Marietta | Page 7

a second time. She
fastened it in her bodice, looking down at it as she did so.
"I am so fond of roses," she said, smiling a little. "Are you?"
"I planted all those you have here," he answered.
"Yes--I know."
She looked up as she spoke, and met his eyes, and all at once she
laughed, not unkindly, nor as if at him, nor at what he had said, but
quietly and happily, as women do when they have got what they want.
Zorzi did not understand.
"You are gay," he said coldly.
"Do you wonder?" she asked. "If you knew what I know, you would

understand."
"But I do not."
Zorzi went back to his furnace, Marietta exchanged a few words with
her father and left the room again to go home.
In the garden she paused a moment by the rose-bush, where she had
talked with Zorzi, but there was not even the shadow of a smile in her
face now. She went down the dark corridor and called the porter, who
roused himself, opened the door and hailed the house opposite. A
woman looked out in the evening light, nodded and disappeared. A few
seconds later she came out of the house, a quiet little middle-aged
creature in brown, with intelligent eyes, and she crossed the shaky
wooden bridge over the canal to come and bring Marietta home. It
would have been a scandalous thing if the daughter of Angelo
Beroviero had been seen by the neighbours to walk a score of paces in
the street without an attendant. She had thrown a hood of dark green
cloth over her head, and the folds hung below her shoulders, half hiding
her graceful figure. Her step was smooth and deliberate, while the little
brown serving-woman trotted beside her across the wooden bridge.
The house of Angelo Beroviero hung over the paved way, above the
edge of the water, the upper story being supported by six stone columns
and massive wooden beams, forming a sort of portico which was at the
same time a public thoroughfare; but as the house was not far from the
end of the canal of San Piero which opens towards Venice, few people
passed that way.
Marietta paused a moment while the woman held the door open for her.
The sun had just set and the salt freshness that comes with the rising
tide was already in the air.
"I wish I were in Venice this evening," she said, almost to herself.
The serving-woman looked at her suspiciously.

CHAPTER II
The June night was dark and warm as Zorzi pushed off from the steps
before his master's house and guided his skiff through the canal,
scarcely moving the single oar, as the rising tide took his boat silently
along. It was not until he had passed the last of the glass-houses on his
right, and was already in the lagoon that separates Murano from Venice,
that he began to row, gently at first, for fear of being heard by some one
ashore, and then more quickly, swinging his oar in the curved crutch
with that skilful, serpentine stroke which is neither rowing nor sculling,
but which has all the advantages of both, for it is swift and silent, and
needs scarcely to be slackened even in a channel so narrow that the
boat itself can barely pass.
Now that he was away from the houses, the stars came out and he felt
the pleasant land breeze in his face, meeting the rising tide. Not a boat
was out upon the shallow lagoon but his own, not a sound came from
the town behind him; but as the flat bow of the skiff gently slapped the
water, it plashed and purled with every stroke of the oar, and a faint
murmur of voices in song was borne to him on the wind from the still
waking city.
He stood upright on the high stern of the shadowy craft, himself but a
moving shadow in the starlight, thrown forward now, and now once
more erect, in changing motion; and as he moved the same thought
came back and back again in a sort of halting and painful rhythm. He
was out that night on a bad errand, it said, helping to sell the life of the
woman he loved, and what he was doing could never be undone. Again
and again the words said themselves, the far-off voices said them, the
lapping water took them up and repeated them, the breeze whispered
them quickly as it passed, the oar pronounced them as it creaked softly
in the crutch rowlock, the stars spelled out the sentences in the sky, the
lights of Venice wrote them in the water in broken reflections. He was
not alone any more, for