The Strolling Saint; being the confessions of the high and mighty Agostino D'Anguissola tyrant of Mondolfo and Lord of Carmina in the state of Piacenza Read online

  Produced by John Stuart Middleton

  THE STROLLING SAINT

  Being the Confessions of the High & Mighty Agostino D'Anguissola Tyrantof 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 I. THE OBLATE

  CHAPTER I. NOMEN ET OMEN

  In seeking other than in myself--as men will--the causes of mytribulations, I have often inclined to lay the blame of much of the illthat befell me, and the ill that in my sinful life I did to others, uponthose who held my mother at the baptismal font and concerted that sheshould bear the name of Monica.

  There are in life many things which, in themselves, seeming to thevulgar and the heedless to be trivial and without consequence, may yetbe causes pregnant of terrible effects, mainsprings of Destiny itself.Amid such portentous trifles I would number the names so heedlesslybestowed upon us.

  It surprises me that in none of the philosophic writings of the learnedscholars of antiquity can I find that this matter of names has beentouched upon, much less given the importance of which I account it to bedeserving.

  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 theirweighty and impressive manner have set down a lesson on the subject,and so relieved me--who am all-conscious of my shortcomings in thisdirection-from the necessity of repairing that omission out of my ownexperience.

  Let it then, even at this late hour, be considered what a subtleinfluence for good or ill, what a very mould of character may lie withina name.

  To the dull clod of earth, perhaps, or, again, to the trulystrong-minded nature that is beyond such influences, it can matterlittle that he be called Alexander or Achilles; and once there was a mannamed Judas who fell so far short of the noble associations of that namethat 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 andgreatest affliction of mankind--or whose nature is such as to crave formodels, the name he bears may become a thing portentous by the imagesit conjures up of some mighty dead who bore it erstwhile and whose lifeinspires to emulation.

  Whatever may be accounted the general value of this premiss, at least asit concerns my mother I shall hope to prove it apt.

  They named her Monica. Why the name was chosen I have never learnt; butI do not conceive that there was any reason for the choice other thanthe taste of her parents in the matter of sounds. It is a pleasingenough name, euphoniously considered, and beyond that--as is so commonlythe case--no considerations were taken into account.

  To her, however, at once imaginative and of a feeble and dependentspirit, the name was fateful. St. Monica was made the special object ofher 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 anold manuscript collection of the life histories of a score or so ofsaints that was one of her dearest possessions. To render herself worthyof the name she bore, to model her life upon that of the sainted womanwho had sorrowed and rejoiced so much in her famous offspring, becamethe obsession of my mother's soul. And but that St. Monica had wed andborne a son, I do not believe that my mother would ever have adventuredherself within the bonds of wedlock.

  How often in the stressful, stormy hours of my most unhappy youth did Inot wish that she had preferred the virginal life of the cloister, andthus spared me the heavy burden of an existence which her unholy andmistaken saintliness went so near to laying waste!

  I like to think that in the days when my father wooed her, she forgotfor a spell in the strong arms of that fierce ghibelline the patternupon which it had become her wont to weave her life; so that in allthat drab, sackcloth tissue there was embroidered at least one warm andbrilliant little wedge of colour; so that in all that desert waste, inall that parched aridity of her existence, there was at least one littlepatch of garden-land, fragrant, fruitful, and cool.

  I like to think it, for at best such a spell must have been briefindeed; and for that I pity her--I, who once blamed her so verybitterly. Before ever I was born it must have ceased; whilst still shebore me she put from her lips the cup that holds the warm andpotent wine of life, and turned her once more to her fasting, hercontemplations, and her prayers.

  That was in the year in which the battle of Pavia was fought and won bythe Emperor. My father, who had raised a condotta to lend a hand in theexpulsion of the French, was left for dead upon that glorious field.Afterwards he was found still living, but upon the very edge and borderof Eternity; and when the news of it was borne to my mother I havelittle doubt but that she imagined it to be a visitation--a punishmentupon her for having strayed for that brief season of her adolescencefrom the narrow flinty path that she had erst claimed to tread in thefootsteps 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 womanas God made her, than of love. Indeed, I almost know this to be so. Indelicate health as she was, she bade her people prepare a litter forher, and so she had herself carried into Piacenza, to the Church of St.Augustine. There, having confessed and received the Sacrament, upon herknees before a minor altar consecrated to St. Monica, she made solemnvow that if my father's life was spared she would devote the unbornchild she carrie
d to the service of God and Holy Church.

  Two months thereafter word was brought her that my father, his recoveryby now well-nigh complete, was making his way home.

  On the morrow was I born--a votive offering, an oblate, ere yet I haddrawn the breath of life.

  It has oft diverted me to conjecture what would have chanced had I beenborn a girl--since that could have afforded her no proper parallel. Inthe circumstance that I was a boy, I have no faintest doubt but that shesaw a Sign, for she was given to seeing signs in the slightest and mostnatural happenings. It was as it should be; it was as it had been withthe Sainted Monica in whose ways she strove, poor thing, to walk. Monicahad borne a son, and he had been named Augustine. It was very well. Myname, too, should be Augustine, that I might walk in the ways of thatother 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 wasthe influence of my name to exert its sway upon me. It was made to doso. Ere I could read for myself, the life of that great saint--with suchcastrations as my tender years demanded--was told me and repeated untilI knew by heart its every incident and act. Anon his writings were myschool-books. His De Civitate Dei and De Vita Beata were the paps atwhich I suckled my earliest mental nourishment.

  And even to-day, after all the tragedy and sin and turbulence of mylife, that was intended to have been so different, it is fromhis Confessions that I have gathered inspiration to set down myown--although betwixt the two you may discern little indeed that iscomparable.

  I was prenatally made a votive offering for the preservation of myfather's life, for his restoration to my mother safe and sound. Thatrestoration she had, as you have seen; and yet, had she been other thanshe was, she must have accounted herself cheated of her bargain in theend. For betwixt my father and my mother I became from my earliest yearsa subject of contentions that drove them far asunder and set them almostin 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 theseclusion of the cloister, whilst our lordship passed into the hands ofour renegade, guelphic cousin, Cosimo d'Anguissola of Codogno?

  I can picture his outbursts at the very thought of it; I can hearhim reasoning, upbraiding, storming. But he was as an ocean of energyhurling himself against the impassive rock of my mother's pietisticobstinacy. She had vowed me to the service of Holy Church, and she wouldsuffer tribulation and death so that her vow should be fulfilled. Andhers was a manner against which that strong man, my father, nevercould prevail. She would stand before him white-faced and mute, neverpresuming to return an answer to his pleading or to enter into argument.

  "I have vowed," she would say, just once; and thereafter, avoiding hisfiery glance, she would bow her head meekly, fold her hands, the veryincarnation of long-suffering and martyrdom.

  Anon, as the storm of his anger crashed about her, two glistening lineswould appear upon her pallid face, and her tears--horrid, silent weepingthat brought no trace of emotion to her countenance--showered down. Atthat he would fling out of her presence and away, cursing the day inwhich he had mated with a fool.

  His hatred of these moods of hers, of the vow she had made which badefair to deprive him of his son, drove him ere long to hatred of thecause of it all. A ghibelline by inheritance, he was not long inbecoming 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 anddoing, seeking the destruction of the thing he hated. And so it befellthat upon the death of Pope Clement (the second Medici Pontiff),profiting by the weak condition from which the papal army had not yetrecovered since the Emperor's invasion and the sack of Rome, my fatherraised an army and attempted to shatter the ancient yoke which Julius IIhad imposed upon Parma and Piacenza when he took them from the State ofMilan.

  A little lad of seven was I at the time, and well do I remember themartial stir and bustle there was about our citadel of Mondolfo, thearmed multitudes that thronged the fortress that was our home, ordrilled and manoeuvred upon the green plains beyond the river.

  I was all wonder-stricken and fascinated by the sight. My blood wasquickened by the brazen notes of their trumpets, and to balance a pikein my hands was to procure me the oddest and most exquisite thrills thatI had known. But my mother, perceiving with alarm the delight affordedme by such warlike matters, withdrew me so that I might see as little aspossible of it all.

  And there followed scenes between her and my father of which hazyimpressions linger in my memory. No longer was she a mute statue,enduring with fearful stoicism his harsh upbraidings. She was turnedinto a suppliant, now fierce, now lachrymose; by her prayers, by herprophecies of the evil that must attend his ungodly aims, she strovewith all her poor, feeble might to turn him from the path of revolt towhich he had set his foot.

  And he would listen now in silence, his face grim and sardonic; and whenfrom very weariness the flow of her inspired oratory began to falter, hewould deliver ever the same answer.

  "It is you who have driven me to this; and this is no more than abeginning. You have made a vow--an outrageous votive offering ofsomething that is not yours to bestow. That vow you cannot break, yousay. Be it so. But I must seek a remedy elsewhere. To save my son fromthe Church to which you would doom him, I will, ere I have done, teardown the Church and make an end of it in Italy."

  And at that she would shrivel up before him with a little moan ofhorror, taking her poor white face in her hands.

  "Blasphemer!" she would cry in mingled terror and aversion, and uponthat word--the "Amen" to all their conferences in those last days theyspent together--she would turn, and dragging me with her, all stunnedand bewildered by something beyond my understanding, she would hurryme 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 spokenbetween them, what premonitions may have troubled one or the other thatthey 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 ofgreat eyes, humid with tears, considered me passionately. Then a ringingvoice--that commanding voice that was my father's--spoke to Falcone, theman-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 convulsivelyuntil 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. Heswung 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-teethin 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 ashaveling of you. When your thews are grown it will not be on thuriblesthey'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 hisbreast so that the studs of his armour remained stamped upon my tenderflesh after he had departed.

  The next instant he was gone, and I lay weeping, a very lonely littlechild.

  But in the revolt that he led he had not reckoned upon the might andvigour of the new Farnese Pontiff. He had conceived, perhaps, that onepope must be as supine as another, and that Paul III would prove no moreredoubtable than Clement VIII. To his bitter cost did he discover hismistake. Beyond the Po he was surprised by the Pontifical army underFerrante Ors
ini, 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 awound in the leg which left him lame for life, so that ever after he wasknown as Pallavicini il Zopo.

  They were all under the pope's ban, outlaws with a price upon the headof 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 theinsubordination it had permitted to be reared upon its soil.

  And Mondolfo went near to suffering confiscation. Assuredly it wouldhave suffered it but for the influence exerted on my mother's and my ownbehalf 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 notto see it confiscated to the Holy See.

  Thus it fell out that we were left in peace and not made to suffer frommy 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 wasin Venice, now in Milan, now in Naples; but never long in any place forhis safety's sake. And then one night, six years later, a scarred andgrizzled veteran, coming none knew whence, dropped from exhaustion inthe courtyard of our citadel, whither he had struggled. Some went tominister 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 myfather in those six weary years of wandering until now that my fatherwas beyond the need of his or any other's service.

  There had been a rising and a bloody battle at Perugia, Falcone informedus. An attempt had been made to overthrow the rule there of Pier LuigiFarnese, Duke of Castro, the pope's own abominable son. For some monthsmy father had been enjoying the shelter of the Perugians, and he hadrepaid their hospitality by joining them and bearing arms with them inthe ill-starred blow they struck for liberty. They had been crushed inthe encounter by the troops of Pier Luigi, and my father had been amongthe 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 undergoneby the unfortunates who had fallen into the hands of Farnese.

  My mother heard him to the end without any sign of emotion. Shesat there, cold and impassive as a thing of marble, what time FraGervasio--who was my father's foster-brother, as you shall presentlylearn more fully--sank his head upon his arm and wept like a child tohear the piteous tale of it. And whether from force of example, whetherfrom the memories that came to me so poignantly in that moment of a finestrong man with a brown, shaven face and a jovial, mighty voice, who hadpromised 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 becared for, and went to pray, taking me with her.

  Oftentimes since have I wondered what was the tenour of her prayers thatnight. Were they for the rest of the great turbulent soul that wasgone forth in sin, in arms against the Holy Church, excommunicate andforedoomed to Hell? Or were they of thanksgiving that at last she wascompletely mistress of my destinies, her mind at rest, since no longerneed she fear opposition to her wishes concerning me? I do not know, norwill I do her the possible injustice that I should were I to guess.