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My stomach out of its very emptiness conjured up evil visions to torment me in the night, and with these I vainly wrestled until I remembered the measures which Fra Gervasio told me that he had taken in like case. I had then the happy inspiration to have recourse to the hair-shirt, which hitherto I had dreaded.
Most of our present force has been enrolled by me in the past month." This was defeat, utter and pitiful. His tone was too confident, he was too sure of his ground to leave me a doubt as to what would befall if I made appeal to his knavish followers. My arms fell to my sides, and I looked at Gervasio. His face was haggard, and his eyes were very full of sorrow as they rested on me.
"Sir," I said, "from my heart I thank you for that pious, kindly wish; and I would that I might fully correspond to it. But Agostino d'Anguissola, who has been so near to death in the body, is, indeed, dead to the world already. Here you see but a poor hermit named Sebastian, who is the guardian of this shrine." Gervasio rose suddenly.
He asked abruptly: "Which is the friend whose little ones you envy? You have made me wish to see them and her?" "That is Elena beside Gervasio." She indicated a young woman with soft, patient, brown eyes, the dignity of her race and the sweetness of young motherhood, who would have looked little older than herself had it not been for an already shapeless figure.
The circumstance that I should become a monk was no departure from the idea to which I had been trained, although explicitly no more than my mere priesthood had been spoken of. So I lay there without thinking of any words in which to answer him. Gervasio considered me steadily, and sighed a little.
I felt her recoiling from me as from the touch of something unclean and contagious, her mind conceiving already by some subtle premonition some shadow of the thing that I had done. And then Gervasio spoke, and his voice was soothing as oil upon troubled waters. "Sinners are we all, Agostino. But repentance purges sin. Do not abandon yourself to despair, my son."
Behind us, the door opened and steps clanked upon the granite floor. Fra Gervasio rose very tall and gaunt, his gaze anxious. He looked, and the anxiety passed. Thankfulness overspread his face. He smiled serenely, tears in his deep-set eyes. Seeing this, I, too, dared to look at last.
But on the night in question there was just silence, broken chiefly by the toothless slobber of the castellan over the soft meats that were especially prepared for him. And there was something of grimness in that silence; for none and Fra Gervasio less than any approved the unchristian thing that out of excess of Christianity my mother had done in driving old Falcone forth.
"And what have you to say, Agostino?" "Why, that I am sorry," answered I, rebellious once more. "I had hoped to break his dirty neck." "You hear him!" cried my mother. "It is the end of the world, Gervasio. The boy is possessed, I say." "What was the cause of your quarrel?" quoth the friar, his manner still more stern. "Quarrel?" quoth I, throwing back my head and snorting audibly.
He was a follower of Simon Mage, trafficking in holy things, battening upon the superstition of poor humble folk. A black villain who is dead dead and damned, for he was not allowed time when the end took him to confess his ghastly sin of sacrilege and the money that he had extorted by his simonies." "My God! Fra Gervasio, what do you say? How dare you say so much?
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