"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 eye-glasses 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 to-morrow 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."
CHAPTER 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."