“You know, my child, if it makes you too unhappy, I shall take you home again.”
She raised her head, tears raining down her cheeks, and with a heart-broken smile replied,
“Oh, father, it is truly my vacation. Only I have been so happy at home,—and never again to see our mother, nor the house—it is hard?”
“And for us?” said my father.
He turned away his head. Perhaps if I had better appreciated his grief, I should have suffered less, in my corner, from thinking myself forgotten. But as he controlled himself, I was free to torment myself to my heart’s content. My sister was going away to carry out her own idea, as grandfather had said, whereas I was being sent to prison. I quite forgot that I had myself asked to be sent. But had I not been a prisoner already, at our house? And in my rebellion, working myself up with the thought of Nazzarena on the high road, the sun shining through her hair and her teeth parted in her smile, I repeated to myself the phrase which chimed with the movement of the train,
“I want to be free! I want to be free!”
BOOK IV
I
THE EPIDEMIC
I WAS being prepared for liberty by years of seclusion, the history of which, after so many petty rebellions, I shall not set down here. I never became wonted to that boarding school to which I had demanded to be sent in a moment of pride which for nothing in the world would I have disavowed. Yet I passed for a good scholar, whose only fault was a little reserve or dissimulation.
I suffered frightfully during the first absence from home. I used to cry in the dormitory, my head smothered in the covers, until I fell asleep, enwrapped in my sorrow. But I never uttered a word of complaint.