The Gadfly, E. L. Voynich [best books to read for self development .txt] 📗
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THE GADFLY
by E. L. VOYNICH
“What have we to do with Thee, Thou Jesus of Nazareth?”
AUTHOR’S PREFACE.
MY most cordial thanks are due to the many
persons who helped me to collect, in Italy, the
materials for this story. I am especially indebted
to the officials of the Marucelliana Library of
Florence, and of the State Archives and Civic
Museum of Bologna, for their courtesy and
kindness.
THE GADFLY
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
Arthur sat in the library of the theological
seminary at Pisa, looking through a pile of manuscript
sermons. It was a hot evening in June, and
the windows stood wide open, with the shutters
half closed for coolness. The Father Director,
Canon Montanelli, paused a moment in his writing
to glance lovingly at the black head bent over
the papers.
“Can’t you find it, carino? Never mind; I
must rewrite the passage. Possibly it has got
torn up, and I have kept you all this time for
nothing.”
Montanelli’s voice was rather low, but full and
resonant, with a silvery purity of tone that gave to
his speech a peculiar charm. It was the voice of a
born orator, rich in possible modulations. When
he spoke to Arthur its note was always that of a
caress.
“No, Padre, I must find it; I’m sure you put
it here. You will never make it the same by
rewriting.”
Montanelli went on with his work. A sleepy
cockchafer hummed drowsily outside the window,
and the long, melancholy call of a fruitseller echoed
down the street: “Fragola! fragola!”
“‘On the Healing of the Leper’; here it is.”
Arthur came across the room with the velvet tread
that always exasperated the good folk at home.
He was a slender little creature, more like an Italian
in a sixteenth-century portrait than a middle-class
English lad of the thirties. From the long
eyebrows and sensitive mouth to the small hands
and feet, everything about him was too much
chiseled, overdelicate. Sitting still, he might
have been taken for a very pretty girl masquerading
in male attire; but when he moved, his lithe
agility suggested a tame panther without the
claws.
“Is that really it? What should I do
without you, Arthur? I should always be losing
my things. No, I am not going to write any
more now. Come out into the garden, and I will
help you with your work. What is the bit you
couldn’t understand?”
They went out into the still, shadowy cloister
garden. The seminary occupied the buildings of
an old Dominican monastery, and two hundred
years ago the square courtyard had been stiff and
trim, and the rosemary and lavender had grown in
close-cut bushes between the straight box edgings.
Now the white-robed monks who had tended
them were laid away and forgotten; but the
scented herbs flowered still in the gracious midsummer
evening, though no man gathered their
blossoms for simples any more. Tufts of wild
parsley and columbine filled the cracks between
the flagged footways, and the well in the middle
of the courtyard was given up to ferns and matted
stone-crop. The roses had run wild, and their
straggling suckers trailed across the paths; in the
box borders flared great red poppies; tall foxgloves
drooped above the tangled grasses; and the
old vine, untrained and barren of fruit, swayed
from the branches of the neglected medlar-tree,
shaking a leafy head with slow and sad persistence.
In one corner stood a huge summer-flowering
magnolia, a tower of dark foliage, splashed
here and there with milk-white blossoms. A
rough wooden bench had been placed against the
trunk; and on this Montanelli sat down. Arthur
was studying philosophy at the university; and,
coming to a difficulty with a book, had applied to
“the Padre” for an explanation of the point.
Montanelli was a universal encyclopaedia to him,
though he had never been a pupil of the seminary.
“I had better go now,” he said when the passage
had been cleared up; “unless you want me for
anything.”
“I don’t want to work any more, but I should
like you to stay a bit if you have time.”
“Oh, yes!” He leaned back against the tree-trunk
and looked up through the dusky branches
at the first faint stars glimmering in a quiet sky.
The dreamy, mystical eyes, deep blue under black
lashes, were an inheritance from his Cornish
mother, and Montanelli turned his head away, that
he might not see them.
“You are looking tired, carino,” he said.
“I can’t help it.” There was a weary sound
in Arthur’s voice, and the Padre noticed it at
once.
“You should not have gone up to college so
soon; you were tired out with sick-nursing and
being up at night. I ought to have insisted on
your taking a thorough rest before you left
Leghorn.”
“Oh, Padre, what’s the use of that? I couldn’t
stop in that miserable house after mother died.
Julia would have driven me mad!”
Julia was his eldest step-brother’s wife, and a
thorn in his side.
“I should not have wished you to stay with your
relatives,” Montanelli answered gently. “I am
sure it would have been the worst possible thing
for you. But I wish you could have accepted the
invitation of your English doctor friend; if you had
spent a month in his house you would have been
more fit to study.”
“No, Padre, I shouldn’t indeed! The Warrens
are very good and kind, but they don’t understand;
and then they are sorry for me,—I can see it in
all their faces,—and they would try to console me,
and talk about mother. Gemma wouldn’t, of
course; she always knew what not to say, even
when we were babies; but the others would.
And it isn’t only that–-”
“What is it then, my son?”
Arthur pulled off some blossoms from a drooping
foxglove stem and crushed them nervously in
his hand.
“I can’t bear the town,” he began after a moment’s
pause. “There are the shops where she
used to buy me toys when I was a little thing, and
the walk along the shore where I used to take her
until she got too ill. Wherever I go it’s the same
thing; every market-girl comes up to me with
bunches of flowers—as if I wanted them now!
And there’s the church-yard—I had to get away;
it made me sick to see the place–-”
He broke off and sat tearing the foxglove bells
to pieces. The silence was so long and deep that
he looked up, wondering why the Padre did not
speak. It was growing dark under the branches
of the magnolia, and everything seemed dim and
indistinct; but there was light enough to show the
ghastly paleness of Montanelli’s face. He was
bending his head down, his right hand tightly
clenched upon the edge of the bench. Arthur
looked away with a sense of awe-struck wonder.
It was as though he had stepped unwittingly on to
holy ground.
“My God!” he thought; “how small and selfish
I am beside him! If my trouble were his own he
couldn’t feel it more.”
Presently Montanelli raised his head and looked
round. “I won’t press you to go back there; at
all events, just now,” he said in his most caressing
tone; “but you must promise me to take a
thorough rest when your vacation begins this
summer. I think you had better get a holiday
right away from the neighborhood of Leghorn. I
can’t have you breaking down in health.”
“Where shall you go when the seminary closes,
Padre?”
“I shall have to take the pupils into the hills,
as usual, and see them settled there. But by the
middle of August the subdirector will be back
from his holiday. I shall try to get up into the
Alps for a little change. Will you come with me?
I could take you for some long mountain rambles,
and you would like to study the Alpine mosses and
lichens. But perhaps it would be rather dull for
you alone with me?”
“Padre!” Arthur clasped his hands in what
Julia called his “demonstrative foreign way.” “I
would give anything on earth to go away with
you. Only—I am not sure–-” He stopped.
“You don’t think Mr. Burton would allow
it?”
“He wouldn’t like it, of course, but he could
hardly interfere. I am eighteen now and can do
what I choose. After all, he’s only my step-brother;
I don’t see that I owe him obedience.
He was always unkind to mother.”
“But if he seriously objects, I think you had
better not defy his wishes; you may find your
position at home made much harder if–-”
“Not a bit harder!” Arthur broke in passionately.
“They always did hate me and always
will—it doesn’t matter what I do. Besides, how
can James seriously object to my going away with
you—with my father confessor?”
“He is a Protestant, remember. However, you
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