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

know about the seminary, but I am sure you will miss me, carino; perhaps almost as much as I shall miss you.”

“I shall indeed; but I am very glad, for all that.”

“Are you? I don’t know that I am.” He sat down at the table with a weary look on his face; not the look of a man who is expecting high promotion.

“Are you busy this afternoon, Arthur?” he said after a moment. “If not, I wish you would stay with me for a while, as you can’t come tonight. I am a little out of sorts, I think; and I want to see as much of you as possible before leaving.”

“Yes, I can stay a bit. I am due at six.”

“One of your meetings?”

Arthur nodded; and Montanelli changed the subject hastily.

“I want to speak to you about yourself,” he said. “You will need another confessor in my absence.”

“When you come back I may go on confessing to you, may I not?”

“My dear boy, how can you ask? Of course I am speaking only of the three or four months that I shall be away. Will you go to one of the Fathers of Santa Caterina?”

“Very well.”

They talked of other matters for a little while; then Arthur rose.

“I must go, Padre; the students will be waiting for me.”

The haggard look came back to Montanelli’s face.

“Already? You had almost charmed away my black mood. Well, goodbye.”

“Goodbye. I will be sure to come tomorrow.”

“Try to come early, so that I may have time to see you alone. Father Cardi will be here. Arthur, my dear boy, be careful while I am gone; don’t be led into doing anything rash, at least before I come back. You cannot think how anxious I feel about leaving you.”

“There is no need, Padre; everything is quite quiet. It will be a long time yet.”

“Goodbye,” Montanelli said abruptly, and sat down to his writing.

The first person upon whom Arthur’s eyes fell, as he entered the room where the students’ little gatherings were held, was his old playmate, Dr. Warren’s daughter. She was sitting in a corner by the window, listening with an absorbed and earnest face to what one of the “initiators,” a tall young Lombard in a threadbare coat, was saying to her. During the last few months she had changed and developed greatly, and now looked a grownup young woman, though the dense black plaits still hung down her back in schoolgirl fashion. She was dressed all in black, and had thrown a black scarf over her head, as the room was cold and draughty. At her breast was a spray of cypress, the emblem of Young Italy. The initiator was passionately describing to her the misery of the Calabrian peasantry; and she sat listening silently, her chin resting on one hand and her eyes on the ground. To Arthur she seemed a melancholy vision of Liberty mourning for the lost Republic. (Julia would have seen in her only an overgrown hoyden, with a sallow complexion, an irregular nose, and an old stuff frock that was too short for her.)

“You here, Jim!” he said, coming up to her when the initiator had been called to the other end of the room. “Jim” was a childish corruption of her curious baptismal name: Jennifer. Her Italian schoolmates called her “Gemma.”

She raised her head with a start.

“Arthur! Oh, I didn’t know you⁠—belonged here!”

“And I had no idea about you. Jim, since when have you⁠—?”

“You don’t understand!” she interposed quickly. “I am not a member. It is only that I have done one or two little things. You see, I met Bini⁠—you know Carlo Bini?”

“Yes, of course.” Bini was the organizer of the Leghorn branch; and all Young Italy knew him.

“Well, he began talking to me about these things; and I asked him to let me go to a students’ meeting. The other day he wrote to me to Florence⁠—Didn’t you know I had been to Florence for the Christmas holidays?”

“I don’t often hear from home now.”

“Ah, yes! Anyhow, I went to stay with the Wrights.” (The Wrights were old schoolfellows of hers who had moved to Florence.) “Then Bini wrote and told me to pass through Pisa today on my way home, so that I could come here. Ah! they’re going to begin.”

The lecture was upon the ideal Republic and the duty of the young to fit themselves for it. The lecturer’s comprehension of his subject was somewhat vague; but Arthur listened with devout admiration. His mind at this period was curiously uncritical; when he accepted a moral ideal he swallowed it whole without stopping to think whether it was quite digestible. When the lecture and the long discussion which followed it were finished and the students began to disperse, he went up to Gemma, who was still sitting in the corner of the room.

“Let me walk with you, Jim. Where are you staying?”

“With Marietta.”

“Your father’s old housekeeper?”

“Yes; she lives a good way from here.”

They walked for some time in silence. Then Arthur said suddenly:

“You are seventeen, now, aren’t you?”

“I was seventeen in October.”

“I always knew you would not grow up like other girls and begin wanting to go to balls and all that sort of thing. Jim, dear, I have so often wondered whether you would ever come to be one of us.”

“So have I.”

“You said you had done things for Bini; I didn’t know you even knew him.”

“It wasn’t for Bini; it was for the other one.”

“Which other one?”

“The one that was talking to me tonight⁠—Bolla.”

“Do you know him well?” Arthur put in with a little touch of jealousy. Bolla was a sore subject with him; there had been a rivalry between them about some work which the committee of Young Italy had finally entrusted to Bolla, declaring Arthur too young and inexperienced.

“I know him pretty well; and I like him very much. He has been staying in Leghorn.”

“I know; he went there in November⁠—”

“Because of the steamers. Arthur, don’t you think your house would