“The sinking ship,” he thought. “Well, let me go down with every flag flying”; and with a bow to the conductor of the little orchestra, he sang Handel’s exquisite song from the opera Acis, which begins “As when the Dove...” and sang it with a faultless tenderness. He followed it with yet another aria from the same hand, Semele’s lament from Semele, “Oh, Sleep, why dost thou leave me?” But whilst he sang, that curious gift of great speakers and executive artists which enables them to criticize and hold a secret conference with themselves, whilst they are giving the very best which they have to give to their audience, was awake in him and at work. He had stood by the side of Handel and sung in his boy’s treble long ago at Grest. Perhaps that incident, he conjectured, brought back his memories of Grest. Perhaps it was just Columba’s absence and the conventional image it had suggested. But whilst he sang he trod the quarter-deck of a great ship of the Line. It was lurching and shaking under him and every second sinking deeper into the trough of the sea. But above his head the great flags which decked in battle a ship of the Line were streaming out on the wind, the Cross of St. George, the Union Flag and, higher than them all at the mainmast head, the giant banner of England. The roll of a drum, as his voice soared and stopped, sounded in his ears like the last thunder of his great ship’s guns. There was the death glorious — not here, under the leads of the Ducal roof, to appease the sordid hatred of a rival — and the rival a woman.
But here he was, a singer bowing his farewell to Venice — a little pale blue monkey under the gold parasol of an artificial voice. Would it avail him now, that gold parasol? He turned and stepped down from the rostrum. He had no valedictions to make; he was not a guest but a performer for a fee. He walked straight to the head of the stairs. In his mind there was just a hope.
“It will take these polite people half an hour to pay their compliments to their host. There will be confusion, delays. If Giuseppe is on the watch waiting for me — and he will be, for the gondolier is the first to hear the news — I might be away to the Giudecca and Mestre before my disappearance is noticed.”
Someone brushed by him, a woman going up — Columba Tadino. She had not a word, not a gesture for Marelli. “The sinking ship,” he repeated. But he did not hurry although he longed to. The staircase was empty, but in the porch, at the landing stage, there were torches flaming, footmen bawling and a throng of guests who had made their farewells betimes. Julian walked sedately down. He saw two of the footmen detach themselves from the crowd and run back to a little door at the side of the staircase. They came out again, leaving the door open. One of them held his cloak, the other his hat. Julian laughed quietly. After all Marelli had his privileges. To footmen, to gondoliers, to the people who slept on the stones of the squares and the quays, he had a special meaning. He meant music and in return they were ready with his cloak and his hat when he was in a hurry.
At the foot of the stairs Julian turned back round the newel post to where the two lackeys waited. The one with the cloak held it spread wide, and Julian turned his back to him so that he might adjust it on his shoulders and held out his hand to the second footman for his hat. He was taken completely off his guard. The lackey with the cloak made a screen of it between Julian and the staircase. The man with the hat plucked Julian into the room so violently that he stumbled. He heard the door slammed behind him, he felt a pair of arms pinion his elbows to his sides in an embrace of iron. Before he could recover from his stumble, a pair of handcuffs gripped his wrists together. The two men stood away from him. His cloak was now lying on the floor behind him.
“Messer-Grande, at your service,” said the man with the hat. “You will stay in this room until his Excellency’s guests have gone and the house is quiet. Then we will come for you. If you utter one cry, we will come back and gag your mouth.”
Messer-Grande stooped and unbuckled the sword from Julian’s waist. “You will not want this again,” he said.
He laid it with the hat on a square oak table. The two men went out of the room. Julian heard the key turn in the lock. He stood without moving where they left him, his hands, manacled and helpless, dangling in front of him. Outside there was still the bawling in the porch and the silence on the staircase. Hardly five minutes could have elapsed since he had passed Columba Tadino at the head of the stairs.
“So it’s over,” he said.
He had jumped with both feet into the neat trap prepared for him. Vanity again was the cause and explanation. Marelli — the boy from the sea with the golden voice — to be sure, lackeys would rush to set his cloak about his shoulders and present his hat to him with an obsequious bow. No doubt of it! But here he was, on his way to the Leads, with handcuffs on his wrists and the threat of a gag if he raised a cry. And all those fine plans — the season at Heidegger’s theatre in the Haymarket, the great opportunity which he was going there to discover, the settlement of a terrible account! All vanity! For him the Leads. Twelve years of them! Did one live for twelve years under the Leads?
On the staircase suddenly there was a chatter of voices, a hiss of silken skirts like a smooth sea breaking on a beach. Count Rocca’s guests were taking their departure from the Rezzonico Palace. Julian waked from his stupor. He was in a porter’s side-room. There was an oak table on which his sword and hat were laid, a three-legged stool by the table and over the table an oil lamp burning dimly hung from a hook in the ceiling. This meagre furniture was on his left hand against the outer wall. In front of him, as he stood with his back to the door, a small unglazed window, high up in the wall, let through the stars. Did one ever see stars, he wondered, under the Leads of the Ducal Palace?
He was asking himself the question idly — for in an hour or two he would know — still possessed of only half his wits, when from that high small window, a few bars of music, sung by a woman’s voice, floated down to his ears. Familiar music — yes, he had heard it, shared it that night — music from La Serva Padrona — and the singer was Columba Tadino. Julian raised his head, but he dared not answer. He had a friend out there then, and his heart rose in gratitude and remorse. Whilst he had been reproaching her, she had been seeking a way to help. Could it succeed?
Julian measured with a glance the wall between the window and the floor. He examined the unglazed window. It was long enough, but between the lintel and the sill it was narrow — perhaps too narrow. It might depend upon — and he looked closely now at the manacles on his wrists. The locks were too strong to break, even if he had risked the noise of smashing them against the stone wall; and slender though his hands were, he could not slip them through the rings. But his hands were not crossed, and there were a couple of links between them. He could just place his hands with the palms side by side instead of face to face. For the first time he drew a breath of hope.
The chatter on the stairs was louder, but he dared not drag the table along the floor and he could not stretch out his arms and carry it. He removed his sword and hat and laid them carefully on the floor. He stooped under the table, rounded his back, raised it so, balancing it carefully and sidled along the wall until he was directly below the window. Then he kneeled again and let the legs of the table come silently to the ground He drew himself from under it. He had judged the distance accurately. The table was exactly below the window.
But he could not reach from its surface to the window-sill. He was sure of it. There was still, however, the stool. He could lift that and he set it up on the table. For a moment he listened and made a little bow of apology towards the door. He had cursed the whole tribe of women often enough for their habit of blocking doorways and staircases whilst they chattered with complete indifference to the wishes of any who were in a hurry to go. The bow of recantation was certainly their due now.
“Stay, fair ladies, as long as you please. Flirt, sneer, laugh! Recall the pickled sturgeon, the lark pâtés, the purple figs and the still champagne at the buffet! How good they were and how villainously the little Marelli sang! Take your time, ladies. There is so
much to say.”
He was standing on the table. He balanced himself on the stool, a rickety wobbling thing. He reached up his arms, standing on his toes. He could lay the palms of his hands flat upon the sill, with the tips of his fingers he could get a grasp on the outer ledge. He laid them so at the left hand corner of the window. Julian had good reason now to bless the hours spent in the fencing room, the dancing-school and the water of the lagunes. He was light of weight, slim as a girl, supple as an acrobat. Without a spring, which would certainly have sent the stool clattering to the floor, he drew himself up the wall, got his right leg over the sill and with a jerk was astride. He could not sit up, the lintel was too low, but he could lie hunched up along the sill, half within the window, half without. He put his head out and looked down the outer wall.
A small canal ran along this side of the Rezzonico Palace. Beyond the mouth of it, in the Grand Canal, there was a great cluster of gondolas, bright as day with Chinese lanterns and flaming torches and noisy as the fruit market by the Rialto. But underneath him it was all silent and all dark. Columba’s voice had stopped. From below, his head projected from the window had been seen against the skyline; and in a moment, his eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness made out a thicker blot of darkness, and a white patch or two, the shirts of Columba’s gondoliers But they seemed a mile beneath him. He had not thought of the steps down from the porch to the landing stage or the height of the landing stage. If he dropped from the window, he would make such a clatter in the gondola, upset its occupants with himself into the water with so much noise and splashing that certainly his attempt at flight would be discovered. He would probably break his legs into the bargain and be fished out by Messer-Grande, if fished out at all, in a condition which would make escape quite impossible for the future.
But he could make out now a narrow ledge or coping half-way down between himself and the water. He compared its level with the level of the stool inside the room. “About the same,” he thought. He turned his hands so that now his fingers grasped the inside of the sill and drew his left leg out of the window, so that from his head to his waist he was in the porter’s lodge, whilst from his waist to his feet he was stretched out in the air.
He lowered himself gently and his toes touched the ledge. He could stand on it, so long as he pressed against the wall. Now all that he had to do was to lower himself on to his knees, get his hands on the ledge and swing down until he could drop into the gondola. But those simple movements with all his suppleness he could not make. The ledge on which he stood was too narrow and his wrists were handcuffed in front of him. Had they been free, he could have spread-eagled his arms against the stone and thus balanced, with his body pressed against it, slip down first on to one knee, then on to the other. But if he brought his hands down in front of him, he pushed himself backwards off the ledge, and instead of his legs, he would break his neck. He had to keep his hands at arm’s length above his head. But he did manage to keep his balance and scrape down the wall. There were, alas! casualties among the pale blue monkeys with the gold parasols, but he was at last precariously on his knees and sure that, what with the strain upon his body and the narrowness of the ledge, he could not stay there for more than the fraction of a minute. If he could have dropped his hands to the ledge on which he knelt the rest of the descent would have been easy.
“Hist! Hist!”
The gondolier might hiss up to him as much as he liked, but since Julian could not turn his head or twist his shoulders and keep his balance, whatever advice he had to give was going to be wasted. Julian had his own problem to consider. He must drop plumb down and catch the ledge under the palms of his hands as he dropped. That they would do more than break the length of his fall, he could not believe. They would strike on a flat surface. There was not a chink nor an edge on which they could grip.
“Hist! Hist!” the gondolier whispered; and Julian whispered back, oh, most unwisely, in his own tongue.
“Buz, buz! The actors are come hither, my Lord,” and he gathered himself for the drop.
But there was more sense after all in the gondolier’s hisses than in Julian’s quotation from Hamlet. For before he could push himself off, there was a slight rattle of wood by the side of his knees. It was the butt of the gondolier’s long sweep. He had jammed the blade between the strong rowlock and the wall and was holding it there. Julian felt it with the side of his knee, pushed himself off the ledge and caught it as he fell. The second gondolier took his legs as he dangled.
“Let go!” and the next moment he was seated by the side of Columba. She drew him back under the canopy and threw a cloak across his knees.
“Quick!” she whispered, pushing her head forward towards her gondoliers, “Mario! Renzo!”
They drove their great sweeps into the water. Columba looked back to the high window of the porter’s room.
“How slow you were, Giovanni! I thought that you would never come.”
Julian tossed back his ruffles and showed her his wrists.
“Awkward ornaments,” he said, and Columba uttered a little cry.
“They did that to you! My poor boy! I promised to hear your last song. I heard of the fire. I ran down to get my gondola to the steps, ready. As I ran up the stairs again, I passed you. I thought it would be madness to show I was your friend. From the landing above, I saw you pushed into the empty room. I brought my gondola under the window, and with — those,” she touched the manacles on his wrists, “you still escaped. Faster, Mario!”; and her eyes still searched for that dark window in the side of the Rezzonico Palace.
But no light showed in it. The gondola was still in the black shadow of the great house. The only light in this dark cleft came from the white of the water as the oars churned it.
“Look at those lights,” she cried. They were driving forwards to the Grand Canal where the shouts rose and the lights flared and the gondolas clashed and jostled in a swaying mass. Beyond them all, alone by the left bank of the Grand Canal, one big gondola rode, silent, unlit, shrouded in black.
“The police-boat waiting for me,” said Julian, and at the change in his voice Columba turned quickly towards him. The bravado, the raillery had all gone out of him with the coming of this moment of relief. He was sitting back, making himself small, his feet drawn back under his knees, his voice shaking, and his body shaking with his voice. His eyes were fixed in a dreadful look of terror upon the black prison barge, and to Columba he had actually grown small. He was a boy in a gala dress, breaking with fear.
“Courage! A moment more! Once we are lost in that swirl of boats!” She snatched the wrap from her shoulders and arranged it over his knees and drew it down to the floor. “We are so near to safety.”
But they were not near enough. A head was thrust out of that high window from which Julian had climbed. A cry rang out over the water above the bawling voices.
“Take care!” and the water flashed from the sweeps of the police gondola as it turned towards the Palace.
Columba rose to the dire need. She had a flashing inspiration. Since secrecy had failed, advertisement must serve. She tore the wrap away from the boy’s knees. She pushed the awning back from above their heads so that all could see.
“Sing Giovanni! Sing as you have never sung! And, Mario, faster, faster!”
Julian stared at her.
“What, you too, Columba?”
“Sing, Giovanni! For the love of God!”
And still not understanding what she would be at, Julian threw back his head and sang — the first song which came into his head — that air of bravura from Artaxerxes, which he had sung at the Villa Angelica under Vesuvius. And as the well-known voice with its liquid notes leapt and swooned from the dark, narrow mouth of the lateral canal, cries of delight and surprise rang out and the crowded gondolas surged forward as though they had ears and a motion of their own.
“Marelli! Marelli! Viva Marelli!” and the gondolas were about them.
“Sing Giovanni! The p
olice won’t interfere now. See, their gondola has stopped! They don’t want a riot, a scandal, Maria Baretti and her lover, the Inquisitor. The game’s up. Mario, keep to the side!”
Columba’s brains were working shrewdly. A water-party! On the loveliest of spring nights, Marelli to sing, and not a copper to pay!
“Keep into the bank, Mario.”
It was not only that she wanted the throng of gondolas between her and the police boat. She had vividly in her mind a map of the Grand Canal.
“We’ll sing the duet from the Olympiade,” she whispered. “And make the most of it, my dear. Come!”
She pushed her hand through his arm, but Julian now understood. Her tender courage had revived his spirit. He had sung Pergolesi’s opera with Columba at the Benedetto Theatre only a week ago. He raised his hand for silence and then in a clear, low voice breathed out the first notes of the most moving, the most simple of all Pergolesi’s melodies.
“Ne’ giorni tuoi felici.”
And as he sang, the whole fleet of gondolas, Rocca’s guests and the lookers-on, swept in a cavalcade down the Grand Canal. Every homeward-bound reveller turned aside to swell it; and here a violin, there a guitar volunteered an accompaniment. Columba took up the strain as Aristea, and in a little while the voices blended. Down the canal the great procession floated, torches and lanterns burning, Columba’s gondola always on the inner rim; and on the other side, unobtrusively, like a boat cruising to be hired, the black police barge kept it company. They passed the Contarini Palace. Columba’s voice dropped away and Julian took up alone his resolve to go and his prayer not to be forgotten.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 741