For my mother’s claustral needs sufficient was provided by the alcove in which she slept, the private chapel of the citadel in which she would spend long hours, and this private dining-room where we now sat. Into the spacious gardens of the castle she would seldom wander, into our town of Mondolfo never. Not since my father’s departure upon his ill-starred rebellion had she set foot across the drawbridge.
“Tell me whom you go with, and I will tell you what you are,” says the proverb. “Show me your dwelling, and I shall see your character,” say I.
And surely never was there a chamber so permeated by the nature of its tenant as that private dining-room of my mother’s.
It was a narrow room in the shape of a small parallelogram, with the windows set high up near the timbered, whitewashed ceiling, so that it was impossible either to look in or to look out, as is sometimes the case with the windows of a chapel.
On the white space of wall that faced the door hung a great wooden Crucifix, very rudely carved by one who either knew nothing of anatomy, or else — as is more probable — was utterly unable to set down his knowledge upon timber. The crudely tinted figure would be perhaps half the natural size of a man; and it was the most repulsive and hideous representation of the Tragedy of Golgotha that I have ever seen. It filled one with a horror which was far indeed removed from the pious horror which that Symbol is intended to arouse in every true believer. It emphasized all the ghastly ugliness of death upon that most barbarous of gallows, without any suggestion of the beauty and immensity of the Divine Martyrdom of Him Who in the likeness of the sinful flesh was Alone without sin.
And to me the ghastliest and most pitiful thing of all was an artifice which its maker had introduced for the purpose of conveying some suggestion of the supernatural to that mangled, malformed, less than human representation. Into the place of the wound made by the spear of Longinus, he had introduced a strip of crystal which caught the light at certain angles — more particularly when there were lighted tapers in the room — so that in reflecting this it seemed to shed forth luminous rays.
An odd thing was that my mother — who looked upon that Crucifix with eyes that were very different from mine — would be at pains in the evening when lights were fetched to set a taper at such an angle as was best calculated to produce the effect upon which the sculptor had counted. What satisfaction it can have been to her to see reflected from that glazed wound the light which she herself had provided for the purpose, I am lost to think. And yet I am assured that she would contemplate that shining effluence in a sort of ecstatic awe, accounting it something very near akin to miracle.
Under this Crucifix hung a little alabaster font of holy-water, into the back of which was stuck a withered, yellow branch of palm, which was renewed on each Palm Sunday. Before it was set a praying-stool of plain oak, without any cushion to mitigate its harshness to the knees.
In the corner of the room stood a tall, spare, square cupboard, capacious but very plain, in which the necessaries of the table were disposed. In the opposite corner there was another smaller cupboard with a sort of writing-pulpit beneath. Here my mother kept the accounts of her household, her books of recipes, her homely medicines and the heavy devotional tomes and lesser volumes — mostly manuscript — out of which she nourished her poor starving soul.
Amongst these was the Treatise of the Mental Sufferings of Christ — the book of the Blessed Battista of Varano, Princess of Camerino, who founded the convent of Poor Clares in that city — a book whose almost blasphemous presumption fired the train of my earliest misgivings.
Another was The Spiritual Combat, that queer yet able book of the cleric Scupoli — described as the “aureo libro,” dedicated “Al Supremo Capitano e Gloriosissimo Trionfatore, Gesu Cristo, Figliuolo di Maria,” and this dedication in the form of a letter to Our Saviour, signed, “Your most humble servant, purchased with Your Blood.” 1
1 This work, which achieved a great vogue and of which
several editions were issued down to 1750, was first printed
in 1589. Clearly, however, MS. copies were in existence
earlier, and it is to one of these that Agostino here
refers.
Down the middle of the chamber ran a long square-ended table of oak, very plain like all the rest of the room’s scant furnishings. At the head of this table was an arm-chair for my mother, of bare wood without any cushion to relieve its hardness, whilst on either side of the board stood a few lesser chairs for those who habitually dined there. These were, besides myself, Fra Gervasio, my tutor; Messer Giorgio, the castellan, a bald-headed old man long since past the fighting age and who in times of stress would have been as useful for purposes of defending Mondolfo as Lorenza, my mother’s elderly woman, who sat below him at the board; he was toothless, bowed, and decrepit, but he was very devout — as he had need to be, seeing that he was half dead already — and this counted with my mother above any other virtue.2
2 Virtu is the word used by Agostino, and it is susceptible to a wider translation than that which the English language affords, comprising as it does a sense of courage and address at arms. Indeed, it is not clear that Agostino is not playing here upon the double meaning of the word.
The last of the four who habitually sat with us was Giojoso, the seneschal, a lantern-jawed fellow with black, beetling brows, about whom the only joyous thing was his misnomer of a name.
Of the table that we kept, beyond noting that the fare was ever of a lenten kind and that the wine was watered, I will but mention that my mother did not observe the barrier of the salt. There was no sitting above it or below at our board, as, from time immemorial, is the universal custom in feudal homes. That her having abolished it was an act of humility on her part there can be little doubt, although this was a subject upon which she never expressed herself in my hearing.
The walls of that room were whitewashed and bare.
The floor was of stone overlain by a carpet of rushes that was changed no oftener than once a week.
From what I have told you, you may picture something of the chill gloom of the place, something of the pietism which hung upon the very air of that apartment in which so much of my early youth was spent. And it had, too, an odour that is peculiarly full of character, the smell which is never absent from a sacristy and rarely from conventual chambers; a smell difficult to define, faint and yet tenuously pungent, and like no other smell in all the world that I have ever known. It is a musty odour, an odour of staleness which perhaps an open window and the fresh air of heaven might relieve but could not dissipate; and to this is wed, but so subtly that it would be impossible to say which is predominant, the slight, sickly aroma of wax.
We supped there that night in silence at about the hour that poor Gino Falcone would be taking his departure. Silence was habitual with us at meal-times, eating being performed — like everything else in that drab household — as a sort of devotional act. Occasionally the silence would be relieved by readings aloud from some pious work, undertaken at my mother’s bidding by one or another of the amanuenses.
But on the night in question there was just silence, broken chiefly by the toothless slobber of the castellan over the soft meats that were especially prepared for him. And there was something of grimness in that silence; for none — and Fra Gervasio less than any — approved the unchristian thing that out of excess of Christianity my mother had done in driving old Falcone forth.
Myself, I could not eat at all. My misery choked me. The thought of that old servitor whom I had loved being sent a wanderer and destitute, and all through my own weakness, all because I had failed him in his need, just as I had failed myself, was anguish to me. My lip would quiver at the thought, and it was with difficulty that I repressed my tears.
At last that hideous repast came to an end in prayers of thanksgiving whose immoderate length was out of all proportion to the fare provided.
The castellan shuffled forth upon the arm of the seneschal; Lorenza followed
at a sign from my mother, and we three — Gervasio, my mother, and I — were left alone.
And here let me say a word of Fra Gervasio. He was, as I have already written, my father’s foster-brother. That is to say, he was the child of a sturdy peasant-woman of the Val di Taro, from whose lusty, healthy breast my father had suckled the first of that fine strength that had been his own.
He was older than my father by a month or so, and as often happens in such cases, he was brought to Mondolfo to be first my father’s playmate, and later, no doubt, to have followed him as a man-at-arms. But a chill that he took in his tenth year as a result of a long winter immersion in the icy waters of the Taro laid him at the point of death, and left him thereafter of a rather weak and sickly nature. But he was quick and intelligent, and was admitted to learn his letters with my father, whence it ensued that he developed a taste for study. Seeing that by his health he was debarred from the hardy open life of a soldier, his scholarly aptitude was encouraged, and it was decided that he should follow a clerical career.
He had entered the order of St. Francis; but after some years at the Convent of Aguilona, his health having been indifferent and the conventual rules too rigorous for his condition, he was given licence to become the chaplain of Mondolfo. Here he had received the kindliest treatment at the hands of my father, who entertained for his sometime playmate a very real affection.
He was a tall, gaunt man with a sweet, kindly face, reflecting his sweet, kindly nature; he had deep-set, dark eyes, very gentle in their gaze, a tender mouth that was a little drawn by lines of suffering and an upright wrinkle, deep as a gash, between his brows at the root of his long, slender nose.
He it was that night who broke the silence that endured even after the others had departed. He spoke at first as if communing with himself, like a man who thinks aloud; and between his thumb and his long forefinger, I remember that he kneaded a crumb of bread upon which his eyes were intent.
“Gino Falcone is an old man, and he was my lord’s best-loved servant. He would have died for my lord, and joyfully; and now he is turned adrift, to die to no purpose. Ah, well.” He heaved a deep sigh and fell silent, whilst I — the pent-up anguish in me suddenly released to hear my thoughts thus expressed — fell soundlessly to weeping.
“Do you reprove me, Fra Gervasio?” quoth my mother, quite emotionless.
The monk pushed back his stool and rose ere he replied. “I must,” he said, “or I am unworthy of the scapulary I wear. I must reprove this unchristian act, or else am I no true servant of my Master.”
She crossed herself with her thumb-nail upon the brow and upon the lips, to repress all evil thoughts and evil words — an unfailing sign that she was stirred to anger and sought to combat the sin of it. Then she spoke, meekly enough, in the same cold, level voice.
“I think it is you who are at fault,” she told him, “when you call unchristian an act which was necessary to secure this child to Christ.”
He smiled a sad little smile. “Yet even so, it were well you should proceed with caution and with authority; and in this you have none.”
It was her turn to smile, the palest, ghostliest of smiles, and even for so much she must have been oddly moved. “I think I have,” said she, and quoted, “‘If thy right hand offend thee, hack it off.’”
I saw a hot flush mount to the friar’s prominent cheek-bones. Indeed, he was a very human man under his conventual robe, with swift stirrings of passion which the long habit of repression had not yet succeeded in extinguishing. He cast his eyes to the ceiling in such a glance of despair as left me thoughtful. It was as an invocation to Heaven to look down upon the obstinate, ignorant folly of this woman who accounted herself wise and who so garbled the Divine teaching as to blaspheme with complacency.
I know that now; at the time I was not quite so clear-sighted as to read the full message of that glance.
Her audacity was as the audacity of fools. Where wisdom, full-fledged, might have halted, trembling, she swept resolutely onward. Before her stood this friar, this teacher and interpreter, this man of holy life who was accounted profoundly learned in the Divinities; and he told her that she had done an evil thing. Yet out of the tiny pittance of her knowledge and her little intellectual sight — which was no better than a blindness — must she confidently tell him that he was at fault.
Argument was impossible between him and her. Thus much I saw, and I feared an explosion of the wrath of which I perceived in him the signs. But he quelled it. Yet his voice rumbled thunderously upon his next words.
“It matters something that Gino Falcone should not starve,” he said.
“It matters more that my son should not be damned,” she answered him, and with that answer left him weapon-less, for against the armour of a crassness so dense and one-ideaed there are no weapons that can prevail.
“Listen,” she said, and her eyes, raised for a moment, comprehended both of us in their glance. “There is something that it were best I tell you, that once for all you may fathom the depth of my purpose for Agostino here. My lord his father was a man of blood and strife...”
“And so were many whose names stand to-day upon the roll of saints and are its glory,” answered the friar with quick asperity.
“But they did not raise their arms against the Holy Church and against Christ’s Own most holy Vicar, as did he,” she reminded him sorrowfully. “The sword is an ill thing save when it is wielded in a holy cause. In my lord’s hands, wielded in the unholiest of all causes, it became a thing accursed. But God’s anger overtook him and laid him low at Perugia in all the strength and vigour that had made him arrogant as Lucifer. It was perhaps well for all of us that it so befell.”
“Madonna!” cried Gervasio in stern horror.
But she went on quite heedless of him. “Best of all was it for me, since I was spared the harshest duty that can be imposed upon a woman and a wife. It was necessary that he should expiate the evil he had wrought; moreover, his life was become a menace to my child’s salvation. It was his wish to make of Agostino such another as himself, to lead his only son adown the path of Hell. It was my duty to my God and to my son to shield this boy. And to accomplish that I would have delivered up his father to the papal emissaries who sought him.”
“Ah, never that!” the friar protested. “You could never have done that!”
“Could I not? I tell you it was as good as done. I tell you that the thing was planned. I took counsel with my confessor, and he showed me my plain duty.”
She paused a moment, whilst we stared, Fra Gervasio white-faced and with mouth that gaped in sheer horror.
“For years had he eluded the long arm of the pope’s justice,” she resumed. “And during those years he had never ceased to plot and plan the overthrow of the Pontifical dominion. He was blinded by his arrogance to think that he could stand against the hosts of Heaven. His stubbornness in sin had made him mad. Quem Deus vult perdere...” And she waved one of her emaciated hands, leaving the quotation unfinished. “Heaven showed me the way, chose me for Its instrument. I sent him word, offering him shelter here at Mondolfo where none would look to find him, assuming it to be the last place to which he would adventure. He was to have come when death took him on the field of Perugia.”
There was something here that I did not understand at all. And in like case, it seemed, was Fra Gervasio, for he passed a hand over his brow, as if to clear thence some veils that clogged his understanding.
“He was to have come?” he echoed. “To shelter?” he asked.
“Nay,” said she quietly, “to death. The papal emissaries had knowledge of it and would have been here to await him.”
“You would have betrayed him?” Fra Gervasio’s voice was hoarse, his eyes were burning sombrely.
“I would have saved my son,” said she, with quiet satisfaction, in a tone that revealed how incontestably right she conceived herself to be.
He stood there, and he seemed taller and more gaunt than usual, for he
had drawn himself erect to the full of his great height — and he was a man who usually went bowed. His hands were clenched and the knuckles showed blue-white like marble. His face was very pale and in his temple a little pulse was throbbing visibly. He swayed slightly upon his feet, and the sight of him frightened me a little. He seemed so full of terrible potentialities.
When I think of vengeance, I picture to myself Fra Gervasio as I beheld him in that hour. Nothing that he could have done would have surprised me. Had he fallen upon my mother then, and torn her limb from limb, it would have been no more than from the sight of him I might have expected.
I have said that nothing that he could have done would have surprised me. Rather should I have said that nothing would have surprised me save the thing he did.
Whilst a man might have counted ten stood he so — she seeing nothing of the strange transfiguration that had come over him, for her eyes were downcast as ever. Then quite slowly, his hands unclenched, his arms fell limply to his sides, his head sank forward upon his breast, and his figure bowed itself lower than was usual. Quite suddenly, quite softly, almost as a man who swoons, he sank down again into the chair from which he had risen.
He set his elbows on the table, and took his head in his hands. A groan escaped him. She heard it, and looked at him in her furtive way.
“You are moved by this knowledge, Fra Gervasio,” she said and sighed. “I have told you this — and you, Agostino — that you may know how deep, how ineradicable is my purpose. You were a votive offering, Agostino; you were vowed to the service of God that your father’s life might be spared, years ago, ere you were born. From the very edge of death was your father brought back to life and strength. He would have used that life and that strength to cheat God of the price of His boon to me.”
“And if,” Fra Gervasio questioned almost fiercely, “Agostino in the end should have no vocation, should have no call to such a life?”
She looked at him very wistfully, almost pityingly. “How should that be?” she asked. “He was offered to God. And that God accepted the gift, He showed when He gave Giovanni back to life. How, then, could it come to pass that Agostino should have no call? Would God reject that which He had accepted?”
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 216
