Project Gutenberg's The Island of Enchantment, by Justus Miles Forman
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Title: The Island of Enchantment
Author: Justus Miles Forman
Illustrator: Howard Pyle
Release Date: December 20, 2014 [EBook #47723]
Language: English
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[Illustration: THE DOGE SAT ALONE IN A GREAT CARVEN CHAIR]
[Illustration]
* * * * *
THE ISLAND
OF ENCHANTMENT
BY
JUSTUS MILES FORMAN
ILLUSTRATED BY
HOWARD PYLE
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS * MCMV
Copyright, 1905, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published September, 1905.
* * * * *
Contents
PAGE
I. YOUNG ZUAN GRADENIGO 1
II. THE WOMAN OF ABOMINATION 59
Illustrations
"THE DOGE SAT ALONE IN A GREAT
CARVEN CHAIR" _Frontispiece_
HE LAID THE MANTLE OVER THE
GIRL'S SHOULDERS _Facing p._ 32
"HE LAY AWHILE, CONSCIOUS OF
GREAT COMFORT" _Facing p._ 60
SHE HUNG DROOPING IN THE GREAT
CHAIR OF STATE _Facing p._ 98
* * * * *
The Island of Enchantment
I
Young Zuan Gradenigo
Evil tidings have their own trick of spreading abroad. You cannot
bury them. The news which had come secretly to Venice was known from
the Giudecca to Madonna dell'Orto in two hours. Before noon it was in
Murano.
Young Zuan Gradenigo, making his way on foot from the crowded Merceria
into the Piazza di San Marco, ran upon his friend, the young German
captain, whom men called Il Lupo--his name was Wölfart--and learned,
what almost every other man in the city already knew, how Lewis of
Hungary, taking excuse of a merchant ship looted in Venetian waters,
was on his way to a second invasion, and had given over the Dalmatian
towns to the ban of Bosnia to ravage.
The two men were still eagerly discussing the matter and its probable
outcome, half an hour later, standing beside one of the gayly painted
booths which, at this time--the spring of 1355--were clustered about
the foot of the great Campanile, when a servant in the livery of the
doge touched young Zuan's arm and, in a low tone, gave him a message.
Gradenigo turned back to the German.
"My uncle wishes to see me at once in the palace," he said. "If you are
not pressed, go to my house and wait for me there. I may have important
news for you." Then, with a parting wave of the hand, he went quickly
across the Piazzetta and under the gateway to the right of St. Mark's.
At the head of the great stair two men were awaiting him, and they led
him at once through a narrow passage with secret sliding-doors to an
inner cabinet of the private apartments of the newly elected doge, his
uncle, Giovanni Gradenigo.
The doge sat alone in a great carven chair before a table which was
littered with papers and with maps and with writing-materials. From a
high window at one side colored beams of light slanted down and rested
in crimson and blue splashes upon the dark oak of the table and what
lay there, and upon the rich velvet of the doge's robe, and upon his
peculiar cap of office. He was not a very old man, but he was far from
strong. Indeed, even at this time he was slowly wasting away with the
disease which carried him off a year later, but as he sat there, bowed
before the table, he looked old and very worn and tired. His face had
no color at all. It was like a dead man's face--cold and damp.
And yet, although he was ill and seemed quite unfit for labors or
duties of any sort, he was in reality an unusually keen and shrewd
man, capable of unremitting toil. There burned somewhere within the
shrunken, pallid body an astonishingly fierce flame of life. He had
been elected to office hard upon the Faliero catastrophe partly because
his name was one of the very greatest in Venice--two others of his
house had worn the cap and ring within the century past--but chiefly
because his sympathies were as remote as possible from the liberal
views of the poor old man who had preceded him. He was patrician
before all else, and fiercely tenacious of patrician rights--fiercely
proud of his name and possessions.
He did not move as his nephew entered the room, only his pale eyes rose
slowly to the young man's face and as slowly dropped again to the table
before him. Young Zuan pulled forward one of the heavy, uncomfortable
chairs of carved wood and sat down in it. He was wondering very busily
what his uncle wanted of him, but he knew the old man too well to ask
questions. Besides that, it would not have been respectful.
Presently the pale eyes rose again.
"You have--heard?" asked the doge, in his thin voice.
Young Zuan nodded.
"It is all over Venice," he said. "That Angevin devil Lewis is coming
westward again, and, to begin with, has set his friend the ban on Zara
and Spalato. He chose his time well, God knows!" He paused a moment as
if in expectation of comment, but old Giovanni's face was a death-mask,
immobile, and he went on: "As Il Lupo, the German captain, said to me
a quarter of an hour ago, 'Venice is a very sick man--poison within,
wounds without.' We shall lose Dalmatia."
Old Giovanni nodded once or twice, and for a moment he closed his pale
eyes, sitting quite motionless in his great chair. It was as if he
ceased even to breathe. Then, quite suddenly, the eyes snapped open
and a swift flame of rage seemed to leap up in the old man, amazing in
its unexpectedness. A momentary patch of crimson glowed upon each of
the gray cheeks.
"That dog may have Dalmatia," he cried, "but, by God and by my ring of
office! I'm damned if he shall have Arbe! I won't give up Arbe! I want
to die there!"
Now Arbe needs a very brief word of comment. It was, and is, one of the
northern Dalmatian islands--a tiny island, claw-fashioned, ten miles
long, perhaps, not more than a mile wide at its thickest. It is hemmed
about by greater isles--Veglia to the north, Cherso and Lussin Grande
to the west, Pago to the south. Eastward the high, bare, rocky rampart
of the Croatian hills rises sheer from the sea, almost throwing its
shadow over the island that nestles under it. The northern expanse of
Arbe is wooded, but at the extremity of one south-stretching claw sits
a city in miniature.
It was at this time, and had been for more than a century, a summer
resort for several of the great Venetian families, who had built there
villas and campanili and churches as beautiful as anything beside the
Grand Canal, though no more beautiful than those of the true, native,
Arbesan families, such as the De Dominis and Nemira and Zudeneghi.
As a witness that I do not lie, you may see the ruins of them even
now--magnificent ruins, dwelt in by a horde of fishermen. And among
these great families, by far the foremost had been the Gradenigo.
There were three Gradenigo villas, cloistered and courtyarded, which
were magnificent enough to be called palaces; a Gradenigo had, early
in the thirteenth century, built the highest and finest of the four
campanili--it still stands; a Gradenigo had been several times count
of the island. Hence, as you see, Arbe was peculiarly a Gradenigo
pride. It was the apple of their eye. Hence also you will comprehend
old Giovanni's sudden flare of rage. His withered heart was wrung with
fear. He saw, I have no doubt, hideous visions of the ban's barbarians
slaying, looting, wielding torch and hammer in his fairy-land.
Young Zuan looked up with new concern.
"A-ah!" he said, half under his breath. "Arbe!--I had not thought of
Arbe." His tone took on a shade of doubt.
"Is it likely," he wondered, aloud, "that the ban will go out of his
way to attack the island? It's of no value whatever, strategically. It
would be mere wanton vandalism."
"And what," snarled old Giovanni, "is that mongrel Bosnian but a
vandal? 'Likely,' say you? It is more than that. The dog has sworn to
take Arbe and give it to that Magyar strumpet of his, Yaga. He knows
nothing would hurt me more. He went about Zara, a week ago, boasting
openly of what he meant to do--so the word comes."
Young Zuan flushed red and cursed under his breath.
"That is beyond bearing!" he said. "That woman in Arbe? That shameless,
thieving wanton who stole away Natalia Volutich?"
The doge nodded, licking his blue lips. "The same," he said. "The ban's
Yaga would appear to have a grudge against the house of Gradenigo."
About a year before this time, for the sake of cementing a closer union
between the two republics, a marriage had been arranged between young
Zuan Gradenigo and the daughter of the Ragusan Senator Volutich. But
before Zuan had reached Ragusa to make his visit of ceremony and see
his prospective bride, the girl, riding with her women a little way
beyond the land gate of the town, had been stolen by brigands. Such
things were by no means extraordinary. Nothing had been heard of her
since, save that, a fortnight after her capture, a letter, couched in
most insulting terms, had come to Ragusa from the Princess Yaga, that
infamous favorite of the ban, saying that the girl was in her household
and somewhat preferred it to her former home.
"It's beyond bearing!" said young Zuan again, and he was so angry that
his voice shook. Then, after the two had for a moment stared into each
other's eyes, he threw out his hands with a little laugh of sheer
exasperation.
"But what can we do?" he cried. "Madonna Santissima, what can we do?
With this war upon our hands the council will never consent to sending
aid to Arbe, which is, after all, of importance to only a few families."
"They _must_ consent!" said the doge, fiercely. "I will not lose Arbe!
Look you! Who are the families concerned? Loredan, Morosini, Dandolo,
Celsi, Venier, Contarini, Corner. All of them members of the Ten. I
will see them, and, among us, we shall be able to arrange it. The thing
must remain a private matter. We who love Arbe must go to Arbe's aid
unofficially. Three galleys will suffice. They must leave to-night,
and the council must not know of it until after they have sailed."
Young Zuan looked up with a certain awe, for the scheme, when one
considered the state of internal affairs in Venice at that time, was
almost madness.
"It is a desperate plan," he said, gravely. "You must feel very deeply
to risk such a scheme, after the Faliero affair."
Old Giovanni Gradenigo beat his yellow hand upon the table before him,
and once again the two spots of color came out upon his sunken cheeks.
"I will not lose Arbe!" he cried for the third time. "Leave the risk
and the arrangements to me. As for you, Zuan, you must go at the head
of the expedition. I want a Gradenigo to rescue my island, and you are
the only one of the house who is experienced in warfare."
"Oh yes, of course I should go," said Zuan. "I have the best right."
He rose to take his leave. "I shall have a busy day of it," he said,
"but I can have the three galleys ready before midnight, and secretly
at that. I shall take Il Lupo with me. He is very faithful and a better
man than I. When shall I come to you for instructions and authority? I
must have authority to clear the galleys, of course."
"Come to-night when I send for you," said the doge. "Everything shall
be ready for you." He had sunk wearily back in his great chair once
more, and all signs of life had faded from his face. It seemed to his
nephew that he looked more than ever like a dead man. He raised one
feeble hand a little way as if in sign of dismissal, but the hand
dropped back upon the carved wood of the chair-arm with a sort of dry
rattle, and Zuan left him so, still, silent, deathly, with the bars of
colored light from the high window slanting across his velvet robes in
billets and lozenges of vert and gules and azure.
* * * * *
The three galleys which slipped gently out of the canal of the Giudecca
that night bore southward before a favoring maestrale. Of one galley
young Zuan Gradenigo held the command, of another the German called Il
Lupo, and of the third a Venetian captain whose name does not matter.
By noon of the next day they were off Lussin Grande, and hove to, well
out of sight of land, to await the darkness. They saw during the day
nothing to disturb them. No ship passed save a Venetian fishing-boat
or two, high-prowed and with colored triangular sails painted with
some device; also, in the afternoon, three great trabacoli south bound
from Trieste or Pola, bluff-bowed craft, with hawse-ports painted to
represent ferocious eyes.
Towards evening the maestrale died away, as it so often does in
these waters, and from the south a sirocco arose, bringing a rack
of clouds over the sky and a heavy dampness to the air. Before dark
it was freshening fast and a fine rain was beginning to drive. The
three galleys pitched and plunged heavily in the mounting sea. Young
Gradenigo signalled to the two other ships, and, leading the way
himself, ran for the southern point of Lussin. He knew that, once
within the shelter of the islands and scoglie, he would be well out
of danger, for there is never a sea there, even though a storm may be
raging outside.
By the time he reached the tranquil shelter between Lussin and Pago
the night had fallen, black dark. It rained in spells, but once in a
while the driving rack overhead parted for a moment and a flash of
moonlight came down. Young Zuan ordered the galley brought to, and
waited for one of these momentary floods of light. The light came,
touching with silver the great, tumbling seas outside the barrier reef,
but the seas were empty. There were no galleys making for the southern
point of Lussin. Gradenigo turned with an oath of surprise to the old
sailing-master who stood beside him, sheltering his eyes from the wind
with one brown hand.
"They have been driven northward," he said. "They'll have to run
between Cherso and the main-land and beat south again by Veglia." The
sailing-master shook his head gloomily.
"It is a bad night, lord," said he. "That sea will be hell in another
hour." And he moved off forward to give orders to his men.
There seemed nothing for it but to go on, and, in the sheltered cove
at the north of Arbe, where the disembarkment was to take pace, await
the other ships. Young Zuan felt no great anxiety over them; he was
sure that they had merely been driven northward, and would have to
round Cherso, and then make their way down again through the sheltered
"canal" between that island and Veglia. His only fear was that they
might not reach Arbe before morning, in which case the relief of the
city--granting always that the ban's expedition had already occupied
it--would have to be delayed until another night.
He put about again, and, running before the strong sirocco (the wind,
of course, reaches these sheltered waters, somewhat abated, though
there is no sea), made out the lights of Arbe within two hours. In
another hour, leaving the galley well to the west of the island and
hidden in the gloom, he was in a skiff, rowed by two strong sailor-men,
creeping round the walls of the city.
Now it has been said that the city occupies a southward-jutting claw
of rock. The villas and streets, indeed, crowd to the very edge of the
narrow ridge. On the western side the sea-wall, a hundred feet high,
rises sheer from the water, and is continued upward by the walls of
the buildings. Eastward, however, round the point, the land slopes
lower, and here is a sheltered cove in the crook of the rocky claw,
with a mole and landing-place of hewn stone. Upon the landing-place
opens a public square.
Young Zuan in his skiff crept round the point, and, always under
the shelter of the sea-wall, into the still harbor where was the
landing-place. Fifty yards from the point where the sea-wall dropped to
the water's level and the open square began, he halted. From the wall
near by lion heads of carved stone projected, and in each beast's mouth
hung a great bronze ring for mooring ships. One of the two sailor-men
laid hold of a ring and held the skiff steady, and Zuan rose to his
feet to look.
Far over his head the wind--driving a thin rain before it once
more--shrieked and whistled past the roofs of Arbe, and flapped the gay
awnings which hung over the marble balconies. Once, above the wind's
noise, a woman's shriek rose and held and then died suddenly. Beyond,
in the open square, a great fire blazed on the flags, and hurrying men
in strange dress threw armfuls of fuel upon it. Others held hands and
danced about the fire in a ring, like devils, singing a weird and wild
chant. It was a fine chant and stirring, and these Huns sang it well,
but to young Zuan Gradenigo's ears it was the baying of unclean dogs.
He dropped back upon the thwart of his skiff with a sobbing curse. The
ban's Magyar strumpet was set where the ban had sworn to set her.
"Row to the galley!" he said, and as the two sailor-men bent to their
work, standing at their oars gondolier fashion, and the skiff leaped
forward through the wet gloom, he laid his face in his hands and it
twisted and worked bitterly. He was by no means a coward, and he was
not a particularly imaginative man, but the picture of that leaping
fire and the leaping, chanting devils about it persisted before his
eyes, and he looked forward to the struggle which was to come, and an
odd premonition of disaster took possession of him and would not be
driven away.
In the tiny sheltered cove of rendezvous, two miles above the city,
they anchored the galley and disembarked. There is a rocky headland
beside the cove, high at its outer end, and here certain trusty
officers took their station, with lanterns muffled in their cloaks, to
watch for the approach of the other two ships. Young Zuan went within
a deserted fisherman's hut which stood where wood and beach met, and
there held council with his sailing-master and his chief lieutenant. He
was still strong in the belief that Il Lupo's ship and the other were
safe and would arrive in a few hours--it was by now somewhat after
midnight--but the old sailing-master again shook a gloomy head. He had
served Venice for forty years on land and sea, and he was a pessimist.
There arose cries and shoutings without, and a petty officer burst into
the hut, puffed with importance and pride.
"Prisoners, lord!" he reported. "Three spies caught skulking and
peeping in the wood."
"Bring them in!" said young Zuan. "And keep those men quiet outside. Do
you wish the whole island to know we are here?"
The prisoners were thrust into the room--great, squat, hairy fellows in
the barbaric dress of Huns, surly and villanous. They would not speak.
It was evident that they understood neither Italian nor Greek, and they
affected not to comprehend the sailing-master's halting efforts at
their own tongue. They only stared under their shaggy brows, silent and
stolid, and tugged at the hands which were bound behind them.
"Are these men?" cried out young Zuan, in fine Venetian scorn. "Take
the cattle away! Bind their feet and set a guard over them. Hark! What
is that?"
That was a woman's scream from without, low and very angry.
"But a woman, lord," explained the officer who had brought in the
prisoners--"a young wench who was prowling with these fellows and was
taken with them. Asking your lordship's pardon, I thought it idle to
bring her to you--a common wench."
"Take these men away," said young Gradenigo, "and bring in the woman.
It may be that she speaks a Christian tongue."
She crept into the hut, pressing against the side of the doorway, and
stood against the farther wall--a girl, a mere slip of a girl, with
her long brown hair down over her eyes. And there against the wall she
stood, shaking, her hands twisting together over her breast, and her
eyes, like the eyes of a hunted, cornered animal, went swiftly from one
face to another of the men across the room, and finally settled upon
the face of Zuan Gradenigo, and did not stir for a long time.
She stood in her thin white shift, and on her bared arms were marks as
if rough hands and none too clean had been there.
When young Zuan spoke his voice was gentle and kindly, the maid was so
sore beset, so full of fear, so alone.
"Do you--understand Italian?" he asked. The maid did not answer him,
but when she spoke she spoke in perfectly fluent Venetian dialect--as
good Venetian as Gradenigo's own. And the fear seemed to go from her,
giving place to anger.
"My garments, lord!" she said, and laid her bruised arms across her
bosom in a little, pitiful gesture of outraged modesty. "Your men
have taken them from me. I am ashamed, lord. They--laid their foul
hands on my arms." Her face twisted as at the memory of insult, and the
lieutenant who stood across the room laughed aloud. Young Zuan turned
upon him fiercely.
"Hold your laughter for a fitter excuse!" he said. "Are we Huns, to
insult women? Go out to those men and find the maid's garments. Bring
them here." The man went, staring, and, at a motion of Gradenigo's
head, the sailing-master followed him, leaving the two alone.
"I am sorry, child," said Zuan Gradenigo. "We did not come here to
ill-treat women. I shall see that my men are punished for what they
have done. Meanwhile--" He took up the mantle which he had put aside
over a near-by bench, and, crossing the room, laid it over the girl's
shoulders. It covered her almost to the feet. And when he had done
this he stood, for what he imagined to be a moment, looking down into
the eyes that held his so steadily--brave eyes, unafraid, unclouded,
unwavering. One could not be harsh or cruel in the gaze of such--even
though they looked from the face of an enemy. An enemy? Nonsense! A
girl taken by chance as she wandered through the wood--as she peeped,
full of childish curiosity, at the disembarkment of a ship's load of
soldiers. Brave eyes, unafraid. That was why they held him so,
because they fronted him without fear--even with trust.
[Illustration: HE LAID THE MANTLE OVER THE GIRL'S SHOULDERS]
Ay, doubtless that was why they held him so, and yet--He stirred
restlessly. Such great eyes! With such illimitable depths! How came a
wandering child by such eyes? They moved him oddly. The child would
seem to be an uncommon child. Those steady, burning eyes of hers had
some uncommon power, worked some strange spell, some sorcery, not evil,
but unfamiliarly sweet, unknown to his experience.
He gave a little, confused laugh and raised an uncertain hand towards
his head, but the girl had, at the same moment, put out one of her own
hands to fasten the clasp of Zuan's mantle at her throat, and his
fingers touched her arm.
At that, as if it brought back her injuries to mind, she dropped her
eyes, and the man was loosed incontinently from his chains.
"Lord!" she cried again, flushing red in the light of the lanterns,
"they put their foul hands upon me! They put their hands upon me!"
The very present peril in which she might well have believed herself
to stand seemed not to occur to her. It seemed that only those rough,
befouling hands were in her mind. Her face gave once more its little,
shivering twist of anger and repulsion.
"They shall be punished, child!" said Zuan Gradenigo, between tight
lips. "Oh, they shall suffer for it, you may be sure. And now"--he took
a turn away from her, for her great eyes were upon him again, level
and unafraid--"now will you tell me who you are and how you came to be
found with those barbarians to-night? Surely you can have no traffic
with such. Surely you are a lady. I have seen that." And indeed he had
seen, while the girl stood in her thin white shift, how beautifully she
was made--deep-bosomed, slim-waisted, with tapering wrists and ankles,
and round white throat. No common wench was there. There was good blood
under that white skin of hers.
"Surely you are a lady," said young Zuan, but the girl bent her head
from him.
"Nay, lord," she said, very low, "I am only--a serving-maid to the
Princess Yaga."
The red flamed into Zuan's cheeks.
"That woman!" he cried. "You serve that vile fiend in human flesh, that
royal strumpet, that wanton at whose name men spit? _You?_" The girl
stared at him under her brows.
"Oh!" cried Zuan Gradenigo. "Where is God that hell could devise such a
wrong? What was God doing that you should stray into such clutches and
He not know? That--that monster of vice and uncleanness!" He pointed a
shaking hand towards the south.
"There she sits," said he, "polluting the castle where Jacopo Corner
has sat for so many years, where my grandfather sat before him, and his
father before him. There she sits gloating; but, by God and St. Mark's
lion! before this week is over I shall tear her head from her body and
throw it to the dogs. Nay! better than that! I shall send it, in the
name of Venice, to the ban who sent her here to shame us."
"Lord!" said the maid, very low--"lord! Oh, you do not know! You--speak
wildly. You do not know what you say."
"I know," said Zuan Gradenigo, "that all I say is true. That woman's
name is infamous throughout Europe. It is a name of scorn. It means
all that is vile--as you must know. Will Arbe ever be clean from
her--even when we have washed its stones with her blood? But _you_!"
he cried, in a new voice. "Oh, child, that _you_ should have to serve
her--be near to her! I cannot think of it with calmness."
The maid turned a little away from him and moved over to the wooden
bench where Zuan's mantle had lain. And she seated herself at one end
of the bench, looking across the room at him very soberly.
"And why not I, lord," she asked, "as well as another? What do you know
of me? I am--a serving-maid, and such must serve whomever they may." He
came nearer and stared into her face, and his own was oddly troubled,
frowning.
"I cannot think of you--so," he said. "A serving-maid? There's
something strange here. Oh, child, you have something about you--I
cannot say what it is, for I have no words. I fight, I am not a poet,
but were I such, I think--your eyes--their trick of looking--their--I
cannot say what I mean. A serving-maid? Oh, child, you are fitter for
velvets and jewels! I do not understand. Something breathes from you,"
he said, with that trouble upon his frowning face, an odd trouble in
his eyes--bewildered, uncomprehending--like a child's eyes before some
mystery. "Something breathes from you. I do not know what it is."
The maid looked at him in the yellow, flickering lantern-light, and
she made as though she would speak, but in the end shook her head
and turned it a little aside, and sat once more silent. And for a
time the man also was silent, watching her averted face and thinking
how amazingly beautiful it was; not white with the pallor which the
Venetian women so prized, but sumptuously rich of color, sun-kissed,
free, unashamed of the wholesome blood which flowed under its golden
skin and stained it with red on either cheek. He found himself
possessed of a mad desire to touch that cheek which was nearest him
with his finger, and the sheer folly, the childishness of the thought
would in any other mood have shaken a laugh of scorn from him. He was
not a woman's man, as he had said, but a fighter.
One of the maid's hands stirred in her lap and dropped beside her
on the wooden bench. The lantern-light fell upon it--long, slender,
tapering.
"Your hand, child!" said young Zuan. "It is not the hand of a
serving-maid. It has never done rough tasks."
"My princess is kind to me, lord," she said. "My tasks are easy."
He put out an uncertain hand and touched the hand that lay in the
lantern-light. The maid drew a little, quick, gasping breath, and her
eyes turned to him, great and dark. Then, like two silly, half-grown
children caught holding hands, they both flushed red and their eyes
turned aside once more.
Zuan raised a hand to his temples, where the blood throbbed.
"I--do not know what has come over me," he said, and turned a few steps
away across the room. In a moment he was back again, on one knee before
her.
"You lay a spell upon me!" he cried, whispering into her bent face. "I
am unmanned. Strange things stir my heart, child--mount to my head like
wine. You lay a spell upon me."
"No, lord," she said, very low. "I am but a maid. I cannot work spells
or sorcery. It is only that I am alone and beset and miserable. It is
pity that you feel, lord. Ah, you are kind and merciful. Lord, I--wish
that I might do you a service for the service you have done me."
"Pity?" said young Zuan.
"Pity, lord," she said again, and to his awkward, unskilful tongue and
to his unaccustomed hands no occupation seemed to come, so that he
knelt silent and troubled before her in the lantern-light.
If it seem that enchantment came overswiftly upon him,
overprecipitately, it must be borne in mind that he was a soldier,
wholly unused to a woman's company, and that this girl, young,
beautiful, and in sore straits, was brought before him in the manner
most certain to waken his chivalry--ay, to stir his ready heart. The
maid spoke shrewdly. It was pity he felt. But other emotions wait hard
upon pity's threshold. Further, in young Zuan's day, love came swiftly
or not at all. It was not the day of courtship. Love was born of a
look--a smile--a hand-touch. And such love has wrecked empires. It is a
sober truth that no great passion was ever of slow maturing.
There came from without the door eager voices and quick steps,
and the lieutenant whom Zuan had sent to fetch the maid's outer
garments--krozet, saruk, and girdle--burst into the room. His eyes
were round, starting out of his head, and his face was flushed with
excitement.
"She's still here, lord?" he cried out, almost before he had entered.
"The woman is here? You have not let her go?" His gaze searched the hut
swiftly.
"She is here," said Zuan Gradenigo, "but you will speak more
respectfully. Give me the garments!" The man's excitement was too great
to heed reproofs. He thrust the things he held into his master's arms.
"See!" he cried. "See the girdle--the necklace--the charm she wore
about her neck! See whom we have taken!"
Young Zuan looked at the jewels, and they slipped from his fingers and
fell, flashing in the light, and lay about his feet. He turned very
slowly towards the girl, who stood against the farther side of the
wall, and his eyes were once more like a child's eyes--bewildered,
hurt, uncomprehending. He stretched out a hand towards her, and the
hand shook and wavered.
"It is the princess herself!" cried the lieutenant. "It is Yaga!" and
fell into a chattering, hysterical laugh.
"It is not--true," whispered Zuan Gradenigo, across the little room.
"Say it is not true!" His voice rose to a sharp, agonized appeal, but
there was no conviction in his tone. He knew.
At the name the girl had cried out suddenly, and to smother the cry she
caught her two hands up to her mouth. Even then her eyes went from one
man to the other, swift and keen.
"Say it is not true!" pleaded Zuan Gradenigo, but the lieutenant
babbled on, stammering in his excitement.
"See, Messer Zuan! We have her! We have her fast! Why not set sail
at once with her on board--at once, before they in the city know she
is taken? Why not? See! they are helpless without her. We can force
them to give up Arbe for her. She is worth fifty Arbes to them--all of
Dalmatia, perhaps. Why not do that? Messer Lupo's galley has not come,
nor the other. We can do nothing alone. Take her on board, lord, before
it is too late, and set sail. Leave Arbe to itself for a little. The
Huns will give it up to us. Come, come!"
It is doubtful if young Zuan even heard. His eyes, stricken and
hopeless, were upon the girl across the room, and he whispered over and
over again:
"Say it is not true! Say it is not true!" But the woman's eyes were
upon the floor, and her hands dropped to her breast, and then to her
side with a little forlorn gesture, and she bent her head.
"It is true, lord," she said. "I am the princess Yaga."
The lieutenant gave a great shout and dashed out to his fellows. Young
Zuan dropped down upon the near-by bench, covering his face.
Then the woman came to him, crossing the room swiftly, and dropped upon
her knees on the floor beside him.
"Lord!" she said, touching his arm with her two hands--"lord, it would
have been of no avail to deny it. You would have found me out in time.
I am that--dreadful woman, lord; perhaps not so dreadful as you have
thought; perhaps men have lied about me--made things worse than they
truly are. Still--lord--" She crept closer to him on her knees, and her
hands pressed eagerly at his arm. "Lord, it was wise, very wise, what
your officer begged you to do. You have me fast--the ban's Yaga. Will
you not set sail with me and leave Arbe? Will you not hold me hostage
for your island? The ban will give it up to you in exchange for me.
Lord, will you not do this?" She pleaded with him in an odd tone of
eager anxiety which might have aroused his suspicions had the man been
less overwhelmed in his misery. I do not think he heard more than the
pleading voice. I do not think he followed her words at all.
"Lord!" she cried again, shaking his arm with her two hands, "will you
not do this? It will be best for you. Oh, far best! Listen, lord! You
have been kind to me, gentle and pitiful. You saved me from--from great
shame at the hands of those men. You saved me when you knew that I must
be an enemy--even though you did not know how great an enemy--and now I
am trying to save you. You are in great danger, lord, you and your men.
_Will_ you not listen to me?"
Young Zuan raised a white face, and his eyes looked bitterly into the
woman's eyes that burned so near.
"Danger?" he said, dully, under his breath. It seemed as if he did not
care. "What danger?"
And then, as if his gaze held for her some of the strange sorcery which
hers had laid upon him, the woman faltered in her swift speech, and she
gave a little sob.
"Oh!" she cried. "Why did I not know? Why did I not know?"
"What danger?" repeated Zuan Gradenigo, as if the words meant nothing
to him.
"They know that you are here, lord," she said. "We knew, in the city,
that you were coming. The fishing-boat which passed you this morning
at sea brought us news of three galleys from Venice. Now two of your
galleys have been blown away by the sirocco. You are but a few men,
a handful, and you will be overwhelmed. Oh, lord, we whom your men
took to-night were spying upon you, but there were three more who
escaped--three more men. They will have reached the city before this
time, and you may be attacked at any moment. Lord, _why_ do you sit
there silent? Why will you not take me on board your ship and sail
away?"
It came dully to Gradenigo's mind, through the stress and whirl which
obscured it, that the maid showed a strange eagerness, out of reason.
"Why do you tell me this?" he asked, suddenly. "Why not let your
barbarians capture us--put us to death? Why do you wish to defeat your
own cause? There's trickery here." He rose to his feet, frowning, but
the woman was before him.
"If you--cannot see--lord," she said, and a bit of bright color came
into her cheeks, "then I cannot tell you." Suddenly she put out her two
hands upon his breast and fell to sobbing.
"I will not have you killed!" she cried. "Oh, lord, I will not have
you taken or slain! For your men I care nothing. They may die where
they stand and it will be nothing to me, but _you_--lord, I cannot bear
to have you taken!" There was no trickery in that. It came from the
woman's soul, shaking her sorely.
Zuan looked at her, this slim, pale girl shaken with her sobbing--this
monster of vice and sin, at whose name men spat with derision--and
again he felt the strange, paralyzing weakness creep over him. He could
not hate her. He turned his eyes away and shook himself into attention.
"Come!" he said, "we will go. You cannot be lying to me. We will go."
But before he could take a step there arose in the night without a
babel of cries and screams and the clashing of steel. Above it all the
same strange, barbaric chant which those devils leaping about the fire
in the landing-place of the city had sung together.
"Too late!" cried the girl. "Oh, too late! They are here already!"
Zuan Gradenigo sprang silently for his sword, which he had laid aside
in a far corner of the room, but as he did so the woman threw herself
upon the half-open door of the hut and crashed it to, swinging the
great bar into place.
"You shall not go!" she said, in a gasping whisper. "You shall not go
out there to be slain!"
"Out of my way!" cried Zuan, sword in hand. "Out of my way, or by
Heaven I'll run you through! Would you have me skulk here while my men
are fighting? Get out of my way!" He ran at her and caught her by the
arm, swinging her aside from the door, but the woman was back again,
on hands and knees, before he could recover his balance. She caught
him about the knees with her arms, and she was as strong as a young
animal and as lithe. He could not move.
He raised the Venetian dagger which he held in his left hand. His eyes
were on fire.
"Once more," said he, "will you stand out of my way and let me go?"
Outside, in the night, the cries and clash of arms clamored on, and
that barbaric chant, broken sometimes, sometimes swelling loud and
triumphant, rang over all.
"You shall not go through this door!" gasped the woman, clinging fast
to young Zuan's knees. "They are four to one out there. They would
kill you the moment you stepped beyond the door."
Strategy came to her, and she shot out a bare arm towards the single
window.
"Go by the window!" she cried. "It opens upon a thicket. They will not
see you there." She loosed him and he sprang for the window, swinging
away the bar and pushing open the heavy wooden shutters.
The woman was upon his heels as he leaped into the night, but he did
not know or care. Through the tangle of shrubbery and vine in which he
found himself he could see the battle raging in the clear space of the
beach beyond, and towards it he fought his way. A heavy creeper laid
hold upon his ankles, and, cursing savagely, he slashed at it with
his sword. A little rise of ground was before him. He mounted it in a
single leap, and from its crest leaped again.
Then he fell a long way, crashing first through the mask of thicket
which covered a narrow ravine, striking thence upon the earth of the
farther side and rolling down that. Once or twice he threw out his
hands to catch himself, but as he slipped and fell again his head
struck upon something hard--a stone, probably--and that was the last he
knew.
II
The Woman of Abomination
When young Zuan Gradenigo came once more to his senses after the fall
in the dark, it was like a peaceful awakening from sweet sleep. Indeed,
literally it was just that, for from the unconsciousness following upon
the injury to his head he had drifted easily into slumber, so that when
he waked he had, by way of souvenir of his mishap, scarcely even a
headache.
That his eyes opened upon blue sky instead of upon painted or carved
ceiling roused in him no astonishment. In service against the Turks
and against the Genoese he had often slept in the open, waking when
the morning light became strong enough to force its way through
his eyelids. He lay awhile, conscious of great comfort and bodily
well-being, coming slowly and lazily into full possession of his
faculties. The air was fresh and warm, with a scent of thyme in it,
and from somewhere in the near distance sea-birds mewed plaintively,
after their kind. He dropped his eyes from the pale-blue sky and saw
that though he lay upon turf--a hill it would seem, or the crest of
a cliff--there was a stretch of tranquil sea before him, a narrow
stretch, and beyond this a mountain range looming sheer and barren
from the water's edge. The sun must be rising behind it, he said to
himself, for the tips of the serrated peaks glowed golden, momentarily
brighter, so that it hurt his eyes to watch them. He wondered what
mountains these could be, and then, all in a flash, it came upon him
where he was--that this was Arbe, and that ridge the Velebic mountains
of the main-land.
[Illustration: "HE LAY AWHILE CONSCIOUS OF GREAT COMFORT"]
His mind raced swiftly back to the preceding evening--to the scene
in the fisherman's hut, to his dash through the window in an attempt
to join his fighting-men, and--there he stopped. He had a confused
recollection of falling in the dark, falling a long way, but he was not
fully awake yet, and the effort to remember tired him. He turned upon
his side--he had been lying on his back, with his head pillowed upon
something soft and comfortable--and, childlike, put up an open hand
under his cheek. But when his hand touched that upon which his head had
been resting he cried out suddenly and struggled forthright to his feet.
The woman who had saved his life half knelt, half sat behind him, and
upon her knees his head had lain. At this moment she was leaning back
a little, with her head and shoulders against a small tree which stood
there, and her eyes were closed as if she were asleep.
Young Zuan saw that she was very white, and that her closed eyelids
were blue and had blue circles under them. The lids stirred after a
moment and she opened her eyes--blank and wondering at first, a child's
eyes, then swiftly intelligent.
"Lord!" she said, in a whisper, looking up to him--"lord, I must
have--slept! I did not know. I am sorry--lord." She sat forward again
and made as though she would rise to her feet, but with the first
effort a spasm of agony went over her white face, and she gave a little
scream and fell forward, prone, and so fainted quite away.
For a moment young Zuan did not understand. Then, as comprehension came
to him, he dropped upon his knees beside the woman with an exclamation
of pity.
"The child has come near to killing herself that I might sleep!" he
cried. Then, before she should wake to further pain, he set skilfully
to work. He straightened the bent and cramped knees and, with his
strong hands, rubbed and chafed the stiffened muscles. They were cold
as stone, he found, save where his head had lain; all feeling must long
since have gone out of them. Then at last, just as he had the blood
once more flowing redly under the skin, the woman stirred, moving her
hands on the turf beside her, and presently came to her senses.
Her eyes opened--they were not black, as he had thought the night
before, but curiously dark blue, almost purple--and she looked up into
young Zuan's face as he knelt above her.
"I would not--have you think me, lord--a weakling," she said,
whispering. "It was a--moment's pain. My knees were a little cramped.
Will you forgive me, lord?"
"Forgive you?" said he. "You have saved my life. Whether that was worth
the saving or not I do not know, but you have saved it, and you have
borne great suffering that I might sleep in comfort. Forgive you?"
She lay quite still on the turf, looking up at him, and the old,
paralyzing weakness began to creep upon Zuan's limbs, the old, strange
shaking came to his heart.
"I would do it, lord," said she, "many, many times over for your
sake." A warm flush spread up into her throat and over her cheeks.
"I do not understand," said Zuan, stammering, and dully he thought how
beautiful she was, lying there still before him, how young and slender
and exquisite, this woman of abomination. "We are enemies," said he,
"the bitterest of enemies. I came here to cleanse Arbe of you, to set
your head on a spear before the count's castle for men to revile and
spit upon."
"Yes, lord," said the woman of abomination, whispering, and that rosy
flush died away from cheeks and neck, leaving her pale again.
"Last night," said he, "you had me in your power. Your men could have
taken me alive or slain me very easily. Yet you would not let me face
them. Even when I threatened to kill you you would not stand out of my
way."
"You had had me in _your_ power first, lord," said she. "But you were
kind to me. You saved me from great shame, and covered me with your
cloak."
"That was nothing," said young Zuan. "I did not know that you were the
princess Yaga. But you knew that I was leader of the force which had
come to recover Arbe from you. Why did you save me, princess? Why are
you here with me now in hiding? Why are you not in the castle where you
should be?"
The flush came again, and for the first time her eyes fell away from
his with a sort of timidity.
"I could not--leave you, lord," she said, whispering again. "I could
not see you hurt or slain or a prisoner. And then when, through
accident, you lay hurt, after all, I could not leave you so."
"But why? Why?" he persisted, staring down upon her with troubled
eyes. "Arbe was in the hollow of your hand! You are the head of those
barbarians who hold the city. Yet you desert them to succor me. Why?"
"If you cannot see, lord," she said, hiding her face with her hands,
"then I cannot tell you."
Young Zuan gave a sudden cry.
"O God of Miracles!" said he, under his breath. His heart was racing
very madly and the veins at his temples throbbed until he thought that
they must burst.
He put out faltering hands and took the woman's hands from her face.
"What is it," he said, "that--has come to me to rob me of strength and
thought when I am near you? What is it that came to me last night when
you first crept into the fisherman's hut and I saw your eyes?"
"Lord," she said, very low, "I think it is love."
Her hands slipped from between his lax palms, and young Zuan got to his
feet blindly and moved a few paces away. He put his arms up against
the trunk of a tree and laid his face upon them. Through the whirl of
things which beset him he had a dull consciousness that his cherished
world--all his sane, ordered life, his duty, his ambitions, his pride
of race--was slipping from him, receding into a misty background,
leaving him face to face with something that was immeasurably,
unthinkably great--something for which he had been begotten and
born--something which drew him towards itself with a might that no puny
strength of his could combat.
He turned, still blindly, and the woman of abomination, slim, girlish,
virginal, with burning eyes, stood before him, her hands at her breast.
"Lord, I think it is--love," she said again.
"And _you_," said Zuan--"_you_ what--_you are_!" But it was not really
he who said that. It was a last faint protest from the man he once had
been.
"Does that matter?" she pleaded, in an agony, her hands going out to
him.
Young Zuan took a great breath. "God knows it should matter!" he
groaned, "but I cannot make it weigh with me. Your spell is over my
heart and soul, and I am sick for helpless love of you. When you touch
me I tremble. When I see your eyes the world drops from me and I ride
upon the stars breathless in some strange ecstasy. I have drunk madness
before you and I am mad. No! It does not matter to me that you are what
you are--the woman of abomination. I love you. You and I are bound
together with chains. We cannot live apart."
Then for a time an odd little awkward silence fell upon them. Once Zuan
put out his arms towards the woman as if he would take her into them,
but as if moved by a sudden panic at what she had roused she shrank
back, crying something under her breath that sounded like, "No, no!"
And presently he moved past her a few steps down the slope of turf on
which they stood, and straightway found himself at the brink of the
westward cliff which rose from the water's edge. He knew where they
were--some three or four miles north of the city and on the opposite
side of the narrow island to where the fight of the night before had
taken place.
"Will you tell me," he said at last, turning--it was a certain relief
to break the strain they had been under--"will you tell me how we came
here? We are a long way from the fisherman's hut and the cove where my
galley lay."
"A lad helped me with you, lord," she said--"a vine-grower's lad whom I
befriended two days ago. When you had fallen into the little ravine I
found you there at its bottom, and at first I--thought you were dead.
You lay so still! Then I felt your heart beat and knew you were only
stunned. I tore a strip from my shift and bound your head with it, for
your head was bleeding." Young Zuan raised a hand and for the first
time discovered that a bandage was wrapped about his brows. "Then I
waited there with you. I waited for a long time, climbing the bank
once or twice to see how the fight above was waging. Not many of your
men were killed, I think--ten or twelve perhaps--those who fought as
rear-guard while the others were swimming and rowing in skiffs out to
the ship--"
"Then they got away?" cried young Zuan, eagerly. "The galley got safe
away?"
"Yes, lord," she said, "the galley sailed away, and after a time the
Huns--_my_ Huns--went away too towards the city. When I came out of the
ravine at last there was only one man left there--the vine-grower's
lad, who had crept from the wood to see the fighting. I called to him,
and between us we raised you and brought you here. You fell asleep
without waking from your swoon."
"They got away!" said young Zuan, staring with wide, bright eyes across
the strait to where the Velebic cliffs rose gray and fierce. "They got
away! They'll meet Il Lupo and the other galleys! They--" A little
restless movement from the woman made him turn his head quickly, and
the light faded from his eyes.
"That--doesn't matter," he said, in a different tone. "Nothing
matters--now." He watched her for a long time under his brows, bitterly
at first, but she was such as no man could look coldly upon, and she
had saved his life and gone from triumph into hiding with him. As he
looked at her, Il Lupo and the galleys dimmed from his mind.
"What," said he at last, very gently, "is to become of you and me?"
"I do not know, lord," she said. "Oh, lord, a woman, when she loves,
does not think of such things or care for them. She does not look
ahead. A woman, lord, when she loves, has space in her mind and soul
for nothing but love. You--do not know women."
"No," said young Zuan, shaking his head, "I do not know them. That is
true. They--have never come into my way."
"I am glad," she said.
"Princess," said he, after a little silence, "it is true, what men say
of you?"
"Does it matter?" she asked again. "No, lord, it is not true--at least
much of it is not. But you have said it did not matter--you have said
so!"
He turned his eyes from the pitifulness of her face.
"It matters," he said, "only in what is to become of us. If it is true,
we can never go back to Venice. I must be an outcast from my city and
from my people."
She crept nearer to him, where they sat on the cliff's edge, nearer, on
her knees, looking eagerly into his face.
"And, lord," she said, watching him, "if it is true--sufficiently
true--would you suffer that for my sake? Would you give up all that to
go with me?"
"How could I do otherwise?" said young Zuan, simply, and at that
the woman broke into a little sobbing laugh of joy and triumph and
tenderness.
"Oh, lord!" she cried, "that were love indeed! Oh, lord, I did not know
that there were men so faithful and so good.
"And yet," she said, presently, as if in argument with herself--"yet
noble lords of Venice and of Genoa and of Naples and of many Italian
cities have married queens and princesses no better than the Princess
Yaga."
"It is not that only," said young Zuan. "There are many evil women in
high places--fawned before, bowed down to--in Italy; but you have done
one very terrible and shameful thing, princess, which alone must make
you hated in Venice forever, and must make marriage between you and me
impossible there."
"I--do not understand," she said, wondering.
"You or your brigands," he said, "carried off from Ragusa Natalia
Volutich. I was to have married her."
The woman screamed, dragging herself backward over the turf away from
him.
"_You--you_," she cried, in a breathless whisper, her hands at her
mouth,--"_you_ are--Zuan--Gradenigo?"
"Why--yes!" said he. "I thought you knew."
She stumbled to her feet, staring and sobbing.
"Oh, what have I done? What have I done?" she cried, over and over
again, and she moved still farther away, staring at him as if he were a
ghost risen against her.
"What have I done?" she whispered. Then all at once she began a
sobbing, hysterical laugh--a laugh that shook all her slim body, like
weeping, and it seemed that she would never have done with it. She
covered her face with her hands, leaning against a tree which grew near
by, and the fit of endless laughter swept her like a storm. Young Zuan
watched her under his brows with a sort of gloomy resentment. Women,
he had been told by those of experience, were creatures of strange and
incomprehensible moods, ruled, like a horse, by divers vagaries and not
at all by reason. This mad fit of hysteria was, he took it, therefore
to be endured as patiently as might be, but he had small store of
patience.
"Oh, lord," said the woman, presently, gasping between her fits of
laughter, tears in her eyes--"lord, there is a thing which I must tell
you--an amazing thing. I do not know whether you will be glad or angry
of it. In any case I must tell you at once--"
"Wait!" said Zuan, and held up a hand. "I must know first about this
maid, Natalia Volutich, whom you stole away. What have you done with
her, princess?" His tone was very grave and stern.
"The maid Natalia," said she, "has been well treated, lord. She has
come to no harm. If this war had not arisen she would have been sent
back safely to her father before now."
"Unharmed?" said Zuan Gradenigo, watching the woman's eyes.
"Unharmed, lord," she said. "A maid, as she came. Indeed"--there seemed
to be a glimmer of a smile at the woman's lips--"indeed, I think she
has not been unhappy, this Natalia of Ragusa. I think she has learned
to feel a certain fondness for her mistress. I think she would serve
her in any way she could." The smile was a wry smile now. "Even so
vile a thing as I, lord," said the woman of abomination, "can be tender
and--faithful. Even so vile a thing as I is sometimes loved. An evil
woman, Messer Zuan, is not all evil. There is something of good in the
very lowest."
"Princess! Princess!" cried the man.
"And now," she said, "I must tell you what must be told; but, lord,
before I tell it will you say to me once more what you have said--that
for my sake, to be with me alone, you stand willing--nay, glad--to give
up your city and your rank and your friends? Will you say to me that I,
woman of infamy though men call me, am dearer to you than everything
else in the world?" She came close to him, putting out her two hands
upon his breast, and her great eyes burned up into his, and her face
seemed for the instant to sharpen, to pale, and her lips trembled.
"Will you tell me once again?" she said, pleading.
"I could not--live without you--child," he said, and she cried out with
joy at the name. He had called her "child" on the night before when he
did not know who she was.
She stood away from him at arm's-length.
"Now then, at last," she said, "I will tell you what you must know.
Lord, I--" Her voice failed suddenly as if she had been stricken ill,
and all the rosy color which had risen to her cheeks began to die
slowly away. She seemed to be staring over young Zuan's shoulder
towards the north. She raised her hand a little way, but it dropped
again weakly by her side. "The--ships!" she said, in a strained
whisper. "The--ships!" Zuan turned to look.
Round a little wooded point of the island, scarcely more than a mile
to the north of where they stood, came, before the wind, three great
Venetian galleys, looming high and stately in that narrow strait.
Zuan gave a great shout. "My ships!" he cried. "My galleys!" His voice
ran up into an odd falsetto note which was almost a scream. "Trapani
has found Il Lupo, and they are going to attack the city by sea!"
He sprang for his cloak, which lay near, as if he would wave it to
attract the attention of those on the galleys, but the woman caught him
by the arm, white-faced and breathless.
"No, no!" she cried, swiftly. "No! You--must not go. They must not
attack--now. The city could be taken in an hour. Those men--fools!
fools!--of ours have destroyed the--engines of defence. They did not
know how to use them. And they have--sunk the ships in the harbor.
Lord, you must not let your ships attack. We must not lose the city.
Oh, it would be cruel, cruel!" She clung to his arms, sobbing,
panic-stricken, stumbling desperately over her words.
"Lord, they must not take Arbe!" she wailed. "All we have done--all
_I_ have done--gone for nothing--nothing! It is not to be borne. Stop
them, lord! You would not be so cruel as to allow this. You do not
know--Oh, stop them! Stop them!" She was quite beside herself with
terror, but Zuan put her out away from him at arm's-length and held her
there.
"Listen!" he said, sharply. "Listen to me!"
And her wild incoherence checked itself--dropped into breathless
sobbing.
"I cannot stop those galleys," he said. "They have come here to retake
Arbe, which you seized from us, and if what you say is true they will
take it easily. Remember, nothing I can do will save the city for you.
The city is lost to you already. You must let me signal to the galleys
and go on board. You must let me lead this force in the attack, as I
was to have done when I left Venice."
The woman cried out upon him again in a panic, but he quieted her
sharply as before, speaking in quick, emphatic words as one speaks to a
terrified child.
"You must let me go!" he said. "Surely you see that my honor is in
this. Whether I go or stay here in hiding, the result will be the same
for the city, but if I do not go I am dishonored for life. You would
be hurt by that as much as I, so let me go. If I retake the city,
the council in Venice will perhaps allow me to marry you without
banishment. At any rate, there is the bare chance of it. Let me go!"
She stood away from him, drooping, downcast eyes averted, and she made
an odd little despairing gesture--as it were of defeat. Arbe went from
her hands in that gesture. Triumph was renounced that her lover's honor
might rest unstained.
"Yes," she said--"yes, you must go, lord. I will not dishonor you. But
oh, if there is a God who hears lovers' prayers, I pray that he will
not let you come to harm. If you are killed this day I shall not live."
The ships were drawing nearer, down the coast of the island.
"I shall be," said the woman of abomination, "in the city, lord, when
you take it." She smiled again her wry smile, as if something grimly
amused her.
"No!" said he. "Wait here or in the wood north of the Land Gate. I will
come for you. You must not put yourself in danger."
"I shall be in the city, lord," she said again, "but not in danger. Oh,
I pray God to keep you safe!"
"I must go," said he, looking over his shoulder at the three high
galleys. "I must go, but oh, my dear, never doubt me! I shall come to
you if I have to crawl on hands and knees!" He took her into his arms
and kissed her mouth. It was the first time. Then he caught up his
mantle and stood, sharply outlined on the brink of the cliff, waving
it about his head, until through the still morning air he heard cries
from the men of the nearest ship and saw that he had attracted their
attention.
Near where he stood a fissure rent the wall of rock--a watercourse half
filled with earth and shale and grown up with low shrubs. Down this he
made his way, plunging recklessly among bowlders, and so reached the
tiny strip of beach at the cliff's foot. The first galley was already
hove to, and from it a skiff put out to take him aboard. In ten minutes
more the three ships bore away again southward, and Zuan Gradenigo was
in command.
And, after all, they had very little fighting for their pains--too
little to please them. For it seems that an hour before the three
ships came into sight of the city the Venetians and Arbesani of the
garrison, too carelessly guarded by their barbarian captors, rose, in
street and market-place and improvised prison--rose at a preconcerted
signal--and fell upon the Huns tooth and nail. Some of them had
weapons, some sticks or stones, one--an Arbesan called Spalatini, and
his name deserves to go down in history along with Messer Samson's--the
thigh-bone of an ox which the Huns had killed and roasted whole in the
Via Venezia.
When, therefore, the three galleys under Zuan Gradenigo drew into
the harbor and hurriedly made fast to the landing-place, a running
hand-to-hand fight was in progress from one end of the city to the
other. It was not a battle, for it had no organization whatever. It
was a disgraceful mêlée. Naturally enough the Venetian reinforcements
incontinently decided the day. Something over three hundred of the
ban's barbarians--Huns, Slavs, and Croats--gave themselves up. Nearly
two hundred killed themselves by leaping over the high westward
sea-wall, and a hundred more were killed in fight or escaped by water.
It was an inglorious ending to a matter which had promised so fine a
struggle.
An hour after the landing, as soon as ever his duties gave him a
moment's breathing space, young Zuan made up the Via Venezia--that
single long street which runs north and south through the city--to the
castle which sits at the street's northern end, and under which is the
Land Gate, the only means of entering the town except by sea.
In the loggia of the castle he came upon the count--Jacopo Corner--a
round old man with a red face, gouty, so that he went upon crutches. At
this moment he was surrounded by a group of gentlemen--Arbesani for the
most part, heads of the city's great families--De Dominis, Galzigna,
Nemira, Zudeneghi, and such; but he turned from them to greet young
Gradenigo.
"Ah, Zuan, my lad!" he cried out, "you come in the nick of time--you
and your archers! You've saved the day, for those dogs were just
getting the better of us. Another hour and--St. Mark!--our heads would
have been on pike-staves!"
Young Zuan struggled to preserve a face of civil sympathy, but his eyes
were upon the open doors beyond. Old Jacopo seemed to read his thought.
"Ay, we have the queen bee in there! She's in my private
audience-chamber, bound to a chair. Queen bee, say I? Hussy! Strumpet!
Daughter of abomination! Mother of sins!" He shook a crutch at the
bronze doors. "Ay, she's there!" he said. "But the wench has cheated
us, for all that. She has robbed me of the pleasure of tearing her evil
bones apart--alive, that is."
Gradenigo, one hand on the door, turned slowly backward a masklike
face. He felt that he was shaking and swaying like a drunken man.
"What do you--mean?" he said, in a flat voice.
Old Jacopo hobbled nearer and touched the younger man's arm. "Eh, lad!"
he croaked. "Come! come! You're not yourself. The sun has got to you.
You've a bound-up head, I see. Better have a rest!"
"What was it you said?" asked young Gradenigo, looking down at the
ground, which swung slowly back and forth under him.
"Yaga?" said old Jacopo. "Oh, she's dead. The wanton's dead. She got a
serving-maid to stab her while she sat bound in her--"
"Out of my way!" said young Zuan, in a great voice of agony, and he
dashed the old man aside and sprang through the half-open doors of the
castle.
He knew where the private audience-room was, and ran there at speed.
No soldier stood on guard at the door--all had been engaged in that
hand-to-hand street-fight through the city. He tore the door open and
reeled into the room, then closed it behind him and stood with his back
against it.
The room was oddly like that room in the doge's palace where he had sat
with his uncle two days since in Venice. The same great, carved table
stood near the centre. The same high-set windows let in bars of colored
light, which slanted down through the dimness and lay across floor and
furniture in billets and lozenges of gules and vert and azure.
A single red beam rested upon the bared shoulder of the woman who hung
drooping from her bonds, in the count's great chair of state; but
lower, from between the woman's breasts, a darker red had coursed a
downward trickling stream, and, still lower, made a red pool in the
woman's lap. Her head, bent, with chin on breast, was in shadow, but
out of the shadow two eyes, still half-open, gleamed with the shallow,
dull opacity of death.
[Illustration: SHE HUNG DROOPING IN THE GREAT CHAIR OF STATE]
Young Zuan, shaking against his closed door, gave a dry sob.
"Child! Child!" he mourned, bitterly. Then, all at once, his eyes
narrowed in an alert frown. There was something strange here.
He crossed the room with swift steps and dropped upon one knee before
the chair of state, staring close through the half-darkness.
This was a woman, beautiful indubitably, but no longer young. Her bared
shoulders were thick and mature, the breast under them mature, too. On
her bent face lust and hatred and cupidity and all evil passions had
graven marks that not even death could erase.
Ay! something strange here. Young Zuan's foot struck against a yielding
body which lay under the heavy shadow of the table. It was another
woman, and dead also, lying upon her face. Gradenigo turned the body
over with panic in his heart. A squat, broad-jowled, peasant face--the
serving-maid, it would seem, who had done her mistress that last
service and straightway followed to serve elsewhere.
Zuan rose to his feet frowning. The matter was quite beyond him. Then
one stirred in the shadows at the far end of the room, and very slowly
his princess came to him through those bars of colored light.
"Child! Child!" he cried again, and tears rolled down over his cheeks.
He put out shaking arms to her, but she held him away with one hand,
saying only:
"Wait, lord!"
Young Zuan swung about towards the dead woman who drooped so heavily in
her bonds.
"Who is--that who sits there dead?" he asked. "Corner told me it was
the Princess Yaga. Some one has lied to him. Who is it?"
She gave a quick sob.
"Lord, it is the Princess Yaga," she said.
"But," said he, dropping his voice to a whisper--he did not know
why--"but _you--you_?"
"Natalia Volutich, lord!" she said, whispering, too.
Young Zuan put up a hand to his bandaged head, and he drew the hand
across his eyes. His eyes were bewildered, hurt--like a child's eyes
before some great mystery.
"I do not understand," he said, just as a child would say it.
"Lord," cried the maid, with little sobs between her words, "I--did
it first--I pretended to be Yaga first, for--duty's sake--the duty
I owed to her. She had been good to me, lord, kind and loving. When
your lieutenant thought I was Yaga and begged you to set sail with me,
leaving Arbe, I saw that it would give her time--time to strengthen
the--defences. So I lied. I did not--care what became of me if only
_she_ was--safe. Then--then you were in--danger and--oh, lord, I had
looked into your eyes! I had--There was never man like you. I--loved
you from the first moment--the very first moment. I could not bear that
you should die. So I--saved you. Lord, do you not understand? What
I did I did for love's sake. This morning when I found who you were
I tried to tell you the truth. I tried, lord, did I not? Did I not?
Oh!" she cried, turning from him with wringing hands, "I have done
everything ill and you will never forgive me; and yet, lord, I did it
all for love's sake!"
She looked towards Zuan Gradenigo, but he stood silent and helpless
in his place, his eyes staring, his lips apart. The thing had been
too swift and too amazing for him. His mind, unused to indirections,
labored blindly at sea. And so, after a moment, she turned away again
and crossed the room to where the dead woman hung, lax and heavy, in
the carven chair. Sobbing, she dropped upon her knees before the chair
and laid her forehead against the dead woman's arm, into whose soft
flesh the leathern thongs had cut so cruelly.
"And I was away when they bound you!" she wept. "I was not with you
when you died!"
Zuan Gradenigo awoke from his daze.
"Child!" he cried. "Child! Come away from that vile body. It pollutes
you!"
But the maid turned fiercely upon him.
"She loved me!" cried the maid. "She was kind to me, gentle and
pitiful--and I let her die alone! Whatever she may have been to others,
to me, lord, she was like the mother who died when I was a little babe.
She loved me, and I let her die miserably, alone here! Oh, lord, have
you nothing but curses for a woman who is dead and cannot answer you?"
Zuan bent his head. "Child," said he, gravely, "I ask your forgiveness,
and hers, and God's. She was kind to you, wherefore I shall never speak
ill of her again. But oh, my dear, come to me! She is dead and you
cannot comfort her now. Come to me, child, who am alive and cannot live
without you."
"Oh, lord," said she, "I would not have you try!"
THE END
* * * * *
Transcriber's Note:
The half-title page has been removed.
Page 91, closing quote added after "... and so good."
End of Project Gutenberg's The Island of Enchantment, by Justus Miles Forman
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