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

so soon, and I know that if you who are left stand together steadily and hit hard, you will see great things. As for me, I shall go out into the courtyard with as light a heart as any child starting home for the holidays. I have done my share of the work, and this death-sentence is the proof that I have done it thoroughly. They kill me because they are afraid of me; and what more can any man’s heart desire?

“It desires just one thing more, though. A man who is going to die has a right to a personal fancy, and mine is that you should see why I have always been such a sulky brute to you, and so slow to forget old scores. Of course, though, you understand why, and I tell you only for the pleasure of writing the words. I loved you, Gemma, when you were an ugly little girl in a gingham frock, with a scratchy tucker and your hair in a pigtail down your back; and I love you still. Do you remember that day when I kissed your hand, and when you so piteously begged me ‘never to do that again’? It was a scoundrelly trick to play, I know; but you must forgive that; and now I kiss the paper where I have written your name. So I have kissed you twice, and both times without your consent.

“That is all. Goodbye, my dear.”

There was no signature, but a verse which they had learned together as children was written under the letter:

“Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
Or if I die.”

Half an hour later Martini entered the room, and, startled out of the silence of half a lifetime, threw down the placard he was carrying and flung his arms about her.

“Gemma! What is it, for God’s sake? Don’t sob like that⁠—you that never cry! Gemma! Gemma, my darling!”

“Nothing, Cesare; I will tell you afterwards⁠—I⁠—can’t talk about it just now.”

She hurriedly slipped the tear-stained letter into her pocket; and, rising, leaned out of the window to hide her face. Martini held his tongue and bit his moustache. After all these years he had betrayed himself like a schoolboy⁠—and she had not even noticed it!

“The cathedral bell is tolling,” she said after a little while, looking round with recovered self-command. “Someone must be dead.”

“That is what I came to show you,” Martini answered in his everyday voice. He picked up the placard from the floor and handed it to her. Hastily printed in large type was a black-bordered announcement that: “Our dearly beloved Bishop, His Eminence the Cardinal, Monsignor Lorenzo Montanelli,” had died suddenly at Ravenna, “from the rupture of an aneurism of the heart.”

She glanced up quickly from the paper, and Martini answered the unspoken suggestion in her eyes with a shrug of his shoulders.

“What would you have, Madonna? Aneurism is as good a word as any other.”

Colophon

The Gadfly
was published in 1897 by
Ethel Voynich.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2009 by
Judy Boss and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at
Google Books.

The cover page is adapted from
San Gimignano,
a painting completed before 1923 by
Elihu Vedder.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
March 26, 2017, 4:39 a.m.
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