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——