The Gadfly

by E. L. Voynich

  Produced by Judy Boss

  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, lookingthrough a pile of manuscript sermons. It was a hot evening in June, andthe windows stood wide open, with the shutters half closed for coolness.The Father Director, Canon Montanelli, paused a moment in his writing toglance 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 fornothing."

  Montanelli's voice was rather low, but full and resonant, with a silverypurity of tone that gave to his speech a peculiar charm. It was thevoice of a born orator, rich in possible modulations. When he spoke toArthur its note was always that of a caress.

  "No, Padre, I must find it; I'm sure you put it here. You will nevermake it the same by rewriting."

  Montanelli went on with his work. A sleepy cockchafer hummed drowsilyoutside the window, and the long, melancholy call of a fruitsellerechoed down the street: "Fragola! fragola!"

  "'On the Healing of the Leper'; here it is." Arthur came across the roomwith the velvet tread that always exasperated the good folk at home.He was a slender little creature, more like an Italian in asixteenth-century portrait than a middle-class English lad of thethirties. From the long eyebrows and sensitive mouth to the small handsand feet, everything about him was too much chiseled, overdelicate.Sitting still, he might have been taken for a very pretty girlmasquerading in male attire; but when he moved, his lithe agilitysuggested a tame panther without the claws.

  "Is that really it? What should I do without you, Arthur? I shouldalways 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 isthe bit you couldn't understand?"

  They went out into the still, shadowy cloister garden. The seminaryoccupied the buildings of an old Dominican monastery, and two hundredyears ago the square courtyard had been stiff and trim, and the rosemaryand lavender had grown in close-cut bushes between the straight boxedgings. Now the white-robed monks who had tended them were laid awayand forgotten; but the scented herbs flowered still in the graciousmid-summer evening, though no man gathered their blossoms for simplesany more. Tufts of wild parsley and columbine filled the cracks betweenthe flagged footways, and the well in the middle of the courtyard wasgiven up to ferns and matted stone-crop. The roses had run wild, andtheir straggling suckers trailed across the paths; in the box bordersflared great red poppies; tall foxgloves drooped above the tangledgrasses; and the old vine, untrained and barren of fruit, swayed fromthe branches of the neglected medlar-tree, shaking a leafy head withslow and sad persistence.

  In one corner stood a huge summer-flowering magnolia, a tower of darkfoliage, splashed here and there with milk-white blossoms. A roughwooden bench had been placed against the trunk; and on this Montanellisat down. Arthur was studying philosophy at the university; and,coming to a difficulty with a book, had applied to "the Padre" for anexplanation of the point. Montanelli was a universal encyclopaedia tohim, 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 ifyou have time."

  "Oh, yes!" He leaned back against the tree-trunk and looked up throughthe dusky branches at the first faint stars glimmering in a quietsky. The dreamy, mystical eyes, deep blue under black lashes, were aninheritance from his Cornish mother, and Montanelli turned his headaway, 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 thePadre noticed it at once.

  "You should not have gone up to college so soon; you were tired out withsick-nursing and being up at night. I ought to have insisted on yourtaking a thorough rest before you left Leghorn."

  "Oh, Padre, what's the use of that? I couldn't stop in that miserablehouse 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," Montanellianswered gently. "I am sure it would have been the worst possible thingfor you. But I wish you could have accepted the invitation of yourEnglish doctor friend; if you had spent a month in his house you wouldhave been more fit to study."

  "No, Padre, I shouldn't indeed! The Warrens are very good and kind, butthey don't understand; and then they are sorry for me,--I can see itin all their faces,--and they would try to console me, and talk aboutmother. Gemma wouldn't, of course; she always knew what not to say, evenwhen 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 andcrushed them nervously in his hand.

  "I can't bear the town," he began after a moment's pause. "There are theshops where she used to buy me toys when I was a little thing, and thewalk 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 mewith bunches of flowers--as if I wanted them now! And there's thechurch-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 silencewas so long and deep that he looked up, wondering why the Padre didnot speak. It was growing dark under the branches of the magnolia, andeverything seemed dim and indistinct; but there was light enough to showthe ghastly paleness of Montanelli's face. He was bending his headdown, his right hand tightly clenched upon the edge of the bench. Arthurlooked away with a sense of awe-struck wonder. It was as though he hadstepped unwittingly on to holy ground.

  "My God!" he thought; "how small and selfish I am beside him! If mytrouble were his own he couldn't feel it more."

  Presently Montanelli raised his head and looked round. "I won't pressyou to go back there; at all events, just now," he said in his mostcaressing tone; "but you must promise me to take a thorough rest whenyour vacation begins this summer. I think you had better get a holidayright away from the neighborhood of Leghorn. I can't have you breakingdown 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 themsettled there. But by the middle of August the subdirector will beback from his holiday. I shall try to get up into the Alps for a littlechange. Will you come with me? I could take you for some long mountainrambles, and you would like to study the Alpine mosses and lichens. Butperhaps 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 awaywith 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. Iam eighteen now and can do what I choose. After all, he's only mystep-brother; I don't see that I owe him obedience. He was always unkindto mother."

  "But if he seriously objects, I think you had better not defy hiswishes; you may find your position at home made much harder if----"

>   "Not a bit harder!" Arthur broke in passionately. "They always did hateme and always will--it doesn't matter what I do. Besides, how can Jamesseriously object to my going away with you--with my father confessor?"

  "He is a Protestant, remember. However, you had better write to him, andwe will wait to hear what he thinks. But you must not be impatient, myson; it matters just as much what you do, whether people hate you orlove you."

  The rebuke was so gently given that Arthur hardly coloured under it."Yes, I know," he answered, sighing; "but it is so difficult----"

  "I was sorry you could not come to me on Tuesday evening," Montanellisaid, abruptly introducing a new subject. "The Bishop of Arezzo washere, and I should have liked you to meet him."

  "I had promised one of the students to go to a meeting at his lodgings,and they would have been expecting me."

  "What sort of meeting?"

  Arthur seemed embarrassed by the question. "It--it was n-not a r-regularmeeting," he said with a nervous little stammer. "A student had comefrom Genoa, and he made a speech to us--a-a sort of--lecture."

  "What did he lecture about?"

  Arthur hesitated. "You won't ask me his name, Padre, will you? Because Ipromised----"

  "I will ask you no questions at all, and if you have promised secrecy ofcourse you must not tell me; but I think you can almost trust me by thistime."

  "Padre, of course I can. He spoke about--us and our duty to thepeople--and to--our own selves; and about--what we might do to help----"

  "To help whom?"

  "The contadini--and----"

  "And?"

  "Italy."

  There was a long silence.

  "Tell me, Arthur," said Montanelli, turning to him and speaking verygravely, "how long have you been thinking about this?"

  "Since--last winter."

  "Before your mother's death? And did she know of it?"

  "N-no. I--I didn't care about it then."

  "And now you--care about it?"

  Arthur pulled another handful of bells off the foxglove.

  "It was this way, Padre," he began, with his eyes on the ground. "When Iwas preparing for the entrance examination last autumn, I got to knowa good many of the students; you remember? Well, some of them began totalk to me about--all these things, and lent me books. But I didn't caremuch about it; I always wanted to get home quick to mother. You see, shewas quite alone among them all in that dungeon of a house; and Julia'stongue was enough to kill her. Then, in the winter, when she got so ill,I forgot all about the students and their books; and then, you know, Ileft off coming to Pisa altogether. I should have talked to mother ifI had thought of it; but it went right out of my head. Then I found outthat she was going to die----You know, I was almost constantly with hertowards the end; often I would sit up the night, and Gemma Warren wouldcome in the day to let me get to sleep. Well, it was in those longnights; I got thinking about the books and about what the students hadsaid--and wondering--whether they were right and--what--Our Lord wouldhave said about it all."

  "Did you ask Him?" Montanelli's voice was not quite steady.

  "Often, Padre. Sometimes I have prayed to Him to tell me what I must do,or to let me die with mother. But I couldn't find any answer."

  "And you never said a word to me. Arthur, I hoped you could have trustedme."

  "Padre, you know I trust you! But there are some things you can't talkabout to anyone. I--it seemed to me that no one could help me--not evenyou or mother; I must have my own answer straight from God. You see, itis for all my life and all my soul."

  Montanelli turned away and stared into the dusky gloom of the magnoliabranches. The twilight was so dim that his figure had a shadowy look,like a dark ghost among the darker boughs.

  "And then?" he asked slowly.

  "And then--she died. You know, I had been up the last three nights withher----"

  He broke off and paused a moment, but Montanelli did not move.

  "All those two days before they buried her," Arthur went on in a lowervoice, "I couldn't think about anything. Then, after the funeral, I wasill; you remember, I couldn't come to confession."

  "Yes; I remember."

  "Well, in the night I got up and went into mother's room. It was allempty; there was only the great crucifix in the alcove. And I thoughtperhaps God would help me. I knelt down and waited--all night. And inthe morning when I came to my senses--Padre, it isn't any use; I can'texplain. I can't tell you what I saw--I hardly know myself. But I knowthat God has answered me, and that I dare not disobey Him."

  For a moment they sat quite silent in the darkness. Then Montanelliturned and laid his hand on Arthur's shoulder.

  "My son," he said, "God forbid that I should say He has not spoken toyour soul. But remember your condition when this thing happened, and donot take the fancies of grief or illness for His solemn call. And if,indeed, it has been His will to answer you out of the shadow of death,be sure that you put no false construction on His word. What is thisthing you have it in your heart to do?"

  Arthur stood up and answered slowly, as though repeating a catechism:

  "To give up my life to Italy, to help in freeing her from all thisslavery and wretchedness, and in driving out the Austrians, that she maybe a free republic, with no king but Christ."

  "Arthur, think a moment what you are saying! You are not even anItalian."

  "That makes no difference; I am myself. I have seen this thing, and Ibelong to it."

  There was silence again.

  "You spoke just now of what Christ would have said----" Montanelli beganslowly; but Arthur interrupted him:

  "Christ said: 'He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.'"

  Montanelli leaned his arm against a branch, and shaded his eyes with onehand.

  "Sit down a moment, my son," he said at last.

  Arthur sat down, and the Padre took both his hands in a strong andsteady clasp.

  "I cannot argue with you to-night," he said; "this has come upon me sosuddenly--I had not thought--I must have time to think it over. Later onwe will talk more definitely. But, for just now, I want you to rememberone thing. If you get into trouble over this, if you--die, you willbreak my heart."

  "Padre----"

  "No; let me finish what I have to say. I told you once that I have noone in the world but you. I think you do not fully understand what thatmeans. It is difficult when one is so young; at your age I should nothave understood. Arthur, you are as my--as my--own son to me. Do yousee? You are the light of my eyes and the desire of my heart. I woulddie to keep you from making a false step and ruining your life. Butthere is nothing I can do. I don't ask you to make any promises to me; Ionly ask you to remember this, and to be careful. Think well beforeyou take an irrevocable step, for my sake, if not for the sake of yourmother in heaven."

  "I will think--and--Padre, pray for me, and for Italy."

  He knelt down in silence, and in silence Montanelli laid his hand on thebent head. A moment later Arthur rose, kissed the hand, and went softlyaway across the dewy grass. Montanelli sat alone under the magnoliatree, looking straight before him into the blackness.

  "It is the vengeance of God that has fallen upon me," he thought, "as itfell upon David. I, that have defiled His sanctuary, and taken the Bodyof the Lord into polluted hands,--He has been very patient with me, andnow it is come. 'For thou didst it secretly, but I will do this thingbefore all Israel, and before the sun; THE CHILD THAT IS BORN UNTO THEESHALL SURELY DIE.'"