Part
II
Thirteen years later.
I
One evening in July, 1846, a few acquaintances met at Professor Fabrizi’s house in Florence to discuss plans for future political work.
Several of them belonged to the Mazzinian party and would have been satisfied with nothing less than a democratic Republic and a United Italy. Others were Constitutional Monarchists and Liberals of various shades. On one point, however, they were all agreed; that of dissatisfaction with the Tuscan censorship; and the popular professor had called the meeting in the hope that, on this one subject at least, the representatives of the dissentient parties would be able to get through an hour’s discussion without quarrelling.
Only a fortnight had elapsed since the famous amnesty which Pius IX had granted, on his accession, to political offenders in the Papal States; but the wave of liberal enthusiasm caused by it was already spreading over Italy. In Tuscany even the government appeared to have been affected by the astounding event. It had occurred to Fabrizi and a few other leading Florentines that this was a propitious moment for a bold effort to reform the press-laws.
“Of course,” the dramatist Lega had said, when the subject was first broached to him; “it would be impossible to start a newspaper till we can get the press-law changed; we should not bring out the first number. But we may be able to run some pamphlets through the censorship already; and the sooner we begin the sooner we shall get the law changed.”
He was now explaining in Fabrizi’s library his theory of the line which should be taken by liberal writers at the moment.
“There is no doubt,” interposed one of the company, a gray-haired barrister with a rather drawling manner of speech, “that in some way we must take advantage of the moment. We shall not see such a favourable one again for bringing forward serious reforms. But I doubt the pamphlets doing any good. They will only irritate and frighten the government instead of winning it over to our side, which is what we really want to do. If once the authorities begin to think of us as dangerous agitators our chance of getting their help is gone.”
“Then what would you have us do?”
“Petition.”
“To the Grand Duke?”
“Yes; for an augmentation of the liberty of the press.”
A keen-looking, dark man sitting by the window turned his head round with a laugh.
“You’ll get a lot out of petitioning!” he said. “I should have thought the result of the Renzi case was enough to cure anybody of going to work that way.”
“My dear sir, I am as much grieved as you are that we did not succeed in preventing the extradition of Renzi. But really—I do not wish to hurt the sensibilities of anyone, but I cannot help thinking that our failure in that case was largely due to the impatience and vehemence of some persons among our number. I should certainly hesitate—”
“As every Piedmontese always does,” the dark man interrupted sharply. “I don’t know where the vehemence and impatience lay, unless you found them in the strings of meek petitions we sent in. That may be vehemence for Tuscany or Piedmont, but we should not call it particularly vehement in Naples.”
“Fortunately,” remarked the Piedmontese, “Neapolitan vehemence is peculiar to Naples.”
“There, there, gentlemen, that will do!” the professor put in. “Neapolitan customs are very good things in their way and Piedmontese customs in theirs; but just now we are in Tuscany, and the Tuscan custom is to stick to the matter in hand. Grassini votes for petitions and Galli against them. What do you think, Dr. Riccardo?”
“I see no harm in petitions, and if Grassini gets one up I’ll sign it with all the pleasure in life. But I don’t think mere petitioning and nothing else will accomplish much. Why can’t we have both petitions and pamphlets?”
“Simply because the pamphlets will put the government into a state of mind in which it won’t grant the petitions,” said Grassini.
“It won’t do that anyhow.” The Neapolitan rose and came across to the table. “Gentlemen, you’re on the wrong tack. Conciliating the government will do no good. What we must do is to rouse the people.”
“That’s easier said than done; how are you going to start?”
“Fancy asking Galli that! Of course he’d start by knocking the censor on the head.”
“No, indeed, I shouldn’t,” said Galli stoutly. “You always think if a man comes from down south he must believe in no argument but cold steel.”
“Well, what do you propose, then? Sh! Attention, gentlemen! Galli has a proposal to make.”
The whole company, which had broken up into little knots of twos and threes, carrying on separate discussions, collected round the table to listen. Galli raised his hands in expostulation.
“No, gentlemen, it is not a proposal; it is merely a suggestion. It appears to me that there is a great practical danger in all this rejoicing over the new Pope. People seem to think that, because he has struck out a new line and granted this amnesty, we have only to throw ourselves—all of us, the whole of Italy—into his arms and he will carry us to the promised land. Now, I am second to no one in admiration of the Pope’s behaviour; the amnesty was a splendid action.”
“I am sure His Holiness ought to feel flattered—” Grassini began contemptuously.
“There, Grassini, do let the man speak!” Riccardo interrupted in his turn. “It’s a most extraordinary thing that you two never can keep from sparring like a cat and dog. Get on, Galli!”
“What I wanted to say is this,” continued the Neapolitan. “The Holy Father, undoubtedly, is acting with the best intentions; but how far he will succeed in carrying his reforms is another question. Just now it’s smooth enough and, of course, the reactionists all over Italy will lie quiet for a month or two till the excitement about the amnesty blows over; but they are not likely to let the power be taken out of their hands without a fight, and my own belief is that before the winter is half over we shall have Jesuits and Gregorians and Sanfedists and all the rest of the crew about our ears, plotting and intriguing, and poisoning off everybody they can’t bribe.”
“That’s likely enough.”
“Very well, then; shall we wait here, meekly sending in petitions, till Lambruschini and his pack have persuaded the Grand Duke to put us bodily under Jesuit rule, with perhaps a few Austrian hussars to patrol the streets and keep us in order; or shall we forestall them and take advantage of their momentary discomfiture to strike the first blow?”
“Tell us first what blow you propose?”
“I would suggest that we start an organized propaganda and agitation against the Jesuits.”
“A pamphleteering declaration of war, in fact?”
“Yes; exposing their intrigues, ferreting out their secrets, and calling upon the people to make common cause against them.”
“But there are no Jesuits here to expose.”
“Aren’t there? Wait three months and see how many we shall have. It’ll be too late to keep them out then.”
“But really to rouse the town against the Jesuits one must speak plainly; and if you do that how will you evade the censorship?”
“I wouldn’t evade it; I would defy it.”
“You would print the pamphlets anonymously? That’s all very well, but the fact is, we have all seen enough of the clandestine press to know—”
“I did not mean that. I would print the pamphlets openly, with our names and addresses, and let them prosecute us if they dare.”
“The project is a perfectly mad one,” Grassini exclaimed. “It is simply putting one’s head into the lion’s mouth out of sheer wantonness.”
“Oh, you needn’t be afraid!” Galli cut in sharply; “we shouldn’t ask you to go to prison for our pamphlets.”
“Hold your tongue, Galli!” said Riccardo. “It’s not a question of being afraid; we’re all as ready as you are to go to prison if there’s any good to be got by it, but it is childish to run into danger for nothing. For my part, I have an amendment to the proposal to suggest.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I think we might contrive, with care, to fight the Jesuits without coming into collision with the censorship.”
“I don’t see how you are going to manage it.”
“I think that it is possible to clothe what one has to say in so roundabout a form that—”
“That the censorship won’t understand it? And then you’ll expect every poor artisan and labourer to find out the meaning by the light of the ignorance and stupidity that are in him! That doesn’t sound very practicable.”
“Martini, what do you think?” asked the professor, turning to a broad-shouldered man with a great brown beard, who was sitting beside him.
“I think that I will reserve my opinion till I have more facts to go upon. It’s a question of trying experiments and seeing what comes of them.”
“And you, Sacconi?”
“I should like to hear what Signora Bolla has to say. Her suggestions are always valuable.”
Everyone turned to the only woman in the room, who had been sitting on the sofa, resting her chin on one hand and listening in silence to the discussion. She had deep, serious black eyes, but as she raised them now there was an unmistakable gleam of amusement in them.
“I am afraid,” she said; “that I disagree with everybody.”
“You always do, and the worst of it is that you are always right,” Riccardo put in.
“I think it is quite true that we must fight the Jesuits somehow; and if we can’t do it with one weapon we must with another. But mere defiance is a feeble weapon and evasion a cumbersome one. As for petitioning, that is a child’s toy.”
“I hope, signora,” Grassini interposed, with a solemn face; “that you are not suggesting such methods as—assassination?”
Martini tugged at his big moustache and Galli sniggered outright. Even the grave young woman could not repress a smile.
“Believe me,” she said, “that if I were ferocious enough to think of such things I should not be childish enough to talk about them. But the deadliest weapon I know is ridicule. If you can once succeed in rendering the Jesuits ludicrous, in making people laugh at them and their claims, you have conquered them without bloodshed.”
“I believe you are right, as far as that goes,” Fabrizi said; “but I don’t see how you are going to carry the thing through.”
“Why should we not be able to carry it through?” asked Martini. “A satirical thing has a better chance of getting over the censorship difficulty than a serious one; and, if it must be cloaked, the average reader is more likely to find out the double meaning of an apparently silly joke than of a scientific or economic treatise.”
“Then is your suggestion, signora, that we should issue satirical pamphlets, or attempt to run a comic paper? That last, I am sure, the censorship would never allow.”
“I don’t mean exactly either. I believe a series of small satirical leaflets, in verse or prose, to be sold cheap or distributed free about the streets, would be very useful. If we could find a clever artist who would enter into the spirit of the thing, we might have them illustrated.”
“It’s a capital idea, if only one could carry it out; but if the thing is to be done at all it must be well done. We should want a first-class satirist; and where are we to get him?”
“You see,” added Lega, “most of us are serious writers; and, with all respect to the company, I am afraid that a general attempt to be humorous would present the spectacle of an elephant trying to dance the tarantella.”
“I never suggested that we should all rush into work for which we are unfitted. My idea was that we should try to find a really gifted satirist—there must be one to be got somewhere in Italy, surely—and offer to provide the necessary funds. Of course we should have to know something of the man and make sure that he would work on lines with which we could agree.”
“But where are you going to find him? I can count up the satirists of any real talent on the fingers of one hand; and none of them are available. Giusti wouldn’t accept; he is fully occupied as it is. There are one or two good men in Lombardy, but they write only in the Milanese dialect—”
“And moreover,” said Grassini, “the Tuscan people can be influenced in better ways than this. I am sure that it would be felt as, to say the least, a want of political savoir faire if we were to treat this solemn question of civil and religious liberty as a subject for trifling. Florence is not a mere wilderness of factories and money-getting like London, nor a haunt of idle luxury like Paris. It is a city with a great history—”
“So was Athens,” she interrupted, smiling; “but it was ‘rather sluggish from its size and needed a gadfly to rouse it’—”
Riccardo struck his hand upon the table. “Why, we never thought of the Gadfly! The very man!”
“Who is that?”
“The Gadfly—Felice Rivarez. Don’t you remember him? One of Muratori’s band that came down from the Apennines three years ago?”
“Oh, you knew that set, didn’t you? I remember your travelling with them when they went on to Paris.”
“Yes; I went as far as Leghorn to see Rivarez off for Marseilles. He wouldn’t stop in Tuscany; he said there was nothing left to do but laugh, once the insurrection had failed, and so he had better go to Paris. No doubt he agreed with Signor Grassini that Tuscany is the wrong place to laugh in. But I am nearly sure he would come back if we asked him, now that there is a chance of doing something in Italy.”
“What name did you say?”
“Rivarez. He’s a Brazilian, I think. At any rate, I know he has lived out there. He is one of the wittiest men I ever came across. Heaven knows we had nothing to be merry over, that week in Leghorn; it was enough to break one’s heart to look at poor Lambertini; but there was no keeping one’s countenance when Rivarez was in the room; it was one perpetual fire of absurdities. He had a nasty sabre-cut across the face, too; I remember sewing it up. He’s an odd creature; but I believe he and his nonsense kept some of those poor lads from breaking down altogether.”
“Is that the man who writes political skits in the French papers under the name of ‘Le Taon’?”
“Yes; short paragraphs mostly, and comic feuilletons. The smugglers up in the Apennines called him ‘the Gadfly’ because of his tongue; and he took the nickname to sign his work with.”
“I know something about this gentleman,” said Grassini, breaking in upon the conversation in his slow and stately manner; “and I cannot say that what I have heard is much to his credit. He undoubtedly possesses a certain showy, superficial cleverness, though I think his abilities have been exaggerated; and possibly he is not lacking in physical courage; but his reputation in Paris and Vienna is, I believe, very far from spotless. He appears to be a gentleman of—a—a—many adventures and unknown antecedents. It is said that he was picked up out of charity by Duprez’s expedition somewhere in the wilds of tropical South America, in a state of inconceivable savagery and degradation. I believe he has never satisfactorily explained how he came to be in such a condition. As for the rising in the Apennines, I fear it is no secret that persons of all characters took part in that unfortunate affair. The men who were executed in Bologna are known to have been nothing but common malefactors; and the character of many who escaped will hardly bear description. Without doubt, some of the participators were men of high character—”
“Some of them were the intimate friends of several persons in this room!” Riccardo interrupted, with an angry ring in his voice. “It’s all very well to be particular and exclusive, Grassini; but these ‘common malefactors’ died for their belief, which is more than you or I have done as yet.”
“And another time when people tell you the stale gossip of Paris,” added Galli, “you can tell them from me that they are mistaken about the Duprez expedition. I know Duprez’s adjutant, Martel, personally, and have heard the whole story from him. It’s true that they found Rivarez stranded out there. He had been taken prisoner in the war, fighting for the Argentine Republic, and had escaped. He was wandering about the country in various disguises, trying to get back to Buenos Aires. But the story of their taking him on out of charity is a pure fabrication. Their interpreter had fallen ill and been obliged to turn back; and not one of the Frenchmen could speak the native languages; so they offered him the post, and he spent the whole three years with them, exploring the tributaries of the Amazon. Martel told me he believed they never would have got through the expedition at all if it had not been for Rivarez.”
“Whatever he may be,” said Fabrizi; “there must be something remarkable about a man who could lay his ‘come hither’ on two old campaigners like Martel and Duprez as he seems to have done. What do you think, signora?”
“I know nothing about the matter; I was in England when the fugitives passed through Tuscany. But I should think that if the companions who were with a man on a three years’ expedition in savage countries, and the comrades who were with him through an insurrection, think well of him, that is recommendation enough to counterbalance a good deal of boulevard gossip.”
“There is no question about the opinion his comrades had of him,” said Riccardo. “From Muratori and Zambeccari down to the roughest mountaineers they were all devoted to him. Moreover, he is a personal friend of Orsini. It’s quite true, on the other hand, that there are endless cock-and-bull stories of a not very pleasant kind going about concerning him in Paris; but if a man doesn’t want to make enemies he shouldn’t become a political satirist.”
“I’m not quite sure,” interposed Lega; “but it seems to me that I saw him once when the refugees were here. Was he not hunchbacked, or crooked, or something of that kind?”
The professor had opened a drawer in his writing-table and was turning over a heap of papers. “I think I have his police description somewhere here,” he said. “You remember when they escaped and hid in the mountain passes their personal appearance was posted up everywhere, and that Cardinal—what’s the scoundrel’s name?—Spinola, offered a reward for their heads.”
“There was a splendid story about Rivarez and that police paper, by the way. He put on a soldier’s old uniform and tramped across country as a carabineer wounded in the discharge of his duty and trying to find his company. He actually got Spinola’s search-party to give him a lift, and rode the whole day in one of their wagons, telling them harrowing stories of how he had been taken captive by the rebels and dragged off into their haunts in the mountains, and of the fearful tortures that he had suffered at their hands. They showed him the description paper, and he told them all the rubbish he could think of about ‘the fiend they call the Gadfly.’ Then at night, when they were asleep, he poured a bucketful of water into their powder and decamped, with his pockets full of provisions and ammunition—”
“Ah, here’s the paper,” Fabrizi broke in: “ ‘Felice Rivarez, called: “The Gadfly.” Age, about 30; birthplace and parentage, unknown, probably South American; profession, journalist. Short; black hair; black beard; dark skin; eyes, blue; forehead, broad and square; nose, mouth, chin—’ Yes, here it is: ‘Special marks: right foot lame; left arm twisted; two fingers missing on left hand; recent sabre-cut across face; stammers.’ Then there’s a note put: ‘Very expert shot; care should be taken in arresting.’ ”
“It’s an extraordinary thing that he can have managed to deceive the search-party with such a formidable list of identification marks.”
“It was nothing but sheer audacity that carried him through, of course. If it had once occurred to them to suspect him he would have been lost. But the air of confiding innocence that he can put on when he chooses would bring a man through anything. Well, gentlemen, what do you think of the proposal? Rivarez seems to be pretty well known to several of the company. Shall we suggest to him that we should be glad of his help here or not?”
“I think,” said Fabrizi, “that he might be sounded upon the subject, just to find out whether he would be inclined to think of the plan.”
“Oh, he’ll be inclined, you may be sure, once it’s a case of fighting the Jesuits; he is the most savage anti-clerical I ever met; in fact, he’s rather rabid on the point.”
“Then will you write, Riccardo?”
“Certainly. Let me see, where is he now? In Switzerland, I think. He’s the most restless being; always flitting about. But as for the pamphlet question—”
They plunged into a long and animated discussion. When at last the company began to disperse Martini went up to the quiet young woman.
“I will see you home, Gemma.”
“Thanks; I want to have a business talk with you.”
“Anything wrong with the addresses?” he asked softly.
“Nothing serious; but I think it is time to make a few alterations. Two letters have been stopped in the post this week. They were both quite unimportant, and it may have been accidental; but we cannot afford to have any risks. If once the police have begun to suspect any of our addresses, they must be changed immediately.”
“I will come in about that tomorrow. I am not going to talk business with you tonight; you look tired.”
“I am not tired.”
“Then you are depressed again.”
“Oh, no; not particularly.”
II
“Is the mistress in, Katie?”
“Yes, sir; she is dressing. If you’ll just step into the parlour she will be down in a few minutes.”
Katie ushered the visitor in with the cheerful friendliness of a true Devonshire girl. Martini was a special favourite of hers. He spoke English, like a foreigner, of course, but still quite respectably; and he never sat discussing politics at the top of his voice till one in the morning, when the mistress was tired, as some visitors had a way of doing. Moreover, he had come to Devonshire to help the mistress in her trouble, when her baby was dead and her husband dying there; and ever since that time the big, awkward, silent man had been to Katie as much “one of the family” as was the lazy black cat which now ensconced itself upon his knee. Pasht, for his part, regarded Martini as a useful piece of household furniture. This visitor never trod upon his tail, or puffed tobacco smoke into his eyes, or in any way obtruded upon his consciousness an aggressive biped personality. He behaved as a mere man should: provided a comfortable knee to lie upon and purr, and at table never forgot that to look on while human beings eat fish is not interesting for a cat. The friendship between them was of old date. Once, when Pasht was a kitten and his mistress too ill to think about him, he had come from England under Martini’s care, tucked away in a basket. Since then, long experience had convinced him that this clumsy human bear was no fair-weather friend.
“How snug you look, you two!” said Gemma, coming into the room. “One would think you had settled yourselves for the evening.”
Martini carefully lifted the cat off his knee. “I came early,” he said, “in the hope that you will give me some tea before we start. There will probably be a frightful crush, and Grassini won’t give us any sensible supper—they never do in those fashionable houses.”
“Come now!” she said, laughing; “that’s as bad as Galli! Poor Grassini has quite enough sins of his own to answer for without having his wife’s imperfect housekeeping visited upon his head. As for the tea, it will be ready in a minute. Katie has been making some Devonshire cakes specially for you.”
“Katie is a good soul, isn’t she, Pasht? By the way, so are you to have put on that pretty dress. I was afraid you would forget.”
“I promised you I would wear it, though it is rather warm for a hot evening like this.”
“It will be much cooler up at Fiesole; and nothing else ever suits you so well as white cashmere. I have brought you some flowers to wear with it.”
“Oh, those lovely cluster roses; I am so fond of them! But they had much better go into water. I hate to wear flowers.”
“Now that’s one of your superstitious fancies.”
“No, it isn’t; only I think they must get so bored, spending all the evening pinned to such a dull companion.”
“I am afraid we shall all be bored tonight. The conversazione will be dull beyond endurance.”
“Why?”
“Partly because everything Grassini touches becomes as dull as himself.”
“Now don’t be spiteful. It is not fair when we are going to be a man’s guests.”
“You are always right, Madonna. Well then, it will be dull because half the interesting people are not coming.”
“How is that?”
“I don’t know. Out of town, or ill, or something. Anyway, there will be two or three ambassadors and some learned Germans, and the usual nondescript crowd of tourists and Russian princes and literary club people, and a few French officers; nobody else that I know of—except, of course, the new satirist, who is to be the attraction of the evening.”
“The new satirist? What, Rivarez? But I thought Grassini disapproved of him so strongly.”
“Yes; but once the man is here and is sure to be talked about, of course Grassini wants his house to be the first place where the new lion will be on show. You may be sure Rivarez has heard nothing of Grassini’s disapproval. He may have guessed it, though; he’s sharp enough.”
“I did not even know he had come.”
“He only arrived yesterday. Here comes the tea. No, don’t get up; let me fetch the kettle.”
He was never so happy as in this little study. Gemma’s friendship, her grave unconsciousness of the charm she exercised over him, her frank and simple comradeship were the brightest things for him in a life that was none too bright; and whenever he began to feel more than usually depressed he would come in here after business hours and sit with her, generally in silence, watching her as she bent over her needlework or poured out tea. She never questioned him about his troubles or expressed any sympathy in words; but he always went away stronger and calmer, feeling, as he put it to himself, that he could “trudge through another fortnight quite respectably.” She possessed, without knowing it, the rare gift of consolation; and when, two years ago, his dearest friends had been betrayed in Calabria and shot down like wolves, her steady faith had been perhaps the thing which had saved him from despair.
On Sunday mornings he sometimes came in to “talk business,” that expression standing for anything connected with the practical work of the Mazzinian party, of which they both were active and devoted members. She was quite a different creature then; keen, cool, and logical, perfectly accurate and perfectly neutral. Those who saw her only at her political work regarded her as a trained and disciplined conspirator, trustworthy, courageous, in every way a valuable member of the party, but somehow lacking in life and individuality. “She’s a born conspirator, worth any dozen of us; and she is nothing more,” Galli had said of her. The “Madonna Gemma” whom Martini knew was very difficult to get at.
“Well, and what is your ‘new satirist’ like?” she asked, glancing back over her shoulder as she opened the sideboard. “There, Cesare, there are barley-sugar and candied angelica for you. I wonder, by the way, why revolutionary men are always so fond of sweets.”
“Other men are, too, only they think it beneath their dignity to confess it. The new satirist? Oh, the kind of man that ordinary women will rave over and you will dislike. A sort of professional dealer in sharp speeches, that goes about the world with a lackadaisical manner and a handsome ballet-girl dangling on to his coattails.”
“Do you mean that there is really a ballet-girl, or simply that you feel cross and want to imitate the sharp speeches?”
“The Lord defend me! No; the ballet-girl is real enough and handsome enough, too, for those who like shrewish beauty. Personally, I don’t. She’s a Hungarian gipsy, or something of that kind, so Riccardo says; from some provincial theatre in Galicia. He seems to be rather a cool hand; he has been introducing the girl to people just as if she were his maiden aunt.”
“Well, that’s only fair if he has taken her away from her home.”
“You may look at things that way, dear Madonna, but society won’t. I think most people will very much resent being introduced to a woman whom they know to be his mistress.”
“How can they know it unless he tells them so?”
“It’s plain enough; you’ll see if you meet her. But I should think even he would not have the audacity to bring her to the Grassinis’.”
“They wouldn’t receive her. Signora Grassini is not the woman to do unconventional things of that kind. But I wanted to hear about Signor Rivarez as a satirist, not as a man. Fabrizi told me he had been written to and had consented to come and take up the campaign against the Jesuits; and that is the last I have heard. There has been such a rush of work this week.”
“I don’t know that I can tell you much more. There doesn’t seem to have been any difficulty over the money question, as we feared there would be. He’s well off, it appears, and willing to work for nothing.”
“Has he a private fortune, then?”
“Apparently he has; though it seems rather odd—you heard that night at Fabrizi’s about the state the Duprez expedition found him in. But he has got shares in mines somewhere out in Brazil; and then he has been immensely successful as a feuilleton writer in Paris and Vienna and London. He seems to have half a dozen languages at his fingertips; and there’s nothing to prevent his keeping up his newspaper connections from here. Slanging the Jesuits won’t take all his time.”
“That’s true, of course. It’s time to start, Cesare. Yes, I will wear the roses. Wait just a minute.”
She ran upstairs, and came back with the roses in the bosom of her dress, and a long scarf of black Spanish lace thrown over her head. Martini surveyed her with artistic approval.
“You look like a queen, Madonna mia; like the great and wise Queen of Sheba.”
“What an unkind speech!” she retorted, laughing; “when you know how hard I’ve been trying to mould myself into the image of the typical society lady! Who wants a conspirator to look like the Queen of Sheba? That’s not the way to keep clear of spies.”
“You’ll never be able to personate the stupid society woman if you try forever. But it doesn’t matter, after all; you’re too fair to look upon for spies to guess your opinions, even though you can’t simper and hide behind your fan like Signora Grassini.”
“Now Cesare, let that poor woman alone! There, take some more barley-sugar to sweeten your temper. Are you ready? Then we had better start.”
Martini had been quite right in saying that the conversazione would be both crowded and dull. The literary men talked polite small-talk and looked hopelessly bored, while the “nondescript crowd of tourists and Russian princes” fluttered up and down the rooms, asking each other who were the various celebrities and trying to carry on intellectual conversation. Grassini was receiving his guests with a manner as carefully polished as his boots; but his cold face lighted up at the sight of Gemma. He did not really like her and indeed was secretly a little afraid of her; but he realized that without her his drawing room would lack a great attraction. He had risen high in his profession, and now that he was rich and well known his chief ambition was to make of his house a centre of liberal and intellectual society. He was painfully conscious that the insignificant, overdressed little woman whom in his youth he had made the mistake of marrying was not fit, with her vapid talk and faded prettiness, to be the mistress of a great literary salon. When he could prevail upon Gemma to come he always felt that the evening would be a success. Her quiet graciousness of manner set the guests at their ease, and her very presence seemed to lay the spectre of vulgarity which always, in his imagination, haunted the house.
Signora Grassini greeted Gemma affectionately, exclaiming in a loud whisper: “How charming you look tonight!” and examining the white cashmere with viciously critical eyes. She hated her visitor rancourously, for the very things for which Martini loved her; for her quiet strength of character; for her grave, sincere directness; for the steady balance of her mind; for the very expression of her face. And when Signora Grassini hated a woman, she showed it by effusive tenderness. Gemma took the compliments and endearments for what they were worth, and troubled her head no more about them. What is called “going into society” was in her eyes one of the wearisome and rather unpleasant tasks which a conspirator who wishes not to attract the notice of spies must conscientiously fulfil. She classed it together with the laborious work of writing in cipher; and, knowing how valuable a practical safeguard against suspicion is the reputation of being a well-dressed woman, studied the fashion-plates as carefully as she did the keys of her ciphers.
The bored and melancholy literary lions brightened up a little at the sound of Gemma’s name; she was very popular among them; and the radical journalists, especially, gravitated at once to her end of the long room. But she was far too practised a conspirator to let them monopolize her. Radicals could be had any day; and now, when they came crowding round her, she gently sent them about their business, reminding them with a smile that they need not waste their time on converting her when there were so many tourists in need of instruction. For her part, she devoted herself to an English M.P. whose sympathies the republican party was anxious to gain; and, knowing him to be a specialist on finance, she first won his attention by asking his opinion on a technical point concerning the Austrian currency, and then deftly turned the conversation to the condition of the Lombardo-Venetian revenue. The Englishman, who had expected to be bored with small-talk, looked askance at her, evidently fearing that he had fallen into the clutches of a bluestocking; but finding that she was both pleasant to look at and interesting to talk to, surrendered completely and plunged into as grave a discussion of Italian finance as if she had been Metternich. When Grassini brought up a Frenchman “who wishes to ask Signora Bolla something about the history of Young Italy,” the M.P. rose with a bewildered sense that perhaps there was more ground for Italian discontent than he had supposed.
Later in the evening Gemma slipped out on to the terrace under the drawing-room windows to sit alone for a few moments among the great camellias and oleanders. The close air and continually shifting crowd in the rooms were beginning to give her a headache. At the further end of the terrace stood a row of palms and tree-ferns, planted in large tubs which were hidden by a bank of lilies and other flowering plants. The whole formed a complete screen, behind which was a little nook commanding a beautiful view out across the valley. The branches of a pomegranate tree, clustered with late blossoms, hung beside the narrow opening between the plants.
In this nook Gemma took refuge, hoping that no one would guess her whereabouts until she had secured herself against the threatening headache by a little rest and silence. The night was warm and beautifully still; but coming out from the hot, close rooms she felt it cool, and drew her lace scarf about her head.
Presently the sounds of voices and footsteps approaching along the terrace roused her from the dreamy state into which she had fallen. She drew back into the shadow, hoping to escape notice and get a few more precious minutes of silence before again having to rack her tired brain for conversation. To her great annoyance the footsteps paused near to the screen; then Signora Grassini’s thin, piping little voice broke off for a moment in its stream of chatter.
The other voice, a man’s, was remarkably soft and musical; but its sweetness of tone was marred by a peculiar, purring drawl, perhaps mere affectation, more probably the result of a habitual effort to conquer some impediment of speech, but in any case very unpleasant.
“English, did you say?” it asked. “But surely the name is quite Italian. What was it—Bolla?”
“Yes; she is the widow of poor Giovanni Bolla, who died in England about four years ago—don’t you remember? Ah, I forgot—you lead such a wandering life; we can’t expect you to know of all our unhappy country’s martyrs—they are so many!”
Signora Grassini sighed. She always talked in this style to strangers; the role of a patriotic mourner for the sorrows of Italy formed an effective combination with her boarding-school manner and pretty infantine pout.
“Died in England!” repeated the other voice. “Was he a refugee, then? I seem to recognize the name, somehow; was he not connected with Young Italy in its early days?”
“Yes; he was one of the unfortunate young men who were arrested in ’33—you remember that sad affair? He was released in a few months; then, two or three years later, when there was a warrant out against him again, he escaped to England. The next we heard was that he was married there. It was a most romantic affair altogether, but poor Bolla always was romantic.”
“And then he died in England, you say?”
“Yes, of consumption; he could not stand that terrible English climate. And she lost her only child just before his death; it caught scarlet fever. Very sad, is it not? And we are all so fond of dear Gemma! She is a little stiff, poor thing; the English always are, you know; but I think her troubles have made her melancholy, and—”
Gemma stood up and pushed back the boughs of the pomegranate tree. This retailing of her private sorrows for purposes of small-talk was almost unbearable to her, and there was visible annoyance in her face as she stepped into the light.
“Ah! here she is!” exclaimed the hostess, with admirable coolness. “Gemma, dear, I was wondering where you could have disappeared to. Signor Felice Rivarez wishes to make your acquaintance.”
“So it’s the Gadfly,” thought Gemma, looking at him with some curiosity. He bowed to her decorously enough, but his eyes glanced over her face and figure with a look which seemed to her insolently keen and inquisitorial.
“You have found a d-d-delightful little nook here,” he remarked, looking at the thick screen; “and w-w-what a charming view!”
“Yes; it’s a pretty corner. I came out here to get some air.”
“It seems almost ungrateful to the good God to stay indoors on such a lovely night,” said the hostess, raising her eyes to the stars. (She had good eyelashes and liked to show them.) “Look, signore! Would not our sweet Italy be heaven on earth if only she were free? To think that she should be a bondslave, with such flowers and such skies!”
“And such patriotic women!” the Gadfly murmured in his soft, languid drawl.
Gemma glanced round at him in some trepidation; his impudence was too glaring, surely, to deceive anyone. But she had underrated Signora Grassini’s appetite for compliments; the poor woman cast down her lashes with a sigh.
“Ah, signore, it is so little that a woman can do! Perhaps some day I may prove my right to the name of an Italian—who knows? And now I must go back to my social duties; the French ambassador has begged me to introduce his ward to all the notabilities; you must come in presently and see her. She is a most charming girl. Gemma, dear, I brought Signor Rivarez out to show him our beautiful view; I must leave him under your care. I know you will look after him and introduce him to everyone. Ah! there is that delightful Russian prince! Have you met him? They say he is a great favourite of the Emperor Nicholas. He is military commander of some Polish town with a name that nobody can pronounce. Quelle nuit magnifique! N’est-ce-pas, mon prince?”
She fluttered away, chattering volubly to a bull-necked man with a heavy jaw and a coat glittering with orders; and her plaintive dirges for “notre malheureuse patrie,” interpolated with “charmant” and “mon prince,” died away along the terrace.
Gemma stood quite still beside the pomegranate tree. She was sorry for the poor, silly little woman, and annoyed at the Gadfly’s languid insolence. He was watching the retreating figures with an expression of face that angered her; it seemed ungenerous to mock at such pitiable creatures.
“There go Italian and—Russian patriotism,” he said, turning to her with a smile; “arm in arm and mightily pleased with each other’s company. Which do you prefer?”
She frowned slightly and made no answer.
“Of c-course,” he went on; “it’s all a question of p-personal taste; but I think, of the two, I like the Russian variety best—it’s so thorough. If Russia had to depend on flowers and skies for her supremacy instead of on powder and shot, how long do you think ‘mon prince’ would k-keep that Polish fortress?”
“I think,” she answered coldly, “that we can hold our personal opinions without ridiculing a woman whose guests we are.”
“Ah, yes! I f-forgot the obligations of hospitality here in Italy; they are a wonderfully hospitable people, these Italians. I’m sure the Austrians find them so. Won’t you sit down?”
He limped across the terrace to fetch a chair for her, and placed himself opposite to her, leaning against the balustrade. The light from a window was shining full on his face; and she was able to study it at her leisure.
She was disappointed. She had expected to see a striking and powerful, if not pleasant face; but the 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 reentered 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 eyeglasses 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 tomorrow 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.”
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 you, once you begin talking rank Antinomianism in that fashion. I’m sure your ancestors must have been English Levellers in the seventeenth century. Besides, what I came round about is this MS.”
He pulled it out of his pocket.
“Another new pamphlet?”
“A stupid thing this wretched man Rivarez sent in to yesterday’s committee. I knew we should come to loggerheads with him before long.”
“What is the matter with it? Honestly, Cesare, I think you are a little prejudiced. Rivarez may be unpleasant, but he’s not stupid.”
“Oh, I don’t deny that this is clever enough in its way; but you had better read the thing yourself.”
The pamphlet was a skit on the wild enthusiasm over the new Pope with which Italy was still ringing. Like all the Gadfly’s writing, it was bitter and vindictive; but, notwithstanding her irritation at the style, Gemma could not help recognizing in her heart the justice of the criticism.
“I quite agree with you that it is detestably malicious,” she said, laying down the manuscript. “But the worst thing about it is that it’s all true.”
“Gemma!”
“Yes, but it is. The man’s a cold-blooded eel, if you like; but he’s got the truth on his side. There is no use in our trying to persuade ourselves that this doesn’t hit the mark—it does!”
“Then do you suggest that we should print it?”
“Ah! that’s quite another matter. I certainly don’t think we ought to print it as it stands; it would hurt and alienate everybody and do no good. But if he would rewrite it and cut out the personal attacks, I think it might be made into a really valuable piece of work. As political criticism it is very fine. I had no idea he could write so well. He says things which need saying and which none of us have had the courage to say. This passage, where he compares Italy to a tipsy man weeping with tenderness on the neck of the thief who is picking his pocket, is splendidly written.”
“Gemma! The very worst bit in the whole thing! I hate that ill-natured yelping at everything and everybody!”
“So do I; but that’s not the point. Rivarez has a very disagreeable style, and as a human being he is not attractive; but when he says that we have made ourselves drunk with processions and embracing and shouting about love and reconciliation, and that the Jesuits and Sanfedists are the people who will profit by it all, he’s right a thousand times. I wish I could have been at the committee yesterday. What decision did you finally arrive at?”
“What I have come here about: to ask you to go and talk it over with him and persuade him to soften the thing.”
“Me? But I hardly know the man; and besides that, he detests me. Why should I go, of all people?”
“Simply because there’s no one else to do it today. Besides, you are more reasonable than the rest of us, and won’t get into useless arguments and quarrel with him, as we should.”
“I shan’t do that, certainly. Well, I will go if you like, though I have not much hope of success.”
“I am sure you will be able to manage him if you try. Yes, and tell him that the committee all admired the thing from a literary point of view. That will put him into a good humour, and it’s perfectly true, too.”
The Gadfly was sitting beside a table covered with flowers and ferns, staring absently at the floor, with an open letter on his knee. A shaggy collie dog, lying on a rug at his feet, raised its head and growled as Gemma knocked at the open door, and the Gadfly rose hastily and bowed in a stiff, ceremonious way. His face had suddenly grown hard and expressionless.
“You are too kind,” he said in his most chilling manner. “If you had let me know that you wanted to speak to me I would have called on you.”
Seeing that he evidently wished her at the end of the earth, Gemma hastened to state her business. He bowed again and placed a chair for her.
“The committee wished me to call upon you,” she began, “because there has been a certain difference of opinion about your pamphlet.”
“So I expected.” He smiled and sat down opposite to her, drawing a large vase of chrysanthemums between his face and the light.
“Most of the members agreed that, however much they may admire the pamphlet as a literary composition, they do not think that in its present form it is quite suitable for publication. They fear that the vehemence of its tone may give offence, and alienate persons whose help and support are valuable to the party.”
He pulled a chrysanthemum from the vase and began slowly plucking off one white petal after another. As her eyes happened to catch the movement of the slim right hand dropping the petals, one by one, an uncomfortable sensation came over Gemma, as though she had somewhere seen that gesture before.
“As a literary composition,” he remarked in his soft, cold voice, “it is utterly worthless, and could be admired only by persons who know nothing about literature. As for its giving offence, that is the very thing I intended it to do.”
“That I quite understand. The question is whether you may not succeed in giving offence to the wrong people.”
He shrugged his shoulders and put a torn-off petal between his teeth. “I think you are mistaken,” he said. “The question is: For what purpose did your committee invite me to come here? I understood, to expose and ridicule the Jesuits. I fulfil my obligation to the best of my ability.”
“And I can assure you that no one has any doubt as to either the ability or the goodwill. What the committee fears is that the liberal party may take offence, and also that the town workmen may withdraw their moral support. You may have meant the pamphlet for an attack upon the Sanfedists: but many readers will construe it as an attack upon the Church and the new Pope; and this, as a matter of political tactics, the committee does not consider desirable.”
“I begin to understand. So long as I keep to the particular set of clerical gentlemen with whom the party is just now on bad terms, I may speak sooth if the fancy takes me; but directly I touch upon the committee’s own pet priests—‘truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when the—Holy Father may stand by the fire and—’ Yes, the fool was right; I’d rather be any kind of a thing than a fool. 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 writer is a friend of mine on the other side of the frontier.”
“The Papal frontier?”
“Yes. This is what he writes—” He took up the letter which had been in his hand when she entered, and read aloud, suddenly beginning to stammer violently:
“ ‘Y-o-you will s-s-s-soon have the p-pleasure of m-m-meeting one of our w-w-worst enemies, C-cardinal Lorenzo M-montan-n-nelli, the B-b-bishop of Brisig-g-hella. He int-t—’ ”
He broke off, paused a moment, and began again, very slowly and drawling insufferably, but no longer stammering:
“ ‘He intends to visit Tuscany during the coming month on a mission of reconciliation. He will preach first in Florence, where he will stay for about three weeks; then will go on to Siena and Pisa, and return to the Romagna by Pistoja. He ostensibly belongs to the liberal party in the Church, and is a personal friend of the Pope and Cardinal Feretti. Under Gregory he was out of favour, and was kept out of sight in a little hole in the Apennines. Now he has come suddenly to the front. Really, of course, he is as much pulled by Jesuit wires as any Sanfedist in the country. This mission was suggested by some of the Jesuit fathers. He is one of the most brilliant preachers in the Church, and as mischievous in his way as Lambruschini himself. His business is to keep the popular enthusiasm over the Pope from subsiding, and to occupy the public attention until the Grand Duke has signed a project which the agents of the Jesuits are preparing to lay before him. What this project is I have been unable to discover.’ Then, further on, it says: ‘Whether Montanelli understands for what purpose he is being sent to Tuscany, or whether the Jesuits are playing on him, I cannot make out. He is either an uncommonly clever knave, or the biggest ass that was ever foaled. The odd thing is that, so far as I can discover, he neither takes bribes nor keeps mistresses—the first time I ever came across such a thing.’ ”
He laid down the letter and sat looking at her with half-shut eyes, waiting, apparently, for her to speak.
“Are you satisfied that your informant is correct in his facts?” she asked after a moment.
“As to the irreproachable character of Monsignor M-mon-t-tan-nelli’s private life? No; but neither is he. As you will observe, he puts in the s-s-saving clause: ‘So far as I c-can discover—’ ”
“I was not speaking of that,” she interposed coldly, “but of the part about this mission.”
“I can fully trust the writer. He is an old friend of mine—one of my comrades of ’43, and he is in a position which gives him exceptional opportunities for finding out things of that kind.”
“Some official at the Vatican,” thought Gemma quickly. “So that’s the kind of connections you have? I guessed there was something of that sort.”
“This letter is, of course, a private one,” the Gadfly went on; “and you understand that the information is to be kept strictly to the members of your committee.”
“That hardly needs saying. Then about the pamphlet: may I tell the committee that you consent to make a few alterations and soften it a little, or that—”
“Don’t you think the alterations may succeed in spoiling the beauty of the ‘literary composition,’ signora, as well as in reducing the vehemence of the tone?”
“You are asking my personal opinion. What I have come here to express is that of the committee as a whole.”
“Does that imply that y-y-you disagree with the committee as a whole?” He had put the letter into his pocket and was now leaning forward and looking at her with an eager, concentrated expression which quite changed the character of his face. “You think—”
“If you care to know what I personally think—I disagree with the majority on both points. I do not at all admire the pamphlet from a literary point of view, and I do think it true as a presentation of facts and wise as a matter of tactics.”
“That is—”
“I quite agree with you that Italy is being led away by a will-o’-the-wisp and that all this enthusiasm and rejoicing will probably land her in a terrible bog; and I should be most heartily glad to have that openly and boldly said, even at the cost of offending or alienating some of our present supporters. But as a member of a body the large majority of which holds the opposite view, I cannot insist upon my personal opinion; and I certainly think that if things of that kind are to be said at all, they should be said temperately and quietly; not in the tone adopted in this pamphlet.”
“Will you wait a minute while I look through the manuscript?”
He took it up and glanced down the pages. A dissatisfied frown settled on his face.
“Yes, of course, you are perfectly right. The thing’s written like a café chantant skit, not a political satire. But what’s a man to do? If I write decently the public won’t understand it; they will say it’s dull if it isn’t spiteful enough.”
“Don’t you think spitefulness manages to be dull when we get too much of it?”
He threw a keen, rapid glance at her, and burst out laughing.
“Apparently the signora belongs to the dreadful category of people who are always right! Then if I yield to the temptation to be spiteful, I may come in time to be as dull as Signora Grassini? Heavens, what a fate! No, you needn’t frown. I know you don’t like me, and I am going to keep to business. What it comes to, then, is practically this: if I cut out the personalities and leave the essential part of the thing as it is, the committee will very much regret that they can’t take the responsibility of printing it. If I cut out the political truth and make all the hard names apply to no one but the party’s enemies, the committee will praise the thing up to the skies, and you and I will know it’s not worth printing. Rather a nice point of metaphysics: Which is the more desirable condition, to be printed and not be worth it, or to be worth it and not be printed? Well, signora?”
“I do not think you are tied to any such alternative. I believe that if you were to cut out the personalities the committee would consent to print the pamphlet, though the majority would, of course, not agree with it; and I am convinced that it would be very useful. But you would have to lay aside the spitefulness. If you are going to say a thing the substance of which is a big pill for your readers to swallow, there is no use in frightening them at the beginning by the form.”
He sighed and shrugged his shoulders resignedly. “I submit, signora; but on one condition. If you rob me of my laugh now, I must have it out next time. When His Eminence, the irreproachable Cardinal, turns up in Florence, neither you nor your committee must object to my being as spiteful as I like. It’s my due!”
He spoke in his lightest, coldest manner, pulling the chrysanthemums out of their vase and holding them up to watch the light through the translucent petals. “What an unsteady hand he has,” she thought, seeing how the flowers shook and quivered. “Surely he doesn’t drink!”
“You had better discuss the matter with the other members of the committee,” she said, rising. “I cannot form any opinion as to what they will think about it.”
“And you?” He had risen too, and was leaning against the table, pressing the flowers to his face.
She hesitated. 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. I heard a great deal about him from—someone who knew him very intimately; and I never heard anything of him that was not good. I believe that, in those days at least, he was really a most remarkable man. But that was long ago, and he may have changed. Irresponsible power corrupts so many people.”
The Gadfly raised his head from the flowers, and looked at her with a steady face.
“At any rate,” he said, “if Monsignor Montanelli is not himself a scoundrel, he is a tool in scoundrelly hands. It is all one to me which he is—and to my friends across the frontier. A stone in the path may have the best intentions, but it must be kicked out of the path, for all that. Allow me, signora!” He rang the bell, and, limping to the door, opened it for her to pass out.
“It was very kind of you to call, signora. May I send for a vettura? No? Good afternoon, then! Bianca, open the hall-door, please.”
Gemma went out into the street, pondering anxiously. “My friends across the frontier”—who were they? And how was the stone to be kicked out of the path? If with satire only, why had he said it with such dangerous eyes?
IV
Monsignor Montanelli arrived in Florence in the first week of October. His visit caused a little flutter of excitement throughout the town. He was a famous preacher and a representative of the reformed Papacy; and people looked eagerly to him for an exposition of the “new doctrine,” the gospel of love and reconciliation which was to cure the sorrows of Italy. The nomination of Cardinal Gizzi to the Roman State Secretaryship in place of the universally detested Lambruschini had raised the public enthusiasm to its highest pitch; and Montanelli was just the man who could most easily sustain it. The irreproachable strictness of his life was a phenomenon sufficiently rare among the high dignitaries of the Roman Church to attract the attention of people accustomed to regard blackmailing, peculation, and disreputable intrigues as almost invariable adjuncts to the career of a prelate. Moreover, his talent as a preacher was really great; and with his beautiful voice and magnetic personality, he would in any time and place have made his mark.
Grassini, as usual, strained every nerve to get the newly arrived celebrity to his house; but Montanelli was no easy game to catch. To all invitations he replied with the same courteous but positive refusal, saying that his health was bad and his time fully occupied, and that he had neither strength nor leisure for going into society.
“What omnivorous creatures those Grassinis are!” Martini said contemptuously to Gemma as they crossed the Signoria square one bright, cold Sunday morning. “Did you notice the way Grassini bowed when the Cardinal’s carriage drove up? It’s all one to them who a man is, so long as he’s talked about. I never saw such lion-hunters in my life. Only last August it was the Gadfly; now it’s Montanelli. I hope His Eminence feels flattered at the attention; a precious lot of adventurers have shared it with him.”
They had been hearing Montanelli preach in the cathedral; and the great building had been so thronged with eager listeners that Martini, fearing a return of Gemma’s troublesome headaches, had persuaded her to come away before the Mass was over. The sunny morning, the first after a week of rain, offered him an excuse for suggesting a walk among the garden slopes by San Niccolo.
“No,” she answered; “I should like a walk if you have time; but not to the hills. Let us keep along the Lung’Arno; Montanelli will pass on his way back from church and I am like Grassini—I want to see the notability.”
“But you have just seen him.”
“Not close. There was such a crush in the cathedral, and his back was turned to us when the carriage passed. If we keep near to the bridge we shall be sure to see him well—he is staying on the Lung’Arno, you know.”
“But what has given you such a sudden fancy to see Montanelli? You never used to care about famous preachers.”
“It is not famous preachers; it is the man himself; I want to see how much he has changed since I saw him last.”
“When was that?”
“Two days after Arthur’s death.”
Martini glanced at her anxiously. They had come out on to the Lung’Arno, and she was staring absently across the water, with a look on her face that he hated to see.
“Gemma, dear,” he said after a moment; “are you going to let that miserable business haunt you all your life? We have all made mistakes when we were seventeen.”
“We have not all killed our dearest friend when we were seventeen,” she answered wearily; and, leaning her arm on the stone balustrade of the bridge, looked down into the river. Martini held his tongue; he was almost afraid to speak to her when this mood was on her.
“I never look down at water without remembering,” she said, slowly raising her eyes to his; then with a nervous little shiver: “Let us walk on a bit, Cesare; it is chilly for standing.”
They crossed the bridge in silence and walked on along the riverside. After a few minutes she spoke again.
“What a beautiful voice that man has! There is something about it that I have never heard in any other human voice. I believe it is the secret of half his influence.”
“It is a wonderful voice,” Martini assented, catching at a subject of conversation which might lead her away from the dreadful memory called up by the river, “and he is, apart from his voice, about the finest preacher I have ever heard. But I believe the secret of his influence lies deeper than that. It is the way his life stands out from that of almost all the other prelates. I don’t know whether you could lay your hand on one other high dignitary in all the Italian Church—except the Pope himself—whose reputation is so utterly spotless. I remember, when I was in the Romagna last year, passing through his diocese and seeing those fierce mountaineers waiting in the rain to get a glimpse of him or touch his dress. He is venerated there almost as a saint; and that means a good deal among the Romagnols, who generally hate everything that wears a cassock. I remarked to one of the old peasants—as typical a smuggler as ever I saw in my life—that the people seemed very much devoted to their bishop, and he said: ‘We don’t love bishops, they are liars; we love Monsignor Montanelli. Nobody has ever known him to tell a lie or do an unjust thing.’ ”
“I wonder,” Gemma said, half to herself, “if he knows the people think that about him.”
“Why shouldn’t he know it? Do you think it is not true?”
“I know it is not true.”
“How do you know it?”
“Because he told me so.”
“He told you? Montanelli? Gemma, what do you mean?”
She pushed the hair back from her forehead and turned towards him. They were standing still again, he leaning on the balustrade and she slowly drawing lines on the pavement with the point of her umbrella.
“Cesare, you and I have been friends for all these years, and I have never told you what really happened about Arthur.”
“There is no need to tell me, dear,” he broke in hastily; “I know all about it already.”
“Giovanni told you?”
“Yes, when he was dying. He told me about it one night when I was sitting up with him. He said—Gemma, dear, I had better tell you the truth, now we have begun talking about it—he said that you were always brooding over that wretched story, and he begged me to be as good a friend to you as I could and try to keep you from thinking of it. And I have tried to, dear, though I may not have succeeded—I have, indeed.”
“I know you have,” she answered softly, raising her eyes for a moment; “I should have been badly off without your friendship. But—Giovanni did not tell you about Monsignor Montanelli, then?”
“No, I didn’t know that he had anything to do with it. What he told me was about—all that affair with the spy, and about—”
“About my striking Arthur and his drowning himself. Well, I will tell you about Montanelli.”
They turned back towards the bridge over which the Cardinal’s carriage would have to pass. Gemma looked out steadily across the water as she spoke.
“In those days Montanelli was a canon; he was Director of the Theological Seminary at Pisa, and used to give Arthur lessons in philosophy and read with him after he went up to the Sapienza. They were perfectly devoted to each other; more like two lovers than teacher and pupil. Arthur almost worshipped the ground that Montanelli walked on, and I remember his once telling me that if he lost his ‘Padre’—he always used to call Montanelli so—he should go and drown himself. Well, then you know what happened about the spy. The next day, my father and the Burtons—Arthur’s stepbrothers, most detestable people—spent the whole day dragging the Darsena basin for the body; and I sat in my room alone and thought of what I had done—”
She paused a moment, and went on again:
“Late in the evening my father came into my room and said: ‘Gemma, child, come downstairs; there’s a man I want you to see.’ And when we went down there was one of the students belonging to the group sitting in the consulting room, all white and shaking; and he told us about Giovanni’s second letter coming from the prison to say that they had heard from the jailer about Cardi, and that Arthur had been tricked in the confessional. I remember the student saying to me: ‘It is at least some consolation that we know he was innocent.’ My father held my hands and tried to comfort me; he did not know then about the blow. Then I went back to my room and sat there all night alone. In the morning my father went out again with the Burtons to see the harbour dragged. They had some hope of finding the body there.”
“It was never found, was it?”
“No; it must have got washed out to sea; but they thought there was a chance. I was alone in my room and the servant came up to say that a ‘reverendissimo padre’ had called and she had told him my father was at the docks and he had gone away. I knew it must be Montanelli; so I ran out at the back door and caught him up at the garden gate. When I said: ‘Canon Montanelli, I want to speak to you,’ he just stopped and waited silently for me to speak. Oh, Cesare, if you had seen his face—it haunted me for months afterwards! I said: ‘I am Dr. Warren’s daughter, and I have come to tell you that it is I who have killed Arthur.’ I told him everything, and he stood and listened, like a figure cut in stone, till I had finished; then he said: ‘Set your heart at rest, my child; it is I that am a murderer, not you. I deceived him and he found it out.’ And with that he turned and went out at the gate without another word.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know what happened to him after that; I heard the same evening that he had fallen down in the street in a kind of fit and had been carried into a house near the docks; but that is all I know. My father did everything he could for me; when I told him about it he threw up his practice and took me away to England at once, so that I should never hear anything that could remind me. He was afraid I should end in the water, too; and indeed I believe I was near it at one time. But then, you know, when we found out that my father had cancer I was obliged to come to myself—there was no one else to nurse him. And after he died I was left with the little ones on my hands until my elder brother was able to give them a home. Then there was Giovanni. Do you know, when he came to England we were almost afraid to meet each other with that frightful memory between us. He was so bitterly remorseful for his share in it all—that unhappy letter he wrote from prison. But I believe, really, it was our common trouble that drew us together.”
Martini smiled and shook his head.
“It may have been so on your side,” he said; “but Giovanni had made up his mind from the first time he ever saw you. I remember his coming back to Milan after that first visit to Leghorn and raving about you to me till I was perfectly sick of hearing of the English Gemma. I thought I should hate you. Ah! there it comes!”
The carriage crossed the bridge and drove up to a large house on the Lung’Arno. Montanelli was leaning back on the cushions as if too tired to care any longer for the enthusiastic crowd which had collected round the door to catch a glimpse of him. The inspired look that his face had worn in the cathedral had faded quite away and the sunlight showed the lines of care and fatigue. When he had alighted and passed, with the heavy, spiritless tread of weary and heartsick old age, into the house, Gemma turned away and walked slowly to the bridge. Her face seemed for a moment to reflect the withered, hopeless look of his. Martini walked beside her in silence.
“I have so often wondered,” she began again after a little pause; “what he meant about the deception. It has sometimes occurred to me—”
“Yes?”
“Well, it is very strange; there was the most extraordinary personal resemblance between them.”
“Between whom?”
“Arthur and Montanelli. It was not only I who noticed it. And there was something mysterious in the relationship between the members of that household. Mrs. Burton, Arthur’s mother, was one of the sweetest women I ever knew. Her face had the same spiritual look as Arthur’s, and I believe they were alike in character, too. But she always seemed half frightened, like a detected criminal; and her stepson’s wife used to treat her as no decent person treats a dog. And then Arthur himself was such a startling contrast to all those vulgar Burtons. Of course, when one is a child one takes everything for granted; but looking back on it afterwards I have often wondered whether Arthur was really a Burton.”
“Possibly he found out something about his mother—that may easily have been the cause of his death, not the Cardi affair at all,” Martini interposed, offering the only consolation he could think of at the moment. Gemma shook her head.
“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.
“My dear,” Martini said at last; “if there were any way on earth to undo a thing that is once done, it would be worth while to brood over our old mistakes; but as it is, let the dead bury their dead. It is a terrible story, but at least the poor lad is out of it now, and luckier than some of those that are left—the ones that are in exile and in prison. You and I have them to think of, we have no right to eat out our hearts for the dead. Remember what your own Shelley says: ‘The past is Death’s, the future is thine own.’ Take it, while it is still yours, and fix your mind, not on what you may have done long ago to hurt, but on what you can do now to help.”
In his earnestness he had taken her hand. He dropped it suddenly and drew back at the sound of a soft, cold, drawling voice behind him.
“Monsignor Montan-n-nelli,” murmured this languid voice, “is undoubtedly all you say, my dear doctor. In fact, he appears to be so much too good for this world that he ought to be politely escorted into the next. I am sure he would cause as great a sensation there as he has done here; there are p-p-probably many old-established ghosts who have never seen such a thing as an honest cardinal. And there is nothing that ghosts love as they do novelties—”
“How do you know that?” asked Dr. Riccardo’s voice in a tone of ill-suppressed irritation.
“From Holy Writ, my dear sir. If the Gospel is to be trusted, even the most respectable of all Ghosts had a f-f-fancy for capricious alliances. Now, honesty and c-c-cardinals—that seems to me a somewhat capricious alliance, and rather an uncomfortable one, like shrimps and liquorice. Ah, Signor Martini, and Signora Bolla! Lovely weather after the rain, is it not? Have you been to hear the n-new Savonarola, too?”
Martini turned round sharply. The Gadfly, with a cigar in his mouth and a hothouse flower in his buttonhole, was holding out to him a slender, carefully-gloved hand. With the sunlight reflected in his immaculate boots and glancing back from the water on to his smiling face, he looked to Martini less lame and more conceited than usual. They were shaking hands, affably on the one side and rather sulkily on the other, when Riccardo hastily exclaimed:
“I am afraid Signora Bolla is not well!”
She was so pale that her face looked almost livid under the shadow of her bonnet, and the ribbon at her throat fluttered perceptibly from the violent beating of the heart.
“I will go home,” she said faintly.
A cab was called and Martini got in with her to see her safely home. As the Gadfly bent down to arrange her cloak, which was hanging over the wheel, he raised his eyes suddenly to her face, and Martini saw that she shrank away with a look of something like terror.
“Gemma, what is the matter with you?” he asked, in English, when they had started. “What did that scoundrel say to you?”
“Nothing, Cesare; it was no fault of his. I—I—had a fright—”
“A fright?”
“Yes; I fancied—” She put one hand over her eyes, and he waited silently till she should recover her self-command. Her face was already regaining its natural colour.
“You are quite right,” she said at last, turning to him and speaking in her usual voice; “it is worse than useless to look back at a horrible past. It plays tricks with one’s nerves and makes one imagine all sorts of impossible things. We will never talk about that subject again, Cesare, or I shall see fantastic likenesses to Arthur in every face I meet. It is a kind of hallucination, like a nightmare in broad daylight. Just now, when that odious little fop came up, I fancied it was Arthur.”
V
The Gadfly certainly knew how to make personal enemies. He had arrived in Florence in August, and by the end of October three-fourths of the committee which had invited him shared Martini’s opinion. His savage attacks upon Montanelli had annoyed even his admirers; and Galli himself, who at first had been inclined to uphold everything the witty satirist said or did, began to acknowledge with an aggrieved air that Montanelli had better have been left in peace. “Decent cardinals are none so plenty. One might treat them politely when they do turn up.”
The only person who, apparently, remained quite indifferent to the storm of caricatures and pasquinades was Montanelli himself. It seemed, as Martini said, hardly worth while to expend one’s energy in ridiculing a man who took it so good-humouredly. It was said in the town that Montanelli, one day when the Archbishop of Florence was dining with him, had found in the room one of the Gadfly’s bitter personal lampoons against himself, had read it through and handed the paper to the Archbishop, remarking: “That is rather cleverly put, is it not?”
One day there appeared in the town a leaflet, headed: “The Mystery of the Annunciation.” Even had the author omitted his now familiar signature, a sketch of a gadfly with spread wings, the bitter, trenchant style would have left in the minds of most readers no doubt as to his identity. The skit was in the form of a dialogue between Tuscany as the Virgin Mary, and Montanelli as the angel who, bearing the lilies of purity and crowned with the olive branch of peace, was announcing the advent of the Jesuits. The whole thing was full of offensive personal allusions and hints of the most risky nature, and all Florence felt the satire to be both ungenerous and unfair. And yet all Florence laughed. There was something so irresistible in the Gadfly’s grave absurdities that those who most disapproved of and disliked him laughed as immoderately at all his squibs as did his warmest partisans. Repulsive in tone as the leaflet was, it left its trace upon the popular feeling of the town. Montanelli’s personal reputation stood too high for any lampoon, however witty, seriously to injure it, but for a moment the tide almost turned against him. The Gadfly had known where to sting; and, though eager crowds still collected before the Cardinal’s house to see him enter or leave his carriage, ominous cries of “Jesuit!” and “Sanfedist spy!” often mingled with the cheers and benedictions.
But Montanelli had no lack of supporters. Two days after the publication of the skit, the Churchman, a leading clerical paper, brought out a brilliant article, called: “An Answer to ‘The Mystery of the Annunciation,’ ” and signed: “A Son of the Church.” It was an impassioned defence of Montanelli against the Gadfly’s slanderous imputations. The anonymous writer, after expounding, with great eloquence and fervour, the doctrine of peace on earth and good will towards men, of which the new Pontiff was the evangelist, concluded by challenging the Gadfly to prove a single one of his assertions, and solemnly appealing to the public not to believe a contemptible slanderer. Both the cogency of the article as a bit of special pleading and its merit as a literary composition were sufficiently far above the average to attract much attention in the town, especially as not even the editor of the newspaper could guess the author’s identity. The article was soon reprinted separately in pamphlet form; and the “anonymous defender” was discussed in every coffee-shop in Florence.
The Gadfly responded with a violent attack on the new Pontificate and all its supporters, especially on Montanelli, who, he cautiously hinted, had probably consented to the panegyric on himself. To this the anonymous defender again replied in the Churchman with an indignant denial. During the rest of Montanelli’s stay the controversy raging between the two writers occupied more of the public attention than did even the famous preacher himself.
Some members of the liberal party ventured to remonstrate with the Gadfly about the unnecessary malice of his tone towards Montanelli; but they did not get much satisfaction out of him. He only smiled affably and answered with a languid little stammer: “R-really, gentlemen, you are rather unfair. I expressly stipulated, when I gave in to Signora Bolla, that I should be allowed a l-l-little chuckle all to myself now. It is so nominated in the bond!”
At the end of October Montanelli returned to his see in the Romagna, and, before leaving Florence, preached a farewell sermon in which he spoke of the controversy, gently deprecating the vehemence of both writers and begging his unknown defender to set an example of tolerance by closing a useless and unseemly war of words. On the following day the Churchman contained a notice that, at Monsignor Montanelli’s publicly expressed desire, “A Son of the Church” would withdraw from the controversy.
The last word remained with the Gadfly. He issued a little leaflet, in which he declared himself disarmed and converted by Montanelli’s Christian meekness and ready to weep tears of reconciliation upon the neck of the first Sanfedist he met. “I am even willing,” he concluded; “to embrace my anonymous challenger himself; and if my readers knew, as his Eminence and I know, what that implies and why he remains anonymous, they would believe in the sincerity of my conversion.”
In the latter part of November he announced to the literary committee that he was going for a fortnight’s holiday to the seaside. He went, apparently, to Leghorn; but Dr. Riccardo, going there soon after and wishing to speak to him, searched the town for him in vain. On the 5th of December a political demonstration of the most extreme character burst out in the States of the Church, along the whole chain of the Apennines; and people began to guess the reason of the Gadfly’s sudden fancy to take his holidays in the depth of winter. He came back to Florence when the riots had been quelled, and, meeting Riccardo in the street, remarked affably:
“I hear you were inquiring for me in Leghorn; I was staying in Pisa. What a pretty old town it is! There’s something quite Arcadian about it.”
In Christmas week he attended an afternoon meeting of the literary committee which was held in Dr. Riccardo’s lodgings near the Porta alla Croce. The meeting was a full one, and when he came in, a little late, with an apologetic bow and smile, there seemed to be no seat empty. Riccardo rose to fetch a chair from the next room, but the Gadfly stopped him. “Don’t trouble about it,” he said; “I shall be quite comfortable here”; and crossing the room to a window beside which Gemma had placed her chair, he sat down on the sill, leaning his head indolently back against the shutter.
As he looked down at Gemma, smiling with half-shut eyes, in the subtle, sphinx-like way that gave him the look of a Leonardo da Vinci portrait, the instinctive distrust with which he inspired her deepened into a sense of unreasoning fear.
The proposal under discussion was that a pamphlet be issued setting forth the committee’s views on the dearth with which Tuscany was threatened and the measures which should be taken to meet it. The matter was a somewhat difficult one to decide, because, as usual, the committee’s views upon the subject were much divided. The more advanced section, to which Gemma, Martini, and Riccardo belonged, was in favour of an energetic appeal to both government and public to take adequate measures at once for the relief of the peasantry. The moderate division—including, of course, Grassini—feared that an over-emphatic tone might irritate rather than convince the ministry.
“It is all very well, gentlemen, to want the people helped at once,” he said, looking round upon the red-hot radicals with his calm and pitying air. “We most of us want a good many things that we are not likely to get; but if we start with the tone you propose to adopt, the government is very likely not to begin any relief measures at all till there is actual famine. If we could only induce the ministry to make an inquiry into the state of the crops it would be a step in advance.”
Galli, in his corner by the stove, jumped up to answer his enemy.
“A step in advance—yes, my dear sir; but if there’s going to be a famine, it won’t wait for us to advance at that pace. The people might all starve before we got to any actual relief.”
“It would be interesting to know—” Sacconi began; but several voices interrupted him.
“Speak up; we can’t hear!”
“I should think not, with such an infernal row in the street,” said Galli, irritably. “Is that window shut, Riccardo? One can’t hear one’s self speak!”
Gemma looked round. “Yes,” she said, “the window is quite shut. I think there is a variety show, or some such thing, passing.”
The sounds of shouting and laughter, of the tinkling of bells and trampling of feet, resounded from the street below, mixed with the braying of a villainous brass band and the unmerciful banging of a drum.
“It can’t be helped these few days,” said Riccardo; “we must expect noise at Christmas time. What were you saying, Sacconi?”
“I said it would be interesting to hear what is thought about the matter in Pisa and Leghorn. Perhaps Signor Rivarez can tell us something; he has just come from there.”
The Gadfly did not answer. He was staring out of the window and appeared not to have heard what had been said.
“Signor Rivarez!” said Gemma. She was the only person sitting near to him, and as he remained silent she bent forward and touched him on the arm. He slowly turned his face to her, and she started as she saw its fixed and awful immobility. For a moment it was like the face of a corpse; then the lips moved in a strange, lifeless way.
“Yes,” he whispered; “a variety show.”
Her first instinct was to shield him from the curiosity of the others. Without understanding what was the matter with him, she realized that some frightful fancy or hallucination had seized upon him, and that, for the moment, he was at its mercy, body and soul. She rose quickly and, standing between him and the company, threw the window open as if to look out. No one but herself had seen his face.
In the street a travelling circus was passing, with mountebanks on donkeys and harlequins in parti-coloured dresses. The crowd of holiday masqueraders, laughing and shoving, was exchanging jests and showers of paper ribbon with the clowns and flinging little bags of sugarplums to the columbine, who sat in her car, tricked out in tinsel and feathers, with artificial curls on her forehead and an artificial smile on her painted lips. Behind the car came a motley string of figures—street arabs, beggars, clowns turning somersaults, and costermongers hawking their wares. They were jostling, pelting, and applauding a figure which at first Gemma could not see for the pushing and swaying of the crowd. The next moment, however, she saw plainly what it was—a hunchback, dwarfish and ugly, grotesquely attired in a fool’s dress, with paper cap and bells. He evidently belonged to the strolling company, and was amusing the crowd with hideous grimaces and contortions.
“What is going on out there?” asked Riccardo, approaching the window. “You seem very much interested.”
He was a little surprised at their keeping the whole committee waiting to look at a strolling company of mountebanks. Gemma turned round.
“It is nothing interesting,” she said; “only a variety show; but they made such a noise that I thought it must be something else.”
She was standing with one hand upon the windowsill, and suddenly felt the Gadfly’s cold fingers press the hand with a passionate clasp. “Thank you!” he whispered softly; and then, closing the window, sat down again upon the sill.
“I’m afraid,” he said in his airy manner, “that I have interrupted you, gentlemen. I was l-looking at the variety show; it is s-such a p-pretty sight.”
“Sacconi was asking you a question,” said Martini gruffly. The Gadfly’s behaviour seemed to him an absurd piece of affectation, and he was annoyed that Gemma should have been tactless enough to follow his example. It was not like her.
The Gadfly disclaimed all knowledge of the state of feeling in Pisa, explaining that he had been there “only on a holiday.” He then plunged at once into an animated discussion, first of agricultural prospects, then of the pamphlet question; and continued pouring out a flood of stammering talk till the others were quite tired. He seemed to find some feverish delight in the sound of his own voice.
When the meeting ended and the members of the committee rose to go, Riccardo came up to Martini.
“Will you stop to dinner with me? Fabrizi and Sacconi have promised to stay.”
“Thanks; but I was going to see Signora Bolla home.”
“Are you really afraid I can’t get home by myself?” she asked, rising and putting on her wrap. “Of course he will stay with you, Dr. Riccardo; it’s good for him to get a change. He doesn’t go out half enough.”
“If you will allow me, I will see you home,” the Gadfly interposed; “I am going in that direction.”
“If you really are going that way—”
“I suppose you won’t have time to drop in here in the course of the evening, will you, Rivarez?” asked Riccardo, as he opened the door for them.
The Gadfly looked back over his shoulder, laughing. “I, my dear fellow? I’m going to see the variety show!”
“What a strange creature that is; and what an odd affection for mountebanks!” said Riccardo, coming back to his visitors.
“Case of a fellow-feeling, I should think,” said Martini; “the man’s a mountebank himself, if ever I saw one.”
“I wish I could think he was only that,” Fabrizi interposed, with a grave face. “If he is a mountebank I am afraid he’s a very dangerous one.”
“Dangerous in what way?”
“Well, I don’t like those mysterious little pleasure trips that he is so fond of taking. This is the third time, you know; and I don’t believe he has been in Pisa at all.”
“I suppose it is almost an open secret that it’s into the mountains he goes,” said Sacconi. “He has hardly taken the trouble to deny that he is still in relations with the smugglers he got to know in the Savigno affair, and it’s quite natural he should take advantage of their friendship to get his leaflets across the Papal frontier.”
“For my part,” said Riccardo; “what I wanted to talk to you about is this very question. It occurred to me that we could hardly do better than ask Rivarez to undertake the management of our own smuggling. That press at Pistoja is very inefficiently managed, to my thinking; and the way the leaflets are taken across, always rolled in those everlasting cigars, is more than primitive.”
“It has answered pretty well up till now,” said Martini contumaciously. He was getting wearied of hearing Galli and Riccardo always put the Gadfly forward as a model to copy, and inclined to think that the world had gone well enough before this “lackadaisical buccaneer” turned up to set everyone to rights.
“It has answered so far well that we have been satisfied with it for want of anything better; but you know there have been plenty of arrests and confiscations. Now I believe that if Rivarez undertook the business for us, there would be less of that.”
“Why do you think so?”
“In the first place, the smugglers look upon us as strangers to do business with, or as sheep to fleece, whereas Rivarez is their personal friend, very likely their leader, whom they look up to and trust. You may be sure every smuggler in the Apennines will do for a man who was in the Savigno revolt what he will not do for us. In the next place, there’s hardly a man among us that knows the mountains as Rivarez does. Remember, he has been a fugitive among them, and knows the smugglers’ paths by heart. No smuggler would dare to cheat him, even if he wished to, and no smuggler could cheat him if he dared to try.”
“Then is your proposal that we should ask him to take over the whole management of our literature on the other side of the frontier—distribution, addresses, hiding-places, everything—or simply that we should ask him to put the things across for us?”
“Well, as for addresses and hiding-places, he probably knows already all the ones that we have and a good many more that we have not. I don’t suppose we should be able to teach him much in that line. As for distribution, it’s as the others prefer, of course. The important question, to my mind, is the actual smuggling itself. Once the books are safe in Bologna, it’s a comparatively simple matter to circulate them.”
“For my part,” said Martini, “I am against the plan. In the first place, all this about his skilfulness is mere conjecture; we have not actually seen him engaged in frontier work and do not know whether he keeps his head in critical moments.”
“Oh, you needn’t have any doubt of that!” Riccardo put in. “The history of the Savigno affair proves that he keeps his head.”
“And then,” Martini went on; “I do not feel at all inclined, from what little I know of Rivarez, to entrust him with all the party’s secrets. He seems to me featherbrained and theatrical. To give the whole management of a party’s contraband work into a man’s hands is a serious matter. Fabrizi, what do you think?”
“If I had only such objections as yours, Martini,” replied the professor, “I should certainly waive them in the case of a man really possessing, as Rivarez undoubtedly does, all the qualifications Riccardo speaks of. For my part, I have not the slightest doubt as to either his courage, his honesty, or his presence of mind; and that he knows both mountains and mountaineers we have had ample proof. But there is another objection. I do not feel sure that it is only for the smuggling of pamphlets he goes into the mountains. I have begun to doubt whether he has not another purpose. This is, of course, entirely between ourselves. It is a mere suspicion. It seems to me just possible that he is in connection with some one of the sects, and perhaps with the most dangerous of them.”
“Which one do you mean—the ‘Red Girdles’?”
“No; the ‘Occoltellatori.’ ”
“The ‘Knifers’! But that is a little body of outlaws—peasants, most of them, with neither education nor political experience.”
“So were the insurgents of Savigno; but they had a few educated men as leaders, and this little society may have the same. And remember, it’s pretty well known that most of the members of those more violent sects in the Romagna are survivors of the Savigno affair, who found themselves too weak to fight the Churchmen in open insurrection, and so have fallen back on assassination. Their hands are not strong enough for guns, and they take to knives instead.”
“But what makes you suppose Rivarez to be connected with them?”
“I don’t suppose, I merely suspect. In any case, I think we had better find out for certain before we entrust our smuggling to him. If he attempted to do both kinds of work at once he would injure our party most terribly; he would simply destroy its reputation and accomplish nothing. However, we will talk of that another time. I wanted to speak to you about the news from Rome. It is said that a commission is to be appointed to draw up a project for a municipal constitution.”
VI
Gemma and the Gadfly walked silently along the Lung’Arno. His feverish talkativeness seemed to have quite spent itself; he had hardly spoken a word since they left Riccardo’s door, and Gemma was heartily glad of his silence. She always felt embarrassed in his company, and today more so than usual, for his strange behaviour at the committee meeting had greatly perplexed her.
By the Uffizi palace he suddenly stopped and turned to her.
“Are you tired?”
“No; why?”
“Nor especially busy this evening?”
“No.”
“I want to ask a favour of you; I want you to come for a walk with me.”
“Where to?”
“Nowhere in particular; anywhere you like.”
“But what for?”
He hesitated.
“I—can’t tell you—at least, it’s very difficult; but please come if you can.”
He raised his eyes suddenly from the ground, and she saw how strange their expression was.
“There is something the matter with you,” she said gently. He pulled a leaf from the flower in his buttonhole, and began tearing it to pieces. Who was it that he was so oddly like? Someone who had that same trick of the fingers and hurried, nervous gesture.
“I am in trouble,” he said, looking down at his hands and speaking in a hardly audible voice. “I—don’t want to be alone this evening. Will you come?”
“Yes, certainly, unless you would rather go to my lodgings.”
“No; come and dine with me at a restaurant. There’s one on the Signoria. Please don’t refuse, now; you’ve promised!”
They went into a restaurant, where he ordered dinner, but hardly touched his own share, and remained obstinately silent, crumbling the bread over the cloth, and fidgeting with the fringe of his table napkin. Gemma felt thoroughly uncomfortable, and began to wish she had refused to come; the silence was growing awkward; yet she could not begin to make small-talk with a person who seemed to have forgotten her presence. At last he looked up and said abruptly:
“Would you like to see the variety show?”
She stared at him in astonishment. What had he got into his head about variety shows?
“Have you ever seen one?” he asked before she had time to speak.
“No; I don’t think so. I didn’t suppose they were interesting.”
“They are very interesting. I don’t think anyone can study the life of the people without seeing them. Let us go back to the Porta alla Croce.”
When they arrived the mountebanks had set up their tent beside the town gate, and an abominable scraping of fiddles and banging of drums announced that the performance had begun.
The entertainment was of the roughest kind. A few clowns, harlequins, and acrobats, a circus-rider jumping through hoops, the painted columbine, and the hunchback performing various dull and foolish antics, represented the entire force of the company. The jokes were not, on the whole, coarse or offensive; but they were very tame and stale, and there was a depressing flatness about the whole thing. The audience laughed and clapped from their innate Tuscan courtesy; but the only part which they seemed really to enjoy was the performance of the hunchback, in which Gemma could find nothing either witty or skilful. It was merely a series of grotesque and hideous contortions, which the spectators mimicked, holding up children on their shoulders that the little ones might see the “ugly man.”
“Signor Rivarez, do you really think this attractive?” said Gemma, turning to the Gadfly, who was standing beside her, his arm round one of the wooden posts of the tent. “It seems to me—”
She broke off and remained looking at him silently. Except when she had stood with Montanelli at the garden gate in Leghorn, she had never seen a human face express such fathomless, hopeless misery. She thought of Dante’s hell as she watched him.
Presently the hunchback, receiving a kick from one of the clowns, turned a somersault and tumbled in a grotesque heap outside the ring. A dialogue between two clowns began, and the Gadfly seemed to wake out of a dream.
“Shall we go?” he asked; “or would you like to see more?”
“I would rather go.”
They left the tent, and walked across the dark green to the river. For a few moments neither spoke.
“What did you think of the show?” the Gadfly asked presently.
“I thought it rather a dreary business; and part of it seemed to me positively unpleasant.”
“Which part?”
“Well, all those grimaces and contortions. They are simply ugly; there is nothing clever about them.”
“Do you mean the hunchback’s performance?”
Remembering his peculiar sensitiveness on the subject of his own physical defects, she had avoided mentioning this particular bit of the entertainment; but now that he had touched upon the subject himself, she answered: “Yes; I did not like that part at all.”
“That was the part the people enjoyed most.”
“I dare say; and that is just the worst thing about it.”
“Because it was inartistic?”
“N-no; it was all inartistic. I meant—because it was cruel.”
He smiled.
“Cruel? Do you mean to the hunchback?”
“I mean—Of course the man himself was quite indifferent; no doubt, it is to him just a way of getting a living, like the circus-rider’s way or the columbine’s. But the thing makes one feel unhappy. It is humiliating; it is the degradation of a human being.”
“He probably is not any more degraded than he was to start with. Most of us are degraded in one way or another.”
“Yes; but this—I dare say you will think it an absurd prejudice; but a human body, to me, is a sacred thing; I don’t like to see it treated irreverently and made hideous.”
“And a human soul?”
He had stopped short, and was standing with one hand on the stone balustrade of the embankment, looking straight at her.
“A soul?” she repeated, stopping in her turn to look at him in wonder.
He flung out both hands with a sudden, passionate gesture.
“Has it never occurred to you that that miserable clown may have a soul—a living, struggling, human soul, tied down into that crooked hulk of a body and forced to slave for it? You that are so tenderhearted to everything—you that pity the body in its fool’s dress and bells—have you never thought of the wretched soul that has not even motley to cover its horrible nakedness? Think of it shivering with cold, stilled with shame and misery, before all those people—feeling their jeers that cut like a whip—their laughter, that burns like red-hot iron on the bare flesh! Think of it looking round—so helpless before them all—for the mountains that will not fall on it—for the rocks that have not the heart to cover it—envying the rats that can creep into some hole in the earth and hide; and remember that a soul is dumb—it has no voice to cry out—it must endure, and endure, and endure. Oh! I’m talking nonsense! Why on earth don’t you laugh? You have no sense of humour!”
Slowly and in dead silence she turned and walked on along the river side. During the whole evening it had not once occurred to her to connect his trouble, whatever it might be, with the variety show; and now that some dim picture of his inner life had been revealed to her by this sudden outburst, she could not find, in her overwhelming pity for him, one word to say. He walked on beside her, with his head turned away, and looked into the water.
“I want you, please, to understand,” he began suddenly, turning to her with a defiant air, “that everything I have just been saying to you is pure imagination. I’m rather given to romancing, but I don’t like people to take it seriously.”
She made no answer, and they walked on in silence. As they passed by the gateway of the Uffizi, he crossed the road and stooped down over a dark bundle that was lying against the railings.
“What is the matter, little one?” he asked, more gently than she had ever heard him speak. “Why don’t you go home?”
The bundle moved, and answered something in a low, moaning voice. Gemma came across to look, and saw a child of about six years old, ragged and dirty, crouching on the pavement like a frightened animal. The Gadfly was bending down with his hand on the unkempt head.
“What is it?” he said, stooping lower to catch the unintelligible answer. “You ought to go home to bed; little boys have no business out of doors at night; you’ll be quite frozen! Give me your hand and jump up like a man! Where do you live?”
He took the child’s arm to raise him. The result was a sharp scream and a quick shrinking away.
“Why, what is it?” the Gadfly asked, kneeling down on the pavement. “Ah! Signora, look here!”
The child’s shoulder and jacket were covered with blood.
“Tell me what has happened?” the Gadfly went on caressingly. “It wasn’t a fall, was it? No? Someone’s been beating you? I thought so! Who was it?”
“My uncle.”
“Ah, yes! And when was it?”
“This morning. He was drunk, and I—I—”
“And you got in his way—was that it? You shouldn’t get in people’s way when they are drunk, little man; they don’t like it. What shall we do with this poor mite, signora? Come here to the light, sonny, and let me look at that shoulder. Put your arm round my neck; I won’t hurt you. There we are!”
He lifted the boy in his arms, and, carrying him across the street, set him down on the wide stone balustrade. Then, taking out a pocketknife, he deftly ripped up the torn sleeve, supporting the child’s head against his breast, while Gemma held the injured arm. The shoulder was badly bruised and grazed, and there was a deep gash on the arm.
“That’s an ugly cut to give a mite like you,” said the Gadfly, fastening his handkerchief round the wound to prevent the jacket from rubbing against it. “What did he do it with?”
“The shovel. I went to ask him to give me a soldo to get some polenta at the corner shop, and he hit me with the shovel.”
The Gadfly shuddered. “Ah!” he said softly, “that hurts; doesn’t it, little one?”
“He hit me with the shovel—and I ran away—I ran away—because he hit me.”
“And you’ve been wandering about ever since, without any dinner?”
Instead of answering, the child began to sob violently. The Gadfly lifted him off the balustrade.
“There, there! We’ll soon set all that straight. I wonder if we can get a cab anywhere. I’m afraid they’ll all be waiting by the theatre; there’s a grand performance going on tonight. I am sorry to drag you about so, signora; but—”
“I would rather come with you. You may want help. Do you think you can carry him so far? Isn’t he very heavy?”
“Oh, I can manage, thank you.”
At the theatre door they found only a few cabs waiting, and these were all engaged. The performance was over, and most of the audience had gone. Zita’s name was printed in large letters on the wall-placards; she had been dancing in the ballet. Asking Gemma to wait for him a moment, the Gadfly went round to the performers’ entrance, and spoke to an attendant.
“Has Mme. Reni gone yet?”
“No, sir,” the man answered, staring blankly at the spectacle of a well-dressed gentleman carrying a ragged street child in his arms, “Mme. Reni is just coming out, I think; her carriage is waiting for her. Yes; there she comes.”
Zita descended the stairs, leaning on the arm of a young cavalry officer. She looked superbly handsome, with an opera cloak of flame-coloured velvet thrown over her evening dress, and a great fan of ostrich plumes hanging from her waist. In the entry she stopped short, and, drawing her hand away from the officer’s arm, approached the Gadfly in amazement.
“Felice!” she exclaimed under her breath, “what have you got there?”
“I have picked up this child in the street. It is hurt and starving; and I want to get it home as quickly as possible. There is not a cab to be got anywhere, so I want to have your carriage.”
“Felice! you are not going to take a horrid beggar-child into your rooms! Send for a policeman, and let him carry it to the Refuge or whatever is the proper place for it. You can’t have all the paupers in the town—”
“It is hurt,” the Gadfly repeated; “it can go to the Refuge tomorrow, if necessary, but I must see to the child first and give it some food.”
Zita made a little grimace of disgust. “You’ve got its head right against your shirt! How can you? It is dirty!”
The Gadfly looked up with a sudden flash of anger.
“It is hungry,” he said fiercely. “You don’t know what that means, do you?”
“Signor Rivarez,” interposed Gemma, coming forward, “my lodgings are quite close. Let us take the child in there. Then, if you cannot find a vettura, I will manage to put it up for the night.”
He turned round quickly. “You don’t mind?”
“Of course not. Good night, Mme. Reni!”
The gipsy, with a stiff bow and an angry shrug of her shoulders, took her officer’s arm again, and, gathering up the train of her dress, swept past them to the contested carriage.
“I will send it back to fetch you and the child, if you like, M. Rivarez,” she said, pausing on the doorstep.
“Very well; I will give the address.” He came out on to the pavement, gave the address to the driver, and walked back to Gemma with his burden.
Katie was waiting up for her mistress; and, on hearing what had happened, ran for warm water and other necessaries. Placing the child on a chair, the Gadfly knelt down beside him, and, deftly slipping off the ragged clothing, bathed and bandaged the wound with tender, skilful hands. He had just finished washing the boy, and was wrapping him in a warm blanket, when Gemma came in with a tray in her hands.
“Is your patient ready for his supper?” she asked, smiling at the strange little figure. “I have been cooking it for him.”
The Gadfly stood up and rolled the dirty rags together. “I’m afraid we have made a terrible mess in your room,” he said. “As for these, they had better go straight into the fire, and I will buy him some new clothes tomorrow. Have you any brandy in the house, signora? I think he ought to have a little. I will just wash my hands, if you will allow me.”
When the child had finished his supper, he immediately went to sleep in the Gadfly’s arms, with his rough head against the white shirtfront. Gemma, who had been helping Katie to set the disordered room tidy again, sat down at the table.
“Signor Rivarez, you must take something before you go home—you had hardly any dinner, and it’s very late.”
“I should like a cup of tea in the English fashion, if you have it. I’m sorry to keep you up so late.”
“Oh! that doesn’t matter. Put the child down on the sofa; he will tire you. Wait a minute; I will just lay a sheet over the cushions. What are you going to do with him?”
“Tomorrow? Find out whether he has any other relations except that drunken brute; and if not, I suppose I must follow Mme. Reni’s advice, and take him to the Refuge. Perhaps the kindest thing to do would be to put a stone round his neck and pitch him into the river there; but that would expose me to unpleasant consequences. Fast asleep! What an odd little lump of ill-luck you are, you mite—not half as capable of defending yourself as a stray cat!”
When Katie brought in the tea-tray, the boy opened his eyes and sat up with a bewildered air. Recognizing the Gadfly, whom he already regarded as his natural protector, he wriggled off the sofa, and, much encumbered by the folds of his blanket, came up to nestle against him. He was by now sufficiently revived to be inquisitive; and, pointing to the mutilated left hand, in which the Gadfly was holding a piece of cake, asked:
“What’s that?”
“That? Cake; do you want some? I think you’ve had enough for now. Wait till tomorrow, little man.”
“No—that!” He stretched out his hand and touched the stumps of the amputated fingers and the great scar on the wrist. The Gadfly put down his cake.
“Oh, that! It’s the same sort of thing as what you have on your shoulder—a hit I got from someone stronger than I was.”
“Didn’t it hurt awfully?”
“Oh, I don’t know—not more than other things. There, now, go to sleep again; you have no business asking questions at this time of night.”
When the carriage arrived the boy was again asleep; and the Gadfly, without awaking him, lifted him gently and carried him out on to the stairs.
“You have been a sort of ministering angel to me today,” he said to Gemma, pausing at the door. “But I suppose that need not prevent us from quarrelling to our heart’s content in future.”
“I have no desire to quarrel with anyone.”
“Ah! but I have. Life would be unendurable without quarrels. A good quarrel is the salt of the earth; it’s better than a variety show!”
And with that he went downstairs, laughing softly to himself, with the sleeping child in his arms.
VII
One day in the first week of January Martini, who had sent round the forms of invitation to the monthly group-meeting of the literary committee, received from the Gadfly a laconic, pencil-scrawled “Very sorry: can’t come.” He was a little annoyed, as a notice of “important business” had been put into the invitation; this cavalier treatment seemed to him almost insolent. Moreover, three separate letters containing bad news arrived during the day, and the wind was in the east, so that Martini felt out of sorts and out of temper; and when, at the group meeting, Dr. Riccardo asked, “Isn’t Rivarez here?” he answered rather sulkily: “No; he seems to have got something more interesting on hand, and can’t come, or doesn’t want to.”
“Really, Martini,” said Galli irritably, “you are about the most prejudiced person in Florence. Once you object to a man, everything he does is wrong. How could Rivarez come when he’s ill?”
“Who told you he was ill?”
“Didn’t you know? He’s been laid up for the last four days.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“I don’t know. He had to put off an appointment with me on Thursday on account of illness; and last night, when I went round, I heard that he was too ill to see anyone. I thought Riccardo would be looking after him.”
“I knew nothing about it. I’ll go round tonight and see if he wants anything.”
The next morning Riccardo, looking very pale and tired, came into Gemma’s little study. She was sitting at the table, reading out monotonous strings of figures to Martini, who, with a magnifying glass in one hand and a finely pointed pencil in the other, was making tiny marks in the pages of a book. She made with one hand a gesture requesting silence. Riccardo, knowing that a person who is writing in cipher must not be interrupted, sat down on the sofa behind her and yawned like a man who can hardly keep awake.
“2, 4; 3, 7; 6, 1; 3, 5; 4, 1;” Gemma’s voice went on with machine-like evenness. “8, 4; 7, 2; 5, 1; that finishes the sentence, Cesare.”
She stuck a pin into the paper to mark the exact place, and turned round.
“Good morning, doctor; how fagged you look! Are you well?”
“Oh, I’m well enough—only tired out. I’ve had an awful night with Rivarez.”
“With Rivarez?”
“Yes; I’ve been up with him all night, and now I must go off to my hospital patients. I just came round to know whether you can think of anyone that could look after him a bit for the next few days. He’s in a devil of a state. I’ll do my best, of course; but I really haven’t the time; and he won’t hear of my sending in a nurse.”
“What is the matter with him?”
“Well, rather a complication of things. First of all—”
“First of all, have you had any breakfast?”
“Yes, thank you. About Rivarez—no doubt, it’s complicated with a lot of nerve trouble; but the main cause of disturbance is an old injury that seems to have been disgracefully neglected. Altogether, he’s in a frightfully knocked-about state; I suppose it was that war in South America—and he certainly didn’t get proper care when the mischief was done. Probably things were managed in a very rough-and-ready fashion out there; he’s lucky to be alive at all. However, there’s a chronic tendency to inflammation, and any trifle may bring on an attack—”
“Is that dangerous?”
“N-no; the chief danger in a case of that kind is of the patient getting desperate and taking a dose of arsenic.”
“It is very painful, of course?”
“It’s simply horrible; I don’t know how he manages to bear it. I was obliged to stupefy him with opium in the night—a thing I hate to do with a nervous patient; but I had to stop it somehow.”
“He is nervous, I should think.”
“Very, but splendidly plucky. As long as he was not actually lightheaded with the pain last night, his coolness was quite wonderful. But I had an awful job with him towards the end. How long do you suppose this thing has been going on? Just five nights; and not a soul within call except that stupid landlady, who wouldn’t wake if the house tumbled down, and would be no use if she did.”
“But what about the ballet-girl?”
“Yes; isn’t that a curious thing? He won’t let her come near him. He has a morbid horror of her. Altogether, he’s one of the most incomprehensible creatures I ever met—a perfect mass of contradictions.”
He took out his watch and looked at it with a preoccupied face. “I shall be late at the hospital; but it can’t be helped. The junior will have to begin without me for once. I wish I had known of all this before—it ought not to have been let go on that way night after night.”
“But why on earth didn’t he send to say he was ill?” Martini interrupted. “He might have guessed we shouldn’t have left him stranded in that fashion.”
“I wish, doctor,” said Gemma, “that you had sent for one of us last night, instead of wearing yourself out like this.”
“My dear lady, I wanted to send round to Galli; but Rivarez got so frantic at the suggestion that I didn’t dare attempt it. When I asked him whether there was anyone else he would like fetched, he looked at me for a minute, as if he were scared out of his wits, and then put up both hands to his eyes and said: ‘Don’t tell them; they will laugh!’ He seemed quite possessed with some fancy about people laughing at something. I couldn’t make out what; he kept talking Spanish; but patients do say the oddest things sometimes.”
“Who is with him now?” asked Gemma.
“No one except the landlady and her maid.”
“I’ll go to him at once,” said Martini.
“Thank you. I’ll look round again in the evening. You’ll find a paper of written directions in the table-drawer by the large window, and the opium is on the shelf in the next room. If the pain comes on again, give him another dose—not more than one; but don’t leave the bottle where he can get at it, whatever you do; he might be tempted to take too much.”
When Martini entered the darkened room, the Gadfly turned his head round quickly, and, holding out to him a burning hand, began, in a bad imitation of his usual flippant manner:
“Ah, Martini! You have come to rout me out about those proofs. It’s no use swearing at me for missing the committee last night; the fact is, I have not been quite well, and—”
“Never mind the committee. I have just seen Riccardo, and have come to know if I can be of any use.”
The Gadfly set his face like a flint.
“Oh, really! that is very kind of you; but it wasn’t worth the trouble. I’m only a little out of sorts.”
“So I understood from Riccardo. He was up with you all night, I believe.”
The Gadfly bit his lip savagely.
“I am quite comfortable, thank you, and don’t want anything.”
“Very well; then I will sit in the other room; perhaps you would rather be alone. I will leave the door ajar, in case you call me.”
“Please don’t trouble about it; I really shan’t want anything. I should be wasting your time for nothing.”
“Nonsense, man!” Martini broke in roughly. “What’s the use of trying to fool me that way? Do you think I have no eyes? Lie still and go to sleep, if you can.”
He went into the adjoining room, and, leaving the door open, sat down with a book. Presently he heard the Gadfly move restlessly two or three times. He put down his book and listened. There was a short silence, then another restless movement; then the quick, heavy, panting breath of a man clenching his teeth to suppress a groan. He went back into the room.
“Can I do anything for you, Rivarez?”
There was no answer, and he crossed the room to the bedside. The Gadfly, with a ghastly, livid face, looked at him for a moment, and silently shook his head.
“Shall I give you some more opium? Riccardo said you were to have it if the pain got very bad.”
“No, thank you; I can bear it a bit longer. It may be worse later on.”
Martini shrugged his shoulders and sat down beside the bed. For an interminable hour he watched in silence; then he rose and fetched the opium.
“Rivarez, I won’t let this go on any longer; if you can stand it, I can’t. You must have the stuff.”
The Gadfly took it without speaking. Then he turned away and closed his eyes. Martini sat down again, and listened as the breathing became gradually deep and even.
The Gadfly was too much exhausted to wake easily when once asleep. Hour after hour he lay absolutely motionless. Martini approached him several times during the day and evening, and looked at the still figure; but, except the breathing, there was no sign of life. The face was so wan and colourless that at last a sudden fear seized upon him; what if he had given too much opium? The injured left arm lay on the coverlet, and he shook it gently to rouse the sleeper. As he did so, the unfastened sleeve fell back, showing a series of deep and fearful scars covering the arm from wrist to elbow.
“That arm must have been in a pleasant condition when those marks were fresh,” said Riccardo’s voice behind him.
“Ah, there you are at last! Look here, Riccardo; ought this man to sleep forever? I gave him a dose about ten hours ago, and he hasn’t moved a muscle since.”
Riccardo stooped down and listened for a moment.
“No; he is breathing quite properly; it’s nothing but sheer exhaustion—what you might expect after such a night. There may be another paroxysm before morning. Someone will sit up, I hope?”
“Galli will; he has sent to say he will be here by ten.”
“It’s nearly that now. Ah, he’s waking! Just see the maidservant gets that broth hot. Gently—gently, Rivarez! There, there, you needn’t fight, man; I’m not a bishop!”
The Gadfly started up with a shrinking, scared look. “Is it my turn?” he said hurriedly in Spanish. “Keep the people amused a minute; I—Ah! I didn’t see you, Riccardo.”
He looked round the room and drew one hand across his forehead as if bewildered. “Martini! Why, I thought you had gone away. I must have been asleep.”
“You have been sleeping like the beauty in the fairy story for the last ten hours; and now you are to have some broth and go to sleep again.”
“Ten hours! Martini, surely you haven’t been here all that time?”
“Yes; I was beginning to wonder whether I hadn’t given you an overdose of opium.”
The Gadfly shot a sly glance at him.
“No such luck! Wouldn’t you have nice quiet committee-meetings? What the devil do you want, Riccardo? Do for mercy’s sake leave me in peace, can’t you? I hate being mauled about by doctors.”
“Well then, drink this and I’ll leave you in peace. I shall come round in a day or two, though, and give you a thorough overhauling. I think you have pulled through the worst of this business now; you don’t look quite so much like a death’s head at a feast.”
“Oh, I shall be all right soon, thanks. Who’s that—Galli? I seem to have a collection of all the graces here tonight.”
“I have come to stop the night with you.”
“Nonsense! I don’t want anyone. Go home, all the lot of you. Even if the thing should come on again, you can’t help me; I won’t keep taking opium. It’s all very well once in a way.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Riccardo said. “But that’s not always an easy resolution to stick to.”
The Gadfly looked up, smiling. “No fear! If I’d been going in for that sort of thing, I should have done it long ago.”
“Anyway, you are not going to be left alone,” Riccardo answered drily. “Come into the other room a minute, Galli; I want to speak to you. Good night, Rivarez; I’ll look in tomorrow.”
Martini was following them out of the room when he heard his name softly called. The Gadfly was holding out a hand to him.
“Thank you!”
“Oh, stuff! Go to sleep.”
When Riccardo had gone, Martini remained a few minutes in the outer room, talking with Galli. As he opened the front door of the house he heard a carriage stop at the garden gate and saw a woman’s figure get out and come up the path. It was Zita, returning, evidently, from some evening entertainment. He lifted his hat and stood aside to let her pass, then went out into the dark lane leading from the house to the Poggio Imperiale. Presently the gate clicked and rapid footsteps came down the lane.
“Wait a minute!” she said.
When he turned back to meet her she stopped short, and then came slowly towards him, dragging one hand after her along the hedge. There was a single streetlamp at the corner, and he saw by its light that she was hanging her head down as though embarrassed or ashamed.
“How is he?” she asked without looking up.
“Much better than he was this morning. He has been asleep most of the day and seems less exhausted. I think the attack is passing over.”
She still kept her eyes on the ground.
“Has it been very bad this time?”
“About as bad as it can well be, I should think.”
“I thought so. When he won’t let me come into the room, that always means it’s bad.”
“Does he often have attacks like this?”
“That depends—It’s so irregular. Last summer, in Switzerland, he was quite well; but the winter before, when we were in Vienna, it was awful. He wouldn’t let me come near him for days together. He hates to have me about when he’s ill.”
She glanced up for a moment, and, dropping her eyes again, went on:
“He always used to send me off to a ball, or concert, or something, on one pretext or another, when he felt it coming on. Then he would lock himself into his room. I used to slip back and sit outside the door—he would have been furious if he’d known. He’d let the dog come in if it whined, but not me. He cares more for it, I think.”
There was a curious, sullen defiance in her manner.
“Well, I hope it won’t be so bad any more,” said Martini kindly. “Dr. Riccardo is taking the case seriously in hand. Perhaps he will be able to make a permanent improvement. And, in any case, the treatment gives relief at the moment. But you had better send to us at once, another time. He would have suffered very much less if we had known of it earlier. Good night!”
He held out his hand, but she drew back with a quick gesture of refusal.
“I don’t see why you want to shake hands with his mistress.”
“As you like, of course,” he began in embarrassment.
She stamped her foot on the ground. “I hate you!” she cried, turning on him with eyes like glowing coals. “I hate you all! You come here talking politics to him; and he lets you sit up the night with him and give him things to stop the pain, and I daren’t so much as peep at him through the door! What is he to you? What right have you to come and steal him away from me? I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
She burst into a violent fit of sobbing, and, darting back into the garden, slammed the gate in his face.
“Good Heavens!” said Martini to himself, as he walked down the lane. “That girl is actually in love with him! Of all the extraordinary things—”
VIII
The Gadfly’s recovery was rapid. One afternoon in the following week Riccardo found him lying on the sofa in a Turkish dressing-gown, chatting with Martini and Galli. He even talked about going downstairs; but Riccardo merely laughed at the suggestion and asked whether he would like a tramp across the valley to Fiesole to start with.
“You might go and call on the Grassinis for a change,” he added wickedly. “I’m sure madame would be delighted to see you, especially now, when you look so pale and interesting.”
The Gadfly clasped his hands with a tragic gesture.
“Bless my soul! I never thought of that! She’d take me for one of Italy’s martyrs, and talk patriotism to me. I should have to act up to the part, and tell her I’ve been cut to pieces in an underground dungeon and stuck together again rather badly; and she’d want to know exactly what the process felt like. You don’t think she’d believe it, Riccardo? I’ll bet you my Indian dagger against the bottled tapeworm in your den that she’ll swallow the biggest lie I can invent. That’s a generous offer, and you’d better jump at it.”
“Thanks, I’m not so fond of murderous tools as you are.”
“Well, a tapeworm is as murderous as a dagger, any day, and not half so pretty.”
“But as it happens, my dear fellow, I don’t want the dagger and I do want the tapeworm. Martini, I must run off. Are you in charge of this obstreperous patient?”
“Only till three o’clock. Galli and I have to go to San Miniato, and Signora Bolla is coming till I can get back.”
“Signora Bolla!” the Gadfly repeated in a tone of dismay. “Why, Martini, this will never do! I can’t have a lady bothered over me and my ailments. Besides, where is she to sit? She won’t like to come in here.”
“Since when have you gone in so fiercely for the proprieties?” asked Riccardo, laughing. “My good man, Signora Bolla is head nurse in general to all of us. She has looked after sick people ever since she was in short frocks, and does it better than any sister of mercy I know. Won’t like to come into your room! Why, you might be talking of the Grassini woman! I needn’t leave any directions if she’s coming, Martini. Heart alive, it’s half-past two; I must be off!”
“Now, Rivarez, take your physic before she comes,” said Galli, approaching the sofa with a medicine glass.
“Damn the physic!” The Gadfly had reached the irritable stage of convalescence, and was inclined to give his devoted nurses a bad time. “W-what do you want to d-d-dose me with all sorts of horrors for now the pain is gone?”
“Just because I don’t want it to come back. You wouldn’t like it if you collapsed when Signora Bolla is here and she had to give you opium.”
“My g-good sir, if that pain is going to come back it will come; it’s not a t-toothache to be frightened away with your trashy mixtures. They are about as much use as a t-toy squirt for a house on fire. However, I suppose you must have your way.”
He took the glass with his left hand, and the sight of the terrible scars recalled Galli to the former subject of conversation.
“By the way,” he asked; “how did you get so much knocked about? In the war, was it?”
“Now, didn’t I just tell you it was a case of secret dungeons and—”
“Yes, that version is for Signora Grassini’s benefit. Really, I suppose it was in the war with Brazil?”
“Yes, I got a bit hurt there; and then hunting in the savage districts and one thing and another.”
“Ah, yes; on the scientific expedition. You can fasten your shirt; I have quite done. You seem to have had an exciting time of it out there.”
“Well, of course you can’t live in savage countries without getting a few adventures once in a way,” said the Gadfly lightly; “and you can hardly expect them all to be pleasant.”
“Still, I don’t understand how you managed to get so much knocked about unless in a bad adventure with wild beasts—those scars on your left arm, for instance.”
“Ah, that was in a puma-hunt. You see, I had fired—”
There was a knock at the door.
“Is the room tidy, Martini? Yes? Then please open the door. This is really most kind, signora; you must excuse my not getting up.”
“Of course you mustn’t get up; I have not come as a caller. I am a little early, Cesare. I thought perhaps you were in a hurry to go.”
“I can stop for a quarter of an hour. Let me put your cloak in the other room. Shall I take the basket, too?”
“Take care; those are new-laid eggs. Katie brought them in from Monte Oliveto this morning. There are some Christmas roses for you, Signor Rivarez; I know you are fond of flowers.”
She sat down beside the table and began clipping the stalks of the flowers and arranging them in a vase.
“Well, Rivarez,” said Galli; “tell us the rest of the puma-hunt story; you had just begun.”
“Ah, yes! Galli was asking me about life in South America, signora; and I was telling him how I came to get my left arm spoiled. It was in Peru. We had been wading a river on a puma-hunt, and when I fired at the beast the powder wouldn’t go off; it had got splashed with water. Naturally the puma didn’t wait for me to rectify that; and this is the result.”
“That must have been a pleasant experience.”
“Oh, not so bad! One must take the rough with the smooth, of course; but it’s a splendid life on the whole. Serpent-catching, for instance—”
He rattled on, telling anecdote after anecdote; now of the Argentine war, now of the Brazilian expedition, now of hunting feats and adventures with savages or wild beasts. Galli, with the delight of a child hearing a fairy story, kept interrupting every moment to ask questions. He was of the impressionable Neapolitan temperament and loved everything sensational. Gemma took some knitting from her basket and listened silently, with busy fingers and downcast eyes. Martini frowned and fidgeted. The manner in which the anecdotes were told seemed to him boastful and self-conscious; and, notwithstanding his unwilling admiration for a man who could endure physical pain with the amazing fortitude which he had seen the week before, he genuinely disliked the Gadfly and all his works and ways.
“It must have been a glorious life!” sighed Galli with naive envy. “I wonder you ever made up your mind to leave Brazil. Other countries must seem so flat after it!”
“I think I was happiest in Peru and Ecuador,” said the Gadfly. “That really is a magnificent tract of country. Of course it is very hot, especially the coast district of Ecuador, and one has to rough it a bit; but the scenery is superb beyond imagination.”
“I believe,” said Galli, “the perfect freedom of life in a barbarous country would attract me more than any scenery. A man must feel his personal, human dignity as he can never feel it in our crowded towns.”
“Yes,” the Gadfly answered; “that is—”
Gemma raised her eyes from her knitting and looked at him. He flushed suddenly scarlet and broke off. There was a little pause.
“Surely it is not come on again?” asked Galli anxiously.
“Oh, nothing to speak of, thanks to your s-s-soothing application that I b-b-blasphemed against. Are you going already, Martini?”
“Yes. Come along, Galli; we shall be late.”
Gemma followed the two men out of the room, and presently returned with an egg beaten up in milk.
“Take this, please,” she said with mild authority; and sat down again to her knitting. The Gadfly obeyed meekly.
For half an hour, neither spoke. Then the Gadfly said in a very low voice:
“Signora Bolla!”
She looked up. He was tearing the fringe of the couch-rug, and kept his eyes lowered.
“You didn’t believe I was speaking the truth just now,” he began.
“I had not the smallest doubt that you were telling falsehoods,” she answered quietly.
“You were quite right. I was telling falsehoods all the time.”
“Do you mean about the war?”
“About everything. I was not in that war at all; and as for the expedition, I had a few adventures, of course, and most of those stories are true, but it was not that way I got smashed. You have detected me in one lie, so I may as well confess the lot, I suppose.”
“Does it not seem to you rather a waste of energy to invent so many falsehoods?” she asked. “I should have thought it was hardly worth the trouble.”
“What would you have? You know your own English proverb: ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.’ It’s no pleasure to me to fool people that way, but I must answer them somehow when they ask what made a cripple of me; and I may as well invent something pretty while I’m about it. You saw how pleased Galli was.”
“Do you prefer pleasing Galli to speaking the truth?”
“The truth!” He looked up with the torn fringe in his hand. “You wouldn’t have me tell those people the truth? I’d cut my tongue out first!” Then with an awkward, shy abruptness:
“I have never told it to anybody yet; but I’ll tell you if you care to hear.”
She silently laid down her knitting. To her there was something grievously pathetic in this hard, secret, unlovable creature, suddenly flinging his personal confidence at the feet of a woman whom he barely knew and whom he apparently disliked.
A long silence followed, and she looked up. He was leaning his left arm on the little table beside him, and shading his eyes with the mutilated hand, and she noticed the nervous tension of the fingers and the throbbing of the scar on the wrist. She came up to him and called him softly by name. He started violently and raised his head.
“I f-forgot,” he stammered apologetically. “I was g-going to t-tell you about—”
“About the—accident or whatever it was that caused your lameness. But if it worries you—”
“The accident? Oh, the smashing! Yes; only it wasn’t an accident, it was a poker.”
She stared at him in blank amazement. He pushed back his hair with a hand that shook perceptibly, and looked up at her, smiling.
“Won’t you sit down? Bring your chair close, please. I’m so sorry I can’t get it for you. R-really, now I come to think of it, the case would have been a p-perfect t-treasure-trove for Riccardo if he had had me to treat; he has the true surgeon’s love for broken bones, and I believe everything in me that was breakable was broken on that occasion—except my neck.”
“And your courage,” she put in softly. “But perhaps you count that among your unbreakable possessions.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said; “my courage has been mended up after a fashion, with the rest of me; but it was fairly broken then, like a smashed teacup; that’s the horrible part of it. Ah—Yes; well, I was telling you about the poker.
“It was—let me see—nearly thirteen years ago, in Lima. I told you Peru was a delightful country to live in; but it’s not quite so nice for people that happen to be at low water, as I was. I had been down in the Argentine, and then in Chile, tramping the country and starving, mostly; and had come up from Valparaiso as odd-man on a cattle-boat. I couldn’t get any work in Lima itself, so I went down to the docks—they’re at Callao, you know—to try there. Well of course in all those shipping-ports there are low quarters where the seafaring people congregate; and after some time I got taken on as servant in one of the gambling hells there. I had to do the cooking and billiard-marking, and fetch drink for the sailors and their women, and all that sort of thing. Not very pleasant work; still I was glad to get it; there was at least food and the sight of human faces and sound of human tongues—of a kind. You may think that was no advantage; but I had just been down with yellow fever, alone in the outhouse of a wretched half-caste shanty, and the thing had given me the horrors. Well, one night I was told to put out a tipsy Lascar who was making himself obnoxious; he had come ashore and lost all his money and was in a bad temper. Of course I had to obey if I didn’t want to lose my place and starve; but the man was twice as strong as I—I was not twenty-one and as weak as a cat after the fever. Besides, he had the poker.”
He paused a moment, glancing furtively at her; then went on:
“Apparently he intended to put an end to me altogether; but somehow he managed to scamp his work—Lascars always do if they have a chance; and left just enough of me not smashed to go on living with.”
“Yes, but the other people, could they not interfere? Were they all afraid of one Lascar?”
He looked up and burst out laughing.
“The other people? The gamblers and the people of the house? Why, you don’t understand! They were negroes and Chinese and Heaven knows what; and I was their servant—their property. They stood round and enjoyed the fun, of course. That sort of thing counts for a good joke out there. So it is if you don’t happen to be the subject practised on.”
She shuddered.
“Then what was the end of it?”
“That I can’t tell you much about; a man doesn’t remember the next few days after a thing of that kind, as a rule. But there was a ship’s surgeon near, and it seems that when they found I was not dead, somebody called him in. He patched me up after a fashion—Riccardo seems to think it was rather badly done, but that may be professional jealousy. Anyhow, when I came to my senses, an old native woman had taken me in for Christian charity—that sounds queer, doesn’t it? She used to sit huddled up in the corner of the hut, smoking a black pipe and spitting on the floor and crooning to herself. However, she meant well, and she told me I might die in peace and nobody should disturb me. But the spirit of contradiction was strong in me and I elected to live. It was rather a difficult job scrambling back to life, and sometimes I am inclined to think it was a great deal of cry for very little wool. Anyway that old woman’s patience was wonderful; she kept me—how long was it?—nearly four months lying in her hut, raving like a mad thing at intervals, and as vicious as a bear with a sore ear between-whiles. The pain was pretty bad, you see, and my temper had been spoiled in childhood with overmuch coddling.”
“And then?”
“Oh, then—I got up somehow and crawled away. No, don’t think it was any delicacy about taking a poor woman’s charity—I was past caring for that; it was only that I couldn’t bear the place any longer. You talked just now about my courage; if you had seen me then! The worst of the pain used to come on every evening, about dusk; and in the afternoon I used to lie alone, and watch the sun get lower and lower—Oh, you can’t understand! It makes me sick to look at a sunset now!”
A long pause.
“Well, then I went up country, to see if I could get work anywhere—it would have driven me mad to stay in Lima. I got as far as Cuzco, and there—Really I don’t know why I’m inflicting all this ancient history on you; it hasn’t even the merit of being funny.”
She raised her head and looked at him with deep and serious eyes. “Please don’t talk that way,” she said.
He bit his lip and tore off another piece of the rug-fringe.
“Shall I go on?” he asked after a moment.
“If—if you will. I am afraid it is horrible to you to remember.”
“Do you think I forget when I hold my tongue? It’s worse then. But don’t imagine it’s the thing itself that haunts me so. It is the fact of having lost the power over myself.”
“I—don’t think I quite understand.”
“I mean, it is the fact of having come to the end of my courage, to the point where I found myself a coward.”
“Surely there is a limit to what anyone can bear.”
“Yes; and the man who has once reached that limit never knows when he may reach it again.”
“Would you mind telling me,” she asked, hesitating, “how you came to be stranded out there alone at twenty?”
“Very simply: I had a good opening in life, at home in the old country, and ran away from it.”
“Why?”
He laughed again in his quick, harsh way.
“Why? Because I was a priggish young cub, I suppose. I had been brought up in an over-luxurious home, and coddled and faddled after till I thought the world was made of pink cotton-wool and sugared almonds. Then one fine day I found out that someone I had trusted had deceived me. Why, how you start! What is it?”
“Nothing. Go on, please.”
“I found out that I had been tricked into believing a lie; a common bit of experience, of course; but, as I tell you, I was young and priggish, and thought that liars go to hell. So I ran away from home and plunged into South America to sink or swim as I could, without a cent in my pocket or a word of Spanish in my tongue, or anything but white hands and expensive habits to get my bread with. And the natural result was that I got a dip into the real hell to cure me of imagining sham ones. A pretty thorough dip, too—it was just five years before the Duprez expedition came along and pulled me out.”
“Five years! Oh, that is terrible! And had you no friends?”
“Friends! I”—he turned on her with sudden fierceness—“I have never had a friend!”
The next instant he seemed a little ashamed of his vehemence, and went on quickly:
“You mustn’t take all this too seriously; I dare say I made the worst of things, and really it wasn’t so bad the first year and a half; I was young and strong and I managed to scramble along fairly well till the Lascar put his mark on me. But after that I couldn’t get work. It’s wonderful what an effectual tool a poker is if you handle it properly; and nobody cares to employ a cripple.”
“What sort of work did you do?”
“What I could get. For some time I lived by odd-jobbing for the blacks on the sugar plantations, fetching and carrying and so on. It’s one of the curious things in life, by the way, that slaves always contrive to have a slave of their own, and there’s nothing a negro likes so much as a white fag to bully. But it was no use; the overseers always turned me off. I was too lame to be quick; and I couldn’t manage the heavy loads. And then I was always getting these attacks of inflammation, or whatever the confounded thing is.
“After some time I went down to the silver-mines and tried to get work there; but it was all no good. The managers laughed at the very notion of taking me on, and as for the men, they made a dead set at me.”
“Why was that?”
“Oh, human nature, I suppose; they saw I had only one hand that I could hit back with. They’re a mangy, half-caste lot; negroes and Zambos mostly. And then those horrible coolies! So at last I got enough of that, and set off to tramp the country at random; just wandering about, on the chance of something turning up.”
“To tramp? With that lame foot!”
He looked up with a sudden, piteous catching of the breath.
“I—I was hungry,” he said.
She turned her head a little away and rested her chin on one hand. After a moment’s silence he began again, his voice sinking lower and lower as he spoke:
“Well, I tramped, and tramped, till I was nearly mad with tramping, and nothing came of it. I got down into Ecuador, and there it was worse than ever. Sometimes I’d get a bit of tinkering to do—I’m a pretty fair tinker—or an errand to run, or a pigsty to clean out; sometimes I did—oh, I hardly know what. And then at last, one day—”
The slender, brown hand clenched itself suddenly on the table, and Gemma, raising her head, glanced at him anxiously. His side-face was turned towards her, and she could see a vein on the temple beating like a hammer, with quick, irregular strokes. She bent forward and laid a gentle hand on his arm.
“Never mind the rest; it’s almost too horrible to talk about.”
He stared doubtfully at the hand, shook his head, and went on steadily:
“Then one day I met a travelling variety show. You remember that one the other night; well, that sort of thing, only coarser and more indecent. The Zambos are not like these gentle Florentines; they don’t care for anything that is not foul or brutal. There was bullfighting, too, of course. They had camped out by the roadside for the night; and I went up to their tent to beg. Well, the weather was hot and I was half starved, and so—I fainted at the door of the tent. I had a trick of fainting suddenly at that time, like a boarding-school girl with tight stays. So they took me in and gave me brandy, and food, and so on; and then—the next morning—they offered me—”
Another pause.
“They wanted a hunchback, or monstrosity of some kind; for the boys to pelt with orange-peel and banana-skins—something to set the blacks laughing—You saw the clown that night—well, I was that—for two years. I suppose you have a humanitarian feeling about negroes and Chinese. Wait till you’ve been at their mercy!
“Well, I learned to do the tricks. I was not quite deformed enough; but they set that right with an artificial hump and made the most of this foot and arm—And the Zambos are not critical; they’re easily satisfied if only they can get hold of some live thing to torture—the fool’s dress makes a good deal of difference, too.
“The only difficulty was that I was so often ill and unable to play. Sometimes, if the manager was out of temper, he would insist on my coming into the ring when I had these attacks on; and I believe the people liked those evenings best. Once, I remember, I fainted right off with the pain in the middle of the performance—When I came to my senses again, the audience had got round me—hooting and yelling and pelting me with—”
“Don’t! I can’t hear any more! Stop, for God’s sake!”
She was standing up with both hands over her ears. He broke off, and, looking up, saw the glitter of tears in her eyes.
“Damn it all, what an idiot I am!” he said under his breath.
She crossed the room and stood for a little while looking out of the window. When she turned round, the Gadfly was again leaning on the table and covering his eyes with one hand. He had evidently forgotten her presence, and she sat down beside him without speaking. After a long silence she said slowly:
“I want to ask you a question.”
“Yes?” without moving.
“Why did you not cut your throat?”
He looked up in grave surprise. “I did not expect you to ask that,” he said. “And what about my work? Who would have done it for me?”
“Your work—Ah, I see! You talked just now about being a coward; well, if you have come through that and kept to your purpose, you are the very bravest man that I have ever met.”
He covered his eyes again, and held her hand in a close passionate clasp. A silence that seemed to have no end fell around them.
Suddenly a clear and fresh soprano voice rang out from the garden below, singing a verse of a doggerel French song:
“Eh, Pierrôt! Danse, Pierrôt!
Danse un peu, mon pauvre Jeannôt!
Vive la danse et l’allégresse!
Jouissons de notre bell’ jeunesse!
Si moi je pleure ou moi je soupire,
Si moi je fais la triste figure—
Monsieur, ce n’est que pour rire!
Ha! Ha, ha, ha!
Monsieur, ce n’est que pour rire!”
At the first words the Gadfly tore his hand from Gemma’s and shrank away with a stifled groan. She clasped both hands round his arm and pressed it firmly, as she might have pressed that of a person undergoing a surgical operation. When the song broke off and a chorus of laughter and applause came from the garden, he looked up with the eyes of a tortured animal.
“Yes, it is Zita,” he said slowly; “with her officer friends. She tried to come in here the other night, before Riccardo came. I should have gone mad if she had touched me!”
“But she does not know,” Gemma protested softly. “She cannot guess that she is hurting you.”
“She is like a Creole,” he answered, shuddering. “Do you remember her face that night when we brought in the beggar-child? That is how the half-castes look when they laugh.”
Another burst of laughter came from the garden. Gemma rose and opened the window. Zita, with a gold-embroidered scarf wound coquettishly round her head, was standing in the garden path, holding up a bunch of violets, for the possession of which three young cavalry officers appeared to be competing.
“Mme. Reni!” said Gemma.
Zita’s face darkened like a thundercloud. “Madame?” she said, turning and raising her eyes with a defiant look.
“Would your friends mind speaking a little more softly? Signor Rivarez is very unwell.”
The gipsy flung down her violets. “Allez-vous en!” she said, turning sharply on the astonished officers. “Vous m’embetez, messieurs!”
She went slowly out into the road. Gemma closed the window.
“They have gone away,” she said, turning to him.
“Thank you. I—I am sorry to have troubled you.”
“It was no trouble.” He at once detected the hesitation in her voice.
“ ‘But?’ ” he said. “That sentence was not finished, signora; there was an unspoken ‘but’ in the back of your mind.”
“If you look into the backs of people’s minds, you mustn’t be offended at what you read there. It is not my 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 down 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.
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 of life. Surely the gods had loved him a little, and had let him die young! Better a thousand times that he should pass into utter nothingness than that he should live and be the Gadfly—the Gadfly, with his faultless neckties and his doubtful witticisms, his bitter tongue and his ballet girl! No, no! It was all a horrible, senseless fancy; and she had vexed her heart with vain imaginings. Arthur was dead.
“May I come in?” asked a soft voice at the door.
She started so that the portrait fell from her hand, and the Gadfly, limping across the room, picked it up and handed it to her.
“How you startled me!” she said.
“I am s-so sorry. Perhaps I am disturbing you?”
“No. I was only turning over some old things.”
She hesitated for a moment; then handed him back the miniature.
“What do you think of that head?”
While he looked at it she watched his face as though her life depended upon its expression; but it was merely negative and critical.
“You have set me a difficult task,” he said. “The portrait is faded, and a child’s face is always hard to read. But I should think that child would grow into an unlucky man, and the wisest thing he could do would be to abstain from growing into a man at all.”
“Why?”
“Look at the line of the underlip. Th-th-that is the sort of nature that feels pain as pain and wrong as wrong; and the world has no r-r-room for such people; it needs people who feel nothing but their work.”
“Is it at all like anyone you know?”
He looked at the portrait more closely.
“Yes. What a curious thing! Of course it is; very like.”
“Like whom?”
“C-c-cardinal Montan-nelli. I wonder whether his irreproachable Eminence has any nephews, by the way? Who is it, if I may ask?”
“It is a portrait, taken in childhood, of the friend I told you about the other day—”
“Whom you killed?”
She winced in spite of herself. How lightly, how cruelly he used that dreadful word!
“Yes, whom I killed—if he is really dead.”
“If?”
She kept her eyes on his face.
“I have sometimes doubted,” she said. “The body was never found. He may have run away from home, like you, and gone to South America.”
“Let us hope not. That would be a bad memory to carry about with you. I have d-d-done some hard fighting in my t-time, and have sent m-more than one man to Hades, perhaps; but if I had it on my conscience that I had sent any l-living thing to South America, I should sleep badly—”
“Then do you believe,” she interrupted, coming nearer to him with clasped hands, “that if he were not drowned—if he had been through your experience instead—he would never come back and let the past go? Do you believe he would never forget? Remember, it has cost me something, too. Look!”
She pushed back the heavy waves of hair from her forehead. Through the black locks ran a broad white streak.
There was a long silence.
“I think,” the Gadfly said slowly, “that the dead are better dead. Forgetting some things is a difficult matter. And if I were in the place of your dead friend, I would s-s-stay dead. The revenant is an ugly spectre.”
She put the portrait back into its drawer and locked the desk.
“That is hard doctrine,” she said. “And now we will talk about something else.”
“I came to have a little business talk with you, if I may—a private one, about a plan that I have in my head.”
She drew a chair to the table and sat down. “What do you think of the projected press-law?” he began, without a trace of his usual stammer.
“What I think of it? I think it will not be of much value, but half a loaf is better than no bread.”
“Undoubtedly. Then do you intend to work on one of the new papers these good folk here are preparing to start?”
“I thought of doing so. There is always a great deal of practical work to be done in starting any paper—printing and circulation arrangements and—”
“How long are you going to waste your mental gifts in that fashion?”
“Why ‘waste’?”
“Because it is waste. You know quite well that you have a far better head than most of the men you are working with, and you let them make a regular drudge and Johannes factotum of you. Intellectually you are as far ahead of Grassini and Galli as if they were schoolboys; yet you sit correcting their proofs like a printer’s devil.”
“In the first place, I don’t spend all my time in correcting proofs; and moreover it seems to me that you exaggerate my mental capacities. They are by no means so brilliant as you think.”
“I don’t think them brilliant at all,” he answered quietly; “but I do think them sound and solid, which is of much more importance. At those dreary committee meetings it is always you who put your finger on the weak spot in everybody’s logic.”
“You are not fair to the others. Martini, for instance, has a very logical head, and there is no doubt about the capacities of Fabrizi and Lega. Then Grassini has a sounder knowledge of Italian economic statistics than any official in the country, perhaps.”
“Well, that’s not saying much; but let us lay them and their capacities aside. The fact remains that you, with such gifts as you possess, might do more important work and fill a more responsible post than at present.”
“I am quite satisfied with my position. The work I am doing is not of very much value, perhaps, but we all do what we can.”
“Signora Bolla, you and I have gone too far to play at compliments and modest denials now. Tell me honestly, do you recognize that you are using up your brain on work which persons inferior to you could do as well?”
“Since you press me for an answer—yes, to some extent.”
“Then why do you let that go on?”
No answer.
“Why do you let it go on?”
“Because—I can’t help it.”
“Why?”
She looked up reproachfully. “That is unkind—it’s not fair to press me so.”
“But all the same you are going to tell me why.”
“If you must have it, then—because my life has been smashed into pieces, and I have not the energy to start anything real, now. I am about fit to be a revolutionary cab-horse, and do the party’s drudge-work. At least I do it conscientiously, and it must be done by somebody.”
“Certainly it must be done by somebody; but not always by the same person.”
“It’s about all I’m fit for.”
He looked at her with half-shut eyes, inscrutably. Presently she raised her head.
“We are returning to the old subject; and this was to be a business talk. It is quite useless, I assure you, to tell me I might have done all sorts of things. I shall never do them now. But I may be able to help you in thinking out your plan. What is it?”
“You begin by telling me that it is useless for me to suggest anything, and then ask what I want to suggest. My plan requires your help in action, not only in thinking out.”
“Let me hear it and then we will discuss.”
“Tell me first whether you have heard anything about schemes for a rising in Venetia.”
“I have heard of nothing but schemes for risings and Sanfedist plots ever since the amnesty, and I fear I am as sceptical about the one as about the other.”
“So am I, in most cases; but I am speaking of really serious preparations for a rising of the whole province against the Austrians. A good many young fellows in the Papal States—particularly in the Four Legations—are secretly preparing to get across there and join as volunteers. And I hear from my friends in the Romagna—”
“Tell me,” she interrupted, “are you quite sure that these friends of yours can be trusted?”
“Quite sure. I know them personally, and have worked with them.”
“That is, they are members of the sect to which you belong? Forgive my scepticism, but I am always a little doubtful as to the accuracy of information received from secret societies. It seems to me that the habit—”
“Who told you I belonged to a sect?” he interrupted sharply.
“No one; I guessed it.”
“Ah!” He leaned back in his chair and looked at her, frowning. “Do you always guess people’s private affairs?” he said after a moment.
“Very often. I am rather observant, and have a habit of putting things together. I tell you that so that you may be careful when you don’t want me to know a thing.”
“I don’t mind your knowing anything so long as it goes no further. I suppose this has not—”
She lifted her head with a gesture of half-offended surprise. “Surely that is an unnecessary question!” she said.
“Of course I know you would not speak of anything to outsiders; but I thought that perhaps, to the members of your party—”
“The party’s business is with facts, not with my personal conjectures and fancies. Of course I have never mentioned the subject to anyone.”
“Thank you. Do you happen to have guessed which sect I belong to?”
“I hope—you must not take offence at my frankness; it was you who started this talk, you know—I do hope it is not the ‘Knifers.’ ”
“Why do you hope that?”
“Because you are fit for better things.”
“We are all fit for better things than we ever do. There is your own answer back again. However, it is not the ‘Knifers’ that I belong to, but the ‘Red Girdles.’ They are a steadier lot, and take their work more seriously.”
“Do you mean the work of knifing?”
“That, among other things. Knives are very useful in their way; but only when you have a good, organized propaganda behind them. That is what I dislike in the other sect. They think a knife can settle all the world’s difficulties; and that’s a mistake. It can settle a good many, but not all.”
“Do you honestly believe that it settles any?”
He looked at her in surprise.
“Of course,” she went on, “it eliminates, for the moment, the practical difficulty caused by the presence of a clever spy or objectionable official; but whether it does not create worse difficulties in place of the one removed is another question. It seems to me like the parable of the swept and garnished house and the seven devils. Every assassination only makes the police more vicious and the people more accustomed to violence and brutality, and the last state of the community may be worse than the first.”
“What do you think will happen when the revolution comes? Do you suppose the people won’t have to get accustomed to violence then? War is war.”
“Yes, but open revolution is another matter. It is one moment in the people’s life, and it is the price we have to pay for all our progress. No doubt fearful things will happen; they must in every revolution. But they will be isolated facts—exceptional features of an exceptional moment. The horrible thing about this promiscuous knifing is that it becomes a habit. The people get to look upon it as an everyday occurrence, and their sense of the sacredness of human life gets blunted. I have not been much in the Romagna, but what little I have seen of the people has given me the impression that they have got, or are getting, into a mechanical habit of violence.”
“Surely even that is better than a mechanical habit of obedience and submission.”
“I don’t think so. All mechanical habits are bad and slavish, and this one is ferocious as well. Of course, if you look upon the work of the revolutionist as the mere wresting of certain definite concessions from the government, then the secret sect and the knife must seem to you the best weapons, for there is nothing else which all governments so dread. But if you think, as I do, that to force the government’s hand is not an end in itself, but only a means to an end, and that what we really need to reform is the relation between man and man, then you must go differently to work. Accustoming ignorant people to the sight of blood is not the way to raise the value they put on human life.”
“And the value they put on religion?”
“I don’t understand.”
He smiled.
“I think we differ as to where the root of the mischief lies. You place it in a lack of appreciation of the value of human life.”
“Rather of the sacredness of human personality.”
“Put it as you like. To me the great cause of our muddles and mistakes seems to lie in the mental disease called religion.”
“Do you mean any religion in particular?”
“Oh, no! That is a mere question of external symptoms. The disease itself is what is called a religious attitude of mind. It is the morbid desire to set up a fetish and adore it, to fall down and worship something. It makes little difference whether the something be Jesus or Buddha or a tum-tum tree. You don’t agree with me, of course. You may be atheist or agnostic or anything you like, but I could feel the religious temperament in you at five yards. However, it is of no use for us to discuss that. But you are quite mistaken in thinking that I, for one, look upon the knifing as merely a means of removing objectionable officials—it is, above all, a means, and I think the best means, of undermining the prestige of the Church and of accustoming people to look upon clerical agents as upon any other vermin.”
“And when you have accomplished that; when you have roused the wild beast that sleeps in the people and set it on the Church; then—”
“Then I shall have done the work that makes it worth my while to live.”
“Is that the work you spoke of the other day?”
“Yes, just that.”
She shivered and turned away.
“You are disappointed in me?” he said, looking up with a smile.
“No; not exactly that. I am—I think—a little afraid of you.”
She turned round after a moment and said in her ordinary business voice:
“This is an unprofitable discussion. Our standpoints are too different. For my part, I believe in propaganda, propaganda, and propaganda; and when you can get it, open insurrection.”
“Then let us come back to the question of my plan; it has something to do with propaganda and more with insurrection.”
“Yes?”
“As I tell you, a good many volunteers are going from the Romagna to join the Venetians. We do not know yet how soon the insurrection will break out. It may not be till the autumn or winter; but the volunteers in the Apennines must be armed and ready, so that they may be able to start for the plains directly they are sent for. I have undertaken to smuggle the firearms and ammunition on to Papal territory for them—”
“Wait a minute. How do you come to be working with that set? The revolutionists in Lombardy and Venetia are all in favour of the new Pope. They are going in for liberal reforms, hand in hand with the progressive movement in the Church. How can a ‘no-compromise’ anti-clerical like you get on with them?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “What is it to me if they like to amuse themselves with a rag-doll, so long as they do their work? Of course they will take the Pope for a figurehead. What have I to do with that, if only the insurrection gets under way somehow? Any stick will do to beat a dog with, I suppose, and any cry to set the people on the Austrians.”
“What is it you want me to do?”
“Chiefly to help me get the firearms across.”
“But how could I do that?”
“You are just the person who could do it best. I think of buying the arms in England, and there is a good deal of difficulty about bringing them over. It’s impossible to get them through any of the Pontifical seaports; they must come by Tuscany, and go across the Apennines.”
“That makes two frontiers to cross instead of one.”
“Yes; but the other way is hopeless; you can’t smuggle a big transport in at a harbour where there is no trade, and you know the whole shipping of Civita Vecchia amounts to about three rowboats and a fishing smack. If we once get the things across Tuscany, I can manage the Papal frontier; my men know every path in the mountains, and we have plenty of hiding-places. The transport must come by sea to Leghorn, and that is my great difficulty; I am not in with the smugglers there, and I believe you are.”
“Give me five minutes to think.”
She leaned forward, resting one elbow on her knee, and supporting the chin on the raised hand. After a few moments’ silence she looked up.
“It is possible that I might be of some use in that part of the work,” she said; “but before we go any further, I want to ask you a question. Can you give me your word that this business is not connected with any stabbing or secret violence of any kind?”
“Certainly. It goes without saying that I should not have asked you to join in a thing of which I know you disapprove.”
“When do you want a definite answer from me?”
“There is not much time to lose; but I can give you a few days to decide in.”
“Are you free next Saturday evening?”
“Let me see—today is Thursday; yes.”
“Then come here. I will think the matter over and give you a final answer.”
On the following Sunday Gemma sent in to the committee of the Florentine branch of the Mazzinian party a statement that she wished to undertake a special work of a political nature, which would for a few months prevent her from performing the functions for which she had up till now been responsible to the party.
Some surprise was felt at this announcement, but the committee raised no objection; she had been known in the party for several years as a person whose judgment might be trusted; and the members agreed that if Signora Bolla took an unexpected step, she probably had good reasons for it.
To Martini she said frankly that she had undertaken to help the Gadfly with some “frontier work.” She had stipulated for the right to tell her old friend this much, in order that there might be no misunderstanding or painful sense of doubt and mystery between them. It seemed to her that she owed him this proof of confidence. He made no comment when she told him; but she saw, without knowing why, that the news had wounded him deeply.
They were sitting on the terrace of her lodging, looking out over the red roofs to Fiesole. After a long silence, Martini rose and began tramping up and down with his hands in his pockets, whistling to himself—a sure sign with him of mental agitation. She sat looking at him for a little while.
“Cesare, you are worried about this affair,” she said at last. “I am very sorry you feel so despondent over it; but I could decide only as seemed right to me.”
“It is not the affair,” he answered, sullenly; “I know nothing about it, and it probably is all right, once you have consented to go into it. It’s the man I distrust.”
“I think you misunderstand him; I did till I got to know him better. He is far from perfect, but there is much more good in him than you think.”
“Very likely.” For a moment he tramped to and fro in silence, then suddenly stopped beside her.
“Gemma, give it up! Give it up before it is too late! Don’t let that man drag you into things you will repent afterwards.”
“Cesare,” she said gently, “you are not thinking what you are saying. No one is dragging me into anything. I have made this decision of my own will, after thinking the matter well over alone. You have a personal dislike to Rivarez, I know; but we are talking of politics now, not of persons.”
“Madonna! Give it up! That man is dangerous; he is secret, and cruel, and unscrupulous—and he is in love with you!”
She drew back.
“Cesare, how can you get such fancies into your head?”
“He is in love with you,” Martini repeated. “Keep clear of him, Madonna!”
“Dear Cesare, I can’t keep clear of him; and I can’t explain to you why. We are tied together—not by any wish or doing of our own.”
“If you are tied, there is nothing more to say,” Martini answered wearily.
He went away, saying that he was busy, and tramped for hours up and down the muddy streets. The world looked very black to him that evening. One poor ewe-lamb—and this slippery creature had stepped in and stolen it away.
X
Towards the middle of February the Gadfly went to Leghorn. Gemma had introduced him to a young Englishman there, a shipping-agent of liberal views, whom she and her husband had known in England. He had on several occasions performed little services for the Florentine radicals: had lent money to meet an unforeseen emergency, had allowed his business address to be used for the party’s letters, etc.; but always through Gemma’s mediumship, and as a private friend of hers. She was, therefore, according to party etiquette, free to make use of the connection in any way that might seem good to her. Whether any use could be got out of it was quite another question. To ask a friendly sympathizer to lend his address for letters from Sicily or to keep a few documents in a corner of his countinghouse safe was one thing; to ask him to smuggle over a transport of firearms for an insurrection was another; and she had very little hope of his consenting.
“You can but try,” she had said to the Gadfly; “but I don’t think anything will come of it. If you were to go to him with that recommendation and ask for five hundred scudi, I dare say he’d give them to you at once—he’s exceedingly generous—and perhaps at a pinch he would lend you his passport or hide a fugitive in his cellar; but if you mention such a thing as rifles he will stare at you and think we’re both demented.”
“Perhaps he may give me a few hints, though, or introduce me to a friendly sailor or two,” the Gadfly had answered. “Anyway, it’s worth while to try.”
One day at the end of the month he came into her study less carefully dressed than usual, and she saw at once from his face that he had good news to tell.
“Ah, at last! I was beginning to think something must have happened to you!”
“I thought it safer not to write, and I couldn’t get back sooner.”
“You have just arrived?”
“Yes; I am straight from the diligence; I looked in to tell you that the affair is all settled.”
“Do you mean that Bailey has really consented to help?”
“More than to help; he has undertaken the whole thing—packing, transports—everything. The rifles will be hidden in bales of merchandise and will come straight through from England. His partner, Williams, who is a great friend of his, has consented to see the transport off from Southampton, and Bailey will slip it through the custom house at Leghorn. That is why I have been such a long time; Williams was just starting for Southampton, and I went with him as far as Genoa.”
“To talk over details on the way?”
“Yes, as long as I wasn’t too seasick to talk about anything.”
“Are you a bad sailor?” she asked quickly, remembering how Arthur had suffered from seasickness one day when her father had taken them both for a pleasure-trip.
“About as bad as is possible, in spite of having been at sea so much. But we had a talk while they were loading at Genoa. You know Williams, I think? He’s a thoroughly good fellow, trustworthy and sensible; so is Bailey, for that matter; and they both know how to hold their tongues.”
“It seems to me, though, that Bailey is running a serious risk in doing a thing like this.”
“So I told him, and he only looked sulky and said: ‘What business is that of yours?’ Just the sort of thing one would expect him to say. If I met Bailey in Timbuktu, I should go up to him and say: ‘Good morning, Englishman.’ ”
“But I can’t conceive how you managed to get their consent; Williams, too; the last man I should have thought of.”
“Yes, he objected strongly at first; not on the ground of danger, though, but because the thing is ‘so unbusiness-like.’ But I managed to win him over after a bit. And now we will go into details.”
When the Gadfly reached his lodgings the sun had set, and the blossoming Pyrus japonica that hung over the garden wall looked dark in the fading light. He gathered a few sprays and carried them into the house. As he opened the study door, Zita started up from a chair in the corner and ran towards him.
“Oh, Felice; I thought you were never coming!”
His first impulse was to ask her sharply what business she had in his study; but, remembering that he had not seen her for three weeks, he held out his hand and said, rather frigidly:
“Good evening, Zita; how are you?”
She put up her face to be kissed, but he moved past as though he had not seen the gesture, and took up a vase to put the pyrus in. The next instant the door was flung wide open, and the collie, rushing into the room, performed an ecstatic dance round him, barking and whining with delight. He put down the flowers and stooped to pat the dog.
“Well, Shaitan, how are you, old man? Yes, it’s really I. Shake hands, like a good dog!”
The hard, sullen look came into Zita’s face.
“Shall we go to dinner?” she asked coldly. “I ordered it for you at my place, as you wrote that you were coming this evening.”
He turned round quickly.
“I am v-v-very sorry; you sh-should not have waited for me! I will just get a bit tidy and come round at once. P-perhaps you would not mind putting these into water.”
When he came into Zita’s dining room she was standing before a mirror, fastening one of the sprays into her dress. She had apparently made up her mind to be good-humoured, and came up to him with a little cluster of crimson buds tied together.
“Here is a buttonhole for you; let me put it in your coat.”
All through dinnertime he did his best to be amiable, and kept up a flow of small-talk, to which she responded with radiant smiles. Her evident joy at his return somewhat embarrassed him; he had grown so accustomed to the idea that she led her own life apart from his, among such friends and companions as were congenial to her, that it had never occurred to him to imagine her as missing him. And yet she must have felt dull to be so much excited now.
“Let us have coffee up on the terrace,” she said; “it is quite warm this evening.”
“Very well. Shall I take your guitar? Perhaps you will sing.”
She flushed with delight; he was critical about music and did not often ask her to sing.
On the terrace was a broad wooden bench running round the walls. The Gadfly chose a corner with a good view of the hills, and Zita, seating herself on the low wall with her feet on the bench, leaned back against a pillar of the roof. She did not care much for scenery; she preferred to look at the Gadfly.
“Give me a cigarette,” she said. “I don’t believe I have smoked once since you went away.”
“Happy thought! It’s just s-s-smoke I want to complete my bliss.”
She leaned forward and looked at him earnestly.
“Are you really happy?”
The Gadfly’s mobile brows went up.
“Yes; why not? I have had a good dinner; I am looking at one of the m-most beautiful views in Europe; and now I’m going to have coffee and hear a Hungarian folksong. There is nothing the matter with either my conscience or my digestion; what more can man desire?”
“I know another thing you desire.”
“What?”
“That!” She tossed a little cardboard box into his hand.
“B-burnt almonds! Why d-didn’t you tell me before I began to s-smoke?” he cried reproachfully.
“Why, you baby! you can eat them when you have done smoking. There comes the coffee.”
The Gadfly sipped his coffee and ate his burnt almonds with the grave and concentrated enjoyment of a cat drinking cream.
“How nice it is to come back to d-decent coffee, after the s-s-stuff one gets at Leghorn!” he said in his purring drawl.
“A very good reason for stopping at home now you are here.”
“Not much stopping for me; I’m off again tomorrow.”
The smile died on her face.
“Tomorrow! What for? Where are you going to?”
“Oh! two or three p-p-places, on business.”
It had been decided between him and Gemma that he must go in person into the Apennines to make arrangements with the smugglers of the frontier region about the transporting of the firearms. To cross the Papal frontier was for him a matter of serious danger; but it had to be done if the work was to succeed.
“Always business!” Zita sighed under her breath; and then asked aloud:
“Shall you be gone long?”
“No; only a fortnight or three weeks, p-p-probably.”
“I suppose it’s some of that business?” she asked abruptly.
“ ‘That’ business?”
“The business you’re always trying to get your neck broken over—the everlasting politics.”
“It has something to do with p-p-politics.”
Zita threw away her cigarette.
“You are fooling me,” she said. “You are going into some danger or other.”
“I’m going s-s-straight into the infernal regions,” he answered languidly. “D-do you happen to have any friends there you want to send that ivy to? You n-needn’t pull it all down, though.”
She had fiercely torn off a handful of the climber from the pillar, and now flung it down with vehement anger.
“You are going into danger,” she repeated; “and you won’t even say so honestly! Do you think I am fit for nothing but to be fooled and joked with? You will get yourself hanged one of these days, and never so much as say goodbye. It’s always politics and politics—I’m sick of politics!”
“S-so am I,” said the Gadfly, yawning lazily; “and therefore we’ll talk about something else—unless you will sing.”
“Well, give me the guitar, then. What shall I sing?”
“The ballad of the lost horse; it suits your voice so well.”
She began to sing the old Hungarian ballad of the man who loses first his horse, then his home, and then his sweetheart, and consoles himself with the reflection that “more was lost at Mohacz field.” The song was one of the Gadfly’s especial favourites; its fierce and tragic melody and the bitter stoicism of the refrain appealed to him as no softer music ever did.
Zita was in excellent voice; the notes came from her lips strong and clear, full of the vehement desire of life. She would have sung Italian or Slavonic music badly, and German still worse; but she sang the Magyar folksongs splendidly.
The Gadfly listened with wide-open eyes and parted lips; he had never heard her sing like this before. As she came to the last line, her voice began suddenly to shake.
“Ah, no matter! More was lost—”
She broke down with a sob and hid her face among the ivy leaves.
“Zita!” The Gadfly rose and took the guitar from her hand. “What is it?”
She only sobbed convulsively, hiding her face in both hands. He touched her on the arm.
“Tell me what is the matter,” he said caressingly.
“Let me alone!” she sobbed, shrinking away. “Let me alone!”
He went quietly back to his seat and waited till the sobs died away. Suddenly he felt her arms about his neck; she was kneeling on the floor beside him.
“Felice—don’t go! Don’t go away!”
“We will talk about that afterwards,” he said, gently extricating himself from the clinging arms. “Tell me first what has upset you so. Has anything been frightening you?”
She silently shook her head.
“Have I done anything to hurt you?”
“No.” She put a hand up against his throat.
“What, then?”
“You will get killed,” she whispered at last. “I heard one of those men that come here say the other day that you will get into trouble—and when I ask you about it you laugh at me!”
“My dear child,” the Gadfly said, after a little pause of astonishment, “you have got some exaggerated notion into your head. Very likely I shall get killed some day—that is the natural consequence of being a revolutionist. But there is no reason to suppose I am g-g-going to get killed just now. I am running no more risk than other people.”
“Other people—what are other people to me? If you loved me you wouldn’t go off this way and leave me to lie awake at night, wondering whether you’re arrested, or dream you are dead whenever I go to sleep. You don’t care as much for me as for that dog there!”
The Gadfly rose and walked slowly to the other end of the terrace. He was quite unprepared for such a scene as this and at a loss how to answer her. Yes, Gemma was right; he had got his life into a tangle that he would have hard work to undo.
“Sit down and let us talk about it quietly,” he said, coming back after a moment. “I think we have misunderstood each other; of course I should not have laughed if I had thought you were serious. Try to tell me plainly what is troubling you; and then, if there is any misunderstanding, we may be able to clear it up.”
“There’s nothing to clear up. I can see you don’t care a brass farthing for me.”
“My dear child, we had better be quite frank with each other. I have always tried to be honest about our relationship, and I think I have never deceived you as to—”
“Oh, no! you have been honest enough; you have never even pretended to think of me as anything else but a prostitute—a trumpery bit of secondhand finery that plenty of other men have had before you—”
“Hush, Zita! I have never thought that way about any living thing.”
“You have never loved me,” she insisted sullenly.
“No, I have never loved you. Listen to me, and try to think as little harm of me as you can.”
“Who said I thought any harm of you? I—”
“Wait a minute. This is what I want to say: I have no belief whatever in conventional moral codes, and no respect for them. To me the relations between men and women are simply questions of personal likes and dislikes—”
“And of money,” she interrupted with a harsh little laugh. He winced and hesitated a moment.
“That, of course, is the ugly part of the matter. But believe me, if I had thought that you disliked me, or felt any repulsion to the thing, I would never have suggested it, or taken advantage of your position to persuade you to it. I have never done that to any woman in my life, and I have never told a woman a lie about my feeling for her. You may trust me that I am speaking the truth—”
He paused a moment, but she did not answer.
“I thought,” he went on; “that if a man is alone in the world and feels the need of—of a woman’s presence about him, and if he can find a woman who is attractive to him and to whom he is not repulsive, he has a right to accept, in a grateful and friendly spirit, such pleasure as that woman is willing to give him, without entering into any closer bond. I saw no harm in the thing, provided only there is no unfairness or insult or deceit on either side. As for your having been in that relation with other men before I met you, I did not think about that. I merely thought that the connection would be a pleasant and harmless one for both of us, and that either was free to break it as soon as it became irksome. If I was mistaken—if you have grown to look upon it differently—then—”
He paused again.
“Then?” she whispered, without looking up.
“Then I have done you a wrong, and I am very sorry. But I did not mean to do it.”
“You ‘did not mean’ and you ‘thought’—Felice, are you made of cast iron? Have you never been in love with a woman in your life that you can’t see I love you?”
A sudden thrill went through him; it was so long since anyone had said to him: “I love you.” Instantly she started up and flung her arms round him.
“Felice, come away with me! Come away from this dreadful country and all these people and their politics! What have we got to do with them? Come away, and we will be happy together. Let us go to South America, where you used to live.”
The physical horror of association startled him back into self-control; he unclasped her hands from his neck and held them in a steady grasp.
“Zita! Try to understand what I am saying to you. I do not love you; and if I did I would not come away with you. I have my work in Italy, and my comrades—”
“And someone else that you love better than me!” she cried out fiercely. “Oh, I could kill you! It is not your comrades you care about; it’s—I know who it is!”
“Hush!” he said quietly. “You are excited and imagining things that are not true.”
“You suppose I am thinking of Signora Bolla? I’m not so easily duped! You only talk politics with her; you care no more for her than you do for me. It’s that Cardinal!”
The Gadfly started as if he had been shot.
“Cardinal?” he repeated mechanically.
“Cardinal Montanelli, that came here preaching in the autumn. Do you think I didn’t see your face when his carriage passed? You were as white as my pocket-handkerchief! Why, you’re shaking like a leaf now because I mentioned his name!”
He stood up.
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” he said very slowly and softly. “I—hate the Cardinal. He is the worst enemy I have.”
“Enemy or no, you love him better than you love anyone else in the world. Look me in the face and say that is not true, if you can!”
He turned away, and looked out into the garden. She watched him furtively, half-scared at what she had done; there was something terrifying in his silence. At last she stole up to him, like a frightened child, and timidly pulled his sleeve. He turned round.
“It is true,” he said.
XI
“But c-c-can’t I meet him somewhere in the hills? Brisighella is a risky place for me.”
“Every inch of ground in the Romagna is risky for you; but just at this moment Brisighella is safer for you than any other place.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Don’t let that man with the blue jacket see your face; he’s dangerous. Yes; it was a terrible storm; I don’t remember to have seen the vines so bad for a long time.”
The Gadfly spread his arms on the table, and laid his face upon them, like a man overcome with fatigue or wine; and the dangerous newcomer in the blue jacket, glancing swiftly round, saw only two farmers discussing their crops over a flask of wine and a sleepy mountaineer with his head on the table. It was the usual sort of thing to see in little places like Marradi; and the owner of the blue jacket apparently made up his mind that nothing could be gained by listening; for he drank his wine at a gulp and sauntered into the outer room. There he stood leaning on the counter and gossiping lazily with the landlord, glancing every now and then out of the corner of one eye through the open door, beyond which sat the three figures at the table. The two farmers went on sipping their wine and discussing the weather in the local dialect, and the Gadfly snored like a man whose conscience is sound.
At last the spy seemed to make up his mind that there was nothing in the wine-shop worth further waste of his time. He paid his reckoning, and, lounging out of the house, sauntered away down the narrow street. The Gadfly, yawning and stretching, lifted himself up and sleepily rubbed the sleeve of his linen blouse across his eyes.
“Pretty sharp practice that,” he said, pulling a clasp-knife out of his pocket and cutting off a chunk from the rye-loaf on the table. “Have they been worrying you much lately, Michele?”
“They’ve been worse than mosquitos in August. There’s no getting a minute’s peace; wherever one goes, there’s always a spy hanging about. Even right up in the hills, where they used to be so shy about venturing, they have taken to coming in bands of three or four—haven’t they, Gino? That’s why we arranged for you to meet Domenichino in the town.”
“Yes; but why Brisighella? A frontier town is always full of spies.”
“Brisighella just now is a capital place. It’s swarming with pilgrims from all parts of the country.”
“But it’s not on the way to anywhere.”
“It’s not far out of the way to Rome, and many of the Easter Pilgrims are going round to hear Mass there.”
“I d-d-didn’t know there was anything special in Brisighella.”
“There’s the Cardinal. Don’t you remember his going to Florence to preach last December? It’s that same Cardinal Montanelli. They say he made a great sensation.”
“I dare say; I don’t go to hear sermons.”
“Well, he has the reputation of being a saint, you see.”
“How does he manage that?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s because he gives away all his income, and lives like a parish priest with four or five hundred scudi a year.”
“Ah!” interposed the man called Gino; “but it’s more than that. He doesn’t only give away money; he spends his whole life in looking after the poor, and seeing the sick are properly treated, and hearing complaints and grievances from morning till night. I’m no fonder of priests than you are, Michele, but Monsignor Montanelli is not like other Cardinals.”
“Oh, I dare say he’s more fool than knave!” said Michele. “Anyhow, the people are mad after him, and the last new freak is for the pilgrims to go round that way to ask his blessing. Domenichino thought of going as a pedlar, with a basket of cheap crosses and rosaries. The people like to buy those things and ask the Cardinal to touch them; then they put them round their babies’ necks to keep off the evil eye.”
“Wait a minute. How am I to go—as a pilgrim? This makeup suits me p-pretty well, I think; but it w-won’t do for me to show myself in Brisighella in the same character that I had here; it would be ev-v-vidence against you if I get taken.”
“You won’t get taken; we have a splendid disguise for you, with a passport and all complete.”
“What is it?”
“An old Spanish pilgrim—a repentant brigand from the Sierras. He fell ill in Ancona last year, and one of our friends took him on board a trading-vessel out of charity, and set him down in Venice, where he had friends, and he left his papers with us to show his gratitude. They will just do for you.”
“A repentant b-b-brigand? But w-what about the police?”
“Oh, that’s all right! He finished his term of the galleys some years ago, and has been going about to Jerusalem and all sorts of places saving his soul ever since. He killed his son by mistake for somebody else, and gave himself up to the police in a fit of remorse.”
“Was he quite old?”
“Yes; but a white beard and wig will set that right, and the description suits you to perfection in every other respect. He was an old soldier, with a lame foot and a sabre-cut across the face like yours; and then his being a Spaniard, too—you see, if you meet any Spanish pilgrims, you can talk to them all right.”
“Where am I to meet Domenichino?”
“You join the pilgrims at the crossroad that we will show you on the map, saying you had lost your way in the hills. Then, when you reach the town, you go with the rest of them into the marketplace, in front of the Cardinal’s palace.”
“Oh, he manages to live in a p-palace, then, in s-spite of being a saint?”
“He lives in one wing of it, and has turned the rest into a hospital. Well, you all wait there for him to come out and give his benediction, and Domenichino will come up with his basket and say: ‘Are you one of the pilgrims, father?’ and you answer: ‘I am a miserable sinner.’ Then he puts down his basket and wipes his face with his sleeve, and you offer him six soldi for a rosary.”
“Then, of course, he arranges where we can talk?”
“Yes; he will have plenty of time to give you the address of the meeting-place while the people are gaping at Montanelli. That was our plan; but if you don’t like it, we can let Domenichino know and arrange something else.”
“No; it will do; only see that the beard and wig look natural.”
“Are you one of the pilgrims, father?”
The Gadfly, sitting on the steps of the episcopal palace, looked up from under his ragged white locks, and gave the password in a husky, trembling voice, with a strong foreign accent. Domenichino slipped the leather strap from his shoulder, and set down his basket of pious gewgaws on the step. The crowd of peasants and pilgrims sitting on the steps and lounging about the marketplace was taking no notice of them, but for precaution’s sake they kept up a desultory conversation, Domenichino speaking in the local dialect and the Gadfly in broken Italian, intermixed with Spanish words.
“His Eminence! His Eminence is coming out!” shouted the people by the door. “Stand aside! His Eminence is coming!”
They both stood up.
“Here, father,” said Domenichino, putting into the Gadfly’s hand a little image wrapped in paper; “take this, too, and pray for me when you get to Rome.”
The Gadfly thrust it into his breast, and turned to look at the figure in the violet Lenten robe and scarlet cap that was standing on the upper step and blessing the people with outstretched arms.
Montanelli came slowly down the steps, the people crowding about him to kiss his hands. Many knelt down and put the hem of his cassock to their lips as he passed.
“Peace be with you, my children!”
At the sound of the clear, silvery voice, the Gadfly bent his head, so that the white hair fell across his face; and Domenichino, seeing the quivering of the pilgrim’s staff in his hand, said to himself with admiration: “What an actor!”
A woman standing near to them stooped down and lifted her child from the step. “Come, Cecco,” she said. “His Eminence will bless you as the dear Lord blessed the children.”
The Gadfly moved a step forward and stopped. Oh, it was hard! All these outsiders—these pilgrims and mountaineers—could go up and speak to him, and he would lay his hand on their children’s hair. Perhaps he would say “Carino” to that peasant boy, as he used to say—
The Gadfly sank down again on the step, turning away that he might not see. If only he could shrink into some corner and stop his ears to shut out the sound! Indeed, it was more than any man should have to bear—to be so close, so close that he could have put out his arm and touched the dear hand.
“Will you not come under shelter, my friend?” the soft voice said. “I am afraid you are chilled.”
The Gadfly’s heart stood still. For a moment he was conscious of nothing but the sickening pressure of the blood that seemed as if it would tear his breast asunder; then it rushed back, tingling and burning through all his body, and he looked up. The grave, deep eyes above him grew suddenly tender with divine compassion at the sight of his face.
“Stand back a little, friends,” Montanelli said, turning to the crowd; “I want to speak to him.”
The people fell slowly back, whispering to each other, and the Gadfly, sitting motionless, with teeth clenched and eyes on the ground, felt the gentle touch of Montanelli’s hand upon his shoulder.
“You have had some great trouble. Can I do anything to help you?”
The Gadfly shook his head in silence.
“Are you a pilgrim?”
“I am a miserable sinner.”
The accidental similarity of Montanelli’s question to the password came like a chance straw, that the Gadfly, in his desperation, caught at, answering automatically. He had begun to tremble under the soft pressure of the hand that seemed to burn upon his shoulder.
The Cardinal bent down closer to him.
“Perhaps you would care to speak to me alone? If I can be any help to you—”
For the first time the Gadfly looked straight and steadily into Montanelli’s eyes; he was already recovering his self-command.
“It would be no use,” he said; “the thing is hopeless.”
A police official stepped forward out of the crowd.
“Forgive my intruding, Your Eminence. I think the old man is not quite sound in his mind. He is perfectly harmless, and his papers are in order, so we don’t interfere with him. He has been in penal servitude for a great crime, and is now doing penance.”
“A great crime,” the Gadfly repeated, shaking his head slowly.
“Thank you, captain; stand aside a little, please. My friend, nothing is hopeless if a man has sincerely repented. Will you not come to me this evening?”
“Would Your Eminence receive a man who is guilty of the death of his own son?”
The question had almost the tone of a challenge, and Montanelli shrank and shivered under it as under a cold wind.
“God forbid that I should condemn you, whatever you have done!” he said solemnly. “In His sight we are all guilty alike, and our righteousness is as filthy rags. If you will come to me I will receive you as I pray that He may one day receive me.”
The Gadfly stretched out his hands with a sudden gesture of passion.
“Listen!” he said; “and listen all of you, Christians! If a man has killed his only son—his son who loved and trusted him, who was flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; if he has led his son into a deathtrap with lies and deceit—is there hope for that man in earth or heaven? I have confessed my sin before God and man, and I have suffered the punishment that men have laid on me, and they have let me go; but when will God say, ‘It is enough’? What benediction will take away His curse from my soul? What absolution will undo this thing that I have done?”
In the dead silence that followed the people looked at Montanelli, and saw the heaving of the cross upon his breast.
He raised his eyes at last, and gave the benediction with a hand that was not quite steady.
“God is merciful,” he said. “Lay your burden before His throne; for it is written: ‘A broken and contrite heart shalt thou not despise.’ ”
He turned away and walked through the marketplace, stopping everywhere to speak to the people, and to take their children in his arms.
In the evening the Gadfly, following the directions written on the wrapping of the image, made his way to the appointed meeting-place. It was the house of a local doctor, who was an active member of the “sect.” Most of the conspirators were already assembled, and their delight at the Gadfly’s arrival gave him a new proof, if he had needed one, of his popularity as a leader.
“We’re glad enough to see you again,” said the doctor; “but we shall be gladder still to see you go. It’s a fearfully risky business, and I, for one, was against the plan. Are you quite sure none of those police rats noticed you in the marketplace this morning?”
“Oh, they n-noticed me enough, but they d-didn’t recognize me. Domenichino m-managed the thing capitally. But where is he? I don’t see him.”
“He has not come yet. So you got on all smoothly? Did the Cardinal give you his blessing?”
“His blessing? Oh, that’s nothing,” said Domenichino, coming in at the door. “Rivarez, you’re as full of surprises as a Christmas cake. How many more talents are you going to astonish us with?”
“What is it now?” asked the Gadfly languidly. He was leaning back on a sofa, smoking a cigar. He still wore his pilgrim’s dress, but the white beard and wig lay beside him.
“I had no idea you were such an actor. I never saw a thing done so magnificently in my life. You nearly moved His Eminence to tears.”
“How was that? Let us hear, Rivarez.”
The Gadfly shrugged his shoulders. He was in a taciturn and laconic mood, and the others, seeing that nothing was to be got out of him, appealed to Domenichino to explain. When the scene in the marketplace had been related, one young workman, who had not joined in the laughter of the rest, remarked abruptly:
“It was very clever, of course; but I don’t see what good all this playacting business has done to anybody.”
“Just this much,” the Gadfly put in; “that I can go where I like and do what I like anywhere in this district, and not a single man, woman, or child will ever think of suspecting me. The story will be all over the place by tomorrow, and when I meet a spy he will only think: ‘It’s mad Diego, that confessed his sins in the marketplace.’ That is an advantage gained, surely.”
“Yes, I see. Still, I wish the thing could have been done without fooling the Cardinal. He’s too good to have that sort of trick played on him.”
“I thought myself he seemed fairly decent,” the Gadfly lazily assented.
“Nonsense, Sandro! We don’t want Cardinals here!” said Domenichino. “And if Monsignor Montanelli had taken that post in Rome when he had the chance of getting it, Rivarez couldn’t have fooled him.”
“He wouldn’t take it because he didn’t want to leave his work here.”
“More likely because he didn’t want to get poisoned off by Lambruschini’s agents. They’ve got something against him, you may depend upon it. When a Cardinal, especially such a popular one, ‘prefers to stay’ in a Godforsaken little hole like this, we all know what that means—don’t we, Rivarez?”
The Gadfly was making smoke-rings. “Perhaps it is a c-c-case of a ‘b-b-broken and contrite heart,’ ” he remarked, leaning his head back to watch them float away. “And now, men, let us get to business.”
They began to discuss in detail the various plans which had been formed for the smuggling and concealment of weapons. The Gadfly listened with keen attention, interrupting every now and then to correct sharply some inaccurate statement or imprudent proposal. When everyone had finished speaking, he made a few practical suggestions, most of which were adopted without discussion. The meeting then broke up. It had been resolved that, at least until he was safely back in Tuscany, very late meetings, which might attract the notice of the police, should be avoided. By a little after ten o’clock all had dispersed except the doctor, the Gadfly, and Domenichino, who remained as a subcommittee for the discussion of special points. After a long and hot dispute, Domenichino looked up at the clock.
“Half-past eleven; we mustn’t stop any longer or the night-watchman may see us.”
“When does he pass?” asked the Gadfly.
“About twelve o’clock; and I want to be home before he comes. Good night, Giordani. Rivarez, shall we walk together?”
“No; I think we are safer apart. Then I shall see you again?”
“Yes; at Castel Bolognese. I don’t know yet what disguise I shall be in, but you have the password. You leave here tomorrow, I think?”
The Gadfly was carefully putting on his beard and wig before the looking-glass.
“Tomorrow morning, with the pilgrims. On the next day I fall ill and stop behind in a shepherd’s hut, and then take a shortcut across the hills. I shall be down there before you will. Good night!”
Twelve o’clock was striking from the cathedral bell-tower as the Gadfly looked in at the door of the great empty barn which had been thrown open as a lodging for the pilgrims. The floor was covered with clumsy figures, most of which were snoring lustily, and the air was insufferably close and foul. He drew back with a little shudder of repugnance; it would be useless to attempt to sleep in there; he would take a walk, and then find some shed or haystack which would, at least, be clean and quiet.
It was a glorious night, with a great full moon gleaming in a purple sky. He began to wander through the streets in an aimless way, brooding miserably over the scene of the morning, and wishing that he had never consented to Domenichino’s plan of holding the meeting in Brisighella. If at the beginning he had declared the project too dangerous, some other place would have been chosen; and both he and Montanelli would have been spared this ghastly, ridiculous farce.
How changed the Padre was! And yet his voice was not changed at all; it was just the same as in the old days, when he used to say: “Carino.”
The lantern of the night-watchman appeared at the other end of the street, and the Gadfly turned down a narrow, crooked alley. After walking a few yards he found himself in the Cathedral Square, close to the left wing of the episcopal palace. The square was flooded with moonlight, and there was no one in sight; but he noticed that a side door of the cathedral was ajar. The sacristan must have forgotten to shut it. Surely nothing could be going on there so late at night. He might as well go in and sleep on one of the benches instead of in the stifling barn; he could slip out in the morning before the sacristan came; and even if anyone did find him, the natural supposition would be that mad Diego had been saying his prayers in some corner, and had got shut in.
He listened a moment at the door, and then entered with the noiseless step that he had retained notwithstanding his lameness. The moonlight streamed through the windows, and lay in broad bands on the marble floor. In the chancel, especially, everything was as clearly visible as by daylight. At the foot of the altar steps Cardinal Montanelli knelt alone, bareheaded, with clasped hands.
The Gadfly drew back into the shadow. Should he slip away before Montanelli saw him? That, no doubt, would be the wisest thing to do—perhaps the most merciful. And yet, what harm could it do for him to go just a little nearer—to look at the Padre’s face once more, now that the crowd was gone, and there was no need to keep up the hideous comedy of the morning? Perhaps it would be his last chance—and the Padre need not see him; he would steal up softly and look—just this once. Then he would go back to his work.
Keeping in the shadow of the pillars, he crept softly up to the chancel rails, and paused at the side entrance, close to the altar. The shadow of the episcopal throne was broad enough to cover him, and he crouched down in the darkness, holding his breath.
“My poor boy! Oh, God; my poor boy!”
The broken whisper was full of such endless despair that the Gadfly shuddered in spite of himself. Then came deep, heavy, tearless sobs; and he saw Montanelli wring his hands together like a man in bodily pain.
He had not thought it would be so bad as this. How often had he said to himself with bitter assurance: “I need not trouble about it; that wound was healed long ago.” Now, after all these years, it was laid bare before him, and he saw it bleeding still. And how easy it would be to heal it now at last! He need only lift his hand—only step forward and say: “Padre, it is I.” There was Gemma, too, with that white streak across her hair. Oh, if he could but forgive! If he could but cut out from his memory the past that was burned into it so deep—the Lascar, and the sugar-plantation, and the variety show! Surely there was no other misery like this—to be willing to forgive, to long to forgive; and to know that it was hopeless—that he could not, dared not forgive.
Montanelli rose at last, made the sign of the cross, and turned away from the altar. The Gadfly shrank further back into the shadow, trembling with fear lest he should be seen, lest the very beating of his heart should betray him; then he drew a long breath of relief. Montanelli had passed him, so close that the violet robe had brushed against his cheek—had passed and had not seen him.
Had not seen him—Oh, what had he done? This had been his last chance—this one precious moment—and he had let it slip away. He started up and stepped into the light.
“Padre!”
The sound of his own voice, ringing up and dying away along the arches of the roof, filled him with fantastic terror. He shrank back again into the shadow. Montanelli stood beside the pillar, motionless, listening with wide-open eyes, full of the horror of death. How long the silence lasted the Gadfly could not tell; it might have been an instant, or an eternity. He came to his senses with a sudden shock. Montanelli was beginning to sway as though he would fall, and his lips moved, at first silently.
“Arthur!” the low whisper came at last; “yes, the water is deep—”
The Gadfly came forward.
“Forgive me, Your Eminence! I thought it was one of the priests.”
“Ah, it is the pilgrim?” Montanelli had at once recovered his self-control, though the Gadfly could see, from the restless glitter of the sapphire on his hand, that he was still trembling. “Are you in need of anything, my friend? It is late, and the cathedral is closed at night.”
“I beg pardon, Your Eminence, if I have done wrong. I saw the door open, and came in to pray, and when I saw a priest, as I thought, in meditation, I waited to ask a blessing on this.”
He held up the little tin cross that he had bought from Domenichino. Montanelli took it from his hand, and, reentering the chancel, laid it for a moment on the altar.
“Take it, my son,” he said, “and be at rest, for the Lord is tender and pitiful. Go to Rome, and ask the blessing of His minister, the Holy Father. Peace be with you!”
The Gadfly bent his head to receive the benediction, and turned slowly away.
“Stop!” said Montanelli.
He was standing with one hand on the chancel rail.
“When you receive the Holy Eucharist in Rome,” he said, “pray for one in deep affliction—for one on whose soul the hand of the Lord is heavy.”
There were almost tears in his voice, and the Gadfly’s resolution wavered. Another instant and he would have betrayed himself. Then the thought of the variety-show came up again, and he remembered, like Jonah, that he did well to be angry.
“Who am I, that He should hear my prayers? A leper and an outcast! If I could bring to His throne, as Your Eminence can, the offering of a holy life—of a soul without spot or secret shame—”
Montanelli turned abruptly away.
“I have only one offering to give,” he said; “a broken heart.”
A few days later the Gadfly returned to Florence in the diligence from Pistoja. He went straight to Gemma’s lodgings, but she was out. Leaving a message that he would return in the morning he went home, sincerely hoping that he should not again find his study invaded by Zita. Her jealous reproaches would act on his nerves, if he were to hear much of them tonight, like the rasping of a dentist’s file.
“Good evening, Bianca,” he said when the maidservant opened the door. “Has Mme. Reni been here today?”
She stared at him blankly.
“Mme. Reni? Has she come back, then, sir?”
“What do you mean?” he asked with a frown, stopping short on the mat.
“She went away quite suddenly, just after you did, and left all her things behind her. She never so much as said she was going.”
“Just after I did? What, a f-fortnight ago?”
“Yes, sir, the same day; and her things are lying about higgledy-piggledy. All the neighbours are talking about it.”
He turned away from the doorstep without speaking, and went hastily down the lane to the house where Zita had been lodging. In her rooms nothing had been touched; all the presents that he had given her were in their usual places; there was no letter or scrap of writing anywhere.
“If you please, sir,” said Bianca, putting her head in at the door, “there’s an old woman—”
He turned round fiercely.
“What do you want here—following me about?”
“An old woman wishes to see you.”
“What does she want? Tell her I c-can’t see her; I’m busy.”
“She has been coming nearly every evening since you went away, sir, always asking when you would come back.”
“Ask her w-what her business is. No; never mind; I suppose I must go myself.”
The old woman was waiting at his hall door. She was very poorly dressed, with a face as brown and wrinkled as a medlar, and a bright-coloured scarf twisted round her head. As he came in she rose and looked at him with keen black eyes.
“You are the lame gentleman,” she said, inspecting him critically from head to foot. “I have brought you a message from Zita Reni.”
He opened the study door, and held it for her to pass in; then followed her and shut the door, that Bianca might not hear.
“Sit down, please. N-now, tell me who you are.”
“It’s no business of yours who I am. I have come to tell you that Zita Reni has gone away with my son.”
“With—your—son?”
“Yes, sir; if you don’t know how to keep your mistress when you’ve got her, you can’t complain if other men take her. My son has blood in his veins, not milk and water; he comes of the Romany folk.”
“Ah, you are a gipsy! Zita has gone back to her own people, then?”
She looked at him in amazed contempt. Apparently, these Christians had not even manhood enough to be angry when they were insulted.
“What sort of stuff are you made of, that she should stay with you? Our women may lend themselves to you a bit for a girl’s fancy, or if you pay them well; but the Romany blood comes back to the Romany folk.”
The Gadfly’s face remained as cold and steady as before.
“Has she gone away with a gipsy camp, or merely to live with your son?”
The woman burst out laughing.
“Do you think of following her and trying to win her back? It’s too late, sir; you should have thought of that before!”
“No; I only want to know the truth, if you will tell it to me.”
She shrugged her shoulders; it was hardly worth while to abuse a person who took it so meekly.
“The truth, then, is that she met my son in the road the day you left her, and spoke to him in the Romany tongue; and when he saw she was one of our folk, in spite of her fine clothes, he fell in love with her bonny face, as our men fall in love, and took her to our camp. She told us all her trouble, and sat crying and sobbing, poor lassie, till our hearts were sore for her. We comforted her as best we could; and at last she took off her fine clothes and put on the things our lasses wear, and gave herself to my son, to be his woman and to have him for her man. He won’t say to her: ‘I don’t love you,’ and: ‘I’ve other things to do.’ When a woman is young, she wants a man; and what sort of man are you, that you can’t even kiss a handsome girl when she puts her arms round your neck?”
“You said,” he interrupted, “that you had brought me a message from her.”
“Yes; I stopped behind when the camp went on, so as to give it. She told me to say that she has had enough of your folk and their hairsplitting and their sluggish blood; and that she wants to get back to her own people and be free. ‘Tell him,’ she said, ‘that I am a woman, and that I loved him; and that is why I would not be his harlot any longer.’ The lassie was right to come away. There’s no harm in a girl getting a bit of money out of her good looks if she can—that’s what good looks are for; but a Romany lass has nothing to do with loving a man of your race.”
The Gadfly stood up.
“Is that all the message?” he said. “Then tell her, please, that I think she has done right, and that I hope she will be happy. That is all I have to say. Good night!”
He stood perfectly still until the garden gate closed behind her; then he sat down and covered his face with both hands.
Another blow on the cheek! Was no rag of pride to be left him—no shred of self-respect? Surely he had suffered everything that man can endure; his very heart had been dragged in the mud and trampled under the feet of the passersby; there was no spot in his soul where someone’s contempt was not branded in, where someone’s mockery had not left its iron trace. And now this gipsy girl, whom he had picked up by the wayside—even she had the whip in her hand.
Shaitan whined at the door, and the Gadfly rose to let him in. The dog rushed up to his master with his usual frantic manifestations of delight, but soon, understanding that something was wrong, lay down on the rug beside him, and thrust a cold nose into the listless hand.
An hour later Gemma came up to the front door. No one appeared in answer to her knock; Bianca, finding that the Gadfly did not want any dinner, had slipped out to visit a neighbour’s cook. She had left the door open, and a light burning in the hall. Gemma, after waiting for some time, decided to enter and try if she could find the Gadfly, as she wished to speak to him about an important message which had come from Bailey. She knocked at the study door, and the Gadfly’s voice answered from within: “You can go away, Bianca. I don’t want anything.”
She softly opened the door. The room was quite dark, but the passage lamp threw a long stream of light across it as she entered, and she saw the Gadfly sitting alone, his head sunk on his breast, and the dog asleep at his feet.
“It is I,” she said.
He started up. “Gemma—Gemma! Oh, I have wanted you so!”
Before she could speak he was kneeling on the floor at her feet and hiding his face in the folds of her dress. His whole body was shaken with a convulsive tremor that was worse to see than tears.
She stood still. There was nothing she could do to help him—nothing. This was the bitterest thing of all. She must stand by and look on passively—she who would have died to spare him pain. Could she but dare to stoop and clasp her arms about him, to hold him close against her heart and shield him, were it with her own body, from all further harm or wrong; surely then he would be Arthur to her again; surely then the day would break and the shadows flee away.
Ah, no, no! How could he ever forget? Was it not she who had cast him into hell—she, with her own right hand?
She had let the moment slip by. He rose hastily and sat down by the table, covering his eyes with one hand and biting his lip as if he would bite it through.
Presently he looked up and said quietly:
“I am afraid I startled you.”
She held out both her hands to him. “Dear,” she said, “are we not friends enough by now for you to trust me a little bit? What is it?”
“Only a private trouble of my own. I don’t see why you should be worried over it.”
“Listen a moment,” she went on, taking his hand in both of hers to steady its convulsive trembling. “I have not tried to lay hands on a thing that is not mine to touch. But now that you have given me, of your own free will, so much of your confidence, will you not give me a little more—as you would do if I were your sister. Keep the mask on your face, if it is any consolation to you, but don’t wear a mask on your soul, for your own sake.”
He bent his head lower. “You must be patient with me,” he said. “I am an unsatisfactory sort of brother to have, I’m afraid; but if you only knew—I have been nearly mad this last week. It has been like South America again. And somehow the devil gets into me and—” He broke off.
“May I not have my share in your trouble?” she whispered at last.
His head sank down on her arm. “The hand of the Lord is heavy.”