Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “There are some steps, Signor,” he said in a low voice, and Julian as he reached the quay looked down and stopped. His first gondolier was lying crouched upon the floor of the gondola, as though he was waiting for his patron to step on board before he rose — and struck.

  “Is this the plot of a new opera, Paolo?” Julian asked.

  “No, Signor. Giuseppe has something to tell you. I will paddle out into the Grand Canal where no one will recognize your gondola or overhear what is said.”

  The man spoke in the low voice he had used before and with the same urgency. Julian under the fold of his cloak made sure that his hanger was loose in its scabbard and stepped down warily into the gondola. Giuseppe did not move and from the stern Paolo drove the boat out into the middle of the Grand Canal.

  It was a warm, clear night of spring, the sky patterned with stars. Gondolas clustered about the doorways of the palaces and from the windows above light poured out in tapering golden beams which shook in the ripple of the water like the bright blades of eastern krisses. And along those beams, music rode forth, weaving on each side of the canal a screen of melody. But here in the middle the gondola was lost in the darkness and the quiet. Paolo eased the thrust of his paddle and Giuseppe spoke, drawing himself close to Julian Linchcombe’s knees.

  “Yesterday, when your Excellency was rehearsing at the theatre — it was about one of the afternoon — a man with a parcel under his arm came in a gondola to your house. Paolo and I were drinking a glass in a little inn in the square opposite and we know that man. Trafelli. He is a paid informer of the Tribunal. He looked about and then he knocked and it was your servant Sandro who opened.”

  “Sandro?”

  “Yes, Signor. Sandro takes the parcel from Trafelli and they chat a little and they laugh. We cannot hear except one sentence. ‘And that exquisite voice! What a pity!’ and both laugh again.”

  “Which of them used the words, Giuseppe?”

  “Sandro, Signor.”

  “Sandro!” said Julian, leaning forward; and suddenly his hand struck like a snake and gripped Giuseppe’s wrist. Giuseppe uttered a small cry of pain, but it was extorted by nothing more than that sharp grip. He looked down in wonder. He could not believe that the slim, white hand with the long, tapering fingers, could hold so much pain. Surely the Signor held within his palm a supple steel ring.

  “You are speaking the truth to me, Giuseppe?”

  “I swear it.”

  The boy’s eyes stared into his for a few seconds.

  “Whom shall I trust?” he said sombrely, and his grip relaxed and the fingers opened. In the darkness the difference between the sunburnt wrist and Julian’s hand was the difference between black and white, between a bar of iron and a supple glove. Yet even now Giuseppe’s arm was numb with the savage clasp, and it was plain that no band of steel was hidden within it.

  “Per Bacco!” Giuseppe said ruefully as he rubbed his wrist, “you should keep that grip for your servant Sandro and give your trust to us. We run a risk, Paolo and I, in telling you that something is planned against you, even though we tell it in whispers out here in the darkness of the canal. But we have found you always generous and fair, and you have given us great moments of pleasure. Believe us, Signor Marelli! The gondoliers, they know all that is said and all that happens. Maria Baretti does not love you.”

  Julian laughed harshly.

  “Why indeed should she?”

  “And she has in her hand,” he looked with a grin at Julian’s hand drooping from the lace ruffles of his sleeve, “a greater strength even than yours.”

  “You mean...”

  “What you mean, Signor,” interrupted Giuseppe. “I have offended no law.”

  “But to this or that man, Signor, a woman is a law. We speak to you with all good will. Paolo and I. For the moment you are safe. Nothing will be done to make a scandal. No! These gentlemen,” — and he waved his hand vaguely, leaving Julian to fill in the application—” like silence. A great singer finishes his season. The next morning he has gone. Where, Signor? To Russia, perhaps, like Luini Bonetto. He stayed there twelve years.”

  There was so much meaning behind his last two words, he so drawled them out to suggest an eternity of weariness and solitude that Julian fell back on his cushions with a shudder.

  “Twelve years!” he whispered.

  “So Maria Baretti said to her friend. Her gondolier Lelio told me.”

  “That you might warn me?”

  Giuseppe shrugged his shoulders.

  “We gossip about our patrons. We have so many hours to lie idle and wait. We cannot sleep all the time. So every little unimportant story goes the round.”

  Clearly the gondolier had more to say. He lay resting on an elbow on the floor of the gondola, his dark eyes shining upwards.

  “For instance?” asked Julian.

  “Maria wondered whether Bonetto would ever sing again. She thought, and from her laughter — Maria has a very pretty, tinkling laugh, though the Signor may not have heard it as often as luckier ones — the thought amused her like Punch at a Fair,” says Lelio.

  Julian seemed to hear the tinkling laughter travelling gaily over the water from some gondola in which she floated with her lover at her side.

  “And what was this thought?” he asked.

  “That twelve years of Russia with the horrors of its winter frosts and burning summers must destroy the sweetest voice as completely as twelve years under the leads of the Ducal Palace.”

  Julian stifled a cry. He covered his face with his hands, trembling from his head to his feet. He made himself small in a panic of fear. He had heard of those terrible prisons under the roof of the Doge’s Palace — tombs into which live people vanished, never to be brought to trial, never to receive a message or a friend, to be kept there in darkness and loneliness as long as the State Inquisitors so willed. And he was nineteen! To a youth of nineteen, twelve years and life was over! Besides, there was something he had to do. He had set himself a task. For six years he had dreamt of it. He looked back over those six years of study and endeavour. They seemed in the retrospect to have been interminable and they were just half the time Maria Baretti had allotted to him in the dungeons under the leads.

  “We are at your service, Signor, Paolo and I.” — Giuseppe was still talking and in the trouble of his spirit Julian heard him from far away. “Night and day.”

  There would have to be a charge. Julian was clinging to the code of his own country. Maria Baretti! What folly to gild her with so much authority! Her — or her lover! Whatever the tyranny of the dreaded Council of Ten, there would have to be a case, the show and semblance of a case at all events; and looking back over his months in Venice he could find none.

  “Whilst I have been talking, Paolo has changed again into his livery. I shall take my place. We shall paddle you back to your house openly as though we come from some accademia, some supper party, and we shall be at your door early to-morrow. But, Signor, there is work for you to-night — secret work. What was that parcel Trafelli the informer gave to Sandro? Search, Signor! Search and find!”

  Yes, not for nothing had it been conveyed into his lodging. Julian leaned forward and laid his hand on his gondolier’s shoulder.

  “I thank you and Paolo, Giuseppe,” he whispered in a voice which shook, and very humbly. The cry of disbelief which rises to most men’s lips at the approach of calamity, “It can’t happen to me,” could never rise to his. Such horrors had happened to him as passed belief.

  “Yes, take me home! Whatever comes, I have found two friends in Venice.”

  Sandro was waiting at the open door, all suppleness and smiles. Julian felt inclined to say: “No, I have not run away. There was no need to watch,” but he held his tongue. In his parlour on the upper floor he took off his coat and slipped into his dressing-gown. A decanter of Lachryma Christi and a plate of cakes stood upon a small table with his coffee.

  “I shall not want you, Sandro, until the morning
.

  I have some letters to write and I may be late to bed.”

  Sandro carried the coat away, and for a little while Julian heard him moving about, preparing his room. Sandro slept some distance away at the end of the corridor and Julian gave him time to fall asleep. Then quietly he began his search. The big high-roofed sitting-room was furnished barely. A few cabinets stood against the walls. There was an old chest or two, a writing-table, a few chairs, a couple of divans. Julian examined everything. He opened each chest. Not one held more than a few draperies. He felt the darkest corners of the cabinets. He looked behind every curtain. He made sure that there was nothing new or strange anywhere. He turned out the light and lit the candles in his bedroom; and in the end, in a drawer at the bottom of his wardrobe, under a pile of his shirts, he found three books. They were not his; he had never seen them before. But they were old, in worn bindings and the pages were marked with thick pencil lines in the margins like books which had been deeply studied.

  If must be that Trafelli’s parcel contained these books, but the names of them baffled him. The Grand Grimoire for instance, and The Key to the Temple of Solomon the King. Julian retired to his bed with them, and as the night grew on to morning, he began to see with a rising terror the chasm widening before his feet. The Grand Grimoire set out the rules and invocations by which the Lord of all evil could be summoned out of his darkness. By the Key you learned how to bewitch and hurt your enemies. But the third book troubled him to the marrow. It was called Adonis, a work by some old German delver into mysteries, who had lost his wits in the delving and translated these mysteries many years back into Italian. Adonis, Julian read, was one of the names of Satan. By certain rites and ceremonial prayers, of which the formula was given, he could be evoked in the shape of the slender white shepherd boy with the blue eyes and the tossing curls to preside over the Black Mass and its abominations.

  Julian had kept his modesty, but he was not a fool. He could not but know that he could pose as some jewelled and silken Adonis of his century — the young Satan summoned to grace a festival of blasphemy.

  Did anyone now believe that these supplications were efficacious, that Satan could be made to appear, like a Genius out of a bottle in an Eastern fable? A few pale students overcharged with midnight oil perhaps. But the grave Venetian Council of Ten? Julian asked himself the question scornfully, but he gave to himself a reply which melted his heart like wax in a flame.

  Yet the books had been hidden in his lodging by a paid informer. For a purpose then. Marelli might pretend — or might be held to pretend — to be that very Adonis of the volume at some private assembly held by the devotees — why, even in this apartment.

  From time to time he had given an entertainment to acquaintances, musical people for the most part, singers, dilettantes. It would not be difficult, perhaps, to secure one of them to tell a fine, convincing story — if it was properly composed for him or her to learn by heart — of Marelli raising an elegant modish Devil in the shape of an eighteenth-century Adonis. And no more than one witness would be needed. And there would be no confrontation; no definite charge which the prisoner would be called upon to answer. Or would there be?

  Julian had spoken boldly enough to his gondoliers, but he must assure himself. And he must get rid of those accursed books. He hid them away again under his shirts and put out his candles. He had no rehearsal in the morning; Demophoon was to be repeated in the evening. He had the day free. But he could not sleep. So bitter a sense of loneliness assailed him, so wide a sea rolled between him and Grest and all that he loved. The daylight was glimmering at the edges of his curtains before all these miseries drifted away.

  He waked with a sudden fear that the day was gone, but it was merely Sandro setting his coffee on the table by his bed. Certain plans had been shaping themselves in the background of Julian’s mind whilst he slept; and now as he stretched his arms above his head, he said with a yawn.

  “Sandro, I shall want you to take a letter from me to the Count Vigano. Giuseppe will put you across to the little square and you can walk. His house is this side of the Rialto and not so far.”

  Sandro was ready. He had but to bring the hot water and set out his master’s clothes.

  “I shall take the letter now?” he asked, crossing to a writing table which stood beside the window.

  “It is not written,” said Julian.

  He wrote it whilst he dressed and sealed it with a seal of his own devising. It represented a mermaid, half fish, half woman, with a mirror in her hand, rising from the sea. He had drawn it in an hour of sharp raillery at his condition. In his letter he asked that he might be allowed to wait upon the Count at a convenient hour that morning.

  “You will wait for an answer, Sandro,” he said as he handed to him the letter; and he wondered whether that letter would go straight to Vigano’s palace or pass thither by way of Trafelli’s lodging. Trafelli, no doubt, was an expert at detaching and replacing seals. Well, the longer Sandro took over his mission the better. From the window Julian watched Sandro cross the canal in the gondola and disappear into a lane on the far side of the little square. Then he took the three books from their hiding place under his shirts and tied them up in a parcel. He looked for something which would act as a weight and yet could disappear from the house without provoking attention. He could find nothing.

  “Well, there’s another way,” he said. He put on his hat, took the parcel under his left arm, adjusted his cloak over it so that it was completely hidden under its folds and sauntered down the stairs.

  The gondola had returned to the steps of the house and with a nod to Giuseppe he stepped on board.

  “Across the Grand Canal to the Giudecca,” he said.

  He had a fear that at any moment Messer-Grande of the Police might draw alongside in his big boat, but there was no sign even that he was being followed.

  “You have a little anchor,” he said to Giuseppe, and when they had rounded the Customs House into the open water of the Giudecca, Giuseppe housed his long paddle and cut the anchor free of its rope. He handed it in to the little cabin and uttered a crow of pleasure.

  “You found it, Signor?”

  “Yes, I found it — hidden.”

  “What was it?”

  “Books, Giuseppe! Dangerous books.”

  Giuseppe cursed Sandro fluently.

  “He will burn in hell — that smiling scoundrel. Tie the anchor firmly, Signor. I will row far out between the two shores where the water is deep.” There were few gondolas in this stretch of water and those close to the shore.

  “Now Signor. No one will notice.”

  Julian lifted the parcel with the anchor attached to it over the side of the gondola and let it sink without a splash. It would have needed a strong spy-glass in the hands of a sharp-sighted watchman to have discovered the reason of his movements from either shore. Julian drew a breath of relief as the bubbles winked and broke upon the surface of the water. There was no evidence now which could be twisted against him.

  “I’ll go back,” he said. “I expect a letter.”

  They returned by the Rio delle Fornaci into the Grand Canal and as they emerged from the narrow opening, they just cleared the bows of another gondola which was being driven at great speed down towards the Arsenal by two big gondoliers in orange liveries. The hood was removed and two men, one of them of a stately dress and presence, were lounging back side by side upon the cushions. Julian drew back and looked straight ahead with his face set.

  Giuseppe quite mistook the reason for his patron’s start.

  “There is nothing there to disquiet you, Signor Marelli. It is the gondola of a multi-millionaire Englishman who lives at the corner of the Rio San Polo. It is natural that you should not know him, for though he has a box at the Benedetto, it is to lend to his friends. It seems that he himself has not the ear for music. He is the Right Honourable, my Lord, Sir James Elliot, Bart.”

  Giuseppe announced the medley of titles with the pr
oper accent of awe and Julian smiled and began to wonder why this dilettante with the passion for music had avoided the Opera House ever since the opening performance four months ago. That he recognised Julian was beyond question. Did he accept placidly the rebuff of Julian’s letter of denial? Was his pride hurt? Or — the poignant sting of humiliation was a familiar circumstance to Julian — or did he just simply despise him? The last explanation, no doubt, was the answer, Julian thought bitterly and unfairly.

  Sandro was waiting with a reply from Vigano that he would see Julian at noon. Julian had the time to powder his hair and put on a more ceremonious laced coat of flame-coloured satin. Sandro helped him to adjust his cravat and arrange his hair in a bag at the back of his neck with all his usual servility and pleasure. “He has not found out yet,” Julian reflected. “I am still the hoodwinked fool dancing in silk stockings towards the dungeons under the leads. Well, we shall see.”

  He took his cane and his three-cornered hat with its edging of white lace and descended to his gondola.

  “The Palazzo Vigano,” he said, and on the stroke of twelve he stood before the Count Onocuto’s door.

  XV. JULIAN FINDS A FRIEND AND A WAY OF ESCAPE

  HE WAS LED by a footman up to a library on the second floor with large windows opening on to a balcony. Onocuto Vigano, a large man with a shrewd and kindly face, rose from a writing-table as Julian bowed to him.

  “For a famous singer, Signor Marelli, you have a gift of punctuality which is the extreme of politeness and good breeding,” he said agreeably. “But we will not stand upon ceremonies. I have some notion of the reason for your wish to see me, my dear Giovanni. I may take the liberty to call you Giovanni? I thank you,” and the Count slipped his arm through Julian Linchcombe’s and drew him towards the window. “It is, of course, to discuss your engagement for the next season at the Benedetto?”

  Now no hint of such a project had been made to Julian, but before he could stammer out a word of surprise, a tight pressure upon his arm warned him to be silent.