Monica was the most soiled and fingered portion of an
old manuscript collection of the life histories of a score or so of
saints that was one of her dearest possessions. To render herself worthy
of the name she bore, to model her life upon that of the sainted woman
who had sorrowed and rejoiced so much in her famous offspring, became
the obsession of my mother's soul. And but that St. Monica had wed and
borne a son, I do not believe that my mother would ever have adventured
herself within the bonds of wedlock.

How often in the stressful, stormy hours of my most unhappy youth did I
not wish that she had preferred the virginal life of the cloister, and
thus spared me the heavy burden of an existence which her unholy and
mistaken saintliness went so near to laying waste!

I like to think that in the days when my father wooed her, she forgot
for a spell in the strong arms of that fierce ghibelline the pattern
upon which it had become her wont to weave her life; so that in all
that drab, sackcloth tissue there was embroidered at least one warm and
brilliant little wedge of colour; so that in all that desert waste, in
all that parched aridity of her existence, there was at least one little
patch of garden-land, fragrant, fruitful, and cool.

I like to think it, for at best such a spell must have been brief
indeed; and for that I pity her--I, who once blamed her so very
bitterly. Before ever I was born it must have ceased; whilst still she
bore me she put from her lips the cup that holds the warm and
potent wine of life, and turned her once more to her fasting, her
contemplations, and her prayers.

That was in the year in which the battle of Pavia was fought and won by
the Emperor. My father, who had raised a condotta to lend a hand in the
expulsion of the French, was left for dead upon that glorious field.
Afterwards he was found still living, but upon the very edge and border
of Eternity; and when the news of it was borne to my mother I have
little doubt but that she imagined it to be a visitation--a punishment
upon her for having strayed for that brief season of her adolescence
from the narrow flinty path that she had erst claimed to tread in the
footsteps of Holy Monica.

How much the love of my father may still have swayed her I do not know.
But to me it seems that in what next she did there was more of duty,
more of penitence, more of reparation for the sin of having been a woman
as God made her, than of love. Inde