The Strolling Saint

by Rafael Sabatini

  "I was intended for the priesthood, father," I replied. "I aspired to holy orders. But through the sins of the flesh I have rendered myself unworthy. Here, perhaps, I can expiate and cleanse my heart of all the foulness it gathered in the world."

  He left me an hour or so later, to make his way back to Casi, having heard enough of my past and having judged sufficiently of my attitude of mind to approve me in my determination to do penance and seek peace in that isolation. Before going he bade me seek him out at Casi at any time should any doubts assail me, or should I find that the burden I had taken up was too heavy for my shoulders.

  I watched him go down the winding, mountain path, watched the bent old figure in his long black gaberdine, until a turn in the path and a clump of chestnuts hid him from my sight.

  Then I first tasted the loneliness to which on that fair morning I had vowed myself. The desolation of it touched me and awoke self-pity in my heart, to extinguish utterly the faint flame of ecstasy that had warmed me when first I thought of taking the dead anchorite's place.

  I was not yet twenty, I was lord of great possessions, and of life I had tasted no more than one poisonous, reckless draught; yet I was done with the world—driven out of it by penitence. It was just; but it was bitter. And then I felt again that touch of ecstasy to reflect that it was the bitterness of the resolve that made it worthy, that through its very harshness was it that this path should lead to grace.

  Later on I busied myself with an inspection of the hut, and my first attentions were for the miraculous image. I looked upon it with awe, and I knelt to it in prayer for forgiveness for the unworthiness I brought to the service of the shrine.

  The image itself was very crude of workmanship and singularly ghastly. It reminded me poignantly of the Crucifix that had hung upon the whitewashed wall of my mother's private dining-room and had been so repellent to my young eyes.

  From two arrow wounds in the breast descended two brown streaks, relics of the last miraculous manifestation. The face of the young Roman centurion who had suffered martyrdom for his conversion to Christianity was smiling very sweetly and looking upwards, and in that part of his work the sculptor had been very happy. But the rest of the arving was gruesome and the anatomy was gross and bad, the figure being so disproportionately broad as to convey the impression of a stunted dwarf.

  The big book standing upon the pulpit of plain deal proved, as I had expected, to be a missal; and it became my custom to recite from it each morning thereafter the office for the day.

  In a rude cupboard I found a jar of baked earth that was half full of oil, and another larger jar containing some cakes of maize bread and a handful of chestnuts. There was also a brown bundle which resolved itself into a monkish habit within which was rolled a hair-shirt.

  I took pleasure in this discovery, and I set myself at once to strip off my secular garments and to don this coarse brown habit, which, by reason of my great height, descended but midway down my calves. For lack of sandals I went barefoot, and having made a bundle of the clothes I had removed I thrust them into the cupboard in the place of those which I had taken thence.

  Thus did I, who had been vowed to the anchorite order of St. Augustine, enter upon my life as an unordained anchorite. I dragged out the wattles upon which my blessed predecessor had breathed his last, and having swept the place clean with a bundle of hazel-switches which I cut for the purpose, I went to gather fresh boughs and rushes by the swollen torrent, and with these I made myself a bed.

  My existence became not only one of loneliness, but of grim privation. People rarely came my way, save for a few faithful women from Casi or Fiori who solicited my prayers in return for the oil and maize-cakes which they left me, and sometimes whole days would pass without the sight of a single human being. These maize-cakes formed my chief nourishment, together with a store of nuts from the hazel coppice that grew before my door and some chestnuts which I went further afield to gather in the woods. Occasionally, as a gift, there would be a jar of olives, which was the greatest delicacy that I savoured in those days. No flesh-food or fish did I ever taste, so that I grew very lean and often suffered hunger.

  My days were spent partly in prayer and partly in meditation, and I pondered much upon what I could remember of the Confessions of St. Augustine, deriving great consolation from the thought that if that great father of the Church had been able to win to grace out of so much sin as had befouled his youth, I had no reason to despair. And as yet I had received no absolution for the mortal offences I had committed at Piacenza. I had confessed to Fra Gervasio, and he had bidden me do penance first, but the penance had never been imposed. I was imposing it now. All my life should I impose it thus.

  Yet, ere it was consummated I might come to die; and the thought appalled me, for I must not die in sin. So I resolved that when I should have spent a year in that fastness I would send word to the priest at Casi by some of those who visited my hermitage, and desire him to come to me that I might seek absolution at his hands.

  CHAPTER VI

  HYPNEROTOMACHIA

  AT first I seemed to make good progress in my quest after grace, and a certain solatium of peace descended upon me, beneficent as the dew of a summer night upon the parched and thirsty earth. But anon this changed and I would catch the thoughts that should have been bent upon pious meditation glancing backward with regretful longings at that life out of which I had departed.

  I would start up in a pious rage and cast out such thoughts by more strenuous prayer and still more strenuous fasting. But as my body grew accustomed to the discomforts to which it was subjected, my mind assumed a rebellious freedom that clogged the work of purification upon which I strove to engage it. My stomach out of its very emptiness conjured up evil visions to torment me in the night, and with these I vainly wrestled until I remembered the measures which Fra Gervasio told me that he had taken in like case. I had then the happy inspiration to have recourse to the hair-shirt, which hitherto I had dreaded.

  It would be towards the end of October, as the days were growing colder, that I first put on that armour against the shafts of Satan. It galled me horribly and fretted my tender flesh at almost every movement; but so at least, at the expense of the body, I won back to some peace of mind, and the flesh, being quelled and subdued, no longer interposed its evil humours to the purity I desired for my meditations.

  For upwards of a month, then, the mild torture of the goat's-hair cilice did the office I required of it. But towards December, my skin having grown tough and callous from the perpetual irritation, and inured to the fretting of the sharp hair, my mind once more began to wander mutinously. To check it again I put off the cilice, and with it all other undergarments, retaining no more clothing than just the rough brown monkish habit. Thus I exposed myself to the rigours of the weather, for it had grown very cold in those heights where I dwelt, and the snows were creeping nearer adown the mountain-side.

  I had seen the green of the valley turn to gold and then to flaming brown. I had seen the fire perish out of those autumnal tints, and with the falling of the leaves, a slow, grey, bald decrepitude covering the world. And to this had now succeeded chill wintry gales that howled and whistled through the logs of my wretched hut, whilst the western wind coming down over the frozen zone above cut into me like a knife's edge.

  And famished as I was I felt this coldness the more, and daily I grew leaner until there was little left of my erstwhile lusty vigour, and I was reduced to a parcel of bones held together in a bag of skin, so that it almost seemed that I must rattle as I walked.

  I suffered, and yet I was glad to suffer, and took a joy in my pain, thanking God for the grace of permitting me to endure it, since the greater the discomforts of my body, the more numbed became the pain of my mind, the more removed from me were the lures of longing with which Satan still did battle for my soul. In pain itself I seemed to find the nepenthes that others seek from pain; in suffering was my Lethean draught that brought the only oblivion that I
craved.

  I think that in those months my reason wandered a little under all this strain; and I think today that the long ecstasies into which I fell were largely the result of a feverishness that burned in me as a consequence of a chill that I had taken.

  I would spend long hours upon my knees in prayer and meditation. And remembering how others in such case as mine had known the great boon and blessing of heavenly visions, I prayed and hoped for some such sign of grace, confident in its power to sustain me thereafter against all possible temptation.

  And then, one night, as the year was touching its end, it seemed to me that my prayer was answered. I do not think that my vision was a dream; leastways, I do not think that I was asleep when it visited me. I was on my knees at the time, beside my bed of wattles, and it was very late at night. Suddenly the far end of my hut grew palely lucent, as if a phosphorescent vapour were rising from the ground; it waved and rolled as it ascended in billows of incandescence, and then out of the heart of it there gradually grew a figure all in white over which there was a cloak of deepest blue all flecked with golden stars, and in the folded hands a sheaf of silver lilies.

  I knew no fear. My pulses throbbed and my heart beat ponderously but rapturously as I watched the vision growing more and more distinct until I could make out the pale face of ineffable sweetness and the veiled eyes.

  It was the Blessed Madonna, as Messer Pordenone had painted her in the Church of Santa Chiara at Piacenza; the dress, the lilies, the sweet pale visage, all were known to me, even the billowing cloud upon which one little naked foot was resting.

  I cried out in longing and in rapture, and I held out my arms to that sweet vision. But even as I did so its aspect gradually changed. Under the upper part of the blue mantle, which formed a veil, was spread a mass of ruddy, gleaming hair; the snowy pallor of the face was warmed to the tint of ivory, and the lips deepened to scarlet and writhed in a voluptuous smile; the dark eyes glowed languidly; the lilies faded away, and the pale hands were held out to me.

  "Giuliana!" I cried, and my pure and piously joyous ecstasy was changed upon the instant to fierce, carnal longings.

  "Giuliana!" I held out my arms, and slowly she floated towards me, over the rough earthen floor of my cell.

  A frenzy of craving seized me. I was impatient to lock my arms once more about that fair sleek body. I sought to rise, to go to meet her slow approach, to lessen by a second this agony of waiting. But my limbs were powerless. I was as if cast in lead, whilst more and more slowly she approached me, so languorously mocking.

  And then revulsion took me, suddenly and without any cause or warning. I put my hands to my face to shut out a vision whose true significance I realized as in a flash.

  "Retro me, Sathanas!" I thundered. "Jesus! Maria!"

  I rose at last numbed and stiff. I looked again. The vision had departed. I was alone in my cell, and the rain was falling steadily outside. I groaned despairingly. Then I swayed, reeled sideways and lost all consciousness.

  When I awoke it was broad day, and the pale wintry sun shone silvery from a winter sky. I was very weak and very cold, and when I attempted to rise all things swam round me, and the floor of my cell appeared to heave like the deck of a ship upon a rolling sea.

  For days thereafter I was as a man entranced, alternately frozen with cold and burning with fever; and but that a shepherd who had turned aside to ask the hermit's blessing discovered me in that condition, and remained, out of his charity, for some three days to tend me, it is more than likely I should have died.

  He nourished me with the milk of goats, a luxury upon which my strength grew swiftly, and even after he had quitted my hut he still came daily for a week to visit me, and daily he insisted that I should consume the milk he brought me, overruling my protests that my need being overpast there was no longer the necessity to pamper me.

  Thereafter I knew a season of peace.

  It was, I then reasoned, as if the Devil having tried me with a masterstroke of temptation, and having suffered defeat, had abandoned the contest. Yet I was careful not to harbour that thought unduly, nor glory in my power, lest such presumption should lead to worse. I thanked Heaven for the strength it had lent me, and implored a continuance of its protection for a vessel so weak.

  And now the hill-side and valley began to put on the raiment of a new year. February, like a benignant nymph, tripped down by meadow and stream, and touched the slumbering earth with gentler breezes. And soon, where she had passed, the crocus reared its yellow head, anemones, scarlet, blue, and purple, tossed from her lap, sang the glories of spring in their tender harmonies of hue, coy violet and sweet-smelling nardosmia waved their incense on her altars, and the hellebore sprouted by the streams.

  Then as birch and beech and oak and chestnut put forth a garb of tender pallid green, March advanced and Easter came on apace.

  But the approach of Easter filled me with a staggering dread. It was in Passion Week that the miracle of the image that I guarded was wont to manifest itself. What if through my unworthiness it should fail? The fear appalled me, and I redoubled my prayers. There was need; for spring which touched the earth so benignly had not passed me by. And at moments certain longings for the world would stir in me again, and again would come those agonizing thoughts of Giuliana which I had conceived were forever laid to rest, so that I sought refuge once more in the hair-shirt; and when this had once more lost its efficacy, I took long whip-like branches of tender eglantine to fashion a scourge with which I flagellated my naked body so that the thorns tore my flesh and set my rebellious blood to flow.

  One evening, at last, as I sat outside my hut, gazing over the rolling emerald uplands, I had my reward. I almost fainted when first I realized it in the extremity of my joy and thankfulness. Very faintly, just as I had heard it that night when first I came to the hermitage, I heard now the mystic, bell-like music that had guided my footsteps thither. Never since that night had the sound of it reached me, though often I had listened for it.

  It came now wafted down to me, it seemed, upon the evening breeze, a sound of angelic chimes infinitely ravishing to my senses, and stirring my heart to such an ecstasy of faith and happiness as I had never yet known since my coming thither.

  It was a sign—a sign of pardon, a sign of grace. It could be naught else. I fell upon my knees and rendered my deep and joyous thanks.

  And in all the week that followed that unearthly silver music was with me, infinitely soothing and solacing. I could wander afield, yet it never left me, unless I chanced to go so near the tumbling waters of the Bagnanza that their thunder drowned that other blessed sound. I took courage and confidence. Passion Week drew nigh; but it no longer had any terrors for me. I was adjudged worthy of the guardianship of the shrine. Yet I prayed, and made St. Sebastian the special object of my devotions, that he should not fail me.

  April came, as I learnt of the stray visitors who, of their charity, brought me the alms of bread, and the second day of it was the first of Holy Week.

  CHAPTER VII

  INTRUDERS

  IT was on Holy Thursday that the image usually began to bleed, and it would continue so to do until the dawn of Easter Sunday.

  Each day now, as the time drew nearer, I watched the image closely, and on the Wednesday I watched it with a dread anxiety I could not repress, for as yet there was no faintest sign. The brown streaks that marked the course of the last bleeding continued dry. All that night I prayed intently, in a torture of doubt, yet soothed a little by the gentle music that was never absent now.

  With the first glint of dawn I heard steps outside the hut; but I did not stir. By sunrise there was a murmur of voices like the muttering of a sea upon its shore. I rose and peered more closely at the saint. He was just wood, inanimate and insensible, and there was still no sign. Outside, I knew, a crowd of pilgrims was already gathered. They were waiting, poor souls. But what was their waiting when compared with mine?

  Another hour I knelt there, still beseec
hing Heaven to take mercy upon me. But Heaven remained unresponsive and the wounds of the image continued dry.

  I rose, at last, in a sort of despair, and going to the door of the hut, I flung it wide.

  The platform was filled with a great crowd of peasantry, and an overflow poured down the sides of it and surged up the hill on the right and the left. At sight of me, so gaunt and worn, my eyes wild with despair and feverish from sleeplessness, a tangled growth of beard upon my hollow cheeks, they uttered as with one voice a great cry of awe. The multitude swayed and rippled, and then with a curious sound as that of a great wind, all went down upon their knees before me—all save the array of cripples huddled in the foreground, brought thither, poor wretches, in the hope of a miraculous healing.

  As I was looking round upon that assembly, my eyes were caught by a flash and glitter on the road above us leading to the Cisa Pass. A little troop of men-at-arms was descending that way. A score of them there would be, and from their lance-heads fluttered scarlet bannerols bearing a white device which at that distance I could not make out.

  The troop had halted, and one upon a great black horse, a man whose armour shone like the sun itself was pointing down with his mail-clad hand. Then they began to move again, and the brightness of their armour, the fluttering pennons on their lances stirred me strangely in that fleeting moment, ere I turned again to the faithful who knelt there waiting for my words. Dolefully, with hanging head and downcast eyes, I made the dread announcement.

  "My children, there is yet no miracle."

  A deathly stillness followed the words. Then came an uproar, a clamour, a wailing. One bold mountaineer thrust forward to the foremost ranks, though without rising from his knees.

  "Father," he cried, "how can that be? The saint has never failed to bleed by dawn on Holy Thursday, these five years past.