Rafael Sabatini - Venetian Masque—a Romance

'The barnabotti remain. They can muster some three hundred voices in the Council. With nothing to lose themselves, they may be brought before it is too late to vote for the costly policy that will save Venice; and if they do, they will establish a preponderance. At present, because they have nothing to lose, they imagine there may be something to gain from an upheaval. It is ever so with the needy and the worthless. And their ranks are rotten with Jacobinism; so that even without an invasion of French arms, the Serenissima may yet succumb to an invasion of French anarchical ideas.

'Leonardo is one of them. A man of gifts, of force and of eloquence. His influence with them is notorious and is increasing. Soon he will have them in the hollow of his hand. He will control their votes; which means, in short, that the fate of Venice may come to lie at the mercy of his will.' He paused a moment, and then added slowly: 'You are the price we pay for his conservatism.'

'Can you trust the patriotism of a man who sells it?'

'Sells it? That is not just. When he aspired to you, I saw the chance to bind him to us. But already he leaned our way and his patriotism was stout and pure, or else I should never have received him. He was seeking guidance. He brought me doubts and I resolved them. The rest was accomplished by his love for you. So that now he is wholly on the side of those who set the State above any personal interest. He would have come to it in the end without us, I am persuaded. But if we were to reject him now, we should be in danger of arousing a despair and a vindictiveness which would drive him with all his barnabotto following into the camp of the Jacobins. And that we dare not contemplate.'

To this she had no answer. It left her with a sense of being trapped.

She hung her head in misery and confusion.

He set an arm about her, and drew her close. 'My child! In this cause I am prepared to sacrifice all. I ask of you and of Domenico no more than the same preparedness.'

But now he seemed to step beyond the unanswerable bounds.

'Ah, but this!' she cried. 'This that is asked of me! To marry, to give myself to a man I do not love, to bear him children, to ... Oh, God! You talk of readiness to sacrifice. What have you to sacrifice that will compare with this? If you gave the last sequin of your wealth and the last drop of your blood, you will still have given nothing by comparison with what you bid me give.'

'It may be as you say. But I who am not twenty-two take leave to doubt it. Be honest with yourself and me, Isotta. If you faced a choice between death and marriage with Leonardo, which would you choose?'

'Death without hesitation.' She was almost fierce.

'I urged you to be honest,' he reproached her softly, drawing her against him. 'I said if you faced the choice. But the choice has always been before you, and yet you have not taken what you tell me is the easier road. You see, my dear, how a surge of emotion may deceive us. And tonight you are the victim of it, and overwrought. Presently your views will readjust themselves. When all is said, Leonardo cannot be repugnant to you, or you would have recoiled before now from the prospect of this marriage. He has great qualities, for which you will come to esteem him. And to sustain you, you will have the proud, exultant thought of a high duty selflessly performed.'

He kissed her tenderly. 'My dear, you may have tears to shed. Believe me, child, they will not be half so salt as those which I shall shed on the grave of your personal hopes. Courage, my Isotta. It needs courage to live worthily.'

'Sometimes it needs courage to live at all,' she answered, choking on the words.

But she was conquered, as she had known from the outset that she would be. If his fanaticism had been of the kind that is thundered forth in uncompromising behests, open rebellion would have met him. But he was so gentle and sincere, he reasoned so patiently, pleaded so mildly that he persuaded where he did not convince and shamed opposition into silence.

Marc-Antoine in a blue-and-gold bedgown sipped his chocolate on the following morning in his pleasant salon at the Inn of the Swords. He sat before windows set wide to the shallow balcony and the sunshine of a perfect May morning. From the canal below came intermittently the swish of the long oar, the gurgle of water under the swanlike prow of a passing gondola, the inarticulate-sounding cry of gondolier giving warning as he swung round the corner from the Grand Canal, and, mellowed by distance, a sound of church bells from Santa Maria della Salute.

It was a morning to make a man glad that he was alive. But Marc-Antoine found little gladness in it. A beacon which for three years had glowed steadily to guide him had suddenly gone out. He was in darkness and without orientation.

Presently there were sounds of a gondola that did not pass. A hoarse hail from a gondolier before the portals of the inn: 'Ehi! Di casa!'

Some moments later the landlord, thrusting a bald head round Marc-Antoine's door, announced that a lady was asking for Mr. Melville; a lady in a mask, he added, with a suggestion of humour about the set of his lips.

Marc-Antoine was on his feet at once. A lady in a mask was no portent in Venice, where the habit of going masked abroad was so common among gentlefolk that the unique city may have gathered from it something of its romantic reputation for mystery and intrigue. The portent lay in the fact that a lady should be seeking him. It was inconceivable that the only lady instantly occurring to him should be his visitor. Yet so it proved when presently the landlord had left her with Marc-Antoine behind closed doors.

She had masked herself with the completeness Venetian habit sanctioned. Under the little three-cornered gold-laced hat, a black silk bauta, that little mantilla edged in lace, covered her head and fell to the shoulders of the black satin cloak that concealed every line of the figure.

When she removed the white silk vizor, Marc-Antoine sprang to her with a cry that was of concern rather than of joy; for the face she showed him framed in the black lines of the bauta was more nunlike than ever in its pallor. Her dark eyes were wistful pools through which a soul looked out in sorrow and some fear. The heave of her breast told of her quickened nervous breathing. She pressed upon it her left hand which was closed about a white fan, the golden frame of which was set with jewels.

'I surprise you, Marc. Oh, I do a surprising thing. But I shall know no peace until it is done. Perhaps not much peace even then.'

It was more surprising even than Marc-Antoine suspected. Gone might be the days when, perhaps from her close relations with the East, Venice imposed so claustral a seclusion upon her women that only a courtesan would show herself freely in public places. The march of progress had gradually mitigated this, and of late those new ideas from beyond the Alps had introduced a measure of licence. But for patrician women this licence was still far indeed from the point at which a reputation could survive such a step as Isotta was now taking.

'I have to talk to you,' she said, her tone implying that nothing in the world could equal this in consequence. 'And I could not wait for opportunity, which might be indefinitely delayed.'

Troubled for her, he pressed her gloved hand to his lips, and strove to keep his voice level as he said: 'I exist to serve you.'

'Must we be formal?' She twisted her lips into a wistful smile. 'God knows the situation does not warrant it. There is nothing formal in what I do.'

'Sometimes we take refuge in formal words to express a meaning that is deep and sincere.'

He conducted her to a chair, and, with the fine consideration that distinguished him, placed her with her back to the light. Thus he thought she might find herself at some slight advantage. He remained standing before her, waiting.

'I hardly know where to begin,' she said. Her hands lay in her lap clutching her fan, and her eyes were lowered to them. Abruptly she asked him: 'Why did you come to Venice?'

'Why? But did I leave anything unexplained last night? I am here on a mission of state.'

'And nothing else? Nothing else? In pity's name be frank with me. Do not let anything that you find impose restraint. I desire to know.'

He hesitated. He had turned pale, as she might have seen had she looked up.

'Could the knowledge profit you?'

She seized upon that. 'Ah! Then there is something more to know! Tell me. Give me the help I need.'

'I do not perceive how it will help. But you shall have the truth since you demand it, Isotta. The mission of state followed upon the resolve I had taken to come to Venice. That, I think, you gathered from what I said last night. But the real motive of my visit ... Your heart must tell you what it was.'

'I desire to hear it from you.'

'It was the love I bear you, Isotta. Though God knows why in all the circumstances you should compel me to say what I had never meant to say.'

She looked up at him at last. 'I had to hear it for my pride's sake; lest I should despise myself for a vain fool who had attached to words more meaning than they held. I had to hear it before I could tell you how clearly I had understood those words—I mean the words you spoke to me on the night before you left London to go to Tours. That, as they were a pledge from you, so my silent acceptance of them made up a pledge from me. If you lived, you said, you would follow me to Venice. You remember?'