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.
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.
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.