The fat dame thought it was an apoplexy, and half rose from her seat; but Giustina’s eyes followed the direction of his look and she uttered a cry of real fear. Sebastian Polo, who sat with his back to the sight that terrified his daughter, gazed at the other three in astonishment. But Omobono turned half round and gasped, and seized the back of Zeno’s empty chair, swinging it round on one of its legs till it was between him and the vision.
Tocktamish stood there, grinning at the assembled company in a way to terrify the stoutest heart amongst them. He was magnificently arrayed in his full dress uniform of flaming yellow and gold, and his huge round fur papakh was set well back on his shaggy head. His right hand toyed amidst a perfect arsenal of weapons in his belt, and his blood-shot eyes rolled frightfully as he looked from one guest to the other, showing his shark’s teeth as he grinned and grinned again.
It was certainly Tocktamish, the Tartar; and Tocktamish was not perfectly sober. He was the more pleased by the impression his appearance had produced. He at once came forward to the empty place of the absent guest, which was next to Giustina’s.
‘I see that you have kept a place for me,’ he said in barbarous Greek. ‘That was very kind of you! And I am in time for the peacock, too!’
Thereupon he sat down in the chair, looked round the table, and grinned again.
The fat lady collapsed in a fainting fit, the two elderly merchants edged away from the board as far as they could, and Giustina uttered another piercing shriek when the Tartar leered at her.
‘Who is this person?’ her father tried to ask with dignity, meaning the question for Omobono.
But Omobono had vanished, and the servants had fled after him.
CHAPTER XV
TOCKTAMISH POURED HALF a flagon of Chian wine into a tall Venetian beaker and drank it off by way of whetting his appetite.
‘The master of the house is unavoidably absent,’ he observed, when he had smacked his lips noisily. ‘He has sent me to beg that you will excuse him and make yourselves at home.’
By this time Dame Polo was beginning to revive, and the two men were somewhat reassured as to the Tartar’s intentions. When he had entered he had looked as if he meant to murder them all, but it was now evident from his manner that he wished to produce a pleasant impression. He drew the peacock towards him, and at once took all the best pieces that were left on the dish, using his fingers to save trouble. Giustina watched him without turning her head, and judged that, after all, he had only meant to show his admiration for her beauty when he had leered so horribly. She was in reality the least timid of all the party, though she had shrieked so loudly, and she remembered a fairy story about a frightful monster that had loved a beautiful princess. She was already pondering on the means of making a similar conquest.
‘Are we to understand,’ asked Marin Cornèr, politely, but in a shaky tone, ‘that you come from Messer Carlo Zeno?’
Tocktamish grunted assent, for his mouth was full, and he nodded emphatically.
‘Messer Carlo Zeno is in need of a large sum of money without delay,’ he said, when he was able to speak again.
Sebastian Polo looked at Marin Cornèr significantly; and Marin Cornèr looked at Sebastian Polo. The fat lady pricked her ears, figuratively speaking, for indeed they were much too deeply embedded in their exuberant surroundings of cheek and jowl to suggest that they could ever prick at all. The Tartar crammed his mouth full again, and his great beard wagged with his jaws in the inevitable silence that followed. In her heart Giustina compared him to a ravenous lion, but her father thought he resembled a hungry hyena.
Finding that his throat was not cut yet, and learning that there was to be a question of money, Marin Cornèr felt that the colour was returning to his nose and the warmth to his heart.
‘Why does Messer Carlo not come home himself and get the money he needs?’ he asked.
By this time Omobono had recovered from his fright enough to creep into the room behind Tocktamish. He was already making anxious gestures to the two Venetian gentlemen to enjoin caution. The Tartar drank again before he answered the question.
‘He happened to be so busy that he preferred to send me to get the money for him,’ said the soldier. ‘You see we are old friends. We fought together in Greece.’
Then Omobono’s voice was heard, quavering with anxiety.
‘There is no money in the house!’ he cried, winking violently at Polo and Cornèr. ‘There is not a penny, I swear! There were large payments to make yesterday.’
The poor little secretary was so anxious to be heard that he had come within arm’s length of the Tartar, though behind him. Tocktamish turned his big head, and put out his hand unexpectedly, and Omobono felt himself caught and whirled round like a child till he was close to the table and face to face with the tipsy giant. He was sure that he felt his liver shrivelling up inside him with sheer fright.
‘What is this little animal?’ the Tartar asked, cocking one eye in a knowing way and examining him with a sort of boozy gravity.
But Omobono really could not find a word. His captor shook him playfully.
‘What is your name, you funny little beast?’ he enquired, and he roared with laughter by way of answering himself.
Giustina, strange to say, was the only one to join in his mirth, and she laughed quite prettily, to the inexpressible surprise of her parents, who were shocked and grieved, as well as scared almost to death.
‘Come, come!’ laughed the Tartar, shaking the little man like a bean-bag. ‘If you cannot speak, you can at least give up your keys, and I will see for myself if there is any money!’
Thereupon he seized the bunch of keys which the secretary wore at his belt, and wrenched it off with a pull that snapped the thong by which it hung. Again Giustina laughed, but a little more nervously now; her mother sat transfixed, open-mouthed, with an almost idiotic expression. Again the two merchants glanced at each other, and then both looked towards the door.
Between his fright and the terrible indignity of having his keys torn from him, Omobono had never been nearer to fainting in his life.
‘Robbery!’ he gasped. ‘Rank robbery!’
Tocktamish sent him spinning into the nearest corner by a turn of the wrist, after which the ruffian took another mouthful of meat, and slowly filled his glass while he was disposing of it. Omobono had steadied himself in the corner, but his face was deadly white, and his lips were moving nervously in a delirium of terror.
‘Messer Carlo needs ten thousand ducats before sunset,’ observed the Tartar before he drank.
Polo and Cornèr started to their feet; to their commercial souls the mere mention of such a demand was more terrifying than all the crooked weapons that gleamed in Tocktamish’s broad belt.
‘Ten thousand ducats!’ they repeated together in a breath.
‘Yes!’ roared the Tartar, in a voice that made the glasses on the table shake together and ring. ‘Ten thousand ducats! And if I do not find the money in the house, you two must find it in yours! Do you understand?’
‘Yes!’ roared the Tartar. ‘Ten thousand ducats! And if I do not find the money in the house, you two must find it in yours! Do you understand?’
They understood, for his voice was like thunder, and he had risen too, and towered above them with his full glass in one hand and Omobono’s keys in the other. Then, being already tolerably drunk, he solemnly raised the keys to his lips, thinking that he held the glass in that hand, and rolled his eyes terribly at the two merchants; and he set the glass down with an emphatic gesture, as if it had been the bunch of keys, and it broke to pieces, and the yellow wine splashed out across the table and ran down and streamed upon the mosaic floor.
A terrific Tartar oath announced that he had realised his mistake, and as he at once made up his mind that the Venetians were responsible for it, his next action was to hurl the foot of the broken glass at Polo’s head; and he instantly seized the empty silver flagon and flung it at Cornèr’s face. The lighter weapo
n missed its aim and broke to atoms against the opposite wall, but the jug struck Cornèr full on the bridge of his thin nose with awful effect, and he fell to the floor and lay there, a moaning, bleeding heap.
Polo looked neither at his wife nor at his daughter, but fled through the open door at the top of his not very great speed. His wife fainted outright, and in real earnest now, and with a final croak rolled gently from her chair, without hurting herself at all. Omobono flattened his lean body against the wall, trembling in every joint, and gibbering with fear; and Tocktamish, seeing that he had so satisfactorily cleared the field, proceeded to address his attentions to Giustina, who had not fainted, but was really much too frightened to rise from her seat or try to escape.
The Tartar drew his chair nearer to hers, and suddenly smiled, as if he had done nothing unusual, and was only anxious to make himself agreeable. He had been drinking since early morning, but he would be good for at least another gallon of wine before it made him senseless. He addressed Giustina in the poetic language of his native country.
‘Come, pet parrot of my soul!’ he began, coaxingly. ‘Fill me a cup and let me hear your ravishing voice! Tocktamish has cleared the house as the thunderstorm clears the hot air from the valley! Drink, my pretty nightingale, and the golden wine shall warm your speech in your little throat, as the morning sunshine melts the icicles in my beard when I have been hunting all night in winter! Drink, my fawn, my spring lamb, my soft wood-pigeon, my white bunny rabbit! Drink, sweet one!’
The Tartar’s similes were in hopeless confusion, possibly because he translated them into Greek, but he was convinced that he was eloquent, and he was undeniably as strong as a bear. He had filled a fresh glass and was evidently anxious to make Giustina drink out of it before him, for he held it to her lips with his left hand while his right tried to take her round the waist and draw her to his knee.
But this was much more than she was prepared to submit to. In the fairy story, Beast was less enterprising in the presence of Beauty, and collapsed into obedience at the mere lifting of her finger. Giustina was a big creature, usually sleepy and not inclined to move quickly; but she was capable of exerting considerable strength in an emergency. The instant she felt Tocktamish’s hand at her waist, she rose with a quick, serpentine motion that unwound her, as it were, from his encircling hold, and almost before he knew that she was on her feet she had fled from the room and slammed the door behind her.
Tocktamish tried to follow her, but he stumbled successively over the still unconscious dame and the still moaning Cornèr, so that when he reached the door at last his purpose had undergone a change, and, as he thought, an improvement. Women never ran out of the house into the street, he argued; therefore Giustina was now upstairs and would stay there; hence it would be wiser to finish the peacock and anything else he could lay hands on before going to pay her a visit. For Tocktamish found the food and the wine to his liking, and such as were not to be had every day, even by a Tartar officer with plenty of money in his wallet. He was tolerably steady still, as he made his way back towards his seat.
His eye fell on Omobono, flattened against the wall and still in a palsy of fear; for all that has been told since Cornèr had fallen and Polo had run away had occupied barely two minutes.
Tocktamish suddenly felt lonely, and the little secretary amused him. He took him by the collar and whirled him into Giustina’s vacant chair at the table.
‘You may keep me company, while I finish my dinner,’ he explained. ‘I cannot eat alone — it disturbs my digestion.’
He roared with laughter, and slapped Omobono on the back playfully. The little man felt as if he had been struck between the shoulders by a large ham, and the breath was almost knocked out of his body; and he wondered how in the world his tight hose had survived the strain of his sitting down so suddenly.
‘You look starved,’ observed the Tartar, in a tone of concern, after observing his face attentively. ‘What you want is food and drink, man!’
With a sudden impulse of hospitality he began to heap up food on Giustina’s unused plate, with a fine indifference to gastronomy, or possibly with a tipsy sense of humour. He piled up bits of roast peacock, little salt fish, olives, salad, raisins, dried figs, candied strawberries, and honey cake, till he could put no more on the plate, which he then set before Omobono.
‘Eat that,’ he said. ‘It will do you good.’
Then he addressed himself to the peacock again, with a good will.
Omobono would have got up and slipped away, if he had dared. Next to his bodily fear, he was oppressed by the terrible impropriety of sitting at his master’s table, where the guests should have been. This seemed to him a dreadful thing.
‘Really, sir,’ he began, ‘if you will allow me I would rather — —’
‘Do not talk. Eat!’
Tocktamish set the example by tearing the meat off a peacock’s leg with his teeth.
‘You need it,’ he added, with his mouth very full.
The poor secretary looked at the curiously mixed mess which his tormentor had set before him, and he felt very uncomfortable at the mere idea of tasting the stuff. Then he glanced at the Tartar and saw the latter’s bloodshot eye rolling at him hideously, while the shark-like teeth picked a leg bone, and terror chilled his heart again. What would happen if he refused to eat? Tocktamish dropped the bone and filled two glasses.
‘To Messer Carlo Zeno!’ he cried, setting the wine to his lips.
Omobono thought a little wine might steady his nerves; and, moreover, he could not well refuse to drink his master’s health.
‘Good!’ laughed Tocktamish. ‘If you cannot eat, you can drink!’
Just then Cornèr groaned piteously, where he lay in a heap on the floor. His nose was much hurt, but he was even more badly frightened. The Tartar was not pleased.
‘If that man is dead, take him out and bury him!’ he cried, turning on Omobono. ‘If he is alive, kick him and tell him to hold his tongue! He disturbs us at our dinner.’
Omobono thought he saw a chance of escaping, and rose, as if to obey. But the Tartar’s long arm reached him instantly and he was forced back into his seat.
‘I thought you meant me to take him away,’ he feebly explained.
‘I was speaking to the slaves,’ said Tocktamish gravely, though there was no servant or slave within hearing.
The unfortunate merchant, who was not at all unconscious, and had probably groaned with a vague idea of exciting compassion, now held his peace, for he did not desire to be kicked, still less to be taken out and buried. The Tartar seemed satisfied by the silence that followed. After another glass he rose to his feet and took Omobono by the arm; considering his potations he was still wonderfully steady on his legs.
‘Where is the strong box?’ he asked, dragging the secretary towards the door opposite to the one through which Giustina had gone out.
‘There is no money in the house,’ cried Omobono, in renewed terror. ‘I swear to you that there is no money!’
‘Very well,’ answered the Tartar, who had taken the keys from the table. ‘Show me the empty box.’
‘There is no strong box, sir,’ answered the secretary, resolving to control his fear and die in defending his master’s property.
The difficulty was to carry out this noble resolution. Tocktamish grabbed him by both arms and held him in the vice of his grasp.
‘Little man,’ he said gravely. ‘There is a box, and I will find the box, and I will put you into the box, and I will throw the box into the water. Then you will know that it is not good to lie to Tocktamish. Now show me where it is.’
Omobono shrank to something like half his natural size in his shame and fear, and led the way to the counting-house. Once only he stopped, and made a gallant attempt to be brave, and tried to repeat his queer little prayer, as he did on all the great occasions of his life.
‘O Lord, grant wealth and honour to the Most Serene Republic,’ he began, and though he realised th
at in his present situation this request was not much to the point, he would have gone on to ask for victory over the Genoese, on general principles.
But at that moment he felt something as sharp as a pin sticking into him just where his hose would naturally have been most tight, and where, in fact, the strain that pulled them up was most severe; in that part of the human body, in short, which, as most of us have known since childhood is peculiarly sensitive to pain. There was no answer to such an argument a posteriori; the little man’s head went down, his shoulders went up, and he trotted on; and though he could not be put off from finishing his prayer he had reached the door of the counting-house when he was only just beginning to pray that he might have strength to resist curiosity, a request even more out of place, just then, than a petition for the destruction of the Genoese. A moment later he and Tocktamish entered the room, and the Tartar shut the door behind him.
Neither of the two had heard two little bare feet following them softly at a distance; but when the door was shut Lucilla ran nimbly up to it and quickly drew the great old iron bolt which had been left where it had once been useful, at a time when the disposition of the house had been different. Lucilla knew that all the windows within had heavy gratings, and that neither Omobono nor his captor could get out.
Giustina had fled upstairs, as women generally do to save themselves from any immediate danger. They are born with the idea that when a house has more than one story the upper one is set apart for them and their children, as indeed it always was in the Middle Ages, and they feel sure that there must be other women there who will help them, or defend them, or hide them. For it is a curious fact that whereas women distrust each other profoundly where the one man of their affections is concerned, they rely on each other as a whole body, banded together to resist and get the better of the male sex, in a way that would do credit to any army in an enemy’s country. Therefore Giustina went upstairs, quite certain of finding other women.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1182