The Strolling Saint | Page 4

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