The Gadfly Part 32

Danse un peu, mon pauvre Jeannot!

Vive la danse et l'allegresse!

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 thunder-cloud. "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-a.s.sertive look, and to deepen the tragic lines about the mouth. By some fanciful a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sed in unbroken silence. At last she rose and went softly out of the room. Coming back with a lamp, she paused for a moment, thinking that the Gadfly was asleep. As the light fell on his face he turned round.

"I have made you a cup of coffee," she said, setting clown the lamp.

"Put it down a minute. Will you come here, please."

He took both her hands in his.

"I have been thinking," he said. "You are quite right; it is an ugly tangle I have got my life into. But remember, a man does not meet every day a woman whom he can--love; and I--I have been in deep waters. I am afraid----"

"Afraid----"

"Of the dark. Sometimes I DARE not be alone at night. I must have something living--something solid beside me. It is the outer darkness, where shall be---- No, no! It's not that; that's a sixpenny toy h.e.l.l;--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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionately, 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!"