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Here were stored air- guns, pistols, and blunderbusses; poisons of various kinds and operating in various ways; garments fit for every possible disguise, whether to personate the monk, the Jew, or the mendicant; the soldier, the sailor, or the gondolier. One day he summoned Abellino to attend him in his armoury. "Mark me," said he, "thou wilt turn out a brave fellow, that I can see already.
I told her to keep quiet, but, being anxious not to frighten her, I dared not acquaint her with the danger we were running. The gondolier, however, had not the same reasons for sparing her feelings, and he called out to us in a stentorian voice that, if we did not keep quiet, we were all lost. His threat had the desired effect, and we reached the landing without mishap.
He opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that it was a long one; wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, who was tender with his valet and his stable-boy, with his old gondolier and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him. The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa.
"He who would find favor with Jupiter must put his own shoulder to the wheel, thou knowest, my friend." The eye of Gino brightened, and he was voluble in his expression of thanks. They had ascended to the first floor, and were already deep in a suite of gloomy apartments, before the gratitude and professional pride of the gondolier were exhausted.
Intoxicated with the wildness of his hopes, he rushed out of the garden. He summoned a gondolier, threw himself into the boat, and hastened to the dwelling of Cinthia, where the inhabitants already were folded in the arms of sleep. "Hark, comrade," said Matteo the next morning to Abellino; "to-day thou shalt make thy first step in our profession."
And far away, perhaps, in the quainter squares of the more primitive island villages in Burano or Chioggia before the Duomo, some reader lies at full length in the brilliant moonlight under the banner of San Marco, his "Boccaccio" open before him, repeating in a half-chant, monotonous and droning, some favorite tale from the well-worn pages to listeners who pause in groups in their evening stroll and linger until another story is begun; this time it is some strophe from the "Gerusalemme," to which a passing gondolier may chant the answering strain for this is the very poem of the people, echoing familiarly from lip to lip, and tales from the Tasso are not seldom wrought into the ebony carvings of their barks.
One may say as a general thing that there is something rather awkward in the movement even of the most graceful gondolier, and something graceful in the movement of the most awkward. In the graceful men of course the grace predominates, and nothing can be finer than the large, firm way in which, from their point of vantage, they throw themselves over their tremendous oar.
He did a good deal of pondering in the course of that day and the next, and, as he was quite unable to justify, or even to formulate his anxieties, he wished that he might at least find out whether the truth in regard to the gondolier were known to May. That might throw some light upon the subject.
Sharp corners are turned quickly, swift-moving boats are passed, narrow passages entered, and we glide into deep shadows under bridges, but never a collision, or danger of one, occurs. The gondolier at crossings cries out his warning. We hear, but do not see, another who calls aloud in similar tones. The two voices are heard again, each in an echo.
Stefano in some such voice as one would use to a dog, and to have bullied the men with the whine of a young kitten. Corpo di Bacco! One hath need of experience in these affairs, Signor Roderigo, to know even his own merits." "I believe thee. But who is this Gino of whom thou hast spoken, and what has his occupation, as a gondolier, to do with one known in thy youth in Calabria?"
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