



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 I. 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 Piac