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Marina had loved the baby the more passionately, perhaps, for the sake of her only sister Toinetta, Piero's child-bride, who had died at the baby's birth, because she was painfully conscious that Toinetta's little flippant life had needed much forgiveness and had been crowned with little gladness.
Hitherto, for Toinetta, there had been no difficulties, and now there were so many she was frightened and did not understand; now, when Piero scolded at her tears or temper she could not run away nor change him for a pleasanter companion, and she knew no other way to manage such a difficulty; and there was no pleasure in the Piazza because of that eternal critica.
The girl stirred his passion too deeply, roused his will to conquer too irresistibly to permit him to forego the privilege of the place and hour. She looked up at him and he smiled down at her, once more the master-lover. "I was right, was I not, Toinetta mia? I did make you a little bit mine, did I not? Be honest. Tell me."
And now, at her window, Marina had the night and the stars to herself, over the still lagoon and down in its mirroring depths. It was a sad little tale soon told, this tragedy of Toinetta which had seemed so great to the dwellers in that home three years ago.
When she raised her head she spoke in a resolute, restrained voice. "Since thou wilt have it, Piero listen. And rest thine oar, for we are almost home; and to-night must be quite the end of all this talk. It can never be. Thou hast no understanding of such matters, so I forgive thee for myself. But for Toinetta I do not think I ever can forgive thee, may the good Madonna help me!"
You will like it even better when you have danced with me. It is then that you will know what it is to dance. We shall dance and dance and love. I shall make you mine dancing, Toinetta mia." Tony shrank back from his ardent eyes and his veiled threat. She was a passionate devotee of her own freedom. She did not want to be made his or any man's certainly not his.
But when the wedding oration had been preached over those twelve bridal pairs, and the wedding benediction had been granted, it was not Gabriele, the boyish betrothed of Toinetta, who brought the blushing bride, partly in triumph and partly in pique, to her father's side, but Piero Salin, the handsomest gondolier on the lagoons, the most daring and dreaded foe of all the established traghetti.
To make part of the pretty pageant of the "Brides of Venice," which took place on Lady Day in San Pietro in Castello, the maidens, all in white with floating hair, their dower-boxes fastened by ribbons from their shoulders, had seemed to Toinetta, as she stood each year an onlooker in the admiring crowd, a happiness devoutly to be desired.
Gabriele, the jilted lover of Toinetta, over whom Piero had triumphed, soon became the husband of another donzel, handsomer than Toinetta had been poor, foolish Toinetta! and the retributive tragedy of her little life had warmed the sullen Gabriele into a magnanimity that rendered him at least a safe, if a moody and unpleasant, member of the traghetto in which Piero had since become a rising star.
His own way had always been the right way for him rules of all orders to the contrary whether he had been a wandering gondolier, a despised barcariol toso, lording it so outrageously over the established traghetti that they were glad to forgive him his bandit crimes and swear him into membership, if only to stop his influence against them; or whether it had been the stealing away of a promised bride, as on that memorable day at San Pietro in Castello, when he had married Toinetta it was never safe to bear "vendetta" with one so strong and handsome and unprincipled as Piero.
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