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At night all Venice was illuminated, and from his covered gondola the French ambassador saw the fireworks and the banquetings that were held at the palaces of the other envoys. He understood what it all meant, and trembled for his king's safety. But he lost no time, and sent warnings both to Orleans at Asti and to Charles at Naples, of the coming storm.
"Even poorer than the rest of them. I wonder what is the reason." "So do I," said May. "Nanni, is your gondola a very old one?" "Si, Signorina; very old." "What a pity! It must be very bad for you. Which is your ferry?" "I don't belong to any." "But I thought every gondolier belonged to a ferry." There was no reply. "Isn't that so?" May insisted. "Si, Signorina, but I am no longer a gondolier."
And in her excitement she began to chatter fast and loudly, mostly to Sir Richard repeating some of the Venice tales she had told in the gondola with much inconsequence and extravagance. The old man listened, his hands on his stick, his eyes on the ground, the expression on his strong mouth hostile or sarcastic.
He seems to me to be too bashful to manage an intrigue with skill." So the elector gave orders to follow the gondola of the Prince of Savoy; and now his gondoliers, too, were rowing for their lives, while many a bright eye was turned admiringly upon his tall, graceful form. Laura was not the only person that was looking out from the curtained bucentoro.
He was rowed to the leading gondola, and, by a sign, directed to the dead body. "Thou see'st that corpse, father?" continued his conductor. "It is the face of one who was an upright and pious Christian!" "He was." "We all knew him as the oldest and the most skilful fisherman of the Lagunes, and one ever ready to assist an unlucky companion." "I can believe thee!"
And he has sworn so great an oath, by that most ancient Madonna of Castello, and so well has he vindicated the honor and splendor of his house in thus early appropriating this recent glory of Venetian workmanship in its own family emblem, that there is no present need of distance between him and his rival, and resting upon his oar, as he stands with a proud and graceful bearing of victory, he allows the gondola to glide back into position with the lapping of the water.
This is a strange, weird, beautiful thing when the black gondola sways a little from side to side in the moonlight. Angelo keeps ours polished so that it shines like silver in the morning sun, and he has an exquisite conscientiousness in rubbing every trace of brass about his precious craft. He has a little box under the prow full of bottles and brushes and rags.
"Santa Maria!" he exclaimed, crossing himself, and awkward under the unaccustomed sense of an overwhelming compassion. "The Holy Mother must shrive me for breaking my vow, for if San Marco and San Teodoro would give me a place between them before the matins ring again mistaking me for a traitor I cannot take thee from Venice. We will return," and already the gondola was yielding to his stroke.
So Arthur good-humoredly changed the canal into a gracefully flowing river, in a bend of which, in the distance, there was just visible a boat, which was a cross between a gondola and one of those little dangerous things so common on the lakes of Wisconsin.
In another moment, "Good-morning," she said briskly, with a sort of airy sob, "I don't want you to come down, please." She drifted out of the room and down the stairs, the servant-maid falling into her wake. Ferris filled his pipe and went out on his balcony again, and stood watching the gondola in its course toward the address he had given, and smoking thoughtfully.
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