Arethusa Part 19

'You may find something to fight for--over the water,' Zoe suggested, emphasising the words a little and watching his face.

The phrase meant nothing to him.

'Over the water?' he repeated carelessly. 'At home, in Venice, you mean. Yes, if Venice needed me, I should not wait to be called twice!'

It was quite clear that he attached no meaning to the words she had used, and this fact tallied with what the astrologer had told her in the morning as to his having been deaf to all advances made to him by the imprisoned Emperor's party.

Zoe leaned back in silence for a while, almost closing her eyes, and she saw that he watched her, and that an unmistakable look of admiration stole into his face. She was wondering whether it would ever turn into something more, and whether she should ever see the gleam of fight in his eyes, for her sake, that had flashed in them a moment ago at the mere thought of battle. What did women do, to make men love them? There is an age when girls believe that love need only be called, like a tame dove, and that he will fly in at the window; and there is an age when he comes to them uncalled-for. If only the ages were the same for all, much trouble might be spared. Zoe was perhaps between the two, but she still believed that there was some fixed rule on which clever women acted to make men fall in love with them, those wicked women who are described to young girls as 'designing,' and are supposed to know precisely the effect they can produce on men at any moment, to the very nicety of an eyelash.

Zeno broke the long silence with an unexpected speech which roughly awakened Zoe from her reflection.

'As for this Emperor John whom his son has locked up,' he said, 'his friends have done their best to interest me in his cause. He has even sent me messages, begging me to help him to escape. Why? What difference can it make to me whether he or his son dies in the Amena tower? They are poor things, both of them, and for all I care John may starve in his chains before I will lift a finger!'

Zoe sighed and bit her lip to check herself, for his voluntary declaration had dashed the palace of her hopes to pieces in an instant.

Then she was ashamed of having even dreamt that he might love her, since he despised the very cause for which she had wished to win his love. But this state of mind did not last long, either. She was too brave to let such a speech pa.s.s, as if she agreed with it.

'You are wrong,' she said, quite forgetting that she had set herself to play the part of the slave. 'You ought to help him, if you can--and you can, if you will.'

Zeno looked at her in surprise. There was something like authority in her tone, and the two little maids, whom he had forgotten in their corner behind him, stared in astonishment at her audacity. Not a word of the conversation had escaped them.

'I mean,' continued Zoe, before he could find an answer to her plain statement, 'if you are a true Venetian you should wish to put down the man whom the Genoese and the Turks have set on the throne. Johannes is your friend and your country's friend, though he is a weak man and always will be. Andronicus is an enemy to Venice and a friend to her enemies. He is even now ready to give the island of Tenedos to them--the key to the Dardanelles----'

'What?' asked Zeno in a loud and angry tone. 'Tenedos?'

His manner had changed, and he almost rose from his seat as he bent forwards and seized her wrist in his excitement. She was glad, and smiled at him.

'Yes,' she answered, 'the Genoese demand it as the price of their protection, and they will force him to give it to them. But it may not be easy, for the governor of the island is loyal to Johannes.'

'How do you know these things?' asked Zeno, still holding her wrist and trying to look into her eyes.

'I know them,' Zoe answered. 'If I am not telling you the truth, sell me in the market to-morrow.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: 'I know them,' Zoe answered. 'If I am not telling you the truth, sell me in the market to-morrow.']

'By the Evangelist,' swore Zeno, 'you will deserve it.'

CHAPTER IX

A month had pa.s.sed, and yet, to all outward appearance, Zeno's manner of living had undergone no change. He rose early and bathed in the Golden Horn on fine days. He attended to his business in the morning, and dined with Sebastian Polo twice a week, but generally at home on the remaining days; and he rode out in the afternoon with a single running footman, or stayed indoors if it rained. Even his own servants and slaves hardly noticed any change in his habits, and only observed that he often looked preoccupied, and sometimes sat on his balcony for an hour without moving, his eyes fixed on the towers of the Blachernae palace.

They did not know how much time he spent with his beautiful Greek slave; and they found that the two little maids, Yulia and Lucilla, were not inclined to gossip when they came downstairs on an errand.

Omobono probably knew a good deal, but he kept it to himself, and stored the fruits of his lively curiosity to enjoy alone the delicious sensation of the miser gloating over his useless gold. On the whole, therefore, life in the Venetian merchant's house had gone on much as usual for a whole month after Zoe had fired a train which was destined to produce momentous results when it reached the mine at last.

Zeno saw her every day now, and often twice, and she had become a part of his life, and necessary to him; though he did not believe that he was in love with her, any more than she would have admitted that she loved him.

For each was possessed by one dominant thought; and it chanced, as it rarely chances in real life, that one deed, if it could be performed, would satisfy the hopes of both. Zeno, born patriot and leader, saw that the whole influence of his country in the East was at stake in the matter of Tenedos; Zoe thirsted to revenge the death of Michael Rhangabe, her adopted father and the idol of her childhood.

If the imprisoned Emperor Johannes could be delivered from the Amena tower, both would certainly obtain what they most desired. Johannes would give Tenedos to Venice, in grat.i.tude for his liberty, and the people of Constantinople would probably tear Andronicus to ribands in the Hippodrome, on the very spot where Rhangabe had suffered.

They would rally round their lawful sovereign if he could only be got out of the precincts of the palace, where the usurper was strongly guarded by his foreign mercenaries, mostly Circa.s.sians, Mingrelians, Avars, and Slavonians. The people would not rise of themselves to storm Blachernae, nor would the Greek troops revolt of their own accord; but as they all feared the soldiers of the foreign legion, they hated them and their master Andronicus, and the presence of Johannes amongst them would restore their courage and make the issue certain.

Such a leader as Carlo Zeno might indeed have successfully besieged Andronicus in his palace; but he knew, and every man and woman in Constantinople knew well enough, that Andronicus would make an end of his father and of his two younger brothers in prison, at the first sign of a revolution, so that there might be no lawful heir to the throne left alive but he himself.

Therefore it was the first and the chief object of the patriots to bring Johannes secretly from his place of confinement to the heart of the city, or to one of the islands, beyond the reach of danger, till the revolution should be over and his son a prisoner in his stead; though it was much more probable that the latter would be summarily put to death as a traitor.

All this Zeno had understood before Zoe had spoken to him about it; but he had not known that the Genoese had demanded Tenedos of Andronicus as the price of their protection against the Turks; for the negotiations had been kept very secret, and at first Carlo had not believed the girl, and had deemed that the tale might be a pure invention.

He had come again to see her on the following day, and again he had vainly tried to find out who she was, and in what great Fanariote house she had been brought up. It was impossible to get a word from her on this subject; and she warned him that what she had told him must not be repeated in the hearing of any Genoese, nor of any one connected with the Court. The Genoese meant that no one should know of the treaty till it was carried out, and until Tenedos was theirs; for the place was very strong, as they afterwards found by experience, and Andronicus needed their help too much to risk losing their favour by an indiscretion.

These injunctions of silence made Carlo still more doubtful as to the veracity of Zoe's story, and he frankly told her so and demanded proof; but she only answered as she had at first.

'If it is not true,' she said, 'brand me in the forehead, as they brand thieves, and sell me in the open market.'

And again he was angry, and swore that he would do so by her indeed if the story was a lie; but she smiled confidently, and nodded her a.s.sent.

'If you do not save the Emperor,' she said, 'you Venetians will be driven out of Constantinople before many months; and if Genoa once holds Tenedos how shall you ever again sail up the Dardanelles?'

Many a time she had heard Michael Rhangabe say as much to his friends, and she knew that it was wisdom. So did Zeno, and he wondered at the knowledge of his bought slave. So he came and went, turning over the great question in his brain; and she awaited his coming gladly, because she saw that he was roused, and because the longing for just revenge was uppermost in her thoughts. Thus were the two drawn together more and more, fate helping. Yet he told her nothing of the steps he took so quickly after he had once made up his mind to act.

She no longer asked him what he meant to do with her; she did not again send for the secretary to complain that her existence was dull; she no longer was impatient with her maids; she seemed perfectly satisfied with her existence.

She went out when she pleased to go, in the beautiful skiff, in charge of Omobono, and always with one of the girls; and she sat in the deep cushioned seat as the great ladies did when they were rowed to the Sweet Waters, and as she had sat many times in old days, beside Kyria Agatha. The secretary sat on a little movable seat in the waist of the boat, which was built almost exactly like a modern Venetian gondola without the hood, and the slave-girl sat in the bottom at her mistress's feet. Zoe, the adopted daughter of the Protosparthos, had gone abroad with uncovered face, but Arethusa, the slave, was closely veiled, though that was not the general custom. And often, as she glided along in the spring afternoons, she pa.s.sed people she had known only a year ago, or a little more, who wondered why she hid her features; or told each other, as was more or less true, that she was some handsome white slave, whose jealous master would not suffer her beauty to be seen. For it was clear that Omobono was only a respectable elderly person placed in charge of her.

The two generally conversed in Latin, and the secretary told her of his search for Kyria Agatha, the children, and old Nectaria. She had never shown him her face since she had been a slave, and she believed that he did not connect her with the ragged girl he had seen bending over the sick woman's bed in the beggars' quarter. She had enjoined upon him the greatest discretion in case he found the little family, and with Omobono such an injunction was quite unnecessary, for outward discretion is the characteristic quality of curiosity, which is inwardly the least discreet of failings. People who look through keyholes, listen behind curtains, and read other people's letters are generally the last to talk of what they learn in that way.

As yet, the secretary's search had been fruitless, but he had long ago made up his mind that Zoe was Kyria Agatha's daughter. The bandy-legged sacristan of Saint Bacchus had helped him to this conclusion by informing him that Rustan Karaboghazji had not come to perform his devotions in the church for some time; never, in fact, since that Friday afternoon on which Omobono had inquired after him.

The secretary had searched the beggars' quarter in vain. He remembered the ruined house very well, and the crazy shutters with bits of rain-bleached string tied to them for fastenings. There were people living in it, but they were not the same beggars; it was now inhabited by the chief physician of the beggars himself, whose business it was to prepare misery for the public eye, at fixed rates. For among those who were really starving there lived a small tribe of professional paupers, who displayed the horrors of their loathsome diseases at the doors of the churches all over Constantinople. The physician was skilful in his way, and though he preferred a real cripple, or a real sore for his art to improve upon, he could produce the semblance of either on sound limbs and a whole skin, though the process was expensive. Yet that increased cost was balanced by the ability of his healthy patients to go alone to a great distance, and thus to vary the scene of their industry. They thus picked up the charity which should have reached the real poor, most of whom could hardly crawl as far as the great thoroughfares more than once or twice a week, at the risk of their lives. The sham beggar always has a marvellous power of covering the ground, but you must generally seek the real one in the lair where he is dying. Omobono had learnt much about beggars which he had not known before then, and he had found no trace whatever of the people whom he was seeking.

They seemed very far away when Zoe thought of them. She wondered whether any of them missed her, except Nectaria, now that they had warm clothes and plenty to eat. The sacrifice had been very terrible at first,--it did not seem so now; and she knew that on that very afternoon when she went home after being out in the boat, she would listen for Zeno's footstep in the vestibule, and think the time long till he came.

But Omobono had gathered a good deal of information about her from his acquaintance, the sacristan, whom he strongly suspected of being in league with Rustan to inform him when there was anything worth buying in the beggars' quarter; for the Bokharian was a busy man, and had no time to spend in searching for unusual merchandise, nor, when there was any to be had, would it have been to his advantage to be seen often in its neighborhood. So he paid the sacristan to quarter the ground continually for him, while he was engaged elsewhere. It is to the credit of Rustan's splendid business intelligence that the system he employed has not been improved on in five hundred years; for when the modern slave-dealers make their annual journeys to the centres of supply they find everything ready for them, like any other commercial traveller.

Having understood Rustan's mode of procedure, Omobono had extracted from the sacristan such information as the latter possessed about Zoe and Kyria Agatha, but that was not very much after all. They had lived three or four weeks in the ruined house, or perhaps six; he could not remember exactly. At first they all came to the church, but they had sold their miserable clothes and their wretched belongings. The last time the girl had come, she had been alone, and she had worn a blanket over her shoulders to keep her warm. That had been at dusk. Then Rustan had bought her, and soon afterwards they must have gone away, since the beggars' physician was now installed in the house. Why should the sacristan take any interest in them? They were gone, and Constantinople was a vast city. No, the woman had not died, for he would have known it. When people died they were buried, even if they had starved to death in the beggars' quarter.

Zoe thanked Omobono for the information, and begged him to continue her search. He wondered why she did not burst into tears, and concluded that she was either quite heartless, or was in love with Zeno, or both. He inclined to the latter theory. Love, he told himself with all the conviction of middle-aged inexperience, was a selfish pa.s.sion. Zoe loved Zeno, and did not care what had become of her mother.

Besides, he knew that she was jealous. She had heard of Giustina, and was determined to see her. She insisted that the boat should keep to the left, going up the Golden Horn, and she made the secretary point out Sebastian Polo's dwelling. It was a small palace, a hundred yards below the gardens of Blachernae, and it had marble steps, like those at Zeno's house. A girl with dyed hair sat in the shade in an upper balcony; her hair was red auburn, like that of the Venetian women, and her face was white, but that was all Zoe could see. She wished she had a hawk's eyes. Omobono said it might be Giustina, but as the latter had many friends, it might also be one of them, for most Venetian women had hair of that colour.

Farther up, they neared Blachernae, and came first to the great Amena tower, of which the foundations stood on an escarped pier in the water. Zoe looked up, trying to guess the height of the upper windows from the water, but she had no experience, and they were very high--perhaps a hundred palms, perhaps fifty--Zeno would know. Could he get up there by a rope? She wondered, and she thought of what she should feel if she herself were hanging there in mid-air by a single rope against the smooth wall. Then in her imagination she saw Zeno half-way up, and some one cut the line above, for he was discovered, and he fell. A painful thrill ran down the back of her neck and her spine and through her limbs, and she shrank in her seat.

It was up there, in the highest story, that Johannes had been a prisoner nearly two years. The windows needed no gratings, for it would be death to leap out, and no one could climb up to get in. The pier below the tower sloped to the stream, and its base ran out so far that no man could have jumped clear of it from above--even if he dared the desperate risk of striking the water. Bertrandon de la Broquiere saw it, years afterwards, when Zeno was an old man, and you may look at a good picture of it in his illuminated book.

A solitary fisherman was perched on the edge of the sloping pier, apparently hindered from slipping off by the very slight projection of the lowest course of stones, which was perpendicular. His brown legs were bare far above the knee, he wore a brown fisherman's coat of a woollen stuff, not woven but fulled like felt; a wide hat of sennet, sewn round and round a small crown of tarred sailcloth, flapped over his ears. He angled in the slow stream with a long reed and a short line.