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"You do not look like an Englishman," answered the captain; "you look like a Marano." "Sir, I cannot help my looks. I am a merchant of London, Castell by name. It is one well known in Seville and throughout this land, where I have large dealings, as, if I can but see him, your king himself will acknowledge.
Well, if it were not there, I should be where Ferdinand is, should I not? So I do not like it either, though it is good blood and ancient that of those high-bred Moors. Now, may not the nephew of a king and the son of a princess of Granada be fit to mate with the daughter of a Jew, yes, a Marano, and of a Christian English lady, of good family, but no more?"
Pretty soon he made a foolish, greedy goldsmith, one Marano, believe that there was a treasure hidden in the sand on the sea-shore near Palermo, and induced the silly man to go one night to dig it up.
Suddenly there appeared half a dozen fellows, the accomplices of the swindler, dressed to represent devils, with horns on their heads, claws to their fingers, and vomiting apparently red and blue flame. They were armed with pitchforks, with which they belaboured poor Marano till he was almost dead, and robbed him of his sixty ounces of gold and all the valuables he carried about his person.
Moreover, that marriage meant safety for himself; it meant a quiet age, a peaceable death in his own bed for, were he fifty times a Marano, who would touch the father-in-law of the Marquis de Morella? Why? Just because he had promised her in marriage to Peter Brome, and through all his life as a merchant he had never yet broken with a bargain because it went against himself. That was the answer.
The people rose, pillaged the houses of those who had summoned the foreigner, and declared that it would not separate its lot from that of the republic. So Treviso remained Venetian. Two other small towns, Marano and Osopo, followed her example; and for several months this was all that the Venetians preserved of their continental possessions.
It seemed to him so strange that he spoke of it to several of his friends, whom he mentions by name and who are ready to confirm his statements. On the 12th of October in the same year, in order to support a fellow-townsman in a duel, he accompanied the seconds, by motorcar, from Naples to Marano, a place which he had never visited nor even heard of.
Not long afterwards a place of no little importance on the coast near Venice, called Marano, having returned under the dominion of the Venetians, was restored and fortified with promptitude and diligence under the direction of San Michele.
He took no pains to disabuse the popular mind on this particular, but rather encouraged the belief than otherwise. He at last made use of it to cheat a silversmith, named Marano, of about sixty ounces of gold, and was in consequence obliged to leave Palermo.
Under this treaty the names of rich Maranos that are already well known here are to be recorded, so that when the time comes, and the active persecution of Jews and Maranos begins, they may be given up and brought to Spain for trial before the Inquisition. Also he is to arrange that no Jew or Marano may be allowed to take refuge in England.
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