She had ripened, he observed, in the three years and more that were gone since he had last beheld her in London, on the night before he left for France. But it was a ripening that was no more than the rich fulfilment of the promise of her nineteenth year. It had not then seemed that she could be more desirable; yet more desirable he found her now; a woman to cherish, to worship, to serve; who in return would be a source of inspiration and a fount of honour to a man. For this is what love meant to Marc-Antoine.

So rapt was he in this material contemplation of her whom the eyes of his soul had so steadily contemplated through all the trials and tribulations of the last three years that he scarcely heard the ejaculations, first of amazement, then of joy, with which the Count and Countess greeted him. It needed the hearty embrace of the Count to awaken him, and to send him forward to kiss the trembling hands which the Countess so readily extended.

Then he stood close before Isotta. She gave him her hand; her lips quivered into a smile; her eyes were wistful. He took the hand, and whilst it lay ice-cold in his, there followed a pause. He waited for some word from her. None coming, he bowed his dark glossy head, and kissed her fingers very reverently. At that touch of his lips he felt her tremble and he heard at last her voice, that gentle voice which he had known so melodious and laughter-laden, now strained and hushed.

'You said that you might one day come to Venice, Marc.'

He thrilled with joy at this evidence that she had remembered what were almost his last words. 'I said that I would come if I lived. And I am here.'

'Yes. You are here.' Her tone was lifeless. It turned him cold. Still more lifeless, and therefore invested for him with peculiar significance was what she added: 'You have delayed your visit.'

It was, he thought, as if she said to him: 'You have come too late, you fool. Why, then, have you come at all?'

Uneasy, he half-turned, to discover concern and even alarm in the eyes of her parents. Domenico stood aloof, his glance upon the ground, a frown knitting his brows.

Then the Countess spoke, gently, easily, her voice level.

'Do you find Isotta changed? She has aged, of course.' And before he could proclaim the enhancement he discovered in her beauty, the words had been added that made all this contraint clear, resolved his doubts into a conviction of despair. 'She is to be married very soon.'

In the stillness that followed, an observant, anxious stillness, he felt much as he had felt that day three years ago when Camille Lebel, presiding over the Revolutionary Tribunal of Tours, had sentenced him to death. And at once, now as then, his sense of doom was suffused by the recollection that he was Marc-Antoine Villiers de Melleville, Vicomte de Saulx and peer of France, and that he owed it to his birth and blood to hold up his head, to admit no tremor from his lips, no faltering to his glance.

He was bowing to Isotta.

'I felicitate that enviable, that most fortunate of men. It is my prayer that he may prove worthy of so great a blessing as he receives in you, my dear Isotta.'

It was well done, he thought. His manner had been correct; his words well chosen. Why then should she look as if she would weep?

He turned to the Count. 'Isotta has said that I have delayed my coming. Not my inclination, but the events delayed it.'

Shortly he related how he had bribed his way out of prison at Tours; how he had returned thereafter to England, where he was claimed by duty to the cause of the èmigrès; how he had been in the disastrous affair of Quiberon, and, later, in that other disaster at Savenay, where he had been wounded; how thereafter he had continued in the Vendèe with the army of Charette until its final rout by Hoche a couple of months ago, when he was so fortunate as to escape alive from France for the second time. He had returned to England; and defeat having at last relieved him of all duty, he had turned his mind to the gratification of his personal aspirations, whereupon duties had once more been imposed upon him, but duties fortunately no longer at war with his own dispositions.

He had for the purposes of the service he had undertaken Anglicized his name to Melville, and he begged them to remember that to all in Venice he was Mr. Melville, an English gentleman of leisure seeing the world.

Mechanically he rehearsed these matters, in a tone that was listless, in a manner that was flat. His mind was elsewhere. He had come too late. Within Isotta's gift lay all that it imported him to have of life, and it had not occurred to him, poor fool, that what he found so divinely desirable would be coveted by others. What was this silly talk he made of a mission, of service to the monarchist cause, of opposition to the forces of anarchy that were loose in the world? What was the world to him, or monarchies or anarchies? What had he to do in all this, since for him the light had gone from the world?

Nevertheless, even if the manner of his narrative had been dull, the matter of it was lively enough in itself. It was an Odyssey that moved his listeners to wonder and sympathy, and deepened the esteem and love in which they already held him.

At the end of the tale the Count got to his feet in the intensity of his feelings on the subject of Marc-Antoine's mission to the Serenissima.

'God prosper you in that,' he cried passionately. 'The effort is needed if we are not to be extinguished and the glory of Venice, already so sadly tarnished, become as if it had never been.'

His long, lean face was flushed.

'You will find your path beset by obstacles: sloth, pusillanimity, avarice, and this canker of Jacobinism which is corroding the foundations of the State. We are impoverished. Our impoverishment has been gradual now for two hundred years, and accelerated of late by incompetent government. Our frontiers, once so wide and far-flung, are sadly shrunken; our might that in its day evoked the League of Cambrai against us, so that we stood to face a world in arms, has largely withered. But we are Venice still, and if we hold fast we may yet again become a power with which the world must reckon. Here we stand at the crisis of our fate. Whether we are to go down in ruin or maintain ourselves to rise again in glory, and be the proud and worthy bridegroom of the sea that once we were, will depend upon the courage we display and the will for sacrifice in those who still have something to lay upon the country's altar. Stout hearts there are still amongst us: men who advocate the armed neutrality that must compel respect for our frontiers. But so far they have been overborne in the Council by those who in their secret hearts are francophile, by those who prefer supinely to think that this is the Empire's affair, and by those who—God forgive them!—fearing the cost, cling like soulless misers to their sequins.

'The Doge himself is of these, for all his enormous wealth. Heaven forgive me that I should speak ill of our prince; but the truth must prevail. Lodovico Manin was not the Doge for us in such an hour. We needed a Morosino, a Dandolo, an Alviani, not this Friulian, who lacks the fervent patriotism that only a true Venetian could supply. Still, your messages from England, and the evidences of French intentions with which it has pleased Heaven so opportunely to supply you, may have their effect.'

He sat down again, shaken almost to the point of exhaustion by the passion surging in him: the contempt, despair, and anger that sprang from a patriotism nothing short of fanatical.

The Countess rose, and went to soothe and pacify him. Isotta looked on with an odd solemnity, like a person entranced, whilst Marc-Antoine, observing her with eyes from which he manfully withheld the pain that gnawed him, was beset by the notion that these matters about which Count Pizzamano waxed so phrenetic were less than nothing.

Domenico's voice aroused him. 'If there is any help you need, you know that you may count upon us.'

'To my last breath and my last sequin,' the Count confirmed his son.

Marc-Antoine wrenched his mind back to this political business. 'There is a service that I require at once. Fortunately, it will not greatly tax you. I need a sponsor: someone in authority to give me the necessary credentials to His Serenity.'

He felt that he should explain how this came about. But he was too weary to go into it unless they should press him. And of this they had no thought.

'I will take you myself to the Doge tomorrow,' Count Pizzamano assured him. 'My knowledge of you is not of yesterday. Come to me at noon, and we'll go when we have dined. I'll send word to His Serenity, so that he may expect us.'

'You will remember that to him as to all without exception I remain Mr. Melville. If by any indiscretion my true identity were to reach the ears of Lallemant, there would be a sharp end to my activities.' And even as he said it he was conscious of how little it really had come to matter.

After this they sat and talked of other things, of Marc-Antoine's mother, of common friends in England, but most of all of Bonaparte, this portent unknown three months ago, suddenly arisen to focus the attention of the world.

Isotta, in the background with folded hands and vacant eyes, played no more than a listener's part, if, indeed, she listened. Thus until an interruption was created by the arrival of Leonardo Vendramin.

CHAPTER VII

LEONARDO VENDRAMIN

Marc-Antoine beheld a tall, floridly handsome man, past his first youth, but still graceful of shape and carriage, very easy of manner, with a ready laugh, and debonair to the point of effusiveness: one, obviously, whose main desire was to stand well with all the world. That he stood well with the Count and Donna Leocadia, the Countess, was instantly plain. With Domenico he seemed less successful, and Isotta, whilst graciously receiving his marked, almost proprietary greeting, yet appeared to shrink a little as he bowed over her hand.