Venetian Masque

'I have no doubt,' he said, 'that he will come to it,' and he changed the subject.

The ambassador had been able to simplify the task ahead of Vendramin by putting him in communication with a survivor of the associates of Sartoni. This man procured two others who were willing to work with him. But since the fate of their predecessors went to show with what terrible risks the task was fraught, these scoundrels required very substantial emoluments.

Vendramin found the embassy accommodatingly liberal. Lallemant did not stint supplies. Not only did he furnish the necessary funds for those wages of treachery, but he made no difficulty about adding fifty ducats, as a douceur to relieve the temporary embarrassment which Vendramin had not hesitated to confess to him.

As a result, and also because driven by anxiety to obtain possession of those incriminating drafts, Vendramin went to work with zealous and assiduous diligence.

Each morning when Zanetto—the chief of the men employed—brought him a rough note of the night's labours, he would spend some hours in carefully recording the figures on the chart he had prepared to receive them.

This, however, did not prevent him from making simultaneously a fuller parade than ever of his patriotic zeal at the Palazzo Pizzamano, where he was an almost daily visitor. There was, however, little to be done just then. Hope was encouraged by the persistent rumour that although Bonaparte was now in great strength, and although the Archduke Charles at Udine was not relaxing his warlike preparations, negotiations for peace were actively on foot.

Vendramin displayed a shrewdness, which he thought that future events might well come to establish, by refusing to share this optimism. He declared that the perceptible underground activities of the French contradicted these rumours. Venice, he reminded them, was full of French agents and French propagandists, working incalculable mischief.

One day, meeting Catarin Corner at the Casa Pizzamano, he actually expressed himself with some bitterness on the subject of the comparative inertia of the inquisitors.

'The danger,' he declared, 'is perhaps more to be feared than the guns of Bonaparte. It is an invasion of ideas, creeping insidiously into the foundations of the State. It is the hope of the apostles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, that if the Venetian oligarchy is not to be destroyed by force of arms, it shall nevertheless succumb to Jacobin intrigue.'

Corner assured him that the inquisitors were by no means either indifferent or inert. Idleness on the part of the inquisitors was not to be assumed from the absence of signs of their activities. It was not the way of the Three to leave footprints. If those responsible for military measures had been one half as active, the Republic today would stand delivered of every menace.

Vendramin deplored so much secrecy at such a time. A parade of the functioning of the inquisitors must prove a salutary deterrent to enemy agents.

Pizzamano listened and approved him, and in this way Ser Leonardo improved his credit with the Count, and at the same time increased the despair of Isotta.

She moved wan and listless in those days, and Vendramin's attitude towards her was not calculated to lighten her burden. Whilst outwardly the perfect courtier, yet his courtship held now an indefinable undercurrent of irony, which, whilst so slight and elusive that it was impossible to seize upon it, was nevertheless perceptible to her keen senses.

Sometimes, when Marc-Antoine was with them, she would detect on Vendramin's lip a faint curl that was not merely the secret mockery of one in whom he perceived a defeated rival; and in his glance at moments she would surprise a malevolence that made her almost afraid. Of the meeting between the two men she knew nothing, and of the open enmity between them they had tacitly agreed to allow nothing to transpire here. The fact that they had no love for each other was beyond dissembling: but at least they used towards each other a cold and distant civility.