Chapter 3

I was in the bow of the gondola when the first of these two pins found its place on the chart, working away like mad, trying to get the exact shadow tones on a sun-flecked wall. Luigi was aft, fast asleep, his elbow under his head: I never object, for then he doesn't shake the boat. Suddenly from out the hum of the children's voices there came a scream vibrant with terror. Then a splash! Then the gondola swayed as if a barca had bumped it, and the next thing I knew Luigi's body made a curve through the air, struck the water, with an enormous souse, and up came Loretta, her plump, wet little body resting as easily on Luigi's hand, as a tray rests on a waiter's. Another sweep with his free arm, and he passed me the dripping child and clambered up beside her. The whole affair had not occupied two minutes.

That was a great day for me!

Heretofore I had been looked upon as a squatter: possessing certain rights, of course, and more or less welcome because of sundry lire expended for the temporary use of fishing boats with sails up,--but still an interloper. Now I became one of the thousand families and the million children. These were all in evidence in less than ten seconds; the peculiar quality of that scream had done it; not only from the top story of the highest rookery did they swarm, but from every near-by campo, and way back to the shipyards.

Luigi pushed the gondola to the quay and I lifted out the water-soaked, blue-lipped little tot, her hair flattened against her cheeks (she was laughing now,--"It was nothing," she said, "my foot slipped,") and placed her in the hands of the longest-armed fishwife; and then Luigi disappeared into a door, level with the quay, from which he reappeared ten minutes later in a suit of dry clothes, the property of a fisherman, and of so grotesque a fit, the trousers reaching to his knees and the cuffs of the coat to his elbows, that he set the population in a roar. My Luigi, you might as well know, is six feet and an inch, with the torso of a Greek god and a face that is twin to Colleone's, and, furthermore, is quite as distinguished looking as that gentleman on horseback, even if he does wear a straw hat instead of a copper helmet. After this Loretta became part of my establishment, especially at luncheon time, Luigi hunting her up and bringing her aboard in his arms, she clinging to his grizzled, sunburned neck. Often she would spend the rest of the day watching me paint.

All I knew of her antecedents and life outside of these visits was what Luigi told me. She was born, he said, in the shipyards, and at the moment lived in the top of the rookery nearest the bridge. She had an only sister, who was ten years older; the mother was the wife of a crab fisherman who had died some years before; the two children and mother were cared for by a brother crab fisherman. His son Francesco, if report were true, was to marry the sister when she turned fifteen, Francesco being four years older. This last reference to Francesco came with a shake of the head and a certain expression in Luigi's eyes which told me at once that his opinion of the prospective groom was not for publication--a way he has when he dislikes somebody and is too polite to express it.

"Fishes for crabs, like his father?" I asked.

"Yes, crabs and young girls," he answered with a frown. "A poor lot, these crab catchers, Signore. Was it the charcoal or a brush you wanted?"

Francesco did not interest me,--nor did the grownup sister; nor the mother, over whom Luigi also shrugged his shoulders. It was Loretta's chubbiness that delighted my soul.

Even at five she was a delightful little body, and full of entrancing possibilities. One can always tell what the blossom will be from the bud. In her case, all the essentials of beauty were in evidence: dark, lustrous velvety eyes; dazzling teeth--not one missing; jet-black hair--and such a wealth of it, almost to her shoulders; a slender figure, small hands and feet; neat, well-turned ankles and wrists, and rounded plump arms above the elbows.

"What do you intend to do, little one, when you grow up?" I asked her one morning. She was sitting beside me, her eyes following every movement of my brush.

"Oh, what everybody does. I shall string beads and then when I get big like my sister I shall go to the priest and get married, and have a ring and new shoes and a beautiful, beautiful veil all over my hair."

"So! And have you picked him out yet?"

"Oh, no, Signore! Why, I am only a little girl. But he will surely come,--they always come."

These mornings in the gondola continued until she was ten years old. Sometimes it was a melon held high in the air that tempted her; or a basket of figs, or some huge bunches of grapes; or a roll and a broiled fish from a passing cook-boat: but the bait always sufficed. With a little cry of joy the beads would be dropped, or the neighbor's child passed to another or whatever else occupied her busy head and small hands, and away she would run to the water steps and hold out her arms until Luigi rowed over and lifted her in. She had changed, of course, in these five years, and was still changing, but only as an expanding bud changes. The eyes were the same and so were the teeth--if any had dropped out, newer and better ones had taken their places; the hair though was richer, fuller, longer, more like coils of liquid jet, with a blue sheen where the sky lights touched its folds. The tight, trim little figure, too, had loosened out in certain places--especially about the chest and hips. Before many years she would flower into the purest type of the Venetian--the most beautiful woman the world knows.

At sixteen she burst into bloom.

I have never seen a black tulip, not a real velvet-black, but if inside its shroud of glossy enfoldings--so like Loretta's hair--there lies enshrined a mouth red as a pomegranate and as enticing, and if above it there burn two eyes that would make a holy man clutch his rosary; and if the flower sways on its stalk with the movement of a sapling caressed by a summer breeze;--then the black tulip is precisely the kind of flower that Loretta bloomed into.

And here the real trouble began,--just as it begins for every other pretty Venetian, and here, too, must I place the second pin in my chart.

It all came through Francesco. The older sister had died with the first child, and this crab catcher had begun to stretch out his claws for Loretta. She and her mother still lived with Francesco's father, who was a widower. The mother kept the house for all,--had done so for Francesco and her daughter during their brief married life.

In her persecution Loretta would pour out her heart to Luigi, telling how they bothered her,--her mother the most of all. She hated Francesco,--hated his father,--hated everybody who wanted her to marry the fisherman. (Luigi, poor fellow, had lost his only daughter when she was five years of age, which accounted, I always thought, for his interest in the girl.)

One morning she called to him and waited on the quay until he could hail a passing barca and step from the gondola to its deck and so ashore. Then the two disappeared through the gate of the garden.

"She is too pretty to go alone," he explained on his return. "Every day she must pay a boy two soldi, Signore, to escort her to the lace factory--the boy is sick today and so I went with her. But their foolishness will stop after this;--these rats know Luigi."

From this day on Loretta had the Riva to herself.

II

So far there has been introduced into this story the bad man, Francesco, with crab-like tendencies, who has just lost his wife; the ravishingly beautiful Loretta; the girl's mother, of whom all sorts of stories were told--none to her credit; big tender-hearted Luigi Zanaletto, prince of gondoliers, and last, and this time least, a staid old painter who works in a gondola up a crooked canal which is smothered in trees, choked by patched-up boats and flanked by tattered rookeries so shaky that the slightest earth quiver would tumble them into kindling wood.

There enters now another and much more important character,--one infinitely more interesting to my beautiful Lady of the Shipyards than any grandfather gondolier or staid old painter who ever lived. This young gentleman is twenty-one; has a head like the Hermes, a body like the fauns, and winsome, languishing eyes with a light in their depths which have set the heart of every girl along his native Giudecca pitapatting morning, noon, and night. He enjoys the distinguished name of Vittorio Borodini, and is the descendant of a family of gondoliers--of the guild of the Castellani--who can trace their ancestral calling back some two hundred years (so can Luigi; but then Luigi never speaks of it, and the Borodinis always do). Being aristocrats, the Zanalettos and Borodinis naturally fraternize, and as they live in the same quarter--away up on the Giudecca--two miles from my canal--the fathers of Vittorio and Luigi have become intimate friends. Anything, therefore, touching the welfare of any one of the descendants of so honorable a guild is more or less vital to the members of both families.

At the moment something HAD touched a Borodino--and in the most vital of spots. This was nothing less than the heart of young Vittorio, the pride and hope of his father. He had seen the "Rose of the Shipyards," as she was now called, pass the traghetto of the Molo, off which lay his gondola awaiting custom,--it was on one of the days when the two-soldi boy acted as chaperon,--and his end had come.

It had only been a flash from out the lower corner of the left eye of Loretta as she floated along past the big columns of the Palazzo of the Doges, but it had gone through the young gondolier and out on the other side, leaving a wound that nothing would heal. She had not intended to hurt him, or even to attract him;--he only happened to be in the way when her search-light illumined his path.

Vittorio knew at a glance that she came from the rookeries and that he, the scion of a noble family, should look higher for his mate, but that made no difference. She was built for him and he was built for her, and that was the end of it: not for an intrigue--he was not constructed along those lines--but with a ring and a priest and all the rest of it. The main difficulty was to find some one who knew her. He would not,--could not, confront her; nor would he follow her home; but something must be done, and at once: a conclusion, it will be admitted, than an incalculable number of young Vittorios have reached, sooner or later, the world over.

When, therefore, a rumor came to his ears that Luigi the Primo was protecting her--the kind of protection that could never be misunderstood in Luigi's case--a piece of news which his informer was convinced would end the projected intrigue of the young gondolier, then and there and for all time, Vittorio laughed so loud and so long, and so merrily, that he lost, in consequence, two fares to San Giorgio, and came near being reprimanded by the Gastaldo for his carelessness.

That was why late one afternoon (I was painting the sunset glow) just as Loretta reached the edge of the quay on her way home, a young fellow, in white duck with a sash of dark red silk binding and hanging from his waist and a rakish straw hat tipped over his handsome face, shot his gondola alongside mine and leaned over to whisper something in Luigi's ear. And that was why the girl in her long black shawl stopped, and why Luigi immediately changed gondolas and made for the quay, and why they all talked together for a moment, the girl flashing and the boy beaming, and that was why, too, they all three disappeared a moment later in the direction of the high rookery where lived the baffled, love-sick Francesco, his anxious father, the much-talked-about mother, and the Rose of the Shipyards.

In a garden where the soil is so rich that a seedling of five--a mere slip--blooms into flower before a foolish old painter can exhaust the subjects along the canal, it is not surprising that a love affair reaches its full growth between two suns. Not since the day she had tumbled into the canal had she gone so headover-heels--both of them. Nor did Luigi pull them out. He helped in the drowning, really.

He was talking to himself when he came back--a soft light in his eyes, a smile lingering around the corners of his up-turned, grizzled mustache.

"It is good to be young, Signore, is it not?" was all he said, and at once began bundling up my traps.

Before the week was out,--nay, before the setting of two suns--every gossip along the Riva--and they about covered the population--had become convinced that Loretta was lost to the Quarter. Unless a wedding ring was to end it all Vittorio would never be so bold in his attentions to Loretta, as to walk home with her nights and wait for her mornings.

Luigi shook his head, but he did not help the gossips solve the problem. He had had trouble enough already with Vittorio's father.

"A common wench from the yards, I hear, Luigi!" he had blazed out--"and you, I understand, brought them together--you,--who have been my friend for--"

"Stop, Borodini! Not another word! You are angry, and when you are angry you are stupid. I carried that girl in my arms when she was a baby! I have watched over her ever since. A wench! Not one of your own daughters has a heart so white. If Vittorio is so great a coward as to listen to their talk I'll keep her for his betters."

All this snapped out of Luigi's eyes and rolled from under his crisp mustache as he repeated the outbreak to me. What the end might be neither the Giudecca nor San Giuseppe could decide. The Borodinis were proud; Vittorio's father was one of the gondoliers belonging to the palace and always rowed the good Queen Margherita when she came incognito to Venice,--a post which greatly enhanced his social station. Vittorio was the only son, and already a member of the traghetto, young as he was. But then, were there any girls better than Loretta, or as good? She helped her mother; she paid her share of the rent to Francesco's father; she gave to the poor box. That she was the sunshine of the Quarter every one knew who heard her sweet, cheery voice. As to her family, it was true that her mother was a Sicilian who boiled over sometimes in a tempest of rage, like Vesuvius,--but her father had been one of them. And then again, was she not the chosen friend of Luigi, the Primo, and of the crazy painter who haunted the canal? The boy and his father might be glad, etc., etc.

The only persons who were oblivious to the talk were the two lovers. Their minds were made up. Father Garola had promised, and they knew exactly what to do, and when and where to do it. In the meantime the Riva was a pathway of rose-tinted clouds constructed for the especial use of two angels, one of whom wore a straw hat with a red ribbon canted over his sunburnt face, and the other a black shawl with silken fringe, whose every movement suggested a caress.

The one disgruntled person was Francesco.

He had supposed at first that, like the others, Vittorio would find out his mistake;--certainly when he looked closely into the pure eyes of the girl, and that then, like the others, he would give up the chase;--he not being the first gay Lothario who had been taught just such a lesson.

Loretta's answer to the schemer, given with a toss of her head and a curl of her lips, closed Francesco's mouth and set his brain in a whirl. In his astonishment he had long talks with his father, the two seated in their boat against the Garden wall so no one could overhear.

Once he approached Luigi and began a tale, first about Vittorio and his escapades and then about Loretta and her coquetry, which Luigi strangled with a look, and which he did not discuss or repeat to me, except to remark--"They have started in to bite, Signore," the meaning of which I could but guess at. At another time he and his associates concocted a scheme by which Vittorio's foot was to slip as he was leaving Loretta at the door, and he be fished out of the canal with his pretty clothes begrimed with mud;--a scheme which was checked when they began to examine the young gondolier the closer, and which was entirely abandoned when they learned that his father was often employed about the palace of the king. In these projected attacks, strange to say, the girl's mother took part. Her hope in keeping her home was in Loretta's marrying Francesco.

Then, dog as he was, he tried the other plan--all this I got from Luigi, he sitting beside me, sharpening charcoal points, handing me a fresh brush, squeezing out a tube of color on my palette: nothing like a romance to a staid old painter; and then, were not both of us in the conspiracy as abettors, and up to our eyes in the plot?

This other plan was to traduce the girl. So the gondoliers on the traghetto began to talk,--behind their hands, at first: She had lived in Francesco's house; she had had a dozen young fishermen trapesing after her; her mother, too, was none too good. Then again, you could never trust these Neapolitans,--the kitten might be like the cat, etc., etc.

Still the lovers floated up and down the Riva, their feet on clouds, their heads in the heavens. Never a day did he miss, and always with a wave of her hand to me as they passed: down to Malamocco on Sundays with another girl as chaperon, or over to Mestre by boat for the festa, coming home in the moonlight, the tip of his cigarette alone lighting her face.

One morning--the lovers had only been waiting for their month's pay--Luigi came sailing down the canal to my lodgings, his gondola in gala attire,--bunches of flowers tied at each corner of the tenda; a mass of blossoms in the lamp socket; he himself in his best white suit, a new red sash around his waist--his own colors--and off we went to San Rosario up the Giudecca. And the Borodinis turned out in great force, and so did all the other 'inis, and 'olas, and 'ninos--dozens of them--and in came Loretta, so beautiful that everybody held his breath; and we all gathered about the altar, and good Father Garola stepped down and took their hands; and two candles were lighted and a little bell rang; and then somebody signed a book--somebody with the bearing of a prince--Borodini, I think--and then Luigi, his rich, sunburned face and throat in contrast with his white shirt, moved up and affixed his name to the register; and then a door opened on the side and they all went out into the sunlight.

I followed and watched the gay procession on its way to the waiting boats. As I neared the corner of the church a heavily-built young fellow ran past me, crouched to the pavement, and hid himself behind one of the tall columns. Something in his dress and movement made me stop. Not being sure, I edged nearer and waited until he turned his head. It was Francesco.

III

The skies were never more beautiful that May, the blossoms of the oleanders and the almond trees never more lovely. Not only was my own canal alive with the stir and fragrance of the coming summer, but all Venice bore the look of a bride who had risen from her bath, drawn aside the misty curtain of the morning, and stood revealed in all her loveliness.

The sun shone everywhere, I say, but to me its brightest rays fell on a garden full of fig trees and flat arbors interwoven with grapevines, running down to the water where there was a dock and a gondola--two, sometimes,--our own and Vittorio's--and particularly on a low, two-story, flat-roofed house,--a kaleidoscope of color--pink, yellow, and green, with three rooms and a portico, in which lived Vittorio, a bird in a cage, a kitten-cat and the Rose of the Shipyards.

It is a long way round to my canal through San Trovaso to the Zattere and across the Giudecca to Ponte Lungo, and then along the edge of the lagoon to this garden and dovecote, but that is the precise route Luigi, who lived within a stone's throw of the couple, selected morning after morning. He always had an excuse:--he had forgotten the big bucket for my water cups, or the sail, or the extra chair; and would the Signore mind going back for his other oar? Then again the tide was bad, and after all we might as well row down the lagoon; it was easier and really shorter with the wind against us--all nonsense, of course, but I never objected.

"Ah, the Signore and dear Luigi!" she would cry when she caught sight of our gondola rounding into the landing. Then down the path she would skip, the joyous embodiment of beauty and grace, and help me out, Luigi following; and we would stroll up under the fig trees, and she would begin showing me this and that new piece of furniture, or pot, or kettle, or new bread knife, or scissors, or spoon, which Vittorio had added to their store since my last visit. Or I would find them both busy over the gondola,--he polishing his brasses and ferro, and she rehanging the curtains of the tenda which she had washed and ironed with her own hands.

In truth it was a very happy little nest that was tucked away in one corner of that old abandoned garden with its outlook on the broad water and its connecting link with the row of neighbors' houses flanking the side canal,--and no birds in or out of any nest in all Venice ever sang so long and so continuously nor were there any others so genuinely happy the livelong day and night as these two.

Did I not know something of the curious mixture of love, jealousy, and suspicion which goes into the making-up of an Italian, it would be hard for me to believe that so lovely a structure as this dovecote, one built with so much hope and alight with so much real happiness, could ever come tumbling to the ground. We Anglo-Saxons flame up indignantly when those we love are attacked, and we demand proofs. "Critica," that bane of Venetian life--what this, that, or the other neighbor tattles to this, that, and the other listener, we dismiss with a wave of the hand, or with fingers tight clenched close to the offender's lips, or by a blow in the face. Not so the Italian. He also blazes, but he will stop and wonder when his anger has cooled; think of this and that; put two and two together, and make ten of what is really only four. This is what happened to the nest under the grapevines.

I was in my own garden at the Britannia leaning over the marble balcony, wondering what kept Luigi--it was past ten o'clock--when the news reached me. I had caught sight of his white shirt and straw hat as he swung out behind the Salute and headed straight toward me, and saw from the way he gripped his oar and stretched his long body flat with the force of each thrust, that he had a message of importance, even before I saw his face.

"A Dio, Signore!" he cried. "What do you think? Vittorio has cursed Loretta, torn her wedding ring from her finger, and thrown it in her face!"

"Vittorio!"

"Yes,--he will listen to nothing! He is a crazy fool and I have done all I could. He believes every one of the lies that crab-catching brute of a Francesco is telling. It would be over by to-night, but Loretta does not take it like the others: she says nothing. You know her eyes--they are not like our Giudecca girls. They are burning now like two coals of fire, and her cheeks are like chalk."

I had stepped into the gondola by this time, my first thought being how best to straighten out the quarrel.

"Now tell me, Luigi--speak slowly, so I do not miss a word. First, where is Loretta?"

"She was putting on her best clothes when I left--those she bought herself. She will touch nothing Vittorio gave her. She is going back to her mother in an hour."

"But what happened? Has Francesco--?"