Venetian Masque

'My poor Isotta! Poor child! Courage, courage! We are not at the marriage yet, and please God we never shall be. Do you think I want that nasty rogue for a brother-in-law? You were clever to compel postponement of the decision. We have a month. And in a month . . . What cannot happen in a month?' He kissed her tenderly, and as she clung to him, fondly, gratefully, he pursued his encouragements. 'I'll not be idle in the time. I'll begin by trying to discover something more about his quarrel with Marc, and how it came, after all, to be fought. It may be known. Leave me to investigate. Then perhaps we can decide on something.'

But for all his earnest brotherly intentions, Domenico, like his father, having always held aloof from the more frivolous groups of Venetian society, which both Vendramin and Marc-Antoine had been frequenting at the time of the duel, did not find it easy to penetrate it now. Moreover, his opportunities were curtailed by an increase of military duties. The consternation caused by the revolts of Bergamo and Brescia was not allayed by the news that reached Venice as the month of March wore on.

Bonaparte, having forced the passage of the Tagliamento, had steadily thrust the Austrian army back and back until before the end of the month the Archduke Charles was assembling the broken remnants of it at Klagenfurth, and the Army of Italy stood on enemy territory and the road to Vienna.

Lodovico Manin had not even been constrained to face the agony of a pronouncement in the matter of that eleventh-hour alliance with the Austrians, nor had the Grand Council ever been assembled to debate the matter. By the time that Count Pizzamano had placed before the Doge his information concerning the French plan, the Army of Italy was already advancing. It was too late for any measure beyond that of fortifying the actual city of Venice in a deluded hope of preserving her from violation, whatever happened.

For this the Council of Ten had issued the necessary orders, and it may have occurred to them that, considering the anger of the inhabitants with a government whose ineptitude seemed now completely established, if the troops assembled in the capital could not ultimately be used to protect the city from the French, they could certainly be used in the meantime to protect the government from the city.

Meanwhile, as a further measure of pacification, rumours were diligently being circulated. It was said, untruly, that the Emperor was sending down yet another army of seventy thousand men. Less untruthful—but of a significance not yet realized by the people—was the rumour that peace was about to be made.

The display of activity was not confined to the military. The agents of the inquisitors of state were now of an extraordinary diligence, and arrests upon denunciations of Jacobinism, of espionage, or other forms of treason were taking place on every hand. Disappearances in those days of panic were commonplace.

It was to a Venice scarcely recognizable that Marc-Antoine at last returned when he emerged from his convalescence at the legation. This did not happen until the early days of April, on the morrow, in fact, of the battle of Judenburg in which the Austrians suffered the final defeat of the campaign.

Although in Venice it was not yet suspected, the war was over, and within a week the suspension of hostilities would be signed.

The Vicomtesse had remained at the legation to tend Marc-Antoine until there was no longer a shadow of an excuse to justify her in neglecting the insidious propagandist work that Lallemant was demanding of her, the careful, gradual preparation of Venetian minds for what was to come. It was a work in which he was employing by now a small army of agents, many of whom were actually Venetian.

Her withdrawal had occurred as soon as Marc-Antoine was permitted to leave his bed and sit for a few hours by his window over-looking the Corte del Cavallo. It was an uninteresting prospect; but he sat in the sun, and this and the invigorating air of early spring helped forward his convalescence.

On the day when first he had sat there, in bedgown and slippers, his thick black hair loosely tied and a rug about his knees, he had expressed to the Vicomtesse his unstinted acknowledgment of a debt which it secretly troubled him to have contracted.

'I should not be alive, Anne, if it had not been for your care of me.'

She smiled upon him with a sad tenderness. She had been unsparing of herself, and the battle she had fought on his behalf with death had left its scars upon her. The winsome little face was pinched, and her true age, which in full state of health she dissembled under an almost childish freshness, was starkly revealed.

'That is too much to say. But if I have helped to preserve your life, that gives me something creditable to set against all the rest.'

'All the rest?'

She turned away, and busied herself in the arrangement of some early violets in a piece of majolica that stood upon the table.