Toxin

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

Italic text is denoted by underscores

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CENTURY LIBRARY

“The Child, The Child! My Carlino!” screamed his mother. Adrianis gave him to her outstretched arms.

OUIDA

TOXIN

A SKETCH

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LONDON

T. FISHER UNWIN

PATERNOSTER SQUARE

M DCCC XCV

TOXIN by Ouida

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I.

“Oh! my necklace!” cried a fair woman as she leaned over the side of her gondola.

A string of opals, linked and set in gold, had been loosened from her throat, and had slid down into the water of the lagoon, midway between the Lido and the city of Venice. But the gondola was moving swiftly under the impulsion of a rower fore and aft, and, though they stopped a few moments after at her cry, the spot where it had fallen was already passed and left behind. She was vexed and provoked. She had many jewels, but the opal necklace was an heirloom, and of fine and curious workmanship. The gondoliers did their best to find it, but in vain. They were in the deeper water of the sailing roads, which were marked out by the lines of poles, and the necklace, a slight thing, had been borne away by the current setting in from the open sea.

It was a pale afternoon in late summer; the heat was still great; the skies and the waters were of the same soft, dreamy, silvery hue, and the same transparency and ethereality were on the distant horizons of the hills, west and east. The only colour there was came from the ruddy painted sails of some fruit-laden market boats which were passing to leeward.

“Oh! my necklace!” cried a fair woman, as she leaned over the side of the gondola.

Neither of the men could swim; many Venetians cannot; but they got over the side, and waded up to their waists in the water, and with their oars struck and sounded the sandy bottom, whilst she encouraged them with praise and extravagant promise of reward. Their efforts were of no avail. The lagoon, which has been the grave of so many, kept the drowned opals.

“We will go back and send divers,” she said to her men who, wet to their waists, were well content to turn the head of the gondola back to the city.

They wore white clothes with red sashes and red ribbons round their straw hats; they were in her private service; they steered quickly home again over the calm water-way, and in and out the crowded craft by the Schiavone past the Customs House, and S. Giorgio, and the Salvatore, until they reached a palace on the Grand Canal, which was their mistress’s residence, with poles painted red and white, with coronets on their tops, marking the landing stairs in the old Venetian fashion.

“I have lost my opals in the water!” she cried to a friend who was on one of the balconies of the first floor.

“I am glad you have lost them,” replied her friend. “They are stones of misfortune.”

“Nonsense! They were beautiful, and they were Ninetta Zaranegra’s, poor Carlo’s great-great-grandmother; they were one of her nuptial presents a hundred and twenty years ago. I must have the men dive and dredge till they are found. The water is so shallow. I cannot think how the collar can have vanished so completely in such a moment of time.”

She ascended her palace steps, and dismissed her gondoliers with a gesture, as she paused in the entrance-hall to tell her major-domo of her loss, and consult him as to the best means to recover the necklace. The hall was painted in fresco, with beautiful Moorish windows, and a groined and gilded ceiling, and a wide staircase of white marble, uncarpeted. Opposite the entrance was a latticed door through which was seen the bright green of acacias, cratægus, and laurel growing in a garden.

On the morrow, when it was known through Venice that the rich and generous Countess Zaranegra had lost her jewels, all the best divers hurried to the place where the opals had dropped, and worked sedulously from daybreak to find it, sailors and fishermen and boatmen all joining in the search, in hope to merit the reward she promised. But no one of them succeeded. Their efforts were useless. The tenacious water would not yield up its prey. The opals were gone, like spindrift.

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The winter came and went, wrapping Venice in its mists.

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II.

The winter came and went, wrapping Venice in its mists, driving the sea-birds into the inland canals, making the pigeons sit ruffled and sad on the parapets of the palaces, and leaving many a gondolier unemployed, to warm his hands over little fires of driftwood under the snow-sprinkled rafters and naked vine-branches of his traghetto. The gondoliers of the Ca’ Zaranegra were more fortunate; they could sit round the great bronze brazier in the hall of their lady’s house, and the gondola was laid up high and dry to await the spring, and their wages were paid with regularity and liberality by the silent and austere major-domo who reigned in the forsaken palace, for their lady was away on warmer shores than the wind-beaten, surge-drowned, sea-walls of their city.

The gondoliers of the Ca’ Zaranegra were more fortunate; they could sit round the great bronze brazier in the hall of their lady’s house.... Their wages were paid with regularity and liberality by the silent and austere major-domo.

The winter was hard; snow lay long on the Istrian hills and on the Paduan pastures; there was ice on the rigging of the Greek brigs in the Giudecca, and the huge ocean steamers from the east looked like uncouth prehistoric beasts, black and gigantic, as they loomed through the fogs, moving slowly towards the docks under cautious pilotage. There were laughter and warmth in the theatres, and the sounds of music came from some of the palaces; but in the Calle, in the fishermen’s quarters, on the islands, on board the poor rough sailing craft, and amongst the maritime population generally, there were great suffering and much want; and by the bar of Malomocco and off the coast of Chioggia there were wrecks which strewed the waters with broken timbers and dashed drowning sailors like seaweed on to the wooden piles. Stout boats were broken like shells, and strong seafaring men were washed to and fro like driftwood. But the frail opal necklace of the Countess Zaranegra was safe in the midst of the strife; it had fallen into a hollow in a sunken pile and lay there, unharmed, whilst above it the stormy tides rose and fell, and the winds churned the cream of the surf. There it lay, all through the rough winter weather, whilst the silvery gulls died of hunger, and the sea swallows were hurled by the hurricane on to the lanterns of lighthouses and against the timbers of vessels.

It weathered many storms, this frail toy, made to lie on the warm breasts of women, whilst the storm kings drew down to their death the bread-winners for whom wife and children vainly prayed on shore, and the daring mariners for whom the deep had had no terrors.

In the hollow of the old oak pile the opals remained all winter long, lying like bird’s eggs in a nest, whilst the restless waters washed and swirled above its sanctuary. The worn stump of the wood had kept its place for centuries, and many a corpse had drifted past it outward to the sea in days when the white marbles of St. Mark’s city had run red with blood. It had once been the base of a sea-shrine, of a Madonna of the waters to whom the boatmen passing had invoked the Stella Maris Virgine so dear to fishermen and sailors.

But the painted shrine had long disappeared, and only the piece of timber, down underneath the waters, rooted in the sand amongst the ribbon weed and mussels, had had power to resist the forces of tide and tempest.

All the winter long the old wood kept the opals safe and sound. When the cold passed, and the blasts from the Dolomite glaciers softened, and the orchards of the fruit islands were in bud, the opals were still in their hollow, covered from the sea by the bend of the wood above them, so that, though often wet, they were never washed away.

But one day, when the peach and pear and plum trees had in turn burst into blossom on the isles, and the flocks of gulls who had survived the stress of famine and frost had returned to their feeding-places on the outer lagoons, a large iron ship coming from the Black Sea gave a rude shock in passing to the old oak pile; the top of it under the blow parted and fell asunder; the necklace was washed out of its hiding-place, and, carried in the heavy trough of the steamer’s path, was floated nearer to the isles, farther from the city. It became entangled with some algæ, and, rocked on the weed as on a little raft, was borne to and fro by a strong wind rushing from the north-east, and so was driven round past San Cristoforo and Burano, and was finally carried ashore up the creeks into the long grasses and reeds beneath the Devil’s Bridge at Torcello. The yellow water iris was then flowering, and two little reed warblers were nesting amongst the flags, as the opals were drifted up under some hemlock leaves and there rested.

“I think they are eggs, but they are all strung together,” said the warbler to his mate.

“They look more like the spawn of a fish,” said the little winged lady, with scorn.

A water-rat came up and smelt at them, then went away disdainfully; they were not good to eat. For birds and beasts do not care for jewels: it is only humanity, which thinks itself superior to them, which sees any value in stones, and calls such toys precious.

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III.

The devil is credited with building many bridges on the earth; it is hard to know why he should have done so, since waters however wide cannot possibly have been an obstacle in his own path.

But Devil’s Bridges there are, from the Hebrides to the Isles of Greece; the Devil’s Bridge at Torcello has been so called from the height and breadth of its one arch, but there is nothing diabolic or infernal in its appearance; it is of old brick made beautiful in its hues by age, and has many seeding grasses and weeds growing in its crevices. Its banks are rich in grass; in flags, in sea lavender, and about it grow hazel trees and pear trees.

There is nowhere in the world any grass richer than that of Torcello, and forget-me-nots, honeysuckle, and wild roses grow down to the water’s edge and around the hoary stones of the deserted isle.

“What a God-forgotten place!” said a young man as he sprang from a boat on to the bank by the bridge.

“Torcello was the mother of Venice; the daughter has slain her,” replied an older man as he laid down his oars in the boat, and prepared to follow his companion.

His foot trod amongst the hemlock leaves and was entangled by them; he stooped, and his eyes, which were very keen, caught sight of the string of opals.

“A woman’s necklace!” he said, as he drew it out from under the salt seaweed, and the dewy dock leaves. It was discoloured, and had sand and mud on it, and bore little traces of its former beauty; but he recognised that it was a jewel of worth; he perceived, even dulled as they were, that the stones were opals.

“What have you there?” cried the younger man from above on the bank. “The skull of an Archimandrite?”

The other threw the necklace up on to the grass.

“You would have been a fitter finder of a woman’s collar than I am.”

“Opals! The stones of sorrow!” said the younger man, gravely, as he raised it and brushed off the sand. “It has been beautiful,” he added. “It will be so again. It is not really hurt, only a little bruised and tarnished.”

The necklace interested him; he examined it minutely as the sun shone on the links of dimmed gold. It awakened in him an image of the woman who might have possessed and worn it.

“What will you do with it?” he said to his companion, who had mounted on to the bank after securing the boat.

“What does one always do with things found? Send them to the police, I believe.”

“Oh you Goth!” said the younger. “Let us spend our lives in discovering the owner.”

“You can spend yours so if you like, Prince. Mine is already in bond to a severer mistress.”

“Lend me your glass,” said the younger man; the glass was of strong magnifying power; when it was handed to him he looked through it at some little marks on the back of the clasp of the opal collar. “Zaranegra 1770,” he read aloud. “Zaranegra is a Venetian name.”

There was an inscription so minute that to the unaided eye it was invisible; through the glass it was possible to read it. It was this:

NINA DELLA LUCEDIA
CONTESSA ZARANEGRA
Capo d Anno
1770.

“Lend me your glass,” said the younger man. The glass was of strong magnifying power; when it was handed to him he looked through it at some little marks on the back of the clasp of the opal collar.

“Zaranegra!” repeated the younger man. “That is a Venetian name. Lucedia is a name of the Marches of Ancona. There is a Ca’ Zaranegra on the Grand Canal. It is next to the Loredàn. You admired its Moorish windows on the second storey this morning. Carlo Zaranegra died young; he left a widow who is only twenty now. She is a daughter of the Duke of Monfalcone; a family of the Trentino, but pure Italians in blood. Their place is in the mountains above Gorizia. It must be she who owns this necklace, an heirloom probably.”

“Take it to her,” said the finder of it, with indifference. “I cede you my rights.”

The younger laughed.

“Ah! who knows what they may become?”

“Whatever they may become they are yours. I do not appreciate that kind of reward.”

“Really?” said the younger man. “If so I pity you!”

“Nay, I pity you,” said the elder.

The young man still stood with the opals in his hands; with a wisp of grass he had cleared the sand in a measure off them; the pearly softness and the roseate flame of the stones began to show here and there; two alone of their number were missing.

“Come,” said his companion, with impatience. “Put that broken rubbish in your pocket and let us go and see the Cathedral and S. Fosca, for it will soon grow dark.”

They walked along the dyke of turf which traverses the isle, past the low fruit trees and the humble cabins of the few peasants who dwell there; the grass was long and full of ox-eyed daisies, and purple loosestrife, and pink campion. They soon reached the green and quiet place where the sacred buildings of S. Maria and S. Fosca, stand in the solitude of field and sea.

They entered first of all the old church of S. Fosca. The younger man went straight to the altar with uncovered head and knelt before it, a soft and serious look upon his face as his lips moved.

The elder cast a glance, contemptuous and derisive, on him, and turned to look at the five arcades, with their columns, so precious to those who understand the laws of architecture.

He was learned in many things, and architecture and archæology were the studies which were to him pastimes, in the rare hours of recreation which he allowed himself.

“Have you prayed to find the mistress of the opals?” he said to the younger man who, risen from his knees, approached him, a red light of the late afternoon slanting in from an upper window in the apse and falling on his bright hair and beautiful classic face.

The young man coloured.

“I prayed that the stones may bring us no evil,” he said, with ingenuous simplicity. “Laugh as you will, a prayer can never do harm, and you know opals are stones of sorrow.”

“I know you are a credulous child—a superstitious peasant—though you are twenty-four years old and have royal and noble blood in your veins.”

“If you had not saved my life I would throw you into the sea,” replied the other, half in jest half in anger. “Leave my faiths alone. Lead your own barren life as you choose, but do not cut down flowers in the garden of others.”

“Life is truly a garden for you,” said the elder man, with a touch of envy in the tone of his voice.

It was dusk in S. Fosca for the day was far advanced, and the sun was setting without beyond the world of waters.

Two peasant women were saying their aves before low burning lamps. The scent of the grass and the smell of the sea came in through the open door. A cat walked noiselessly across the altar. As the church was now so it had been a thousand years earlier.

“Does this place say nothing to you?” asked the younger man.

“Nothing,” replied the other. “What should it say?”

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IV.

When the young Sicilian prince, Lionello Adrianis, head of an ancient Hispano-Italian family, had met with a hunting accident, and the tusks of an old boar had brought him near to death, an English surgeon, by name Frederic Damer, who was then in Palermo, did for him what none of the Italian surgeons dared to do, and, so far as the phrase can ever be correct of human action, saved his life. A year had passed since then; the splendid vitality of the Sicilian had returned to all its natural vigour; he was only twenty-four years of age and naturally strong as a young oak in the woods of Etna. But he had a mother who loved him, and was anxious; she begged the Englishman to remain awhile near him; the Sicilian laughed but submitted; he and Damer had travelled together in Egypt and India during several months, and were now about in another month to part company; the Sicilian to return to his own people, the Englishman to occupy a chair of physiology in a town of northern Europe.

Their lives had been briefly united by accident and would have parted in peace: a collar of opals was by chance washed up amongst the flags and burdocks of Torcello and the shape of their fate was altered.

With such trifles do the gods play when they stake the lives of men on the game.

Damer was the son of a country physician, but his father had been poor, the family numerous, and he, a third son, had been sent out into the world with only his education as his capital. He practised surgery to live; he practised physiology to reach through it that power and celebrity for which his nature craved and his mental capacity fitted him. But at every step his narrow means galled and fretted him, and he had been a demonstrator, an assistant, a professor in schools, when his vast ability and relentless will fitted him for the position of a Helmholtz or a Virchow in that new priesthood which has arisen to claim the rule of mankind, and sacrifices to itself all sentient races.

In Adrianis he saw all the powers of youth and of wealth concentrated in one who merely used them for a careless enjoyment and a thoughtless good nature, which seemed, to himself, as senseless as the dance in the sun of an amorous negro.

Adrianis and the whole of his family had shown him the utmost gratitude, liberality, and consideration, and the young prince bore from him good-humouredly sarcasms and satires which he would not have supported from an emperor; but Damer in his turn felt for the Sicilian and his people nothing but the contempt of the great intellect for the uncultured mind, the irritation of the wise man who sees a child gaily making a kite to divert itself out of the parchments of a treatise in an unknown tongue which, studied, might have yielded up to the student the secret of perished creeds and of lost nations. There is no pride so arrogant, no supremacy so unbending, as those of the intellect. It may stand, like Belisarius, a beggar at the gate; but like Belisarius it deems itself the superior of all the crowds who drop their alms to it, and while it stretches out its hand to them its lips curse them.

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V.

They went, without visiting the basilica, back to Venice in the twilight which deepened into night as they drew near the city; the moon was high and the air still. They dined in the spacious rooms set aside in the hotel for the young prince. When the dinner was over Adrianis rose.

“Will you come?” he asked.

“Where?” asked Damer.

“To the Ca’ Zaranegra,” he replied, with a boyish laugh.

“Not I,” replied Damer.

“A rivederci, then,” said Adrianis.

But he lingered a moment.

“It will not be fair to you,” he said, “for me to take the credit of having found this necklace.”

“Whatever honour there may be in the salvage I cede it, I tell you, willingly.”

“Of course I shall tell her that it was you.”

“There is no need to do so; I am not a squire of dames. She will prefer a Sicilian Prince to a plain man of science. However, you must find the lady first. The true owner lies under some mossgrown slab in some chapel crypt, no doubt.”

“Why will you speak of death? I hate it.”

“Hate it as you may it will overtake you. Alexander hated it, but still! When we shall have found the secret of life we may perhaps find the antidote to death. But that time is not yet.”

He looked at his companion as he spoke, and thought what he did not speak:

“Yes; strong as you are, and young as you are, and fortunate as you are, you too will die like the pauper and the cripple and the beggar!”

The reflection gratified him; for of the youth, of the beauty, of the fortune, he was envious, and with all his scorn of higher intellect he despised the childlike, happy, amorous temperament, and the uncultured mind which went with them.

“If I had only his wealth,” he thought often. “Or if he only had my knowledge!”

“When we shall have penetrated the secret of life we shall perhaps be able to defy death,” repeated Adrianis. “What use would that be? You would soon have the world so full that there would be no standing room; and what would you do with the choking multitudes?”

“I never knew you so logical,” said the elder man, contemptuously. “But have no fear. We are far enough off the discovery; when it is made it will remain in the hands of the wise. The immortality of fools will never be contemplated by science.”

“The wise will not refuse to sell the secret to the wealthy fools,” thought his companion, but he forbore to say so. He was generous of temper, and knew that his companion had both wisdom and poverty.

A few seconds later the splash of the canal water beneath the balcony told the other that the gondola was moving.

“What a child!” thought Damer, with impatient contempt; he turned up the light of his reading lamp, opened a number of the French Journal de Physiologie, and began to read, not heeding the beauty of the moonlit marbles of the Salvatore in front of him, or listening to the song from Mignon which a sweet-voiced lad was singing in a boat below. He read on thus in solitude for three hours; the great tapestried and gilded room behind him, the gliding water below; the beautiful church in front of his balcony, the laughter, the music, the swish of oars, the thrill of lutes and guitars, all the evening movement on the canal as the crowds went to and fro the Piazza, not disturbing him from his studies of which every now and then he made a note in pencil in a pocket-book.

It was twelve o’clock when, into the empty brilliantly lighted room, Adrianis entered and came across it to where Damer sat on the balcony.

“I have found her!” he said, with joyous triumph. The moonlight shone on his dark, starry eyes, his laughing mouth, his tall figure, full of grace and strength like the form of the Greek Hermes in the Vatican.

Damer laid aside his papers with impatience.

“And she has welcomed you, apparently? It is midnight, and you look victorious.”

Adrianis made a gesture of vexed protestation.

“Pray do not suspect such things. I sent in my card and begged her major-domo to say that I had found her necklace. She sent word for me to go upstairs that she might thank me. Of course my name was known to her. She had a duenna with her. It was all solemn and correct. She was enchanted to find her necklace. It was an heirloom which Zaranegra gave her. He was killed in a duel, as I told you, two years ago. She is very beautiful and looks twenty years old, even less. I was very honest; I told her that an Englishman who was travelling with me had enjoyed the honour of finding the opals; and she wishes to see you to-morrow. I promised to take you in prima sera; you surely ought to be grateful.”

Damer shrugged his shoulders and looked regretfully at his papers and pencils.

“Women only disturb one,” he said, ungraciously.

Adrianis laughed.

“It is that disturbance which perfumes our life and shakes the rose leaves over it. But I remember, to attract you a woman must be lying, dead or alive, on an operating-table.”

“Alive by preference,” said Damer. “The dead are little use to us; their nervous system is still, like a stopped clock.”

“A creature must suffer to interest you?”

“Certainly.”

Adrianis shuddered slightly.

“Why did you save me?”

Damer smiled.

“My dear prince, it is my duty to save when I can. I should have preferred to let you alone, and study your natural powers of resistance in conflict with the destruction which was menacing them. But I could not follow my preferences. I was called in to assist your natural powers by affording them artificial resistance; and I was bound to do so.”

Adrianis made a grimace which signified disappointment and distaste.

“If my mother knew you looked at it in that way she would not adore you, my friend, as she does.”

“The princess exaggerates,” said Damer, putting out his lamp. “Mothers always do; I do not think I ever said anything to lead her to deceive herself with regard to me. She knows what my interests and my pursuits are.”

“But,” said Adrianis, wistfully, “surely there are many men of science, many surgeons, whose desire is to console, to amend, who care for the poor human material on which they work?”

“There are some,” replied Damer; “but they are not in the front ranks of their profession, nor will science ever owe much to them.”

The young man was silent; he felt in his moral nature as he had sometimes felt in his physical, when a chill icy wind had risen and passed through the sunshine of a balmy day. He shook off the impression with the mutability of a happy temper.

“Eh via!” he cried. “You make me feel cold in the marrow of my bones. Good-night. I am tired, and I go to dream of the lady of the opals. Like you, I prefer living women to dead ones, but I do not wish them to suffer. I wish them to enjoy—for my sake and their own!”

Damer, left alone, relit his lamp, took up his papers and books, went into the room, for the night was fresh, and remained reading and writing until daybreak.

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VI.

Veronica Zaranegra was charmed to find her necklace; she was still more charmed to find an adventure through it.

This beautiful youth with his starry eyes, soft with admiration, who had brought her back the opals, looked like a knight out of fairyland. She was young; she was weary of the seclusion of her widowhood; she was kept in close constraint by those who had authority over her; she was ready to re-enter life in its enjoyments, its amusements, its affections, its desires. The tragic end of her husband had impressed and saddened her, but she had recovered from its shock. The marriage had been arranged by their respective families, and the hearts of neither had been consulted. Zaranegra, however, had become much in love with her, and had left her all which it was in his power to leave, and that had been much.

She was like a picture of Caterina Cornaro as she stood on the balcony of her house; her golden hair was enclosed in a pearl-sown net, she had some crimson carnations at her throat, and her cloak of red satin, lined with sables, lay on her shoulders and fell to her feet like the robes of a Dogaressa.

She was like a picture of Caterina Cornaro as she stood on the balcony of her house; her golden hair was enclosed in a pearl-sown net, she had some crimson carnations at her throat, and her cloak of red satin lined with sables lay on her shoulders and fell to her feet like the robes of a Dogaressa.

The balcony was filled with spiræa, whose white blossoms were like snow about her in the starlight and lamplight as the gondola which brought the Sicilian prince and his companion to her palace paused below at the water-stairs.

“How clever it was of you to see my opals under the grass and the sand!” she said, a few moments later, as Adrianis presented Damer in the long, dim room hung with tapestries and rich in bronzes, marbles, pictures, and mosaics.

She threw her cloak on a couch as she spoke; she was dressed in black, but the gauze sleeves of the gown showed her fair arms, and the bodice was slightly open on her bosom; her face was bright like a rose above the deep shadow of the gown; her hair had been a little ruffled by the wind of the evening as she had stood on the balcony.

“Madame,” said Damer, as he bowed to her with a strange and unwelcome sense of embarrassment, “Prince Adrianis should not have told you that I had such good fortune. I am no fit squire of dames: he is.”

“But how came you to see them, all dull and muddy as they were?”

“Sight is a matter of training; I use my eyes. Most people do not use theirs.”

She looked at him curiously and laughed. The answer seemed to her very droll.

“Everybody sees except the blind,” she said, somewhat puzzled.

“And the purblind,” added Damer.

She did not catch his meaning. She turned from him a little impatiently and addressed Adrianis.

She spoke of music. Adrianis was accomplished in that art; there was a mandoline lying on the grand piano; he took it up and sang to it a Sicilian love-song; she took it from him and sang Venetian barcarolle and stornelli; then they sang together, and their clear, youthful voices blent melodiously. People passing on the canal stopped their gondolas under the balcony to listen; some Venetian professional musicians in a boat below applauded. Damer sat in the shadow, and listened, and looked at them. Music said little or nothing to him; he had scarcely any comprehension of it; but something in the sound of those blended voices touched a chord in his nature; made him feel vaguely sad, restlessly desirous, foolishly irritated. The light fell on the handsome head of the youth, on the carnations at the lady’s throat, on the rings on their hands, which touched as they took the mandoline one from the other; behind them were the open casement, the balcony with its white flowers, the lighted frontage of a palace on the opposite side of the canal.

There was a mandoline lying on the grand piano; he took it up and sang to it a Sicilian love-song; she took it from him and sang Venetian barcarolle and stornelli.... Damer sat in the shadow, and listened, and looked at them.

As they ceased to sing the people below on the water applauded again, and cried, “Brava! brava! Bis, bis!”

Adrianis laughed and rose, and, going out on to the balcony, threw some money to the boat-load of ambulant musicians who had left off their playing and singing to listen.

“Those artists below are very kind to us amateurs,” said Adrianis, with a little branch of spiræa in his hand, which he proceeded to fasten in his button-hole as he came back into the light of the room.

“You are more than an amateur.”

“Oh, all Sicilians sing. The syrens teach us.”

“Prince Adrianis is a poet,” said Damer, with a harsh tone in his voice.

“Who never wrote a verse,” said Adrianis, as he handed a cup of coffee to his hostess.

“Shut the windows,” said the Countess Zaranegra to her servants, who brought in coffee and wine, lemonade and syrups.

Through the closed windows the sound of a chorus sung by the strolling singers below came faintly and muffled into the room; the lamplight shone on the white spray of the spiræa in his coat, which looked like a crystal of snow.

“If I had found the opals I should have been inspired by them,” he added. “As it is, I am dumb and unhappy.”

Veronica Zaranegra smiled.

“If you are dumb, so was Orpheus.”

“And if you are unhappy so was Prince Fortunatus,” added Damer. “You are only sad out of wantonness because the gods have given you too many gifts.”

“Or because he has stolen a piece of spiræa.”

“I may keep my theft?” asked Adrianis.

“Yes. For you brought back the opals, though you did not find them.”

Soon after they both took their leave of her and went down to the waiting gondola. The boat-load of musicians had drifted upwards towards Rialto, the colours of their paper lanthorns glowing through the dark. There was no moon. They did not speak to each other in the few minutes which carried them to their hotel. When they reached it they parted with a brief good-night. Neither asked the other what his impressions of the lady, and of the evening, had been.

The night was dark. Mists obscured the stars. The lights at the Dogana and of the lamps along the Schiavone were shining brightly, and many other lights gleamed here and there, where they shone in gondolas, or boats, or at the mast-heads of vessels anchored in the dock of St. Mark. The hour was still early; eleven o’clock and the canal was not yet deserted. There was the liquid sound of parting water as people went to and fro on its surface. At such an hour Venice is still what it was in the days of Paul Veronese, or of Virginia di Leyva.

Adrianis sat by the sea-wall of the hotel garden and looked absently down the dark expanse studded with lights like diamonds, and thought exclusively of the woman he had quitted. He saw her golden hair shining in the lamplight, the red of the knot of carnations at her throat, the slender, jewelled hand on the mandoline, the smiling, rose-like mouth; he heard the clear, fresh, unstrained voice rising and falling with his own, whilst her eyes smiled and her eyes met his.

“Stones of sorrow! stones of sorrow!” he thought. “No, no. They shall be jewels of joy to me, to her. Love is born of a glance, of a note, of a murmur. It is the wonder flower of life. It blossoms full-grown in an instant. It needs neither time nor reflection.”

His heart beat gladly in him: his nerves were thrilled and throbbing; his welcome of a new and profound emotion was without fear.

In such a mood the merest trifle has eloquence. He was sorry when he looked down on the spray of spiræa in his coat, and saw that all the little starry flowers of it had fallen off, and vanished, as though it had indeed been snow which had melted at a breath of scirocco.

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VII.

Two weeks passed, and brought the month of May. On the many island banks long sprays of dog-rose and honeysuckle hung down over the water, and the narrow canals which ran through them were tunnels of blossom and verdure; on the sunny shallows thousands of white-winged gulls were fishing and bathing all the day long; and in the churches azaleas and lilies and arums were grouped round the altars under the dark-winged angels of Tintoretto and the golden-haired cherubim of Tiepolo.

The nights were still cold but the days were warm, were at noontide even hot; and Veronica Zaranegra passed almost all her time on the water. There was a little orchard island which belonged to the family, out beyond Mazzorbo; in the previous century a small summer-house or pavilion, with a red-tiled dome like a beehive, had been erected on it and was still there; a pretty toy still, though its frescoed walls were faded and its marble landing steps eaten away by the incessant washing of the sea; it was embowered in peach and plum and pear trees, and looked westward. Here she came often for breakfast, or for afternoon tea, or the evening merenda of fruit sweetmeats and wine, and here she was often accompanied by a gay party of Venetians of her own years and by the two strangers who had given her back her opals. The weather was rainless and radiant; the gondolas glided like swallows over the lagoons; she was rich, childlike, fond of pleasure; she tried to bring back the life of the eighteenth century, and amused herself with reviving its customs, its costumes, its comedies, as they had been before the storms of revolution and the smoke of war had rolled over the Alps, and Arcole and Marengo had silenced the laughter of Italy.

“I wish I had lived when this collar was new,” she said, when her jewellers returned to her the opals restored to their pristine brilliancy. “Life in Venice was one long festa then; I have read of it. It was all masque, and serenade, and courtship, and magnificence. People were not philosophical about life then; they lived. Nina Zaranegra was a beautiful woman. They have her portrait in the Belle Arte. She holds a rose to her lips and laughs. She was killed by her husband for an amour. She had these opals on her throat when he drove the stiletto through it. At least so Carlo used to tell me. But perhaps it was not true.”

“Do not wear them,” said Adrianis, to whom she was speaking. “Do not wear them if they are blood-stained. You know they are stones of sorrow.”

She laughed.

“You Sicilians are superstitious. We northerners are not. I like to wear them for that very reason of their tragedy.”

She took up the necklace and clasped it round her throat; some tendrils of her hair caught in the clasp; she gave an involuntary little cry of pain. Adrianis hastened to release her hair from the clasp. His hand trembled; their eyes met, and said much to each other. Damer, who was near, drew nearer.

“I have seen the portrait in the Belle Arte,” he said. “The Countess Nina symbolises silence with her rose, but she has the face of a woman who would not keep even her own secrets. Indeed a charming woman is always ‘bavarde comme les pies,’ as the French say.”

“You despise women,” said Veronica Zaranegra, with vexation.

“Oh, no. But I should not give them my confidence any more than I should give a delicate scientific instrument to a child.”

“Not even to a woman whom you loved?”

“Still less to a woman whom I loved.”

“You are a mysterious sage,” she said, a little impatiently. “You regard us as if we were children indeed, incapable of any comprehension.”

Damer did not dispute the accusation.

“Did I hear you say,” he asked, “that the lovely original of that portrait was murdered by her husband?”

“Yes, and he would not even allow her Christian burial, but had her body carried out on to the Orfano canal, and thrown into the water, with a great stone tied to her feet.”

“He was primitive,” said Damer. “Those are rough, rude ways of vengeance.”

“What would you have done?”

“I hardly know; but I should not have so stupidly wasted such a beautiful organism. Besides the end was too swift to be any great punishment.”

She was silent, looking at him with that mixture of curiosity, interest, and vague apprehension which he always aroused in her. She was not very intelligent, but she had quick susceptibilities; there was that in him which alarmed them and yet fascinated them.

“He awes me,” she said later in the day to Adrianis. “So often one cannot follow his meaning, but one always feels his reserve of power.”

It was a grave speech for a light-hearted lover of pleasure. Adrianis heard it with vexation, but he was loyal to the man who, as he considered, had saved his life.

“He is a person of great intellect,” he answered; “we are pigmies beside him. But——”

“But what?”

“He used his brains to cure my body. So I must not dispute the virtue of his use of them. Yet sometimes I fancy that he has no heart. I think all the forces in him have only nourished his mind, which is immense. But his heart, perhaps, has withered away, getting no nourishment. He would say I talk nonsense; but I think you will understand what I mean.”

“I think I understand,” said Veronica, thoughtfully.

She had thought very little in her careless young life; she had begun to think more since these two men had come into it.

“Adrianis merits better treatment than you give him,” said her duenna to her that day. “How long will you keep him in suspense? You ought to remember ‘what hell it is in waiting to abide.’”

“A hell?” said Veronica, with the colour in her face. “You mean a paradise!”

“A fool’s paradise, I fear,” replied the elder woman. “And what does that other man do here? He told me he was due at some university in Germany.”

“How can I tell why either of them stays?” said Veronica, disingenuously as her conscience told her. “Venice allures many people, especially in her spring season.”

“So does a woman in her spring,” said the elder lady, drily, with an impatient gesture.

“You are angry with me,” said Veronica, mournfully.

“No, my dear. It is as useless to be angry with you as to be angry with a young cat because in its gambols it breaks a vase of which it knows nothing of the preciousness.”

Veronica Zaranegra did not resent or reply. She knew the vase was precious; she did not mean to break it; but she wanted to be free awhile longer. Mutual love was sweet, but it was not freedom. And what she felt ashamed of was a certain reluctance which moved her to allow Damer to see or know that she loved a man of so little intellectual force as Adrianis, a man who had nothing but his physical beauty and his gay, glad temper and kind heart.

“Do you want nothing more than these?” the gaze of Damer seemed in her imagination to say to her.

She was angered with herself for thinking of him or of his opinion; he was not of her world or of her station; he was a professional man, a worker, a teacher; natural pride of lineage and habit made her regard him as in no way privileged to be considered by her. And yet she could not help being influenced by that disdain of the mental powers of others which he had never uttered, but which he continually showed. Indecision is the greatest bane of women; obstinacy costs them much, but indecision costs them more. The will of Veronica flickered like a candle in the wind, veered hither and thither like a fallen leaf in a gust of wind and rain.

Adrianis was delightful to her; his beauty, his gaiety, and his homage were all sympathetic to her. She knew that he loved her, but she prevented him telling her so; she liked her lately acquired liberty; she did not want a declaration which would force her to decide in one way or another what to do with her future. And she was affected without being aware of it by the scarcely disguised contempt which his companion had for him. It was seldom outspoken, but it was visible in every word of Damer, in every glance.

“He is beautiful, yes,” he said once to her. “So is an animal.”

“Do you not like animals?”

“I do not like or dislike them. The geologist does not like or dislike the stones he breaks up, the metallurgist does not like or dislike the ore he fuses.”

She did not venture to ask him what he meant; she had a vague conception of his meaning, and it gave her a chill as such replies gave to Adrianis: a chill such as the north wind, when it comes down from the first snows on the Dolomite peaks, gives to the honeysuckle flowers hanging over the sea-walls. She was not clever or much educated, but she had seen a good deal of the world, and she had heard men talk of science, of its pretensions and its methods, its self-worship and its tyrannies. She had put her rosy fingers in her ears and run away when they had so spoken, but some things she had heard and now remembered.

“You are what they call a physiologist?” she said once, suddenly.

“I am,” replied Damer.

She looked at him under her long silky lashes as a child looks at what it fears in the dusk of a fading day. He attracted her and repelled her, as when she had herself been a little child she had been at once charmed and frightened by the great ghostly figures on the tapestries, and the white and grey busts of gods and sages on the grand staircase of her father’s house in the Trentino. She would have liked to ask him many things, things of mystery and of horror, but she was afraid. After all, how much better were the sea, the sunshine, the dog-rose, the barcarolle, the laughter, the lute!

She turned to Adrianis, who at that moment came along the sands of the beach, his hands filled with spoils from the blossoming hedges; turned to him as when, a little child on the staircase in the dusk, she had run to reach the shelter of a warmed and lighted room. He was of her own country, her own age, her own temperament; he carried about him a sense of gladness, an atmosphere of youth; he was of her own rank; he was as rich as she, and richer. There was no leaven of self-seeking in the love he bore her; the passion she had roused in him was pure of any alloy; it was the love of the poets and the singers. If she accepted it, her path, from youth to age, would be like one of those flowering meadows of his own Sicily which fill the cloudless day with perfume.

She knew that; her foot was ready to tread the narcissus-filled grass, but by an unaccountable indecision and caprice she would not let him invite her thither. She continually evaded or eluded the final words which would have united them or parted them.

Again and again, when that moment of decision could not have been postponed, the sombre shadow of Damer had appeared, as in the moment when the clasp of the necklace had been entangled in the little curls at the back of her throat.

It might be chance, it might be premeditation; but he was always there in those moments when the heart of Adrianis leaped to his eyes and lips and called to hers.

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VIII.

In the evening she was usually at home. She did not as yet go to balls or theatres; the aristocratic society of Venice flocked to her rooms, and what was best in the foreign element. In the evenings neither Adrianis nor Damer saw her alone; but in the daytime, on the island or in the water excursions, sometimes one or the other was beside her for a few minutes with no listener near.

Adrianis eagerly sought such occasions; Damer never seemed to seek them. He was often in her palace and on her island, but appeared to be so chiefly because he went where Adrianis went. No one could have told that he took pleasure in doing so.

But Adrianis, somewhat surprised at his lingering so long, thought to himself: “He was to be in Gottenberg by the 10th of May, and it is now the 23rd.”

“Have you given up your appointment?” he asked once, directly.

Damer merely answered, “No.” He did not offer any explanation; but he continued to stay on in Venice, though he had removed from the fine apartments occupied by his friend to a house on the Fondamenti Nuovi, where he had hired two chambers.

Adrianis, who was very generous and had always a grateful and uneasy sense of unrepaid obligation, vainly urged him to remain at his hotel. But Damer, somewhat rudely, refused.

“I cannot pursue any studies there,” he replied.

The house he had chosen was obscure and uninviting, standing amidst the clang of coppersmiths’ hammers and the stench of iron-foundries in what was once the most patrician and beautiful garden-quarter of Venice, but which is now befouled, blackened, filled with smoke, and clamour, and vileness, where once the rose-terraces and the clematis-covered pergole ran down to the lagoon, and the marble stairs were white as snow under silken awnings.

“What do you do there?” Veronica Zaranegra wished to ask him; but she never did so; she felt vaguely afraid as a woman of the Middle Age would have feared to ask a magician what he did with his alembics and his spheres.

Although the eyes of lovers are proverbially washed by the collyrium of jealousy, those of Adrianis were blind to the passion which Damer, like himself, had conceived. The reserve and power of self-restraint in Damer were extreme, and served to screen his secret from the not very discerning mind of his companion. Moreover, the pride of race which was born and bred in Adrianis rendered it impossible for him to suspect that he possessed a rival in one who was, however mentally superior, so far socially inferior, to himself and to the woman he loved.

That a man who was going to receive a stipend as a teacher in a German university could lift his eyes to Veronica Zaranegra would have seemed wholly impossible to one who had been reared in patrician and conservative tenets. He never noticed the fires which slumbered in the cold wide-opened eyes of his friend and monitor. He never observed how frequently Damer watched him and her when they were together, listened from afar to their conversation, and invariably interrupted them at any moment when their words verged on more tender or familiar themes. He was himself tenderly, passionately, romantically enamoured; his temper was full of a romance to which he could not often give adequate expression; his love for her had the timidity of all sincere and nascent passion; he was pained and chafed by the manner in which she avoided his definite declaration of it, but he did not for a moment trace it to its right cause, the magnetic influence which the Englishman had upon her, the hesitation which was given her by vague hypnotic suggestion. If any looker-on had warned him, he would have laughed and said that the days of magic were past.

He himself only counted time by the hours which brought him into her presence on the water, on the island, or in the evening receptions in the palace. He made water-festivals and pleasure-cruises to please her; he had sent for his own sailing yacht from Palermo. The long, light days of late spring and earliest summer passed in a series of ingenious amusements of which the sole scope was to obtain a smile from her. Often she did smile, the radiance of youth and of a woman’s willingness to be worshipped shining on her fair countenance as the sun shone on the sea. Sometimes also the smile ceased suddenly when, from a distance, her eyes encountered those of Damer.

All that was most delightful in life offered itself to her in the homage of Adrianis: his mother’s welcome, his southern clime, his great love, his infinite tenderness and sweetness of temper, his great physical beauty. She longed to accept these great gifts; she longed to feel his arms folded about her and his cheek against hers; and yet she hesitated, she delayed, she avoided, because in the eyes of another man, whom she disliked and feared, she read mockery, disdain, and superiority. She could not have said what it was that she felt any more than the young spaniel could tell what moves it as it looks up into human eyes, and reads authority in them, and crouches, trembling.

Why did he stay here? she asked herself, this cold, still, irresponsive man, who had nothing in him which was not alien to the youthful and pleasure-loving society in which he found himself, and who was by his own admission already overdue at the university to which he had been appointed.

“Are you not losing time?” she said once to him; “we are so frivolous, so ignorant, so unlike you.”

“I never lose time,” replied Damer. “An amœba in a pool on the sand is companion enough for me.”

Seeing that she had no idea of what he meant, he added:

“A man of science is like an artist; his art is everywhere, wherever natural forms exist.”

“Or like a sportsman,” said Adrianis, who was listening; “his sport is everywhere, wherever there are living things to kill.”

“Put it so if you please,” said Damer. But he was annoyed; he disliked being answered intelligently and sarcastically by one whom he considered a fool. Whatever Adrianis said irritated him, though it was almost perpetually courteous and simple, as was the nature of the speaker.

Damer read the young man’s heart like an open book and he knew that it was wholly filled with the image of Veronica. He had never liked Adrianis; he had no liking for youth or for physical beauty, or for kindliness and sweetness and simplicity of character. Such qualities were not in tune with him; they were no more to him than the soft, thick fur of the cat in his laboratory, which he stripped off her body that he might lay bare her spinal cord; the pretty, warm skin was nothing to science—no more than was the pain of the bared nerves.

He had saved the life of Adrianis because it had interested and recompensed him to do so; he had travelled with him for a year because it suited him financially to do so; but he had never liked him, he had never been touched by any one of the many generous and delicate acts of the young man, nor by the trust which the mother of Adrianis continually expressed in her letters to himself. Where jealousy sits on the threshold of the soul, goodness and kindness and faith knock in vain for admittance. Envy is hatred in embryo; and only waits in the womb of time for birth.

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IX.

One day Veronica asked him to go and see an old servant of the Zaranegra household who was very ill and in hospital; they had begged him not to go to the hospital, but he had wished to do so, and had been allowed to fulfil his wish. Damer went to visit him. He found the man at death’s door with cancer of the food and air passages.

“If he be not operated on he will die in a week,” said the Englishman.

None of the hospital surgeons dared perform such an operation.

“I will operate if you consent,” said Damer.

The surgeons acquiesced.

“Will Biancon recover?” asked Veronica, when he returned and told her on what they had decided.

“In his present state he cannot live a week,” replied Damer, evasively.

“Does he wish for the operation?”

“He can be no judge. He cannot know his own condition. He cannot take his own prognosis.”

“But it will be frightful suffering.”

“He will be under anæsthetics.”

“But will he recover?”

“Madame, I am not the master of Fate.”

“But what is probable?”

“What is certain is that the man will die if left as he is.”

He performed the operation next day. The man ceased to breathe as it was ended; the shock to the nervous system had killed him.

When she heard that he was dead she burst into tears.

“Oh! why, oh! why,” she said passionately to Damer, later in the day: “why, if you knew he must die, did you torture him in his last moments?”

“I gave him a chance,” he replied, indifferently. “Anyhow he would never have survived the operation more than a few weeks.”

“Why did you torture him with it then?” said Veronica, indignantly.

“It was a rare, and almost unique, opportunity. I have solved by it a doubt which has never been solved before, and never could have been without a human subject.”

She shrank from him in horror.

“You are a wicked man!” she said, faintly. “Oh, how I wish, how I wish I had never asked you to see my poor Biancon! He might have lived!”

“He would most certainly have died,” said Damer, unmoved. “The life of a man at sixty is not an especially valuable thing, and I believe he did nothing all his life except polish your palace floors with beeswax or oil; I forget which it is they use in Venice.”

She looked at him with a mixture of horror and fear.

“But you have killed him!—and you can jest.”

“I did not kill him. His disease killed him,” replied Damer, with calm indifference. “And his end has been a source of knowledge. I should wish my own end to be as fruitful.”

She shuddered, and motioned to him to leave her.

“Go away, go away, you have no heart, and no conscience.”

Damer smiled slightly.

“I have a scientific conscience; it is as good as a moral one, and does better work.”

“Why did you bring that man to Venice?” she said to Adrianis some hours later. “He has killed my poor Biancon, and he cares nothing.”

“Why do you receive him?” said Adrianis, feeling the reproach unjust. “Cease to receive him. That is very simple. If you banish him he is proud; he will not persist.”

“He would not perhaps persist; but he would be revenged,” she thought, but she did not say so. Though her life was short, she had learned in it that men are like detonators which you cannot throw against each other without explosion.

Adrianis began to desire the exile of his companion, though his loyalty withheld him from trying to obtain it by any unfair means or unjust attack. He was mortified and disquieted. Why had he not had patience, and waited to carry the opals to the Ca’ Zaranegra until the Englishman had been safe on the sea on his way to Trieste? He began to perceive that Damer had an influence on the Countess Veronica which was contrary to his own, and adverse to his interests. He did not attach importance to it, because he saw that it was purely intellectual; but he would have preferred that it had not existed. So would she.

It was such an influence as the confessor obtains over the devotee; against which husband, lover, children, all natural ties, struggle altogether in vain.

It is not love; it is alien to love, but it is frequently stronger than love, and casts down the winged god maimed and helpless.

“Pierres de malheur! Pierres de malheur!” she said, as she looked at the opals that night. “Why did you bring that cruel man into my life?”

She might banish him as Adrianis had said, but she felt that she would never have courage to do it. Damer awed her. She felt something of what the poor women in the Salpêtrière had felt, when he had hypnotised them, and made them believe that they clasped their hands on red-hot iron, or were being dragged by ropes to the scaffold. She strove to resist and conquer the impression, but she was subjugated by it against her will.

She buried her poor old servant that night, and followed the coffin in its gondola in her own, with her men in mourning and the torches burning at the prow.