The Gadfly by E. L. Voynich (latest novels to read .txt) 📖

most salient points of his appearance were

a tendency to foppishness in dress and rather more

than a tendency to a certain veiled insolence of

expression and manner. For the rest, he was as

swarthy as a mulatto, and, notwithstanding his

lameness, as agile as a cat. His whole personality

was oddly suggestive of a black jaguar. The forehead

and left cheek were terribly disfigured by

the long crooked scar of the old sabre-cut; and

she had already noticed that, when he began to

stammer in speaking, that side of his face was

affected with a nervous twitch. But for these

defects he would have been, in a certain restless

and uncomfortable way, rather handsome; but it

was not an attractive face.

 

Presently he began again in his soft, murmuring

purr (“Just the voice a jaguar would talk in,

if it could speak and were in a good humour,”

Gemma said to herself with rising irritation).

 

“I hear,” he said, “that you are interested in

the radical press, and write for the papers.”

 

“I write a little; I have not time to do much.”

 

“Ah, of course! I understood from Signora

Grassini that you undertake other important

work as well.”

 

Gemma raised her eyebrows slightly. Signora

Grassini, like the silly little woman she was, had

evidently been chattering imprudently to this

slippery creature, whom Gemma, for her part, was

beginning actually to dislike.

 

“My time is a good deal taken up,” she said

rather stiffly; “but Signora Grassini overrates

the importance of my occupations. They are

mostly of a very trivial character.”

 

“Well, the world would be in a bad way if we

ALL of us spent our time in chanting dirges for

Italy. I should think the neighbourhood of our

host of this evening and his wife would make anybody

frivolous, in self-defence. Oh, yes, I know

what you’re going to say; you are perfectly right,

but they are both so deliciously funny with their

patriotism.—Are you going in already? It is so

nice out here!”

 

“I think I will go in now. Is that my scarf?

Thank you.”

 

He had picked it up, and now stood looking at

her with wide eyes as blue and innocent as forget-me-nots

in a brook.

 

“I know you are offended with me,” he said

penitently, “for fooling that painted-up wax doll;

but what can a fellow do?”

 

“Since you ask me, I do think it an ungenerous

and—well—cowardly thing to hold one’s intellectual

inferiors up to ridicule in that way; it is

like laughing at a cripple, or––”

 

He caught his breath suddenly, painfully; and

shrank back, glancing at his lame foot and mutilated

hand. In another instant he recovered his

self-possession and burst out laughing.

 

“That’s hardly a fair comparison, signora; we

cripples don’t flaunt our deformities in people’s

faces as she does her stupidity. At least give us

credit for recognizing that crooked backs are no

pleasanter than crooked ways. There is a step

here; will you take my arm?”

 

She re-entered the house in embarrassed silence;

his unexpected sensitiveness had completely disconcerted her.

 

Directly he opened the door of the great reception

room she realized that something unusual

had happened in her absence. Most of the gentlemen

looked both angry and uncomfortable;

the ladies, with hot cheeks and carefully feigned

unconsciousness, were all collected at one end of

the room; the host was fingering his eye-glasses

with suppressed but unmistakable fury, and a little

group of tourists stood in a corner casting amused

glances at the further end of the room. Evidently

something was going on there which appeared to

them in the light of a joke, and to most

of the guests in that of an insult. Signora Grassini

alone did not appear to have noticed anything;

she was fluttering her fan coquettishly

and chattering to the secretary of the Dutch

embassy, who listened with a broad grin on his

face.

 

Gemma paused an instant in the doorway, turning

to see if the Gadfly, too, had noticed the disturbed

appearance of the company. There was

no mistaking the malicious triumph in his eyes as

he glanced from the face of the blissfully unconscious

hostess to a sofa at the end of the room.

She understood at once; he had brought his mistress

here under some false colour, which had

deceived no one but Signora Grassini.

 

The gipsy-girl was leaning back on the sofa,

surrounded by a group of simpering dandies and

blandly ironical cavalry officers. She was gorgeously

dressed in amber and scarlet, with an

Oriental brilliancy of tint and profusion of ornament

as startling in a Florentine literary salon

as if she had been some tropical bird among

sparrows and starlings. She herself seemed to

feel out of place, and looked at the offended

ladies with a fiercely contemptuous scowl. Catching

sight of the Gadfly as he crossed the room

with Gemma, she sprang up and came towards

him, with a voluble flood of painfully incorrect

French.

 

“M. Rivarez, I have been looking for you everywhere!

Count Saltykov wants to know whether

you can go to his villa to-morrow night. There

will be dancing.”

 

“I am sorry I can’t go; but then I couldn’t

dance if I did. Signora Bolla, allow me to introduce

to you Mme. Zita Reni.”

 

The gipsy glanced round at Gemma with a half

defiant air and bowed stiffly. She was certainly

handsome enough, as Martini had said, with a

vivid, animal, unintelligent beauty; and the perfect

harmony and freedom of her movements were

delightful to see; but her forehead was low and

narrow, and the line of her delicate nostrils was

unsympathetic, almost cruel. The sense of

oppression which Gemma had felt in the Gadfly’s

society was intensified by the gypsy’s presence;

and when, a moment later, the host came up to

beg Signora Bolla to help him entertain some

tourists in the other room, she consented with an

odd feeling of relief.

 

… . .

 

“Well, Madonna, and what do you think of the

Gadfly?” Martini asked as they drove back to

Florence late at night. “Did you ever see anything

quite so shameless as the way he fooled that

poor little Grassini woman?”

 

“About the ballet-girl, you mean?”

 

“Yes, he persuaded her the girl was going to

be the lion of the season. Signora Grassini would

do anything for a celebrity.”

 

“I thought it an unfair and unkind thing to

do; it put the Grassinis into a false position; and

it was nothing less than cruel to the girl herself.

I am sure she felt ill at ease.”

 

“You had a talk with him, didn’t you? What

did you think of him?”

 

“Oh, Cesare, I didn’t think anything except

how glad I was to see the last of him. I never

met anyone so fearfully tiring. He gave me a

headache in ten minutes. He is like an incarnate

demon of unrest.”

 

“I thought you wouldn’t like him; and, to tell

the truth, no more do I. The man’s as slippery

as an eel; I don’t trust him.”

 

CHAPTER III.

 

THE Gadfly took lodgings outside the Roman

gate, near to which Zita was boarding. He was

evidently somewhat of a sybarite; and, though

nothing in the rooms showed any serious extravagance,

there was a tendency to luxuriousness in

trifles and to a certain fastidious daintiness in the

arrangement of everything which surprised Galli

and Riccardo. They had expected to find a man

who had lived among the wildernesses of the Amazon

more simple in his tastes, and wondered at his

spotless ties and rows of boots, and at the masses

of flowers which always stood upon his writing

table. On the whole they got on very well with

him. He was hospitable and friendly to everyone,

especially to the local members of the Mazzinian

party. To this rule Gemma, apparently, formed

an exception; he seemed to have taken a dislike to

her from the time of their first meeting, and in

every way avoided her company. On two or three

occasions he was actually rude to her, thus bringing

upon himself Martini’s most cordial detestation.

There had been no love lost between the

two men from the beginning; their temperaments

appeared to be too incompatible for them to feel

anything but repugnance for each other. On

Martini’s part this was fast developing into

hostility.

 

“I don’t care about his not liking me,” he said

one day to Gemma with an aggrieved air. “I

don’t like him, for that matter; so there’s no harm

done. But I can’t stand the way he behaves to

you. If it weren’t for the scandal it would make

in the party first to beg a man to come and then

to quarrel with him, I should call him to account

for it.”

 

“Let him alone, Cesare; it isn’t of any consequence,

and after all, it’s as much my fault as his.”

 

“What is your fault?”

 

“That he dislikes me so. I said a brutal thing

to him when we first met, that night at the

Grassinis’.”

 

“YOU said a brutal thing? That’s hard to

believe, Madonna.”

 

“It was unintentional, of course, and I was very

sorry. I said something about people laughing at

cripples, and he took it personally. It had never

occurred to me to think of him as a cripple; he is

not so badly deformed.”

 

“Of course not. He has one shoulder higher

than the other, and his left arm is pretty badly

disabled, but he’s neither hunchbacked nor clubfooted.

As for his lameness, it isn’t worth talking

about.”

 

“Anyway, he shivered all over and changed

colour. Of course it was horribly tactless of me,

but it’s odd he should be so sensitive. I wonder

if he has ever suffered from any cruel jokes of that

kind.”

 

“Much more likely to have perpetrated them, I

should think. There’s a sort of internal brutality

about that man, under all his fine manners, that

is perfectly sickening to me.”

 

“Now, Cesare, that’s downright unfair. I

don’t like him any more than you do, but what is

the use of making him out worse than he is? His

manner is a little affected and irritating—I expect

he has been too much lionized—and the everlasting

smart speeches are dreadfully tiring; but I

don’t believe he means any harm.”

 

“I don’t know what he means, but there’s something

not clean about a man who sneers at everything. It

fairly disgusted me the other day at

Fabrizi’s debate to hear the way he cried down

the reforms in Rome, just as if he wanted to find

a foul motive for everything.”

 

Gemma sighed. “I am afraid I agreed better

with him than with you on that point,” she said.

“All you good people are so full of the most

delightful hopes and expectations; you are always

ready to think that if one well-meaning middle-aged

gentleman happens to get elected Pope,

everything else will come right of itself. He has

only got to throw open the prison doors and give

his blessing to everybody all round, and we may

expect the millennium within three months. You

never seem able to see that he can’t set things

right even if he would. It’s the principle of the

thing that’s wrong, not the behaviour of this man

or that.”

 

“What principle? The temporal power of the

Pope?”

 

“Why that in particular? That’s merely a part

of the general wrong. The bad principle is that

any man should hold over another the power to

bind and loose. It’s a false relationship to stand

in towards one’s fellows.”

 

Martini held up his hands. “That will do, Madonna,”

he said, laughing. “I am not going to

discuss with