Marietta Part 16

The heavy slab slipped into its bed with a soft thud. Zorzi took the lamp and examined the edges. One of them was a little chipped by the crowbar, and he rubbed it with the greasy tow and scattered dust over it. Then he got a cypress broom and swept the earth carefully away into a heap. Beroviero himself brought the shovel and held it close to the stones while Zorzi pushed the loose earth upon it.

"Carry it out and scatter it in the garden," said the old man.

It was the first time that he had allowed his affection for Zorzi to express itself so strongly, for he was generally a very cautious person. He took the young man's hand and held it a moment, pressing it kindly.

"It was not I who made the law against strangers, and it was not meant for men like you," he added.

Zorzi knew how much this meant from such a master and he would have found words for thanks, had he been able; but when he tried, they would not come.

"You may trust me," was all he could say.

Beroviero left him, and went down the dark corridor with the firm step of a man who knows his way without light.

In the morning, when he left the house to begin his journey, Zorzi stood by the steps with the servant to steady the gondola for him. His horses were to be in waiting in Venice, whence he was to go over to the mainland. He nodded to the young man carelessly, but said nothing, and no one would have guessed how kindly he had spoken to him on the previous night. Giovanni Beroviero took ceremonious leave of his father, his cap in his hand, bending low, a lean man, twenty years older than Marietta, with an insignificant brow and clean-shaven, pointed jaw and greedy lips. Marietta stood within the shadow of the doorway, very pale. Nella was beside her, and Giovanni's wife, and further in, at a respectful distance, the serving-people, for the master's departure was an event of importance.

The gondola pushed off when Beroviero had disappeared under the 'felse' with a final wave of the hand. Zorzi stood still, looking after his master, and Marietta came forward to the doorstep and pretended to watch the gondola also. Zorzi was the first to turn, and their eyes met. He had not expected to see her still there, and he started a little. Giovanni looked at him coldly.

"You had better go to your work," he said in a sour tone. "I suppose my father has told you what to do."

The young artist flushed, but answered quietly enough.

"I am going to my work," he said. "I need no urging."

Before he put on his cap, he bent his head to Marietta; then he pa.s.sed on towards the bridge.

"That fellow is growing insolent," said Giovanni to his sister, but he was careful that Zorzi should not hear the words. "I think I shall advise our father to turn him out."

Marietta looked at her brother with something like contempt.

"Since when has our father consulted you, or taken your advice?" she asked.

"I presume he takes yours," retorted Giovanni, regretting that he could not instantly find a sharper answer, for he was not quick-witted though he was suspicious.

"He needs neither yours nor mine," said Marietta, "and he trusts whom he pleases."

"You seem inclined to defend his servants when they are insolent," answered Giovanni.

"For that matter, Zorzi is quite able to defend himself!" She turned her back on her brother and went towards the stairs, taking Nella with her.

Giovanni glanced at her with annoyance and walked along the footway in the direction of his own gla.s.s-house, glad to go back to a place where he was absolute despot. But he had been really surprised that Marietta should boldly take the Dalmatian's side against him, and his narrow brain brooded upon the unexpected circ.u.mstance. Besides the dislike he felt for the young artist, his small pride resented the thought that his sister, who was to marry a Contarini, should condescend to the defence of a servant.

Zorzi went his way calmly and spent the day in the laboratory. He was in a frame of mind in which such speeches as Giovanni's could make but little impression upon him, sensitive though he naturally was. Really great sorrows, or great joys or great emotions, make smaller ones almost impossible for the time. Men of vast ambition, whose deeds are already moving the world and making history, are sometimes as easily annoyed by trifles as a nervous woman; but he who knows that what is dearest to him is slipping from his hold, or has just been taken, is half paralysed in his sense of outward things. His own mind alone has power to give him a momentary relief.

Herein lies one of the strongest problems of human nature. We say with a.s.surance that the mind rules the body, we feel that the spirit in some way overshadows and includes the mind. Yet if this were really true the spirit-that is, the will-should have power against bodily pain, but not against moral suffering except with some help from a higher source. But it is otherwise. If the will of ordinary human beings could hypnotise the body against material sensation, the credit due to those brave believers in all ages who have suffered cruel torments for their faith would be singularly diminished. If the mind could dominate matter by ordinary concentration of thought, a bad toothache should have no effect upon the delicate imagination of the poet, and Napoleon would not have lost the decisive battle of his life by a fit of indigestion, as has been a.s.serted.

On the other hand, there was never yet a man of genius, or even of great talent, who was not aware that the most acute moral anguish can be momentarily forgotten, as if it did not exist for the time, by concentrating the mind upon its accustomed and favourite kind of work. Johnson wrote Ra.s.selas to pay for the funeral of his yet unburied mother, and Johnson was a man of heart if ever one lived; he could not have written the book if he had had a headache. Saints and ascetics without end and of many persuasions have resorted to bodily pain as a means of deadening the imagination and exalting the will or spirit. Some great thinkers have been invalids, but in every case their food, work has been done when they were temporarily free from pain. Perhaps the truth is on the side of those mystics who say that although the mind is of a higher nature than matter, it is so closely involved with it that neither can get away from the other, and that both together tend to shut out the spirit and to forget its existence, which is a perpetual reproach to them; and any ordinary intellectual effort being produced by the joint activity of mind and the matter through which the mind acts, the condition of the spirit at the time has little or no effect upon them, nor upon what they are doing. And if one would carry the little theory further, one might find that the greatest works of genius have been produced when the effort of mind and matter has taken place under the inspiration of the spirit, so that all three were momentarily involved together. But such thoughts lead far, and it may be that they profit little. The best which a man means to do is generally better than the best he does, and it is perhaps the best he is capable of doing.

Be these things as they may, Zorzi worked hard in the laboratory, minutely carrying out the instructions he had received, but reasoning upon them with a freshness and keenness of thought of which his master was no longer capable. When he had made the trials and had added the new ingredients for future ones, he began to think out methods of his own which had suggested themselves to him of late, but which he had never been able to try. But though he had the furnace to himself, to use as long as he could endure the heat of the advancing summer, he was face to face with a difficulty that seemed insuperable.

The furnace had but three crucibles, each of which contained one of the mixtures by means of which he and Beroviero were trying to produce the famous red gla.s.s. In order to begin to make gla.s.s in his own way, it was necessary that one of the three should be emptied, but unless he disobeyed his orders this was out of the question. In his train of thought and longing to try what he felt sure must succeed, he had forgotten the obstacle. The check brought him back to himself, and he walked disconsolately up and down the long room by the side of the furnace.

Everything was against him, said the melancholy little demon that torments genius on dark days. It was not enough that he should be forced by every consideration of honour and wisdom to hide his love for his master's daughter; when he took refuge in his art and tried to throw his whole life into it, he was stopped at the outset by the most impa.s.sable barriers of impossibility. The furious desire to create, which is the strength as well as the essence of genius, surged up and dashed itself to futile spray upon the face of the solid rock.

He stood still before the hanging shelves on which he had placed the objects he had occasionally made, and which his master allowed him to keep there-light, air-thin vessels of graceful shapes: an ampulla of exquisite outline with a long curved spout that bent upwards and then outwards and over like the stalk of a lily of the valley; a large drinking-gla.s.s set on a stem so slender that one would doubt its strength to carry the weight of a full measure, yet so strong that the cup might have been filled with lead without breaking it; a broad dish that was nothing but a shadow against the light, but in the shadow was a fair design of flowers, drawn free with a diamond point; there were a dozen of such things on the shelves, not the best that Zorzi had made, for those Beroviero took to his own house and used on great occasions, while these were the results of experiments unheard of in those days, and which not long afterwards made a school.

In his present frame of mind Zorzi felt a foolish impulse to take them down and smash them one by one in the big jar into which the failures were thrown, to be melted again in the main furnace, for in a gla.s.s-house nothing is thrown away. He knew it was foolish, and he held his hands behind him as he looked at the things, wishing that he had never made them, that he had never learned the art he was forbidden by law to practise, that he had never left Dalmatia as a little boy long ago, that he had never been born.

The door opened suddenly and Giovanni entered. Zorzi turned and looked at him in silence. He was surprised, but he supposed that the master's son had a right to come if he chose, though he never showed himself in the gla.s.s-house when his father was in Murano.

"Are you alone here?" asked Giovanni, looking about him. "Do none of the workmen come here?"

"The master has left me in charge of his work," answered Zorzi. "I need no help."

Giovanni seated himself in his father's chair and looked at the table before the window.

"It is not very hard work, I fancy," he observed, crossing one leg over the other and pulling up his black hose to make it fit his lean calf better.

Zorzi suspected at once that he had come in search of information, and paused before answering.

"The work needs careful attention," he said at last.

"Most gla.s.s-work does," observed Giovanni, with a harsh little laugh. "Are you very attentive, then? Do you remember to do all that my father told you?"

"The master only left this morning. So far, I have obeyed his orders."

"I do not understand how a man who is not a gla.s.s-blower can know enough to be left alone in charge of a furnace," said Giovanni, looking at Zorzi's profile.

This time Zorzi was silent. He did not think it necessary to tell how much he knew.

"I suppose my father knows what he is about," continued Giovanni, in a tone of disapproval.

Zorzi thought so too, and no reply seemed necessary. He stood still, looking out of the window, and wishing that his visitor would go away. But Giovanni had no such intention.

"What are you making?" he asked presently.

"A certain kind of gla.s.s," Zorzi answered.

"A new colour?"

"A certain colour. That is all I can tell you."

"You can tell me what colour it is," said Giovanni. "Why are you so secret? Even if my father had ordered you to be silent with me about his work, which I do not believe, you would not be betraying anything by telling me that. What colour is he trying to make?"

"I am to say nothing about it, not even to you. I obey my orders."

Giovanni was a gla.s.s-maker himself. He rose with an air of annoyance and crossed the laboratory to the jar in which the broken gla.s.s was kept, took out a piece and held it up against the light. Zorzi had made a movement as if to hinder him, but he realised at once that he could not lay hands on his master's son. Giovanni laughed contemptuously and threw the fragment back into the jar.

"Is that all? I can do better than that myself!" he said, and he sat down again in the big chair.