Chapter I: HAVE made no attempt in these pages to review the splendors of the (2)

THERE is but one piazza in the world. There may be other splendid courts and squares, magnificent breathing spaces for the people, enriched by mosque and palace, bordered by wide-spreading trees, and adorned by noble statues. You know, of course, every slant of sunlight over the plaza of the Hippodrome, in Constantinople, with its slender twin needles of stone; you know the _Puerta del Sol_ of Madrid, cooled by the splash of sunny fountains and alive with the rush of Spanish life; and you know, too, the royal _Place de la Concorde_, brilliant with the never-ending whirl of pleasure-loving Paris. Yes, you know and may love them all, and yet there is but one grand piazza the world over; and that lies to-day in front of the Church of San Marco.

It is difficult to account for this fascination. Sometimes you think it lurks in the exquisite taper of the Campanile. Sometimes you think the secret of its charm is hidden in masterly carvings, delicacy of arch, or refinement of color. Sometimes the Piazza appeals to you only as the great open-air bricabrac shop of the universe, with its twin columns of stone stolen from the islands of the Archipelago; its bronze horses, church doors, and altar front wrested from Constantinople and the East; and its clusters of pillars torn from almost every heathen temple within reach of a Venetian galley.

When your eye becomes accustomed to the dazzling splendor of the surroundings, and you begin to analyze each separate feature of this Court of the Doges, you are even more enchanted and bewildered. San Marco itself no longer impresses you as a mere temple, with open portals and swinging doors; but as an exquisite jewel-case of agate and ivory, resplendent in gems and precious stones. The clock tower, with its dial of blue and gold and its figures of bronze, is not, as of old, one of a row of buildings, but a priceless ornament that might adorn the palace of some King of the Giants; while the _Loggia_ of Sansovino could serve as a mantel for his banquet hall, and any one of the three bronze sockets of the flag-staffs, masterpieces of Leopardo, hold huge candles to light him to bed.

And behind all this beauty of form and charm of handicraft, how lurid the background of tradition, cruelty, and crime! Poor Doge Francesco Foscari, condemning his own innocent son Jacopo to exile and death, in that very room overlooking the square; the traitor Marino Faliero, beheaded on the Giant Stairs of the palace, his head bounding to the pavement below; the perfidies of the Council of Ten; the state murders, tortures, and banishments; the horrors of the prisons of the _Piombi_; the silent death-stroke of the unsigned denunciations dropped into the _Bocca del Leone_--that fatal letter-box with its narrow mouth agape in the wall of stone, nightly filled with the secrets of the living, daily emptied of the secrets of the dead. All are here before you. The very stones their victims trod lie beneath your feet, their water-soaked cells but a step away.

As you pass between the twin columns of stone,--the pillars of Saint Theodore and of the Lion,--you shudder when you recall the fate of the brave Piedmontese, Carmagnola, a fate unfolding a chapter of cunning, ingratitude, and cruelty almost unparalleled in the history of Venice. You remember that for years this great hireling captain had led the armies of Venice and the Florentines against his former master, Philip of Milan; and that for years Venice had idolized the victorious warrior.

You recall the disastrous expedition against Cremona, a stronghold of Philip, and the subsequent anxiety of the Senate lest the sword of the great captain should be turned against Venice herself. You remember that one morning, as the story runs, a deputation entered the tent of the great captain and presented the confidence of the Senate and an invitation to return at once to Venice and receive the plaudits of the people. Attended by his lieutenant, Gonzaga, Carmagnola set out to obey. All through the plains of Lombardy, brilliant in their gardens of olive and vine, he was received with honor and welcome. At Mestre he was met by an escort of eight gentlemen in gorgeous apparel, special envoys dispatched by the Senate, who conducted him across the wide lagoon and down the Grand Canal, to this very spot on the Molo.

On landing from his sumptuous barge, the banks ringing with the shouts of the populace, he was led by his escort direct to the palace, and instantly thrust into an underground dungeon. Thirty days later, after a trial such as only the Senate of the period would tolerate, and gagged lest his indignant outcry might rebound in mutinous echoes, his head fell between the columns of San Marco.

There are other pages to which one could turn in this book of the past, pages rubricated in blood and black-lettered in crime. The book is opened here because this tragedy of Carmagnola recalls so clearly and vividly the methods and impulses of the times, and because, too, it occurred where all Venice could see, and where to-day you can conjure up for yourself the minutest details of the terrible outrage. Almost nothing of the scenery is changed. From where you stand between these fatal shafts, the same now as in the days of Carmagnola (even then two centuries old), there still hangs a balcony whence you could have caught the glance of that strong, mute warrior. Along the water’s edge of this same Molo, where now the gondoliers ply their calling, and the _lasagnoni_ lounge and gossip, stood the soldiers of the state drawn up in solid phalanx. Across the canal, by the margin of this same island of San Giorgio--before the present church was built--the people waited in masses, silently watching the group between those two stone posts that marked for them, and for all Venice, the doorway of hell. Above towered this same Campanile, all but its very top complete.

But you hurry away, crossing the square with a lingering look at this fatal spot, and enter where all these and a hundred other tragedies were initiated, the Palace of the Doges. It is useless to attempt a description of its wonderful details. If I should elaborate, it would not help to give you a clearer idea of this marvel of the fifteenth century. To those who know Venice, it will convey no new impression; to those who do not it might add only confusion and error.

Give yourself up instead to the garrulous old guide who assails you as you enter, and who, for a few _lire_, makes a thousand years as one day. It is he who will tell you of the beautiful gate, the _Porta della Carta_ of Bartolommeo Bon, with its statues weather-stained and worn; of the famous _Scala dei Giganti_, built by Rizzo in 1485; of the two exquisitely moulded and chased bronze well-heads of the court; of the golden stairs of Sansovino; of the ante-chamber of the Council of Ten; of the great _Sala di Collegio_, in which the foreign ambassadors were received by the Doge; of the superb senate chamber, the _Sala del Senato_; of the costly marbles and marvelous carvings; of the ceilings of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese; of the secret passages, dungeons, and torture chambers.

But the greatest of all these marvels of the Piazza still awaits you, the Church of San Marco. Dismiss the old guide outside the beautiful gate and enter its doors alone; here he would fail you.

If you come only to measure the mosaics, to value the swinging lamps, or to speculate over the uneven, half-worn pavement of the interior, enter its doors at any time, early morning or bright noonday, or whenever your practical, materialistic, nineteenth-century body would escape from the blaze of the sun outside. Or you can stay away altogether; neither you nor the world will be the loser. But if you are the kind of man who loves all beautiful things,--it may be the sparkle of early dew upon the grass, the silence and rest of cool green woods, the gloom of the fading twilight,--or if your heart warms to the sombre tones of old tapestries, armor, and glass, and you touch with loving tenderness the vellum backs of old books, then enter when the glory of the setting sun sifts in and falls in shattered shafts of light on altar, roof, and wall. Go with noiseless step and uncovered head, and, finding some deep-shadowed seat or sheltered nook, open your heart and mind and soul to the story of its past, made doubly precious by the splendor of its present. As you sit there in the shadow, the spell of its exquisite color will enchant you--color mellowing into harmonies you knew not of; harmonies of old gold and porphyry reds; the dull silver of dingy swinging lamps, with the soft light of candles and the dreamy haze of dying incense; harmonies of rich brown carvings and dark bronzes rubbed bright by a thousand reverent hands.

The feeling which will steal over you will not be one of religious humility, like that which took possession of you in the Saint Sophia of Constantinople. It will be more like the blind idolatry of the pagan, for of all the temples of the earth, this shrine of San Marco is the most worthy of your devotion. Every turn of the head will bring new marvels into relief; marvels of mosaic, glinting like beaten gold; marvels of statue, crucifix, and lamp; marvels of altars, resplendent in burnished silver and flickering tapers; of alabaster columns merging into the vistas; of sculptured saint and ceiling of sheeted gold; of shadowy aisle and high uplifted cross.

Never have you seen any such interior. Hung with the priceless fabrics and relics of the earth, it is to you one moment a great mosque, studded with jewels and rich with the wealth of the East; then, as its color deepens, a vast tomb, hollowed from out a huge, dark opal, in which lies buried some heroic soul, who in his day controlled the destinies of nations and of men. And now again, when the mystery of its light shimmers through windows covered with the dust of ages, there comes to this wondrous shrine of San Marco, small as it is, something of the breadth and beauty, the solitude and repose, of a summer night.

When the first hush and awe and sense of sublimity have passed away, you wander, like the other pilgrims, into the baptistery; or you move softly behind the altar, marveling over each carving of wood and stone and bronze; or you descend to the crypt and stand by the stone sarcophagus that once held the bones of the good saint himself.

As you walk about these shadowy aisles, and into the dim recesses, some new devotee swings back a door, and a blaze of light streams in, and you awake to the life of to-day.

Yes, there is a present as well as a past. There is another Venice outside; a Venice of life and joyousness and stir. The sun going down; the caffès under the arcades of the King’s Palace and of the _Procuratie Vecchie_ are filling up. There is hardly an empty table at Florian’s. The pigeons, too, are coming home to roost, and are nestling under the eaves of the great buildings and settling on the carvings of San Marco. The flower girls, in gay costumes, are making shops of the marble benches next the Campanile, assorting roses and pinks, and arranging their _boutonnières_ for the night’s sale. The awnings which have hung all day between the columns of the arcades are drawn back, exposing the great line of shops fringing three sides of the square. Lights begin to flash; first in the clusters of lamps illuminating the arcades, and then in the windows filled with exquisite bubble-blown Venetian glass, wood carvings, inlaid cabinets, cheap jewelry, gay-colored photographs and prints.

As the darkness falls, half a dozen men drag to the centre of the Piazza the segments of a great circular platform. This they surround with music-rests and a stand for the leader. Now the pavement of the Piazza itself begins filling up. Out from the Merceria, from under the clock tower, pours a steady stream of people merging in the crowds about the band-stand. Another current flows in through the west entrance, under the _Bocca di Piazza_, and still another from under the Riva, rounding the Doges’ Palace. At the Molo, just where poor Carmagnola stepped ashore, a group of officers--they are everywhere in Venice--land from a government barge. These are in full regalia, even to their white kid gloves, their swords dangling and ringing as they walk. They, too, make their way to the square and fill the seats around one of the tables at Florian’s, bowing magnificently to the old Countess who sits just inside the door of the caffè itself, resplendent, as usual, in dyed wig and rose-colored veil. She is taking off her long, black, fingerless silk gloves, and ordering her customary spoonful of cognac and lump of sugar. Gustavo, the head waiter, listens as demurely as if he expected a bottle of Chablis at least, with the customary commission for Gustavo--but then Gustavo is the soul of politeness. Some evil-minded people say the Countess came in with the Austrians; others, more ungallant, date her advent about the days of the early doges.

By this time you notice that the old French professor is in his customary place; it is outside the caffè, in the corridor, on a leather-covered, cushioned seat against one of the high pillars. You never come to the Piazza without meeting him. He is as much a part of its history as the pigeons, and, like them, dines here at least once a day. He is a perfectly straight, pale, punctilious, and exquisitely deferential relic of a by-gone time, whose only capital is his charming manner and his thorough knowledge of Venetian life. This combination rarely fails where so many strangers come and go; and then, too, no one knows so well the intricacies of an Italian kitchen as Professor Croisac.

Sometimes on summer evenings he will move back a chair at your own table and insist upon dressing the salad. Long before his greeting, you catch sight of him gently edging his way through the throng, the seedy, straight-brimmed silk hat in his hand brushed with the greatest precision; his almost threadbare frock-coat buttoned snug around his waist, the collar and tails flowing loose, his one glove hanging limp. He is so erect, so gentle, so soft-voiced, so sincere, and so genuine, and for the hour so supremely happy, that you cannot divest yourself of the idea that he really is an old marquis, temporarily exiled from some faraway court, and to be treated with the greatest deference. When, with a little start of sudden surprise, he espies some dark-eyed matron in the group about him, rises to his feet and salutes her as if she were the Queen of Sheba, you are altogether sure of his noble rank. Then the old fellow regains his seat, poises his gold eyeglasses--a relic of better days--between his thumb and forefinger, holds them two inches from his nose, and consults the _menu_ with the air of a connoisseur.

Before your coffee is served the whole Piazza is ablaze and literally packed with people. The tables around you stand quite out to the farthest edge permitted. (These caffès have, so to speak, riparian rights--so much piazza seating frontage, facing the high-water mark of the caffè itself.) The waiters can now hardly wedge their way through the crowd. The chairs are so densely occupied that you barely move your elbows. Next you is an Italian mother--full-blown even to her delicate mustache--surrounded by a bevy of daughters, all in pretty hats and white or gay-colored dresses, chatting with a circle of still other officers. All over the square, where earlier in the day only a few stray pilgrims braved the heat, or a hungry pigeon wandered in search of a grain of corn, the _personnel_ of this table is repeated--mothers and officers and daughters, and daughters and officers and mothers again.

Outside this mass, representing a _clientèle_ possessing at least half a _lira_ each--one cannot, of course, occupy a chair and spend less, and it is equally difficult to spend very much more--there moves in a solid mass the rest of the world: bareheaded girls, who have been all day stringing beads in some hot courtyard; old crones in rags from below the shipyards; fishermen in from Chioggia; sailors, stevedores, and soldiers in their linen suits, besides sight-seers and wayfarers from the four corners of the earth.

If there were nothing else in Venice but the night life of this grand Piazza, it would be worth a pilgrimage half across the world to see. Empty every café in the Boulevards; add all the _habitués_ of the Volks Gardens of Vienna, and all those you remember at Berlin, Buda-Pesth, and Florence; pack them in one mass, and you would not half fill the Piazza. Even if you did, you could never bring together the same kinds of people. Venice is not only the magnet that draws the idler and the sight-seer, but those who love her just because she is Venice--painters, students, architects, historians, musicians, every soul who values the past and who finds here, as nowhere else, the highest achievement of chisel, brush, and trowel.

The painters come, of course--all kinds of painters, for all kinds of subjects. Every morning, all over the canals and quays, you find a new growth of white umbrellas, like mushrooms, sprung up in the night. Since the days of Canaletto these men have painted and repainted these same stretches of water, palace, and sky. Once under the spell of her presence, they are never again free from the fascinations of this Mistress of the Adriatic. Many of the older men are long since dead and forgotten, but the work of those of to-day you know: Ziem first, nearly all his life a worshiper of the wall of the Public Garden; and Rico and Ruskin and Whistler. Their names are legion. They have all had a corner at Florian’s. No matter what their nationality or specialty, they speak the common language of the brush. Old Professor Croisac knows them all. He has just risen again to salute Marks, a painter of sunrises, who has never yet recovered from his first thrill of delight when early one morning his gondolier rowed him down the lagoon and made fast to a cluster of spiles off the Public Garden. When the sun rose behind the sycamores and threw a flood of gold across the sleeping city, and flashed upon the sails of the fishing-boats drifting up from the Lido, Marks lost his heart. He is still tied up every summer to that same cluster of spiles, painting the glory of the morning sky and the drifting boats. He will never want to paint anything else. He will not listen to you when you tell him of the sunsets up the Giudecca, or the soft pearly light of the dawn silvering the Salute, or the picturesque life of the fisher-folk of Malamocco.

“My dear boy,” he breaks out, “get up to-morrow morning at five and come down to the Garden, and just see one sunrise--only one. We had a lemon-yellow and pale emerald sky this morning, with dabs of rose-leaves, that would have paralyzed you.”

Do not laugh at the painter’s enthusiasm. This white goddess of the sea has a thousand lovers, and, like all other lovers the world over, each one believes that he alone holds the key to her heart.

IN AN OLD GARDEN

YOU think, perhaps, there are no gardens in Venice; that it is all a sweep of palace front and shimmering sea; that save for the oleanders bursting into bloom near the Iron Bridge, and the great trees of the Public Garden shading the flower-bordered walks, there are no half-neglected tangles where rose and vine run riot; where the plash of the fountain is heard in the stillness of the night, and tall cedars cast their black shadows at noonday.

Really, if you but knew it, almost every palace hides a garden nestling beneath its balconies, and every high wall hems in a wealth of green, studded with broken statues, quaint arbors festooned with purple grapes, and white walks bordered by ancient box; while every roof that falls beneath a window is made a hanging garden of potted plants and swinging vines.

Step from your gondola into some open archway. A door beyond leads you to a court paved with marble flags and centred by a well with carved marble curb, yellow stained with age. Cross this wide court, pass a swinging iron gate, and you stand under rose-covered bowers, where in the olden time gay gallants touched their lutes and fair ladies listened to oft-told tales of love.

And not only behind the palaces facing the Grand Canal, but along the Zattere beyond San Rosario, away down the Giudecca, and by the borders of the lagoon, will you find gay oleanders flaunting red blossoms, and ivy and myrtle hanging in black-green bunches over crumbling walls.

In one of these hidden nooks, these abandoned cloisters of shaded walk and over-bending blossom, I once spent an autumn afternoon with my old friend, the Professor,--“Professor of Modern Languages and Ancient Legends,” as some of the more flippant of the _habitués_ of Florian’s were wont to style him. The old Frenchman had justly earned this title. He had not only made every tradition and fable of Venice his own, often puzzling and charming the Venetians themselves with his intimate knowledge of the many romances of their past, but he could tell most wonderful tales of the gorgeous fêtes of the seventeenth century, the social life of the nobility, their escapades, intrigues, and scandals.

If some fair Venetian had loved not wisely but too well, and, clinging to brave Lorenzo’s neck, had slipped down a rope ladder into a closely curtained, muffled-oared gondola, and so over the lagoon to Mestre, the old Frenchman could not only point out to you the very balcony, provided it were a palace balcony and not a fisherman’s window,--he despised the _bourgeoisie_,--but he could give you every feature of the escapade, from the moment the terror-stricken duenna missed her charge to that of the benediction of the priest in the shadowed isle. So, when upon the evening preceding this particular day, I accepted the Professor’s invitation to breakfast, I had before me not only his hospitality, frugal as it might be, but the possibility of drawing upon his still more delightful fund of anecdote and reminiscence.

Neither the day nor the hour had been definitely set. The invitation, I afterwards discovered, was but one of the many he was constantly giving to his numerous friends and haphazard acquaintances, evincing by its perfect genuineness his own innate kindness and his hearty appreciation of the many similar courtesies he was daily receiving at their hands. Indeed, to a man so delicately adjusted as the Professor and so entirely poor, it was the only way he could balance, in his own mind, many long-running accounts of, coffee for two at the _Calcina_, with a fish and a fruit salad, the last a specialty of the Professor’s--the oil, melons, and cucumbers being always provided by his host--or a dish of _risotto_, with kidneys and the like, at the _Bauer-Grünwald_.

Nobody ever accepted these invitations seriously, that is, no one who knew the Professor at all well. In fact, there was a general impression existing among the many frequenters of Florian’s and the _Quadri_ that the Professor’s hour and place of breakfasting were very like the birds’--whenever the unlucky worm was found, and wherever the accident happened to occur. When I asked Marks for the old fellow’s address--which rather necessary item I remembered later had also been omitted by the Professor--he replied, “Oh, somewhere down the Riva,” and dropped the subject as too unimportant for further mental effort.

All these various eccentricities of my prospective host, however, were at the time unknown to me. He had cordially invited me to breakfast--“to-morrow, or any day you are near my apartments, I would be so charmed,” etc. I had as graciously accepted, and it would have been unpardonable indifference, I felt sure, not to have continued the inquiries until my hand touched his latch-string.

The clue was a slight one. I had met him once, leaning over the side of the bridge below Danieli’s, the _Ponte del Sepolcro_, looking wistfully out to sea, and was greeted with the remark that he had that moment left his apartments, and only lingered on the bridge to watch the play of silvery light on the lagoon, the September skies were so enchanting. So on this particular morning I began inspecting the bell-pulls of all the doorways, making inquiry at the several caffès and shops. Then I remembered the apothecary, down one step from the sidewalk, in the _Via Garibaldi_--a rather shabby continuation of the Riva--and nearly a mile below the more prosperous quarter where the Professor had waved his hand, the morning I met him on the bridge.

“The Signor Croisac--the old Frenchman?” “Upstairs, next door.”

He was as delightful as ever in his greetings; started a little when I reminded him of his invitation, but begged me to come in and sit down, and with great courtesy pointed out the view of the garden below, and the sweep and glory of the lagoon. Then he excused himself, adjusted his hat, picked up a basket, and gently closed the door.

The room, upon closer inspection, was neither dreary nor uninviting. It had a sort of annex, or enlarged closet, with a drawn curtain partly concealing a bed, a row of books lining one wall, a table littered with papers, a smaller one containing a copper coffee-pot and a scant assortment of china, some old chairs, and a disemboweled lounge that had doubtless lost heart in middle life and committed hari-kari. There were also a few prints and photographs, a corner of the Parthenon, a mezzo of Napoleon in his cocked hat, and an etching or two, besides a miniature reduction of the Dying Gladiator, which he used as a paper-weight. All the windows of this modest apartment were filled with plants, growing in all kinds of pots and boxes, broken pitchers, cracked dishes--even half of a Chianti flask. These, like their guardian, ignored their surroundings and furnishings, and flamed away as joyously in the summer sun as if they had been nurtured in the choicest of majolica.

He was back before I had completed my inventory, thanking me again and again for my extreme kindness in coming, all the while unwrapping the Gorgonzola, and flecking off with a fork the shreds of paper that still clung to its edges. The morsel was then laid upon a broad leaf gathered at the window, and finally upon a plate covered by a napkin so that the flies should not taste it first. This, with a simple salad, a pot of coffee and some rolls, a siphon of seltzer and a little raspberry juice in a glass,--“so much fresher than wine these hot mornings,” he said,--constituted the entire repast.

But there was no apology offered with the serving. Poor as he was, he had that exquisite tact which avoided burdening his guest even with his economies. He had offered me all his slender purse could afford. Indeed, the cheese had quite overstrained it.

When he had drawn a cigarette from my case,--it was delightful to see him do this, and always reminded me of a young girl picking bonbons from a box, it was so daintily done,--the talk drifted into a discussion of the glories of the old days and of the welfare of Italy under the present government. I made a point of expressing my deep admiration for the good King Humbert and his gracious queen. The Professor merely waved his hand, adding:--

“Yes, a good man and a noble lady, worthy successors of the old régime!” Then, with a certain air, “I have known, professionally, very many of these great families. A most charming, delightful society! The women so exquisite, with such wealth of hair and eyes, and so _gentilles_: always of the _Beau Monde_! And their traditions and legends, so full of romance and mystery! The palaces too! Think of the grand staircase of the Foscari, the entrance to the Barbaro, and the superb ceilings of the Albrezzi! Then their great gardens and vine orchards! There is nothing like them. Do you happen to know the old garden on the Giudecca, where lived the beautiful Contessa Alberoni? No? And you never heard the romantic story of her life, her disappearance, and its dramatic ending?”

I shook my head. The Professor, to my delight, was now fairly in the saddle; the best part of the breakfast was to come.

“My dear friend! One of the most curious of all the stories of Venice! I know intimately many of her descendants, and I know, too, the old gardener who still cares for what is left of the garden. It has long since passed out of the hands of the family.

“Let me light another cigarette before I tell you,” said the Professor, crossing the room, “and just another drop of seltzer,” filling my glass.

“Is it to be a true story?” I asked.

“_Mon cher ami!_ absolutely so. Would you care to see the garden itself, where it all occurred, or will you take my word for it? No, not until you sit under the arbors and lean over the very balcony where the lovers sat. Come, is your gondola here? Under the window?” pushing aside the flowers. “Which is your gondolier? The one in blue with the white _tenda_ over his boat? Yes, sound asleep like all the rest of them!”

Here the old gentleman picked up his silk hat, passed his hand once or twice around its well-brushed surface, discarded it for a white straw with a narrow black band, adjusted his cravat in a broken mirror that hung near the door, gave an extra twist to his gray mustache, and preceded me downstairs and out into the blinding light of a summer day.

Several members of the Open-Air Club were hanging over the bridge as we passed--Luigi flat on his face and sound asleep in the shadow of the side-wall, and Vittorio sprawled out on the polished rail above. Those who were awake touched their hats respectfully to the old fellow as he crossed the bridge, he returning their salutations quite as a distinguished earl would those of his tenants. Vittorio, when he caught my eye, sprang down and ran ahead to rouse Espero, and then back for Luigi, who awoke with a dazed look on his face, only regaining consciousness in time to wave his hat to me when we were clear of the quay, the others standing in a row enjoying his discomfiture.

“This garden,” continued the Professor, settling himself on the cushions and drawing the curtains so that he could keep the view toward San Giorgio and still shut out the dazzling light, “is now, of course, only a ghost of its former self. The château is half in ruins, and one part is inhabited by fishermen, who dry their nets in the grape arbors and stow their fish-baskets in the porticoes. Many of the fruit-trees, however, still exist, as do many of the vines, and so my old friend Angelo, the gardener, makes a scanty living for himself and his pretty daughter, by supplying the fruit-stands in the autumn and raising lettuce and melons in the spring and summer. The ground itself, like most of the land along the east side of the islands of the Giudecca, is valueless, and everything is falling into ruin.”

We were rounding the Dogana, Espero bending lustily to his oar as we shot past the wood-boats anchored in the stream. The Professor talked on, pointing out the palace where Pierre, the French adventurer, lived during the Spanish conspiracy, and the very side door in the old building, once a convent, from which an Englishman in the old days stole a nun who loved him, and spirited her off to another quaint nook in this same Giudecca, returning her to her cell every morning before daybreak.

“Ah, those were the times to live in. Then a _soldo_ was as large as a _lira_. Then a woman loved you for yourself, not for what you gave her. Then your gondolier kept your secrets, and the keel of your boat left no trace behind. Then your family crest meant something more than the name-plate on your door, upon which to nail a tax-levy.”

The old man had evidently forgotten his history, but I did not check him. It was his buoyant enthusiasm that always charmed me most.

As Espero passed under Ponte Lungo, the wooden bridge leading to the _Fondamenta della Pallada_, the Professor waved his hand to the right, and we floated out into the lagoon and stopped at an old water-gate, its doors weather-stained and broken, over which hung a mass of tangled vines.

“The garden of the Contessa,” said the Professor, his face aglow with the expectancy of my pleasure.

It was like a dozen other water-gates I had seen, except that no gratings were open and the surrounding wall was unusually high. Once inside, however, with the gate swung-to on its rusty hinges, you felt instantly that the world had been shut away forever. Here were long arbors bordered by ancient box, with arching roofs of purple grapes. Against the high walls stood fragments of statues, some headless, some with broken arms or battered faces. Near the centre of the great quadrangle was a sunken basin, covered with mould, and green with the scum of stagnant water. In the once well-regulated garden beds the roses bloomed gayly, climbing over pedestal and statue, while the trumpet-flower and scarlet-creeper flaunted their colors high upon the crumbling walls overlooking the lagoon. At one end of this tangled waste rose the remains of a once noble château or summer home, built of stone in the classic style of architecture, the pediment of the porch supported by a row of white marble columns. Leaning against these columns stood old fish-baskets, used for the storing of live fish, while over the ruined arbors hung in great festoons the nets of a neighboring fisherman, who reserved this larger space for drying and mending his seines.

It was a ruin, and yet not a hopeless one. You could see that each year the flowers struggled into life again; that the old black cypresses, once trimmed into quaint designs, had still determined to live on, even without the care of their arboreal barber; that really only the pruning-knife and spade were needed to bring back the garden to its former beauty. And the solitude was there too, the sense of utter isolation, as if the outside world were across the sea, whither nor eye nor voice could follow.

Old Angelo and his pretty daughter--a pure type of the Venetian girl of to-day, as she stood expectantly with folded arms--met us at the gate, and led the way to a sort of summer-house, so thickly covered with matted vines that the sun only filtered through and fell in drops of gold, spattering the ground below. Here, encrusted with green mould, was a marble table of exquisite design, its circular top supported by a tripod with lions’ feet.

Angelo evidently knew my companion and his ways, for in a few moments the girl returned, bringing a basket of grapes, some figs, and a flask of wine. The Professor thanked her, and then, dismissing her with one of his gentle hand-waves and brushing the fallen leaves from the stone bench with his handkerchief, sat down.

“And now, right here,” said the old fellow, placing his straw hat on the seat beside him, his gray hair glistening in the soft light, “right here, where she loved and died, I will tell you the story of the Contessa Alberoni.

“This most divine of women once lived in a grand old palace above the Rialto. She belonged to a noble family of Florence, whose ancestors fought with Philip, before the Campanile was finished. All over Italy she was known as the most beautiful woman of her day, and that, let me tell you, at a time when to be counted as beautiful in Venice was to be beautiful the world over. She was a woman,”--here the Professor rested his head on the marble seat and half closed his eyes, as if he were recalling the vision of loveliness from out his own past,--“well, one of those ideal women, with fathomless eyes and rounded white arms and throat; a Catherine Cornaro type, of superb carriage and presence. Titian would have lost his heart over the torrent of gold that fell in masses about her shapely head, and Canova might have exhausted all his skill upon the outlines of her form.

“In the beginning of her womanhood, when yet barely sixteen, she had married, at her father’s bidding, a decrepit Italian count nearly thrice her age, who, in profound consideration of her sacrifice, died in a becoming manner within a few years of their marriage, leaving her his titles and estates. For ten years of her wedded life and after, she lived away off in the secluded villa of Valdagna, a small town nestling among the foothills of the Alps. Then, suddenly awakening to the power of her wonderful beauty, she took possession of the great palace on the Grand Canal above the Rialto. You can see it any day; and save that some of the spindles in the exquisite rose-marble balconies are broken and the façade blackened and weather-stained, the exterior is quite as it appeared in her time. The interior, however, owing to the obliteration of this noble family and the consequent decay of its vast estates, is almost a ruin. Every piece of furniture and all the gorgeous hangings are gone; together with the mantels, and the superb well-curb in the court below. Tell Espero to take you there some day. You will not only find the grand entrance blocked with wine casks, but my lady’s boudoir plastered over with cheap green paper and rented as cheaper lodgings to still cheaper tenants. Bah!”

Then the Professor, dropping easily and gracefully into a style of delivery as stilted as if he were remembering the very words of some old chronicle, told me how she had lived in this grand palace during the years of her splendor, the pride and delight of all who came under her magic spell, as easily Queen of Venice as Venice was Queen of the Sea. How at thirty, then in the full radiance of her beauty, beloved and besought by every hand that could touch her own, painters vied with each other in matching the tints of her marvelous skin; sculptors begged for models of her feet to grace their masterpieces; poets sang her praises, and the first musicians of Italy wrote the songs that her lovers poured out beneath her windows. How there had come a night when suddenly the whole course of her life was changed,--the night of a great ball given at one of the old palaces on the Grand Canal, the festivities ending with a pageant that revived the sumptuous days of the Republic, in which the Contessa herself was to take part.

When the long-expected hour arrived, she was seen to step into her gondola, attired in a dress of the period, a marvel of velvet and cloth of gold. Then she disappeared as completely from human sight as if the waters of the canal had closed over her forever.

For days all investigation proved fruitless. The only definite clue came from her gondolier, who said that soon after the gondola had left the steps of her palace, the Contessa ordered him to return home at once; that on reaching the landing she covered her face with her veil and reëntered the palace. Later it was whispered that for many weeks she had not left her apartments. Then she sent for her father confessor, and at a secret interview announced her decision never again to appear to the world.

At this point of the story the Professor had risen from his seat and poured half the flagon in his glass. He was evidently as much absorbed in the recital as if it had all happened yesterday. I could see, too, that it appealed to those quaint, romantic views of life which, for all their absurdities, endeared the old fellow to every one who knew him.

“For a year,” he continued, “this seclusion was maintained; no one saw the Contessa, not even her own servants. Her meals were served behind a screen. Of course, all Venice was agog. Every possible solution of so strange and unexpected a seclusion was suggested and discussed.

“In the beginning of the following winter vague rumors reached the good father’s ears. One morning he left his devotions, and, waylaying her duenna outside the palace garden, pressed his rosary into her hands and said: ‘Take this to the Contessa.’” Here the Professor became very dramatic, holding out his hand with a quick gesture, as if it clasped the rosary. “‘Tell her that to-night, when San Giorgio strikes twelve, I shall be at the outer gate of the palace and must be admitted.’”

Then, pacing up and down the narrow arbor, his face flushed, his eyes glistening, the old fellow told the rest of the story. “When,” said he, “the hour arrived, the heavy grated door, the same through which you can now see the wine casks, was cautiously opened. A moment later the priest was ushered into a dimly lighted room, luxuriously furnished, and screened at one end by a silken curtain, behind which sat the Contessa. She listened while he told her how all Venice was outraged at her conduct, many hearts being grieved and many tongues dropping foul slander. He remonstrated with her about the life she was leading, condemning its selfishness and threatening the severest discipline. But neither threats nor the voice of slander intimidated the Contessa. She steadfastly avowed that her life had been blameless, and despite the earnest appeals of the priest persisted in the determination to live the rest of her days in quiet and seclusion. The most he was able to effect was a promise that within a month she would open the doors of her palace for one more great ball. Her friends would then be reassured and her enemies silenced.

“The records show that no such festival had been seen in Venice for many years. The palace was a blaze of light. So great was the crush of gondolas bringing their beauteous freight of richly dressed Venetians, that the traffic of the canal was obstructed for hours. Ten o’clock came, eleven, and still there was no Contessa to welcome her guests. Strange stories were set afloat. It was whispered that a sudden illness had overtaken her. Then, as the hours wore on, the terrible rumor gained credence, that she had been murdered by her servants, and that the report of her illness was only a cloak to conceal their crime.

“While the excitement was at its height, a man, in the costume of a herald, appeared in the great _salon_ and announced the arrival of the hostess. As the hour struck twelve a curtain was drawn at the farther end of the room, revealing the Contessa seated upon a dais, superbly attired in velvet and lace, and brilliant with jewels. When the hum and wonder of the surprise had ceased, she arose, stood like a queen receiving the homage of her subjects, and, welcoming her guests to her palace, bade them dance on until the sun rose over the Lido. Then the curtains were drawn, and so ended the last sight of the Contessa in Venice. Her palace was never opened again. Later she disappeared completely, and the spiders spun their webs across the threshold.

“Years afterward, a man repairing a high chimney on a roof overlooking this very garden--the chimney can still be seen from the far corner below the landing--saw entering the arbor a noble lady, leaning upon the arm of a distinguished looking man of about her own age. In the lady he recognized the Contessa.

“Little by little, the story came out. It appeared that immediately after the ball she had moved to this château, a part of her own estates, which had been quietly fitted up and restored. It was then remembered that soon after the château had been finished, a certain Marquis, well known in France, who had adored the Contessa for years, and was really the only man she ever loved, had disappeared from Paris. He was traced at the time to Milan and Genoa, and finally to Venice. There all trace of him was lost. Such disappearances were not uncommon in those days, and it was often safer even for one’s relatives to shrug their shoulders and pass on. Further confirmation came from the gondolier, who had landed him the night of his arrival at the water-gate of this garden,--just where we landed an hour ago,--and who, on hearing of his supposed murder, had kept silent upon his share in the suspected crime. Inquiries conducted by the State corroborated these facts.

“Look around you, _mon ami_,” exclaimed the Professor suddenly. “Underneath this very arbor have they sat for hours, and in the window of that crumbling balcony have they listened to the low sound of each other’s voice in the still twilight, the world shut out, the vine-covered wall their only horizon. Here, as the years passed unheeded, they dreamed their lives away. _L’amour, l’amour, vous êtes tout puissant!_”

The Professor stopped, turned as if in pain, and rested his head on his arm. For some moments neither of us spoke. Was the romance to which I had listened only the romance of the Contessa, or had he unconsciously woven into its meshes some of the silken threads of his own past? When he raised his head I said: “But, Professor, you have not told me the secret she kept from the priest. Why did she shut herself up? What was it that altered the whole course of her life?”

“Did I not tell you? Then listen. She had overheard her gondolier say, as she stepped into her gondola on the fatal night of the great fête at the Foscari, ‘The Contessa is growing old; she is no longer as beautiful as she was.’”

I looked at the old fellow to see if he were really in earnest, and, throwing back my head, laughed heartily. For the first time in all my intercourse with him I saw the angry color mount to his cheeks.

He turned quickly, looked at me in astonishment, as if unable to believe his ears, and said sharply, knitting his brows, “Why do you laugh?”

“It seems so absurd,” I replied. “What did she expect; to be always a goddess?”

“Ah, there you go!” he burst out again, with flashing eyes. “That is just like a cold-blooded materialist. I hate your modern Shylock, who can see a pound of flesh cut from a human heart with no care for the hot blood that follows. Have you no sympathy deep down in your soul for a woman when she realizes for the first time that her hold on the world is slipping? Can you not understand the agony of the awakening from a long dream of security and supremacy, when she finds that others are taking her place? The daily watching for the loss of color, the fullness of the waist, the penciling of care-lines about the eyes? We men have bodily force and mental vigor, and sometimes lifelong integrity, to commend us, and as we grow older and the first two fail, the last serves us best of all; but what has a woman like the Contessa left? I am not talking of an ordinary woman, nor of all the good daughters, good wives, and good mothers in the world. You expect in such women the graces of virtue, duty, and resignation. I am talking of a superb creature whom the good God created just to show the world what the angels looked like. I insist that before you laugh you must put yourself in the place of this noble Contessa whom all Venice adored, whose reign for fifteen years had been supreme, whose beauty was to her something tangible, a weapon, a force, an atmosphere. She had all the other charms that adorned the women of her day, good-humor, a rich mind, charity, and wit, but so had a hundred other Venetians of her class. I insist that before censuring her, you enter the _salon_ and watch with her the faces of her guests, noting her eagerness to detect the first glance of delight or disappointment, and her joy or chagrin as she reads the verdict in their eyes. Can you not realize that in a beauty such as hers there is an essence, a spirit, a something divine and ethereal? A something like the bloom on these grapes, adding the exquisite to their lusciousness; like the pure color of the diamond, intensifying its flash? A something that, in addition to all her other qualities, makes a woman transcendent and should make her immortal? We men long for this divine quality, adore it, go mad over it; and yet when it has faded, with an inconstancy and neglect which to me is one of the enigmas of human nature, we shrug our shoulders, laugh, and pass on. Believe me, _mon ami_, when that gondolier confirmed the looking-glass of the Contessa, his words fell upon her ears like earth upon her coffin.”

If the Professor’s emotion at the close of the story was a surprise to me, this frenzied outburst, illogical and quixotic as it seemed, was equally unexpected. I could hardly realize that this torrent of fiery passion and pent-up energy had burst from the frail, plain little body before me. Again and again, as I looked at him, the thought ran through my mind, Whom had he loved like that? What had come between himself and his own Contessa? Why was this man an exile--this cheery, precise, ever courteous dignified old thoroughbred, with his dry, crackling exterior, and his volcano of a heart beneath? Or was it Venice, with her wealth of traditions,--traditions he had made his own,--that had turned his head?

Long after the Professor left the garden, I sat looking about me, noting the broken walls overhung with matted vines, and the little lizards darting in and out. Then I strolled on and entered the doorway of the old château, and looked long and steadily at the ruined balcony, half buried in a tangle of roses, the shadows of their waving blossoms splashing the weather-stained marble; and thence to the apartment above, where these same blossoms thrust themselves far into its gloom, as if they too would search for the vision of loveliness that had vanished. Then I wandered into an alcove sheltering the remains of an altar and font--the very chapel, no doubt, where the good priest had married her; on through the unkept walks bordered on each side by rows of ancient box, with here and there a gap where the sharp tooth of some winter more cruel than the rest had bitten deep, and so out again into the open garden, where I sat down under a great tree that sheltered the head of a Madonna built into the wall--the work of Canova, the Professor had told me.

Despite my own convictions, I seem to feel the presence of these spirits of the past that the Professor, in his simple, earnest way, had conjured up before me, and to see on every hand evidences of their long life of happiness. The ruined balcony, with its matted rose vines, had now a deeper meaning. How often had the beautiful Venetian leaned over this same iron grating and watched her lover in the garden below! On how many nights, made glorious by the radiance of an Italian moon, had they listened to the soft music of passing gondolas beyond the garden walls?

The whole romance, in spite of its improbability and my thoughtless laughter, had affected me deeply. Why, I could not tell. Perhaps it was the Professor’s enthusiasm; perhaps his reverence for the beauty of woman, as well as for the Contessa herself. Perhaps he had really been recalling a chapter out of his own past, before exile and poverty had made him a wanderer and a dreamer. Perhaps!--Yes, perhaps it was the thought of the long, quiet life of the Contessa with her lover in this garden.

AMONG THE FISHERMEN