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

affair, of course, but I cannot understand–-”

 

“My aversion to Mme. Reni? It is only when–-”

 

“No, your caring to live with her when you feel

that aversion. It seems to me an insult to her as

a woman and as–-”

 

“A woman!” He burst out laughing harshly.

“Is THAT what you call a woman? ‘Madame, ce

n’est que pour rire!’”

 

“That is not fair!” she said. “You have no

right to speak of her in that way to anyone—

especially to another woman!”

 

He turned away, and lay with wide-open eyes,

looking out of the window at the sinking sun. She

lowered the blind and closed the shutters, that he

might not see it set; then sat down at the table

by the other window and took up her knitting

again.

 

“Would you like the lamp?” she asked after a moment.

 

He shook his head.

 

When it grew too dark to see, Gemma rolled up

her knitting and laid it in the basket. For some

time she sat with folded hands, silently watching

the Gadfly’s motionless figure. The dim evening

light, falling on his face, seemed to soften away its

hard, mocking, self-assertive look, and to deepen

the tragic lines about the mouth. By some fanciful

association of ideas her memory went vividly

back to the stone cross which her father had set

up in memory of Arthur, and to its inscription:

 

“All thy waves and billows have gone over me.”

 

An hour passed in unbroken silence. At last

she rose and went softly out of the room. Coming

back with a lamp, she paused for a moment,

thinking that the Gadfly was asleep. As the light

fell on his face he turned round.

 

“I have made you a cup of coffee,” she said,

setting clown the lamp.

 

“Put it down a minute. Will you come here,

please.”

 

He took both her hands in his.

 

“I have been thinking,” he said. “You are

quite right; it is an ugly tangle I have got my life

into. But remember, a man does not meet every

day a woman whom he can—love; and I—I have

been in deep waters. I am afraid–-”

 

“Afraid–-”

 

“Of the dark. Sometimes I DARE not be alone

at night. I must have something living—something

solid beside me. It is the outer darkness,

where shall be–- No, no! It’s not that; that’s

a sixpenny toy hell;—it’s the INNER darkness.

There’s no weeping or gnashing of teeth there;

only silence—silence–-”

 

His eyes dilated. She was quite still, hardly

breathing till he spoke again.

 

“This is all mystification to you, isn’t it? You

can’t understand—luckily for you. What I mean

is that I have a pretty fair chance of going mad if

I try to live quite alone–- Don’t think too

hardly of me, if you can help it; I am not altogether

the vicious brute you perhaps imagine me to be.”

 

“I cannot try to judge for you,” she answered.

“I have not suffered as you have. But—I have

been in rather deep water too, in another way; and

I think—I am sure—that if you let the fear of anything

drive you to do a really cruel or unjust or

ungenerous thing, you will regret it afterwards.

For the rest—if you have failed in this one thing,

I know that I, in your place, should have failed

altogether,—should have cursed God and died.”

 

He still kept her hands in his.

 

“Tell me,” he said very softly; “have you ever

in your life done a really cruel thing?”

 

She did not answer, but her head sank down,

and two great tears fell on his hand.

 

“Tell me!” he whispered passionately, clasping

her hands tighter. “Tell me! I have told you

all my misery.”

 

“Yes,—once,—long ago. And I did it to the

person I loved best in the world.”

 

The hands that clasped hers were trembling violently;

but they did not loosen their hold.

 

“He was a comrade,” she went on; “and I believed

a slander against him,—a common glaring

lie that the police had invented. I struck him in

the face for a traitor; and he went away and

drowned himself. Then, two days later, I found

out that he had been quite innocent. Perhaps

that is a worse memory than any of yours. I

would cut off my right hand to undo what it has done.”

 

Something swift and dangerous—something

that she had not seen before,—flashed into his

eyes. He bent his head down with a furtive, sudden

gesture and kissed the hand.

 

She drew back with a startled face. “Don’t!”

she cried out piteously. “Please don’t ever do

that again! You hurt me!”

 

“Do you think you didn’t hurt the man you

killed?”

 

“The man I—killed–- Ah, there is Cesare

at the gate at last! I—I must go!”

 

… . .

 

When Martini came into the room he found the

Gadfly lying alone with the untouched coffee beside

him, swearing softly to himself in a languid,

spiritless way, as though he got no satisfaction

out of it.

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

A FEW days later, the Gadfly, still rather pale and

limping more than usual, entered the reading

room of the public library and asked for Cardinal

Montanelli’s sermons. Riccardo, who was reading

at a table near him, looked up. He liked the

Gadfly very much, but could not digest this one

trait in him—this curious personal maliciousness.

 

“Are you preparing another volley against that

unlucky Cardinal?” he asked half irritably.

 

“My dear fellow, why do you a-a-always attribute

evil m-m-motives to people? It’s m-most

unchristian. I am preparing an essay on contemporary

theology for the n-n-new paper.”

 

“What new paper?” Riccardo frowned. It

was perhaps an open secret that a new press-law

was expected and that the Opposition was preparing

to astonish the town with a radical newspaper;

but still it was, formally, a secret.

 

“The Swindlers’ Gazette, of course, or the

Church Calendar.”

 

“Sh-sh! Rivarez, we are disturbing the other

readers.”

 

“Well then, stick to your surgery, if that’s

your subject, and l-l-leave me to th-theology—

that’s mine. I d-d-don’t interfere with your

treatment of broken bones, though I know a

p-p-precious lot more about them than you do.”

 

He sat down to his volume of sermons with an

intent and preoccupied face. One of the librarians

came up to him.

 

“Signor Rivarez! I think you were in the

Duprez expedition, exploring the tributaries of the

Amazon? Perhaps you will kindly help us in a

difficulty. A lady has been inquiring for the

records of the expedition, and they are at the

binder’s.”

 

“What does she want to know?”

 

“Only in what year the expedition started and

when it passed through Ecuador.”

 

“It started from Paris in the autumn of 1837,

and passed through Quito in April, 1838. We

were three years in Brazil; then went down to Rio

and got back to Paris in the summer of 1841.

Does the lady want the dates of the separate

discoveries?”

 

“No, thank you; only these. I have written

them down. Beppo, take this paper to Signora

Bolla, please. Many thanks, Signor Rivarez. I

am sorry to have troubled you.”

 

The Gadfly leaned back in his chair with a perplexed

frown. What did she want the dates for?

When they passed through Ecuador–-

 

Gemma went home with the slip of paper in her

hand. April, 1838—and Arthur had died in May,

1833. Five years—

 

She began pacing up and down her room. She

had slept badly the last few nights, and there were

dark shadows under her eyes.

 

Five years;—and an “overluxurious home”—

and “someone he had trusted had deceived him”

—had deceived him—and he had found it out–-

 

She stopped and put up both hands to her head.

Oh, this was utterly mad—it was not possible—it

was absurd–-

 

And yet, how they had dragged that harbour!

 

Five years—and he was “not twenty-one”

when the Lascar–- Then he must have been

nineteen when he ran away from home. Had he

not said: “A year and a half–-” Where did he

get those blue eyes from, and that nervous restlessness

of the fingers? And why was he so bitter

against Montanelli? Five years—five years––

 

If she could but know that he was drowned—if

she could but have seen the body; some day,

surely, the old wound would have left off aching,

the old memory would have lost its terrors. Perhaps

in another twenty years she would have

learned to look back without shrinking.

 

All her youth had been poisoned by the thought

of what she had done. Resolutely, day after day

and year after year, she had fought against the

demon of remorse. Always she had remembered

that her work lay in the future; always had shut

her eyes and ears to the haunting spectre of the

past. And day after day, year after year, the

image of the drowned body drifting out to sea had

never left her, and the bitter cry that she could not

silence had risen in her heart: “I have killed

Arthur! Arthur is dead!” Sometimes it had

seemed to her that her burden was too heavy to

be borne.

 

Now she would have given half her life to have

that burden back again. If she had killed him—

that was a familiar grief; she had endured it too

long to sink under it now. But if she had driven

him, not into the water but into–– She sat

down, covering her eyes with both hands. And

her life had been darkened for his sake, because he

was dead! If she had brought upon him nothing

worse than death–-

 

Steadily, pitilessly she went back, step by step,

through the hell of his past life. It was as vivid

to her as though she had seen and felt it all; the

helpless shivering of the naked soul, the mockery

that was bitterer than death, the horror of

loneliness, the slow, grinding, relentless agony. It

was as vivid as if she had sat beside him in the

filthy Indian hut; as if she had suffered with him in

the silver-mines, the coffee fields, the horrible

variety show—

 

The variety show–- No, she must shut out

that image, at least; it was enough to drive one

mad to sit and think of it.

 

She opened a little drawer in her writing-desk.

It contained the few personal relics which she

could not bring herself to destroy. She was

not given to the hoarding up of sentimental

trifles; and the preservation of these keepsakes

was a concession to that weaker side of her

nature which she kept under with so steady a

hand. She very seldom allowed herself to look

at them.

 

Now she took them out, one after another:

Giovanni’s first letter to her, and the flowers that

had lain in his dead hand; a lock of her baby’s

hair and a withered leaf from her father’s grave.

At the back of the drawer was a miniature portrait

of Arthur at ten years old—the only existing

likeness of him.

 

She sat down with it in her hands and looked

at the beautiful childish head, till the face of the

real Arthur rose up afresh before her. How clear

it was in every detail! The sensitive lines of the

mouth, the wide, earnest eyes, the seraphic purity

of expression—they were graven in upon her

memory, as though he had died yesterday.

Slowly the blinding tears welled up and hid the

portrait.

 

Oh, how could she have thought such a thing!

It was like sacrilege even to dream of this bright,

far-off spirit, bound to the sordid miseries