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Below the blue is stained by the smoke of steamers and flecked with the many-coloured sails of other craft, while in the middle-distance populous Trieste stretches round the curve of the bay, with many vessels at its wharves, and the smoke from the Lloyd-Arsenal mingling with that from the iron-works at Muggia beyond S. Servolo across the bay; or, if it should be night, lines of lights define the long stretch of quays and streets like strings of pearls, and sparkle up the heights which the houses climb in several directions.
They had passed San Lazzaro, and San Servolo too was receding astern of them before May spoke again. "Pauline," she queried, presently, "did you see Nanni's gondola come up from out the lagoon in front of us?" "Yes, I saw it. How ghostly it was, with his solitary figure, and then that tragic face of his in the light of the lanterns!"
"There's the flag-ship over by San Servolo," Geof would exclaim, seizing an oar and giving immediate chase; or they would cruise about in an aimless way until Kenwick dropped the remark that the Colonel had said something about a trip to Murano that day. The casual nature of Kenwick's allusions to the Colonel's party afforded Geof no little amusement.
Above the altar of S. Giusto, to the right, in the semi-dome, SS. Giusto and Servolo stand on each side of our Saviour, beneath whose feet are two monsters, asp and basilisk. The central apse was reconstructed in the seventeenth century. The main reconstruction took place in the fourteenth century.
The twin towers of San Servolo, its massive buildings and sparse lights, had been left behind, and now the gondola was approaching San Lazzaro, wrapped in silence and shadow, like the good monks who pace its quiet paths. Neither of the girls had felt inclined to talk, yet their sense of mutual companionship was peculiarly near and intimate.
Mark; and so terrible was the shock, that he nearly fell from his seat. He tells us that he felt for the moment unchristian indignation and revolt, when he thought of the octogenarian idiots he had seen that morning at the asylum on the island of San Servolo, and then of Balzac cut off in his prime; but he checked himself, for he remembered that all souls are equal in the sight of God.
Vervain fell fitfully silent. Now and then Ferris briefly spoke, calling Miss Vervain's notice to this or that, and she briefly responded. As they passed the mad-house of San Servolo, a maniac standing at an open window took his black velvet skull-cap from his white hair, bowed low three times, and kissed his hand to the ladies.
In front lay San Giorgio, picturesque with its church and pathetic with its political prisons; and, farther away to the east again, the gloomy mass of the madhouse at San Servolo, and then the slender campanili of the Armenian convent rose over the gleaming and tremulous water.
There is a picture by Benedetto Carpaccio, of the Madonna, between SS. Giusto and Servolo, in the right-hand portion of the church. The treasury is kept in the chapel of S. Antonio Abate, to the north of the apse of the Santissimo; it is closed with a very fine late Renaissance German iron grille, with elaborate projecting floral bosses.
The other two are S. Sergio, a soldier, whose halberd still appears in the arms of the town, and S. Servolo, a pious youth who lived at one time in a grotto not far from this place, where they both were martyred. There is said to have been a bishop in the fourth century, but the list of authentic bishops begins with Frugiferus in the sixth.
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