The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich (top fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

than a tendency to a certain veiled insolence of expression and manner. For the rest, he was as swarthy as a mulatto, and, notwithstanding his lameness, as agile as a cat. His whole personality was oddly suggestive of a black jaguar. The forehead and left cheek were terribly disfigured by the long crooked scar of the old sabre-cut; and she had already noticed that, when he began to stammer in speaking, that side of his face was affected with a nervous twitch. But for these defects he would have been, in a certain restless and uncomfortable way, rather handsome; but it was not an attractive face.

Presently he began again in his soft, murmuring purr (“Just the voice a jaguar would talk in, if it could speak and were in a good humour,” Gemma said to herself with rising irritation).

“I hear,” he said, “that you are interested in the radical press, and write for the papers.”

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

“Ah, of course! I understood from Signora Grassini that you undertake other important work as well.”

Gemma raised her eyebrows slightly. Signora Grassini, like the silly little woman she was, had evidently been chattering imprudently to this slippery creature, whom Gemma, for her part, was beginning actually to dislike.

“My time is a good deal taken up,” she said rather stiffly; “but Signora Grassini overrates the importance of my occupations. They are mostly of a very trivial character.”

“Well, the world would be in a bad way if we all of us spent our time in chanting dirges for Italy. I should think the neighbourhood of our host of this evening and his wife would make anybody frivolous, in self-defence. Oh, yes, I know what you’re going to say; you are perfectly right, but they are both so deliciously funny with their patriotism.⁠—Are you going in already? It is so nice out here!”

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

He had picked it up, and now stood looking at her with wide eyes as blue and innocent as forget-me-nots in a brook.

“I know you are offended with me,” he said penitently, “for fooling that painted-up wax doll; but what can a fellow do?”

“Since you ask me, I do think it an ungenerous and⁠—well⁠—cowardly thing to hold one’s intellectual inferiors up to ridicule in that way; it is like laughing at a cripple, or⁠—”

He caught his breath suddenly, painfully; and shrank back, glancing at his lame foot and mutilated hand. In another instant he recovered his self-possession and burst out laughing.

“That’s hardly a fair comparison, signora; we cripples don’t flaunt our deformities in people’s faces as she does her stupidity. At least give us credit for recognizing that crooked backs are no pleasanter than crooked ways. There is a step here; will you take my arm?”

She re-entered the house in embarrassed silence; his unexpected sensitiveness had completely disconcerted her.

Directly he opened the door of the great reception room she realized that something unusual had happened in her absence. Most of the gentlemen looked both angry and uncomfortable; the ladies, with hot cheeks and carefully feigned unconsciousness, were all collected at one end of the room; the host was fingering his 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