“I cannot have been above five years of age, and I must have been singularly sturdy, for my little legs bore me several miles that night, driven by unreasoning fear. At last I must have sunk down exhausted by the roadside, and there fallen asleep, for my next memory is of my awakening. It was broad daylight, and I was in the grasp of a big, bearded man who from his cap to his spurs was all steel and leather. Beside him stood the great bay horse from which he had just leaped, and behind him, filling the road in a staring, grinning, noisy cluster, was ranged a troop of fully fifty men with lances reared above them.
“He soothed my terrors with a voice incredibly gentle in one so big and fierce, and asked me who I was and whence I came, questions to which I could return no proper answers. To increase my confidence, perhaps, he gave me food, some fruit and bread—such bread as I had never tasted.
“ ‘We cannot leave you here, baby,’ he said. ‘And since you don’t know where you belong, I will take charge of you.’
“I no longer feared him or those with him. What cause had I to fear them? This man had stroked and petted and fed me. He had used me more kindly than I could remember ever to have been used before. So when presently I was perched in front of him on the withers of his great horse, I knew no sense but one of entire satisfaction.
“Later that day we came to a town, whose inhabitants regarded us in cringing awe. But, perhaps, because its numbers were small, the troop bore itself with circumspection, careful to give no provocation.
“The man-at-arms who had befriended me kept me in his train for a month or more. Then, the exigencies of the campaign against Morea demanding it, he placed me with the Augustinian fathers at the Grazie near Cigliano. They cared for me as if I had been a prince’s child instead of a stray waif picked up by the roadside. Thereafter at intervals he would come to visit me, and these visits, although the intervals between them grew ever longer, continued for some three or four years, after which we never saw or heard of him again. Either he died or else lost interest in the child he had saved and protected. Thereafter the Augustinians were my only friends. They reared me, and educated me, hoping that I would one day enter the order. They made endeavours to trace my birthplace and my family. But without success. And that,” he ended, “is all my story.”
“Ah, not quite all,” the friar reminded him. “There is this matter of your name.”
“Ah, yes. On that first day when I rode with my man-at-arms we went to a tavern in the town I mentioned, and there he delivered me into the hands of the taverner’s wife, to wash and clothe me. It was an odd fancy in such a man, as I now realise; but I am persuaded that whilst he rode that morning with my little body resting in the crook of his great arm, he conceived the notion to adopt me for his own. Men are like that, their natures made up of contradictory elements; and a rough, even brutal, soldier of fortune, not normally pitiful, may freakishly be moved to pity by the sight and touch of a poor waif astray by the roadside.” And on that he fell to musing.
“But the name?” the friar reminded him again.
He laughed. “Why, when the taverner’s wife set me before him, scoured clean and dressed in a comely suit of green cloth, not unlike the suit I am wearing now—for I have affected green ever since in memory of him and of the first fair raiment I ever wore, which was of his providing—it may be that I presented a comely appearance. He stared at me in sheer surprise. I can see him now, seated on a three-legged stool in a patch of sunlight that came through the blurred glass of the window, one hand on the knee of his booted leg, the other stroking his crisp black beard, his grey eyes conning me with an increasing kindliness.
“ ‘Come hither, boy,’ he bade me, and held out his hand.
“I went without fear or hesitation. He rested me against his knee, and set a hand upon my head still tingling from its recent combing.
“ ‘What did you tell me is your name?’ he asked.
“ ‘Ilario,’ I answered him.
“He stared a moment, then a smile half scornful broke upon his rugged, weather-beaten face. ‘Ilario, thou? With that solemn countenance and those big melancholy eyes?’ He ran on in words which I remember, though I barely caught their meaning then. ‘Was there ever an Ilario less hilarious? There’s no hilarity about you, child, nor ever has been, I should judge. Ilario! Faugh! Bellario, rather, with such a face. Is he not a lovely lad?’ He turned me about for the approval of the taverner’s wife, who stood behind me, and she, poor woman, made haste to agree, with fawning smiles, as she would have agreed with anything uttered by this dread man who must be conciliated. ‘Bellario!’ he repeated, savouring the word of his invention with an inventor’s pride. ‘That were a better name for him, indeed. And by the Host, Bellario he shall be renamed. Do you hear me, boy? Henceforth you are Bellario.’ ”
Thus, he explained, the name so lightly bestowed became his own; and later because of his rapid and rather excessive growth, the monks at the Grazie fell into the habit of calling him Bellarione, or big Bellario.
It still wanted an hour or so to noon when the twain
