



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--