by Ouida
Adrianis saw but little of him in the daytime, but most evenings in prima sera they met in the Palazzo Zaranegra. There Damer spoke little, but he spoke with effect; and, when he was silent, it seemed to the young mistress of the house that his silence was odiously eloquent, for it appeared always to say to her: “What a mindless creature you are! What a mindless creature you love!”
Sometimes it seemed to her to say more; to say across the length of the lighted, perfumed, flower-filled salon, “And if I forbid your mutual passion? If I prevent its fruition?”
Out of his presence she ridiculed these ideas, but in his presence they were realities to her, and realities which alarmed and haunted her.
“How I wish you had never brought him here — oh, how I wish it!” she said once to Adrianis.
They were in the Piazza of St. Mark; it was late in the evening; the gay summer crowd was all around them; the band was playing; the full moon was above in all her glory; laughter and gay chatter mingled with the lapping of the water and the splash of oars. In the blaze of light under the colonnades people were supping and flirting and jesting, as though they were still in the days of Goldoni.
“Are you not a little unjust to me?” said Adrianis, gently. “I could not do otherwise, in common honesty, than tell you that it was not I who had found your opals, and you wished to see and to thank the person who had done so.”
“Oh, I know! I know!” she said, with an impatient sigh. “Such things are always one’s own fault. But he killed Biancon, and his very presence now is painful to me.”
“Tell him so.”
“I dare not.”
“Shall I tell him for you?” She looked at him with the wistful, alarmed gaze of a frightened child.
“Oh, no, no! He would be offended. He might quarrel with you. No! Pray do not do that.”
“His anger has no terrors for me,” he said, with a smile.
“But you know what you wish is my law for silence as for speech.”
“Limonate? Fragolone? Gelate? Confetti?” sang a boy, pushing against them with his tray of summer drinks, ices, fruits, and sweetmeats.
“Let us go; it is late; and the crowd grows noisy,” said her duenna.
Adrianis accompanied them to their gondola, which was in waiting beyond the pillars. He did not venture to offer to accompany them, for the hour was late, and the elder lady, herself a Zaranegra, was rigid in her construction and observance of etiquette. He watched the gondola drift away amongst the many others waiting there, and then turned back to the piazza as the two Vulcans on the clock-tower beat out on their anvil with their hammers the twelve strokes of midnight. He saw amongst the crowd the pale and thoughtful countenance of Darner. Had he heard what the young Countess had said of him? It was impossible to tell from his expression; he was looking up at the four bronze horses, as he sat, with an evening paper on his knee, at one of the little tables, an untouched lemonade standing at his elbow.
“I did not know you were here,” said Adrianis. “It is too frivolous a scene for you. Are you longing to dissect the horses of St. Mark’s?”
Damer smiled slightly.
“I fear I should find their anatomy faulty. I am no artist, or art critic either, or I should venture to say that I object to their attitude. Arrested motion is a thing too momentary to perpetuate in metal or in stone.”
Adrianis looked up at the rearing coursers.
“Surely we might as well object to the statue of Colleone because he sits erect and motionless through centuries?”
“No, that is quite another matter. Colleone is at rest. The horses yonder are leaping violently.”
“You are too subtle for me! I can only admire. I am an ignorant, you know. Have you been here long?”
“Half an hour.”
Had he heard? Adrianis wondered. It was impossible to tell.
“I seldom see you now,” he added. “You have become very unsociable.”
“I was not aware that I was ever sociable. People much occupied cannot be so. You see I have a newspaper and I do not read it; I have a bevanda and I do not drink it. I have seen the Contessa Zaranegra and I have not spoken to her.”
It seemed that the reply, which was longer and more jesting than was the wont of the speaker, was made with intention.
Adrianis was silent. He wished to tell Damer that his presence was unwelcome to the lady of whom he spoke, but he hesitated; he was afraid to compromise her, to seem to boast of some confidence from her.
“Did you know,” he asked in a low tone, “that her poor serving man would die under the knife?”
Damer gave him a cold, contemptuous glance.
“I do not speak on professional subjects to laymen,” he said, curtly.
“I do hot ask you,” replied Adrianis, “from the professional point of view. I ask you from that of humanity.”
“Humanity does not enter into the question,” said Damer, slightingly. “I hope you will not regard it as offensive if I ask you to limit yourself to speaking of what you understand.”
The blood rose into the cheek of Adrianis, and anger leapt to his lips. He restrained it with effort from utterance. The boundless scorn which Damer never scrupled to show for him was at times very chafing and provocative.
“You know, yourself, nothing of sculpture, you admit,” he said, controlling his personal feeling, “and yet you venture to criticise the horses of Lysippus.”
“My criticism is sound, and they are not the horses of Lysippus.”
“They may not be. But my criticism is sound too, I think, on your want of humanity towards poor Biancon.”
Damer cast an evil and disdainful glance at him.
“With regard,” he replied, “to the man Biancon, there could be no question of either cruelty or kindness. These terms do not enter into surgical vocabularies. You are well aware that on the stage no actor could act who felt in any manner the real emotions of his part. In like degree no surgeon could operate who was unnerved by what you call ‘humanity’ with regard to his patient. There is no more of feeling, or want of feeling, in the operator than in the actor. Is it impossible for you to comprehend that? As for yourself, you do not care the least for the dead facchino, you only care because a fair woman who is dear to you has wept.”
He spoke with insolence, but with apparently entire indifference. Adrianis coloured with displeasure and self-consciousness. It was the first time that the name of the Countess Zaranegra had been mentioned between them when out of her presence. It seemed to him an intolerable presumption in Damer to speak of her. But he scarcely knew how to reply. With a man of his own rank he would have quarrelled in such a manner that a sabre duel on the pastures by the Brenta river would have followed in the morning. But Damer was not socially his equal, and was a man to whom a year before he had owed, or had thought that he owed, his restoration to health and life.
“I should prefer that you left the name of that lady out of our discourse,” he said, in a low tone but with hauteur. “In my world we do not venture to speak of women whom we respect.”
Damer understood the reproof and the lesson so conveyed.
“I am not of your world,” he said, slightingly. “I have no such pretensions. And women are to me but subjects of investigation, like cats — in their bodies, I mean; of their minds and hearts I have no knowledge. I leave such studies to Paul Bourget and you.”
Then he rose and walked away towards the end of the piazza, where the opening of the goldsmiths’ street of the Merceria leads to the back of the clock-tower and the network of narrow passages beyond it.
Adrianis did not detain him, but went himself to his gondola and was taken the few yards which parted St. Mark’s from his hotel. Sometimes he slept on board his yacht, but sometimes at the hotel, because it was nearer to the Ca’ Zaranegra, which he could not see from his windows, but which he knew were there on the bend of the canal towards Rialto.
However, he reflected with consolation, in a week or two more Veronica woul
d go to her father’s villa in the mountains of the Trentino, and she had given him to understand that she would tell the duke to invite him. Thither it would be impossible for Damer to go, even if he should desire to do so, which was improbable. For Adrianis never suspected the existence of any passion in Damer except the desire of command, the pleasure which the exercise of a strong will over weaker ones gave him from its sense of intellectual dominion.
The words of Damer seemed to him insolent; but he was used to his insolence, and he did not attribute them to any other feeling than that coldness of heart which was not new to him in the speaker.
To all interference in, or interrogation concerning, his scientific or surgical actions and purposes the Englishman had always replied with the same refusal to permit those whom he called laymen to judge either the deeds or the motives of his priesthood. It was precisely the same kind of arrogance and of inflexible secrecy to which Adrianis had been used in the ecclesiastics who had been set over him in his boyhood; the same refusal to be interrogated, the same mystic and unexplained claim of superiority and infallibility.
“If he would only go away!” thought Adrianis, as his gondola glided over the few hundred yards.
For the next few days he and Damer did not meet; he had arranged an excursion to Chioggia, and another to Grado, in which small cruises the Countess Zaranegra and other ladies were on board his schooner. It was beautiful weather; the sea was smooth and smiling; all that wealth could do to make the little voyages delightful was done, and he hoped in the course of them to have some opportunity to force from the lady of his thoughts some definite assurance of her acceptance of his love. In this hope he was disappointed.
Damer was not on board the yacht; but as she saw, over the distant water as they sailed away from Venice, the foundry flames and factory smoke of the Fondamenti, where his tower stood, she shuddered in the hot midsummer noon. It seemed as if even from that distance the eyes of the strange Englishman could see her and lay silence on her lips and terror on her heart. It was but a morbid fancy; she knew that; but she could not shake off the impression. Even when far out on the sunlit green waves of the Adriatic, when Venice had long dropped away out of sight, the chilliness and oppression of the hallucination remained with her.
Although she and every one else knew that the water-fêtes were solely in her honour and for her pleasure, she continued to accept the homage but to stop short of any actual and decisive words on her own part. Adrianis believed that her heart was his, and he could see nothing in the circumstances of either of them which need cause so much hesitation and doubt. Each was free, each young; each might run to meet happiness half-way, as children run to catch a ripe fruit before it has time to fall to earth, and pluck it, warm with sunlight, or pause, and let it drop ungathered. The position troubled and galled him, but his nature was sanguine and his temper optimistic.
Adrianis returned to the city, not wholly discouraged, but vexed and impatient of continual probation and uncertainty.
If he could not persuade her to promise herself to him in Venice he would follow her to the hills above Goritz, and there decide his fate. He had little doubt that he would succeed before the summer should have wholly fled.
“It is getting too warm here; let us go to the mountains,” said her companion.
“In a few days,” she answered. But the days passed, the weeks passed, the temperature grew higher, and she still did not move; and Adrianis stayed also, living chiefly on board his yacht, and Damer still delayed his departure, passing most of his time behind bolted doors in his two chambers on the Fondamenti.
What harm could he do? What harm should he do? He was going to the German university; he would pass out of her existence with the steamship which should bear him from the Giudecca to Trieste; he would vanish in the cold, grim, dark north, and she would remain in the sunshine and laughter and mirth of the south. They had nothing in common: could have nothing. He belonged to his ghastly pursuits, his sickening experiments, his merciless ambitions, and she belonged to herself — and another. So she told herself a hundred times, and out of his presence her reasoning served to reassure her. But whenever she saw him a vague, dull fear turned her heart cold. She felt as helpless as the blythe bird feels when suddenly in the flowering meadow, where it has made its nest, it sees a snake come gliding through the grass. The bird trembles, but does not fly away; dares not fly away.
So she dared not dismiss this man from her house, and had not courage to go herself out of the city, out of reach from his magnetism. Her nerves felt the same cold terror as was felt by those of the Venetian brides who were borne away from the feasting on Castello by the brown arms of the Moorish sea-ravishers. She endeavoured to conceal what she felt, for she was ashamed of her own groundless and harmless fears, but they dulled for her the gaiety, the mirth, the beauty of the summer cruise on the emerald seas.
“You play with your happiness,” said her duenna, angrily, to her.
“I do not play, indeed,” she answered, seriously. “We will go to the hills the day after tomorrow.”
XI.
ADRIANIS went out on the following day to make some purchases of glass and metal work for which one of his sisters had written to him. He thought that when they were completed it would be but courtesy to go and tell Damer that he himself was about to leave the city, and offer him his yacht to go in, if he desired it, to Trieste. Their last words had been chafing and cold. The indulgent kindliness of his nature made him wish to part friends with a man to whom he considered that he owed his life.
He bade his gondolier steer northwards to the Fondamenti. He had never been to the chambers occupied by Damer in the old watch-tower; the other had always discouraged all visits; but now he thought that he had better go there, or he might wholly miss seeing the Englishman again before his departure, for of late Damer had come but rarely to the Ca’ Zaranegra. But before he could give the order to his gondolier, in passing the Ponte del Paradiso, a sandalo, in which there was one person alone, fouled his own in the narrow channel, and that solitary person was Damer.
“I was just going to your apartments,” cried Adrianis, whilst his gondolier swore loudly as his prow grazed the wall of Palazzo Narni.
“I am going to the hospital, and shall not be at home till dark,” replied Damer, ungraciously.
“I was coming to tell you,” said Adrianis, “that I am about to leave Venice.” —
“And are going to Goritz, no doubt,” said Damer, with a brief smile.
“I may be and I may not,” replied Adrianis, in a tone which implied that wherever he chose to go was no business of any one’s “Anyhow, I wished to say that the schooner is entirely at your disposition if you remain here or if you cross to Trieste.”
“Thanks. Yachts are rich men’s toys for which I have no use,” answered Damer, without saying where he was going or what he intended to do. “Send yours to her docks in Messina, if you do not require her yourself.”
“You might be a little more polite,” said Adrianis, half angrily, half jestingly. “I should be glad to do you any services.”
“Poor men cannot accept such services.”
“Why do you constantly speak of your poverty? You have intellect; that is much rarer than riches.”
“And much less esteemed,” said Damer, with that brief, icy smile which always depressed and troubled Adrianis. “I fear I cannot stay to gossip,” he added, “I am already rather late for a conference at the hospital with my esteemed Venetian colleague.”
They were about to part, Damer to pass underneath the bridge, Adrianis to pursue his way to a coppersmith’s workshop, when a weak, infantine cry smote on their ears, echoed by other shriller childish voices.
There was a row of barges moored along the wall under the old grim Narni palace which stands just beyond the bridge, with its massive iron-studded doors, unaltered in appearance since the time when Tiziano walked a living presence over the Paradiso, and the sunshine shone on the golden hair of Palm
a Vecchio’s daughter.
Some children were playing on the black barges which were laden with firewood and coal. They were small creatures, half naked in the warm air and sportive as young rabbits; they ran, leaped, climbed the piles of fuel, caught each other in mimic wrestling and screamed with glad laughter; there was only one who did not join in the games, a little boy who lay languidly and motionless on some sacks, and watched the sports of others with heavy eyes.
There was no grown man or woman near, there were only the children, and the old palace, like a grey beard with closed eyes; it looked as if it had been shut when Dandolo was young, and had never been opened since; its white statues gazed down over the iron fencing of its garden wall; they, too, were very old.
As the gondola passed under that wall the sporting children growing wilder and more reckless, rushed in their course past and over the little sick boy, and jostled him so roughly that they pushed him over the edge of the barge, and he fell, with a shrill cry, into the water. The others, frightened at what had befallen them, gathered together, whimpering and afraid, irresolute and incapable. The fallen child disappeared. The water hereabouts is thick and dark, and sewage flows unchecked into it. It was in that instant of his fall that his cry, and the shrieks of his companions, rose shrilly on the morning silence.
In a second Adrianis sprang from the gondola, dived for the child, who had drifted underneath the barge, and brought him up in his arms. He was a boy of some five years old, with a pretty pale face and naked limbs, his small, curly head fell in exhaustion on the young man’s shoulder, his ragged clothes were dripping.