Рафаэль Сабатини - Venetian Masque

'Do you conceive how I am torn, and yet how helpless I am? Perhaps if I were really brave, Marc, negligent of pledges, of honour and of all else, I should say to you: my dear, take me if you will have me, and let betide what will. But I have not the courage to break my father's heart, to be false to a pledge that is given in which he is concerned. Conscience would never let me rest thereafter, and its reproaches would poison our lives—yours and mine, Marc. Do you understand?'

Kneeling ever, his arm round her, he had drawn her close. She sank her head to his shoulder. 'Tell me that you understand,' she implored him.

'Too well, my dear,' he answered miserably. 'So well, indeed, that you need hardly have given yourself the pain of coming here to tell me this.'

'There is no pain in that. No added pain; but rather a relief. If you do not see this, then you do not yet understand. If I cannot give you myself, my dear, at least I can offer all I have to give of my mind and soul, by letting you know what you are to me, what you have been since that veiled pledge was passed between us. There is a solace to me in knowing that you know; that between us all is clear; that there can be no doubtings, no searchings of spirit. Somehow it absolves me of what I have done. Somehow it revives my hopes in that future when all this is over. For whereas, before, the knowledge was buried in myself, now you share it: the knowledge that whatever they may do with the rest of me, the spiritual part of me is and always will be yours, the eternal Me that wears for a while this body like a garment, and suffers all that wearing it imposes.' She let the fan which she had been bending and twisting fall into her lap, and she turned to take his face in both her hands. 'Surely, my Marc, you believe with me that this life on earth is not all that there is to us? If I have hurt you, as God knows I have hurt myself, by the course to which I am committed, will you not find solace where I find it?'

'If I must, Isotta,' he answered. 'But all is not yet done. We have not come yet to the end of the journey.'

Still holding his face, her eyes abrim with tears, she shook her head.

'Torture neither yourself nor me with any such hopes.'

'Hope is not torture,' he answered her. 'It is the anodyne of life.'

'And when it fails? What of the pain then? The agony?'

'Ay, when it fails; if it fails. But until then I'll bear it in my heart. I need it. I need courage. And you have brought it to me, Isotta, with a nobility to have been looked for in none but you.'

'Courage I desired to bring you, and to take from you for my own needs. But not the courage of a hope that leads to cruelest disillusion. Content you, dear. I pray you.'

'Yes, I'll content me.' His tone rang clear. 'I'll content me whilst I wait upon events. It is not my way to order a requiem while the patient lives.' He rose, and drew her up with him, so that her breast was against his breast, his hands gripping her arms. From her lap her fan and her mask fell to the floor.

There was a tap upon the door, and before Marc-Antoine could speak, it opened.

Facing it, as he stood with Isotta in his arms, Marc-Antoine beheld the landlord framed for a moment in the doorway, his countenance startled at realizing his intrusion. Over his shoulder, in that moment, he had a glimpse of another face, fair and florid. Then, as abruptly as it had been opened, the door was closed again by the hurriedly retreating landlord. But a deep, rich laugh from beyond it came to add to the confusion of Isotta, conscious of that momentary detection.

They fell apart, and Marc-Antoine stooped to pick up fan and mask. In her panic she almost snatched the white vizor, and hurriedly with fumbling fingers readjusted it.

'Someone is there,' she whispered. 'Waiting at the door. How am I to go?'

'Whoever it is will not venture to hinder you,' he promised her, and stepping to the door he flung it wide. On the threshold the landlord waited, Vendramin beside him.

'Here is a lord who will not be denied, sir,' Battista explained himself. 'He says he is your friend, and expected.'

Vendramin was broadly smiling as if with infinite, unpleasant understanding.

'Ah, but, morbleu, the fool, did not say that you had a lady with you. God forgive me that I should be a marplot, that I should come between a man and his delights.'

Marc-Antoine stood stiff and straight, admirably masking his deep irritation.

'It is no matter. Madame is on the point of going.'

Isotta, responsive to his glance, was already moving towards the door. But Vendramin made no shift to give her passage. He continued to fill the doorway, observing her approach with his slyly humorous eyes.

'Do not let me be the cause of that, I pray you.' He employed an oily gallantry. 'I was never one to drive out beauty, madame. Will you not unmask again, and let me make amends for my intrusion?'

'The best amends you could make, sir, would be to suffer the lady to pass.'

'Suffer is indeed the word,' he sighed, and stood aside. She swept past him, and out, leaving no more behind her than a faint perfume, for the Venetian to inhale.

When the landlord had departed in her wake, Vendramin closed the door, and came breezily to clap Marc-Antoine on the shoulder.

'Oh, my Englishman! You lose no time, faith. Scarce twenty-four hours in Venice, and already you show a knowledge of its ways that is not usually acquired in weeks. Morbleu, there's more of the Frenchman about you than the accent.'

And Marc-Antoine, to cover that retreat, to avoid the birth of the least suspicion of the truth, must feed the obvious foulness of this rakehell's mind by pretending the levity with which it credited him. He laughed, and waved a careless hand.

'It is lonely for a man in a foreign country. We must do what we can.'

Vendramin thrust playfully at his ribs. 'A coy piece, on my life! And she looked neat. Let her be never so muffled, I have eyes, my friend, that can strip a nun.'

Marc-Antoine thought it time to turn the talk. 'You told the landlord that you were expected?'

'You'll not pretend to have forgotten it? You'll not break my heart by saying that you had forgotten it, indeed? The last thing I said to you last night, when you landed here, was that I would come and take you to Florian's this morning. And you are not yet dressed. This nègligè . . . Ah, yes, of course, the lady ...'

Marc-Antoine turned away, dissembling disgust. 'I have but to don a coat and my walking-shoes. I will be with you at once.'

He yielded without argument so as to have a moment to himself, a moment in which to master the emotions Isotta had left in him, and those produced by this most inopportune intrusion. And so, he left the salon to pass into his bedroom beyond.

Messer Vendramin, smiling and nodding at the picture his imagination conjured of the doings he had interrupted, sauntered slowly towards the balcony. Something grated under his foot. He stooped and picked up an object that in size and shape was like the half of a large pea. The sunlight struck a dull glow from it as it lay in his palm. He looked over his shoulder. The door to the bedroom was closed. He continued his walk to the balcony. There he stood contemplating the little jewel. A malicious smile took shape on his full lips, as he realized that he held a clue. It would be amusing if chance were to lead him one day to find the indiscreet owner. The smile broadened as he dropped the cabochon sapphire into his waistcoat pocket.

Past the majestic portal of Santa Maria della Salute and across the Basin of Saint Mark they were borne in Vendramin's gondola, with the funereal exterior trappings which the old sumptuary laws ordained, but enriched within the felza—the little cabin amidships—by delicate carvings, little painted escutcheons and wide cushions covered in leather that was wrought with scroll-work in gold and ultramarine and red. Whilst of no startling extravagance, yet for a pauper patrician it seemed to Marc-Antoine too much.