This exposition made Marc-Antoine aware of a blunder committed in mentioning the intercepted letter to the Empress of Russia. He was not, however, disposed to attach importance to it.

The Serenissima bent in servile humility her once proud head. She ate dust, complied with the French ultimatum, and Louis XVIII departed from Verona on his travels.

He did not depart without some characteristic expressions of petulance, utterly beneath the dignity of a prince. His case is an illustration of how the conferring of benefits can appear to establish a liability to continue them. Instead of gratitude for the hospitality enjoyed, he displayed only resentment that it should be discontinued, and that Venice should be unwilling to defy on his behalf the guns of Bonaparte. He demanded that the name of Bourbon should be erased from the Golden Book of the Serenissima, and that a suit of armour presented to Venice by his ancestor Henri IV should be restored to him. They were childish demands, and they were so treated. Nevertheless, they served to increase the Senate's sense of shame and humiliation.

Within a week Marc-Antoine was relieved by the definite orders to present just such an ultimatum which reached Lallemant from the Directory; so that to the ambassador's impressions of Lebel's ardent Jacobinism was now added an increased respect for his acumen and foresight.

It was also of some relief to Marc-Antoine that the problem presented by the Vicomtesse was resolved for him by the events. In the first place to denounce her now must, in view of the suspicions that had attached to him in the matter of Terzi, be in the last degree imprudent; in the second place, it became desirable to leave her at liberty because her activities, being observed by him, supplied a channel of information.

As the summer advanced, the disregard of Venetian rights by both belligerents became more marked. Yet Manin curbed the impatience of public opinion with the news that a fresh Austrian army under General Wurmser was about to descend into Italy. It came at the end of July; and pouring down the slopes of Monte Baldo, inflicted a rout upon the French. There was joy in Venice, and its faith in the Empire was maintained thereafter even when by the middle of August Wurmser, defeated, was in full retreat towards the Tyrol. The procrastinators could still point to Austrian victories on the Rhine, and to the fact that Mantua still held, insisting, not without truth, that as long as Mantua held, Bonaparte was comparatively immobilized.

Thus, save for transient alarms and transient upliftings, life in hedonistic Venice flowed much as usual, and Marc-Antoine found in it little more than the part of the English idler he had assumed.

In those months his only activity on behalf of the cause he served was concerned with another denunciation. He had gleaned from Lallemant that a successor to Terzi had been found, and that soundings were once more being charted. When he inquired into the identity of this successor, Lallemant shook his head.

'Let me keep that to myself. If there should be an accident, I cannot again commit the folly of suspecting you of indiscretion.'

The accident followed. The inquisitors of state, on information supplied through Count Pizzamano by Marc-Antoine, employed the Signori di Notte, as the night-police of Venice was termed, to keep a sharp lookout for any boats that might be fishing in unlikely waters between Venice and the mainland, and to track them carefully down. After weeks of patient vigilance, the Signors of the Night were at last able to report such a boat. After operations which could have no legitimate object, this vessel was wont to repair to a house in the Giudecca. The person with whom the boatmen communicated there was a gentleman in poor circumstances named Sartoni.

This time not only was Sartoni taken by order of the inquisitors, and upon conviction suppressed as Terzi had been, but the two boatmen were also caught and sent to share his fate.

To Lallemant the distressing event supplied confirmation of the rashness of his earlier suspicions of Lebel.

CHAPTER XV

THE CHOICE

Marc-Antoine beguiled his abundant enforced leisures in amusements, which even in those days were never far to seek in Venice. He was to be seen at theatres and casinos, often accompanied by Vendramin, who continued freely to borrow money from him whilst keeping him under observation.

He was being a source of definite anxiety to Vendramin, who could not rid himself of the feeling that between Marc-Antoine and Isotta some intelligence existed. Marc-Antoine was too constantly at the Casa Pizzamano for the peace of mind of Vendramin, who knew nothing of his political activities. There were water-parties to Malamocco, and occasional visits to Domenico at the Fort Sant' Andrea, in which Marc-Antoine was invariably included, whilst once in September, when some British ships of war stood off the Port of Lido, Marc-Antoine took Isotta and her mother with him to visit the captain of one of them who was a friend of his.

He was also frequently met by Vendramin at the lodgings of the Vicomtesse de Saulx in the Casa Gazzola. This, too, was becoming disquieting, if only because Marc-Antoine, fully aware by now of Vendramin's liaison with the Vicomtesse, might be moved to carry the tale of them to Isotta. And Vendramin had good cause to dread its effect upon the mind of a patrician Venetian maid, who had been so cloistered and guarded from knowledge of the world's impurities.

So far he had played his cards shrewdly with Isotta. He had affected an austerity which should make him stand well in her virginal mind. And he had taken care that the Pizzamani had never even heard the name of the Vicomtesse de Saulx, an easy matter considering how different were the social worlds in which they moved. Isotta's was a very restricted circle, and she had never seen the inside of a casino. Nor for that matter had her parents, whilst for the last few months Domenico had been chiefly absent on the duties of his command.

But the possibility of betrayal by a man whose rivalry he sensed so clearly set him brooding upon measures for bringing matters to an issue.

He was in this obsession when he went one afternoon of late September to the Casa Pizzamano, to be informed by the porter that his excellency the Count was above stairs, and that Madonna Isotta was in the garden. As a matter of natural instinct the lover chose the garden.

There he found not only Isotta, but Marc-Antoine, walking with her.

Jealousy has the faculty of taking every attendant circumstance for its confirmation. Because the sky was grey and there was an edge to the wind of that autumnal day, it must seem to Vendramin unnatural that these two should choose to saunter in the open; he must see in it evidence of an overwhelming desire to be alone together, to escape the restraining surveillance indoors; and at once, disregarding the intimate standing of Marc-Antoine with the Pizzamani, he must perceive here an impropriety.

In a less degree some consciousness of this may have been upon the straitly-reared Isotta herself. She had gone out to cut a few roses that still lingered within the shelter of a trim, tall, boxwood enclosure. Marc-Antoine, espying her from above, had slipped away, leaving the Count and Countess in talk with Domenico who happened that day to be on leave from the fort.

She had greeted him with a glance so timid as to be almost apprehensive. With constraint they had talked of roses, of the garden, of the fragrance of the vervain that was everywhere, of the summer that was dying, and of other things as remote from what was in the mind of each. Then, with her little sheaf of roses red and white in the hand coarsely gloved for her task, she turned to re-enter.

'What haste, Isotta,' he reproached her.

She met his eyes with that serenity in which she had been schooled, and which she had by now recovered.

'It is kindly meant, Marc.'

'Kind? To avoid me? When I so rarely, so very rarely have a moment with you?'

'How else shall we save unnecessary heartache? See! You make me say things that I should not say. We have the knowledge of them to place among our memories. But there is no strength to be gathered from adding to it.'

'If you would only hope a little,' he sighed.

'So that I may heighten my ultimate despair?' She smiled as she spoke.

He attacked on a new line. 'Why do you suppose that I linger in Venice? What I came to do is done so far as I can do it. Which is to say that I have accomplished nothing, and that nothing is to be accomplished. I have no illusions on that score. Whether Venice stands or falls depends today no longer upon those entrusted with her government, but upon whether the French or the Austrians prevail in this struggle. Therefore, it must seem to me that Vendramin can have little claim to be rewarded for services he will never be called upon to render.'

Sadly she shook her head. 'A sophism, Marc. He will still claim fulfilment of a promise, a fulfilment not to be withheld in honour.'

'But the promise was in the nature of a bargain. Domenico perceives this, I know. If Vendramin is given no opportunity to perform his part, the bargain fails. So at least I see it, and therefore I remain in Venice, and I wait. I keep my hopes alive. You are so pale and wan these days, Isotta.' His voice assumed an ineffable tenderness that tortured her. 'There is not yet the need for this despair, my dear. I have been looking for a chance to tell you this; to tell you, too, that I am not entirely idle; that I not merely wait and watch. It is not only in the cause of monarchism that I am a secret agent here in Venice.'