An odd thing was that my mother--who looked upon that Crucifix with eyes that were very different from mine--would be at pains in the evening when lights were fetched to set a taper at such an angle as was best calculated to produce the effect upon which the sculptor had counted. What satisfaction it can have been to her to see reflected from that glazed wound the light which she herself had provided for the purpose, I am lost to think. And yet I am assured that she would contemplate that shining effluence in a sort of ecstatic awe, accounting it something very near akin to miracle.
Under this Crucifix hung a little alabaster font of holy-water, into the back of which was stuck a withered, yellow branch of palm, which was renewed on each Palm Sunday. Before it was set a praying-stool of plain oak, without any cushion to mitigate its harshness to the knees.
In the corner of the room stood a tall, spare, square cupboard, capacious but very plain, in which the necessaries of the table were disposed. In the opposite corner there was another smaller cupboard with a sort of writing-pulpit beneath. Here my mother kept the accounts of her household, her books of recipes, her homely medicines and the heavy devotional tomes and lesser volumes--mostly manuscript--out of which she nourished her poor starving soul.
Amongst these was the Treatise of the Mental Sufferings of Christ--the book of the Blessed Battista of Varano, Princess of Camerino, who founded the convent of Poor Clares in that city--a book whose almost blasphemous presumption fired the train of my earliest misgivings.
Another was The Spiritual Combat, that queer yet able book of the cleric Scupoli--described as the “aureo libro,” dedicated “Al Supremo Capitano e Gloriosissimo Trionfatore, Gesu Cristo, Figliuolo di Maria,” and this dedication in the form of a letter to Our Saviour, signed, “Your most humble servant, purchased with Your Blood.” 1
1 This work, which achieved a great vogue and of which several editions were issued down to 1750, was first printed in 1589. Clearly, however, MS. copies were in existence earlier, and it is to one of these that Agostino here refers.
Down the middle of the chamber ran a long square-ended table of oak, very plain like all the rest of the room's scant furnishings. At the head of this table was an arm-chair for my mother, of bare wood without any cushion to relieve its hardness, whilst on either side of the board stood a few lesser chairs for those who habitually dined there. These were, besides myself, Fra Gervasio, my tutor; Messer Giorgio, the castellan, a bald-headed old man long since past the fighting age and who in times of stress would have been as useful for purposes of defending Mondolfo as Lorenza, my mother's elderly woman, who sat below him at the board; he was toothless, bowed, and decrepit, but he was very devout--as he had need to be, seeing that he was half dead already--and this counted with my mother above any other virtue.2