Bellarion the Fortunate, self-styled adopted son of Facino Cane, Governor of Milan, was to need every favour that Fortune could bestow when he found himself caught up in the web of intrigue and ambition that characterized the ducal courts of Italy in the 15th century.
Leaving the sheltered cloisters of a monastery, an orphan without title or fortune, Bellarion became the unwitting tool of the ruthless Marquis Theodore, Regent of Montferrat. Barely escaping with his life by claiming noble parentage, Bellarion fled to Milan, thereby forfeiting the trust and regard of the beautiful Princess Valeria, who had looked to him to champion the cause of her brother, the rightful ruler of Montferrat. But in Milan, falling victim of its vicious and imbecilic young Duke, Bellarion found himself thrown upon the mercy of the very nobleman whose name he had adopted in an hour of desperate need.
How Bellarion, despite his cloistered upbringing, grasped the sword which Fortune held out to him, and with it carved for himself power and wealth beyond his wildest dreams, makes exciting reading, and we share the moments of high drama in an age when a whispered word could mean life or death, and humanity and honour were sacrificed with barbarous cruelty to the schemings of ambitious men.
CHAPTER I. THE THRESHOLD
“HALF-GOD, HALF-BEAST,” THE PRINCESS Valeria once described him, without suspecting that the phrase describes not merely Bellarion, but Man.
Aware of this, the anonymous chronicler who has preserved it for us goes on to comment that the Princess said at once too much and too little. He makes phrases in his turn—which I will spare you—and seeks to prove that if the moieties of divinity and beastliness are equally balanced in a man, that man will be neither good nor bad. Then he passes on to show us a certain poor swineherd who rose to ultimate eminence in whom the godly part so far predominated that naught else was humanly discernible, and a great prince—of whom more will be heard in the course of this narrative—who was just as the beasts that perish, without any spark of divinity to exalt him. These are the extremes. For each of the dozen, or so, intermediate stages which he discerns our chronicler has a portrait out of history, of which his learning appears to be considerable.
From this, from his general manner, from the fact that most of his illustrations are supplied by Florentine sources, and from the austerely elegant Tuscan language in which he writes, a fairly definite conclusion is possible on the score of his identity. It is more than probable that this study of Bellarion the Fortunate (Bellarione Fortunato) belongs to that series of historical portraits from the pen of Niccolo Macchiavelli, of which The Life of Castruccio Castracane is, perhaps, the most widely known. Research, however, fails to discover the source from which he draws. Whilst many of his facts agree completely with those contained in the voluminous monkish Vita et Gesta Bellarionis, left us by Fra Serafino of Imola, whoever he may have been, yet discrepancies are frequent and irreconcilable.
Thus, at the very outset, on the score of his name, Macchiavelli (to cling to my assumption) tells us that he was called Bellarion not merely because he was a man of war, but because he was the very child of War, born, as it were, out of the very womb of conflict—"edi guerra propriamente partorito”. The use of this metaphor reveals a full acquaintance with the tale of the child’s being plucked from the midst of strife and alarums. But Fra Serafino’s account of the name is the only one that fits into the known facts. That this name should have been so descriptive of Bellarion’s afterlife merely provides one of those curious instances of homonymy in which history abounds.
Continuing his comments upon the Princess Valeria’s phrase, Macchiavelli states that Bellarion’s is not a nature thus to be packed into a sentence. Because of his perception of this fact, he wrote his biographical sketch. Because of my perception of it, I have embarked upon this fuller narrative.
I choose to begin at a point where Bellarion himself may be said to make a certain beginning. I select the moment when he is to be seen standing upon the threshold of the secular world, known to him until that moment only from the writings of other men, yet better known to him thus than it is to many who have lived a lifetime among their fellows. After all, to view a scene from a distance is to enjoy advantages of perspective denied to the actors in that scene.
Bellarion’s reading had been prodigious. There was no branch of learning—from the Theological Fathers to Vegetius Hyginus on the Art of War—to which he had not addressed his eager spirit. And his exhaustion of all immediately available material for study was one of the causes of his going forth from the peace of the convent of which he was a nursling in quest of deeper wells of learning to slake his hot intellectual thirst. Another cause was a certain heretical doctrine of which it was hoped that further study would cure him; a doctrine so subversive of theological teaching that a hundred years later it must have made him closely acquainted with the operations of the Holy Office and probably—in Spain certainly—have brought him to the fire. This abominable heresy, fruit of much brooding, was that in the world there is not, nor can be, such a thing as sin. And it was in vain that the abbot, who loved him very dearly, sought by argument to convert him.
“It is your innocence that speaks. Alas, my child, in the world, from which hitherto you have been mercifully sheltered, you will find that sin is not only real, but terribly abundant.”
Bellarion answered with a syllogism, the logical formula to which he had reduced his doctrine. He presented it in the Socratic manner of inquiry, which was the method of argument he ever preferred.
“Are not all things in the world from God? Is not God the fount of all goodness? Can, therefore, any created thing be other than good?”
“And the devil, then?” quoth the abbot.
Bellarion smiled, a singularly sweet smile that had power to draw men’s love and lead them into agreement with him.
“Is it not possible that those who invented the devil may have studied divinity in Persia, where the creed obtains that powers of light and darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman, strive perpetually for mastery of the world? Surely, otherwise, they would have remembered that if the devil exists God must have created him, which in itself is blasphemy, for God can create no evil.”
Aghast, the abbot descended at a stride from the theological to the practical.
“Is it not evil to steal, to kill, to commit adultery?”
“Ah yes. But these are evils between men, disruptive of society, and therefore to be suppressed lest the gregariousness which men desire should become impossible. But that is all.”
“All? All!” The abbot’s deep-set eyes surveyed the youth with sorrow. “My son, the devil lends you a false subtlety to destroy your soul.”
And gently now that benign and fatherly man preached him a sermon of the faith. It was followed by others in the days that ensued. But to all the weapons of his saintly rhetoric Bellarion continued to oppose the impenetrable shield of that syllogism of his which the abbot knew at heart to be fallacious, yet whose fallacy he laboured in vain to expose. When at last the good man began to fear lest this heresy should come to trouble and corrupt the peace and faith in his convent, he consented to speed its author to Pavia and to those further studies which he hoped would cure him of this heretical pravity. And that is how, on a day of August of the year of grace 1407, Bellarion departed from the Convent of our Lady of Grace of Cigliano.
He went on foot. He was to be dependent for food and shelter mainly upon the charity of the religious houses that lay on his way to Pavia, and as a passport to these he bore in his scrip a letter from the Abbot of the Grazie. Beside it lay a purse containing for emergencies five ducats, a princely sum, not only in his own eyes, but in those of the abbot, who at parting had bestowed it upon him. The tale of his worldly possessions is completed by the suit of coarse green cloth he wore, and the knife at his girdle, which was to serve all purposes from the carving of his meat to affording him a means of defence from predatory beasts and men. To fortify him spiritually in his adventurous pilgrimage through Lombardy he had the abbot’s blessing and a memory of the fond tears in the eyes of that old man who loved him and who had reared him from the age of six. At the last the abbot had again reminded him of the peace of the convent and of the strife and unhappiness that distract the world.
“Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella.”
The mischief began—and you may account it symbolical—by his losing his way. This happened a mile or two beyond the township of Livorno. Because the peace of the riverside allured a mind that for seventeen years had been schooled in peace, because the emerald meadows promised to be soft and yielding to his feet, he left the dusty highway for the grassy banks of Po. Beside its broad waters winding here about the shallow pleasant hills of Montferrat, Bellarion trudged, staff in hand, the green hood of his cape thrown back, the long liripipe trailing like a tail behind him, a tall, lithe stripling of obvious vigour, olive-skinned, black-haired and with dark eyes that surveyed the world bold and fearlessly.
The day was hot. The air was laden with the heavy perfumes of late summer, and the river swollen and clouded by the melting snows on distant Monte Rosa.
He wandered on, lost in day-dreams, until the sunlight passed with the sinking of the sun behind the heights across the river, and a breeze came whispering through the trees on his own bank. He checked, his dark eyes alert, a frown of thought rumpling the fair smoothness of his lofty brow. He looked about, became aware of a deep forest on his left, bethought him of the road, remembered where the sun had set, and realized hence that for some time he had been travelling south, and consequently in the wrong direction. In following the allurements offered to his senses he had gone astray. He made some homely philosophy upon that, to his infinite satisfaction, for he loved parallels and antitheses and all such intellectual toys. For the rest, there was about him no doubt or hesitation. He computed from the time he had taken and the pace at which he had come the extent to which he had wandered from the road. It must run too far beyond this forest to leave him any hope of lying that night, as he had intended, with the Augustinian fathers at their house on the Sesia, on the frontiers of the State of Milan.
Save for the hunger that beset him, he was undismayed. And what, after all, is a little hunger to one schooled to the most rigid lenten feasts in season?
He entered the wood and resolutely went forward in the direction in which he knew the road to lie. For a half-mile or more he penetrated by a path growing less visible at every step, until darkness and the forest swallowed him. To go on would certainly be to lose himself completely in this maze. Better far to lie down and sleep where he was and wait for the morning sun to give him his orientation.
So he spread his cloak upon the ground, and, this proving no harder as a couch than the pallet to which he was accustomed, he slept soundly and peacefully.
When he awakened he found the sunlight in the forest and something else of almost more immediate interest: a man in the grey habit of a minor friar. This man, tall and lean, was standing beside him, yet half-turned from him in a curious attitude of arrested movement, almost as if the abrupt suddenness with which Bellarion had sat up—a single heartbeat after his eyes had opened—had checked his intention to depart.
Thus an instant, then the friar was facing him again, his hands folded within the loose sleeves of his robe, a smile distending his countenance. He uttered a benedictory greeting.
“Pax tecum.”
“Et tecum, frater, pax,” was Bellarion’s mechanical answer, what time he studied this stranger’s villainous, patibulary countenance, marking the animal looseness of the mouth and the craft peering from the little eyes that were like black beads thrust into a face of clay. A closer scrutiny softened his judgment. The man’s face was disfigured; ridged, scarred and pitted from the smallpox. Those scars had contracted the skin about the eyes, thus altering the expression, and to the ravages of the disease was also due the sickly pallor overspreading cheek and brow.
Considering this and the habit which he wore—a habit which Bellarion had no cause to associate with anything that was not sweet and good—he disposed himself to make amends for the hastiness of his first assumptions.
“Benedictus sis,” he murmured, and with that abandoned Latin for the vulgar tongue. “I bless the Providence that sends you to a poor traveller who has lost his way.”
The friar laughed aloud at this, and the lingering apprehension left his eyes, which, thus relieved, grew pleasanter to look upon.
“Lord! Lord! And I, like a fool and coward, having almost trodden upon you, was for creeping off in haste, supposing you a sleeping robber. This forest is a very sanctuary of thieves. They infest it, thick as rabbits in a warren.”
“Why, then, do you adventure in it?”
“Why? One! And what shall they steal from a poor friar-mendicant? My beads? My girdle?” He laughed again. A humorous fellow, clearly, taking a proper saintly joy in his indigenous condition. “No, no, my brother. I have no cause to go in fear of thieves.”
“Yet supposing me a thief, you were in fear of me?”
The man’s smile froze. This stripling’s simple look was disconcerting.
“I feared,” he said at last, slowly and solemnly, “your fear of me. A hideous passion, fear, in man or beast. It makes men murderers at times. Had you been the robber I supposed you, and, waking suddenly, found me beside you, you might have suspected some intent to harm you. It is easily guessed what would have followed then.”
Bellarion nodded thoughtfully. No explanation could have been more complete. The man was not only virtuous, but wise. “Whither to do you journey, brother?”
“To Pavia,” Bellarion answered him, “by the way of Santa Tenda.”
“Santa Tenda! Why, that is my way, too; at least, as far as the Augustinian Monastery of the Sesia. Wait here, my son, and we will go together. It is good to have a comrade on a journey. Wait but sortie few moments, to give me time to bathe, which is the purpose for which I came. I will not keep you long.”
He went striding off through the grass. Bellarion called after him: “Where do you bathe?”
Over his shoulder the friar answered him: “There is a rivulet down yonder. But a little way. Do not stray from that spot, so that I may find you again, my son.”
Bellarion thought the form of address an odd one. A minorite is brother, not father, to all humanity. But it was no suspicion based on this that brought him to his feet. He was a youth of cleanly habits, and if there was water at hand he, too, would profit by it. So he rose, picked up his cloak, and went off in the wake of the swiftly-moving friar.
When presently he overtook him, Bellarion made him a present of a proverb:
“Who goes slowly, goes soundly.”
“But never gets there,” was the slightly breathless answer. “And it’s still some way to the water.”
“Some way? But you said...”
“Ay, ay, I was mistaken. One place is like another in this labyrinth. I am none so sure that I am not as lost as you are.”
It must have been so, for they trudged a full mile before they came to a brook that flowed westwards towards the river. It lay in a dell amid mossy boulders and spreading fronds of ferns all dappled now with the golden light that came splashing through the trees. They found a pool of moderate dimensions in a bowl of grey stone fashioned by the ceaseless sculpture of the water. It was too shallow to afford a bath. But the friar’s ablutionary dispositions scarce seemed to demand so much. He rinsed his face and hands perfunctorily, whilst Bellarion stripped to the waist, and displaying a white torso of much beauty and more vigour, did what was possible in that cramped space.
After that the friar produced from one of the sack-like pockets of his habit an enormous piece of sausage and a loaf of rye bread.
To Bellarion, who had gone supperless to bed, this was as the sight of manna in the desert.
“Little brother!” he cooed in sheer delight. “Little brother!”
“Ay, ay. We have our uses, we little brothers of Saint Francis.” The minorite sliced the sausage in two equal halves. “We know how to provide ourselves upon a journey.”
They fell to eating, and with the stilling of his hunger Bellarion experienced an increasing kindliness to this Good Samaritan. At the friar’s suggestion that they should be moving so as to cover the greater part of the road to Casale before the noontide heat, Bellarion stood up, brushing the crumbs from his lap. In doing so his hand came in contact with the scrip that dangled from his girdle.
“Saints of God,” he ejaculated, as he tightened his clutch upon that bag of green cloth.
The beady eyes of the minorite were upon him and there was blank inquiry in that ashen corrugated face.
“What is it, brother?”
Bellarion’s fingers groped within the bag a moment, then turned it inside out, to reveal its utter emptiness. He showed his companion a face which blended suspicion with dismay.
“I have been robbed,” he said.
“Robbed?” the other echoed, then smiled a pitying concern. “My surprise is less than yours, my son. Did I not say these woods are infested by thieves? Had you slept less soundly you might have been robbed of life as well. Render thanks to God, Whose grace is discernible even in misfortune. For no evil befalls us that will not serve to show how much greater that evil might have been. Take that for comfort ever in adversity, my child.”
“Ay, ay!” Bellarion displayed ill-humour whilst his eyes abated nothing of their suspicious glance. “It is easy to make philosophy upon the woes of others.”
“Child, child! What is your woe? What is the full sum of it? What have you lost when all is said?”
“Five ducats and a letter.” Bellarion flung the answer fiercely.
“Five ducats!” The friar spread his hands in pious remonstrance. “And will you blaspheme God for five ducats?”
“Blaspheme?”
“Is not your furious frame of mind a blasphemy, your anger at your loss where there should be a devout thankfulness for all that you retain? And you should be thankful, too, for the Providence that guided my steps towards you in the hour of your need.”
“I should be thankful for that?” Bellarion stressed the question with mistrust.
The friar’s countenance changed. A gentle melancholy invested it.
“I read your thoughts, child, and they harbour suspicion of me. Of me!” he smiled. “Why, what a madness! Should I turn thief? Should I imperil my immortal soul for five paltry ducats? Do you not know that we little brothers of Saint Francis live as the birds of the air, without thought for material things, our trust entirely in God’s providence? What should I do with five ducats, or five hundred? Without a single minted coin, with no more than my gown and my staff, I might journey from here to Jerusalem, living upon the alms that never fail us. But assurances are not enough for minds poisoned by suspicion.” He flung wide his arms and stood cruciform before the youth. “Come, child, make search upon me for your ducats, and so assure yourself. Come!”
Bellarion flushed and lowered his head in shame.
“There...there is not the need,” he answered lamely. “The gown you wear is a full assurance. You could not be what you are and yet the thing that for a moment I...” He broke off. “I beg that you’ll forgive my unworthiness, my brother.”
Slowly the friar lowered his arms. His eyes were smiling again.
“I will be merciful by not insisting.” He laid a hand, lean and long in the fingers as an eagle’s claw, upon the young man’s shoulder. “Think no more of your loss. I am here to repair it. Together we will journey. The habit of Saint Francis is wide enough to cover both of us, and you shall not want for anything until you reach Pavia.”
Bellarion looked at him in gratitude. “It was Providence, indeed, that sent you.”
“Did I not say so? And now you see it for yourself. Benedicamus Domine.”
To which Bellarion sincerely made the prescribed answer: “Deo gratias!”
CHAPTER II. THE GREY FRIAR
They made their way towards the road, not directly, but by a course with which Fra Sulpizio—as the friar announced himself named—seemed singularly well acquainted. It led transversely across the forest. And as they went Fra Sulpizio plied Bellarion with questions.
“There was a letter, you said, that was stolen with your gold?”
“Ay,” Bellarion’s tone was bitter. “A letter worth many times five ducats.”
“Worth many times...? A letter?” The incredulity on the friar’s face was ludicrous. “Why, what manner of letter was that?”
Bellarion, who knew the contents by heart, recited them word for word.
Fra Sulpizio scratched his head in perplexity. “I have Latin enough for my office; but not for this,” he confessed, and finding Bellarion’s searching glance upon him, he softened his voice to add, truly enough: “We little brothers of Saint Francis are not famed for learning. Learning disturbs humility.”
Bellarion sighed. “So I know to my cost,” said he, and thereafter translated the lost letter: “This is our dearly beloved son Bellarion, a nutritus of this house, who goes hence to Pavia to increase his knowledge of the humanities. We commend him first to God and then to the houses of our own and other brethren orders for shelter and assistance on his journey, invoking upon all who may befriend him the blessing of Our Lord.”
The friar nodded his understanding. “It might have been a grievous loss, indeed. But as it is, I will do the office of your letter whilst I am with you, and when we part I will see you armed with the like from the Prior of the Augustinians on the Sesia. He will do this at my word.”
The young man thanked him with a fervour dictated by shame of certain unworthy suspicions which had recurred. Thereafter they trudged on awhile in silence, broken by the friar at last.
“And is your name Belisario, then? An odd name that!”
“Not Belisario. Beliario or, rather, Bellarione.”
“Bellarione? Why, it is even less Christian than the other. Where got you such a name?”
“Not at the font, you may be sure. There I was christened Ilario, after the good Saint Hilary, who is still my patron saint.”
“Then why...?”
“There’s a story to it; my story,” Bellarion answered him, and upon slight encouragement proceeded to relate it.
He was born, he told the friar, as nearly as he could guess, some six years after the outbreak of the Great Schism; that is to say, somewhere about the year 1384, in a village of whose name, like that of his own family, he had no knowledge.
“Of my father and my mother,” he continued, “I can evoke no mental picture. Of my father my only positive knowledge is that he existed. Of my mother I know that she was a termagant of whom the family, my father included, stood in awe. Amongst my earliest impressions is the sense of fear that invaded us at the sound of her scolding voice. It was querulous and strident; and I can hear it to this day harshly raised to call my sister. Leocadia was that sister’s name, the only name of all my family that I remember, and this because I must have often heard it called in that dread voice. There were several of us. I have one vivid memory of perhaps a half-dozen tumbling urchins playing at some game in a bare, chill room that was yellow washed, lighted by an unglazed window beyond which the rain was streaming down upon a narrow dismal street. There was a clang of metal in the air, as if armourers were at work in the neighbourhood. And we were in the charge, I remember, of that same Leocadia, who must have been the eldest of us. I have an impression, vague and misty, of a lanky girl whose lean, bare legs showed through a rent in her tattered petticoat. Faintly I discern a thin pinched face set in a mane of untidy yellow hair, and then I hear a heavy step and the creak of a stair and a shrill discordant voice calling, ‘Leocadia!’ and then a scuttle amongst us to shelter from some unremembered peril.
“Of my family, that is all that I can tell you, brother. You’ll agree, perhaps, that since my memory can hold so little it is a pity that it should hold so much. But for these slight impressions of my infancy, I might weave a pleasant romance about it, conceive myself born in a palace and heir to an illustrious name.
“That these memories of mine concern the year 1389 or 1390, I know from what the abbot tells me, and also from later studies and deductions of my own. As you may know, there was at that time a bitter war being waged hereabouts between Ghibelline Montferrat and Guelphic Morea. It may have ravaged these very lands by which we travel now. One evening at the hour of dusk a foraging troop of Montferrat horse swept into my native place. There was pillage and brutality of every kind, as you can imagine. There was terror and confusion in every household, no doubt, and even in our own, although, heaven knows, we had little cause to stand in dread of pillage. I remember that as night descended we huddled in the dark listening to the sounds of violence in the distance, coming from what I now imagine to have been the more opulent quarter of that township. I can hear my mother’s heavy breathing. For once she inspired no terror in us, being herself stricken with terror and cowed into silence. But this great terror was upon us all, a sense of impending evil, of some horror advancing presently to overwhelm us. There were snivelling whimpering sounds in the gloom about me from Leocadia and the other children. It is odd how things heard have remained stamped upon my mind so much more vividly than things seen, which usually are more easily remembered. But from that moment my memory begins to grow clear and consecutive, perhaps from the sudden sharpening of my wits by this crisis.
“It was probably the instinct to withdraw myself beyond the reach of that approaching evil which drew me furtively from the room. I remember groping my way in the dark down a steep crazy staircase and tumbling down three stone steps at the door of that hovel into the mud of the street.
“I picked myself up, bruised and covered with filth. At another time this might have set me howling. Just then my mind was filled with graver concerns. In the open the noises were more distinct. I could hear shouts, and once a piercing scream that made my young blood run cold. Away on my right there was a red glow in the sky, and, associating it with the evil that was to be escaped, I turned down the alley and made off, whimpering as I ran. Soon there was an end to the houses, and I was out of their shadow in the light of a rising moon on a road that led away through the open country into eternity, as it must have seemed to me. From this I have since argued either that the township had neither gates nor walls, or else that the mean quarter we inhabited was outside and beyond them.
“I cannot have been above five years of age, and I must have been singularly sturdy, for my little legs bore me several miles that night, driven by unreasoning fear. At last I must have sunk down exhausted by the roadside and there fallen asleep, for my next memory is of my awakening. It was broad daylight, and I was in the grasp of a big bearded man who, from his cap to his spurs, was all steel and leather. Beside him stood the great bay horse from which he had just leaped, and behind him, filling the road in a staring, grinning cluster, was ranged a troop of fully fifty men with lances reared above them.
“He soothed my terrors with a voice incredibly gentle in one so big and fierce, and asked me who I was and whence I came, questions to which I could return no proper answers. To increase my confidence, perhaps, he gave me food—some fruit and bread—such bread as I had never tasted.
“‘We cannot leave you here, baby’, he said. ‘And since you don’t know where you belong I will take charge of you.’
“I no longer feared him or those with him. What cause had I to fear them? This man had stroked and petted and fed me. He had used me more kindly than I could remember ever to have been used before. So when, presently, I was perched in front of him on the withers of his great horse, I knew no sense but one of entire satisfaction.
“Later that day we came to a town, whose inhabitants regarded us in cringing awe. But perhaps, because its numbers were small, the troop bore itself with circumspection, careful to give no provocation.
“The man-at-arms who had befriended me kept me in his train for a month or more. Then the exigencies of the campaign against Morea demanding it, he placed me with the Augustinian fathers at the Grazie near Cigliano. They cared for me as if I had been a prince’s child instead of a stray waif picked up by the roadside. Thereafter at intervals he would come to visit me, and these visits, although the intervals between them grew ever longer, continued for some three or four years, after which we never saw or heard of him again. Either he died or else lost interest in the child he had saved and protected. Thereafter the Augustinians were my only friends. They reared me and educated me, hoping that I would one day enter the order. They made endeavours to trace my birthplace and my family, but without success. And that,” he ended, “is all my story.”
“Ah, not quite all,” the friar reminded him. “There is this matter of your name.”
“Ah yes. On the first day when I rode with my man-at-arms we went to a tavern in the town I mentioned, and there he delivered me into the hands of the taverner’s wife, to wash and clothe me. It was an odd fancy in such a man, as I now realize; but I am persuaded that whilst he rode that morning with my little body in the crook of his great arm he conceived the notion to adopt me for his own. Men are like that, their natures made up of contradictory elements; and a rough, even brutal, soldier of fortune, not normally pitiful, may freakishly be moved to pity by the sight and touch of a poor waif astray by the roadside.” And on that he fell to musing.
“But the name?” the friar reminded him again.
He laughed. “Why, when the taverner’s wife set me before him, scoured clean and dressed in a comely suit of green cloth, not unlike the suit I am wearing now—for I have affected green ever since in memory of him and of the first fine raiment I ever wore, which was of his providing—it may be that I presented a comely appearance. He stared at me in sheer surprise. I can see him now, seated on a three-legged stool in a patch of sunlight that came through the blurred glass of the window, one hand on the knee of his booted leg, the other stroking his crisp black beard, his grey eyes conning me with an increasing kindliness.
“‘Come hither, boy’, he bade me, and held out his hand.
“I went without fear or hesitation. He rested me against his knee, and set a hand upon my head, still tingling from its recent combing.
“‘What did you tell me is your name?’ he asked.
“‘Ilario’, I answered him.
“He stared a moment. Then a smile, half scornful, broke upon his rugged weather-beaten face. ‘Ilario, thou? With that solemn countenance and those big melancholy eyes?’ He ran on in words which I remember, though I barely caught their meaning then. ‘Was there ever an Ilario less hilarious? There’s no hilarity about you, child, nor ever has been, I should judge. Ilario! Faugh! Bellario, rather, with such a face. Is he not a lovely lad?’ He turned me about for the approval of the taverner’s wife, who stood beside me, and she, poor woman, made haste to agree with fawning smiles, as she would have agreed with anything uttered by this dread man who must be conciliated. ‘Bellario!’ he repeated, savouring the word of his invention with an inventor’s pride. ‘That were a better name for him, indeed. And by the host, Bellario, he shall be renamed. Do you hear me, boy? Henceforth you are Bellario’.”
Thus, he explained, the name so lightly bestowed became his own; and later, because of his rapid and rather excessive growth, the monks at the Grazie fell into the habit of calling him Bellarione, or big Bellario.
It still wanted an hour or so to noon when the twain emerged from the forest on to the open road. A little way along this they came upon a homestead set amid rice fields, now denuded, and vineyards where men and women were at the labours of the vintage, singing as they harvested the grape. And here Bellarion had an instance of how the little brothers of St. Francis receive alms without being so much as put to the trouble of asking for them. For at sight of the friar’s grey frock, one of the labourers, who presently announced himself the master of the homestead, came hurrying to bid them stay and rest and join the household at dinner, of which the hour was at hand.
They sat down to rough abundant fare in the roomy kitchen amid the members of that considerable family, sharing with them the benches set against a trestle table of well-scoured deal.
There was a cereal porridge, spread, like mortar, upon a board, into which each dipped a wooden spoon, and after this came strips of roast kid, with boiled figs and bread moist and solid as cheese. To wash all down there was a rough red wine, sharp on the palate but wholesome and cool from the cellar, of which the friar drank over copiously.
They numbered a round dozen at table: the old peasant and his wife, a nephew and seven children of full age, three of whom were young women, red-lipped, dark-skinned, deep-bosomed wenches with lusty brown arms and bright eyes which were over busy about Bellarion for his ease.
Once, across the board, he caught the eye of the friar, and about these and the fellow’s loose lips there played a smile of sly unpleasant amusement at Bellarion’s uneasiness under these feminine attentions. Later, when Fra Sulpizio’s excessive consumption of wine had brought a flush to the cheekbones of that pallid face and set a glitter in the beady eyes, Bellarion caught him pondering the girls with such a wolfish leer that all his first instincts against the man were roused again, and not the thought of his office or the contemplation of his habit could efface them.
After dinner the friar must rest awhile, and Bellarion beguiled the time of waiting, which was also the time of siesta in which all labour is suspended, by wandering in the vineyard whither the peasant’s daughters led him, and where they engaged him in chatter that he found monstrous tedious and silly.
Yet, but for this and the fact that the vineyard bordered on the road, Bellarion’s association with the friar would have ended there, and all his subsequent history must have been different indeed. The minorite’s siesta was shorter than might have been expected, and when, something less than an hour later, he resumed his journey, so confused was he by sleep and wine that he appeared to have forgotten his companion quite. Had not Bellarion seen him striding away along the road to Casale, it is certain the young man would have been left behind.
Nor did he manifest much satisfaction when Bellarion came running after him. The scowl on his face argued displeasure. But his excuses and his explanations that he was but half-awake permitted the assumption that it was himself with whom he was displeased.
He moved briskly now, swinging his long legs in great strides, and casting ever and anon a glance behind him.
Bellarion offered a remonstrance at the pace, a reminder that Casale was but some two leagues away and they had the afternoon in which to. reach it. He was answered churlishly:
“If I go too fast for you, you may follow at your leisure.” It was for an instant in Bellarion’s mind to take him at his word, then partly perversity, and partly a suspicion which he strove in vain to stifle, overcame his natural pride.
“No, no, little brother. I’ll accommodate my pace to yours, as befits.”
A grunt was the only answer; nor, indeed, although Bellarion made several attempts to resume conversation, was there much said between them thereafter as they trudged on in the heat of the afternoon along the road that crosses the fertile plains from Trino to Casale.
They did not, however, proceed very far on foot. For, being presently overtaken by a string of six or seven mules with capacious panniers slung on either flank, the leading beast bestridden by the muleteer, Bellarion received another demonstration of how a little brother of St. Francis may travel upon charity. As the column advanced upon them at a brisk trot, Fra Sulpizio stepped to the middle of the road, with arms held wide as if to offer a barrier.
The muleteer, a brawny, black-bearded fellow, drew rein within a yard of him.
“What now, little brother? How can I serve you?”
“The blessing of God upon you, brother! Will you earn it by a little charity besought in the name of the Blessed Francis? If your beasts are not overladen, will you suffer them to carry a poor footsore Franciscan and this gentle lad into Casale?”
The muleteer swung one cross-gartered leg over to the side of the other and slipped to the ground, that he might assist them to mount, each on one of the more lightly laden mules. Thereupon, having begged and received Fra Sulpizio’s blessing, he climbed back into his own saddle and they were off at a sharp trot.
To Bellarion the experience of a saddle, or of what did duty for a saddle, was as novel as it was painful, and so kept his thoughts most fully engaged. It was his first essay in equitation, and the speed they made shook and tossed and bruised him until there was not a bone or muscle in his body that did not ache. His humour, too, was a little bruised by the hilarity which his efforts to maintain his seat excited in his two companions.
Thankful was he when they came in sight of the brown walls of Casale. These surged before them almost suddenly in the plain as they took a bend of the road; for the city’s level position was such as to render it inconspicuous from afar. The road led straight on to the San Stefano Gate, towards which they clattered over the drawbridge spanning the wide moat. There was a guard-house in the deep archway, and the door of this stood open, revealing some three or four soldiers lounging within. But they kept a loose and careless guard, for these were peaceful times. One of them, a young man in a leather hacketon but bare of head, sauntered forward as far as the doorway to fling a greeting at the muleteer, which was taken by the fellow as permission to pass on.
From that gateway, cool and cavernous, they emerged into one of the streets of the busy capital of the war-like State of Montferrat, which at one time, none so far distant, had bidden fair to assume the lordship of Northern Italy.
They proceeded slowly now, perforce. The crooked street, across which the crazy houses seemed to lean towards each other so as to exclude the sunlight from all but a narrow middle line, was thronged with people of all degrees. It was ever a busy thoroughfare, this street of San Stefano, leading from the gate of that name to the Cathedral Square, and from his post of vantage on the back of the now ambling mule, Bellarion, able at last to sit unshaken, looked about him with deep interest upon manifestations of life known to him hitherto through little more than the imagination which had informed his extensive reading.
It was market-day in Casale, and before the shops the way was blocked by trestle tables, on which the merchants displayed their wares, shouting their virtues to lure the attention of the wayfarers.
Through this they came, by low and narrow archways, to an even greater bustle in the open space before the cathedral, founded, as Bellarion knew, some seven hundred years before by Liutprand, King of the Lombards. He turned to stare at the Roman architecture of the red and white facade, flanked by slender square towers, each surmounted by an hexagonal extinguisher roof. He was still considering the cruciform windows, when the mule halted, and recalled his attention.
Ahead of him Fra Sulpizio was slipping to the ground, bestowing thanks and invoking the blessings of God upon the muleteer. Bellarion dismounted, a little stiff from his ride, and very thankful to be at the end of it. The muleteer flung them a “God guard you” over his shoulder, and the string of mules passed on.
“And now, brother, we’ll seek a supper, if you please,” the friar announced.
To seek it was natural enough, but hardly, thought Bellarion, in the tavern across the square, whither he was led.
On the threshold, under the withered bough that was hung as a sign above the portal, the young man demurred, protesting that one of the religious houses of the town were a fitter resort, and its charitable shelter more suitable to a friar mendicant.
“Why, as to charity,” quoth Fra Sulpizio, “it is on charity I depend. Old Benvenuto here, the taverner, is my cousin. He will make us free of his table, and give me news of my own folk at the same time. Is it not natural and proper that I seek him?”
Reluctantly Bellarion was forced to agree. And he reminded himself, to buttress a waning faith in his companion, that not once had he voiced a suspicion of the friar’s actions to which the friar’s answer had not been ready and complete.
CHAPTER III. THE DOOR AJAR
The event which was to deviate Bellarion so abruptly and brutally from the peaceful ways of a student and a scholar, and to extinguish his cherished hopes of learning Greek at Pavia under the far-famed Messer Chrysolaras, was upon him so suddenly and so unheralded that he scarcely realized it until it was overpast.
He and the friar had supped in the unclean and crowded common-room of the Hostelry of the Stag—so called, it is presumed, in honour of the Lords of Montferrat, who had adopted the stag as their device—and it is to be confessed that they had supped abundantly and well under the particular auspices of Ser Benvenuto, the host, who used his cousin Fra Sulpizio with almost more than cousinly affection. He had placed them a little apart from the noisy occupants of that low-ceilinged, grimy chamber, in a recess under a tall, narrow window, standing open, so that the stench, compounded of garlic, burnt meats, rancid oil and other things, which pervaded the apartment, was here diluted for them by the pure evening air. And he waited upon them himself, after a protracted entertainment with the friar, conducted in a mutter of which nothing reached Bellarion. He brought them of his best, of which the most conspicuous item was a lean and stringy fowl, and he produced for them from his cellar a flask of Valtelline which at least was worthy of a better table.
Bellarion, tired and hungry, did justice to the viands, without permitting himself more than a passing irritation at his companion’s whining expositions of the signal advantages of travelling under the aegis of the Blessed Francis. The truth is that he did not hear more than the half of all that Fra Sulpizio found occasion to urge. For one thing, in his greed, the friar spoke indistinctly, slobbering the while at his food; for another, the many tenants of the inn were very noisy. They made up a motley crowd, but had this in common that all belonged to the lower walks of life, as their loud, coarse speech, freely interlarded with blasphemy and obscenity, abundantly bore witness. There were some peasants from Romaglia or Torcella, or perhaps from Terranova beyond the Po, who had come there to market; rude, brawny men for the most part, accompanied by their equally brawny barelegged women. There were a few labourers of the town and others who may have been artisans, one or two of them, indeed, so proclaimed by their leather aprons; and at one table a group of four men and a woman were very boisterous over their wine. The men were soldiers, so to be judged at a glance from their leather hacketons and studded girdles with heavy daggers slung behind. The woman with them was a gaudy, sinuous creature with haggard, painted cheeks, whose mirth, now shrill, now raucous, was too easily moved. When first he heard it, Bellarion had shuddered.
“She laughs,” he had told the friar, “as one might laugh in hell.”
For only answer Fra Sulpizio had looked at him and then veiled his eyes, almost as if, himself, he were suppressing laughter.
Soon, however, Bellarion grew accustomed to the ever-recurring sound and to the rest of the din, the rattle of platters and drinking cans, the growling of a dog over a bone it had discovered among the foul rushes rotting on the bare earthen floor.
Having eaten, he sat back in his chair, a little torpid now, and drowsy. Last night he had lain in the open, and he had been afoot almost since dawn. It is little wonder that presently, whilst again the taverner was muttering with his cousin the friar, he should have fallen into a doze.
He must have slept some little while—a half-hour perhaps—for when he awakened the patch of sunlight had faded from the wall across the alley, visible from the window under which they sat. This he did not notice at the time, but remembered afterwards. In the moment of awakening, his attention was drawn by the friar, who had risen, and instantly afterwards by something else beyond the friar. At the open window behind and above Fra Sulpizio there was the face of a man. Upon the edge of the sill, beneath his face, were visible the fingers by which he had hoisted himself thither. The questing eyes met Bellarion’s, and seemed to dilate a little; the mouth gaped suddenly. But before Bellarion could cry out or speak, or even form the intention of doing either, the face had vanished. And it was the face of the peasant with whom they had dined that day.
The friar, warned by Bellarion’s quickening stare, had swung round to look behind him. But he was too late; the window space was already empty.
“What is it?” he asked, suddenly apprehensive. “What did you see?”
Bellarion told him, and was answered by an obscenely morphological oath, which left him staring. The friar’s countenance was suddenly transfigured. A spasm of mingled fear and anger bared his fangs; his beady eyes grew cruel and sinister. He swung aside as if to depart abruptly, then as abruptly halted where he stood.
On the threshold surged the peasant, others following him.
The friar sank again to his stool at the table and composed his features.
“Yonder he sits, that friar rogue. That thief!” Thus the peasant as he advanced.
The cry, and, more than all, the sight of the peasant’s companions, imposed a sudden silence upon the babel of that room. First came a young man, stalwart and upright, in steel cap and gorget, booted and spurred, a sword swinging from his girdle, a dagger hanging on his hip behind. A little crimson feather adorning his steel cap proclaimed him an officer of the Captain of Justice of Casale. After him came two of his men, armed with short pikes.
Straight to that table in the window recess the peasant led the way. “There he is. This is he.” Belligerently he thrust his face into the friar’s, leaning his knuckles on the table’s edge. “Now, rogue...” he was beginning furiously, when Fra Sulpizio, raising eyes of mild astonishment to meet his anger, gently interrupted him.
“Little brother, do you speak so to me! Do you call me rogue? Me?” He smiled sadly, and so calm and gently wistful was his manner that it clearly gave the peasant pause. “A sinner I confess myself, for sinners are we all. But I am conscious of no sin against you, brother, whose charity was so freely given me only today.”
That saintly demeanour threw the peasant’s simple wits into confusion. He was thrust aside by the officer.
“What is your name?”
Fra Sulpizio looked at him, and his look was laden with reproach.
“My brother!” he cried.
“Attend to me,” the officer barked at him. “This man charges you with theft.”