My lip would quiver at the
thought, and it was with difficulty that I repressed my tears.
At last that hideous repast came to an end in prayers of thanksgiving whose
immoderate length was out of all proportion to the fare provided.
The castellan shuffled forth upon the arm of the seneschal; Lorenza
followed at a sign from my mother, and we three--Gervasio, my mother, and
I--were left alone.
And here let me say a word of Fra Gervasio. He was, as I have already
written, my father's foster-brother. That is to say, he was the child of a
sturdy peasant-woman of the Val di Taro, from whose lusty, healthy breast
my father had suckled the first of that fine strength that had been his
own.
He was older than my father by a month or so, and as often happens in such
cases, he was brought to Mondolfo to be first my father's playmate, and
later, no doubt, to have followed him as a man-at-arms. But a chill that
he took in his tenth year as a result of a long winter immersion in the icy
waters of the Taro laid him at the point of death, and left him thereafter
of a rather weak and sickly nature. But he was quick and intelligent, and
was admitted to learn his letters with my father, whence it ensued that he
developed a taste for study. Seeing that by his health he was debarred
from the hardy open life of a soldier, his scholarly aptitude was
encouraged, and it was decided that he should follow a clerical career.
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