The Veiled Lady, and Other Men and Women Part 3

I

For centuries the painters of Venice have seized and made their own the objects they loved most in this wondrous City by the Sea. Ca.n.a.letto, ignoring every other beautiful thing, laid hold of quays backed by lines of palaces bordering the Grand Ca.n.a.l, dotted with queer gondolas rowed by gondoliers, in queerer hoods of red or black, depending on the guild to which they belonged. Turner stamped his ownership on sunset skies, silver dawns, illuminations, fetes, and once in a while on a sweep down the ca.n.a.l past the Salute, its dome a huge incandescent pearl. Ziem tied up to the long wall and water steps of the Public Garden, aflame with sails of red and gold: he is still there--was the last I heard of him, octogenarian as he is. Rico tacks his card to garden walls splashed with the cool shadows of rose-pink oleanders dropping their blossoms into white and green ripples, melting into blue. As for me--I have laid hands on a ca.n.a.l--the Rio Giuseppe--all of it--from the beginning of the red wall where the sailors land, along its crookednesses to the side entrance of the Public Garden, and so past the rookeries to the lagoon, where the tower of Castello is ready to topple into the sea.

Not much of a ca.n.a.l--not much of a painting ground really, to the masters who have gone before and are still at work, but a truly lovable, lovely, and most enchanting possession to me their humble disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and, once out, you are miserable until you get back again. On one side stretches a row of rookeries--a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other runs the long brick wall of the garden,--soggy, begrimed; streaked with moss and lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which ma.s.s and sway the great sycamores that Ziem loves, their lower branches interwoven with zinn.o.ber cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun drips gold.

Only wide enough for a barca and two gondolas to pa.s.s--this ca.n.a.l of mine. Only deep enough to let a wine barge through; so narrow you must go all the way back to the lagoon if you would turn your gondola; so short you can row through it in five minutes; every inch of its water surface part of everything about it, so clear are the reflections; full of moods, whims, and fancies, this wave s.p.a.ce--one moment in a broad laugh coquetting with a bit of blue sky peeping from behind a cloud, its cheeks dimpled with sly undercurrents, the next swept by flurries of little winds, soft as the breath of a child on a mirror; then, when aroused by a pa.s.sing boat, breaking out into ribbons of color--swirls of twisted doorways, flags, awnings, flower-laden balconies, black-shawled Venetian beauties all upside down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters--a bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of any painter living or dead.

On summer days--none other for me in Venice (the other fellow can have it in winter)--everybody living in the rookeries camps out on the quay, the women sitting in groups stringing beads, the men flat on the pavement mending their nets. On its edge, hanging over the water, reaching down, holding on by a foot or an arm to the iron rail, are ma.s.sed the children--millions of children--I never counted them, but still I say millions of children. This has gone on since I first staked out my claim--was a part of the inducement, in fact, that decided me to move in and take possession--boats, children, still water, and rookeries being the ingredients from which I concoct color combinations that some misguided people take home and say they feel better for.

If you ask me for how many years I have been sole owner of this stretch of water I must refer you to Loretta, who had lived just five summers when my big gondolier, Luigi, pulled her dripping wet from the ca.n.a.l, and who had lived eleven more--sixteen, in all--when what I have to tell you happened.

And yet, Loretta's little mishap, now I come to think of it, does not go back far enough. My claim was really staked out before she was born (I am still in possession--that is--I was last year, and hope to be this), and her becoming part of its record is but the sticking of two pins along a chart,--the first marking her entrance at five and the second her exit at sixteen. All the other years of my occupation--those before her coming and since her going--were, of course, full of the kind of joy that comes to a painter, but these eleven years--well, these had all of this joy and then, too, they had--Loretta.

I was in the bow of the gondola when the first of these two pins found its place on the chart, working away like mad, trying to get the exact shadow tones on a sun-flecked wall. Luigi was aft, fast asleep, his elbow under his head: I never object, for then he doesn't shake the boat. Suddenly from out the hum of the children's voices there came a scream vibrant with terror. Then a splash! Then the gondola swayed as if a barca had b.u.mped it, and the next thing I knew Luigi's body made a curve through the air, struck the water, with an enormous souse, and up came Loretta, her plump, wet little body resting as easily on Luigi's hand, as a tray rests on a waiter's. Another sweep with his free arm, and he pa.s.sed me the dripping child and clambered up beside her. The whole affair had not occupied two minutes.

That was a great day for me!

Heretofore I had been looked upon as a squatter: possessing certain rights, of course, and more or less welcome because of sundry lire expended for the temporary use of fishing boats with sails up,--but still an interloper. Now I became one of the thousand families and the million children. These were all in evidence in less than ten seconds; the peculiar quality of that scream had done it; not only from the top story of the highest rookery did they swarm, but from every near-by campo, and way back to the shipyards.

Luigi pushed the gondola to the quay and I lifted out the water-soaked, blue-lipped little tot, her hair flattened against her cheeks (she was laughing now,--"It was nothing," she said, "my foot slipped,") and placed her in the hands of the longest-armed fishwife; and then Luigi disappeared into a door, level with the quay, from which he reappeared ten minutes later in a suit of dry clothes, the property of a fisherman, and of so grotesque a fit, the trousers reaching to his knees and the cuffs of the coat to his elbows, that he set the population in a roar. My Luigi, you might as well know, is six feet and an inch, with the torso of a Greek G.o.d and a face that is twin to Colleone's, and, furthermore, is quite as distinguished looking as that gentleman on horseback, even if he does wear a straw hat instead of a copper helmet. After this Loretta became part of my establishment, especially at luncheon time, Luigi hunting her up and bringing her aboard in his arms, she clinging to his grizzled, sunburned neck. Often she would spend the rest of the day watching me paint.

All I knew of her antecedents and life outside of these visits was what Luigi told me. She was born, he said, in the shipyards, and at the moment lived in the top of the rookery nearest the bridge. She had an only sister, who was ten years older; the mother was the wife of a crab fisherman who had died some years before; the two children and mother were cared for by a brother crab fisherman. His son Francesco, if report were true, was to marry the sister when she turned fifteen, Frances...o...b..ing four years older. This last reference to Francesco came with a shake of the head and a certain expression in Luigi's eyes which told me at once that his opinion of the prospective groom was not for publication--a way he has when he dislikes somebody and is too polite to express it.

"Fishes for crabs, like his father?" I asked.

"Yes, crabs and young girls," he answered with a frown. "A poor lot, these crab catchers, Signore. Was it the charcoal or a brush you wanted?"

Francesco did not interest me,--nor did the grownup sister; nor the mother, over whom Luigi also shrugged his shoulders. It was Loretta's chubbiness that delighted my soul.

Even at five she was a delightful little body, and full of entrancing possibilities. One can always tell what the blossom will be from the bud. In her case, all the essentials of beauty were in evidence: dark, l.u.s.trous velvety eyes; dazzling teeth--not one missing; jet-black hair--and such a wealth of it, almost to her shoulders; a slender figure, small hands and feet; neat, well-turned ankles and wrists, and rounded plump arms above the elbows.

"What do you intend to do, little one, when you grow up?" I asked her one morning. She was sitting beside me, her eyes following every movement of my brush.

"Oh, what everybody does. I shall string beads and then when I get big like my sister I shall go to the priest and get married, and have a ring and new shoes and a beautiful, beautiful veil all over my hair."

"So! And have you picked him out yet?"

"Oh, no, Signore! Why, I am only a little girl. But he will surely come,--they always come."

These mornings in the gondola continued until she was ten years old.

Sometimes it was a melon held high in the air that tempted her; or a basket of figs, or some huge bunches of grapes; or a roll and a broiled fish from a pa.s.sing cook-boat: but the bait always sufficed. With a little cry of joy the beads would be dropped, or the neighbor's child pa.s.sed to another or whatever else occupied her busy head and small hands, and away she would run to the water steps and hold out her arms until Luigi rowed over and lifted her in. She had changed, of course, in these five years, and was still changing, but only as an expanding bud changes. The eyes were the same and so were the teeth--if any had dropped out, newer and better ones had taken their places; the hair though was richer, fuller, longer, more like coils of liquid jet, with a blue sheen where the sky lights touched its folds. The tight, trim little figure, too, had loosened out in certain places--especially about the chest and hips. Before many years she would flower into the purest type of the Venetian--the most beautiful woman the world knows.

At sixteen she burst into bloom.

I have never seen a black tulip, not a real velvet-black, but if inside its shroud of glossy enfoldings--so like Loretta's hair--there lies enshrined a mouth red as a pomegranate and as enticing, and if above it there burn two eyes that would make a holy man clutch his rosary; and if the flower sways on its stalk with the movement of a sapling caressed by a summer breeze;--then the black tulip is precisely the kind of flower that Loretta bloomed into.

And here the real trouble began,--just as it begins for every other pretty Venetian, and here, too, must I place the second pin in my chart.

It all came through Francesco. The older sister had died with the first child, and this crab catcher had begun to stretch out his claws for Loretta. She and her mother still lived with Francesco's father, who was a widower. The mother kept the house for all,--had done so for Francesco and her daughter during their brief married life.

In her persecution Loretta would pour out her heart to Luigi, telling how they bothered her,--her mother the most of all. She hated Francesco,--hated his father,--hated everybody who wanted her to marry the fisherman. (Luigi, poor fellow, had lost his only daughter when she was five years of age, which accounted, I always thought, for his interest in the girl.)

One morning she called to him and waited on the quay until he could hail a pa.s.sing barca and step from the gondola to its deck and so ash.o.r.e. Then the two disappeared through the gate of the garden.

"She is too pretty to go alone," he explained on his return. "Every day she must pay a boy two soldi, Signore, to escort her to the lace factory--the boy is sick today and so I went with her. But their foolishness will stop after this;--these rats know Luigi."

From this day on Loretta had the Riva to herself.

II

So far there has been introduced into this story the bad man, Francesco, with crab-like tendencies, who has just lost his wife; the ravishingly beautiful Loretta; the girl's mother, of whom all sorts of stories were told--none to her credit; big tender-hearted Luigi Za.n.a.letto, prince of gondoliers, and last, and this time least, a staid old painter who works in a gondola up a crooked ca.n.a.l which is smothered in trees, choked by patched-up boats and flanked by tattered rookeries so shaky that the slightest earth quiver would tumble them into kindling wood.

There enters now another and much more important character,--one infinitely more interesting to my beautiful Lady of the Shipyards than any grandfather gondolier or staid old painter who ever lived. This young gentleman is twenty-one; has a head like the Hermes, a body like the fauns, and winsome, languishing eyes with a light in their depths which have set the heart of every girl along his native Giudecca pitapatting morning, noon, and night. He enjoys the distinguished name of Vittorio Borodini, and is the descendant of a family of gondoliers--of the guild of the Castellani--who can trace their ancestral calling back some two hundred years (so can Luigi; but then Luigi never speaks of it, and the Borodinis always do). Being aristocrats, the Za.n.a.lettos and Borodinis naturally fraternize, and as they live in the same quarter--away up on the Giudecca--two miles from my ca.n.a.l--the fathers of Vittorio and Luigi have become intimate friends. Anything, therefore, touching the welfare of any one of the descendants of so honorable a guild is more or less vital to the members of both families.

At the moment something HAD touched a Borodino--and in the most vital of spots. This was nothing less than the heart of young Vittorio, the pride and hope of his father. He had seen the "Rose of the Shipyards,"

as she was now called, pa.s.s the traghetto of the Molo, off which lay his gondola awaiting custom,--it was on one of the days when the two-soldi boy acted as chaperon,--and his end had come.

It had only been a flash from out the lower corner of the left eye of Loretta as she floated along past the big columns of the Palazzo of the Doges, but it had gone through the young gondolier and out on the other side, leaving a wound that nothing would heal. She had not intended to hurt him, or even to attract him;--he only happened to be in the way when her search-light illumined his path.

Vittorio knew at a glance that she came from the rookeries and that he, the scion of a n.o.ble family, should look higher for his mate, but that made no difference. She was built for him and he was built for her, and that was the end of it: not for an intrigue--he was not constructed along those lines--but with a ring and a priest and all the rest of it.

The main difficulty was to find some one who knew her. He would not,--could not, confront her; nor would he follow her home; but something must be done, and at once: a conclusion, it will be admitted, than an incalculable number of young Vittorios have reached, sooner or later, the world over.

When, therefore, a rumor came to his ears that Luigi the Primo was protecting her--the kind of protection that could never be misunderstood in Luigi's case--a piece of news which his informer was convinced would end the projected intrigue of the young gondolier, then and there and for all time, Vittorio laughed so loud and so long, and so merrily, that he lost, in consequence, two fares to San Giorgio, and came near being reprimanded by the Gastaldo for his carelessness.

That was why late one afternoon (I was painting the sunset glow) just as Loretta reached the edge of the quay on her way home, a young fellow, in white duck with a sash of dark red silk binding and hanging from his waist and a rakish straw hat tipped over his handsome face, shot his gondola alongside mine and leaned over to whisper something in Luigi's ear. And that was why the girl in her long black shawl stopped, and why Luigi immediately changed gondolas and made for the quay, and why they all talked together for a moment, the girl flashing and the boy beaming, and that was why, too, they all three disappeared a moment later in the direction of the high rookery where lived the baffled, love-sick Francesco, his anxious father, the much-talked-about mother, and the Rose of the Shipyards.

In a garden where the soil is so rich that a seedling of five--a mere slip--blooms into flower before a foolish old painter can exhaust the subjects along the ca.n.a.l, it is not surprising that a love affair reaches its full growth between two suns. Not since the day she had tumbled into the ca.n.a.l had she gone so headover-heels--both of them.

Nor did Luigi pull them out. He helped in the drowning, really.

He was talking to himself when he came back--a soft light in his eyes, a smile lingering around the corners of his up-turned, grizzled mustache.

"It is good to be young, Signore, is it not?" was all he said, and at once began bundling up my traps.

Before the week was out,--nay, before the setting of two suns--every gossip along the Riva--and they about covered the population--had become convinced that Loretta was lost to the Quarter. Unless a wedding ring was to end it all Vittorio would never be so bold in his attentions to Loretta, as to walk home with her nights and wait for her mornings.

Luigi shook his head, but he did not help the gossips solve the problem. He had had trouble enough already with Vittorio's father.

"A common wench from the yards, I hear, Luigi!" he had blazed out--"and you, I understand, brought them together--you,--who have been my friend for--"

"Stop, Borodini! Not another word! You are angry, and when you are angry you are stupid. I carried that girl in my arms when she was a baby! I have watched over her ever since. A wench! Not one of your own daughters has a heart so white. If Vittorio is so great a coward as to listen to their talk I'll keep her for his betters."

All this snapped out of Luigi's eyes and rolled from under his crisp mustache as he repeated the outbreak to me. What the end might be neither the Giudecca nor San Giuseppe could decide. The Borodinis were proud; Vittorio's father was one of the gondoliers belonging to the palace and always rowed the good Queen Margherita when she came incognito to Venice,--a post which greatly enhanced his social station.

Vittorio was the only son, and already a member of the traghetto, young as he was. But then, were there any girls better than Loretta, or as good? She helped her mother; she paid her share of the rent to Francesco's father; she gave to the poor box. That she was the sunshine of the Quarter every one knew who heard her sweet, cheery voice. As to her family, it was true that her mother was a Sicilian who boiled over sometimes in a tempest of rage, like Vesuvius,--but her father had been one of them. And then again, was she not the chosen friend of Luigi, the Primo, and of the crazy painter who haunted the ca.n.a.l? The boy and his father might be glad, etc., etc.

The only persons who were oblivious to the talk were the two lovers.