Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Then Aristarchi and his men paid the dealers their commission and took the money and the sword. But before he went from the house, the Greek captain begged leave to see Arisa once more at the grating, and he told her that come what might he should steal her away. She bade him not to be in too great haste, and she promised that if he would wait, he should have with her more gold than her new master had given for her, for she would take all he had from him, little by little; and when they had enough they would leave Venice secretly, and live in a grand manner in Florence, or in Rome, or in Sicily. For she never doubted but that he would find some way of coming to her, though she were guarded more closely than in the slave-dealers’ house, where the windows were grated and armed men slept before the door, and one of the dealers watched all night.

  More than a year had passed since then; the strong Greek knew every corner of the house of the Agnus Dei, and every foothold under Arisa’s windows, from the water to the stone sill, by which he could help himself a little as he went up hand over hand by the knotted silk rope that would have cut to the bone any hands but his. She kept it hidden in a cushioned footstool in her inner room. Many a risk he had run, and more than once in winter he had slipped down the rope with haste to let himself gently into the icy water, and he had swum far down the dark canal to a landing-place. For he was a man of iron.

  So it came about that Jacopo Contarini lived in a fool’s paradise, in which he was not only the chief fool himself, but was moreover in bodily danger more often than he knew. For though Aristarchi had hitherto managed to escape being seen, he would have killed Jacopo with his naked hands if the latter had ever caught him, as easily as a boy wrings a bird’s neck, and with as little scruple of conscience.

  The Georgian loved him for his hirsute strength, for his fearlessness, even his violence and dangerous temper. He dominated her as naturally as she controlled her master, whose vacillating nature and love of idle ease filled her with contempt. It was for the sake of gold that she acted her part daily and nightly, with a wisdom and unwavering skill that were almost superhuman; and the Greek ruffian agreed to the bargain, and had been in no haste to carry her off, as he might have done at any time. She hoarded the money she got from Jacopo, to give it by stealth to Aristarchi, who hid their growing wealth in a safe place where it was always ready; but she kept her jewels always together, in case of an unexpected flight, since she dared not sell them nor give them to the Greek, lest they should be missed.

  Of late it had seemed to them both that the time for their final action was at hand, for it had been clear to Arisa that Jacopo was near the end of his resources, and that his father was resolved to force him to change his life. There were days when he was reduced to borrowing money for his actual needs, and though an occasional stroke of good fortune at play temporarily relieved him, Arisa was sure that he was constantly sinking deeper into debt. But within the week, the aspect of his affairs had changed. The marriage with Marietta had been proposed, and Arisa had made a discovery. She told Aristarchi everything, as naturally as she would have concealed everything from Contarini.

  “We shall be rich,” she said, twining her white arms round his swarthy neck and looking up into his murderous eyes with something like genuine adoration. “We shall get the wife’s dowry for ourselves, by degrees, every farthing of it, and it shall be the dower of Aristarchi’s bride instead. I shall not be portionless. You shall not be ashamed of me when you meet your old friends.”

  “Ashamed!” His arm pressed her to him till she longed to cry out for pain, yet she would not have had him less rough.

  “You are so strong!” she gasped in a broken whisper. “Yes — a little looser — so! I can speak now. You must go to Murano to-morrow and find out all about this Angelo Beroviero and his daughter. Try to see her, and tell me whether she is pretty, but most of all learn whether she is really rich.”

  “That is easy enough. I will go to the furnace and offer to buy a cargo of glass for Sicily.”

  “But you will not take it?” asked Arisa in sudden anxiety lest he should leave her to make the voyage.

  “No, no! I will make inquiries. I will ask for a sort of glass that does not exist.”

  “Yes,” she said, reassured. “Do that. I must know if the girl is rich before I marry him to her.”

  “But can you make him marry her at all?” asked Aristarchi.

  “I can make him do anything I please. We drank to the health of the bride to-night, in a goblet made by her father! The wine was strong, and I put a little syrup of poppies into it. He will not wake for hours. What is the matter?”

  She felt the rough man shaking beside her, as if he were in an ague.

  “I was laughing,” he said, when he could speak. “It is a good jest. But is there no danger in all this? Is it quite impossible that he should take a liking for his wife?”

  “And leave me?” Arisa’s whisper was hot with indignation at the mere thought. “Then I suppose you would leave me for the first pretty girl with a fortune who wanted to marry you!”

  “This Contarini is such a fool!” answered Aristarchi contemptuously, by way of explanation and apology.

  Arisa was instantly pacified.

  “If he should be foolish enough for that, I have means that will keep him,” she answered.

  “I do not see how you can force him to do anything except by his passion for you.”

  “I can. I was not going to tell you yet — you always make me tell you everything, like a child.”

  “What is it?” asked the Greek. “Have you found out anything new about him? Of course you must tell me.”

  “We hold his life in our hands,” she said quietly, and Aristarchi knew that she was not exaggerating the truth.

  She began to tell him how this was the third time that a number of masked men had come to the house an hour after dark, and had stayed till midnight or later, and how Contarini had told her that they came to play at dice where they were safe from interruption, and that on these nights the servants were sent to their quarters at sunset on pain of dismissal if Jacopo found them about the house, but that they also received generous presents of money to keep them silent.

  “The man is a fool!” said Aristarchi again. “He puts himself in their power.”

  “He is much more completely in ours,” answered Arisa. “The servants believe that his friends come to play dice. And so they do. But they come for something more serious.”

  Aristarchi moved his massive head suddenly to an attitude of profound attention.

  “They are plotting against the Republic,” whispered Arisa. “I can hear all they say.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I tell you I can hear every word. I can almost see them. Look here. Come with me.”

  She rose and he followed her to the corner of the room where the small silver lamp burned steadily before an image of Saint Mark, and above a heavy kneeling-stool.

  “The foot moves,” she said, and she was already on her knees on the floor, pushing the step.

  It slid back with the soft sound Contarini had heard before he came upstairs. The upper part of the woodwork was built into the wall.

  “They meet in the place below this,” Arisa said. “When they are there, I can see a glimmer of light. I cannot get my head in. It is too narrow, but I hear as if I were with them.”

  “How did you find this out?” asked Aristarchi on the floor beside her, and reaching down into the dark space to explore it with his hand. “It is deep,” he continued, without waiting for an answer. “There may be some passage by which one can get down.”

  “Only a child could pass. You see how narrow it is. But one can hear every sound. They said enough to-night to send them all to the scaffold.”

  “Better they than we if we ever have to make the choice,” said the Greek ominously.

  He had withdrawn his arm and was planted upon his hands and knees, his shaggy head hanging over the dark aperture. He was like some rough wild beast that has tr
acked its quarry to earth and crouches before the hole, waiting for a victim.

  “How did you find this out?” he asked again, looking up.

  She was standing by the corner of the stool, now, all her marvellous beauty showing in the light of the little lamp and against the wall behind her.

  “I was saying my prayers here, the first night they met,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I heard voices, as it seemed, under my feet. I tried to push away the stool, and the foot moved. That is all.”

  Aristarchi’s jaw dropped a little as he looked up at her.

  “Do you say prayers every night?” he asked in wonder.

  “Of course I do. Do you never say a prayer?”

  “No.” He was still staring at her.

  “That is very wrong,” she said, in the earnest tone a mother might use to her little child. “Some harm will befall us, if you do not say your prayers.”

  A slow smile crossed the ruffian’s face as he realised that this evil woman who was ready to commit the most atrocious deeds out of love for him, was still half a child.

  CHAPTER IV

  MARIETTA AWOKE BEFORE sunrise, with a smile on her lips, and as she opened her eyes, the world seemed suddenly gladder than ever before, and her heart beat in time with it. She threw back the shutters wide to let in the June morning as if it were a beautiful living thing; and it breathed upon her face and caressed her, and took her in its spirit arms, and filled her with itself.

  Not a sound broke the stillness, as she looked out, and the glassy waters of the canal reflected delicate tints from the sky, palest green and faintest violet and amber with all the lovely changing colours of the dawn. By the footway a black barge was moored, piled high with round uncovered baskets of beads, white, blue, deep red and black, waiting to be taken over to Venice where they would be threaded for the East, and the colours stood out in strong contrast with the grey stones, the faint reflections in the water and the tender sky above. There were flowers on the window-sill, a young rose with opening buds, growing in a red earthen jar, and a pot of lavender just bursting into flower, with a sweet geranium beside it and some rosemary. Zorzi had planted them all for her, and her serving-woman had helped her to fasten the pots in the window, because it would have been out of the question that any man except her father should enter her room, even when she was not there. But they were Zorzi’s flowers, and she bent down and smelt their fragrance. On a table behind her a single rose hung over the edge of a tall glass with a slender stem, almost the counterpart of the one in which Contarini had drunk her health at midnight. Her father had given it to her as it came from the annealing oven, still warm after long hours of cooling with many others like it. She loved it for its grace and lightness, and as for the rose, it was the one she had made Zorzi give back to her yesterday. She meant to keep it in water till it faded, and then she would press it between the first page and the binding of her parchment missal. It would keep some of its faint scent, perhaps, and if any one saw it, no one would ever guess whence it came.

  It meant a great thing to her, for it had told her Zorzi’s secret, which he had kept so well. He should know hers some day, but not yet, and her drooping lids could hide it if it ever came into her eyes. It was too soon to let him know that she loved him. That was one reason for hiding it, but she had another. If her father guessed that she loved the waif, it would fare ill with him. She fancied she could see the old man’s fiery brown eyes and hear his angry voice. Poor Zorzi would be driven from Murano and Venice, never to set foot again within the boundaries of the Republic; for Beroviero was a man of weight and influence, of whom Venice was proud.

  Youth would be very sad if it counted time and labour as it is reckoned and valued by mature age. Some day Zorzi would be no longer a mere paid helper, calling himself a servant when his humour was bitter, tending a fire on his knees and grinding coloured earths and salts in a mortar. He had the understanding of the glorious art, and the true love of it, with the magic touch; he would make a name for himself in spite of the harsh Venetian law, and some day his master would be proud to call him son. There would not be many months to wait. Months or years, what mattered, since she loved him and was at last quite sure that he loved her? To-day, that was enough. She would go over to the glass-house and sit in the garden, by the rose he had planted, and now and then she would go into the close furnace room where he worked with her father, or Zorzi would come out for something; she should be near him, she should see his face and hear his quiet voice, and she would say to herself: He loves me, he loves me — as often as she chose, knowing that it was true.

  Since she knew it, she was sure that she should see it in his face, that had hidden it from her so long. There would be glances when he thought she was not watching him, his colour would come and go, as yesterday, and he would do her some little service, now and then, in which the sweet truth, against his will, should tell itself to her again and again. It would be a delicious and ever-remembered day, each minute a pearl, each hour a chaplet of jewels, from golden sunrise to golden sunset, all perfect through and through.

  There were so many little things she could watch in him, now that she knew the truth, things that had long meant nothing and would mean volumes to-day. She would watch him, and then call him suddenly and see him try to hide the little gladness he would feel as he turned to her; and when they were alone a moment, she would ask him whether he had remembered to forget Jacopo Contarini’s name; and some day, but not for a long time yet, she would drop a rose again, and she would turn as he picked it up, but she would not make him give it back to her, and in that way he should know that she loved him. She must not think of that, for it was too soon, yet she could almost see his face as it would be when he knew.

  Yesterday her father had talked again of her marriage. A whole month had passed since he had even alluded to it, but this time he had spoken of it as a certainty; and she had opened her eyes wide in surprise. She did not believe that it was to be. How could she marry a man she did not love? How could she love any man but Zorzi? They might show her twenty Venetian patricians, that she might choose among them. Meanwhile she would show her indifference. Nothing was easier than to put on an inscrutable expression which betrayed nothing, but which, as she knew, sometimes irritated her father beyond endurance.

  He had always promised that she should not be married against her will, as many girls were. Then why should she marry Contarini, any more than any other man except the one she had chosen? She need only say that Contarini did not please her, and her father would certainly not try to use force. There was therefore nothing to fear, and since her first surprise was over, she felt sure of appearing quite indifferent. She would put the thought out of her mind and begin the day with the perfect certainty that the marriage was altogether impossible.

  She looked out over her flowers. The door of the glass-house was open now, and the burly porter was sweeping; she could hear the cypress broom on the flagstones inside, and presently it appeared in sight while the porter was still invisible, and it whisked out a mixture of black dust and bread crumbs and bits of green salad leaves, and the old man came out and swept everything across the footway into the canal. As he turned to go back, the workmen came trooping across the bridge to the furnaces — pale men with intent faces, very different from ordinary working people. For each called himself an artist, and was one; and each knew that so far as the law was concerned the proudest noble in Venice could marry his daughter without the least derogation from patrician dignity. The workmen differed from her own father not in station, but only in the degree of their prosperity.

  If Zorzi could ever have been one of them the rest would have been simple enough. But he could not, any more than a black man could turn white at will. There was no evasion of law by which a man not born a Venetian could ever be a glass-blower, or could ever acquire the privileges possessed from birth by one of those shabby, pale young men who were crowding past the porter to go to their har
d day’s work. Yet dexterous as they were, there was not one that had his skill, there was not one that could compare with him as an artist, as a workman, as a man. No Indian caste, no ancient nobility, no mystic priesthood ever set up a barrier so impassable between itself and the outer world as that which defended the glass-blowers of Murano for centuries against all who wished to be initiated. Even the boys who fed the fires all night were of the calling, and by and by would become workmen, and perhaps masters, legally almost the equals of the splendid nobles who sat in the Grand Council over there in Venice.

  Zorzi’s very existence was an anomaly. He had no social right to be what he was, and he knew it when he called himself a servant, for the cruel law would not allow him to be anything else so long as he helped Angelo Beroviero.

  Suddenly, while Marietta watched the men, Zorzi was there among them, coming out as they went in. He must have risen early, she thought, for she did not know that he had slept in the laboratory. He looked pale and thin as he flattened himself against the door-post to let a workman pass, and then slipped out himself. No one greeted him, even by a nod. Marietta knew that they hated him because he was in her father’s confidence; and somehow, instead of pitying him, she was glad.

  It seemed natural that he should not be one of them, that he should pass them with quiet indifference and that they should feel for him the instinctive dislike which most inferiors feel for those above them. Doubtless, they looked down upon him, or told themselves that they did; but in their hearts they knew that a man with such a face was born to be their teacher and their master, and the girl was proud of him. He treated them with more civility than they bestowed on him, but it was the courtesy of a superior who would not assert himself, who would scorn to thrust himself forward or in any way to claim what was his by right, if it were not freely offered. Marietta drew back a little, so that she could just see him between the flowers, without being seen.