The Strolling Saint Part 6

So was it now with me. In all my eighteen years I had by my mother's careful contriving never set eyes upon a woman of an age inferior to her own. And--consider me foolish if you will but so it is--I do not think that it had occurred to me that they existed, or else, if they did, that in youth they differed materially from what in age I found them. Thus I had come to look upon women as just feeble, timid creatures, over-p.r.o.ne to gossip, tears, and lamentations, and good for very little that I could perceive.

I had been unable to understand for what reason it was that San Luigi of Gonzaga had from years of discretion never allowed his eyes to rest upon a woman; nor could I see wherein lay the special merit attributed to this. And certain pa.s.sages in the Confessions of St. Augustine and in the early life of St. Francis of a.s.sisi bewildered me and left me puzzled.

But now, quite suddenly, it was as if revelation had come to me. It was as if the Book of Life had at last been opened for me, and at a glance I had read one of its dazzling pages. So that whether this brown peasant girl was beautiful or not, beautiful she seemed to me with the radiant beauty that is attributed to the angels of Paradise. Nor did I doubt that she would be as holy, for to see in beauty a mark of divine favour is not peculiar only to the ancient Greeks.

And because of the appeal of this beauty--real or supposed--I was very ready with my protection, since I felt that protection must carry with it certain rights of ownership which must be very sweet and were certainly desired.

Holding her, therefore, within the shelter of my arms, where in her heedless innocence she had flung herself, and by very instinct stroking with one hand her little brown head to soothe her fears, I became truculent for the first time in my new-found manhood, and boldly challenged her pursuer.

"What is this, Rinolfo?" I demanded. "Why do you plague her?"

"She broke up my snares," he answered sullenly, "and let the birds go free."

"What snares? What birds?" quoth I.

"He is a cruel beast," she shrilled. "And he will lie to you, Madonnino."

"If he does I'll break the bones of his body," I promised in a tone entirely new to me. And then to him--"The truth now, poltroon!" I admonished him.

At last I got the story out of them: how Rinolfo had scattered grain in a little clearing in the garden, and all about it had set twigs that were heavily smeared with visc.u.m; that he set this trap almost daily, and daily took a great number of birds whose necks he wrung and had them cooked for him with rice by his silly mother; that it was a sin in any case to take little birds by such cowardly means, but that since amongst these birds there were larks and thrushes and plump blackbirds and other sweet musicians of the air, whose innocent lives were spent in singing the praises of G.o.d, his sin became a hideous sacrilege.

Finally I learnt that coming that morning upon half a score of poor fluttering terrified birds held fast in Rinolfo's viscous snares, the little girl had given them their liberty and had set about breaking up the springes. At this occupation he had caught her, and there is no doubt that he would have taken a rude vengeance but for the sanctuary which she had found in me.

And when I had heard, behold me for the first time indulging the prerogative that was mine by right of birth, and dispensing justice at Mondolfo like the lord of life and death that I was there.

"You, Rinolfo," I said, "will set no more snares here at Mondolfo, nor will you ever again enter these gardens under pain of my displeasure and its consequences. And as for this child, if you dare to molest her for what has happened now, or if you venture so much as to lay a finger upon her at any time and I have word of it, I shall deal with you as with a felon. Now go."

He went straight to his father, the seneschal, with a lying tale of my having threatened him with violence and forbidden him ever to enter the garden again because he had caught me there with Luisina--as the child was called--in my arms. And Messer Giojoso, full of parental indignation at this gross treatment of his child, and outraged chast.i.ty at the notion of a young man of churchly aims, as were mine, being in perversive dalliance with that peasant-wench, repaired straight to my mother with the story of it, which I doubt not lost nothing by its repet.i.tion.

Meanwhile I abode there with Luisina. I was in no haste to let her go.

Her presence pleased me in some subtle, quite indefinable manner; and my sense of beauty, which, always strong, had hitherto lain dormant within me, was awake at last and was finding nourishment in the graces of her.

I sat down upon the topmost of the terrace steps, and made her sit beside me. This she did after some demur about the honour of it and her own unworthiness, objections which I brushed peremptorily aside.

So we sat there on that May morning, quite close together, for which there was, after all, no need, seeing that the steps were of a n.o.ble width. At our feet spread the garden away down the flight of terraces to end in the castle's grey, b.u.t.tressed wall. But from where we sat we could look beyond this, our glance meeting the landscape a mile or so away with the waters of the Taro glittering in the sunshine, and the Apennines, all hazy, for an ultimate background.

I took her hand, which she relinquished to me quite freely and frankly with an innocence as great as my own; and I asked her who she was and how she came to Mondolfo. It was then that I learnt that her name was Luisina, that she was the daughter of one of the women employed in the castle kitchen, who had brought her to help there a week ago from Borgo Taro, where she had been living with an aunt.

To-day the notion of the Tyrant of Mondolfo sitting--almost coram populo--on the steps of the garden of his castle, clasping the hand of the daughter of one of his scullions, is grotesque and humiliating. At the time the thought never presented itself to me at all, and had it done so it would have troubled me no whit. She was my first glimpse of fresh young maidenhood, and I was filled with pleasant interest and desirous of more acquaintance with this phenomenon. Beyond that I did not go.

I told her frankly that she was very beautiful. Whereupon she looked at me with suddenly startled eyes that were full of fearful questionings, and made to draw her hand from mine. Unable to understand her fears, and seeking to rea.s.sure her, to convince her that in me she had a friend, one who would ever protect her from the brutalities of all the Rinolfos in the world, I put an arm about her shoulders and drew her closer to me, gently and protectingly.

She suffered it very stonily, like a poor fascinated thing that is robbed by fear of its power to resist the evil that it feels enfolding it.

"O Madonnino!" she whispered fearfully, and sighed. "Nay, you must not.

It... it is not good."

"Not good?" quoth I, and it was just so that that fool of a son of Balducci's must have protested in the story when he was told by his father that it was not good to look on women. "Nay, now, but it is good to me."

"And they say you are to be a priest," she added, which seemed to me a very foolish and inconsequent thing to add.

"Well, then? And what of that?" I asked.

She looked at me again with those timid eyes of hers. "You should be at your studies," said she.

"I am," said I, and smiled. "I am studying a new subject."

"Madonnino, it is not a subject whose study makes good priests," she announced, and puzzled me again by the foolish inconsequence of her words.

Already, indeed, she began to disappoint me. Saving my mother--whom I did not presume to judge at all, and who seemed a being altogether apart from what little humanity I had known until then--I had found that foolishness was as natural to women as its bleat to a sheep or its cackle to a goose; and in this opinion I had been warmly confirmed by Fra Gervasio. Now here in Luisina I had imagined at first that I had discovered a phase of womanhood unsuspected and exceptional. She was driving me to conclude, however, that I had been mistaken, and that here was just a pretty husk containing a very trivial spirit, whose companionship must prove a dull affair when custom should have staled the first impression of her fresh young beauty.

It is plain now that I did her an injustice, for there was about her words none of the inconsequence I imagined. The fault was in myself and in the profound ignorance of the ways of men and women which went hand in hand with my deep but ineffectual learning in the ways of saints.

Our entertainment, however, was not destined to go further. For at the moment in which I puzzled over her words and sought to attach to them some intelligent meaning, there broke from behind us a scream that flung us apart, as startled as if we had been conscious indeed of guilt.

We looked round to find that it had been uttered by my mother. Not ten yards away she stood, a tall black figure against the grey background of the lichened wall, with Giojoso in attendance and Rinolfo slinking behind his father, leering.

CHAPTER V. REBELLION

The sight of my mother startled me more than I can say. It filled me with a positive dread of things indefinable. Never before had I seen her coldly placid countenance so strangely disordered, and her unwonted aspect it must have been that wrought so potently upon me.

No longer was she the sorrowful spectre, white-faced, with downcast eyes and level, almost inanimate, tones. Her cheeks were flushed unnaturally, her lips were quivering, and angry fires were smouldering in her deep-set eyes.

Swiftly she came down to us, seeming almost to glide over the ground.

Not me she addressed, but poor Luisina; and her voice was hoa.r.s.e with an awful anger.

"Who are you, wench?" quoth she. "What make you here in Mondolfo?"

Luisina had risen and stood swaying there, very white and with averted eyes, her hands clasping and unclasping. Her lips moved; but she was too terrified to answer. It was Giojoso who stepped forward to inform my mother of the girl's name and condition. And upon learning it her anger seemed to increase.

"A kitchen-wench!" she cried. "O horror!"

And quite suddenly, as if by inspiration, scarce knowing what I said or that I spoke at all, I answered her out of the store of the theological learning with which she had had me stuffed.

"We are all equals in the sight of G.o.d, madam mother."

She flashed me a glance of anger, of pious anger than which none can be more terrible.

"Blasphemer!" she denounced me. "What has G.o.d to do with this?"

She waited for no answer, rightly judging, perhaps, that I had none to offer.

"And as for that wanton," she commanded, turning fiercely to Giojoso, "let her be whipped hence and out of the town of Mondolfo. Set the grooms to it."