LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER II

       THE GREY FRIAR

       Table of Contents

      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 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 greater terror was upon us all, a sense of impending evil, of some horror advancing presently to overwhelm us. There were snivelling,

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