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Updated: May 4, 2025
Giojoso fell to trembling; behind him, Rinolfo, the cause of all this garboil, stared with round big eyes; whilst my mother, all a-quiver, clutched at her bosom and looked at me fearfully, but spoke no word. I smiled upon them, towering there, conscious and glad of my height for the first time in my life. "Well?" I demanded of Giojoso. "For what do you wait?
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. The sight of my mother startled me more than I can say. It filled me with a positive dread of things indefinable.
Ere any could stop me I had seized him by throat and belt and shaken him savagely. "Will you answer me like a fool?" I cried. "Must you be taught sense and a proper respect of me?" "Agostino! Agostino!" wailed my mother. "Help, Ser Giojoso! Do you not see that he is mad!" I do not believe that it was in my mind to do the fellow any grievous hurt.
Giojoso, the seneschal, of whom I have spoken, had a son, a great raw-boned lad whom he would have trained as an amanuensis, but who was one of Nature's dunces out of which there is nothing useful to be made. He was strong-limbed, however, and he was given odd menial duties to perform about the castle. But these he shirked where possible, as he had shirked his lessons in earlier days.
"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." But upon that command of hers I leapt of a sudden to my feet, a tightening about my heart, and beset by a certain breathlessness that turned me pale.
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.
Besides, the subtle influence of sex all unconscious of it as I was stirred me now to prove my new-found manhood. "Stay!" I said to Giojoso, and in uttering the command I grew very cold and steady, and my breathing resumed the normal. He checked in the act of turning away to do my mother's hideous bidding. "You will give Madonna's order to the grooms, Ser Giojoso, as you have been bidden.
And Messer Giojoso, full of parental indignation at this gross treatment of his child, and outraged chastity 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 repetition. Meanwhile I abode there with Luisina. I was in no haste to let her go.
She dispatched some to help Giojoso, others she sent in urgent quest of Fra Gervasio, me she hurried along to her private dining-room. I went very obediently, and even a little fearfully now that my passion had fallen from me.
The last of the four who habitually sat with us was Giojoso, the seneschal, a lantern-jawed fellow with black, beetling brows, about whom the only joyous thing was his misnomer of a name. Of the table that we kept, beyond noting that the fare was ever of a lenten kind and that the wine was watered, I will but mention that my mother did not observe the barrier of the salt.
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