Again little Yulia tripped downstairs to the ground floor. But the counting-house was locked, and the men-servants told her that Omobono had gone out. She would not leave the book with them, for she had a superstitiously exaggerated idea of the value of all written things; therefore, after a moment’s hesitation, she turned and carried it upstairs again, though she did not like the idea of facing her mistress.
At the first landing she almost ran against the master of the house, who asked her what she was carrying and where she was going. He spoke rather sharply, and Yulia was frightened and told him the whole story, explaining that Zoë seemed to be in a bad temper, and would be angry with her for bringing back the account-book, but that it was Omobono’s fault. How could he dare to suppose that the Kokóna could not read? And why was he out? And if he was not out why had the men-servants told her that he was?
The little slave did as all slaves and servants naturally do when they wish to gain favour with the master; she hinted that all the other servants in the house were in league to do evil, and that she only was righteous. Zeno carelessly looked through the pages of the account-book as he stood listening to her tale.
‘You talk too much,’ he observed, when she paused. ‘Go upstairs.’
Thereupon he turned his back on her and went in under the heavy curtain to his own room, taking the book with him and leaving Yulia considerably disconcerted. She looked at the curtain disconsolately for a few seconds, and then slowly ascended the second flight of steps to the women’s apartments.
A few minutes later Zeno himself followed her, with another book in his hand. He knocked discreetly at the outer door, and Lucilla opened, for Yulia was still explaining to Zoë what had happened. The maid stood aside to let the master pass through the vestibule which separated the inner rooms from the staircase. Zeno raised the curtain and went in.
‘I am no great reader,’ he said, as he came forward towards the divan, ‘but I have brought you this old book. It may amuse you. The man died more than fifty years ago, and I fancy he was mad; but there must be something in his poem, for it has been copied again and again. This was given me by the Emperor Charles when I was with him in Venice.’
Zoë had time to recover from her surprise and to study his face and manner while he spoke, and again she was convinced that he was a little shy in her presence. If she changed colour at all he did not see it, for though he glanced at her two or three times, he looked more often at the book he held. As he finished speaking he placed it in her hands and his eyes met hers.
Possibly Zoë had guessed that if she could make a stir in the house by sending messages to Omobono, the master would at last come in person; at all events she felt a little thrill of triumph when he was before her bringing his book and speaking pleasantly, as a sort of peace-offering for having neglected her so long.
‘Thank you,’ said she, very sweetly. ‘Will it please your lordship to be seated?’
Yulia had pushed forward a large fold-stool, and Zoë motioned to her and her companion to sit down in a corner. Zeno thought she had sent them out of the room, and he looked round and saw them squatting on their carpet, side by side.
‘Shall I send them away?’ asked Zoë, with a sweet smile.
‘They are not in the way,’ Zeno answered coldly; for he felt that they might be if they understood, but nothing would have induced him to dismiss them just then.
A little pause followed, during which Zoë opened the manuscript and read the illuminated title-page.
‘It is dull for you, here,’ said Carlo awkwardly.
Zoë did not even look up, and affected to answer absently, while she turned over the pages.
‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘Not in the least, I assure you!’ She went back to the title and read it aloud. ‘“The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri” — I have heard his name. A Sicilian, was he not? Or a Lombard? I cannot remember. Have you read the poetry? The paintings are very pretty, I see. There is much more life in Italian painting than in our stiff pictures with their gilt backgrounds. Of course, there is a certain childlike simplicity about them, an absence of school, of the traditions of good masters, of reverence for the old art! But they mean something that is, whereas our Greek pictures mean something that never was. Do you agree with me?’
She had talked on in a careless tone, toying with the book, and only looking up as she asked a question without waiting for a reply. By the time she paused she had asked so many that Zeno only noticed the last.
‘You would like Venice,’ he said, ‘but you would like Florence better. There are good pictures there, I believe.’
‘You have not seen them yourself?’
‘Oh yes! But I do not understand such things. This man Alighieri describes some of them in his book. He was a Florentine.’
As Zeno showed himself more willing to talk, Zoë seemed to grow more indifferent. She laid the book down beside her, leaned back, and looked out of the window, turning her face half away from him. It was the first time he had seen her by daylight since she had come, and the strong afternoon light glowed in her white skin, her eyes, and her brown hair. He could have seen on her cheek the very smallest imperfection, had it been as tiny as the point of a pin, but there was none. He looked at her tender mouth; and in the strong glare he could have detected the least roughness on her lips, if they had not been as smooth as fresh fruit. Moreover, the line from her ear to her neck was really as perfect as it had seemed at first sight. Her nervous, high-bred young hand lay on the folds of her over-garment, within his reach, and he felt much inclined to take it and hold it. He did not remember that any woman’s near presence had disturbed him in the same way, nor had he ever hesitated on the few occasions in his life when he had been inclined to take a woman’s hand. He had the fullest rights which the laws of the Empire could give him, for Arethusa, as he called her, was his property out-and-out, and if he died suddenly she would be sold at auction with the furniture. Yet, for some wholly inexplicable reason he did not quite dare to touch the tips of her fingers.
‘I have heard that you are a hero,’ Zoë observed, without looking at him. ‘Is it true?’
Then she turned her eyes to him and smiled a little maliciously, he fancied, as if she had guessed his timidity from his silence.
‘Who told you such nonsense?’ Zeno asked, with a laugh, for her question had broken the ice — or perhaps had quenched the fire for a while. ‘I am a man like any other!’
‘That I doubt, sir,’ answered Zoë, laughing too, though not much.
‘You have no experience of men,’ he said. ‘They are all like me, I assure you. One sheep is not more like another in a flock.’
‘I should not have taken you for one of the common herd. Besides, I know of your deeds in Italy and Greece, and how you fought a Turkish army for a whole year with a handful of men — —’
‘I have seen some fighting, of course,’ Zeno replied. ‘But that is all in the past. I am a sober, peace-loving Venetian merchant now, and nothing else.’
‘It must be very dull to be a sober, peace-loving Venetian merchant,’ said Zoë, faintly mimicking his tone.
‘Making money is too hard work to be dull.’
‘I suppose so. And then,’ she added, with magnificent calm, ‘I have always heard that avarice is the passion of old age.’
Zeno fell into the trap.
‘Dear me!’ he cried in astonishment. ‘How old do you think I am?’
Zoë looked at him quietly.
‘I have no experience of men,’ she said, with perfect gravity, ‘but from your manner, sir, I should judge you to be — about fifty.’
Zeno’s jaw dropped, for she spoke so naturally and quietly that he could not believe she was laughing at him.
‘I shall be twenty-nine in August,’ he answered.
‘Only twenty-nine?’ Zoë affected great surprise. ‘I should have thought you were much, much older! Are you quite sure?’
‘Yes.’ Carlo laughed. ‘I am quite sure. But I s
uppose I seem very old to you.’
‘Oh yes! Very!’ She nodded gravely as she spoke.
‘You are seventeen, are you not?’ Zeno asked.
‘How in the world should I know!’ she enquired. ‘Is not my age set down in the receipt Rustan gave you with me? How should a slave know her own age, sir? And if we knew it, do you think that any of us could speak the truth, except under torture? It would not be worth while to dislocate my arms and burn my feet with hot irons, just to know how old I am, would it? You could not even sell me again, if I had once been tortured!’
‘What horrible ideas you have! Imagine torturing this little thing!’
Thereupon, without warning, he took her hand in his and looked at it. She made a very slight instinctive movement to withdraw it, and then it lay quite still and passive.
‘I am sure I could never bear pain,’ she said, smiling. ‘I should tell everything at once! I should never make a good conspirator. I suppose you must have been wounded once or twice, when you were young. Tell me, did it hurt very much?’
He let her hand fall as he answered, and she drew it back and hid it under her wide sleeve.
‘A cut with a sharp sword feels like a stream of icy-cold water,’ he answered. ‘A thrust through the flesh pricks like a big thorn, and pricks again when the point comes out on the other side. One feels very little, or nothing at all, if one is badly wounded in the head, for one is stunned at once; it is the headache afterwards that really hurts. If one is wounded in the lungs, one feels nothing, but one is choked by the blood, and one must turn on one’s face at once in order not to suffocate. Broken bones hurt afterwards as a rule, more than at first, but it is a curious sensation to have one’s collar bone smashed by a blow from a two-handed sword — —’
‘Good heavens!’ cried Zoë. ‘What a catalogue! How do you know how each thing feels?’
‘I can remember,’ Zeno answered simply.
‘You have been wounded in all those different ways, and you are alive?’
Zeno smiled.
‘Yes; and you understand now why I look so old.’
‘I was not in earnest,’ Zoë said. ‘You knew that I was not. You need only look at yourself in a mirror to see that I was laughing.’
‘I was not very deeply hurt by being taken for a man of fifty,’ Zeno answered, not quite truthfully.
‘Oh no!’ laughed Zoë. ‘I cannot imagine that my opinion of your age could make any difference to you. It was silly of me — only, for a man who has had so many adventures, you do look absurdly young!’
‘So much the better, since my fighting days are over.’
‘And since you are a sober, peace-loving merchant,’ said Zoë, continuing the sentence for him. ‘But are you so very sure, my lord? Would nothing make you draw your sword again and risk your life on your fencing? Nothing?’
‘Nothing that did not affect my honour, I truly believe.’
‘You would not do it for a woman’s sake?’ She turned to him, to watch his face, but its expression did not change.
‘Three things can drive a wise man mad, — wine, women, and dice.’
‘I daresay! Your lordship reckons us in good company. But that is no answer to my question.’
‘Yes it is,’ said Zeno with a laugh. ‘Why should I do for a woman what I would not do for dice or wine?’
‘But dice and wine never tempted you,’ Zoë objected.
Zeno laughed louder.
‘Never? When I was a student at Padua I sold everything, even my books, to get money for both. It was only when the books were gone that I turned soldier, and learned the greatest game of hazard in the world. Compared with that, dice are an opiate, and wine is a sleeping-draught.’
He only smiled now, after laughing, but there was a look in his face as he spoke which she saw then for the first time and did not forget, and recognised when she saw it again. It was subtle, and might have passed unnoticed among men, but it spoke to the sex in the girl, and made her young blood thrill. For worlds, she would not have had him guess what she felt just then.
‘Fighting for its own sake would tempt you, if nothing else could,’ she answered quietly.
‘Ah — perhaps, perhaps,’ he answered, musing.
‘But you would need a cause, though ever so slight, and you have none here, have you?’
‘None that I care to take up.’
‘You may find something to fight for — over the water,’ Zoë suggested, emphasising the words a little and watching his face.
The phrase meant nothing to him.
‘Over the water?’ he repeated carelessly. ‘At home, in Venice, you mean. Yes, if Venice needed me, I should not wait to be called twice!’
It was quite clear that he attached no meaning to the words she had used, and this fact tallied with what the astrologer had told her in the morning as to his having been deaf to all advances made to him by the imprisoned Emperor’s party.
Zoë leaned back in silence for a while, almost closing her eyes, and she saw that he watched her, and that an unmistakable look of admiration stole into his face. She was wondering whether it would ever turn into something more, and whether she should ever see the gleam of fight in his eyes, for her sake, that had flashed in them a moment ago at the mere thought of battle. What did women do, to make men love them? There is an age when girls believe that love need only be called, like a tame dove, and that he will fly in at the window; and there is an age when he comes to them uncalled-for. If only the ages were the same for all, much trouble might be spared. Zoë was perhaps between the two, but she still believed that there was some fixed rule on which clever women acted to make men fall in love with them, those wicked women who are described to young girls as ‘designing,’ and are supposed to know precisely the effect they can produce on men at any moment, to the very nicety of an eyelash.
Zeno broke the long silence with an unexpected speech which roughly awakened Zoë from her reflection.
‘As for this Emperor John whom his son has locked up,’ he said, ‘his friends have done their best to interest me in his cause. He has even sent me messages, begging me to help him to escape. Why? What difference can it make to me whether he or his son dies in the Amena tower? They are poor things, both of them, and for all I care John may starve in his chains before I will lift a finger!’
Zoë sighed and bit her lip to check herself, for his voluntary declaration had dashed the palace of her hopes to pieces in an instant.
Then she was ashamed of having even dreamt that he might love her, since he despised the very cause for which she had wished to win his love. But this state of mind did not last long, either. She was too brave to let such a speech pass, as if she agreed with it.
‘You are wrong,’ she said, quite forgetting that she had set herself to play the part of the slave. ‘You ought to help him, if you can — and you can, if you will.’
Zeno looked at her in surprise. There was something like authority in her tone, and the two little maids, whom he had forgotten in their corner behind him, stared in astonishment at her audacity. Not a word of the conversation had escaped them.
‘I mean,’ continued Zoë, before he could find an answer to her plain statement, ‘if you are a true Venetian you should wish to put down the man whom the Genoese and the Turks have set on the throne. Johannes is your friend and your country’s friend, though he is a weak man and always will be. Andronicus is an enemy to Venice and a friend to her enemies. He is even now ready to give the island of Tenedos to them — the key to the Dardanelles — —’
‘What?’ asked Zeno in a loud and angry tone. ‘Tenedos?’
His manner had changed, and he almost rose from his seat as he bent forwards and seized her wrist in his excitement. She was glad, and smiled at him.
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘the Genoese demand it as the price of their protection, and they will force him to give it to them. But it may not be easy, for the governor of the island is loyal to Johannes.’
; ‘How do you know these things?’ asked Zeno, still holding her wrist and trying to look into her eyes.
‘I know them,’ Zoë answered. ‘If I am not telling you the truth, sell me in the market to-morrow.’
‘I know them,’ Zoë answered. ‘If I am not telling you the truth, sell me in the market to-morrow.’
‘By the Evangelist,’ swore Zeno, ‘you will deserve it.’
CHAPTER IX
A MONTH HAD passed, and yet, to all outward appearance, Zeno’s manner of living had undergone no change. He rose early and bathed in the Golden Horn on fine days. He attended to his business in the morning, and dined with Sebastian Polo twice a week, but generally at home on the remaining days; and he rode out in the afternoon with a single running footman, or stayed indoors if it rained. Even his own servants and slaves hardly noticed any change in his habits, and only observed that he often looked preoccupied, and sometimes sat on his balcony for an hour without moving, his eyes fixed on the towers of the Blachernæ palace.
They did not know how much time he spent with his beautiful Greek slave; and they found that the two little maids, Yulia and Lucilla, were not inclined to gossip when they came downstairs on an errand. Omobono probably knew a good deal, but he kept it to himself, and stored the fruits of his lively curiosity to enjoy alone the delicious sensation of the miser gloating over his useless gold. On the whole, therefore, life in the Venetian merchant’s house had gone on much as usual for a whole month after Zoë had fired a train which was destined to produce momentous results when it reached the mine at last.
Zeno saw her every day now, and often twice, and she had become a part of his life, and necessary to him; though he did not believe that he was in love with her, any more than she would have admitted that she loved him.
For each was possessed by one dominant thought; and it chanced, as it rarely chances in real life, that one deed, if it could be performed, would satisfy the hopes of both. Zeno, born patriot and leader, saw that the whole influence of his country in the East was at stake in the matter of Tenedos; Zoë thirsted to revenge the death of Michael Rhangabé, her adopted father and the idol of her childhood.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1173