Bellarion the Fortunate. Rafael Sabatini

intellectual toys. For the rest, there was about him no doubt or hesitation. He computed, from the time he had taken and the pace at which he had come, the extent to which he had wandered from the road. It must run too far beyond this forest to leave him any hope of lying that night, as he had intended, with the Augustinian fathers at their house on the Sesia, on the frontiers of the State of Milan.

      Save for the hunger that beset him, he was undismayed. And what after all is a little hunger to one schooled to the most rigid lenten fasts in season?

      He entered the wood, and resolutely went forward in the direction in which he knew the road to lie. For a half-mile or more he penetrated by a path growing less visible at every step, until darkness and the forest swallowed him. To go on would certainly be to lose himself completely in this maze. Better far to lie down and sleep where he was, and wait for the morning sun to give him his orientation.

      So he spread his cloak upon the ground, and this proving no harder as a couch than the pallet to which he was accustomed, he slept soundly and peacefully.

      When he awakened he found the sunlight in the forest and something else of almost more immediate interest; a man in the grey habit of a minor friar. This man, tall and lean, was standing beside him, yet half turned from him in a curious attitude of arrested movement, almost as if the abrupt suddenness with which Bellarion had sat up—a single heartbeat after his eyes had opened—had checked his intention to depart.

      Thus an instant, then the friar was facing him again, his hands folded within the loose sleeves of his robe, a smile distending his countenance. He uttered a benedictory greeting.

      ‘Pax tecum.’

      ‘Et tecum, frater, pax,’ was Bellarion’s mechanical answer, what time he studied this stranger’s villainous, patibulary countenance, marking the animal looseness of mouth, and the craft peering from the little eyes that were black beads thrust into a face of clay. A closer scrutiny softened his judgment. The man’s face was disfigured, ridged, scarred, and pitted from the smallpox. These scars had contracted the skin about the eyes, thus altering their expression, and to the ravages of the disease was also due the sickly pallor overspreading cheek and brow.

      Considering this and the habit which the man wore—a habit which Bellarion had no cause to associate with anything that was not sweet and good—he disposed himself to make amends for the hastiness of his first assumptions.

      ‘Benedictus sis,’ he murmured, and with that abandoned Latin for the vulgar tongue. ‘I bless the Providence that sends you to a poor traveller who has lost his way.’

      The friar laughed aloud at that, and the lingering apprehension left his eyes, which thus relieved grew pleasanter to look upon.

      ‘Lord! Lord! And I like a fool and coward, having almost trod upon you, was for creeping off in haste, supposing you a sleeping robber. This forest is a very sanctuary of thieves. They infest it, thick as rabbits in a warren.’

      ‘Why, then, do you adventure in it?’

      ‘Why? Ohé! And what shall they steal from a poor friar-mendicant? My beads? My girdle?’ He laughed again. A humorous fellow, clearly, taking a proper saintly joy in his indigenous condition. ‘No, no, my brother. I have no cause to go in fear of thieves.’

      ‘Yet supposing me a thief, you were in fear of me?’

      The man’s smile froze. This stripling’s simple logic was disconcerting.

      ‘I feared,’ he said at last, slowly and solemnly, ‘your fear of me. A hideous passion, fear, in man or beast. It makes men murderers at times. Had you been the robber I supposed you, and, waking suddenly, found me beside you, you might have suspected some intent to harm you. It is easily guessed what would have followed then.’

      Bellarion nodded thoughtfully. No explanation could have been more complete. The man was not only virtuous, but wise.

      ‘Whither do you journey, brother?’

      ‘To Pavia,’ Bellarion answered him, ‘by way of Santa Tenda.’

      ‘Santa Tenda! Why, that is my way too; at least as far as the Augustinian Monastery on the Sesia. Wait here, my son, and we will go together. It is good to have a comrade on a journey. Wait but some few moments, to give me time to bathe, which is the purpose for which I came. I will not keep you long.’

      He went striding off through the grass. Bellarion called after him:

      ‘Where do you bathe?’

      Over his shoulder the friar answered him: ‘There is a rivulet down yonder. But a little way. Do not stray from that spot, so that I may find you again, my son.’

      Bellarion thought the form of address an odd one. A minorite is brother, not father, to all humanity. But it was no suspicion based on this that brought him to his feet. He was a youth of cleanly habits, and if there was water at hand, he too would profit by it. So he rose, picked up his cloak, and went off in the wake of the swiftly moving friar.

      When, presently, he overtook him, Bellarion made him a present of a proverb.

      ‘Who goes slowly, goes soundly.’

      ‘But never gets there,’ was the slightly breathless answer. ‘And it’s still some way to the water.’

      ‘Some way? But you said . . .’

      ‘Aye, aye. I was mistaken. One place is like another in this labyrinth. I am none so sure that I am not as lost as you are.’

      It must have been so, for they trudged a full mile before they came to a brook that flowed westward towards the river. It lay in a dell amid mossy boulders and spreading fronds of ferns all dappled now with the golden light that came splashing through the trees. They found a pool of moderate dimensions in a bowl of grey stone fashioned by the ceaseless sculpture of the water. It was too shallow to afford a bath. But the friar’s ablutionary dispositions scarce seemed to demand so much. He rinsed face and hands perfunctorily, whilst Bellarion stripped to the waist, and displaying a white torso of much beauty and more vigour, did what was possible in that cramped space.

      After that the friar produced from one of the sack-like pockets of his habit an enormous piece of sausage and a loaf of rye bread.

      To Bellarion who had gone supperless to bed this was as the sight of manna in the desert.

      ‘Little brother!’ he cooed in sheer delight. ‘Little brother!’

      ‘Aye, aye. We have our uses, we little brothers of Saint Francis.’ The minorite sliced the sausage in two equal halves. ‘We know how to provide ourselves upon a journey.’

      They fell to eating, and with the stilling of his hunger Bellarion experienced an increasing kindliness to this Good Samaritan. At the friar’s suggestion that they should be moving so as to cover the greater part of the road to Casale before the noontide heat, Bellarion stood up, brushing the crumbs from his lap. In doing so his hand came in contact with the scrip that dangled from his girdle.

      ‘Saints of God!’ he ejaculated, as he tightened his clutch upon that bag of green cloth.

      The beady eyes of the minorite were upon him, and there was blank inquiry in that ashen, corrugated face.

      ‘What is it, brother?’

      Bellarion’s fingers groped within the bag a moment, then turned it inside out, to reveal its utter emptiness. He showed his companion a face which blended suspicion with dismay.

      ‘I have been robbed!’ he said.

      ‘Robbed?’ the other echoed, then smiled a pitying concern. ‘My surprise is less than yours, my son. Did I not say these woods are infested by thieves and robbers? Had you slept less soundly you might have been robbed of life as well. Render thanks to God, Whose grace is discernible even in misfortune. For no evil befalls us that will not serve to show how much greater that evil might have been. Take that for comfort ever in adversity, my child.’

      ‘Aye, Aye!’ Bellarion displayed ill-humour, whilst his