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 visitansMulierum genusFacit eas subditasTibi, 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.
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: