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Updated: June 8, 2025
There yet remained five hours until the time fixed for the rendezvous. I wished to go home, and once more embrace my wife and daughter before precipitating myself into that abyss of the "unknown" which was there, yawning and gloomy, and which several of us were about to enter, never to return. The two Italian exiles, Carini aril Montanelli, accompanied me.
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."
The question distressed her, bringing up old and miserable associations. "I hardly know," she said at last. "Many years ago I used to know something about Monsignor Montanelli. He was only a canon at that time, and Director of the theological seminary in the province where I lived as a girl.
Of course I must bow to the committee's decision, but I continue to think that it has pared its wit o' both sides and left M-mon-signor M-m-montan-n-nelli in the middle." "Montanelli?" Gemma repeated. "I don't understand you. Do you mean the Bishop of Brisighella?" "Yes; the new Pope has just created him a Cardinal, you know. I have a letter about him here. Would you care to hear it?
The Gadfly seemed to have left some terrible shadow of himself, some ghostly trail of his personality, to haunt the room; and Montanelli sat trembling and cowering, not daring to look up lest he should see the phantom presence that he knew was not there. The spectre hardly amounted to a hallucination.
"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."
On and on he wandered, and came out upon the sea-shore, on the barren rocks where the fierce light struck down, and the water moaned its low, perpetual wail of unrest. "Ah!" he said; "the sea will be more merciful; it, too, is wearied unto death and cannot sleep." Then Arthur rose up from the deep, and cried aloud: "This sea is mine!" "Your Eminence! Your Eminence!" Montanelli awoke with a start.
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!"
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.
"If you could have seen his face after I struck him, Cesare, you would not think that. It may be all true about Montanelli very likely it is but what I have done I have done." They walked on a little way without speaking.
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