ar asunder and set them almost
in enmity the one against the other.

I was his only son, heir to the noble lordships of Mondolfo and Carmina.
Was it likely, then, that he should sacrifice me willingly to the
seclusion of the cloister, whilst our lordship passed into the hands of
our renegade, guelphic cousin, Cosimo d'Anguissola of Codogno?

I can picture his outbursts at the very thought of it; I can hear
him reasoning, upbraiding, storming. But he was as an ocean of energy
hurling himself against the impassive rock of my mother's pietistic
obstinacy. She had vowed me to the service of Holy Church, and she would
suffer tribulation and death so that her vow should be fulfilled. And
hers was a manner against which that strong man, my father, never
could prevail. She would stand before him white-faced and mute, never
presuming to return an answer to his pleading or to enter into argument.

"I have vowed," she would say, just once; and thereafter, avoiding his
fiery glance, she would bow her head meekly, fold her hands, the very
incarnation of long-suffering and martyrdom.

Anon, as the storm of his anger crashed about her, two glistening lines
would appear upon her pallid face, and her tears--horrid, silent weeping
that brought no trace of emotion to her countenance--showered down. At
that he would fling out of her presence and away, cursing the day in
which he had mated with a fool.

His hatred of these moods of hers, of the vow she had made which bade
fair to deprive him of his son, drove him ere long to hatred of the
cause of it all. A ghibelline by inheritance, he was not long in
becoming an utter infidel, at war with Rome and the Pontifical sway.
Nor was he one to content himself with passive enmity. He must be up and
doing, seeking the destruction of the thing he hated. And so it befell
that upon the death of Pope Clement (the second Medici Pontiff),
profiting by the weak condition from which the papal army had not yet
recovered since the Emperor's invasion and the sack of Rome, my father
raised an army and attempted to shatter the ancient yoke which Julius II
had imposed upon Parma and Piacenza when he took them from the State of
Milan.

A little lad of seven was I at the time, and well do I remember the
martial stir and bustle there was about our citadel of Mondolfo, the
armed multitudes that thronged the fortress that was our home, or
drilled and manoeuvred upon the green plains beyond the river.

I was a