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Updated: May 9, 2025
There, in that cheerless room, which not even the splashes of sunlight falling from the high-placed windows upon the whitewashed wall could help to gladden, I stood a little sullenly what time she first upbraided me and then wept bitterly, sitting in her high-backed chair at the table's head. At last Gervasio came, anxious and flurried, for already he had heard some rumour of what had chanced.
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.
It was my mother who saved the situation. "Alas!" she moaned, "there is wicked blood in him. He has the abominable pride that was the ruin and downfall of his father." Now that was not the way to make an ally of Fra Gervasio. It did the very opposite. It set him instantly on my side, in antagonism to the abuser of my father's memory, a memory which he, poor man, still secretly revered.
Fifanti flung into strange passions when he discovered the extent of my ignorance and the amazing circumstance that whilst Fra Gervasio had made of me a fluent Latin scholar, he had kept me in utter ignorance of the classic writers, and almost in as great an ignorance of history itself.
"You are faint, Agostino," cried Gervasio, with a sudden solicitude, and put an arm about my shoulders as I staggered. "No, no," said I. "It is nothing. Tell me " And I paused almost afraid to put the question, lest the answer should dash my sudden hope.
But the mother who bore me took no such charitable and Christian view. "What is it? Wretched boy, what have you done?" And the cold repugnance in her voice froze anew the courage I was forming. "O God help me! God help me!" I groaned miserably. Gervasio, seeing my condition, with that quick and saintly sympathy that was his, came softly towards me and set a hand upon my shoulder.
Next the old man went on to tell me how three days ago there had come to the hermitage a little troop of men-at-arms, led by a tall, bearded man whose device was a sable band upon an argent field, and accompanied by a friar of the order of St. Francis, a tall, gaunt fellow who had wept at sight of me. "That would be Fra Gervasio!" I exclaimed. "How came he to discover me?"
"So much protesting where no doubt has been expressed," said Fra Gervasio, "in itself casts a doubt upon your good faith. Are you not Cosimo d'Anguissola my lord's cousin and heir?" "I am," said he, "yet that has no part in this, sir friar." "Then let it have part. Let it have the part it should have. Will you bear one of your own name and blood to the gallows?
A shadow crossed his face; he smiled very wanly, a smile that was like a gleam of pale sunshine from an over-clouded sky, and he spoke in gentle, soothing words of the Divine Mercy. I staggered to my bruised feet. "I will confess to you, Fra Gervasio," I said, "and afterwards we will tell my mother." She looked as she would make demur. But Fra Gervasio checked any such intent.
Like all highly seasoned men of the world, he had no patience with the small vanities of the provincial, and although diplomatically courteous to all, in his present precarious position, he had taken too little trouble to conciliate Gervasio to find him of use in the absence of his friends.
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