en a ringing
voice--that commanding voice that was my father's--spoke to Falcone, the
man-at-arms who attended him and who ever acted as his equerry.

"Shall we take him with us to the wars, Falcone?"

My little arms went round his neck and tightened there convulsively
until the steel rim of his gorget bit into them.

"Take me!" I sobbed. "Take me!"

He laughed for answer, with something of exultation in his voice. He
swung me to his shoulder, and held me poised there, looking up at me.
And then he laughed again.

"Dost hear the whelp?" he cried to Falcone. "Still with his milk-teeth
in his head, and already does he yelp for battle!"

Then he looked up at me again, and swore one of his great oaths.

"I can trust you, son of mine," he laughed. "They'll never make a
shaveling of you. When your thews are grown it will not be on thuribles
they'll spend their strength, or I'm a liar else. Be patient yet awhile,
and we shall ride together, never doubt it."

With that he pulled me down again to kiss me, and he clasped me to his
breast so that the studs of his armour remained stamped upon my tender
flesh after he had departed.

The next instant he was gone, and I lay weeping, a very lonely little
child.

But in the revolt that he led he had not reckoned upon the might and
vigour of the new Farnese Pontiff. He had conceived, perhaps, that one
pope must be as supine as another, and that Paul III would prove no more
redoubtable than Clement VIII. To his bitter cost did he discover his
mistake. Beyond the Po he was surprised by the Pontifical army under
Ferrante Orsini, and there his force was cut to pieces.

My father himself escaped and with him some other gentlemen of Piacenza,
notably one of the scions of the great house of Pallavicini, who took a
wound in the leg which left him lame for life, so that ever after he was
known as Pallavicini il Zopo.

They were all under the pope's ban, outlaws with a price upon the head
of each, hunted and harried from State to State by the papal emissaries,
so that my father never more dared set foot in Mondolfo, or, indeed,
within the State of Piacenza, which had been rudely punished for the
insubordination it had permitted to be reared upon its soil.

And Mondolfo went near to suffering confiscation. Assuredly it would
have suffered it but for the influence exerted on my mother's and my own
behalf by her brother, the powerful Cardinal of San Paulo in Carcere,
seconded by that