The Gadfly - E. L. Voynich (phonics readers .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