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Barozzo was not a suitor to be rejected by her sordid father; and, without any appeal to his daughter's inclinations, her hand was promised to a man of more than twice her age, forbidding in his exterior, coarse and revolting in his manners, and utterly destitute of redeeming qualities.
To this tale of visionary and real horrors, heightened and dramatised by the indignant eloquence of Colonna, I listened with intense interest, and my abhorrence of the monstrous cruelty of Barozzo swelled into active sympathy and a firm resolve to second, at all hazards, the just vengeance of this noble and deeply-injured youth.
Controlling, however, with sudden effort his agitation, he resumed his seat, and, with averted looks and seeming indifference, inquired if Colonna had resided long in Venice. The painter filled his brush, and answered carelessly, that he had lived there a few months. "Your accent is Tuscan," continued Barozzo. "Are you a native of Florence?"
Whether the remembrance of this kindness excited his compunction, or whether he wished to atone for his past offences, I know not, but he thus addressed me in broken accents: "'Son of Montalto! a just retribution has overtaken me. My necessities sold me to the savage Barozzo.
Dashing the paint out of his brush, he fixed a look of startling fierceness on Barozzo, and answered, with marked and bitter emphasis, "He was a sword-cutler, and made excellent blades." At this critical moment Laura entered the room with her mother to observe the progress of Barozzo's portrait.
They were in habits of daily intercourse, and Barozzo was not the man who would, from honourable feeling, decline to forward the murderous views of the implacable ruler of Tuscany. From this eventful day Colonna was an altered man.
Every proposal was, however, promptly rejected by the ambitious Foscari, who, like a cold and calculating trader, measured the merits of each suitor by the extent of his possessions. At length, after the conclusion of the war with Turkey in the spring, arrived from Greece the governor of Candia, Ercole Barozzo, whose splendid establishment and lavish expenditure attracted universal attention.
Laura's abhorrence of the presuming and insolent Barozzo has proved a powerful auxiliary to my renewed entreaties that she would fly with me from the miseries which menace her, and I have recently succeeded in obtaining her reluctant consent to accompany me to Genoa, and from thence to Greece.
Conceiving that the portentous agitation of Barozzo had grown out of some incipient feelings of jealousy and suspicion, I remonstrated with Colonna, during our walk, on the gratuitous imprudence of his deportment, and pointed out the personal danger he had incurred by thus taunting a man so powerful and irritable as the governor of Candia.
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