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

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