The Gadfly | Page 4

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 mid-summer 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