Argument was impossible between him and her. Thus much I saw, and I feared an explosion of the wrath of which I perceived in him the signs. But he quelled it. Yet his voice rumbled thunderously upon his next words.
“It matters something that Gino Falcone should not starve,” he said.
“It matters more that my son should not be damned,” she answered him, and with that answer left him weapon-less, for against the armour of a crassness so dense and one-ideaed there are no weapons that can prevail.
“Listen,” she said, and her eyes, raised for a moment, comprehended both of us in their glance. “There is something that it were best I tell you, that once for all you may fathom the depth of my purpose for Agostino here. My lord his father was a man of blood and strife...”
“And so were many whose names stand to-day upon the roll of saints and are its glory,” answered the friar with quick asperity.
“But they did not raise their arms against the Holy Church and against Christ's Own most holy Vicar, as did he,” she reminded him sorrowfully. “The sword is an ill thing save when it is wielded in a holy cause. In my lord's hands, wielded in the unholiest of all causes, it became a thing accursed. But God's anger overtook him and laid him low at Perugia in all the strength and vigour that had made him arrogant as Lucifer. It was perhaps well for all of us that it so befell.”
“Madonna!” cried Gervasio in stern horror.
But she went on quite heedless of him. “Best of all was it for me, since I was spared the harshest duty that can be imposed upon a woman and a wife. It was necessary that he should expiate the evil he had wrought; moreover, his life was become a menace to my child's salvation. It was his wish to make of Agostino such another as himself, to lead his only son adown the path of Hell. It was my duty to my God and to my son to shield this boy. And to accomplish that I would have delivered up his father to the papal emissaries who sought him.”
“Ah, never that!” the friar protested. “You could never have done that!”
“Could I not? I tell you it was as good as done. I tell you that the thing was planned. I took counsel with my confessor, and he showed me my plain duty.”