“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.