"It started from Paris in the autumn of 1837, and passed through Quito in April, 1838.
We were three years in Brazil; then went down to Rio and got back to Paris in the summer of 1841.
Does the lady want the dates of the separate discoveries?"
"No, thank you; only these.
I have written them down. Beppo, take this paper to Signora Bolla, please. Many thanks, Signor Rivarez.
I am sorry to have troubled you."
The Gadfly leaned back in his chair with a perplexed frown.
What did she want the dates for?
When they passed through Ecuador----
Gemma went home with the slip of paper in her hand.
April, 1838--and Arthur had died in May, 1833.
Five years--
She began pacing up and down her room.
She had slept badly the last few nights, and there were dark shadows under her eyes.
Five years;--and an "overluxurious home"-- and "someone he had trusted had deceived him" --had deceived him--and he had found it out----
She stopped and put up both hands to her head.
Oh, this was utterly mad--it was not possible--it was absurd----
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.