THE VENETIANS

A Novel BY THE AUTHOR OF “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,” “ISHMAEL,” Etc. Stereotyped Edition LONDON SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LIMITED STATIONERS’ HALL COURT 1893 [All rights reserved]

LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

CONTENTS.

[Pg 1]

THE VENETIANS.

CHAPTER I.

IN THE CITY BY THE SEA.

Little golden cloudlets, like winged living creatures, were hanging high up in the rosy glow above Santa Maria della Salute, and all along the Grand Canal the crowded gondolas were floating in a golden haze, and all the westward-facing palace windows flashed and shone with an illumination which the lamps and lanterns that were to be lighted after sundown could never equal, burnt they never so merrily. It was Shrove Tuesday in Venice, Carnival time. The sun had been shining on the city and on the lagunes all day long. It was one of those Shrove Tuesdays which recall the familiar proverb—

But who cares about the chance of cold and gloom six weeks hence when to-day is fair and balmy? A hum of joyous, foolish voices echoed from those palace façades, and floated out seaward, and rang along the narrow Calle, and drifted on the winding water-ways, and resounded under the innumerable bridges; for everywhere in the City by the Sea men, women, and children were making merry, and had given themselves up to a wild and childish rapture of unreasoning mirth, ready to explode into loud laughter at the sorriest jokes. An old man tapped upon the shoulder by a swinging paper lantern—a boy whose hat had been knocked off—a woman calling to her husband or her lover across the gay flotilla—anything was food for mirth on this holiday evening, while the great gold orb sank in the silvery lagoon, and all the sky yonder towards Chioggia was dyed with the crimson afterglow, and the Chioggian fishing-boats were moving westward in all the splendour of their painted sails.

At Danieli’s the hall and staircase, reading-room, smoking-room, and saloons were crowded with people; English and American for the most part, but with a sprinkling of French and German. Shrewd[Pg 2] Yankees were bargaining on the sea-washed steps below the hall-door with gondoliers almost as shrewd. Quanto per la notte—tutte la notte, sul canale? To-night the gondoliers would have it all their own way, for every one wanted a gondola to row up and down the Grand Canal, with gaudy Chinese lanterns, and singing men, twanging guitar or tinkling mandoline to that tune which is almost the national melody of Venice fin de siècle—“Funicoli, funicola.”

The dining-rooms at Danieli’s are capacious enough for all ordinary occasions, but to-night there was not space for half the number who wanted to dine. The waiters were flying about wildly, trying to appease the hungry crowd with promises of tables subito, subito. But travellers in Italy know what subito means in an Italian restaurant, and were not comforted by these assurances. Amiable Signor Campi moved about among his men, and his very presence gave comfort somehow, and finally everybody had food and wine, and a din of jovial voices rose up from the table d’hôte to the grand old rooms above, on that upper story which is called the noble floor, a place of strange histories, perhaps, in those stern days when these hotels were palaces.

The ubiquitous Signor Campi was near the door when a gondola stopped at the bottom of the steps, and two ladies came tripping up into the hall, followed by a young man who was evidently English, handsome, tall, broad-shouldered, and clad in a suit of rough grey cloth, whose every line testified to the excellence of an English tailor.

The ladies were as evidently not English, and they had a Carnival air which was totally different from the gaiety of the American young ladies in their neat tailor gowns, or the English ladies in their table d’hôte silks. One wore ruby plush, with a train which trailed on the wet steps as she came up to the door. The other wore black velvet, with a wide yellow sash loosely knotted round a supple waist. The ruby lady was masked, the black velvet lady dangled her lace-fringed mask on the end of a finger, and looked boldly round the crowded hall with her big black eyes—eyes which reflected the lamplight in their golden splendour.

Signor Campi was at the Englishman’s side before the ladies could pass the threshold.

“You were thinking of dining with those two ladies, sir?” he inquired, in excellent English.

“Certainly. You can give us a private room, if you like.”

“There is not a room in the house unoccupied;” and then, in a lower voice, Signor Campi murmured, “Quite impossible. Those ladies cannot dine here.”

The Englishman laughed lightly.

“You are not fond of your own countrywomen, it seems, Monsieur[Pg 3] Campi;” and then to the hall-porter, “Keep that gondola, will you?” and then in Italian, to the larger lady in ruby plush, who might have been mother or aunt to the lovely girl in black velvet, “They have no room for us anywhere. We should have to wait ages, ages for our dinner. Shall we try a restaurant?”

“Yes, yes,” cried the girl eagerly. “Ever so much more fun. Let us go to the Black Hat. No gha megio casa per el disnar.”

“Where is the Black Hat?”

“On the Piazza. We often dine there, la Zia and I. We shan’t want the gondola, it is only five minutes’ walk.”

“Shall I engage him for the evening?”

“No, no. You are going to take us to the opera.”

“As you will.”

He offered the girl his arm, and left la Zia to follow him across the hall to the door opening on to the Quay of the Slaves—that quay whose stones are beaten nowadays chiefly by the footsteps of light-hearted travellers drunken with the enchantment of Venice. They crossed the bridge, the girl hanging on the young man’s arm, chatting gaily, and holding up her long black skirt with the other hand, revealing glimpses of feet and ankles which were far from fairy-like, feet that had been widened by the flip-flopping shoe which the damsel had worn when she was a lace-maker on the island of Burano.

If he wanted a good dinner—a real Venetian dinner—nowhere would he get it better than at the sign of the Black Hat, and good wine into the bargain, the girl told her cavalier.

They turned by the Vine Corner, and then threaded their way along the crowded Piazzetta, whence the sacred pigeons had been banished by the tumult of the throng. They crossed the Piazza in front of St. Mark’s Moorish domes, and entered a low doorway under the colonnade, only a few paces from the Torre del Orologio, with its ultramarine and gold clock and its bronze giants to beat the time. At the end of a long, narrow, stuffy passage, they found themselves in a low-ceiled room where there were numerous small tables, and where the heat from the flare of the gas, and the steam of cooked viands, was too suggestive of the torrid zone for comfort.

The waiters were evidently devoted to the dark-eyed Si’ora in black and yellow, for room was speedily found where there was apparently no room. Some diners were hustled away from a snug little table in a corner by a window, where by opening one side of the casement one might get a breath of cool air—flavoured by sewage, but still a boon.

“May I order the dinner?” pleaded the dark eyes, smiling at the young man in rough grey woollen, while la Zia looked about her, turning her head to survey the groups of diners at the tables in the rear.

[Pg 4]

The waiter set a huge flask of Chiante on the table unbidden, and stood, napkin in hand, waiting for Fiordelisa’s orders. Fiordelisa—otherwise Lisa—was the name of the dark-eyed damsel, who to the Englishman’s eye looked as if she had just stepped out of a story in the Decameron.

She ordered the dinner, discussing the menu confidentially with the waiter; she ordered, and the dishes came, and they all ate, Vansittart being too hungry to be daintily curious as to the food set before him after a long day on the lagoons and an afternoon on the Lido, and all the fun and riot of the Grand Canal at sunset. He never knew of what his dinner at the Black Hat was composed, except that he ate some oysters and drank a pint of white wine, and helped to finish a couple of bottles of champagne—which he ordered in lieu of the big flask of Chiante—that they began with a frittura of minnows, and that the most substantial dish which the brisk waiter brought them was a savoury mess of macaroni, with shreds of meat or choppings of liver mixed up in an unctuous gravy. Lisa was in high spirits, and ate ravenously, and drank a good many glasses of the sparkling wine, and told him, half in broken English and half in her Venetian dialect, of the old days when she had worked in the lace factory, where her earnings were about seven soldi

per diem, and where she lived chiefly on polenta.

This was the sole knowledge Mr. Vansittart had of her history, since he had only made her acquaintance three or four hours ago at the concert hall on the Lido, where he had offered this young person and her aunt a cup of coffee, and whence he had brought them back to Venice in his gondola. He knew nothing of their histories and characters, cared to know nothing, had no idea of seeing them ever again after this Carnival day. He had taken them to his hotel without stopping to consider the wisdom of such a course, thinking to feast them in one of those grand upper rooms overlooking the broad sweep of water between the Quay of the Slaves and St. George the Greater, meaning to feast them upon Signor Campi’s best; but Signor Campi had willed otherwise, and here they were feasting just as merrily upon a savoury mess of macaroni and chopped liver at the sign of the Black Hat.

After the savoury dishes Fiordelisa began upon pastry, with an appetite as of a giant refreshed. She rested her elbow on the table, and the loose sleeve of her velveteen gown rolled back and showed the round white arm. All the little crinkly curls danced upon her pure white forehead and over her dancing eyes as she ate chocolate éclairs and creamy choux to her heart’s content, while Vansittart thought what a pretty creature she was, and what a pity Mr. Burgess or Mr. Logsdaile was not there with palette and brushes, to fix that gay and brilliant image upon canvas for ever.

[Pg 5]

Vansittart was not in love with this chance acquaintance of an idle afternoon. He was only delighted with her. She amused, she fascinated him, just as he was amused and fascinated by this enchanting city of Venice, which had always the same charm and the same glamour for him, come here at what season he might. She impressed him with a sense of her beauty, just as one of those wonderful pictures in the Venetian Academy would have done.

His heart was unmoved by this sensuous, eager, earthly loveliness. Her vulgarity, all her words and gestures essentially of the people, interested him, yet kept him worlds away from her.

He was rich, idle, alone in Venice, and he thought it was his right to amuse himself to the uttermost at this Carnival season. That offer of a cup of coffee, arising out of mutual laughter at some absurdities among the crowd, had been the beginning of the friendliest relations.

He strolled on the loose, level sands with Lisa and her aunt, those sands over which Byron used to ride, the poet of whose existence Lisa had never heard, yet who had wasted lightest hours with just such girls as Lisa. And then how could he go back to Venice alone in his gondola and leave this black-eyed girl and her chaperon to struggle for standing room among the crowd on the twopenny steamer, in their fine clothes and jewels, those jewels in which lower-class Venetians love to invest their savings? No; it was the most natural thing in life to offer them seats in his gondola, and then to see the fun of the Grand Canal in their company; and what young man with his note-case plethoric with limp Italian notes, and a reserve of English bank-notes in a close-buttoned inside pocket, could refrain from offering dinner, and then, hearing that Lisa was pining to go to the opera, a box at that entertainment? No sooner had she expressed her desire, while they were on the Grand Canal, than he sent off a Venetian guide, whom he knew of old, to engage a stage box for the evening.

Fiordelisa told him about her life at Burano, while she devoured her pastry, the aunt listening placidly, replete with dinner and wine, caring for nothing except that those old days were a thing of the past, and that neither she nor her handsome niece need toil or starve any more—not for the present, at any rate; perhaps never. La Zia was not a woman to peer curiously into the future while the present gave her a comfortable lodging and meat and drink.

The girl talked her Venetian, and Vansittart, who had spent most of his holidays in Italy, and had a quick ear for dialects, was able to understand her. Now and then she spoke English, better than he would have expected from her youthful ignorance.

“How is it that you can talk English, Signorina mia, and how is it that you left Burano?” he asked in Italian.

[Pg 6]

“For one and the same reason. A young English gentleman fell in love with me, and brought my aunt and me to Venice, and is having me educated, in order to marry me and take me to England with him.”

Vansittart did not believe in the latter half of the story, but he was too polite to express his doubt.

“Oh, you are being educated up to our idea of the British matron, are you, bella mia?” he said, smiling at her, as she wiped her coral lips with the coarse serviette, and flung herself back in her chair, satiated with cream and pastry. “And pray in what does the education consist?”

“I am learning to play on the mandoline. A little old man with a cracked voice comes to our lodgings twice a week to teach me—and we sing duets, ‘La ci darem’ and ‘Sul aria.’”

“The mandoline. Ah, that is your English friend’s notion of education,” said Vansittart, laughing. “Well, I dare say that it is as good as Greek or Latin, or the pure science that gave Giordano Bruno such a bad time in this very city.”

He leant back with his head in an angle of the wall, idle, amused, interested, taking life as it seemed to him life ought to be taken—very lightly.

He had been in Venice only a few days, days of sunshine and sauntering in gondolas to this or the other island, to dream away an idle afternoon. It was his third visit, and he seemed to know every stone of the city almost as well as Ruskin—every palace front and Saracenic window, every mouldering flight of steps, every keystone of every bridge which he passed under almost every day with lazy motion, drifting as the cabbage leaves and egg-shells drifted on the dark green water. He never stayed very long anywhere, being free to wander as he pleased at his present stage of existence, and having a dim foreshadowing of the time when he would not be free, when he would be bound and fettered by domestic ties, and travelling would be altogether a different business from this casual rambling. He pictured himself at the head of his breakfast table discussing the summer holiday with his wife, while perhaps his mother-in-law sat by and put various spokes into the family wheel, opposing every preference of his on principle.

He would have to marry some day, he knew. It was an obligation laid upon him together with the family seat and comfortable income to which he had succeeded before his two-and-twentieth birthday. The thing would have to be done—but he meant to delay the evil hour as long as he could, and to be monstrously exacting as to the fairy princess for whose dear sake he should put on those domestic fetters.

He had enjoyed this particular visit to Venice with a keener[Pg 7] relish than either of his previous visits. Though the year was still young, the weather had been exceptionally lovely. Sun, moon, and stars had shed all that they have of glory and of glamour over the romantic city, painting the smooth lagoons with a rare splendour of colouring which changed city and sea into something supernal, unimaginable, dreamlike.

His windows at Danieli’s looked over an enchanted sea, where the great modern Peninsular and Oriental steamer moored between the Riva and St. George the Greater seemed an anachronism in iron. All else was fairy-like, historic, mediæval.

The steamer was to sail for Alexandria in the afternoon, they had told him, whenever he made any inquiry about her; but the days and afternoons had gone, and she was still lying there, blocking out a little bit of the opposite island and the famous church.

“And so you sing as well as play, Fiordelisa?” he asked, presently, after a silence in which they all three smoked their cigarettes.

“Sing! I should think she did sing,” answered the aunt. “She warbles like a nightingale. Signor Zefferino, her master, says she ought to come out at the opera.”

Vansittart smiled. Idle flattery on the maestro’s part, no doubt; the flattery of the small parasite who knows where the macaroni is savouriest, and where the salad reeks with oil.

And yet, if this girl sang at all, she should sing sweetly. Those dark, sunny eyes of hers gave promise of the artistic temperament. The tones that came from that round, full throat, ivory white against the tawdry black and yellow of her gown, should be rich and ripe.

He asked no questions about her English lover. Had he been ever so little in love with her himself he would have been full of curiosity—but for this flower of a day, this beautiful stranger, with whom he ate and drank and made merry to-night, and whom he might never see again, he had no serious concern. He cared not who were her friends or followers; whether the life she lived were good or evil. She had a fresh youthfulness, a look of almost childlike innocence, in spite of her tousled hair and tawdry raiment, and although Signor Campi’s keen eye had condemned her. The aunt, too, fat, common, too fine for respectability, seemed a harmless old thing. No word of evil had come from her lips. She had not the air of laying snares for the stranger’s feet. She thought of nothing but the enjoyment of the moment.

“Pray, where may your Englishman be to-day?” asked Vansittart, as it flashed upon his idle mind that there might be peril in such a city as Venice in being seen with another man’s sweetheart. “Why didn’t he escort you to the Lido?”

[Pg 8]

“He went to Monte Carlo a fortnight ago,” she answered. “I am afraid he is a gambler.”

“Is he rich?”

“No, not as you English count riches. He is rich for a Venetian. He gave la Zia and me our gowns—she chose red, I black—last Christmas. There are few Venetians who would give such handsome presents. He is very generous.”

“Yes, he is very generous,” echoed the aunt.

“It is time we went to the opera,” cried Fiordelisa. “I want to be there at the beginning.”

The opera was “Don Giovanni;” the artists were third-rate; but they sang well enough to lull la Zia into a comfortable slumber and to lift Lisa to the seventh heaven. She sat with clasped hands, listening in a rapture of content. She only unclasped her hands to applaud vehemently when the house applauded. The theatre was crowded, the audience were noisy, but Fiordelisa craned her long neck out of the box to listen, and drank in every note with those quick ears of hers, and was perhaps almost the only person in the Rossini Theatre that night who listened intently: but before the second act was over the crowd and the heat had increased to such a degree that women were fainting in the boxes, and even Fiordelisa was resigned to leaving before “Don Giovanni” was half done. She wanted to walk in the Piazza before the shops were shut, or the crowd began to thin, or the bands ceased playing.