The Strolling Saint | Page 6

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