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 whichseveral editions were issued down to 1750, was first printedin 1589. Clearly, however, MS. copies were in existenceearlier, and it is to one of these that Agostino hererefers.
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.
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.