and with quickened feet he came slip-slopping down

the passage.

I had meant, I think, to play the fox: to seat myself at the table, a

book before me, and feigning slumber, present the appearance of one who

had been overcome by weariness at his labours. But now all thought

of that was at an end. I had been seen, and that I fled was all too

apparent. So that in every way I was betrayed.

The thing I did, I did upon instinct rather than reason; and this again

was not well done. I slammed the door, and turned the key, placing

at least that poor barrier between myself and the man I had so deeply

wronged, the man whom I had given the right to slay me. A second later

the door shook as if a hurricane had smitten it. He had seized the

handle, and he was pulling at it frenziedly with a maniacal strength.

“Open!” he thundered, and fell to snarling and whimpering horribly.

“Open!”

Then, quite abruptly he became oddly calm. It was as if his rage grew

coldly purposeful; and the next words he uttered acted upon me as a

dagger-prod, and reawakened my mind from its momentary stupefaction.

“Do you think these poor laths can save you from my vengeance, my Lord

Gambara?” quoth he, with a chuckle horrible to hear.

My Lord Gambara! He mistook me for the Legate! In an instant I saw the

reason of this. It was as Giuliana had conceived. The boy had run to

warn him wherever he was--at Roncaglia, perhaps, a league away upon the

road to Parma. And the boy's news was that my Lord the Governor had

gone to Fifanti's house. The boy had never waited to see the Legate come

forth again; but had obeyed his instructions to the letter, and it was

Gambara whom Fifanti came to take red-handed and to kill as he had the

right to do.

When he had espied my flying shape, the length of the corridor had lain

between us, Fifanti was short-sighted, and since it was Gambara whom he

expected to find, Gambara at once he concluded it to be who fled before

him.

There was no villainy for which I was not ripe that night, it seemed.

For no sooner did I perceive this error than I set myself to scheme how

I might profit by it. Let Gambara by all means suffer in my place if

the thing could be contrived. If not in fact, at least in intent, the

Cardinal-legate had certainly sinned. If he was not in my place now,

it was through the too great good fortune that attended him. Besides,

Gambara would be in better case to protect himself from the consequences

and from Fifanti's anger.

Thus cravenly I reasoned; and reasoning thus, I reached the window. If

I could climb down to the garden, and then perhaps up again to my own

chamber, I might get me to bed, what time Fifanti still hammered at that

door. Meanwhile his voice came rasping through those slender timbers, as

he mocked the Lord Cardinal he supposed me.

“You would not be warned, my lord, and yet I warned you enough. You

would plant horns upon my head. Well, well! Do not complain if you are

gored by them.”

Then he laughed hideously. “This poor Astorre Fifanti is blind and a

fool. He is to be sent packing on a journey to the Duke, devised to suit

my Lord Cardinal's convenience. But you should have bethought you that

suspicious husbands have a trick of pretending to depart whilst they

remain.”

Next his voice swelled up again in passion, and again the door was

shaken.

“Will you open, then, or must I break down the door! There is no barrier

in the world shall keep me from you, there is no power can save you. I

have the right to kill you by every law of God and man. Shall I forgo

that right?” He laughed snarlingly.

“Three hundred ducats yearly to recompense the hospitality I have given

you--and six hundred later upon the coming of the Duke!” he mocked.

“That was the price, my lord, of my hospitality--which was to include

my wife's harlotry. Three hundred ducats! Ha! ha! Three hundred thousand

million years in Hell! That is the price, my lord--the price that you

shall pay, for I present the reckoning and enforce it. You shall be

shriven in iron--you and your wanton after you.

“Shall I be caged for having shed a prelate's sacred blood? for having

sent a prelate's soul to Hell with all its filth of sin upon it? Shall

I? Speak, magnificent; out of the fullness of your theological knowledge

inform me.”

I had listened in a sort of fascination to that tirade of venomous

mockery. But now I stirred, and pulled the casement open. I peered

down into the darkness and hesitated. The wall was creeper-clad to the

window's height; but I feared the frail tendrils of the clematis would

never bear me. I hesitated. Then I resolved to jump. It was but little

more than some twelve feet to the ground, and that was nothing to daunt

an active lad of my own build, with the soft turf to land upon below. It

should have been done without hesitation; for that moment's hesitation

was my ruin.

Fifanti had heard the opening of the casement, and fearing that, after

all, his prey might yet escape him, he suddenly charged the door like an

infuriated bull, and borrowing from his rage a strength far greater than

his usual he burst away the fastenings of that crazy door.

Into the room hurtled the doctor, to check and stand there blinking at

me, too much surprised for a moment to grasp the situation.

When, at last, he understood, the returning flow of rage was

overwhelming.

“You!” he gasped, and then his voice mounting--“You dog!” he screamed.

“So it was you! You!”

He crouched and his little eyes, all blood-injected, peered at me with

horrid malice. He grew cold again as he mastered his surprise. “You!” he

repeated. “Blind fool that I have been! You! The walker in the ways

of St. Augustine--in his early ways, I think. You saint in embryo, you

postulant for holy orders! You shall be ordained this night--with this!”

And he raised his sword so that little yellow runnels of light sped down

the livid blade.

“I will ordain you into Hell, you hound!” And thereupon he leapt at me.

I sprang away from the window, urged by fear of him into a very sudden

activity. As I crossed the room I had a glimpse of the white figure of

Giuliana in the gloom of the passage, watching.

He came after me, snarling. I seized a stool and hurled it at him. He

avoided it nimbly, and it went crashing through the half of the casement

that was still closed.

And as he avoided it, grown suddenly cunning, he turned back towards the

door to bar my exit should I attempt to lead him round the table.

We stood at gaze, the length of the little low-ceilinged chamber between

us, both of us breathing hard.

Then I looked round for something with which to defend myself; for

it was plain that he meant to have my life. By a great ill-chance it

happened that the sword which I had worn upon that day when I went as

Giuliana's escort into Piacenza was still standing in the very corner

where I had set it down. Instinctively I sprang for it, and Fifanti,

never suspecting my quest until he saw me with a naked iron in my hand,

did nothing to prevent my reaching it.

Seeing me armed, he laughed. “Ho, ho! The saint-at-arms!” he mocked.

“You'll be as skilled with weapons as with holiness!” And he advanced

upon me in long stealthy strides. The width of the table was between us,

and he smote at me across it. I parried, and cut back at him, for being

armed now, I no more feared him than I should have feared a child.

Little he knew of the swordcraft I had learnt from old Falcone, a thing

which once learnt is never forgotten though lack of exercise may make us

slow.

He cut at me again, and narrowly missed the lamp in his stroke. And now,

I can most solemnly make oath that in the thing that followed there was

no intent. It was over and done before I was conscious of the happening.

I had acted purely upon instinct as men will in performing what they

have been taught.

To ward his blow, I came almost unconsciously into that guard of

Marozzo's which is known as the iron girdle. I parried and on the stroke

I lunged, and so, taking the poor wretch entirely unawares, I sank the

half of my iron into his vitals ere he or I had any thought that the

thing was possible.

I saw his little eyes grow very wide, and the whole expression of his

face become one of intense astonishment.

He moved his lips as if to speak, and then the sword clattered from his

one hand, the lanthorn from his other; he sank forward quietly, still

looking at me with the same surprised glance, and so came further on to

my rigidly held blade, until his breast brought up against the quillons.

For a moment he remained supported thus, by just that rigid arm of mine

and the table against which his weight was leaning. Then I withdrew the

blade, and in the same movement flung the weapon from me. Before the

sword had rattled to the floor, his body had sunk down into a heap

beyond the table, so that I could see no more than the yellow, egg-like

top of his bald head.

Awhile I stood watching it, filled with an extraordinary curiosity and

a queer awe. Very slowly was it that I began to realize the thing I had

done. It might be that I had killed Fifanti. It might be. And slowly,

gradually I grew cold with the thought and the apprehension of its

horrid meaning.

Then from the passage came a stifled scream, and Giuliana staggered

forward, one hand holding flimsy draperies to her heaving bosom, the

other at her mouth, which had grown hideously loose and uncontrolled.

Her glowing copper hair, all unbound, fell about her shoulders like a

mantle.

Behind her with ashen face and trembling limbs came old Busio. He

was groaning and ringing his hands. Thus I saw the pair of them creep

forward to approach Fifanti, who had made no sound since my sword had

gone through him.

But Fifanti was no longer there to heed them--the faithful servant and

the unfaithful wife. All that remained, huddled there at the foot of the

table, was a heap of bleeding flesh and shabby garments.

It was Giuliana who gave me the information. With a courage that was

almost stupendous she looked down into his face, then up into mine,

which I doubt not was as livid.

“You have killed him,” she whispered. “He is dead.”

He was dead and I had killed him! My lips moved.

“He would have killed me,” I answered in a strangled voice, and knew

that what I said was a sort of lie to cloak the foulness of my deed.

Old Busio uttered a long, croaking wail, and went down on his knees

beside the master he had served so long--the master who would never more

need servant in this world.

It was upon the wings of that pitiful cry that the full understanding

of the thing I had done was borne in upon my soul. I bowed my head, and

took my face in my hands. I saw myself in that moment for what I was. I

accounted myself wholly and irrevocably damned, Be God never so clement,

surely here was something for which even His illimitable clemency could

find no pardon.

I had come to Fifanti's house as a student of humanities and divinities;

all that I had learnt there had been devilries culminating in this

hour's work. And all through no fault of that poor, mean, ugly pedant,

who indeed had been my victim--whom I had robbed of honour and of life.

Never man felt self-horror as I felt it then, self-loathing and

self-contempt. And then, whilst the burden of it all, the horror of

it all was full upon me, a soft hand touched my shoulder, and a soft,

quivering voice murmured urgently in my ear:

“Agostino, we must go; we must go.”

I plucked away my hands, and showed her a countenance before which she

shrank in fear.

“We?” I snarled at her. “We?” I repeated still more fiercely, and drove

her back before me as if I had done her a bodily hurt.

O, I should have imagined--had I had time in which to imagine

anything--that already I had descended to the very bottom of the pit of

infamy. But it seems that one more downward step remained me; and that

step I took. Not by act, nor yet by speech, but just by thought.

For without the manliness to take the whole blame of this great crime

upon myself, I must in my soul and mind fling the burden of it upon her.

Like Adam of old, I blamed the woman, and charged her in my thoughts

with having tempted me. Charging her thus, I loathed her as the cause of

all this sin that had engulfed me; loathed her in that moment as a thing

unclean and hideous; loathed her with a completeness of loathing such as

I had never experienced before for any fellow-creature.

Instead of beholding in her one whom I had dragged with me into my pit

of sin and whom it was incumbent upon my manhood thenceforth to shelter

and protect from the consequences of my own iniquity, I attributed to

her the blame of all that had befallen.

To-day I know that in so doing I did no more than justice. But it was

not justly done. I had then no such knowledge as I have to-day by which

to correct my judgment. The worst I had the right to think of her in

that hour was that her guilt was something less than mine. In thinking

otherwise was it that I took that last step to the very bottom of the

hell that I had myself created for myself that night.

The rest was as nothing by comparison. I have said that it was not by

act or speech that I added to the sum of my iniquities; and yet it was

by both. First, in that fiercely echoed “We?” that I hurled at her to

strike her from me; then in my precipitate flight alone.

How I stumbled from that room I scarcely know. The events of the time

that followed immediately upon Fifanti's death are all blurred as the

impressions of a sick man's dream.

I dimly remember that as she backed away from me until her shoulders

touched the wall, that as she stood so, all white and lovely as any

snare that Satan ever devised for man's ruin, staring at me with mutely

pleading eyes, I staggered forward, avoiding the sight of that dreadful

huddle on the floor, over which Busio was weeping foolishly.

As I stepped a sudden moisture struck my stockinged feet. Its nature

I knew by instinct upon the instant, and filled by it with a sudden

unreasoning terror, I dashed with a loud cry from the room.

Along the passage and down the dark stairs I plunged until I reached

the door of the house. It stood open and I went heedlessly forth. From

overhead I heard Giuliana calling me in a voice that held a note of

despair. But I never checked in my headlong career.

Fifanti's mule, I have since reflected, was tethered near the steps. I

saw the beast, but it conveyed no meaning to my mind, which I think was

numbed. I sped past it and on, through the gate, round the road by the

Po, under the walls of the city, and so away into the open country.

Without cap, without doublet, without shoes, just in my trunks and shirt

and hose, as I was, I ran, heading by instinct for home as heads the

animal that has been overtaken by danger whilst abroad. Never since

Phidippides, the Athenian courier, do I believe that any man had run as

desperately and doggedly as I ran that night.

By dawn, having in some three hours put twenty miles or so between

myself and Piacenza, I staggered exhausted and with cut and bleeding

feet through the open door of a peasant's house.

The family, sat at breakfast in the stone-flagged room into which I

stumbled. I halted under their astonished eyes.

“I am the Lord of Mondolfo,” I panted hoarsely, “and I need a beast to

carry me home.”

The head of that considerable family, a grizzled, suntanned peasant,

rose from his seat and pondered my condition with a glance that was

laden with mistrust.

“The Lord of Mondolfo--you, thus?” quoth he. “Now, by Bacchus, I am the

Pope of Rome!”

But his wife, more tender-hearted, saw in my disorder cause for pity

rather than irony.

“Poor lad!” she murmured, as I staggered and fell into a chair, unable

longer to retain my feet. She rose immediately, and came hurrying

towards me with a basin of goat's milk. The draught refreshed my body as

her gentle words of comfort soothed my troubled soul. Seated there, her

stout arm about my shoulders, my head pillowed upon her ample, motherly

breast, I was very near to tears, loosened in my overwrought state by

the sweet touch of sympathy, for which may God reward her.

I rested in that place awhile. Three hours I slept upon a litter of

straw in an outhouse; whereupon, strengthened by my repose, I renewed my

claim to be the Lord of Mondolfo and my demand for a horse to carry me

to my fortress.

Still doubting me too much to trust me alone with any beast of his, the

peasant nevertheless fetched out a couple of mules and set out with me

for Mondolfo.

BOOK III. THE WILDERNESS

CHAPTER I. THE HOME-COMING

It was still early morning when we came into the town of Mondolfo, my

peasant escort and I.

The day being Sunday there was little stir in the town at such an hour,

and it presented a very different appearance from that which it had worn

when last I had seen it. But the difference lay not only in the absence

of bustle and the few folk abroad now as compared with that market-day

on which, departing, I had ridden through it. I viewed the place to-day

with eyes that were able to draw comparisons, and after the wide streets

and imposing buildings of Piacenza, I found my little township mean and

rustic.

We passed the Duomo, consecrated to Our Lady of Mondolfo. Its

portals stood wide, and in the opening swung a heavy crimson curtain,

embroidered with a huge golden cross which was bellying outward like an

enormous gonfalon. On the steps a few crippled beggars whined, and a few

faithful took their way to early Mass.

On, up the steep, ill-paved street we climbed to the mighty grey citadel

looming on the hill's crest, like a gigantic guardian brooding over the

city of his trust. We crossed the drawbridge unchallenged, passed under

the tunnel of the gateway, and so came into the vast, untenanted bailey

of the fortress.

I looked about me, beat my hands together, and raised my voice to shout

“Ola! Ola!”

In answer to my call the door of the guardhouse opened presently, and

a man looked out. He frowned at first; then his brows went up and his

mouth fell open.

“It is the Madonnino!” he shouted over his shoulder, and hurried forward

to take my reins, uttering words of respectful welcome, which seemed to

relieve the fears of my peasant, who had never quite believed me what I

proclaimed myself.

There was a stir in the guardhouse, and two or three men of the absurd

garrison my mother kept there shuffled in the doorway, whilst a burly

fellow in leather with a sword girt on him thrust his way through

and hurried forward, limping slightly. In the dark, lowering face

I recognized my old friend Rinolfo, and I marvelled to see him thus

accoutred.

He halted before me, and gave me a stiff and unfriendly salute; then he

bade the man-at-arms to hold my stirrup.

“What is your authority here, Rinolfo?” I asked him shortly.

I am the castellan,” he informed me.

“The castellan? But what of Messer Giorgio?”

“He died a month ago.”

“And who gave you this authority?”

“Madonna the Countess, in some recompense for the hurt you did me,” he

replied, thrusting forward his lame leg.

His tone was surly and hostile; but it provoked no resentment in me

now. I deserved his unfriendliness. I had crippled him. At the moment I

forgot the provocation I had received--forgot that since he had raised

his hand to his lord, it would have been no great harshness to have

hanged him. I saw in him but another instance of my wickedness, another

sufferer at my hands; and I hung my head under the rebuke implicit in

his surly tone and glance.

“I had not thought, Rinolfo, to do you an abiding hurt,” said I, and

here checked, bethinking me that I lied; for had I not expressed regret

that I had not broken his neck?

I got down slowly and painfully, for my limbs were stiff and my feet

very sore. He smiled darkly at my words and my sudden faltering; but I

affected not to see.

“Where is Madonna?” I asked.

“She will have returned by now from chapel,” he answered.

I turned to the man-at-arms. “You will announce me,” I bade him. “And

you, Rinolfo, see to these beasts and to this good fellow here. Let him

have wine and food and what he needs. I will see him again ere he sets

forth.”

Rinolfo muttered that all should be done as I ordered, and I signed to

the man-at-arms to lead the way.

We went up the steps and into the cool of the great hall. There the

soldier, whose every feeling had been outraged no doubt by Rinolfo's

attitude towards his lord, ventured to express his sympathy and

indignation.

“Rinolfo is a black beast, Madonnino,” he muttered.

“We are all black beasts, Eugenio,” I answered heavily, and so startled

him by words and tone that he ventured upon no further speech, but led

me straight to my mother's private dining-room, opened the door and

calmly announced me.

“Madonna, here is my Lord Agostino.”

I heard the gasp she uttered before I caught sight of her. She was

seated at the table's head in her great wooden chair, and Fra Gervasio

was pacing the rush-strewn floor in talk with her, his hands behind his

back, his head thrust forward.

At the announcement he straightened suddenly and wheeled round to face

me, inquiry in his glance. My mother, too, half rose, and remained

so, staring at me, her amazement at seeing me increased by the strange

appearance I presented.

Eugenio closed the door and departed, leaving me standing there, just

within it; and for a moment no word was spoken.

The cheerless, familiar room, looking more cheerless than it had done

of old, with its high-set windows and ghastly Crucifix, affected me in

a singular manner. In this room I had known a sort of peace--the peace

that is peculiarly childhood's own, whatever the troubles that may haunt

it. I came into it now with hell in my soul, sin-blackened before God

and man, a fugitive in quest of sanctuary.

A knot rose in my throat and paralysed awhile my speech. Then with a

sudden sob, I sprang forward and hobbled to her upon my wounded feet. I

flung myself down upon my knees, buried my head in her lap, and all that

I could cry was:

“Mother! Mother!”

Whether perceiving my disorder, my distraught and suffering condition,

what remained of the woman in her was moved to pity; whether my cry

acting like a rod of Moses upon that rock of her heart which excess of

piety had long since sterilized, touched into fresh life the springs

that had long since been dry, and reminded her of the actual bond

between us, her tone was more kindly and gentle than I had ever known

it.

“Agostino, my child! Why are you here?” And her wax-like fingers very

gently touched my head. “Why are you here--and thus? What has happened

to you?”

“Me miserable!” I groaned.

“What is it?” she pressed me, an increasing anxiety in her voice.

At last I found courage to tell her sufficient to prepare her mind.

“Mother, I am a sinner,” I faltered miserably.

I felt her recoiling from me as from the touch of something unclean and

contagious, her mind conceiving already by some subtle premonition some

shadow of the thing that I had done. And then Gervasio spoke, and his

voice was soothing as oil upon troubled waters.

“Sinners are we all, Agostino. But repentance purges sin. Do not abandon

yourself to despair, my son.”

But the mother who bore me took no such charitable and Christian view.

“What is it? Wretched boy, what have you done?” And the cold repugnance

in her voice froze anew the courage I was forming.

“O God help me! God help me!” I groaned miserably.

Gervasio, seeing my condition, with that quick and saintly sympathy that

was his, came softly towards me and set a hand upon my shoulder.

“Dear Agostino,” he murmured, “would you find it easier to tell me

first? Will you confess to me, my son? Will you let me lift this burden

from your soul?”

Still on my knees I turned and looked up into that pale, kindly face.

I caught his thin hand, and kissed it ere he could snatch it away.

“If there were more priests like you,” I cried, “there would be fewer

sinners like me.”

A shadow crossed his face; he smiled very wanly, a smile that was like a

gleam of pale sunshine from an over-clouded sky, and he spoke in gentle,

soothing words of the Divine Mercy.

I staggered to my bruised feet. “I will confess to you, Fra Gervasio,” I

said, “and afterwards we will tell my mother.”

She looked as she would make demur. But Fra Gervasio checked any such

intent.

“It is best so, Madonna,” he said gravely. “His most urgent need is the

consolation that the Church alone can give.”

He took me by the arm very gently, and led me forth. We went to his

modest chamber, with its waxed floor, the hard, narrow pallet upon

which he slept, the blue and gold image of the Virgin, and the little

writing-pulpit upon which lay open a manuscript he was illuminating,

for he was very skilled in that art which already was falling into

desuetude.

At this pulpit, by the window, he took his seat, and signed to me to

kneel. I recited the Confiteor. Thereafter, with my face buried in my

hands, my soul writhing in an agony of penitence and shame, I poured out

the hideous tale of the evil I had wrought.

Rarely did he speak while I was at that recitation. Save when I halted

or hesitated he would interject a word of pity and of comfort that fell

like a blessed balsam upon my spiritual wounds and gave me strength to

pursue my awful story.

When I had done and he knew me to the full for the murderer and

adulterer that I was, there fell a long pause, during which I waited as

a felon awaits sentence. But it did not come. Instead, he set himself

to examine more closely the thing I had told him. He probed it with

a question here and a question there, and all of a shrewdness that

revealed the extent of his knowledge of humanity, and the infinite

compassion and gentleness that must be the inevitable fruits of such sad

knowledge.

He caused me to go back to the very day of my arrival at Fifanti's; and

thence, step by step, he led me again over the road that in the past

four months I had trodden, until he had traced the evil to its very

source, and could see the tiny spring that had formed the brook which,

gathering volume as it went, had swollen at last into a raging torrent

that had laid waste its narrow confines.

“Who that knows all that goes to the making of a sin shall dare to

condemn a sinner?” he cried at last, so that I looked up at him,

startled, and penetrated by a ray of hope and comfort. He returned my

glance with one of infinite pity.

“It is the woman here upon whom must fall the greater blame,” said he.

But at that I cried out in hot remonstrance, adding that I had yet

another vileness to confess--for it was now that for the first time I

realized it. And I related to him how last night I had repudiated her,

cast her off and fled, leaving her to bear the punishment alone.

Of my conduct in that he withheld his criticism. “The sin is hers,” he

repeated. “She was a wife, and the adultery is hers. More, she was the

seducer. It was she who debauched your mind with lascivious readings,

and tore away the foundations of virtue from your soul. If in the

cataclysm that followed she was crushed and smothered, it is no more

than she had incurred.”

I still protested that this view was all too lenient to me, that it

sprang of his love for me, that it was not just. Thereupon he began to

make clear to me many things that may have been clear to you worldly

ones who have read my scrupulous and exact confessions, but which at the

time were still all wrapped in obscurity for me.

It was as if he held up a mirror--an intelligent and informing

mirror--in which my deeds were reflected by the light of his own deep

knowledge. He showed me the gradual seduction to which I had been

subjected; he showed me Giuliana as she really was, as she must be from

what I had told him; he reminded me that she was older by ten years than

I, and greatly skilled in men and worldliness; that where I had gone

blindly, never seeing what was the inevitable goal and end of the road

I trod, she had consciously been leading me thither, knowing full well

what the end must be, and desiring it.

As for the murder of Fifanti, the thing was grievous; but it had been

done in the heat of combat, and he could not think that I had meant the

poor man's death. And Fifanti himself was not entirely without blame.

Largely had he contributed to the tragedy. There had been evil in his

heart. A good man would have withdrawn his wife from surroundings which

he knew to be perilous and foul, not used her as a decoy to enable him

to trap and slay his enemy.

And the greatest blame of all he attached to that Messer Arcolano who

had recommended Fifanti to my mother as a tutor for me, knowing full

well--as he must have known--what manner of house the doctor kept

and what manner of wanton was Giuliana. Arcolano had sought to serve

Fifanti's interests in pretending to serve mine and my mother's; and my

mother should be enlightened that at last she might know that evil man

for what he really was.

“But all this,” he concluded, “does not mean, Agostino, that you are

to regard yourself as other than a great sinner. You have sinned

monstrously, even when all these extenuations are considered.”

“I know, I know!” I groaned.

“But beyond forgiveness no man has ever sinned, nor have you now. So

that your repentance is deep and real, and when by some penance that

I shall impose you shall have cleansed yourself of all this mire that

clings to your poor soul, you shall have absolution from me.”

“Impose your penance,” I cried eagerly. “There is none I will not

undertake, to purchase pardon and some little peace of mind.

“I will consider it,” he answered gravely. “And now let us seek your

mother. She must be told, for a great deal hangs upon this, Agostino.

The career to which you were destined is no longer for you, my son.”

My spirit quailed under those last words; and yet I felt an immense

relief at the same time, as if some overwhelming burden had been lifted

from me.

“I am indeed unworthy,” I said.

“It is not your unworthiness that I am considering, my son, but your

nature. The world calls you over-strongly. It is not for nothing that

you are the child of Giovanni d'Anguissola. His blood runs thick in your

veins, and it is very human blood. For such as you there is no hope

in the cloister. Your mother must be made to realize it, and she must

abandon her dreams concerning you. It will wound her very sorely. But

better that than...” He shrugged and rose. “Come, Agostino.”

And I rose, too, immensely comforted and soothed already, for all that

I was yet very far from ease or peace of mind. Outside his room he set a

hand upon my arm.

“Wait,” he said, “we have ministered in some degree to your poor spirit.

Let us take thought for the body, too. You need garments and other

things. Come with me.”

He led me up to my own little chamber, took fresh raiment for me from

a press, called Lorenza and bade her bring bread and wine, vinegar and

warm water.

In a very weak dilution of the latter he bade me bathe my lacerated

feet, and then he found fine strips of linen in which to bind them ere I

drew fresh hose and shoes. And meanwhile munching my bread and salt and

taking great draughts of the pure if somewhat sour wine, my mental peace

was increased by the refreshment of my body.

At last I stood up more myself than I had been in these last twelve

awful hours--for it was just noon, and into twelve hours had been packed

the events that well might have filled a lifetime.

He put an arm about my shoulder, fondly as a father might have done, and

so led me below again and into my mother's presence.

We found her kneeling before the Crucifix, telling her beads; and we

stood waiting a few moments in silence until with a sigh and a rustle of

her stiff black dress she rose gently and turned to face us.

My heart thudded violently in that moment, as I looked into that pale

face of sorrow. Then Fra Gervasio began to speak very gently and softly.

“Your son, Madonna, has been lured into sin by a wanton woman,” he

began, and there she interrupted him with a sudden and very piteous cry.

“Not that! Ah, not that!” she exclaimed, putting out hands gropingly

before her.

“That and more, Madonna,” he answered gravely. “Be brave to hear the

rest. It is a very piteous story. But the founts of Divine Mercy are

inexhaustible, and Agostino shall drink therefrom when by penitence he

shall have cleansed his lips.”

Very erect she stood there, silent and ghostly, her face looking

diaphanous by contrast with the black draperies that enshrouded her,

whilst her eyes were great pools of sorrow. Poor, poor mother! It is the

last recollection I have of her; for after that day we never met again,

and I would give ten years to purgatory if I might recall the last words

that passed between us.

As briefly as possible and ever thrusting into the foreground the

immensity of the snare that had been spread for me and the temptation

that had enmeshed me, Gervasio told her the story of my sin.

She heard him through in that immovable attitude, one hand pressed to

her heart, her poor pale lips moving now and again, but no sound coming

from them, her face a white mask of pain and horror.

When he had done, so wrought upon was I by the sorrow of that

countenance that I went forward again to fling myself upon my knees

before her.

“Mother, forgive!” I pleaded. And getting no answer I put up my hands to

take hers. “Mother!” I cried, and the tears were streaming down my face.

But she recoiled before me.

“Are you my child?” she asked in a voice of horror. “Are you the thing

that has grown out of that little child I vowed to chastity and to

God? Then has my sin overtaken me--the sin of bearing a son to Giovanni

d'Anguissola, that enemy of God!”

“Ah, mother, mother!” I cried again, thinking perhaps by that

all-powerful word to move her yet to pity and to gentleness.

“Madonna,” cried Gervasio, “be merciful if you would look for mercy.”

“He has falsified my vows,” she answered stonily. “He was my votive

offering for the life of his impious father. I am punished for the

unworthiness of my offering and the unworthiness of the cause in which I

offered it. Accursed is the fruit of my womb!” She moaned, and sank her

head upon her breast.

“I will atone!” I cried, overwhelmed to see her so distraught.

She wrung her pale hands.

“Atone!” she cried, and her voice trembled. “Go then, and atone. But

never let me see you more; never let me be reminded of the sinner to

whom I have given life. Go! Begone!” And she raised a hand in tragical

dismissal.

I shrank back, and came slowly to my feet. And then Gervasio spoke, and

his voice boomed and thundered with righteous indignation.

“Madonna, this is inhuman!” he denounced. “Shall you dare to hope for

mercy being yourself unmerciful?”

“I shall pray for strength to forgive him; but the sight of him might

tempt me back with the memory of the thing that he has done,” she

answered, and she had returned to that cold and terrible reserve of

hers.

And then things that Fra Gervasio had repressed for years welled up in a

mighty flood. “He is your son, and he is as you have made him.”

“As I have made him?” quoth she, and her glance challenged the friar.

“By what right did you make of him a votive offering? By what right

did you seek to consecrate a child unborn to a claustral life without

thought of his character, without reck of the desires that should be

his? By what right did you make yourself the arbiter of the future of a

man unborn?”

“By what right?” quoth she. “Are you a priest, and do you ask me by what

right I vowed him to the service of God?”

“And is there, think you, no way of serving God but in the sterility of

the cloister?” he demanded. “Why, since no man is born to damnation,

and since by your reasoning the world must mean damnation, then all men

should be encloistered, and soon, thus, there would be an end to man.

You are too arrogant, Madonna, when you presume to judge what pleases

God. Beware lest you fall into the sin of the Pharisee, for often have I

seen you stand in danger of it.”

She swayed as if her strength were failing her, and again her pale lips

moved.

“Enough, Fra Gervasio! I will go,” I cried.

“Nay, it is not yet enough,” he answered, and strode down the room until

he stood between her and me. “He is what you have made him,” he repeated

in denunciation. “Had you studied his nature and his inclinations, had

you left them free to develop along the way that God intended, you would

have seen whether or not the cloister called him; and then would have

been the time to have taken a resolve. But you thought to change his

nature by repressing it; and you never saw that if he was not such as

you would have him be, then most surely would you doom him to damnation

by making an evil priest of him.

“In your Pharisaic arrogance, Madonna, you sought to superimpose your

will to God's will concerning him--you confounded God's will with your

own. And so his sins recoil upon you as much as upon any. Therefore,

Madonna, do I bid you beware. Take a humbler view if you would be

acceptable in the Divine sight. Learn to forgive, for I say to you

to-day that you stand as greatly in need of forgiveness for the thing

that Agostino has done, as does Agostino himself.”

He paused at last, and stood trembling before her, his eyes aflame, his

high cheek-bones faintly tinted. And she measured him very calmly and

coldly with her sombre eyes.

“Are you a priest?” she asked with steady scorn. “Are you indeed a

priest?” And then her invective was loosened, and her voice shrilled and

mounted as her anger swayed her. “What a snake have I harboured here!”

she cried. “Blasphemer! You show me clearly whence came the impiety and

ungodliness of Giovanni d'Anguissola. It had the same source as your

own. It was suckled at your mother's breast.”

A sob shook him. “My mother is dead, Madonna!” he rebuked her.

“She is more blessed, then, than I; since she has not lived to see what

a power for sin she has brought forth. Go, pitiful friar. Go, both of

you. You are very choicely mated. Begone from Mondolfo, and never let me

see either of you more.”

She staggered to her great chair and sank into it, whilst we stood

there, mute, regarding her. For myself, it was with difficulty that I

repressed the burning things that rose to my lips. Had I given free rein

to my tongue, I had made of it a whip of scorpions. And my anger sprang

not from the things she said to me, but from what she said to that

saintly man who held out a hand to help me out of the morass of sin in

which I was being sunk. That he, that sweet and charitable follower of

his Master, should be abused by her, should be dubbed blasphemer

and have the cherished memory of his mother defiled by her pietistic

utterances, was something that inflamed me horribly.

But he set a hand upon my shoulder.

“Come, Agostino,” he said very gently. He was calm once more. “We will

go, as we are bidden, you and I.”

And then, out of the sweetness of his nature, he forged all unwittingly

the very iron that should penetrate most surely into her soul.

“Forgive her, my son. Forgive her as you need forgiveness. She does not

understand the thing she does. Come, we will pray for her, that God in

His infinite mercy may teach her humility and true knowledge of Him.”

I saw her start as if she had been stung.

“Blasphemer, begone!” she cried again; and her voice was hoarse with

suppressed anger.

And then the door was suddenly flung open, and Rinolfo clanked in, very

martial and important, his hand thrusting up his sword behind him.

“Madonna,” he announced, “the Captain of Justice from Piacenza is here.”

CHAPTER II. THE CAPTAIN OF JUSTICE

There was a moment's silence after Rinolfo had flung that announcement.

“The Captain of Justice?” quoth my mother at length, her voice startled.

“What does he seek?”

“The person of my Lord Agostino d'Anguissola,” said Rinolfo steadily.

She sighed very heavily. “A felon's end!” she murmured, and turned to

me. “If thus you may expiate your sins,” she said, speaking more gently,

“let the will of Heaven be done. Admit the captain, Ser Rinolfo.”

He bowed, and turned sharply to depart.

“Stay!” I cried, and rooted him there by the imperative note of my

command.

Fra Gervasio was more than right when he said that mine was not a nature

for the cloister. In that moment I might have realized it to the full by

the readiness with which the thought of battle occurred to me, and more

by the anticipatory glow that warmed me at the very thought of it. I was

the very son of Giovanni d'Anguissola.

“What force attends the captain?” I inquired.

“He has six mounted men with him,” replied Rinolfo. “In that case,” I

answered, “you will bid him begone in my name.”

“And if he should not go?” was Rinolfo's impudent question.

“You will tell him that I will drive him hence--him and his braves. We

keep a garrison of a score of men at least--sufficient to compel him to

depart.”

“He will return again with more,” said Rinolfo.

“Does that concern you?” I snapped. “Let him return with what he

pleases. To-day I enrol more forces from the countryside, take up the

bridge and mount our cannon. This is my lair and fortress, and I'll

defend it and myself as becomes my name and blood. For I am the lord and

master here, and the Lord of Mondolfo is not to be dragged away thus at

the heels of a Captain of Justice. You have my orders, obey them. About

it, sir.”

Circumstances had shown me the way that I must take, and the folly of

going forth a fugitive outcast at my mother's bidding. I was Lord of

Mondolfo, as I had said, and they should know and feel it from this

hour--all of them, not excepting my mother.

But I reckoned without the hatred Rinolfo bore me. Instead of the prompt

obedience that I had looked for, he had turned again to my mother.

“Is it your wish, Madonna?” he inquired.

“It is my wish that counts, you knave,” I thundered and advanced upon

him.

But he fronted me intrepidly. “I hold my office from my Lady the

Countess. I obey none other here.”

“Body of God! Do you defy me?” I cried. “Am I Lord of Mondolfo, or am

I a lackey in my own house? You'ld best obey me ere I break you, Ser

Rinolfo. We shall see whether the men will take my orders,” I added

confidently.

The faintest smile illumined his dark face. “The men will not stir a

finger at the bidding of any but Madonna the Countess and myself,” he

answered hardily.

It was by an effort that I refrained from striking him. And then my

mother spoke again.

“It is as Ser Rinolfo says,” she informed me. “So cease this futile

resistance, sir son, and accept the expiation that is offered you.”

I looked at her, she avoiding my glance.

“Madonna, I cannot think that it is so,” said I. “These men have known

me since I was a little lad. Many of them have followed the fortunes of

my father. They'll never turn their backs upon his son in the hour of

his need. They are not all so inhuman as my mother.”

“You mistake, sir,” said Rinolfo. “Of the men you knew but one or two

remain. Most of our present force has been enrolled by me in the past

month.”

This was defeat, utter and pitiful. His tone was too confident, he was

too sure of his ground to leave me a doubt as to what would befall if

I made appeal to his knavish followers. My arms fell to my sides, and I

looked at Gervasio. His face was haggard, and his eyes were very full of

sorrow as they rested on me.

“It is true, Agostino,” he said.

And as he spoke, Rinolfo limped out of the room to fetch the Captain of

Justice, as my mother had bidden him; and his lips smiled cruelly.

“Madam mother,” I said bitterly, “you do a monstrous thing. You usurp

the power that is mine, and you deliver me--me, your son--to the

gallows. I hope that, hereafter, when you come to realize to the full

your deed, you will be able to give your conscience peace.”

“My first duty is to God,” she answered; and to that pitiable answer

there was nothing to be rejoined.

So I turned my shoulder to her and stood waiting, Fra Gervasio beside

me, clenching his hands in his impotence and mute despair. And then an

approaching clank of mail heralded the coming of the captain.

Rinolfo held the door, and Cosimo d'Anguissola entered with a firm,

proud tread, two of his men, following at his heels.

He wore a buff-coat, under which no doubt there would be a shirt of

mail; his gorget and wristlets were of polished steel, and his headgear

was a steel cap under a cover of peach-coloured velvet. Thigh-boots

encased his legs; sword and dagger hung in the silver carriages at his

belt; his handsome, aquiline face was very solemn.

He bowed profoundly to my mother, who rose to respond, and then he

flashed me one swift glance of his piercing eyes.

“I deplore my business here,” he announced shortly. “No doubt it will be

known to you already.” And he looked at me again, allowing his eyes to

linger on my face.

“I am ready, sir,” I said.

“Then we had best be going, for I understand that none could be less

welcome here than I. Yet in this, Madonna, let me assure you that there

is nothing personal to myself. I am the slave of my office. I do but

perform it.”

“So much protesting where no doubt has been expressed,” said Fra

Gervasio, “in itself casts a doubt upon your good faith. Are you not

Cosimo d'Anguissola--my lord's cousin and heir?”

“I am,” said he, “yet that has no part in this, sir friar.”

“Then let it have part. Let it have the part it should have. Will you

bear one of your own name and blood to the gallows? What will men say of

that when they perceive your profit in the deed?”

Cosimo looked him boldly between the eyes, his hawk-face very white.

“Sir priest, I know not by what right you address me so. But you do

me wrong. I am the Podesta of Piacenza bound by an oath that it would

dishonour me to break; and break it I must or else fulfil my duty here.

Enough!” he added, in his haughty, peremptory fashion. “Ser Agostino, I

await your pleasure.”

“I will appeal to Rome,” cried Fra Gervasio, now beside himself with

grief.

Cosimo smiled darkly, pityingly. “It is to be feared that Rome will turn

a deaf ear to appeals on behalf of the son of Giovanni d'Anguissola.”

And with that he motioned me to precede him. Silently I pressed Fra

Gervasio's hand, and on that departed without so much as another look at

my mother, who sat there a silent witness of a scene which she approved.

The men-at-arms fell into step, one on either side of me, and so we

passed out into the courtyard, where Cosimo's other men were waiting,

and where was gathered the entire family of the castle--a gaping, rather

frightened little crowd.

They brought forth a mule for me, and I mounted. Then suddenly there was

Fra Gervasio at my side again.

“I, too, am going hence,” he said. “Be of good courage, Agostino. There

is no effort I will not make on your behalf.” In a broken voice he added

his farewells ere he stood back at the captain's peremptory bidding. The

little troop closed round me, and thus, within a couple of hours of my

coming, I departed again from Mondolfo, surrendered to the hangman

by the pious hands of my mother, who on her knees, no doubt, would be

thanking God for having afforded her the grace to act in so righteous a

manner.

Once only did my cousin address me, and that was soon after we had left

the town behind us. He motioned the men away, and rode to my side. Then

he looked at me with mocking, hating eyes.

“You had done better to have continued in your saint's trade than have

become so very magnificent a sinner,” said he.

I did not answer him, and he rode on beside me in silence some little

way.

“Ah, well,” he sighed at last. “Your course has been a brief one, but

very eventful. And who would have suspected so very fierce a wolf under

so sheepish an outside? Body of God! You fooled us all, you and that

white-faced trull.”

He said it through his teeth with such a concentration of rage in his

tones that it was easy to guess where the sore rankled.

I looked at him gravely. “Does it become you, sir, do you think, to gird

at one who is your prisoner?”

“And did you not gird at me when it was your turn?” he flashed back

fiercely. “Did not you and she laugh together over that poor, fond fool

Cosimo whose money she took so very freely, and yet who seems to have

been the only one excluded from her favours?”

“You lie, you dog!” I blazed at him, so fiercely that the men turned in

their saddles. He paled, and half raised the gauntleted hand in which he

carried his whip. But he controlled himself, and barked an order to his

followers:

“Ride on, there!”

When they had drawn off a little, and we were alone again, “I do not

lie, sir,” he said. “It is a practice which I leave to shavelings of all

degrees.”

“If you say that she took aught from you, then you lie,” I repeated.

He considered me steadily. “Fool!” he said at last. “Whence else

came her jewels and fine clothes? From Fifanti, do you think--that

impecunious pedant? Or perhaps you imagine that it was from Gambara?

In time that grasping prelate might have made the Duke pay. But pay,

himself? By the Blood of God! he was never known to pay for anything.

“Or, yet again, do you suppose her finery was afforded her by

Caro?--Messer Annibale Caro--who is so much in debt that he is never

like to return to Piacenza, unless some dolt of a patron rewards him for

his poetaster's labours.

“No, no, my shaveling. It was I who paid--I who was the fool. God! I

more than suspected the others. But you. You saint... You!”

He flung up his head, and laughed bitterly and unpleasantly. “Ah,

well!” he ended, “You are to pay, though in different kind. It is in the

family, you see.” And abruptly raising his voice he shouted to the men

to wait.

Thereafter he rode ahead, alone and gloomy, whilst no less alone and

gloomy rode I amid my guards. The thing he had revealed to me had torn

away a veil from my silly eyes. It had made me understand a hundred

little matters that hitherto had been puzzling me. And I saw how utterly

and fatuously blind I had been to things which even Fra Gervasio had

apprehended from just the relation he had drawn from me.

It was as we were entering Piacenza by the Gate of San Lazzaro that I

again drew my cousin to my side.

“Sir Captain!” I called to him, for I could not bring myself to address

him as cousin now. He came, inquiry in his eyes.

“Where is she now?” I asked.

He stared at me a moment, as if my effrontery astonished him. Then

he shrugged and sneered. “I would I knew for certain,” was his fierce

answer. “I would I knew. Then should I have the pair of you.” And I saw

it in his face how unforgivingly he hated me out of his savage jealousy.

“My Lord Gambara might tell you. I scarcely doubt it. Were I but

certain, what a reckoning should I not present! He may be Governor of

Piacenza, but were he Governor of Hell he should not escape me.” And

with that he rode ahead again, and left me.

The rumour of our coming sped through the streets ahead of us, and out

of the houses poured the townsfolk to watch our passage and to point me

out one to another with many whisperings and solemn head-waggings. And

the farther we advanced, the greater was the concourse, until by the

time we reached the square before the Communal Palace we found there

what amounted to a mob awaiting us.

My guards closed round me as if to protect me from that crowd. But I

was strangely without fear, and presently I was to see how little cause

there was for any, and to realize that the action of my guards was

sprung from a very different motive.

The people stood silent, and on every upturned face of which I caught a

glimpse I saw something that was akin to pity. Presently, however, as we

drew nearer to the Palace, a murmur began to rise. It swelled and grew

fierce. Suddenly a cry rose vehement and clear.

“Rescue! Rescue!”

“He is the Lord of Mondolfo,” shouted one tall fellow, “and the

Cardinal-legate makes a cat's-paw of him! He is to suffer for Messer

Gambara's villainy!”

Again he was answered by the cry--“Rescue! Rescue!” whilst some added an

angry--“Death to the Legate!”

Whilst I was deeply marvelling at all this, Cosimo looked at me over

his shoulder, and though his lips were steady, his eyes seemed to smile,

charged with a message of derision--and something more, something that I

could not read. Then I heard his hard, metallic voice.

“Back there, you curs! To your kennels! Out of the way, or we ride you

down.”

He had drawn his sword, and his white hawk-face was so cruel and

determined that they fell away before him and their cries died down.

We passed into the courtyard of the Communal Palace, and the great

studded gates were slammed in the faces of the mob, and barred.

I got down from my mule, and was conducted at Cosimo's bidding to one

of the dungeons under the Palace, where I was left with the announcement

that I must present myself to-morrow before the Tribunal of the Ruota.

I flung myself down upon the dried rushes that had been heaped in

a corner to do duty for a bed, and I abandoned myself to my bitter

thoughts. In particular I pondered the meaning of the crowd's strange

attitude. Nor was it a riddle difficult to resolve. It was evident that

believing Gambara, as they did, to be Giuliana's lover, and informed

perhaps--invention swelling rumour as it will--that the Cardinal-legate

had ridden late last night to Fifanti's house, it had been put about

that the foul murder done there was Messer Gambara's work.

Thus was the Legate reaping the harvest of all the hatred he had sown,

of all the tyranny and extortion of his iron rule in Piacenza. And

willing to believe any evil of the man they hated, they not only laid

Fifanti's death at his door, but they went to further lengths and

accounted that I was the cat's-paw; that I was to be sacrificed to save

the Legate's face and reputation. They remembered perhaps the ill-odour

in which we Anguissola of Mondolfo had been at Rome, for the ghibelline

leanings that ever had been ours and for the rebellion of my father

against the Pontifical sway; and their conclusions gathered a sort of

confirmation from that circumstance.

Long upon the very edge of mutiny and revolt against Gambara's

injustice, it had needed but what seemed a crowning one such as this to

quicken their hatred into expression.

It was all very clear and obvious, and it seemed to me that to-morrow's

trial should be very interesting. I had but to deny; I had but to make

myself the mouthpiece of the rumour that was abroad, and Heaven alone

could foretell what the consequences might be.

Then I smiled bitterly to myself. Deny? O, no! That was a last vileness

I could not perpetrate. The Ruota should hear the truth, and Gambara

should be left to shelter Giuliana, who--Cosimo was assured--had fled to

him in her need as to a natural protector.

It was a bitter thought. The intensity of that bitterness made me

realize with alarm how it still was with me. And pondering this, I fell

asleep, utterly worn out in body and in mind by the awful turmoil of

that day.

CHAPTER III. GAMBARA'S INTERESTS

I awakened to find a man standing beside me. He was muffled in a black

cloak and carried a lanthorn. Behind him the door gaped as he had left

it.

Instantly I sat up, conscious of my circumstance and surroundings, and

at my movement this visitor spoke.

“You sleep very soundly for a man in your case.” said he, and the voice

was that of my Lord Gambara, its tone quite coldly critical.

He set down the lanthorn on a stool, whence it shed a wheel of yellow

light intersected with black beams. His cloak fell apart, and I saw that

he was dressed for riding, very plainly, in sombre garments, and that he

was armed.

He stood slightly to one side that the light might fall upon my face,

leaving his own in shadow; thus he considered me for some moments in

silence. At last, very slowly, very bitterly, shaking his head as he

spoke.

“You fool, you clumsy fool!” he said.

Having drawn, as you have seen, my own conclusions from the attitude of

the mob, I was in little doubt as to the precise bearing of his words.

I answered him sincerely. “If folly were all my guilt,” said I, “it

would be well.”

He sniffed impatiently. “Still sanctimonious!” he sneered. “Tcha! Up

now, and play the man, at least. You have shed your robe of sanctity,

Messer Agostino; have done with pretence!”

“I do not pretend,” I answered him. “And as for playing the man, I shall

accept what punishment the law may have for me with fortitude at least.

If I can but expiate...”

“Expiate a fig!” he snapped, interrupting me. “Why do you suppose that I

am here?”

“I wait to learn.”

“I am here because through your folly you have undone us all. What

need,” he cried, the anger of expostulation quivering in his voice,

“what need was there to kill that oaf Fifanti?”

“He would have killed me,” said I. “I slew him in self-defence.”

“Ha! And do you hope to save your neck with such a plea?”

“Nay. I have no thought of urging it. I but tell it you.”

“There is not the need to tell me anything,” he answered, his anger

very plain. “I am very well informed of all. Rather, let me tell you

something. Do you realize, sir, that you have made it impossible for me

to abide another day in Piacenza?”

“I am sorry...” I began lamely.

“Present your regrets to Satan,” he snapped. “Me they avail nothing.

I am put to the necessity of abandoning my governorship and fleeing by

night like a hunted thief. And I have you to thank for it. You see me on

the point of departure. My horses wait above. So you may add my ruin to

the other fine things you accomplished yesternight. For a saint you are

over-busy, sir.” And he turned away and strode the length of my cell and

back, so that, at last, I had a glimpse of his face, which was drawn and

scowling. Gone now was the last vestige of his habitual silkiness; the

pomander-ball hung neglected, and his delicate fingers tugged viciously

at his little pointed beard, his great sapphire ring flashing sombrely.

“Look you, Ser Agostino, I could kill you and take joy in it. I could,

by God!”

His eyes upon me, he drew from his breast a folded paper. “Instead, I

bring you liberty. I open your doors for you, and bid you escape. Here,

man, take this paper. Present it to the officer at the Fodesta Gate.

He will let you pass. And then away with you, out of the territory of

Piacenza.”

For an instant my heart-beats seemed suspended by astonishment. I swung

my legs round, and half rose, excitedly. Then I sank back again. My mind

was made up. I was tired of the world; sick of life the first draught of

which had turned so bitter in my throat. If by my death I might expiate

my sins and win pardon by my submission and humility, it was all I could

desire. I should be glad to be released from all the misery and sorrow

into which I had been born.

I told him so in some few words. “You mean me well, my lord,” I ended,

“and I thank you. But...”

“By God and the Saints!” he blazed, “I do not mean you well at all. I

mean you anything but well. Have I not said that I could kill you

with satisfaction? Whatever be the sins of Egidio Gambara, he is no

hypocrite, and he lets his enemies see his face unmasked.”

“But, then,” I cried, amazed, “why do you offer me my freedom?”

“Because this cursed populace is in such a temper that if you are

brought to trial I know not what may happen. As likely as not we shall

have an insurrection, open revolt against the Pontifical authority, and

red war in the streets. And this is not the time for it.

“The Holy Father requires the submission of these people. We are upon

the eve of Duke Pier Luigi's coming to occupy his new States, and it

imports that he should be well received, that he should be given a

loving welcome by his subjects. If, instead, they meet him with revolt

and defiance, the reasons will be sought, and the blame of the affair

will recoil upon me. Your cousin Cosimo will see to that. He is a very

subtle gentleman, this cousin of yours, and he has a way of working to

his own profit. So now you understand. I have no mind to be crushed in

this business. Enough have I suffered already through you, enough am

I suffering in resigning my governorship. So there is but one way

out. There must be no trial to-morrow. It must be known that you have

escaped. Thus they will be quieted, and the matter will blow over. So

now, Ser Agostino, we understand each other. You must go.”

“And whither am I to go?” I cried, remembering my mother and that

Mondolfo--the only place of safety--was closed to me by her cruelly

pious hands.

“Whither?” he echoed. “What do I care? To Hell--anywhere, so that you

get out of this.”

“I'd sooner hang,” said I quite seriously.

“You'ld hang and welcome, for all the love I bear you,” he answered, his

impatience growing. “But if you hang blood will be shed, innocent lives

will be lost, and I myself may come to suffer.”

“For you, sir, I care nothing,” I answered him, taking his own tone, and

returning him the same brutal frankness that he used with me. “That you

deserve to suffer I do not doubt. But since other blood than yours might

be shed as you say, since innocent lives might be lost... Give me the

paper.”

He was frowning upon me, and smiling viperishly at the same time.

“I like your frankness better than your piety,” said he. “So now we

understand each other, and know that neither is in the other's debt.

Hereafter beware of Egidio Gambara. I give you this last loyal warning.

See that you do not come into my way again.”

I rose and looked at him--looked down from my greater height. I knew

well the source of this last, parting show of hatred. Like Cosimo's

it sprang from jealousy. And a growth more potential of evil does not

exist.

He bore my glance a moment, then turned and took up the lanthorn.

“Come,” he said, and obediently I followed him up the winding stone

staircase, and so to the very gates of the Palace.

We met no one. What had become of the guards, I cannot think; but I am

satisfied that Gambara himself had removed them. He opened the wicket

for me, and as I stepped out he gave me the paper and whistled softly.

Almost at once I heard a sound of muffled hooves under the colonnade,

and presently loomed the figures of a man and a mule; both dim and

ghostly in the pearly light of dawn--for that was the hour.

Gambara followed me out, and pulled the wicket after him.

“That beast is for you,” he said curtly. “It will the better enable you

to get away.”

As curtly I acknowledged the gift, and mounted whilst the groom held the

stirrup for me.

O! it was the oddest of transactions! My Lord Gambara with death in his

heart very reluctantly giving me a life I did not want.

I dug my heels into the mule's sides and started across the silent,

empty square, then plunged into a narrow street where the gloom was

almost as of midnight, and so pushed on.

I came out into the open space before the Porta Fodesta, and so to the

gate itself. From one of the windows of the gatehouse, a light shone

yellow, and, presently, in answer to my call, out came an officer

followed by two men, one of whom carried a lanthorn swinging from his

pike. He held this light aloft, whilst the officer surveyed me.

“What now?” he challenged. “None passes out to-night.”

For answer I thrust the paper under his nose. “Orders from my Lord

Gambara,” said I.

But he never looked at it. “None passes out to-night,” he repeated

imperturbably. “So run my orders.”

“Orders from whom?” quoth I, surprised by his tone and manner.

“From the Captain of Justice, if you must know. So you may get you back

whence you came, and wait till daylight.”

“Ah, but stay,” I said. “I do not think you can have heard me. I carry

orders from my Lord the Governor. The Captain of Justice cannot overbear

these.” And I shook the paper insistently.

“My orders are that none is to pass--not even the Governor himself,” he

answered firmly.

It was very daring of Cosimo, and I saw his aim. He was, as Gambara

had said, a very subtle gentleman. He, too, had set his finger upon the

pulse of the populace, and perceived what might be expected of it.

He was athirst for vengeance, as he had shown me, and determined that

neither I nor Gambara should escape. First, I must be tried, condemned,

and hanged, and then he trusted, no doubt, that Gambara would be torn

in pieces; and it was quite possible that Messer Cosimo himself would

secretly find means to fan the mob's indignation against the Legate into

fierce activity. And it seemed that the game was in his hands, for this

officer's resoluteness showed how implicitly my cousin was obeyed.

Of that same resoluteness of the lieutenant's I was to have a yet

more signal proof. For presently, whilst still I stood there vainly

remonstrating, down the street behind me rode Gambara himself on a tall

horse, followed by a mule-litter and an escort of half a score of armed

grooms.

He uttered an exclamation when he saw me still there, the gate shut and

the officer in talk with me. He spurred quickly forward.

“How is this?” he demanded haughtily and angrily. “This man rides upon

the business of the State. Why this delay to open for him?”

“My orders,” said the lieutenant, civilly but firmly, “are that none

passes out to-night.”

“Do you know me?” demanded Gambara.

“Yes, my lord.”

“And you dare talk to me of your orders? There are no orders here in

Piacenza but my orders. Set me wide the wicket of that gate. I myself

must pass.”

“My lord, I dare not.”

“You are insubordinate,” said the Legate, of a sudden very cold.

He had no need to ask whose orders were these. At once he saw the

trammel spread for him. But if Messer Cosimo was subtle, so, too, was

Messer Gambara. By not so much as a word did he set his authority in

question with the officer.

“You are insubordinate,” was all he answered him, and then to the two

men-at-arms behind the lieutenant--“Ho, there!” he called. “Bring out

the guard. I am Egidio Gambara, your Governor.”

So calm and firm and full of assurance was his tone, so unquestionable

his right to command them, that the men sprang instantly to obey him.

“What would you do, my lord?” quoth the officer, and he seemed daunted.

“Buffoon,” said Gambara between his teeth. “You shall see.”

Six men came hurrying from the gatehouse, and the Cardinal called to

them.

“Let the corporal stand forth,” he said.

A man advanced a pace from the rank they had hastily formed and saluted.

“Place me your officer under arrest,” said the Legate coldly, advancing

no reason for the order. “Let him be locked in the gatehouse until my

return; and do you, sir corporal, take command here meanwhile.”

The startled fellow saluted again, and advanced upon his officer. The

lieutenant looked up with sudden uneasiness in his eyes. He had gone too

far. He had not reckoned upon being dealt with in this summary fashion.

He had been bold so long as he conceived himself no more than Cosimo's

mouthpiece, obeying orders for the issuing of which Cosimo must answer.

Instead, it seemed, the Governor intended that he should answer for them

himself. Whatever he now dared, he knew--as Gambara knew--that his men

would never dare to disobey the Governor, who was the supreme authority

there under the Pope.

“My lord,” he exclaimed, “I had my orders from the Captain of Justice.”

“And dare you to say that your orders included my messengers and my own

self?” thundered the dainty prelate.

“Explicitly, my lord,” answered the lieutenant.

“It shall be dealt with on my return, and if what you say is proved

true, the Captain of Justice shall suffer with yourself for this

treason--for that is the offence. Take him away, and someone open me

that gate.”

There was an end to disobedience, and a moment or two later we stood

outside the town, on the bank of the river, which gurgled and flowed

away smoothly and mistily in the growing light, between the rows of

stalwart poplars that stood like sentinels to guard it.

“And now begone,” said Gambara curtly to me, and wheeling my mule I rode

for the bridge of boats, crossed it, and set myself to breast the slopes

beyond.

Midway up I checked and looked back across the wide water. The light had

grown quite strong by now, and in the east there was a faint pink flush

to herald the approaching sun. Away beyond the river, moving southward,

I could just make out the Legate's little cavalcade. And then, for the

first time, a question leapt in my mind concerning the litter whose

leathern curtains had remained so closely drawn. Whom did it contain?

Could it be Giuliana? Had Cosimo spoken the truth when he said that she

had gone to Gambara for shelter?

A little while ago I had sighed for death and exulted in the chance of

expiation and of purging myself of the foulness of sin. And now, at

the sudden thought that occurred to me, I fell a prey to an insensate

jealousy touching the woman whom I had lately loathed as the cause of my

downfall. O, the inconstancy of the human heart, and the eternal battles

in such poor natures as mine between the knowledge of right and the

desire for wrong!

It was in vain that I sought to turn my thoughts to other things;

in vain that I cast them back upon my recent condition and my recent

resolves; in vain that I remembered the penitence of yestermorn, the

confession at Fra Gervasio's knee, and the strong resolve to do penance

and make amends by the purity of all my after-life. Vain was it all.

I turned my mule about, and still wrestling with my conscience, choking

it, I rode down the hill again, and back across the bridge, and then

away to the south, to follow Messer Gambara and set an end to doubt.

I must know. I must! It was no matter that conscience told me that here

was no affair of mine; that Giuliana belonged to the past from which I

was divorced, the past for which I must atone and seek forgiveness. I

must know. And so I rode along the dusty highway in pursuit of Messer

Gambara, who was proceeding, I imagined, to join the Duke at Parma.

I had no difficulty in following them. A question here, and a question

there, accompanied by a description of the party, was all that was

necessary to keep me on their track. And ever, it seemed to me from the

answers that I got, was I lessening the distance that separated us.

I was weak for want of food, for the last time that I had eaten was

yesterday at noon, at Mondolfo; and then but little. Yet all I had this

day were some bunches of grapes that I stole in passing from a vineyard

and ate as I trotted on along that eternal Via Aemilia.

It was towards noon, at last, that a taverner at Castel Guelfo informed

me that my party had passed through the town but half an hour ahead of

me. At the news I urged my already weary beast along, for unless I made

good haste now it might well happen that Parma should swallow up Gambara

and his party ere I overtook them. And then, some ten minutes later,

I caught a flutter of garments half a mile or so ahead of me, amid the

elms. I quitted the road and entered the woodland. A little way I still

rode; then, dismounting, I tethered my mule, and went forward cautiously

on foot.

I found them in a little sunken dell by a tiny rivulet. Lying on my

belly in the long grass above, I looked down upon them with a black

hatred of jealousy in my heart.

They were reclining there, in that cool, fragrant spot in the shadow of

a great beech-tree. A cloth had been spread upon the ground, and upon

this were platters of roast meats, white bread and fruits, and a flagon

of wine, a second flagon standing in the brook to cool.

My Lord Gambara was talking and she was regarding him with eyes that

were half veiled, a slow, insolent smile upon her matchless face.

Presently at something that he said she laughed outright, a laugh so

tuneful and light-hearted that I thought I must be dreaming all this. It

was the gay, frank, innocent laughter of a child; and I never heard in

all my life a sound that caused me so much horror. He leaned across to

her, and stroked her velvet cheek with his delicate hand, whilst she

suffered it in that lazy fashion that was so peculiarly her own.

I stayed for no more. I wriggled back a little way to where a clump of

hazel permitted me to rise without being seen. Thence I fled the spot.

And as I went, my heart seemed as it must burst, and my lips could frame

but one word which I kept hurling out of me like an imprecation, and

that word was “Trull!”

Two nights ago had happened enough to stamp her soul for ever with

sorrow and despair. Yet she could sit there, laughing and feasting and

trulling it lightly with the Legate!

The little that remained me of my illusions was shivered in that hour.

There was, I swore, no good in all the world; for even where goodness

sought to find a way, it grew distorted, as in my mother's case. And yet

through all her pietism surely she had been right! There was no peace,

no happiness save in the cloister. And at last the full bitterness of

penitence and regret overtook me when I reflected that by my own act I

had rendered myself for ever unworthy of the cloister's benign shelter.

CHAPTER IV. THE ANCHORITE OF MONTE ORSARO

I went blindly through the tangle of undergrowth, stumbling at every

step and scarce noticing that I stumbled; and in this fashion I came

presently back to my mule.

I mounted and rode amain, not by the way that I had come, but westward;

not by road, but by bridle-paths, through meadow-land and forest, up

hill and down, like a man entranced, not knowing whither I went nor

caring.

Besides, whither was I to go? Like my father before me I was an outcast,

a fugitive outlaw. But this troubled me not yet. My mind, my wounded,

tortured mind was all upon the past. It was of Giuliana that I thought

as I rode in the noontide warmth of that September day. And never can

human brain have held a sorer conflict of reflection than was mine.

No shadow now remained of the humour that had possessed me in the hour

in which I had repudiated her after the murder of Fifanti. I had heard

Fra Gervasio deliver judgment upon her, and I had doubted his justice,

felt that he used her mercilessly. My own sight had now confirmed to me

the truth of what he had said; but in doing so--in allowing me to

see her in another man's possession--a very rage of jealousy had been

stirred in me and a greater rage of longing.

This longing followed upon my first bitter denunciation of her; and it

followed soon. It is in our natures, as I then experienced, never more

to desire a thing than when we see it lost to us. Bitterly now did I

reproach myself for not having borne her off with me two nights ago when

I had fled Fifanti's house, when she herself had urged that course upon

me. I despised myself, out of my present want, for my repudiation of

her--a hundred times more bitterly than I had despised myself when I

imagined that I had done a vileness by that repudiation.

Never until now, did it seem to me, had I known how deeply I loved her,

how deeply the roots of our passion had burrowed down into my heart,

and fastened there to be eradicated only with life itself. So thought I

then; and thinking so I cried her name aloud, called to her through the

scented pine-woods, thus voicing my longing and my despair.

And swift on the heels of this would come another mood. There would come

the consciousness of the sin of it all, the imperative need to cleanse

myself of this, to efface her memory from my soul which could not hold

it without sinning anew in fierce desire. I strove to do so with all my

poor weak might. I denounced her to myself again for a soulless harlot;

blamed her for all the ill that had befallen me; accounted her the

very hand that had wielded me, a senseless instrument, to slay her

importunate husband.

And then I perceived that this was as pitiful a ruse of self-deception

as that of the fox in the fable unable to reach the luscious grapes

above him. For as well might a starving man seek to compel by an effort

of his will the hunger to cease from gnawing at his vitals.

Thus were desire and conscience locked in conflict, and each held the

ascendancy alternately what time I pushed onward aimlessly until I came

to the broad bed of a river.

A grey waste of sun-parched boulders spread away to the stream, which

was diminished by the long drought. Beyond the narrow sheen of water,

stretched another rocky space, and then came the green of meadows and a

brown city upon the rising ground.

The city was Fornovo, and the diminished river was the Taro, the

ancient boundary between the Gaulish and Ligurian folk. I stood upon the

historic spot where Charles VIII had cut his way through the allies to

win back to France after the occupation of Naples. But the grotesque

little king who had been dust for a quarter of a century troubled my

thoughts not at all just then. The Taro brought me memories not of

battle, but of home. To reach Mondolfo I had but to follow the river up

the valley towards that long ridge of the Apennines arrayed before me,

with the tall bulks of Mount Giso and Mount Orsaro, their snow-caps

sparkling in the flood of sunshine that poured down upon them.

Two hours, or perhaps three at most, along the track of that cool,

glittering water, and the grey citadel of Mondolfo would come into view.

It was this very reflection that brought me now to consider my

condition; to ask myself whither I should turn. Money I had none--not so

much as a single copper grosso. To sell I had nothing but the clothes I

stood in--black, clerkly garments that I had got yesterday at Mondolfo.

Not so much as a weapon had I that I might have bartered for a few

coins. There was the mule; that should yield a ducat or two. But when

this was spent, what then? To go a suppliant to that pious icicle my

mother were worse than useless.

Whither was I to turn--I, Lord of Mondolfo and Carmina, one of the

wealthiest and most puissant tyrants of this Val di Taro? It provoked me

almost to laughter, of a fierce and bitter sort. Perhaps some peasant

of the contado would take pity on his lord and give him shelter and

nourishment in exchange for such labour as his lord might turn his stout

limbs to upon that peasant's land, which was my own.

I might perhaps essay it. Certainly it was the only thing that was left

me. For against my mother and to support my rights I might not invoke

a law which had placed me under a ban, a law that would deal me out its

rigours did I reveal myself.

Then I had thoughts of seeking sanctuary in some monastery, of offering

myself as a lay-brother, to do menial work, and in this way perhaps I

might find peace, and, in a lesser degree than was originally intended,

the comforts of the religion to which I had been so grossly unfaithful.

The thought grew and developed into a resolve. It brought me some

comfort. It became a desire.

I pushed on, following the river along ground that grew swiftly steeper,

conscious that perforce my journey must end soon, for my mule was

showing signs of weariness.

Some three miles farther, having by then penetrated the green rampart

of the foothills, I came upon the little village of Pojetta. It is a

village composed of a single street throwing out as its branches a few

narrow alleys, possessing a dingy church and a dingier tavern; this last

had for only sign a bunch of withered rosemary that hung above its grimy

doors.

I drew rein there as utterly weary as my mule, hungry and thirsty

and weak. I got down and invited the suspicious scrutiny of the

lantern-jawed taverner, who, for all that my appearance was humble

enough in such garments as I wore, must have accounted me none the less

of too fine an air for such a house as his.

“Care for my beast,” I bade him. “I shall stay here an hour or two.”

He nodded surlily, and led the mule away, whilst I entered the tavern's

single room. Coming into it from the sunlight I could scarcely see

anything at first, so dark did the place seem. What light there was came

through the open door; for the chamber's single window had long since

been rendered opaque by a screen of accumulated dust and cobwebs. It

was a roomy place, low-ceilinged with blackened rafters running parallel

across its dirty yellow wash.

The floor was strewn with foul rushes that must have lain unchanged for

months, slippery with grease and littered with bones that had been flung

there by the polite guests the place was wont to entertain. And it stank

most vilely of rancid oil and burnt meats and other things indefinable

in all but their acrid, nauseating, unclean pungency.

A fire was burning low at the room's far end, and over this a girl

was stooping, tending something in a stew-pot. She looked round at my

advent, and revealed herself for a tall, black-haired, sloe-eyed wench,

comely in a rude, brown way, and strong, to judge by the muscular arms

which were bared to the elbow.

Interest quickened her face at sight of so unusual a patron. She

slouched forward, wiping her hands upon her hips as she came, and pulled

out a stool for me at the long trestle-table that ran down the middle of

the floor.

Grouped about the upper end of this table sat four men of the peasant

type, sun-tanned, bearded, and rudely garbed in loose jerkins and cross

gartered leg cloths.

A silence had fallen upon them as I entered, and they too were now

inspecting me with a frank interest which in their simple way they made

no attempt to conceal.

I sank wearily to the stool, paying little heed to them, and in answer

to the girl's invitation to command her, I begged for meat and bread

and wine. Whilst she was preparing these, one of the men addressed me

civilly; and I answered him as civilly but absently, for I had enough of

other matters to engage my thoughts. Then another of them questioned me

in a friendly tone as to whence I came. Instinctively I concealed the

truth, answering vaguely that I was from Castel Guelfo--which was the

neighbourhood in which I had overtaken my Lord Gambara and Giuliana.

“And what do they say at Castel Guelfo of the things that are happening

in Piacenza?” asked another.

“In Piacenza?” quoth I. “Why, what is happening in Piacenza?”

Eagerly, with an ardour to show themselves intimate with the affairs of

towns, as is the way of rustics, they related to me what already I had

gathered to be the vulgar version of Fifanti's death. Each spoke in

turn, cutting in the moment another paused to breathe, and sometimes

they spoke together, each anxious to have the extent of his information

revealed and appreciated.

And their tale, of course, was that Gambara, being the lover of

Fifanti's wife, had dispatched the doctor on a trumped-up mission, and

had gone to visit her by night. But that the suspicious Fifanti lying

near by in wait, and having seen the Cardinal enter, followed him soon

after and attacked him, whereupon the Lord Gambara had slain him. And

then that wily, fiendish prelate had sought to impose the blame upon the

young Lord of Mondolfo, who was a student in the pedant's house, and

he had caused the young man's arrest. But this the Piacentini would not

endure. They had risen, and threatened the Governor's life; and he was

fled to Rome or Parma, whilst the authorities to avoid a scandal had

connived at the escape of Messer d'Anguissola, who was also gone, no man

knew whither.

The news had travelled speedily into that mountain fastness, it seemed.

But it had been garbled at its source. The Piacentini conceived that

they held some evidence of what they believed--the evidence of the lad

whom Fifanti had left to spy and who had borne him the tale that the

Cardinal was within. This evidence they accounted well-confirmed by the

Legate's flight.

Thus is history written. Not a doubt but that some industrious scribe in

Piacenza with a grudge against Gambara, would set down what was the

talk of the town; and hereafter, it is not to be doubted, the murder of

Astorre Fifanti for the vilest of all motives will be added to the many

crimes of Egidio Gambara, that posterity may execrate his name even

beyond its already rich enough deserts.

I heard them in silence and but little moved, yet with a question now

and then to probe how far this silly story went in detail. And whilst

they were still heaping abuse upon the Legate--of whom they spoke as

Jews may speak of pork--came the lantern-jawed host with a dish of

broiled goat, some bread, and a jug of wine. This he set before me, then

joined them in their vituperation of Messer Gambara.

I ate ravenously, and for all that I do not doubt the meat was tough

and burnt, yet at the time those pieces of broiled goat upon that dirty

table seemed the sweetest food that ever had been set before me.

Finding that I was but indifferently communicative and had little news

to give them, the peasants fell to gossiping among themselves, and

they were presently joined by the girl, whose name, it seemed, was

Giovannozza. She came to startle them with the rumour of a fresh miracle

attributed to the hermit of Monte Orsaro.

I looked up with more interest than I had hitherto shown in anything

that had been said, and I inquired who might be this anchorite.

“Sainted Virgin!” cried the girl, setting her hands upon her generous

hips, and turning her bold sloe-eyes upon me in a stare of incredulity.

“Whence are you, sir, that you seem to know nothing of the world? You

had not heard the news of Piacenza, which must be known to everyone by

now; and you have never heard of the anchorite of Monte Orsaro!” She

appealed by a gesture to Heaven against the Stygian darkness of my mind.

“He is a very holy man,” said one of the peasants.

“And he dwells alone in a hut midway up the mountain,” added a second.

“In a hut which he built for himself with his own hands,” a third

explained.

“And he lives on nuts and herbs and such scraps of food as are left

him by the charitable,” put in the fourth, to show himself as full of

knowledge as his fellows.

But now it was Giovannozza who took up the story, firmly and resolutely;

and being a woman she easily kept her tongue going and overbore the

peasants so that they had no further share in the tale until it was

entirely told. From her I learnt that the anchorite, one Fra Sebastiano,

possessed a miraculous image of the blessed martyr St. Sebastian, whose

wounds miraculously bled during Passion Week, and that there were no

ills in the world that this blood would not cure, provided that those to

whom it was applied were clean of mortal sin and imbued with the spirit

of grace and faith.

No pious wayfarer going over the Pass of Cisa into Tuscany but would

turn aside to kiss the image and ask a blessing at the hands of the

anchorite; and yearly in the season of the miraculous manifestation,

great pilgrimages were made to the hermitage by folk from the Valleys of

the Taro and Bagnanza, and even from beyond the Apennines. So that Fra

Sebastiano gathered great store of alms, part of which he redistributed

amongst the poor, part of which he was saving to build a bridge over

the Bagnanza torrent, in crossing which so many poor folk had lost their

lives.

I listened intently to the tale of wonders that followed, and now the

peasants joined in again, each with a story of some marvellous cure of

which he had direct knowledge. And many and amazing were the details

they gave me of the saint--for they spoke of him as a saint already--so

that no doubt lingered in my mind of the holiness of this anchorite.

Giovannozza related how a goatherd coming one night over the pass had

heard from the neighbourhood of the hut the sounds of singing, and the

music was the strangest and sweetest ever sounded on earth, so that it

threw the poor fellow into a strange ecstasy, and it was beyond doubt

that what he had heard was an angel choir. And then one of the peasants,

the tallest and blackest of the four, swore with a great oath that one

night when he himself had been in the hills he had seen the hermit's hut

all aglow with heavenly light against the black mass of the mountain.

All this left me presently very thoughtful, filled with wonder and

amazement. Then their talk shifted again, and it was of the vintage they

discoursed, the fine yield of grapes about Fontana Fredda, and the heavy

crop of oil that there would be that year. And then with the hum of

their voices gradually receding, it ceased altogether for me, and I was

asleep with my head pillowed upon my arms.

It would be an hour later when I awakened, a little stiff and cramped

from the uncomfortable position in which I had rested. The peasants had

departed and the surly-faced host was standing at my side.

“You should be resuming your journey,” said he, seeing me awake. “It

wants but a couple of hours to sunset, and if you are going over the

pass it were well not to let the night overtake you.”

“My journey?” said I aloud, and looked askance at him.

Whither, in Heaven's name, was I journeying?

Then I bethought me of my earlier resolve to seek shelter in some

convent, and his mention of the pass caused me to think now that it

would be wiser to cross the mountains into Tuscany. There I should be

beyond the reach of the talons of the Farnese law, which might close

upon me again at any time so long as I was upon Pontifical territory.

I rose heavily, and suddenly bethought me of my utter lack of money.

It dismayed me for a moment. Then I remembered the mule, and determined

that I must go afoot.

“I have a mule to sell,” said I, “the beast in your stables.”

He scratched his ear, reflecting no doubt upon the drift of my

announcement. “Yes?” he said dubiously. “And to what market are you

taking it?”

“I am offering it to you,” said I.

“To me?” he cried, and instantly suspicion entered his crafty eye and

darkened his brow. “Where got you the mule?” he asked, and snapped his

lips together.

The girl entering at that moment stood at gaze, listening.

“Where did I get it?” I echoed. “What is that to you?”

He smiled unpleasantly. “It is this to me: that if the bargelli were to

come up here and discover a stolen mule in my stables, it would be an

ill thing for me.”

I flushed angrily. “Do you imply that I stole the mule?” said I, so

fiercely that he changed his air.

“Nay now, nay now,” he soothed me. “And, after all, it happens that I do

not want a mule. I have one mule already, and I am a poor man, and...”

“A fig for your whines,” said I. “Here is the case. I have no money--not

a grosso. So the mule must pay for my dinner. Name your price, and let

us have done.”

“Ha!” he fumed at me. “I am to buy your stolen beast, am I? I am to be

frightened by your violence into buying it? Be off, you rogue, or I'll

raise the village and make short work of you. Be off, I say!”

He backed away as he spoke, towards the fireplace, and from the corner

took a stout oaken staff. He was a villain, a thieving rogue. That much

was plain. And it was no less plain that I must submit, and leave my

beast to him, or else perhaps suffer a worse alternative.

Had those four honest peasants still been there, he would not have dared

to have so borne himself. But as it was, without witnesses to say how

the thing had truly happened, if he raised the village against me how

should they believe a man who confessed that he had eaten a dinner for

which he could not pay? It must go very ill with me.

If I tried conclusions with him, I could break him in two

notwithstanding his staff. But there would remain the girl to give the

alarm, and when to dishonesty I should have added violence, my case

would be that of any common bandit.

“Very well,” I said. “You are a dirty, thieving rascal, and a vile one

to take advantage of one in my position. I shall return for the mule

another day. Meanwhile consider it in pledge for what I owe you. But see

that you are ready for the reckoning when I present it.”

With that, I swung on my heel, strode past the big-eyed girl, out of

that foul kennel into God's sweet air, followed by the ordures of speech

which that knave flung after me.

I turned up the street, setting my face towards the mountains, and

trudged amain.

Soon I was out of the village and ascending the steep road towards the

Pass of Cisa that leads over the Apennines to Pontremoli. This way had

Hannibal come when he penetrated into Etruria some two thousand years

ago. I quitted the road and took to bridle-paths under the shoulder

of the mighty Mount Prinzera. Thus I pushed on and upward through

grey-green of olive and deep enamelled green of fig-trees, and came at

last into a narrow gorge between two great mountains, a place of ferns

and moisture where all was shadow and the air felt chill.

Above me the mountains towered to the blue heavens, their flanks of a

green that was in places turned to golden, where Autumn's fingers had

already touched those heights, in places gashed with grey and purple

wounds, where the bare rock thrust through.

I went on aimlessly, and came presently upon a little fir thicket,

through which I pushed towards a sound of tumbling waters. I stood at

last upon the rocks above a torrent that went thundering down the mighty

gorge which it had cloven itself between the hills. Thence I looked

down a long, wavering valley over which the rays of the evening sun

were slanting, and hazily in the distance I could see the russet city

of Fornovo which I had earlier passed that day. This torrent was the

Bagnanza, and it effectively barred all passage. So I went up, along its

bed, scrambling over lichened rocks or sinking my feet into carpets of

soft, yielding moss.

At length, grown weary and uncertain of my way, I sank down to rest and

think. And my thoughts were chiefly of that hermit somewhere above me

in these hills, and of the blessedness of such a life, remote from the

world that man had made so evil. And then, with thinking of the world,

came thoughts of Giuliana. Two nights ago I had held her in my arms. Two

nights ago! And already it seemed a century remote--as remote as all the

rest of that life of which it seemed a part. For there had been a break

in my existence with the murder of Fifanti, and in the past two days I

had done more living and I had aged more than in all the eighteen years

before.

Thinking of Giuliana, I evoked her image, the glowing, ruddy copper of

her hair, the dark mystery of her eyes, so heavy-lidded and languorous

in their smile. My spirit conjured her to stand before me all white and

seductive as I had known her, and my longings were again upon me like a

searing torture.

I fought them hard. I sought to shut that image out. But it abode to

mock me. And then faintly from the valley, borne upon the breeze that

came sighing through the fir-trees, rose the tinkle of an Angelus bell.

I fell upon my knees and prayed to the Mother of Purity for strength,

and thus I came once more to peace. That done I crept under the shelter

of a projecting rock, wrapped my cloak tightly about me, and lay down

upon the hard ground to rest, for I was very weary.

Lying there I watched the colour fading from the sky. I saw the purple

lights in the east turn to an orange that paled into faintest yellow,

and this again into turquoise. The shadows crept up those heights. A

star came out overhead, then another, then a score of stars to sparkle

silvery in the blue-black heavens.

I turned on my side, and closed my eyes, seeking to sleep; and then

quite suddenly I heard a sound of unutterable sweetness--a melody so

faint and subtle that it had none of the form and rhythm of earthly

music. I sat up, my breath almost arrested, and listened more intently.

I could still hear it, but very faint and distant. It was as a sound of

silver bells, and yet it was not quite that. I remembered the stories I

had heard that day in the tavern at Pojetta, and the talk of the mystic

melodies by which travellers had been drawn to the anchorite's abode. I

noted the direction of the sound, and I determined to be guided by it,

and to cast myself at the feet of that holy man, to implore of him who

could heal bodies the miracle of my soul's healing and my mind's purging

from its torment.

I pushed on, then, through the luminous night, keeping as much as

possible to the open, for under trees lesser obstacles were not to be

discerned. The melody grew louder as I advanced, ever following the

Bagnanza towards its source; and the stream, too, being much less

turbulent now, did not overbear that other sound.

It was a melody on long humming notes, chiefly, it seemed to me, upon

two notes with the occasional interjection of a third and fourth, and,

at long and rare intervals, of a fifth. It was harmonious beyond all

description, just as it was weird and unearthly; but now that I heard

it more distinctly it had much more the sound of bells--very sweet and

silvery.

And then, quite suddenly, I was startled by a human cry--a piteous,

wailing cry that told of helplessness and pain. I went forward more

quickly in the direction whence it came, rounded a stout hazel coppice,

and stood suddenly before a rude hut of pine logs built against the

side of the rock. Through a small unglazed window came a feeble shaft of

light.

I halted there, breathless and a little afraid. This must be the

dwelling of the anchorite. I stood upon holy ground.

And then the cry was repeated. It proceeded from the hut. I advanced to

the window, took courage and peered in. By the light of a little brass

oil lamp with a single wick I could faintly make out the interior.

The rock itself formed the far wall of it, and in this a niche was

carved--a deep, capacious niche in the shadows of which I could faintly

discern a figure some two feet in height, which I doubted not would

be the miraculous image of St. Sebastian. In front of this was a rude

wooden pulpit set very low, and upon it a great book with iron clasps

and a yellow, grinning skull.

All this I beheld at a single glance. There was no other furniture in

that little place, neither chair nor table; and the brass lamp was set

upon the floor, near a heaped-up bed of rushes and dried leaves upon

which I beheld the anchorite himself. He was lying upon his back, and

seemed a vigorous, able-bodied man of a good length.

He wore a loose brown habit roughly tied about his middle by a piece of

rope from which was suspended an enormous string of beads. His beard and

hair were black, but his face was livid as a corpse's, and as I looked

at him he emitted a fresh groan, and writhed as if in mortal suffering.

“O my God! My God!” I heard him crying. “Am I to die alone? Mercy! I

repent me!” And he writhed moaning, and rolled over on his side so that

he faced me, and I saw that his livid countenance was glistening with

sweat.

I stepped aside and lifted the latch of the rude door.

“Are you suffering, father?” I asked, almost fearfully. At the sound of

my voice, he suddenly sat up, and there was a great fear in his eyes.

Then he fell back again with a cry.

“I thank Thee, my God! I thank Thee!”

I entered, and crossing to his side, I went down on my knees beside him.

Without giving me time to speak, he clutched my arm with one of his

clammy hands, and raised himself painfully upon his elbow, his eyes

burning with the fever that was in him.

“A priest!” he gasped. “Get me a priest! Oh, if you would be saved

from the flames of everlasting Hell, get me a priest to shrive me. I am

dying, and I would not go hence with the burden of all this sin upon my

soul.”

I could feel the heat of his hand through the sleeve of my coat. His

condition was plain. A raging fever was burning out his life.

“Be comforted,” I said. “I will go at once.” And I rose, whilst he

poured forth his blessings upon me.

At the door I checked to ask what was the nearest place.

“Casi,” he said hoarsely. “To your right, you will see the path down the

hill-side. You cannot miss it. In half an hour you should be there. And

return at once, for I have not long. I feel it.”

With a last word of reassurance and comfort I closed the door, and

plunged away into the darkness.

CHAPTER V. THE RENUNCIATION

I found the path the hermit spoke of, and followed its sinuous

downhill course, now running when the ground was open, now moving more

cautiously, yet always swiftly, when it led me through places darkened

by trees.

At the end of a half-hour I espied below me the twinkling lights of a

village on the hill-side, and a few minutes later I was among the houses

of Casi. To find the priest in his little cottage by the church was an

easy matter; to tell him my errand and to induce him to come with me, to

tend the holy man who lay dying alone in the mountain, was as easy. To

return, however, was the most difficult part of the undertaking; for the

upward path was steep, and the priest was old and needed such assistance

as my own very weary limbs could scarcely render him. We had the

advantage of a lanthorn which he insisted upon bringing, and we made as

good progress as could be expected. But it was best part of two hours

after my setting out before we stood once more upon the little platform

where the hermit had his hut.

We found the place in utter darkness. Through lack of oil his little

lamp had burned itself out; and when we entered, the man on the bed of

wattles lay singing a lewd tavern-song, which, coming from such holy

lips, filled me with horror and amazement.

But the old priest, with that vast and doleful experience of death-beds

which belongs to men of his class, was quick to perceive the cause of

this. The fever was flickering up before life's final extinction, and

the poor moribund was delirious and knew not what he said.

For an hour we watched beside him, waiting. The priest was confident

that there would be a return of consciousness and a spell of lucidity

before the end.

Through that lugubrious hour I squatted there, watching the awful

process of human dissolution for the first time.

Save in the case of Fifanti I had never yet seen death; nor could it be

said that I had really seen it then. With the pedant, death had been a

sudden sharp severing of the thread of life, and I had been conscious

that he was dead without any appreciation of death itself, blinded in

part by my own exalted condition at the time.

But in this death of Fra Sebastiano I was heated by no participation.

I was an unwilling and detached spectator, brought there by force of

circumstance; and my mind received from the spectacle an impression not

easily to be effaced, an impression which may have been answerable in

part for that which followed.

Towards dawn at last the sick man's babblings--and they were mostly as

profane and lewd as his occasional bursts of song--were quieted. The

unseeing glitter of his eyes that had ever and anon been turned upon us

was changed to a dull and heavy consciousness, and he struggled to rise,

but his limbs refused their office.

The priest leaned over him with a whispered word of comfort, then turned

and signed to me to leave the hut. I rose, and went towards the door.

But I had scarcely reached it when there was a hoarse cry behind me

followed by a gasping sob from the priest. I started round to see the

hermit lying on his back, his face rigid, his mouth open and idiotic,

his eyes more leaden than they had been a moment since.

“What is it?” I cried, despite myself.

“He has gone, my son,” answered the old priest sorrowfully. “But he

was contrite, and he had lived a saint.” And drawing from his breast a

little silver box, he proceeded to perform the last rites upon the body

from which the soul was already fled.

I came slowly back and knelt beside him, and long we remained there

in silent prayer for the repose of that blessed spirit. And whilst we

prayed the wind rose outside, and a storm grew in the bosom of the night

that had been so fair and tranquil. The lightning flashed and illumined

the interior of that hut with a vividness as of broad daylight, throwing

into livid relief the arrow-pierced St. Sebastian in the niche and the

ghastly, grinning skull upon the hermit's pulpit.

The thunder crashed and crackled, and the echoes of its artillery went

booming and rolling round the hills, whilst the rain fell in a terrific

lashing downpour. Some of it finding a weakness in the roof, trickled

and dripped and formed a puddle in the middle of the hut.

For upwards of an hour the storm raged, and all the while we remained

upon our knees beside the dead anchorite. Then the thunder receded and

gradually died away in the distance; the rain ceased; and the dawn crept

pale as a moon-stone adown the valley.

We went out to breathe the freshened air just as the first touches of

the sun quickened to an opal splendour the pallor of that daybreak.

All the earth was steaming, and the Bagnanza, suddenly swollen, went

thundering down the gorge.

At sunrise we dug a grave just below the platform with a spade which I

found in the hut. There we buried the hermit, and over the spot I made a

great cross with the largest stones that I could find. The priest would

have given him burial in the hut itself; but I suggested that perhaps

there might be some other who would be willing to take the hermit's

place, and consecrate his life to carrying on the man's pious work

of guarding that shrine and collecting alms for the poor and for the

building of the bridge.

My tone caused the priest to look at me with sharp, kindly eyes.

“Have you such thoughts for yourself, perchance?” he asked me.

“Unless you should adjudge me too unworthy for the office,” I answered

humbly.

“But you are very young, my son,” he said, and laid a kindly hand upon

my shoulder. “Have you suffered, then, so sorely at the hands of the

world that you should wish to renounce it and to take up this lonely

life?”

“I was intended for the priesthood, father,” I replied. “I aspired to

holy orders. But through the sins of the flesh I have rendered myself

unworthy. Here, perhaps, I can expiate and cleanse my heart of all the

foulness it gathered in the world.”

He left me an hour or so later, to make his way back to Casi, having

heard enough of my past and having judged sufficiently of my attitude of

mind to approve me in my determination to do penance and seek peace in

that isolation. Before going he bade me seek him out at Casi at any

time should any doubts assail me, or should I find that the burden I had

taken up was too heavy for my shoulders.

I watched him go down the winding, mountain path, watched the bent old

figure in his long black gaberdine, until a turn in the path and a clump

of chestnuts hid him from my sight.

Then I first tasted the loneliness to which on that fair morning I had

vowed myself. The desolation of it touched me and awoke self-pity in my

heart, to extinguish utterly the faint flame of ecstasy that had warmed

me when first I thought of taking the dead anchorite's place.

I was not yet twenty, I was lord of great possessions, and of life I had

tasted no more than one poisonous, reckless draught; yet I was done

with the world--driven out of it by penitence. It was just; but it was

bitter. And then I felt again that touch of ecstasy to reflect that it

was the bitterness of the resolve that made it worthy, that through its

very harshness was it that this path should lead to grace.

Later on I busied myself with an inspection of the hut, and my first

attentions were for the miraculous image. I looked upon it with awe, and

I knelt to it in prayer for forgiveness for the unworthiness I brought

to the service of the shrine.

The image itself was very crude of workmanship and singularly ghastly.

It reminded me poignantly of the Crucifix that had hung upon the

whitewashed wall of my mother's private dining-room and had been so

repellent to my young eyes.

From two arrow wounds in the breast descended two brown streaks, relics

of the last miraculous manifestation. The face of the young Roman

centurion who had suffered martyrdom for his conversion to Christianity

was smiling very sweetly and looking upwards, and in that part of his

work the sculptor had been very happy. But the rest of the carving

was gruesome and the anatomy was gross and bad, the figure being so

disproportionately broad as to convey the impression of a stunted dwarf.

The big book standing upon the pulpit of plain deal proved, as I had

expected, to be a missal; and it became my custom to recite from it each

morning thereafter the office for the day.

In a rude cupboard I found a jar of baked earth that was half full of

oil, and another larger jar containing some cakes of maize bread and

a handful of chestnuts. There was also a brown bundle which resolved

itself into a monkish habit within which was rolled a hair-shirt.

I took pleasure in this discovery, and I set myself at once to strip off

my secular garments and to don this coarse brown habit, which, by reason

of my great height, descended but midway down my calves. For lack of

sandals I went barefoot, and having made a bundle of the clothes I had

removed I thrust them into the cupboard in the place of those which I

had taken thence.

Thus did I, who had been vowed to the anchorite order of St. Augustine,

enter upon my life as an unordained anchorite. I dragged out the wattles

upon which my blessed predecessor had breathed his last, and having

swept the place clean with a bundle of hazel-switches which I cut for

the purpose, I went to gather fresh boughs and rushes by the swollen

torrent, and with these I made myself a bed.

My existence became not only one of loneliness, but of grim privation.

People rarely came my way, save for a few faithful women from Casi or

Fiori who solicited my prayers in return for the oil and maize-cakes

which they left me, and sometimes whole days would pass without the

sight of a single human being. These maize-cakes formed my chief

nourishment, together with a store of nuts from the hazel coppice that

grew before my door and some chestnuts which I went further afield to

gather in the woods. Occasionally, as a gift, there would be a jar of

olives, which was the greatest delicacy that I savoured in those days.

No flesh-food or fish did I ever taste, so that I grew very lean and

often suffered hunger.

My days were spent partly in prayer and partly in meditation, and I

pondered much upon what I could remember of the Confessions of St.

Augustine, deriving great consolation from the thought that if that

great father of the Church had been able to win to grace out of so much

sin as had befouled his youth, I had no reason to despair. And as yet

I had received no absolution for the mortal offences I had committed

at Piacenza. I had confessed to Fra Gervasio, and he had bidden me do

penance first, but the penance had never been imposed. I was imposing it

now. All my life should I impose it thus.

Yet, ere it was consummated I might come to die; and the thought

appalled me, for I must not die in sin.

So I resolved that when I should have spent a year in that fastness I

would send word to the priest at Casi by some of those who visited my

hermitage, and desire him to come to me that I might seek absolution at

his hands.

CHAPTER VI. HYPNEROTOMACHIA

At first I seemed to make good progress in my quest after grace, and a

certain solatium of peace descended upon me, beneficent as the dew of a

summer night upon the parched and thirsty earth. But anon this changed

and I would catch the thoughts that should have been bent upon pious

meditation glancing backward with regretful longings at that life out of

which I had departed.

I would start up in a pious rage and cast out such thoughts by more

strenuous prayer and still more strenuous fasting. But as my body grew

accustomed to the discomforts to which it was subjected, my mind assumed

a rebellious freedom that clogged the work of purification upon which

I strove to engage it. My stomach out of its very emptiness conjured

up evil visions to torment me in the night, and with these I vainly

wrestled until I remembered the measures which Fra Gervasio told me

that he had taken in like case. I had then the happy inspiration to have

recourse to the hair-shirt, which hitherto I had dreaded.

It would be towards the end of October, as the days were growing colder,

that I first put on that armour against the shafts of Satan. It galled

me horribly and fretted my tender flesh at almost every movement; but so

at least, at the expense of the body, I won back to some peace of mind,

and the flesh, being quelled and subdued, no longer interposed its evil

humours to the purity I desired for my meditations.

For upwards of a month, then, the mild torture of the goat's-hair cilice

did the office I required of it. But towards December, my skin having

grown tough and callous from the perpetual irritation, and inured to

the fretting of the sharp hair, my mind once more began to wander

mutinously. To check it again I put off the cilice, and with it all

other undergarments, retaining no more clothing than just the rough

brown monkish habit. Thus I exposed myself to the rigours of the

weather, for it had grown very cold in those heights where I dwelt, and

the snows were creeping nearer adown the mountain-side.

I had seen the green of the valley turn to gold and then to flaming

brown. I had seen the fire perish out of those autumnal tints, and with

the falling of the leaves, a slow, grey, bald decrepitude covering the

world. And to this had now succeeded chill wintry gales that howled and

whistled through the logs of my wretched hut, whilst the western wind

coming down over the frozen zone above cut into me like a knife's edge.

And famished as I was I felt this coldness the more, and daily I grew

leaner until there was little left of my erstwhile lusty vigour, and I

was reduced to a parcel of bones held together in a bag of skin, so that

it almost seemed that I must rattle as I walked.

I suffered, and yet I was glad to suffer, and took a joy in my pain,

thanking God for the grace of permitting me to endure it, since the

greater the discomforts of my body, the more numbed became the pain of

my mind, the more removed from me were the lures of longing with which

Satan still did battle for my soul. In pain itself I seemed to find

the nepenthes that others seek from pain; in suffering was my Lethean

draught that brought the only oblivion that I craved.

I think that in those months my reason wandered a little under all this

strain; and I think to-day that the long ecstasies into which I fell

were largely the result of a feverishness that burned in me as a

consequence of a chill that I had taken.

I would spend long hours upon my knees in prayer and meditation. And

remembering how others in such case as mine had known the great boon and

blessing of heavenly visions, I prayed and hoped for some such sign

of grace, confident in its power to sustain me thereafter against all

possible temptation.

And then, one night, as the year was touching its end, it seemed to me

that my prayer was answered. I do not think that my vision was a dream;

leastways, I do not think that I was asleep when it visited me. I was on

my knees at the time, beside my bed of wattles, and it was very late

at night. Suddenly the far end of my hut grew palely lucent, as if a

phosphorescent vapour were rising from the ground; it waved and rolled

as it ascended in billows of incandescence, and then out of the heart

of it there gradually grew a figure all in white over which there was a

cloak of deepest blue all flecked with golden stars, and in the folded

hands a sheaf of silver lilies.

I knew no fear. My pulses throbbed and my heart beat ponderously but

rapturously as I watched the vision growing more and more distinct until

I could make out the pale face of ineffable sweetness and the veiled

eyes.

It was the Blessed Madonna, as Messer Pordenone had painted her in the

Church of Santa Chiara at Piacenza; the dress, the lilies, the sweet

pale visage, all were known to me, even the billowing cloud upon which

one little naked foot was resting.

I cried out in longing and in rapture, and I held out my arms to that

sweet vision. But even as I did so its aspect gradually changed. Under

the upper part of the blue mantle, which formed a veil, was spread a

mass of ruddy, gleaming hair; the snowy pallor of the face was warmed

to the tint of ivory, and the lips deepened to scarlet and writhed in a

voluptuous smile; the dark eyes glowed languidly; the lilies faded away,

and the pale hands were held out to me.

“Giuliana!” I cried, and my pure and piously joyous ecstasy was changed

upon the instant to fierce, carnal longings.

“Giuliana!” I held out my arms, and slowly she floated towards me, over

the rough earthen floor of my cell.

A frenzy of craving seized me. I was impatient to lock my arms once more

about that fair sleek body. I sought to rise, to go to meet her slow

approach, to lessen by a second this agony of waiting. But my limbs were

powerless. I was as if cast in lead, whilst more and more slowly she

approached me, so languorously mocking.

And then revulsion took me, suddenly and without any cause or warning.

I put my hands to my face to shut out a vision whose true significance I

realized as in a flash.

“Retro me, Sathanas!” I thundered. “Jesus! Maria!”

I rose at last numbed and stiff. I looked again. The vision had

departed. I was alone in my cell, and the rain was falling steadily

outside. I groaned despairingly. Then I swayed, reeled sideways and lost

all consciousness.

When I awoke it was broad day, and the pale wintry sun shone silvery

from a winter sky. I was very weak and very cold, and when I attempted

to rise all things swam round me, and the floor of my cell appeared to

heave like the deck of a ship upon a rolling sea.

For days thereafter I was as a man entranced, alternately frozen with

cold and burning with fever; and but that a shepherd who had turned

aside to ask the hermit's blessing discovered me in that condition, and

remained, out of his charity, for some three days to tend me, it is more

than likely I should have died.

He nourished me with the milk of goats, a luxury upon which my strength

grew swiftly, and even after he had quitted my hut he still came daily

for a week to visit me, and daily he insisted that I should consume the

milk he brought me, overruling my protests that my need being overpast

there was no longer the necessity to pamper me.

Thereafter I knew a season of peace.

It was, I then reasoned, as if the Devil having tried me with a

masterstroke of temptation, and having suffered defeat, had abandoned

the contest. Yet I was careful not to harbour that thought unduly, nor

glory in my power, lest such presumption should lead to worse. I thanked

Heaven for the strength it had lent me, and implored a continuance of

its protection for a vessel so weak.

And now the hill-side and valley began to put on the raiment of a new

year. February, like a benignant nymph, tripped down by meadow and

stream, and touched the slumbering earth with gentler breezes. And

soon, where she had passed, the crocus reared its yellow head, anemones,

scarlet, blue and purple, tossed from her lap, sang the glories of

spring in their tender harmonies of hue, coy violet and sweet-smelling

nardosmia waved their incense on her altars, and the hellebore sprouted

by the streams.

Then as birch and beech and oak and chestnut put forth a garb of tender

pallid green, March advanced and Easter came on apace.

But the approach of Easter filled me with a staggering dread. It was in

Passion Week that the miracle of the image that I guarded was wont to

manifest itself. What if through my unworthiness it should fail? The

fear appalled me, and I redoubled my prayers. There was need; for spring

which touched the earth so benignly had not passed me by. And at moments

certain longings for the world would stir in me again, and again would

come those agonizing thoughts of Giuliana which I had conceived were for

ever laid to rest, so that I sought refuge once more in the hair-shirt;

and when this had once more lost its efficacy, I took long whip-like

branches of tender eglantine to fashion a scourge with which I

flagellated my naked body so that the thorns tore my flesh and set my

rebellious blood to flow.

One evening, at last, as I sat outside my hut, gazing over the rolling

emerald uplands, I had my reward. I almost fainted when first I realized

it in the extremity of my joy and thankfulness. Very faintly, just as I

had heard it that night when first I came to the hermitage, I heard now

the mystic, bell-like music that had guided my footsteps thither. Never

since that night had the sound of it reached me, though often I had

listened for it.

It came now wafted down to me, it seemed, upon the evening breeze, a

sound of angelic chimes infinitely ravishing to my senses, and stirring

my heart to such an ecstasy of faith and happiness as I had never yet

known since my coming thither.

It was a sign--a sign of pardon, a sign of grace. It could be naught

else. I fell upon my knees and rendered my deep and joyous thanks.

And in all the week that followed that unearthly silver music was with

me, infinitely soothing and solacing. I could wander afield, yet it

never left me, unless I chanced to go so near the tumbling waters of

the Bagnanza that their thunder drowned that other blessed sound. I took

courage and confidence. Passion Week drew nigh; but it no longer had any

terrors for me. I was adjudged worthy of the guardianship of the shrine.

Yet I prayed, and made St. Sebastian the special object of my devotions,

that he should not fail me.

April came, as I learnt of the stray visitors who, of their charity,

brought me the alms of bread, and the second day of it was the first of

Holy Week.

CHAPTER VII. INTRUDERS

It was on Holy Thursday that the image usually began to bleed, and it

would continue so to do until the dawn of Easter Sunday.

Each day now, as the time drew nearer, I watched the image closely, and

on the Wednesday I watched it with a dread anxiety I could not repress,

for as yet there was no faintest sign. The brown streaks that marked

the course of the last bleeding continued dry. All that night I prayed

intently, in a torture of doubt, yet soothed a little by the gentle

music that was never absent now.

With the first glint of dawn I heard steps outside the hut; but I did

not stir. By sunrise there was a murmur of voices like the muttering of

a sea upon its shore. I rose and peered more closely at the saint. He

was just wood, inanimate and insensible, and there was still no sign.

Outside, I knew, a crowd of pilgrims was already gathered. They were

waiting, poor souls. But what was their waiting compared with mine?

Another hour I knelt there, still beseeching Heaven to take mercy

upon me. But Heaven remained unresponsive and the wounds of the image

continued dry.

I rose, at last, in a sort of despair, and going to the door of the hut,

I flung it wide.

The platform was filled with a great crowd of peasantry, and an overflow

poured down the sides of it and surged up the hill on the right and the

left. At sight of me, so gaunt and worn, my eyes wild with despair and

feverish from sleeplessness, a tangled growth of beard upon my hollow

cheeks, they uttered as with one voice a great cry of awe. The multitude

swayed and rippled, and then with a curious sound as that of a great

wind, all went down upon their knees before me--all save the array of

cripples huddled in the foreground, brought thither, poor wretches, in

the hope of a miraculous healing.

As I was looking round upon that assembly, my eyes were caught by a

flash and glitter on the road above us leading to the Cisa Pass. A

little troop of men-at-arms was descending that way. A score of them

there would be, and from their lance-heads fluttered scarlet bannerols

bearing a white device which at that distance I could not make out.

The troop had halted, and one upon a great black horse, a man whose

armour shone like the sun itself, was pointing down with his mail-clad

hand. Then they began to move again, and the brightness of their armour,

the fluttering pennons on their lances, stirred me strangely in that

fleeting moment, ere I turned again to the faithful who knelt there

waiting for my words. Dolefully, with hanging head and downcast eyes, I

made the dread announcement.

“My children, there is yet no miracle.”

A deathly stillness followed the words. Then came an uproar, a clamour,

a wailing. One bold mountaineer thrust forward to the foremost ranks,

though without rising from his knees.

“Father,” he cried, “how can that be? The saint has never failed to

bleed by dawn on Holy Thursday, these five years past.”

“Alas!” I groaned, “I do not know. I but tell you what is. All night

have I held vigil. But all has been vain. I will go pray again, and do

you, too, pray.”

I dared not tell them of my growing suspicion and fear that the fault

was in myself; that here was a sign of Heaven's displeasure at the

impurity of the guardian of that holy place.

“But the music!” cried one of the cripples raucously. “I hear the

blessed music!”

I halted, and the crowd fell very still to listen. We all heard it

pealing softly, soothingly, as from the womb of the mountain, and a

great cry went up once more from that vast assembly, a hopeful cry that

where one miracle was happening another must happen, that where the

angelic choirs were singing all must be well.

And then with a thunder of hooves and clank of metal the troop that I

had seen came over the pasture-lands, heading straight for my hermitage,

having turned aside from the road. At the foot of the hillock upon which

my hut was perched they halted at a word from their leader.

I stood at gaze, and most of the people too craned their necks to see

what unusual pilgrim was this who came to the shrine of St. Sebastian.

The leader swung himself unaided from the saddle, full-armed as he was;

then going to a litter in the rear, he assisted a woman to alight from

it.

All this I watched, and I observed too that the device upon the

bannerols was the head of a white horse. By that device I knew them.

They were of the house of Cavalcanti--a house that had, as I had heard,

been in alliance and great friendship with my father. But that their

coming hither should have anything to do with me or with that friendship

I was assured was impossible. Not a single soul could know of my

whereabouts or the identity of the present hermit of Monte Orsaro.

The pair advanced, leaving the troop below to await their return, and as

they came I considered them, as did, too, the multitude.

The man was of middle height, very broad and active, with long arms, to

one of which the little lady clung for help up the steep path. He had a

proud, stern aquiline face that was shaven, so that the straight lines

of his strong mouth and powerful length of jaw looked as if chiselled

out of stone. It was only at closer quarters that I observed how the

general hardness of that countenance was softened by the kindliness of

his deep brown eyes. In age I judged him to be forty, though in reality

he was nearer fifty.

The little lady at his side was the daintiest maid that I had ever

seen. The skin, white as a water-lily, was very gently flushed upon her

cheeks; the face was delicately oval; the little mouth, the tenderest

in all the world; the forehead low and broad, and the slightly

slanting eyes--when she raised the lashes that hung over them like long

shadows--were of the deep blue of sapphires. Her dark brown hair was

coifed in a jewelled net of thread of gold, and on her white neck a

chain of emeralds sparkled sombrely. Her close-fitting robe and her

mantle were of the hue of bronze, and the light shifted along the silken

fabric as she moved, so that it gleamed like metal. About her waist

there was a girdle of hammered gold, and pearls were sewn upon the back

of her brown velvet gloves.

One glance of her deep blue eyes she gave me as she approached; then she

lowered them instantly, and so weak--so full of worldly vanities was I

still that in that moment I took shame at the thought that she should

see me thus, in this rough hermit's habit, my face a tangle of unshorn

beard, my hair long and unkempt. And the shame of it dyed my gaunt

cheeks. And then I turned pale again, for it seemed to me that out of

nowhere a voice had asked me:

“Do you still marvel that the image will not bleed?”

So sharp and clear did those words arise from the lips of Conscience

that it seemed to me as if they had been uttered aloud, and I looked

almost in alarm to see if any other had overheard them.

The cavalier was standing before me, and his brows were knit, a

deep amazement in his eyes. Thus awhile in utter silence. Then quite

suddenly, his voice a ringing challenge:

“What is your name?” he said.

“My name?” quoth I, astonished by such a question, and remarking now

the intentness and surprise of his own glance. “It is Sebastian,” I

answered, and truthfully, for that was the name of my adoption, the name

I had taken when I entered upon my hermitage.

“Sebastian of what and where?” quoth he.

He stood before me, his back to the peasant crowd, ignoring them as

completely as if they had no existence, supremely master of himself. And

meanwhile, the little lady on his arm stole furtive upward glances at

me.

“Sebastian of nowhere,” I answered. “Sebastian the hermit, the guardian

of this shrine. If you are come to...”

“What was your name in the world?” he interrupted impatiently, and all

the time his eyes were devouring my gaunt face.

“The name of a sinner,” answered I. “I have stripped it off and cast it

from me.”

An expression of impatience rippled across the white face

“But the name of your father?” he insisted.

“I have none,” answered I. “I have no kin or ties of any sort. I am

Sebastian the hermit.”

His lips smacked testily. “Were you baptized Sebastian?” he inquired.

“No,” I answered him. “I took the name when I became the guardian of

this shrine.”

“And when was that?”

“In September of last year, when the holy man who was here before me

died.”

I saw a sudden light leap to his eyes and a faint smile to his lips.

He leaned towards me. “Heard you ever of the name of Anguissola?” he

inquired, and watched me closely, his face within a foot of mine.

But I did not betray myself, for the question no longer took me by

surprise. I was accounted to be very like my father, and that a member

of the house of Cavalcanti, with which Giovanni d'Anguissola had been so

intimate, should detect the likeness was not unnatural. I was convinced,

moreover, that he had been guided thither by merest curiosity at the

sight of that crowd of pilgrims.

“Sir,” I said, “I know not your intentions; but in all humility let me

say that I am not here to answer questions of worldly import. The world

has done with me, and I with the world. So that unless you are come

hither out of piety for this shrine, I beg that you will depart with God

and molest me no further. You come at a singularly inauspicious time,

when I need all my strength to forget the world and my sinful past, that

through me the will of Heaven may be done here.”

I saw the maid's tender eyes raised to my face with a look of great

compassion and sweetness whilst I spoke. I observed the pressure which

she put on his arm. Whether he gave way to that, or whether it was the

sad firmness of my tone that prevailed upon him I cannot say. But he

nodded shortly.

“Well, well!” he said, and with a final searching look, he turned, the

little lady with him, and went clanking off through the lane which the

crowd opened out for him.

That they resented his presence, since it was not due to motives of

piety, they very plainly signified. They feared that the intrusion at

such a time of a personality so worldly must raise fresh difficulties

against the performance of the expected miracle.

Nor were matters improved when at the crowd's edge he halted and

questioned one of them as to the meaning of this pilgrimage. I did not

hear the peasant's answer; but I saw the white, haughty face suddenly

thrown up, and I caught his next question:

“When did it last bleed?”

Again an inaudible reply, and again his ringing voice--“That would be

before this young hermit came? And to-day it will not bleed, you say?”

He flashed me a last keen glance of his eyes, which had grown narrow and

seemed laden with mockery. The little lady whispered something to him,

in answer to which he laughed contemptuously.

“Fool's mummery,” he snapped, and drew her on, she going, it seemed to

me, reluctantly.

But the crowd had heard him and the insult offered to the shrine. A

deep-throated bay rose up in menace, and some leapt to their feet as if

they would attack him.

He checked, and wheeled at the sound. “How now?” he cried, his voice a

trumpet-call, his eyes flashing terribly upon them; and as dogs crouch

to heel at the angry bidding of their master, the multitude grew silent

and afraid under the eyes of that single steel-clad man.

He laughed a deep-throated laugh, and strode down the hill with his

little lady on his arm.

But when he had mounted and was riding off, the crowd, recovering

courage from his remoteness, hurled its curses after him and shrilly

branded him, “Derider!” and “Blasphemer!”

He rode contemptuously amain, however, looking back but once, and then

to laugh at them.

Soon he had dipped out of sight, and of his company nothing was visible

but the fluttering red pennons with the device of the white horse-head.

Gradually these also sank and vanished, and once more I was alone with

the crowd of pilgrims.

Enjoining prayer upon them again, I turned and re-entered the hut.

CHAPTER VIII. THE VISION

Pray as we might, night came and still the image gave no sign. The crowd

melted away, with promises to return at dawn--promises that sounded

almost like a menace in my ears.

I was alone once more, alone with my thoughts and these made sport of

me. It was not only upon the unresponsiveness of St. Sebastian that my

mind now dwelt, nor yet upon the horrid dread that this unresponsiveness

might be a sign of Heaven's displeasure, an indication that as a

custodian of that shrine I was unacceptable through the mire of sin

that still clung to me. Rather, my thoughts went straying down the

mountain-side in the wake of that gallant company, that stern-faced man

and that gentle-eyed little lady who had hung upon his arm. Before the

eyes of my mind there flashed again the brilliance of their arms, in my

ears rang the thunder of their chargers' hooves, whilst the image of the

girl in her shimmering, bronze-hued robe remained insistently.

Theirs the life that should have been mine! She such a companion as

should have shared my life and borne me children of my own. And I would

burn with shame again in memory, as I had burnt in actual fact, to think

that she should have beheld me in so unkempt and bedraggled a condition.

How must I compare in her eyes with the gay courtiers who would daily

hover in her presence and hang upon her gentle speech? What thought of

me could I hope should ever abide with her, as the image of her abode

with me? Or, if she thought of me at all, she must think of me just as

a poor hermit, a man who had donned the anchorite's sackcloth and turned

his back upon a world that for him was empty.

It is very easy for you worldly ones who read, to conjecture what had

befallen me. I was enamoured. In a meeting of eyes had the thing come to

me. And you will say that it is little marvel, considering the seclusion

of all my life and particularly that of the past few months, that the

first sweet maid I beheld should have wrought such havoc, and conquered

my heart by the mere flicker of her lashes.

Yet so much I cannot grant your shrewdness.

That meeting was predestined. It was written that she should come and

tear the foolish bandage from my eyes, allowing me to see for myself

that, as Fra Gervasio had opined, my vocation was neither for hermitage

nor cloister; that what called me was the world; and that in the world

must I find salvation since I was needed for the world's work.

And none but she could have done that. Of this I am persuaded, as you

shall be when you have read on.

The yearnings with which she filled my soul were very different from

those inspired by the memory of Giuliana. That other sinful longing,

she entirely effaced at last, thereby achieving something that had been

impossible to prayers and fasting, to scourge and cilice. I longed for

her almost beatifically, as those whose natures are truly saintly long

for the presence of the blessed ones of Heaven. By the sight of her I

was purified and sanctified, washed clean of all that murk of sinful

desire in which I had lain despite myself; for my desire of her was the

blessed, noble desire to serve, to guard, to cherish.

Pure was she as the pale narcissus by the streams, and serving her what

could I be but pure?

And then, quite suddenly, upon the heels of such thoughts came the

reaction. Horror and revulsion were upon me. This was but a fresh

snare of Satan's baiting to lure me to destruction. Where the memory

of Giuliana had failed to move me to aught but penance and increasing

rigours, the foul fiend sought to engage me with a seeming purity to my

ultimate destruction. Thus had Anthony, the Egyptian monk, been tempted;

and under one guise or another it was ever the same Circean lure.

I would make an end. I swore it in a mighty frenzy of repentance, in a

very lust to do battle with Satan and with my own flesh and a phrenetic

joy to engage in the awful combat.

I stripped off my ragged habit, and standing naked I took up my scourge

of eglantine and beat myself until the blood flowed freely. But that was

not enough. All naked as I was, I went forth into the blue night, and

ran to a pool of the Bagnanza, going of intent through thickets of

bramble and briar-rose that gripped and tore my flesh and lacerated me

so that at times I screamed aloud in pain, to laugh ecstatically the

next moment and joyfully taunt Satan with his defeat.

Thus I tore on, my very body ragged and bleeding from head to foot, and

thus I came to the pool in the torrent's course. Into this I plunged,

and stood with the icy waters almost to my neck, to purge the unholy

fevers out of me. The snows above were melting at the time, and the pool

was little more than liquid ice. The chill of it struck through me to

the very marrow, and I felt my flesh creep and contract until it seemed

like the rough hide of some fabled monster, and my wounds stung as if

fire were being poured into them.

Thus awhile; then all feeling passed, and a complete insensibility

to the cold of the water or the fire of the wounds succeeded. All was

numbed, and every nerve asleep. At last I had conquered. I laughed

aloud, and in a great voice of triumph I shouted so that the shout went

echoing round the hills in the stillness of the night:

“Satan, thou art defeated!”

And upon that I crawled up the mossy bank, the water gliding from my

long limbs. I attempted to stand. But the earth rocked under my feet;

the blueness of the night deepened into black, and consciousness was

extinguished like a candle that is blown out.

. . . . . . . .

She appeared above me in a great effulgence that emanated from herself

as if she were grown luminous. Her robe was of cloth of silver and of

a dazzling sheen, and it hung closely to her lissom, virginal form,

defining every line and curve of it; and by the chaste beauty of her I

was moved to purest ecstasy of awe and worship.

The pale, oval face was infinitely sweet, the slanting eyes of heavenly

blue were infinitely tender, the brown hair was plaited into two long

tresses that hung forward upon either breast and were entwined with

threads of gold and shimmering jewels. On the pale brow a brilliant

glowed with pure white fires, and her hands were held out to me in

welcome.

Her lips parted to breathe my name.

“Agostino d'Anguissola!” There were whole tomes of tender meaning in

those syllables, so that hearing her utter them I seemed to learn all

that was in her heart.

And then her shining whiteness suggested to me the name that must be

hers.

“Bianca!” I cried, and in my turn held out my arms and made as if to

advance towards her. But I was held back in icy, clinging bonds, whose

relentlessness drew from me a groan of misery.

“Agostino, I am waiting for you at Pagliano,” she said, and it did not

occur to me to wonder where might be this Pagliano of which I could not

remember ever to have heard. “Come to me soon.”

“I may not come,” I answered miserably. “I am an anchorite, the guardian

of a shrine; and my life that has been full of sin must be given

henceforth to expiation. It is the will of Heaven.”

She smiled all undismayed, smiled confidently and tenderly.

“Presumptuous!” she gently chid me. “What know you of the will of

Heaven? The will of Heaven is inscrutable. If you have sinned in

the world, in the world must you atone by deeds that shall serve the

world--God's world. In your hermitage you are become barren soil that

will yield naught to yourself or any. Come then from the wilderness.

Come soon! I am waiting!”

And on that the splendid vision faded, and utter darkness once more

encompassed me, a darkness through which still boomed repeatedly the

fading echo of the words:

“Come soon! I am waiting!”

. . . . . . . .

I lay upon my bed of wattles in the hut, and through the little unglazed

windows the sun was pouring, but the dripping eaves told of rain that

had lately ceased.

Over me was bending a kindly faced old man in whom I recognized the good

priest of Casi.

I lay quite still for a long while, just gazing up at him. Soon my

memory got to work of its own accord, and I bethought me of the pilgrims

who must by now have come and who must be impatiently awaiting news.

How came I to have slept so long? Vaguely I remembered my last night's

penance, and then came a black gulf in my memory, a gap I could not

bridge. But uppermost leapt the anxieties concerning the image of St.

Sebastian.

I struggled up to discover that I was very weak; so weak that I was glad

to sink back again.

“Does it bleed? Does it bleed yet?” I asked, and my voice was so small

and feeble that the sound of it startled me.

The old priest shook his head, and his eyes were very full of

compassion.

“Poor youth, poor youth!” he sighed.

Without all was silent; there was no such rustle of a multitude as I

listened for. And then I observed in my cell a little shepherd-lad who

had been wont to come that way for my blessing upon occasions. He was

half naked, as lithe as a snake and almost as brown. What did he there?

And then someone else stirred--an elderly peasant-woman with a wrinkled

kindly face and soft dark eyes, whom I did not know at all.

Somehow, as my mind grew clearer, last night seemed ages remote. I

looked at the priest again.

“Father,” I murmured, “what has happened?”

His answer amazed me. He started violently. Looked more closely, and

suddenly cried out:

“He knows me! He knows me! Deo gratias!” And he fell upon his knees

Now here it seemed to me was a sort of madness. “Why should I not know

you?” quoth I.

The old woman peered at me. “Ay, blessed be Heaven! He is awake at

last, and himself again.” She turned to the lad, who was staring at me,

grinning. “Go tell them, Beppo! Haste!”

“Tell them?” I cried. “The pilgrims? Ah, no, no--not unless the miracle

has come to pass!”

“There are no pilgrims here, my son,” said the priest.

“Not?” I cried, and cold horror descended upon me. “But they should have

come. This is Holy Friday, father.”

“Nay, my son, Holy Friday was a fortnight ago.”

I stared askance at him, in utter silence. Then I smiled half

tolerantly. “But father, yesterday they were all here. Yesterday was...”

“Your yesterday, my son, is sped these fifteen days,” he answered. “All

that long while, since the night you wrestled with the Devil, you have

lain exhausted by that awful combat, lying there betwixt life and death.

All that time we have watched by you, Leocadia here and I and the lad

Beppo.”

Now here was news that left me speechless for some little while. My

amazement and slow understanding were spurred on by a sight of my hands

lying on the rude coverlet which had been flung over me. Emaciated they

had been for some months now. But at present they were as white as

snow and almost as translucent in their extraordinary frailty. I became

increasingly conscious, too, of the great weakness of my body and the

great lassitude that filled me.

“Have I had the fever?” I asked him presently.

“Ay, my son. And who would not? Blessed Virgin! who would not after what

you underwent?”

And now he poured into my astonished ears the amazing story that had

overrun the country-side. It would seem that my cry in the night, my

exultant cry to Satan that I had defeated him, had been overheard by

a goatherd who guarded his flock in the hills. In the stillness he

distinctly heard the words that I had uttered, and he came trembling

down, drawn by a sort of pious curiosity to the spot whence it had

seemed to him that the cry had proceeded.

And there by a pool of the Bagnanza he had found me lying prone, my

white body glistening like marble and almost as cold. Recognizing in me

the anchorite of Monte Orsaro, he had taken me up in his strong arms

and had carried me back to my hut. There he had set about reviving me by

friction and by forcing between my teeth some of the grape-spirit that

he carried in a gourd.

Finding that I lived, but that he could not arouse me and that my icy

coldness was succeeded by the fire of fever, he had covered me with my

habit and his own cloak, and had gone down to Casi to fetch the priest

and relate his story.

This story was no less than that the hermit of Monte Orsaro had been

fighting with the devil, who had dragged him naked from his hut and had

sought to hurl him into the torrent; but that on the very edge of

the river the anchorite had found strength, by the grace of God, to

overthrow the tormentor and to render him powerless; and in proof of

it there was my body all covered with Satan's claw-marks by which I had

been torn most cruelly.

The priest had come at once, bringing with him such restoratives as he

needed, and it is a thousand mercies that he did not bring a leech, or

else I might have been bled of the last drops remaining in my shrunken

veins.

And meanwhile the goatherd's story had gone abroad. By morning it was on

the lips of all the country-side, so that explanations were not lacking

to account for St. Sebastian's refusal to perform the usual miracle, and

no miracle was expected--nor had the image yielded any.

The priest was mistaken. A miracle there had been. But for what had

chanced, the multitude must have come again confidently expecting the

bleeding of the image which had never failed in five years, and had the

image not bled it must have fared ill with the guardian of the

shrine. In punishment for his sacrilegious ministry which must be held

responsible for the absence of the miracle they so eagerly awaited, well

might the crowd have torn me limb from limb.

Next the old man went on to tell me how three days ago there had come to

the hermitage a little troop of men-at-arms, led by a tall, bearded man

whose device was a sable band upon an argent field, and accompanied by a

friar of the order of St. Francis, a tall, gaunt fellow who had wept at

sight of me.

“That would be Fra Gervasio!” I exclaimed. “How came he to discover me?”

“Yes--Fra Gervasio is his name,” replied the priest.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“I think he is here.”

In that moment I caught the sound of approaching steps. The door opened,

and before me stood the tall figure of my best friend, his eyes all

eagerness, his pale face flushed with joyous excitement.

I smiled my welcome.

“Agostino! Agostino!” he cried, and ran to kneel beside me and take my

hand in his. “O, blessed be God!” he murmured.

In the doorway stood now another man, who had followed him--one whose

face I had seen somewhere yet could not at first remember where. He was

very tall, so that he was forced to stoop to avoid the lintel of the low

door--as tall as Gervasio or myself--and the tanned face was bearded by

a heavy brown beard in which a few strands of grey were showing. Across

his face there ran the hideous livid scar of a blow that must have

crushed the bridge of his nose. It began just under the left eye, and

crossed the face downwards until it was lost in the beard on the

right side almost in line with the mouth. Yet, notwithstanding that

disfigurement, he still possessed a certain beauty, and the deep-set,

clear, grey-blue eyes were the eyes of a brave and kindly man.

He wore a leather jerkin and great thigh-boots of grey leather, and from

his girdle of hammered steel hung a dagger and the empty carriages of a

sword. His cropped black head was bare, and in his hand he carried a cap

of black velvet.

We looked at each other awhile, and his eyes were sad and wistful, laden

with pity, as I thought, for my condition. Then he moved forward with a

creak of leather and jingle of spurs that made pleasant music.

He set a hand upon the shoulder of the kneeling Gervasio.

“He will live now, Gervasio?” he asked.

“O, he will live,” answered the friar with an almost fierce satisfaction

in his positive assurance. “He will live and in a week we can move him

hence. Meanwhile he must be nourished.” He rose. “My good Leocadia, have

you the broth? Come, then, let us build up this strength of his. There

is haste, good soul; great haste!” She bustled at his bidding, and soon

outside the door there was a crackling of twigs to announce the lighting

of a fire. And then Gervasio made known to me the stranger.

“This is Galeotto,” he said. “He was your father's friend, and would be

yours.”

“Sir,” said I, “I could not desire otherwise with any who was my

father's friend. You are not, perchance, the Gran Galeotto?” I inquired,

remembering the sable device on argent of which the priest had told me.

“I am that same,” he answered, and I looked with interest upon one whose

name had been ringing through Italy these last few years. And then, I

suddenly realized why his face was familiar to me. This was the man who

in a monkish robe had stared so insistently at me that day at Mondolfo

five years ago.

He was a sort of outlaw, a remnant of the days of chivalry and

free-lances, whose sword was at the disposal of any purchaser. He rode

at the head of a last fragment of the famous company that Giovanni de'

Medici had raised and captained until his death. The sable band which

they adopted in mourning for that warrior, earned for their founder the

posthumous title of Giovanni delle Bande Nere.

He was called Il Gran Galeotto (as another was called Il Gran Diavolo)

in play upon the name he bore and the life he followed. He had been in

bad odour with the Pope for his sometime association with my father, and

he was not well-viewed in the Pontifical domains until, as I was soon

to learn, he had patched up a sort of peace with Pier Luigi Farnese,

who thought that the day might come when he should need the support of

Galeotto's free-lances.

“I was,” he said, “your father's closest friend. I took this at Perugia,

where he fell,” he added, and pointed to his terrific scar. Then he

laughed. “I wear it gladly in memory of him.”

He turned to Gervasio, smiling. “I hope that Giovanni d'Anguissola's son

will hold me in some affection for his father's sake, when he shall come

to know me better.”

“Sir,” I said, “from my heart I thank you for that pious, kindly

wish; and I would that I might fully correspond to it. But Agostino

d'Anguissola, who has been so near to death in the body, is, indeed,

dead to the world already. Here you see but a poor hermit named

Sebastian, who is the guardian of this shrine.”

Gervasio rose suddenly. “This shrine...” he began in a fierce voice,

his face inflamed as with sudden wrath. And there he stopped short. The

priest was staring at him, and through the open door came Leocadia with

a bowl of steaming broth. “We'll talk of this again,” he said, and there

was a sort of thunder rumbling in the promise.

CHAPTER IX. THE ICONOCLAST

It was a week later before we returned to the subject.

Meanwhile, the good priest of Casi and Leocadia had departed, bearing

with them a princely reward from the silent, kindly eyed Galeotto.

To tend me there remained only the boy Beppo; and after my long six

months of lenten fare there followed now a period of feasting that began

to trouble me as my strength returned. When, finally, on the seventh

day, I was able to stand, and, by leaning on Gervasio's arm, to reach

the door of the hut and to look out upon the sweet spring landscape and

the green tents that Galeotto's followers had pitched for themselves in

the dell below my platform, I vowed that I would make an end of broths

and capons' breasts and trout and white bread and red wine and all such

succulences.

But when I spoke so to Gervasio, he grew very grave.

“There has been enough of this, Agostino,” said he. “You have gone

near your death; and had you died, you had died a suicide and had been

damned--deserving it for your folly if for naught else.”

I looked at him with surprise and reproach. “How, Fra Gervasio?” I said.

“How?” he answered. “Do you conceive that I am to be fooled by tales of

fights with Satan in the night and the marks of the fiend's claws

upon your body? Is this your sense of piety, to add to the other foul

impostures of this place by allowing such a story to run the breadth of

the country-side?”

“Foul impostures?” I echoed, aghast. “Fra Gervasio, your words are

sacrilege.”

“Sacrilege?” he cried, and laughed bitterly. “Sacrilege? And what of

that?” And he flung out a stern, rigid, accusing arm at the image of St.

Sebastian in its niche.

“You think because it did not bleed...” I began.

“It did not bleed,” he cut in, “because you are not a knave. That is the

only reason. This man who was here before you was an impious rogue.

He was no priest. He was a follower of Simon Mage, trafficking in holy

things, battening upon the superstition of poor humble folk. A black

villain who is dead--dead and damned, for he was not allowed time when

the end took him to confess his ghastly sin of sacrilege and the money

that he had extorted by his simonies.”

“My God! Fra Gervasio, what do you say? How dare you say so much?

“Where is the money that he took to build his precious bridge?” he asked

me sharply. “Did you find any when you came hither? No. I'll take oath

that you did not. A little longer, and this brigand had grown rich and

had vanished in the night--carried off by the Devil, or borne away to

realms of bliss by the angels, the poor rustics would have said.”

Amazed at his vehemence, I sank to a tree-bole that stood near the door

to do the office of a stool.

“But he gave alms!” I cried, my senses all bewildered.

“Dust in the eyes of fools. No more than that. That image--” his scorn

became tremendous--“is an impious fraud, Agostino.”

Could the monstrous thing that he suggested be possible? Could any man

be so lost to all sense of God as to perpetrate such a deed as that

without fear that the lightnings of Heaven would blast him?

I asked the question. Gervasio smiled.

“Your notions of God are heathen notions,” he said more quietly.

“You confound Him with Jupiter the Thunderer. But He does not use His

lightnings as did the father of Olympus. And yet--reflect! Consider the

manner in which that brigand met his death.”

“But... but...” I stammered. And then, quite suddenly, I stopped short,

and listened. “Hark, Fra Gervasio! Do you not hear it?”

“Hear it? Hear what?”

“The music--the angelic melodies! And you can say that this place is

a foul imposture; this holy image an impious fraud! And you a priest!

Listen! It is a sign to warn you against stubborn unbelief.”

He listened, with frowning brows, a moment; then he smiled.

“Angelic melodies!” he echoed with gentlest scorn. “By what snares does

the Devil delude men, using even suggested holiness for his purpose!

That, boy--that is no more than the dripping of water into little wells

of different depths, producing different notes. It is in there, in some

cave in the mountain where the Bagnanza springs from the earth.”

I listened, half disillusioned by his explanation, yet fearing that my

senses were too slavishly obeying his suggestion. “The proof of that?

The proof!” I cried.

“The proof is that you have never heard it after heavy rain, or while

the river was swollen.”

That answer shattered my last illusion. I looked back upon the time

I had spent there, upon the despair that had beset me when the music

ceased, upon the joy that had been mine when again I heard it,

accepting it always as a sign of grace. And it was as he said. Not my

unworthiness, but the rain, had ever silenced it. In memory I ran over

the occasions, and so clearly did I perceive the truth of this, that I

marvelled the coincidence should not earlier have discovered it to me.

Moreover, now that my illusions concerning it were gone, the sound was

clearly no more than he had said. I recognized its nature. It might have

intrigued a sane man for a day or a night. But it could never longer

have deceived any but one whose mind was become fevered with fanatic

ecstasy.

Then I looked again at the image in the niche, and the pendulum of my

faith was suddenly checked in its counter-swing. About that image there

could be no delusions. The whole country-side had witnessed the miracle

of the bleeding, and it had wrought cures, wondrous cures, among the

faithful. They could not all have been deceived. Besides, from the

wounds in the breast there were still the brown signs of the last

manifestation.

But when I had given some utterance to these thoughts Gervasio for only

answer stooped and picked up a wood-man's axe that stood against the

wall. With this he went straight towards the image.

“Fra Gervasio!” I cried, leaping to my feet, a premonition of what he

was about turning me cold with horror. “Stay!” I almost screamed.

But too late. My answer was a crashing blow. The next instant, as I sank

back to my seat and covered my face, the two halves of the image fell at

my feet, flung there by the friar.

“Look!” he bade me in a roar.

Fearfully I looked. I saw. And yet I could not believe.

He came quickly back, and picked up the two halves. “The oracle of

Delphi was not more impudently worked,” he said. “Observe this sponge,

these plates of metal that close down upon it and exert the pressure

necessary to send the liquid with which it is laden oozing forth.” As he

spoke he tore out the fiendish mechanism. “And see now how ingeniously

it was made to work--by pressure upon this arrow in the flank.”

There was a burst of laughter from the door. I looked up, startled, to

find Galeotto standing at my elbow. So engrossed had I been that I had

never heard his soft approach over the turf.

“Body of Bacchus!” said he. “Here is Gervasio become an image breaker to

some purpose. What now of your miraculous saint, Agostino?”

My answer was first a groan over my shattered illusion, and then a

deep-throated curse at the folly that had made a mock of me.

The friar set a hand upon my shoulder. “You see, Agostino, that your

excursions into holy things do not promise well. Away with you, boy! Off

with this hypocrite robe, and get you out into the world to do useful

work for God and man. Had your heart truly called you to the priesthood,

I had been the first to have guided your steps thither. But your mind

upon such matters has been warped, and your views are all false; you

confound mysticism with true religion, and mouldering in a hermitage

with the service of God. How can you serve God here? Is not the world

God's world that you must shun it as if the Devil had fashioned it? Go,

I say--and I say it with the authority of the orders that I bear--go and

serve man, and thus shall you best serve God. All else are but snares to

such a nature as yours.”

I looked at him helplessly, and from him to Galeotto who stood there,

his black brows knit; watching me with intentness as if great issues

hung upon my answer. And Gervasio's words touched in my mind some chord

of memory. They were words that I had heard before--or something very

like them, something whose import was the same.

Then I groaned miserably and took my head in my hands. “Whither am I

to go?” I cried. “What place is there in all the world for me? I am an

outcast. My very home is held against me. Whither, then, shall I go?”

“If that is all that troubles you,” said Galeotto, his tone unctuously

humorous, “why we will ride to Pagliano.”

I leapt at the word--literally leapt to my feet, and stared at him with

blazing eyes.

“Why, what ails him now?” quoth he.

Well might he ask. That name--Pagliano--had stirred my memory so

violently, that of a sudden as in a flash I had seen again the strange

vision that visited my delirium; I had seen again the inviting eyes,

the beckoning hands, and heard again the gentle voice saying, “Come to

Pagliano! Come soon!”

And now I knew, too, where I had heard words urging my return to the

world that were of the same import as those which Gervasio used.

What magic was there here? What wizardry was at play? I knew--for they

had told me--that it had been that cavalier who had visited me, that man

whose name was Ettore de' Cavalcanti, who had borne news to them of one

who was strangely like what Giovanni d'Anguissola had been. But Pagliano

had never yet been mentioned.

“Where is Pagliano?” I asked.

“In Lombardy--in the Milanes,” replied Galeotto.

“It is the home of Cavalcanti.”

“You are faint, Agostino,” cried Gervasio, with a sudden solicitude, and

put an arm about my shoulders as I staggered.

“No, no,” said I. “It is nothing. Tell me--” And I paused almost afraid

to put the question, lest the answer should dash my sudden hope. For it

seemed to me that in this place of false miracles, one true miracle at

least had been wrought; if it should be proved so indeed, then would

I accept it as a sign that my salvation lay indeed in the world. If

not...

“Tell me,” I began again; “this Cavalcanti has a daughter. She was with

him upon that day when he came here. What is her name?”

Galeotto looked at me out of narrowing eyes.

“Why, what has that to do with anything?” quoth Gervasio.

“More than you think. Answer me, then. What is her name?”

“Her name is Bianca,” said Caleotto.

Something within me seemed to give way, so that I fell to laughing

foolishly as women laugh who are on the verge of tears. By an effort I

regained my self-control.

“It is very well,” I said. “I will ride with you to Pagliano.”

Both stared at me in utter amazement at the suddenness of my consent

following upon information that, in their minds, could have no possible

bearing upon the matter at issue.

“Is he quite sane, do you think?” cried Galeotto gruffly.

“I think he has just become so,” said Fra Gervasio after a pause.

“God give me patience, then,” grumbled the soldier, and left me puzzled

by the words.

BOOK IV. THE WORLD

CHAPTER I. PAGLIANO

The lilac was in bloom when we came to the grey walls of Pagliano in

that May of '45, and its scent, arousing the memory of my return to the

world, has ever since been to me symbolical of the world itself.

Mine was no half-hearted, backward-glancing return. Having determined

upon the step, I took it resolutely and completely at a single stride.

Since Galeotto placed his resources at my disposal, to be repaid him

later when I should have entered upon the enjoyment of my heritage of

Mondolfo, I did not scruple to draw upon them for my needs.

I accepted the fine linen and noble raiment that he offered, and I took

pleasure in the brave appearance that I made in them, my face shorn

now of its beard and my hair trimmed to a proper length. Similarly I

accepted weapons, money, and a horse; and thus equipped, looking for the

first time in my life like a patrician of my own lofty station, I rode

forth from Monte Orsaro with Galeotto and Gervasio, attended by the

former's troop of twenty lances.

And from the moment of our setting out there came upon me a curious

peace, a happiness and a great sense of expectancy. No longer was

I oppressed by the fear of proving unworthy of the life which I had

chosen--as had been the case when that life had been monastic.

Galeotto was in high spirits to see me so blithe, and he surveyed with

pride the figure that I made, vowing that I should prove a worthy son of

my father ere all was done.

The first act of my new life was performed as we were passing through

the village of Pojetta.

I called a halt before the doors of that mean hostelry, over which hung

what no doubt would still be the same withered bunch of rosemary that

had been there in autumn when last I went that way.

To the sloe-eyed, deep-bosomed girl who lounged against the door-post to

see so fine a company ride by, I gave an order to fetch the taverner.

He came with a slouch, a bent back, and humble, timid eyes--a very

different attitude from that which he had last adopted towards me.

“Where is my mule, you rogue?” quoth I.

He looked at me askance. “Your mule, magnificent? said he.

“You have forgotten me, I think--forgotten the lad in rusty black who

rode this way last autumn and whom you robbed.”

At the words be turned a sickly yellow, and fell to trembling and

babbling protestations and excuses.

“Have done,” I broke in. “You would not buy the mule then. You shall buy

it now, and pay for it with interest.”

“What is this, Agostino?” quoth Galeotto at my elbow. “An act of

justice, sir,” I answered shortly, whereupon he questioned me no

further, but looked on with a grim smile. Then to the taverner, “Your

manners to-day are not quite the same as on the last occasion when we

met. I spare you the gallows that you may live to profit by the lesson

of your present near escape. And now, rogue, ten ducats for that mule.”

And I held out my hand.

“Ten ducats!” he cried, and gathering courage perhaps since he was not

to hang. “It is twice the value of the beast,” he protested.

“I know,” I said. “It will be five ducats for the mule, and five for

your life. I am merciful to rate the latter as cheaply as it deserves.

Come, thief, the ten ducats without more ado, or I'll burn your nest of

infamy and hang you above the ruins.”

He cowered and shrivelled. Then he scuttled within doors to fetch the

money, whilst Galeotto laughed deep in his throat.

“You are well-advised,” said I, when the rogue returned and handed me

the ducats. “I told you I should come back to present my reckoning. Be

warned by this.”

As we rode on Galeotto laughed again. “Body of Satan! There is a

thoroughness about you, Agustino. As a hermit you did not spare

yourself; and now as a tyrant you do not seem likely to spare others.”

“It is the Anguissola way,” said Gervasio quietly.

“You mistake,” said I. “I conceive myself in the world for some good

purpose, and the act you have witnessed is a part of it. It was not a

revengeful deed. Vengeance would have taken a harsher course. It was

justice, and justice is righteous.”

“Particularly a justice that puts ten ducats in your pocket,” laughed

Galeotto.

“There, again, you mistake me,” said I. “My aim is that thieves be

mulcted to the end that the poor shall profit.” And I drew rein again.

A little crowd had gathered about us, mostly of very ragged, half-clad

people, for this village of Pojetta was a very poverty-stricken place.

Into that little crowd I flung the ten ducats--with the consequence

that on the instant it became a seething, howling, snarling, quarrelling

mass. In the twinkling of an eye a couple of heads were cracked and

blood was flowing, so that to quell the riot my charity had provoked, I

was forced to spur my horse forward and bid them with threats disperse.

“And I think now,” said Galeotto when it was done, “that you are just as

reckless in the manner of doing charity. For the future, Agostino, you

would do well to appoint an almoner.”

I bit my lip in vexation; but soon I smiled again. Were such little

things to fret me? Did we not ride to Pagliano and to Bianca de'

Cavalcanti? At the very thought my pulses would quicken, and a sweetness

of anticipation would invade my soul, to be clouded at moments by an

indefinable dread.

And thus we came to Pagliano in that month of May, when the lilac was in

bloom, as I have said, and after Fra Gervasio had left us, to return to

his convent at Piacenza.

We were received in the courtyard of that mighty fortress by that

sturdy, hawk-faced man who had recognized me in the hermitage on Monte

Orsaro. But he was no longer in armour. He wore a surcoat of yellow

velvet, and his eyes were very kindly and affectionate when they rested

on Galeotto and from Galeotto passed on to take survey of me.

“So this is our hermit!” quoth he, a note of some surprise in his crisp

tones. “Somewhat changed!”

“By a change that goes deeper than his pretty doublet,” said Galeotto.

We dismounted, and grooms, in the Cavalcanti livery of scarlet with

the horse-head in white upon their breasts, led away our horses. The

seneschal acted as quarter-master to our lances, whilst Cavalcanti

himself led us up the great stone staircase with its carved balustrade

of marble, from which rose a file of pillars to support the groined

ceiling. This last was frescoed in dull red with the white horse-head

at intervals. On our right, on every third step, stood orange-trees in

tubs, all flowering and shedding the most fragrant perfume.

Thus we ascended to a spacious gallery, and through a succession of

magnificent rooms we came to the noble apartments that had been made

ready for us.

A couple of pages came to tend me, bringing perfumed water and macerated

herbs for my ablutions. These performed, they helped me into fresh

garments that awaited me--black hose of finest silk and velvet trunks

of the same sable hue, and for my body a fine close-fitting doublet of

cloth of gold, caught at the waist by a jewelled girdle from which hung

a dagger that was the merest toy.

When I was ready they went before me, to lead the way to what they

called the private dining-room, where supper awaited us. At the very

mention of a private dining-room I had a vision of whitewashed walls and

high-set windows and a floor strewn with rushes. Instead we came into

the most beautiful chamber that I had ever seen. From floor to ceiling

it was hung with arras of purple brocade alternating with cloth of gold;

thus on three sides. On the fourth there was an opening for the embayed

window which glowed like a gigantic sapphire in the deepening twilight.

The floor was spread with a carpet of the ruddy purple of porphyry, very

soft and silent to the feet. From the frescoed ceiling, where a joyous

Phoebus drove a team of spirited white stallions, hung a chain that

was carved in the semblance of interlocked Titans to support a great

candelabrum, each branch of which was in the image of a Titan holding

a stout candle of scented wax. It was all in gilded bronze and the

workmanship--as I was presently to learn--of that great artist and rogue

Benvenuto Cellini. From this candelabrum there fell upon the board a

soft golden radiance that struck bright gleams from crystals and plate

of gold and silver.

By a buffet laden with meats stood the master of the household in black

velvet, his chain of office richly carved, his badge a horse's head in

silver, and he was flanked on either hand by a nimble-looking page.

Of all this my first glance gathered but the most fleeting of

impressions. For my eyes were instantly arrested by her who stood

between Cavalcanti and Galeotto, awaiting my arrival. And, miracle of

miracles, she was arrayed exactly as I had seen her in my vision.

Her supple maiden body was sheathed in a gown of cloth of silver; her

brown hair was dressed into two plaits interlaced with gold threads and

set with tiny gems, and these plaits hung one on either breast. Upon the

low, white brow a single jewel gleamed--a brilliant of the very whitest

fire.

Her long blue eyes were raised to look at me as I entered, and their

glance grew startled when it encountered mine, the delicate colour

faded gradually from her cheeks, and her eyes fell at last as she moved

forward to bid me welcome to Pagliano in her own name.

They must have perceived her emotion as they perceived mine. But they

gave no sign. We got to the round table--myself upon Cavalcanti's left,

Galeotto in the place of honour, and Bianca facing her father so that I

was on her right.

The seneschal bestirred himself, and the silken ministering pages

fluttered round us. My Lord of Pagliano was one who kept a table as

luxurious as all else in his splendid palace. First came a broth of veal

in silver basins, then a stew of cocks' combs and capons' breasts, then

the ham of a roasted boar, the flesh very lusciously saturated with the

flavour of rosemary; and there was venison that was as soft as velvet,

and other things that I no longer call to mind. And to drink there was a

fragrant, well-sunned wine of Lombardy that had been cooled in snow.

Galeotto ate enormously, Cavalcanti daintily, I but little, and Bianca

nothing. Her presence had set up such emotions in me that I had no

thought for food. But I drank deeply, and so came presently to a

spurious ease which enabled me to take my share in the talk that

was toward, though when all is said it was but a slight share, since

Cavalcanti and Galeotto discoursed of matters wherein my knowledge was

not sufficient to enable me to bear a conspicuous part.

More than once I was on the point of addressing Bianca herself, but

always courage failed me. I had ever in mind the memory she must have of

me as she had last seen me, to increase the painful diffidence which her

presence itself imposed upon me. Nor did I hear her voice more than once

or twice when she demurely answered such questions as her father set

her. And though once or twice I found her stealing a look at me, she

would instantly avert her eyes when our glances crossed.

Thus was our first meeting, and for a little time it was to be our last,

because I lacked the courage to seek her out. She had her own apartments

at Pagliano with her own maids of honour, like a princess; and the

castle garden was entirely her domain into which even her father seldom

intruded. He gave me the freedom of it; but it was a freedom of which I

never took advantage in the week that we abode there. Several times

was I on the point of doing so. But I was ever restrained by my

unconquerable diffidence.

And there was something else to impose restraint upon me. Hitherto the

memory of Giuliana had come to haunt me in my hermitage, by arousing in

me yearnings which I had to combat with fasting and prayer, with scourge

and dice. Now the memory of her haunted me again; but in a vastly

different way. It haunted me with the reminder of all the sin in which

through her I had steeped myself; and just as the memory of that sin had

made me in purer moments deem myself unworthy to be the guardian of

the shrine on Monte Orsaro, so now did it cause me to deem myself

all unworthy to enter the garden that enshrined Madonna Bianca de'

Cavalcanti.

Before the purity that shone from her I recoiled in an awe whose nature

was as the feelings of a religion. I felt that to seek her presence

would be almost to defile her. And so I abstained, my mind very full

of her the while, for all that the time was beguiled for me in daily

exercise with horse and arms under the guidance of Galeotto.

I was not so tutored merely for the sake of repairing a grave omission

in my education. It had a definite scope, as Galeotto frankly told me,

informing me that the time approached in which to avenge my father and

strike a blow for my own rights.

And then at the end of a week a man rode into the courtyard of Pagliano

one day, and flung down from his horse shouting to be led to Messer

Galeotto. There was something about this courier's mien and person that

awoke a poignant memory. I was walking in the gallery when the clatter

of his advent drew my attention, and his voice sent a strange thrill

through me.

One glance I gave to make quite sure, and then I leapt down the broad

steps four at a time, and a moment later, to the amazement of all

present, I had caught the dusty rider in my arms, and I was kissing the

wrinkled, scarred, and leathery old cheeks.

“Falcone!” I cried. “Falcone, do you not know me?”

He was startled by the violence of my passionate onslaught. Indeed, he

was almost borne to the ground by it, for his old legs were stiff now

from riding.

And then--how he stared! What oaths he swore!

“Madonnino!” he babbled. “Madonnino!” And he shook himself free of my

embrace, and stood back that he might view me. “Body of Satan! But you

are finely grown, and how like to what your father was when he was no

older than are you! And they have not made a shaveling of you, after

all. Now blessed be God for that!” Then he stopped short, and his eyes

went past me, and he seemed to hesitate.

I turned, and there, leaning on the balustrade of the staircase, looking

on with smiling eyes stood Galeotto with Messer Cavalcanti at his elbow.

I heard Galeotto's words to the Lord of Pagliano. “His heart is

sound--which is a miracle. That woman, it seems, could not quite

dehumanize him.” And he came down heavily, to ask Falcone what news he

bore.

The old equerry drew a letter from under his leathern jacket.

“From Ferrante?” quoth the Lord of Pagliano eagerly, peering over

Galeotto's shoulder.

“Ay,” said Galeotto, and he broke the seal. He stood to read, with

knitted brows. “It is well,” he said, at last, and passed the sheet to

Cavalcanti. “Farnese is in Piacenza already, and the Pope will sway the

College to give his bastard the ducal crown. It is time we stirred.”

He turned to Falcone, whilst Cavalcanti read the letter. “Take food and

rest, good Gino. For to-morrow you ride again with me. And so shall you,

Agostino.”

“I ride again?” I echoed, my heart sinking and some of my dismay showing

upon my face. “Whither?”

“To right the wrongs of Mondolfo,” he answered shortly, and turned away.