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 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 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
had better write to him, and we will wait to hear
what he thinks. But you must not be impatient,
my son; it matters just as much what you do,
whether people hate you or love 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," Montanelli said, abruptly introducing
a new subject. "The Bishop of Arezzo
was here, 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-regular meeting," he said
with a nervous little stammer. "A student had
come from 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 I promised----"
"I will ask you no questions at all, and if you
have promised secrecy of course you must not tell
me; but I think you can almost trust me by this
time."
"Padre, of course I can. He spoke about--us
and our duty to the people--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 very gravely, "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 I was preparing for
the entrance examination last autumn, I got to
know a good many of the students; you remember?
Well, some of them began to talk to me
about--all these things, and lent me books. But
I didn't care much about it; I always wanted to
get home quick to mother. You see, she was quite
alone among them all in that dungeon of a house;
and Julia's tongue 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,
I left off coming to Pisa altogether. I should have
talked to mother if I had thought of it; but it went
right out of my head. Then I found out that she
was going to die----You know, I was almost
constantly with her towards the end; often I would
sit up the night, and Gemma Warren would come
in the day to let me get to sleep. Well, it was in
those long nights; I got thinking about the books
and about what the students had said--and wondering--
whether they were right and--what--
Our Lord would have 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 trusted me."
"Padre, you know I trust you! But there are
some things you can't talk about to anyone. I--it
seemed to me that no one could help me--not
even you or mother; I must have my own answer
straight from God. You see, it is for all my life
and all my soul."
Montanelli turned away and stared into the
dusky gloom of the magnolia branches. 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 with her----"
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 lower voice, "I couldn't think
about anything. Then, after the funeral, I was ill;
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 all empty; there was only
the great crucifix in the alcove. And I thought
perhaps God would help me. I knelt down
and waited--all night. And in the morning
when I came to my senses--Padre, it isn't any use;
I can't explain. I can't tell you what I saw--I
hardly know myself. But I know that God has
answered me, and that I dare not disobey Him."
For a moment they sat quite silent in the darkness.
Then Montanelli turned and laid his hand
on Arthur's shoulder.
"My son," he said, "God forbid that I should
say He has not spoken to your soul. But remember
your condition when this thing happened, and
do not 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 this thing 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 this slavery and wretchedness, and in
driving out the Austrians, that she may be a
free republic, with no king but Christ."
"Arthur, think a moment what you are saying!
You are not even an Italian."
"That makes no difference; I am myself. I
have seen this thing, and I belong to it."
There was silence again.
"You spoke just now of what Christ would have
said----" Montanelli began slowly; 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 one hand.
"Sit down a moment, my son," he said at
last.
Arthur sat down, and the Padre took both his
hands in a strong and steady clasp.
"I cannot argue with you to-night," he said;
"this has come upon me so suddenly--I had not
thought--I must have time to think it over.
Later on we will talk more definitely. But, for
just now, I want you to remember one thing. If
you get into trouble over this, if you--die, you
will break my heart."
"Padre----"
"No; let me finish what I have to say. I told
you once that I have no one in the world but you.
I think you do not fully understand what that
means. It is difficult when one is so young; at
your age I should not have understood. Arthur,
you are as my--as my--own son to me. Do you
see? You are the light of my eyes and the desire
of my heart. I would die to keep you from making
a false step and ruining your life. But there
is nothing I can do. I don't ask you to make any
promises to me; I only ask you to remember this,
and to be careful. Think well before you take an
irrevocable step, for my sake, if not for the sake
of your mother 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 the bent head. A moment
later Arthur rose, kissed the hand, and went
softly away across the dewy grass. Montanelli
sat alone under the magnolia tree, looking straight
before him into the blackness.
"It is the vengeance of God that has fallen upon
me," he thought, "as it fell upon David. I, that
have defiled His sanctuary, and taken the Body of
the Lord into polluted hands,--He has been very
patient with me, and now it is come. 'For thou
didst it secretly, but I will do this thing before all
Israel, and before the sun; THE CHILD THAT IS BORN
UNTO THEE SHALL SURELY DIE.'"
