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The Strolling Saint
R >> Raphael Sabatini >> The Strolling Saint Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 This etext was produced by John Stuart Middleton
The Strolling Saint
Being the Confessions of the High & Mighty Agostino D'Anguissola
Tyrant of Mondolfo & Lord of Carmina, in the State of Piacenza
By Raphael Sabatini
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
THE OBLATE
CHAPTER
I. NOMEN ET OMEN
II. GINO FALCONE
III. THE PIETISTIC THRALL
IV. LUISINA
V. REBELLION
VI. FRA GERVASIO
BOOK TWO
GIULIANA
I. THE HOUSE OF ASTORRE FIFANTI
II. HUMANITIES
III. PREUX-CHEVALIER
IV. MY LORD GAMBARA CLEARS THE GROUND
V. PABULUM ACHERONTIS
VI. THE IRON GIRDLE
BOOK THREE
THE WILDERNESS
I. THE HOME-COMING
II. THE CAPTAIN OF JUSTICE
III. GAMBARA'S INTERESTS
IV. THE ANCHORITE OF MONTE ORSARO
V. THE RENUNCIATION
VI. HYPNEROTOMACHIA
VII. INTRUDERS
VIII. THE VISION
IX. THE ICONOCLAST
BOOK FOUR
THE WORLD
I. PAGLIANO
II. THE GOVERNOR OF MILAN
III. PIER LUIGI FARNESE
IV. MADONNA BIANCA
V. THE WARNING
VI. THE TALONS OF THE HOLY OFFICE
VII. THE PAPAL BULL
VIII. THE THIRD DEGREE
IX. THE RETURN
X. THE NUPTIALS OF BIANCA
XI. THE PENANCE
XII. BLOOD
XIII. THE OVERTHROW
XIV. THE CITATION
XV. THE WILL OF HEAVEN
BOOK ONE
THE OBLATE
CHAPTER I
NOMEN ET OMEN
In seeking other than in myself--as men will--the causes of my
tribulations, I have often inclined to lay the blame of much of the ill
that befell me, and the ill that in my sinful life I did to others, upon
those who held my mother at the baptismal font and concerted that she
should bear the name of Monica.
There are in life many things which, in themselves, seeming to the vulgar
and the heedless to be trivial and without consequence, may yet be causes
pregnant of terrible effects, mainsprings of Destiny itself. Amid such
portentous trifles I would number the names so heedlessly bestowed upon us.
It surprises me that in none of the philosophic writings of the learned
scholars of antiquity can I find that this matter of names has been touched
upon, much less given the importance of which I account it to be deserving.
Possibly it is because no one of them ever suffered, as I have suffered,
from the consequences of a name. Had it but been so, they might in their
weighty and impressive manner have set down a lesson on the subject, and so
relieved me--who am all-conscious of my shortcomings in this direction-
from the necessity of repairing that omission out of my own experience.
Let it then, even at this late hour, be considered what a subtle influence
for good or ill, what a very mould of character may lie within a name.
To the dull clod of earth, perhaps, or, again, to the truly strong-minded
nature that is beyond such influences, it can matter little that he be
called Alexander or Achilles; and once there was a man named Judas who fell
so far short of the noble associations of that name that he has changed for
all time the very sound and meaning of it.
But to him who has been endowed with imagination--that greatest boon and
greatest affliction of mankind--or whose nature is such as to crave for
models, the name he bears may become a thing portentous by the images it
conjures up of some mighty dead who bore it erstwhile and whose life
inspires to emulation.
Whatever may be accounted the general value of this premiss, at least as it
concerns my mother I shall hope to prove it apt.
They named her Monica. Why the name was chosen I have never learnt; but I
do not conceive that there was any reason for the choice other than the
taste of her parents in the matter of sounds. It is a pleasing enough
name, euphoniously considered, and beyond that--as is so commonly the
case--no considerations were taken into account.
To her, however, at once imaginative and of a feeble and dependent spirit,
the name was fateful. St. Monica was made the special object of her
devotions in girlhood, and remained so later when she became a wife. The
Life of St. Monica was the most soiled and fingered portion of an old
manuscript collection of the life histories of a score or so of saints that
was one of her dearest possessions. To render herself worthy of the name
she bore, to model her life upon that of the sainted woman who had sorrowed
and rejoiced so much in her famous offspring, became the obsession of my
mother's soul. And but that St. Monica had wed and borne a son, I do not
believe that my mother would ever have adventured herself within the bonds
of wedlock.
How often in the stressful, stormy hours of my most unhappy youth did I not
wish that she had preferred the virginal life of the cloister, and thus
spared me the heavy burden of an existence which her unholy and mistaken
saintliness went so near to laying waste!
I like to think that in the days when my father wooed her, she forgot for a
spell in the strong arms of that fierce ghibelline the pattern upon which
it had become her wont to weave her life; so that in all that drab,
sackcloth tissue there was embroidered at least one warm and brilliant
little wedge of colour; so that in all that desert waste, in all that
parched aridity of her existence, there was at least one little patch of
garden-land, fragrant, fruitful, and cool.
I like to think it, for at best such a spell must have been brief indeed;
and for that I pity her--I, who once blamed her so very bitterly. Before
ever I was born it must have ceased; whilst still she bore me she put from
her lips the cup that holds the warm and potent wine of life, and turned
her once more to her fasting, her contemplations, and her prayers.
That was in the year in which the battle of Pavia was fought and won by the
Emperor. My father, who had raised a condotta to lend a hand in the
expulsion of the French, was left for dead upon that glorious field.
Afterwards he was found still living, but upon the very edge and border of
Eternity; and when the news of it was borne to my mother I have little
doubt but that she imagined it to be a visitation--a punishment upon her
for having strayed for that brief season of her adolescence from the narrow
flinty path that she had erst claimed to tread in the footsteps of Holy
Monica.
How much the love of my father may still have swayed her I do not know.
But to me it seems that in what next she did there was more of duty, more
of penitence, more of reparation for the sin of having been a woman as God
made her, than of love. Indeed, I almost know this to be so. In delicate
health as she was, she bade her people prepare a litter for her, and so she
had herself carried into Piacenza, to the Church of St. Augustine. There,
having confessed and received the Sacrament, upon her knees before a minor
altar consecrated to St. Monica, she made solemn vow that if my father's
life was spared she would devote the unborn child she carried to the
service of God and Holy Church.
Two months thereafter word was brought her that my father, his recovery by
now well-nigh complete, was making his way home.
On the morrow was I born--a votive offering, an oblate, ere yet I had drawn
the breath of life.
It has oft diverted me to conjecture what would have chanced had I been
born a girl--since that could have afforded her no proper parallel. In the
circumstance that I was a boy, I have no faintest doubt but that she saw a
Sign, for she was given to seeing signs in the slightest and most natural
happenings. It was as it should be; it was as it had been with the Sainted
Monica in whose ways she strove, poor thing, to walk. Monica had borne a
son, and he had been named Augustine. It was very well. My name, too,
should be Augustine, that I might walk in the ways of that other Augustine,
that great theologian whose mother's name was Monica.
And even as the influence of her name had been my mother's guide, so was
the influence of my name to exert its sway upon me. It was made to do so.
Ere I could read for myself, the life of that great saint--with such
castrations as my tender years demanded--was told me and repeated until I
knew by heart its every incident and act. Anon his writings were my
school-books. His De Civitate Dei and De Vita Beata were the paps at which
I suckled my earliest mental nourishment.
And even to-day, after all the tragedy and sin and turbulence of my life,
that was intended to have been so different, it is from his Confessions
that I have gathered inspiration to set down my own--although betwixt the
two you may discern little indeed that is comparable.
I was prenatally made a votive offering for the preservation of my father's
life, for his restoration to my mother safe and sound. That restoration
she had, as you have seen; and yet, had she been other than she was, she
must have accounted herself cheated of her bargain in the end. For betwixt
my father and my mother I became from my earliest years a subject of
contentions that drove them far asunder and set them almost in enmity the
one against the other.
I was his only son, heir to the noble lordships of Mondolfo and Carmina.
Was it likely, then, that he should sacrifice me willingly to the seclusion
of the cloister, whilst our lordship passed into the hands of our renegade,
guelphic cousin, Cosimo d'Anguissola of Codogno?
I can picture his outbursts at the very thought of it; I can hear him
reasoning, upbraiding, storming. But he was as an ocean of energy hurling
himself against the impassive rock of my mother's pietistic obstinacy.
She had vowed me to the service of Holy Church, and she would suffer
tribulation and death so that her vow should be fulfilled. And hers was a
manner against which that strong man, my father, never could prevail.
She would stand before him white-faced and mute, never presuming to return
an answer to his pleading or to enter into argument.
"I have vowed," she would say, just once; and thereafter, avoiding his
fiery glance, she would bow her head meekly, fold her hands, the very
incarnation of long-suffering and martyrdom.
Anon, as the storm of his anger crashed about her, two glistening lines
would appear upon her pallid face, and her tears--horrid, silent weeping
that brought no trace of emotion to her countenance--showered down. At
that he would fling out of her presence and away, cursing the day in which
he had mated with a fool.
His hatred of these moods of hers, of the vow she had made which bade fair
to deprive him of his son, drove him ere long to hatred of the cause of it
all. A ghibelline by inheritance, he was not long in becoming an utter
infidel, at war with Rome and the Pontifical sway. Nor was he one to
content himself with passive enmity. He must be up and doing, seeking the
destruction of the thing he hated. And so it befell that upon the death of
Pope Clement (the second Medici Pontiff), profiting by the weak condition
from which the papal army had not yet recovered since the Emperor's
invasion and the sack of Rome, my father raised an army and attempted to
shatter the ancient yoke which Julius II had imposed upon Parma and
Piacenza when he took them from the State of Milan.
A little lad of seven was I at the time, and well do I remember the martial
stir and bustle there was about our citadel of Mondolfo, the armed
multitudes that thronged the fortress that was our home, or drilled and
manoeuvred upon the green plains beyond the river.
I was all wonder-stricken and fascinated by the sight. My blood was
quickened by the brazen notes of their trumpets, and to balance a pike in
my hands was to procure me the oddest and most exquisite thrills that I had
known. But my mother, perceiving with alarm the delight afforded me by
such warlike matters, withdrew me so that I might see as little as possible
of it all.
And there followed scenes between her and my father of which hazy
impressions linger in my memory. No longer was she a mute statue, enduring
with fearful stoicism his harsh upbraidings. She was turned into a
suppliant, now fierce, now lachrymose; by her prayers, by her prophecies of
the evil that must attend his ungodly aims, she strove with all her poor,
feeble might to turn him from the path of revolt to which he had set his
foot.
And he would listen now in silence, his face grim and sardonic; and when
from very weariness the flow of her inspired oratory began to falter, he
would deliver ever the same answer.
"It is you who have driven me to this; and this is no more than a
beginning. You have made a vow--an outrageous votive offering of something
that is not yours to bestow. That vow you cannot break, you say. Be it
so. But I must seek a remedy elsewhere. To save my son from the Church to
which you would doom him, I will, ere I have done, tear down the Church and
make an end of it in Italy."
And at that she would shrivel up before him with a little moan of horror,
taking her poor white face in her hands.
"Blasphemer!" she would cry in mingled terror and aversion, and upon that
word--the "Amen" to all their conferences in those last days they spent
together--she would turn, and dragging me with her, all stunned and
bewildered by something beyond my understanding, she would hurry me to the
chapel of the citadel, and there, before the high altar, prostrate herself
and spend long hours in awful sobbing intercessions.
And so the gulf between them widened until the day of his departure.
I was not present at their parting. What farewells may have been spoken
between them, what premonitions may have troubled one or the other that
they were destined never to meet again, I do not know.
I remember being rudely awakened one dark morning early in the year, and
lifted from my bed by arms to whose clasp I never failed to thrill. Close
to mine was pressed a hot, dark, shaven hawk-face; a pair of great eyes,
humid with tears, considered me passionately. Then a ringing voice--that
commanding voice that was my father's--spoke to Falcone, the man-at-arms
who attended him and who ever acted as his equerry.
"Shall we take him with us to the wars, Falcone?"
My little arms went round his neck and tightened there convulsively until
the steel rim of his gorget bit into them.
"Take me!" I sobbed. "Take me!"
He laughed for answer, with something of exultation in his voice. He swung
me to his shoulder, and held me poised there, looking up at me. And then
he laughed again.
"Dost hear the whelp?" he cried to Falcone. "Still with his milk-teeth in
his head, and already does he yelp for battle!"
Then he looked up at me again, and swore one of his great oaths.
"I can trust you, son of mine," he laughed. "They'll never make a
shaveling of you. When your thews are grown it will not be on thuribles
they'll spend their strength, or I'm a liar else. Be patient yet awhile,
and we shall ride together, never doubt it."
With that he pulled me down again to kiss me, and he clasped me to his
breast so that the studs of his armour remained stamped upon my tender
flesh after he had departed.
The next instant he was gone, and I lay weeping, a very lonely little
child.
But in the revolt that he led he had not reckoned upon the might and vigour
of the new Farnese Pontiff. He had conceived, perhaps, that one pope must
be as supine as another, and that Paul III would prove no more redoubtable
than Clement VIII. To his bitter cost did he discover his mistake. Beyond
the Po he was surprised by the Pontifical army under Ferrante Orsini, and
there his force was cut to pieces.
My father himself escaped and with him some other gentlemen of Piacenza,
notably one of the scions of the great house of Pallavicini, who took a
wound in the leg which left him lame for life, so that ever after he was
known as Pallavicini il Zopo.
They were all under the pope's ban, outlaws with a price upon the head of
each, hunted and harried from State to State by the papal emissaries, so
that my father never more dared set foot in Mondolfo, or, indeed, within
the State of Piacenza, which had been rudely punished for the
insubordination it had permitted to be reared upon its soil.
And Mondolfo went near to suffering confiscation. Assuredly it would have
suffered it but for the influence exerted on my mother's and my own behalf
by her brother, the powerful Cardinal of San Paulo in Carcere, seconded by
that guelphic cousin of my father's, Cosimo d'Anguissola, who, after me,
was heir to Mondolfo, and had, therefore, good reason not to see it
confiscated to the Holy See.
Thus it fell out that we were left in peace and not made to suffer from my
father's rebellion. For that, he himself should suffer when taken. But
taken he never was. From time to time we had news of him. Now he was in
Venice, now in Milan, now in Naples; but never long in any place for his
safety's sake. And then one night, six years later, a scarred and grizzled
veteran, coming none knew whence, dropped from exhaustion in the courtyard
of our citadel, whither he had struggled. Some went to minister to him,
and amongst these there was a groom who recognized him.
"It is Messer Falcone!" he cried, and ran to bear the news to my mother,
with whom I was at table at the time. With us, too, was Fra Gervasio, our
chaplain.
It was grim news that old Falcone brought us. He had never quitted my
father in those six weary years of wandering until now that my father was
beyond the need of his or any other's service.
There had been a rising and a bloody battle at Perugia, Falcone informed
us. An attempt had been made to overthrow the rule there of Pier Luigi
Farnese, Duke of Castro, the pope's own abominable son. For some months my
father had been enjoying the shelter of the Perugians, and he had repaid
their hospitality by joining them and bearing arms with them in the
ill-starred blow they struck for liberty. They had been crushed in the
encounter by the troops of Pier Luigi, and my father had been among the
slain.
And well was it for him that he came by so fine and merciful an end,
thought I, when I had heard the tale of horrors that had been undergone by
the unfortunates who had fallen into the hands of Farnese.
My mother heard him to the end without any sign of emotion. She sat there,
cold and impassive as a thing of marble, what time Fra Gervasio--who was my
father's foster-brother, as you shall presently learn more fully--sank his
head upon his arm and wept like a child to hear the piteous tale of it.
And whether from force of example, whether from the memories that came to
me so poignantly in that moment of a fine strong man with a brown, shaven
face and a jovial, mighty voice, who had promised me that one day we should
ride together, I fell a-weeping too.
When the tale was done, my mother coldly gave orders that Falcone be cared
for, and went to pray, taking me with her.
Oftentimes since have I wondered what was the tenour of her prayers that
night. Were they for the rest of the great turbulent soul that was gone
forth in sin, in arms against the Holy Church, excommunicate and foredoomed
to Hell? Or were they of thanksgiving that at last she was completely
mistress of my destinies, her mind at rest, since no longer need she fear
opposition to her wishes concerning me? I do not know, nor will I do her
the possible injustice that I should were I to guess.
CHAPTER II
GINO FALCONE
When I think of my mother now I do not see her as she appeared in any of
the scenes that already I have set down. There is one picture of her that
is burnt as with an acid upon my memory, a picture which the mere mention
of her name, the mere thought of her, never fails to evoke like a ghost
before me. I see her always as she appeared one evening when she came
suddenly and without warning upon Falcone and me in the armoury of the
citadel.
I see her again, a tall, slight, graceful woman, her oval face of the
translucent pallor of wax, framed in a nun-like coif, over which was thrown
a long black veil that fell to her waist and there joined the black
unrelieved draperies that she always wore. This sable garb was no mere
mourning for my father. His death had made as little change in her apparel
as in her general life. It had been ever thus as far as my memory can
travel; always had her raiment been the same, those trailing funereal
draperies. Again I see them, and that pallid face with its sunken eyes,
around which there were great brown patches that seemed to intensify the
depth at which they were set and the sombre lustre of them on the rare
occasions when she raised them; those slim, wax-like hands, with a chaplet
of beads entwined about the left wrist and hanging thence to a silver
crucifix at the end.
She moved almost silently, as a ghost; and where she passed she seemed to
leave a trail of sorrow and sadness in her wake, just as a worldly woman
leaves a trail of perfume.
Thus looked she when she came upon us there that evening, and thus will she
live for ever in my memory, for that was the first time that I knew
rebellion against the yoke she was imposing upon me; the first time that
our wills clashed, hers and mine; and as a consequence, maybe, was it the
first time that I considered her with purpose and defined her to myself.
The thing befell some three months after the coming of Falcone to Mondolfo.
That the old man-at-arms should have exerted a strong attraction upon my
young mind, you will readily understand. His intimate connection with that
dimly remembered father, who stood secretly in my imagination in the
position that my mother would have had St. Augustine occupy, drew me to his
equerry like metal to a lodestone.
And this attraction was reciprocal. Of his own accord old Falcone sought
me out, lingering in my neighbourhood at first like a dog that looks for a
kindly word. He had not long to wait. Daily we had our meetings and our
talks and daily did these grow in length; and they were stolen hours of
which I said no word to my mother, nor did others for a season, so that all
was well.
Our talks were naturally of my father, and it was through Falcone that I
came to know something of the greatness of that noble-souled, valiant
gentleman, whom the old servant painted for me as one who combined with the
courage of the lion the wiliness of the fox.
He discoursed of their feats of arms together, he described charges of
horse that set my nerves a-tingle as in fancy I heard the blare of trumpets
and the deafening thunder of hooves upon the turf. Of escalades, of
surprises, of breaches stormed, of camisades and ambushes, of dark
treacheries and great heroisms did he descant to fire my youthful fancy, to
fill me first with delight, and then with frenzy when I came to think that
in all these things my life must have no part, that for me another road was
set--a grey, gloomy road at the end of which was dangled a reward which did
not greatly interest me.
And then one day from fighting as an endeavour, as a pitting of force
against force and astuteness against astuteness, he came to talk of
fighting as an art.
It was from old Falcone that first I heard of Marozzo, that miracle-worker
in weapons, that master at whose academy in Bologna the craft of
swordsmanship was to be acquired, so that from fighting with his irons as a
beast with its claws, by sheer brute strength and brute instinct, man might
by practised skill and knowledge gain advantages against which mere
strength must spend itself in vain.
What he told me amazed me beyond anything that I had ever heard, even from
himself, and what he told me he illustrated, flinging himself into the
poises taught by Marozzo that I might appreciate the marvellous science of
the thing.
Thus was it that for the first time I made the acquaintance--an
acquaintance held by few men in those days--of those marvellous guards of
Marozzo's devising; Falcone showed me the difference between the mandritto
and the roverso, the false edge and the true, the stramazone and the tondo;
and he left me spellbound by that marvellous guard appropriately called by
Marozzo the iron girdle--a low guard on the level of the waist, which on
the very parry gives an opening for the point, so that in one movement you
may ward and strike.
At last, when I questioned him, he admitted that during their wanderings,
my father, with that recklessness that alternated curiously with his
caution, had ventured into the city of Bologna notwithstanding that it was
a Papal fief, for the sole purpose of studying with Marozzo that Falcone
himself had daily accompanied him, witnessed the lessons, and afterwards
practised with my father, so that he had come to learn most of the secrets
that Marozzo taught.
One day, at last, very timidly, like one who, whilst overconscious of his
utter unworthiness, ventures to crave a boon which he knows himself without
the right to expect, I asked Falcone would he show me something of
Marozzo's art with real weapons.
I had feared a rebuff. I had thought that even old Falcone might laugh at
one predestined to the study of theology, desiring to enter into the
mysteries of sword-craft. But my fears were far indeed from having a
foundation. There was no laughter in the equerry's grey eyes, whilst the
smile upon his lips was a smile of gladness, of eagerness, almost of
thankfulness to see me so set.
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