The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich (top fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

Montanelli sighed.

“I used to see those things once.”

“Do you never see them now?”

“Never. I shall not see them any more. They are there, I know; but I have not the eyes to see them. I see quite other things.”

“What do you see?”

“I, carino? I see a blue sky and a snow-mountain⁠—that is all when I look up into the heights. But down there it is different.”

He pointed to the valley below them. Arthur knelt down and bent over the sheer edge of the precipice. The great pine trees, dusky in the gathering shades of evening, stood like sentinels along the narrow banks confining the river. Presently the sun, red as a glowing coal, dipped behind a jagged mountain peak, and all the life and light deserted the face of nature. Straightway there came upon the valley something dark and threatening⁠—sullen, terrible, full of spectral weapons. The perpendicular cliffs of the barren western mountains seemed like the teeth of a monster lurking to snatch a victim and drag him down into the maw of the deep valley, black with its moaning forests. The pine trees were rows of knife-blades whispering: “Fall upon us!” and in the gathering darkness the torrent roared and howled, beating against its rocky prison walls with the frenzy of an everlasting despair.

“Padre!” Arthur rose, shuddering, and drew back from the precipice. “It is like hell.”

“No, my son,” Montanelli answered softly, “it is only like a human soul.”

“The souls of them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death?”

“The souls of them that pass you day by day in the street.”

Arthur shivered, looking down into the shadows. A dim white mist was hovering among the pine trees, clinging faintly about the desperate agony of the torrent, like a miserable ghost that had no consolation to give.

“Look!” Arthur said suddenly. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

Eastwards the snow-peaks burned in the afterglow. When the red light had faded from the summits Montanelli turned and roused Arthur with a touch on the shoulder.

“Come in, carino; all the light is gone. We shall lose our way in the dark if we stay any longer.”

“It is like a corpse,” Arthur said as he turned away from the spectral face of the great snow-peak glimmering through the twilight.

They descended cautiously among the black trees to the chalet where they were to sleep.

As Montanelli entered the room where Arthur was waiting for him at the supper table, he saw that the lad seemed to have shaken off the ghostly fancies of the dark, and to have changed into quite another creature.

“Oh, Padre, do come and look at this absurd dog! It can dance on its hind legs.”

He was as much absorbed in the dog and its accomplishments as he had been in the afterglow. The woman of the chalet, red-faced and white-aproned, with sturdy arms akimbo, stood by smiling, while he put the animal through its tricks. “One can see there’s not much on his mind if he can carry on that way,” she said in patois to her daughter. “And what a handsome lad!”

Arthur coloured like a schoolgirl, and the woman, seeing that he had understood, went away laughing at his confusion. At supper he talked of nothing but plans for excursions, mountain ascents, and botanizing expeditions. Evidently his dreamy fancies had not interfered with either his spirits or his appetite.

When Montanelli awoke the next morning Arthur had disappeared. He had started before daybreak for the higher pastures “to help Gaspard drive up the goats.”

Breakfast had not long been on the table, however, when he came tearing into the room, hatless, with a tiny peasant girl of three years old perched on his shoulder, and a great bunch of wild flowers in his hand.

Montanelli looked up, smiling. This was a curious contrast to the grave and silent Arthur of Pisa or Leghorn.

“Where have you been, you madcap? Scampering all over the mountains without any breakfast?”

“Oh, Padre, it was so jolly! The mountains look perfectly glorious at sunrise; and the dew is so thick! Just look!”

He lifted for inspection a wet and muddy boot.

“We took some bread and cheese with us, and got some goat’s milk up there on the pasture; oh, it was nasty! But I’m hungry again, now; and I want something for this little person, too. Annette, won’t you have some honey?”

He had sat down with the child on his knee, and was helping her to put the flowers in order.

“No, no!” Montanelli interposed. “I can’t have you catching cold. Run and change your wet things. Come to me, Annette. Where did you pick her up?”

“At the top of the village. She belongs to the man we saw yesterday⁠—the man that cobbles the commune’s boots. Hasn’t she lovely eyes? She’s got a tortoise in her pocket, and she calls it ‘Caroline.’ ”

When Arthur had changed his wet socks and came down to breakfast he found the child seated on the Padre’s knee, chattering volubly to him about her tortoise, which she was holding upside down in a chubby hand, that “monsieur” might admire the wriggling legs.

“Look, monsieur!” she was saying gravely in her half-intelligible patois: “Look at Caroline’s boots!”

Montanelli sat playing with the child, stroking her hair, admiring her darling tortoise, and telling her wonderful stories. The woman of the chalet, coming in to clear the table, stared in amazement at the sight of Annette turning out the pockets of the grave gentleman in clerical dress.

“God teaches the little ones to know a good man,” she said. “Annette is always afraid of strangers; and see, she is not shy with his reverence at all. The wonderful thing! Kneel down, Annette, and ask the good monsieur’s blessing before he goes; it will bring thee luck.”

“I didn’t know you could play with children that way, Padre,” Arthur said an hour later, as they walked through the sunlit pastureland. “That child never took her