Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  If the imprisoned Emperor Johannes could be delivered from the Amena tower, both would certainly obtain what they most desired. Johannes would give Tenedos to Venice, in gratitude for his liberty, and the people of Constantinople would probably tear Andronicus to ribands in the Hippodrome, on the very spot where Rhangabé had suffered.

  They would rally round their lawful sovereign if he could only be got out of the precincts of the palace, where the usurper was strongly guarded by his foreign mercenaries, mostly Circassians, Mingrelians, Avars, and Slavonians. The people would not rise of themselves to storm Blachernæ, nor would the Greek troops revolt of their own accord; but as they all feared the soldiers of the foreign legion, they hated them and their master Andronicus, and the presence of Johannes amongst them would restore their courage and make the issue certain.

  Such a leader as Carlo Zeno might indeed have successfully besieged Andronicus in his palace; but he knew, and every man and woman in Constantinople knew well enough, that Andronicus would make an end of his father and of his two younger brothers in prison, at the first sign of a revolution, so that there might be no lawful heir to the throne left alive but he himself.

  Therefore it was the first and the chief object of the patriots to bring Johannes secretly from his place of confinement to the heart of the city, or to one of the islands, beyond the reach of danger, till the revolution should be over and his son a prisoner in his stead; though it was much more probable that the latter would be summarily put to death as a traitor.

  All this Zeno had understood before Zoë had spoken to him about it; but he had not known that the Genoese had demanded Tenedos of Andronicus as the price of their protection against the Turks; for the negotiations had been kept very secret, and at first Carlo had not believed the girl, and had deemed that the tale might be a pure invention.

  He had come again to see her on the following day, and again he had vainly tried to find out who she was, and in what great Fanariote house she had been brought up. It was impossible to get a word from her on this subject; and she warned him that what she had told him must not be repeated in the hearing of any Genoese, nor of any one connected with the Court. The Genoese meant that no one should know of the treaty till it was carried out, and until Tenedos was theirs; for the place was very strong, as they afterwards found by experience, and Andronicus needed their help too much to risk losing their favour by an indiscretion.

  These injunctions of silence made Carlo still more doubtful as to the veracity of Zoë’s story, and he frankly told her so and demanded proof; but she only answered as she had at first.

  ‘If it is not true,’ she said, ‘brand me in the forehead, as they brand thieves, and sell me in the open market.’

  And again he was angry, and swore that he would do so by her indeed if the story was a lie; but she smiled confidently, and nodded her assent.

  ‘If you do not save the Emperor,’ she said, ‘you Venetians will be driven out of Constantinople before many months; and if Genoa once holds Tenedos how shall you ever again sail up the Dardanelles?’

  Many a time she had heard Michael Rhangabé say as much to his friends, and she knew that it was wisdom. So did Zeno, and he wondered at the knowledge of his bought slave. So he came and went, turning over the great question in his brain; and she awaited his coming gladly, because she saw that he was roused, and because the longing for just revenge was uppermost in her thoughts. Thus were the two drawn together more and more, fate helping. Yet he told her nothing of the steps he took so quickly after he had once made up his mind to act.

  She no longer asked him what he meant to do with her; she did not again send for the secretary to complain that her existence was dull; she no longer was impatient with her maids; she seemed perfectly satisfied with her existence.

  She went out when she pleased to go, in the beautiful skiff, in charge of Omobono, and always with one of the girls; and she sat in the deep cushioned seat as the great ladies did when they were rowed to the Sweet Waters, and as she had sat many times in old days, beside Kyría Agatha. The secretary sat on a little movable seat in the waist of the boat, which was built almost exactly like a modern Venetian gondola without the hood, and the slave-girl sat in the bottom at her mistress’s feet. Zoë, the adopted daughter of the Protosparthos, had gone abroad with uncovered face, but Arethusa, the slave, was closely veiled, though that was not the general custom. And often, as she glided along in the spring afternoons, she passed people she had known only a year ago, or a little more, who wondered why she hid her features; or told each other, as was more or less true, that she was some handsome white slave, whose jealous master would not suffer her beauty to be seen. For it was clear that Omobono was only a respectable elderly person placed in charge of her.

  The two generally conversed in Latin, and the secretary told her of his search for Kyría Agatha, the children, and old Nectaria. She had never shown him her face since she had been a slave, and she believed that he did not connect her with the ragged girl he had seen bending over the sick woman’s bed in the beggars’ quarter. She had enjoined upon him the greatest discretion in case he found the little family, and with Omobono such an injunction was quite unnecessary, for outward discretion is the characteristic quality of curiosity, which is inwardly the least discreet of failings. People who look through keyholes, listen behind curtains, and read other people’s letters are generally the last to talk of what they learn in that way.

  As yet, the secretary’s search had been fruitless, but he had long ago made up his mind that Zoë was Kyría Agatha’s daughter. The bandy-legged sacristan of Saint Bacchus had helped him to this conclusion by informing him that Rustan Karaboghazji had not come to perform his devotions in the church for some time; never, in fact, since that Friday afternoon on which Omobono had inquired after him.

  The secretary had searched the beggars’ quarter in vain. He remembered the ruined house very well, and the crazy shutters with bits of rain-bleached string tied to them for fastenings. There were people living in it, but they were not the same beggars; it was now inhabited by the chief physician of the beggars himself, whose business it was to prepare misery for the public eye, at fixed rates. For among those who were really starving there lived a small tribe of professional paupers, who displayed the horrors of their loathsome diseases at the doors of the churches all over Constantinople. The physician was skilful in his way, and though he preferred a real cripple, or a real sore for his art to improve upon, he could produce the semblance of either on sound limbs and a whole skin, though the process was expensive. Yet that increased cost was balanced by the ability of his healthy patients to go alone to a great distance, and thus to vary the scene of their industry. They thus picked up the charity which should have reached the real poor, most of whom could hardly crawl as far as the great thoroughfares more than once or twice a week, at the risk of their lives. The sham beggar always has a marvellous power of covering the ground, but you must generally seek the real one in the lair where he is dying. Omobono had learnt much about beggars which he had not known before then, and he had found no trace whatever of the people whom he was seeking.

  They seemed very far away when Zoë thought of them. She wondered whether any of them missed her, except Nectaria, now that they had warm clothes and plenty to eat. The sacrifice had been very terrible at first, — it did not seem so now; and she knew that on that very afternoon when she went home after being out in the boat, she would listen for Zeno’s footstep in the vestibule, and think the time long till he came.

  But Omobono had gathered a good deal of information about her from his acquaintance, the sacristan, whom he strongly suspected of being in league with Rustan to inform him when there was anything worth buying in the beggars’ quarter; for the Bokharian was a busy man, and had no time to spend in searching for unusual merchandise, nor, when there was any to be had, would it have been to his advantage to be seen often in its neighborhood. So he paid the sacristan to quarter the ground continually
for him, while he was engaged elsewhere. It is to the credit of Rustan’s splendid business intelligence that the system he employed has not been improved on in five hundred years; for when the modern slave-dealers make their annual journeys to the centres of supply they find everything ready for them, like any other commercial traveller.

  Having understood Rustan’s mode of procedure, Omobono had extracted from the sacristan such information as the latter possessed about Zoë and Kyría Agatha, but that was not very much after all. They had lived three or four weeks in the ruined house, or perhaps six; he could not remember exactly. At first they all came to the church, but they had sold their miserable clothes and their wretched belongings. The last time the girl had come, she had been alone, and she had worn a blanket over her shoulders to keep her warm. That had been at dusk. Then Rustan had bought her, and soon afterwards they must have gone away, since the beggars’ physician was now installed in the house. Why should the sacristan take any interest in them? They were gone, and Constantinople was a vast city. No, the woman had not died, for he would have known it. When people died they were buried, even if they had starved to death in the beggars’ quarter.

  Zoë thanked Omobono for the information, and begged him to continue her search. He wondered why she did not burst into tears, and concluded that she was either quite heartless, or was in love with Zeno, or both. He inclined to the latter theory. Love, he told himself with all the conviction of middle-aged inexperience, was a selfish passion. Zoë loved Zeno, and did not care what had become of her mother.

  Besides, he knew that she was jealous. She had heard of Giustina, and was determined to see her. She insisted that the boat should keep to the left, going up the Golden Horn, and she made the secretary point out Sebastian Polo’s dwelling. It was a small palace, a hundred yards below the gardens of Blachernæ, and it had marble steps, like those at Zeno’s house. A girl with dyed hair sat in the shade in an upper balcony; her hair was red auburn, like that of the Venetian women, and her face was white, but that was all Zoë could see. She wished she had a hawk’s eyes. Omobono said it might be Giustina, but as the latter had many friends, it might also be one of them, for most Venetian women had hair of that colour.

  Farther up, they neared Blachernæ, and came first to the great Amena tower, of which the foundations stood on an escarped pier in the water. Zoë looked up, trying to guess the height of the upper windows from the water, but she had no experience, and they were very high — perhaps a hundred palms, perhaps fifty — Zeno would know. Could he get up there by a rope? She wondered, and she thought of what she should feel if she herself were hanging there in mid-air by a single rope against the smooth wall. Then in her imagination she saw Zeno half-way up, and some one cut the line above, for he was discovered, and he fell. A painful thrill ran down the back of her neck and her spine and through her limbs, and she shrank in her seat.

  It was up there, in the highest story, that Johannes had been a prisoner nearly two years. The windows needed no gratings, for it would be death to leap out, and no one could climb up to get in. The pier below the tower sloped to the stream, and its base ran out so far that no man could have jumped clear of it from above — even if he dared the desperate risk of striking the water. Bertrandon de la Broquière saw it, years afterwards, when Zeno was an old man, and you may look at a good picture of it in his illuminated book.

  A solitary fisherman was perched on the edge of the sloping pier, apparently hindered from slipping off by the very slight projection of the lowest course of stones, which was perpendicular. His brown legs were bare far above the knee, he wore a brown fisherman’s coat of a woollen stuff, not woven but fulled like felt; a wide hat of sennet, sewn round and round a small crown of tarred sailcloth, flapped over his ears. He angled in the slow stream with a long reed and a short line.

  Zoë looked at him attentively as the boat passed near him, and she saw that he was watching her, too, from under the limp brim of his queer hat.

  Her left hand hung over the gunwale of the skiff, and when she was opposite the fisherman she wetted her fingers and carelessly raised them to her lips as if she were tasting the drops. The man instantly replied by waving his rod over the water thrice, and he cast his short line each time. She had seen his mouth and chin and scanty beard below the hanging brim of his hat, and she had fancied that she recognised him; she had no doubt of it now. The solitary fisherman was Gorlias Pietrogliant, the astrologer.

  Omobono had scarcely noticed him, for his own natural curiosity made him look steadily up at the high windows, on the chance that the imperial prisoner might look out just then. He had seen him once or twice before the revolution, and wondered whether he was much changed by his long confinement. But instead of the handsome bearded face the secretary remembered, a woman appeared and looked towards Pera for a moment, and drew back hastily as she caught sight of the skiff; she was rather a stout woman with red cheeks, and she wore the Greek head-dress of the upper classes. So much Omobono saw at a glance, though the window was fully ninety feet above him, and she had only remained in sight a few seconds. He had always had good eyes.

  But without seeing her at all Zoë had understood that communication between the prisoner and the outer world was carried on through Gorlias, and that by him a message could be sent directly to the Emperor. She did not speak till the boat had passed the whole length of the palace and was turning in the direction of the Sweet Waters.

  ‘That astrologer,’ she said, ‘do you remember him? Why has he never come again?’

  Omobono promised to send for him the very next day. After that there was silence for a while, and the skiff slipped along upstream, till the secretary spoke again, to correct what he had last said.

  ‘He had better not come to-morrow. I will tell him to come the next morning.’

  ‘Why?’ Zoë asked, in some surprise.

  ‘To-morrow,’ said Omobono, ‘Messer Sebastian Polo comes to dine with the master. There will be confusion in the house.’

  ‘Confusion, because one guest comes to dinner?’ Zoë spoke incredulously.

  ‘I believe,’ said Omobono rather timidly, ‘that he will not be the only guest.’

  ‘He brings his daughter with him, then?’ Zoë felt that she changed colour under her veil.

  ‘I do not know,’ the secretary said smoothly; ‘but there will be several guests.’

  Zoë turned towards him impatiently.

  ‘You will have orders to keep me out of the way while they are in the house,’ she said. ‘I shall receive through you the master’s commands not to show myself at my window!’

  ‘How can you think such a thing?’ cried Omobono, protesting. ‘Rather than put you to such inconvenience I am sure the master will beg his guests to enter by the other side of the house.

  If it was his object to exasperate her, he had succeeded, but if he expected her to break out in anger he was mistaken. She was too proud, and she already regretted the few hasty words she had spoken. Moreover, her anger told her something that surprised her, and wounded her self-respect. She understood for the first time how jealous she was, and that she could feel no such jealousy if she were not in love. She was not a child, and but for misfortune she would have been married at least two years by this time. This was not the dreamy and slowly stealing dawn of girlhood’s day; her sun had risen in a flash amidst angry clouds, as he does in India in mid-June, when the south-west monsoon is just going to break and the rain is very near.

  When Omobono had spoken she leaned back in her seat and drew the folds of her mantle more closely round her, as if to separate herself from him more completely, and she did not speak again for a long time. On his side, the secretary understood, and instead of feeling rebuked by her silence, he was pleased with himself because his curiosity had made another step forward in the land of discovery.

  It occurred to him that it would be very interesting to bring Zoë and Giustina within sight of each other, if no nearer. Zeno had not said that his guests w
ere to come by land instead of by water; the secretary had only argued that he would request them to do so, to avoid their seeing Zoë if she happened to be at her window. Omobono had power to do whatever he thought necessary for keeping the house and the approach to it in repair without consulting any one. That was a part of his duty.

  It was usual to repair the road in the spring. Omobono chose to have the work done now, sent for a gang of labourers, and gave a few simple orders. Before Zeno knew what was going on the way to the main entrance was quite impassable, though a narrow passage had been left to the door of the kitchen for the servants and slaves. The secretary had suddenly discovered that the road was in such a deplorable condition as to make it necessary to dig it out to the depth of a yard here and there, where the soil was soft, thus making a series of pits, over which no horse could pass.

  ‘What in the world possessed you to do this now?’ asked Zeno, with annoyance, ‘I told you that Messer Sebastian and his daughter were coming to dine with me to-morrow, as well as other friends.’

  ‘They will see nothing, sir,’ answered the secretary imperturbably. ‘The guests always come by water, they dine on that side of the house, and they go away by water. How could they see the road, sir? It is beyond the court!’

  Zeno did not choose to explain that he had especially begged Polo and the others to come by land, and he now concealed his displeasure, or believed that he did. But when Omobono had gone to his own room Zeno sent for the running footmen and bade them go to each of the invited guests early the next morning to say that the road was torn up and that they must be good enough to come in their boats.

  Then he went upstairs, for he had not seen Zoë all day, and it pleased him to sup with her. As soon as he entered the room and saw her he felt that something was wrong, but he made as if he noticed nothing, and sat down in his usual place.