Bellarion the Fortunate (Historical Novel). Rafael Sabatini
us that will not serve to show how much greater that evil might have been. Take that for comfort ever in adversity, my child.’
‘Aye, Aye!’ 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?’
‘Aye,’ 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, involving 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 a while in silence, broken by the friar at last.
‘And is your name Belisario, then? An odd name, that!’
‘Not Belisario. Bellario, 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 often have 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