The Gadfly Part 13

"Arthur!" This time it was James who called, and the door-handle was shaken impatiently. "Are you asleep?"

Arthur looked round the room, saw that everything was hidden, and unlocked the door.

"I should think you might at least have obeyed my express request that you should sit up for us, Arthur," said Julia, sweeping into the room in a towering pa.s.sion. "You appear to think it the proper thing for us to dance attendance for half an hour at your door----"

"Four minutes, my dear," James mildly corrected, stepping into the room at the end of his wife's pink satin train. "I certainly think, Arthur, that it would have been more--becoming if----"

"What do you want?" Arthur interrupted. He was standing with his hand upon the door, glancing furtively from one to the other like a trapped animal. But James was too obtuse and Julia too angry to notice the look.

Mr. Burton placed a chair for his wife and sat down, carefully pulling up his new trousers at the knees. "Julia and I," he began, "feel it to be our duty to speak to you seriously about----"

"I can't listen to-night; I--I'm not well. My head aches--you must wait."

Arthur spoke in a strange, indistinct voice, with a confused and rambling manner. James looked round in surprise.

"Is there anything the matter with you?" he asked anxiously, suddenly remembering that Arthur had come from a very hotbed of infection. "I hope you're not sickening for anything. You look quite feverish."

"Nonsense!" Julia interrupted sharply. "It's only the usual theatricals, because he's ashamed to face us. Come here and sit down, Arthur." Arthur slowly crossed the room and sat down on the bed. "Yes?" he said wearily.

Mr. Burton coughed, cleared his throat, smoothed his already immaculate beard, and began the carefully prepared speech over again:

"I feel it to be my duty--my painful duty--to speak very seriously to you about your extraordinary behaviour in connecting yourself with--a--law-breakers and incendiaries and--a--persons of disreputable character. I believe you to have been, perhaps, more foolish than depraved--a----"

He paused.

"Yes?" Arthur said again.

"Now, I do not wish to be hard on you," James went on, softening a little in spite of himself before the weary hopelessness of Arthur's manner. "I am quite willing to believe that you have been led away by bad companions, and to take into account your youth and inexperience and the--a--a--imprudent and--a--impulsive character which you have, I fear, inherited from your mother."

Arthur's eyes wandered slowly to his mother's portrait and back again, but he did not speak.

"But you will, I feel sure, understand," James continued, "that it is quite impossible for me to keep any longer in my house a person who has brought public disgrace upon a name so highly respected as ours."

"Yes?" Arthur repeated once more.

"Well?" said Julia sharply, closing her fan with a snap and laying it across her knee. "Are you going to have the goodness to say anything but 'Yes,' Arthur?"

"You will do as you think best, of course," he answered slowly, without moving. "It doesn't matter much either way."

"Doesn't--matter?" James repeated, aghast; and his wife rose with a laugh.

"Oh, it doesn't matter, doesn't it? Well, James, I hope you understand now how much grat.i.tude you may expect in that quarter. I told you what would come of showing charity to Papist adventuresses and their----"

"Hush, hus.h.!.+ Never mind that, my dear!"

"It's all nonsense, James; we've had more than enough of this sentimentality! A love-child setting himself up as a member of the family--it's quite time he did know what his mother was! Why should we be saddled with the child of a Popish priest's amourettes? There, then--look!"

She pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of her pocket and tossed it across the table to Arthur. He opened it; the writing was in his mother's hand, and was dated four months before his birth. It was a confession, addressed to her husband, and with two signatures.

Arthur's eyes travelled slowly down the page, past the unsteady letters in which her name was written, to the strong, familiar signature: "Lorenzo Montanelli." For a moment he stared at the writing; then, without a word, refolded the paper and laid it down. James rose and took his wife by the arm.

"There, Julia, that will do. Just go downstairs now; it's late, and I want to talk a little business with Arthur. It won't interest you."

She glanced up at her husband; then back at Arthur, who was silently staring at the floor.

"He seems half stupid," she whispered.

When she had gathered up her train and left the room, James carefully shut the door and went back to his chair beside the table. Arthur sat as before, perfectly motionless and silent.

"Arthur," James began in a milder tone, now Julia was not there to hear, "I am very sorry that this has come out. You might just as well not have known it. However, all that's over; and I am pleased to see that you can behave with such self-control. Julia is a--a little excited; ladies often--anyhow, I don't want to be too hard on you."

He stopped to see what effect the kindly words had produced; but Arthur was quite motionless.

"Of course, my dear boy," James went on after a moment, "this is a distressing story altogether, and the best thing we can do is to hold our tongues about it. My father was generous enough not to divorce your mother when she confessed her fall to him; he only demanded that the man who had led her astray should leave the country at once; and, as you know, he went to China as a missionary. For my part, I was very much against your having anything to do with him when he came back; but my father, just at the last, consented to let him teach you, on condition that he never attempted to see your mother. I must, in justice, acknowledge that I believe they both observed that condition faithfully to the end. It is a very deplorable business; but----"

Arthur looked up. All the life and expression had gone out of his face; it was like a waxen mask.

"D-don't you think," he said softly, with a curious stammering hesitation on the words, "th-that--all this--is--v-very--funny?"

"FUNNY?" James pushed his chair away from the table, and sat staring at him, too much petrified for anger. "Funny! Arthur, are you mad?"

Arthur suddenly threw back his head, and burst into a frantic fit of laughing.

"Arthur!" exclaimed the s.h.i.+powner, rising with dignity, "I am amazed at your levity!"

There was no answer but peal after peal of laughter, so loud and boisterous that even James began to doubt whether there was not something more the matter here than levity.

"Just like a hysterical woman," he muttered, turning, with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders, to tramp impatiently up and down the room. "Really, Arthur, you're worse than Julia; there, stop laughing! I can't wait about here all night."

He might as well have asked the crucifix to come down from its pedestal.

Arthur was past caring for remonstrances or exhortations; he only laughed, and laughed, and laughed without end.

"This is absurd!" said James, stopping at last in his irritated pacing to and fro. "You are evidently too much excited to be reasonable to-night. I can't talk business with you if you're going on that way.

Come to me to-morrow morning after breakfast. And now you had better go to bed. Good-night."

He went out, slamming the door. "Now for the hysterics downstairs," he muttered as he tramped noisily away. "I suppose it'll be tears there!"

The frenzied laughter died on Arthur's lips. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the hammer from the table and flung himself upon the crucifix.

With the crash that followed he came suddenly to his senses, standing before the empty pedestal, the hammer still in his hand, and the fragments of the broken image scattered on the floor about his feet.

He threw down the hammer. "So easy!" he said, and turned away. "And what an idiot I am!"

He sat down by the table, panting heavily for breath, and rested his forehead on both hands. Presently he rose, and, going to the wash-stand, poured a jugful of cold water over his head and face. He came back quite composed, and sat down to think.

And it was for such things as these--for these false and slavish people, these dumb and soulless G.o.ds--that he had suffered all these tortures of shame and pa.s.sion and despair; had made a rope to hang himself, forsooth, because one priest was a liar. As if they were not all liars!