University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.

“My daughter!” said the count Spinola.

The lady so addressed threw off a slight mantle and
turned her fair features inquiringly to her father. Heedless
of the attention he had arrested, the abstracted
count paced up and down the marble pavement of his
hall, and when, a moment after, Francesca came to
him for his good-night kiss, he imprinted it silently
on her forehead, and stepped out on the balcony to
pursue, under the aiding light of the stars, thoughts
that were more imperative than sleep.

There had been a fête of great splendor in the ducal
gardens of the Boboli, and Francesca Spinola had
shown there, as usual, the most radiant and worshipped
daughter of the nobilita of Florence. The melancholy
duke himself (this was in the days of his first
marriage) had seemed even gay in presenting her with
flowers which he had gathered at her side, with the
dew on them (in an alley glittering with the diamonds on
noble bosoms, and dewdrops on roses that would slumber,
though it was the birth-night of a princess), and

marked as was the royal attention to the envied beauty,
it was more easily forgiven her than her usual triumphs—for
it cost no one a lover. True to his conjugal
vows, the sad-featured monarch paid to beauty
only the homage exacted alike by every most admirable
work of nature.

The grand-duke Leopold had not been the only admirer
whose attentions to Francesca Spinola had been
remarked. A stranger, dressed with a magnificence
that seemed more fitted for a masquerade than a court-hall,
and yet of a mien that promised danger to the
too inquisitive, had entered alone, and, marking out the
daughter of the haughty count from the first, had
procured an introduction, no one knew how, and
sought every opportunity which the intervals of the
dance afforded, to place himself at her side. Occupied
with the courtly devoirs of his rank, the count
was, for a while, unaware of what struck almost every
one else, and it was only when the stranger's name
was inquired of him by the duke, that his dark and
jealous eye fell upon a face whose language of kindling
and undisguised admiration a child would have interpreted
aright. It was one of those faces that are of
no degree—that may belong to a barbaric king, or to
a Greek slave—that no refinement would improve, and
no servile habits degrade; faces which take their
changes from an indomitable and powerful soul, and
are beyond the trifling impression of the common usages
of life. Spinola was offended with the daring and
passionate freedom of the stranger's gaze upon his
daughter; but he hesitated to interrupt their conversation
too rudely. He stayed to exchange a compliment
with some fair obstruction in his way across the
crowded saloon, and, in the next moment, Francesca
stood alone.

“Who left you this moment, my Francesca?” asked
the count, with affected unconcern.

“I think, a Venetian,” she answered.

“And his name?”

“I know not, my father!”

The count's face flashed.

“Who presented him to my darling?” he asked,
again forcing himself to composure.

Francesca colored; and, with downcast eyes, answered:—

“No one, my father! He seemed to know me, and
I thought I might have forgotten him.”

Spinola turned on his heel, and, after a few vain inquiries,
and as vain a search for the stranger, ordered
his attendants, and drove silently home.

It was close upon the gray of the morning, and the
count still leaned over the stone-railing of his balcony.
Francesca had been gone an hour to her chamber.
A guitar-string sounded from the street below, and, a
moment after, a manly and mellow voice broke into a
Venetian barcarole, and sang with a skill and tenderness
which a vestal could scarce have listened to unmoved.
Spinola stepped back and laid his hand upon
his sword; but, changing his thought, he took a lamp
from the wall within, and crept noiselessly to his
daughter's chamber. She lay within her silken curtains,
with her hands crossed on her bosom, and from
her parted lips came the low breath of innocent and
untroubled sleep. Reassured, the count closed her
window and extinguished his lamp; and, when the
guitar was no longer heard echoing from the old
palace walls, and the rich voice of the serenader had
died away with his footsteps, the lord of the Palazzo
Spinola betook himself to sleep with a heart somewhat
relieved of its burden.

On the following day, the count pleaded the early-coming
heats of summer; and, with slight preparation,
left Florence for his summer-palace in the Apennines.
When Francesca joined him cheerfully, and
even gayly, in his sudden plan, he threw aside the
jealous fears that had haunted his breast, and forgot
the stranger and his barcarole. The old trees of his
maison de plaisance were heavy with the leaves of the
Italian May; the statues stood cool in the shade; the
mountain rivulets forgot their birth in the rocky
brooks, and ran over channels of marble, and played
up through cactus-leaves and sea-shells, and nereids'
horns, all carved by the contemporaries of Donatello.
“And here,” thought the proud noble, “I am á l'ecart
of the designs of adventurers, and the temptations and
dangers of gayety, and the child of my hopes will refresh
her beauty and her innocence, under the watchful
eye, ever present, of my love.

Francesca Spinola was one of those Italian natures
of which it is difficult for the inhabitants of other
climes to conceive. She had no feelings. She had
passions. She could love—but it sprang in an instant
to its fullest power—and maidenly reserve and hesitation
were incompatible with its existence. She had
listened, unmoved, to all the adulation of the duke's
court, and had been amused with the devotion of all
around her—but never touched. The voice of the
stranger at the fête of the Boboli—the daring words
he had addressed to her—had arrested her attention;
and it needed scarce the hour—which flew like a moment
at his side—to send a new sensation, like a tempest,
through her heart. She reasoned upon nothing
—asked nothing; but, while she gave up her soul
wholly to a passion hitherto unfelt, the deep dissimulation
which seems a natural part of the love of that
burning clime, prompted her, by an unquestioned impulse,
to conceal it entirely from her father. She had
counterfeited sleep when nearly surprised in listening
to the barcarole, and she had little need to counterfeit
joy at her departure for the mountains.

The long valley of the Arno lay marked out upon
the landscape by a wreath of vapor, stealing up as if
enamored of the fading color of the clouds; and far
away, like a silver bar on the rim of the horizon, shone
the long line of the Mediterranean. The mountain
sides lay bathed in azure; and, echoing from the
nearest, came the vesper-bells of Vallombrosa. Peace
and purity were stamped upon the hour.

“My child,” said the softened count, drawing Francesca
to his bosom, as they stood looking off upon
this scene from the flowery terrace beneath the portico;
“does my child love me?”

Francesca placed her hands upon his shoulders and
kissed him for reply.

“I feel impelled,” he continued, “to talk to you
while this beautiful hour is around us, of an affection
that resembles it.”

“Resembles the sunset, my father?”

“Yes! Shall I tell you how? By affecting with
its soft influence every object under the bend of the
sky! My Francesca! there are parents who love
their children, and love them well, and yet find feelings
for other attachments, and devotion for every
other interest in life. Not so mine! My love for
my child is a whole existence poured into hers.
Look at me, Francesca! I am not old. I am capable,
perhaps, of other love than a parent's. There are
among the young and beautiful who have looked on
me with favoring eyes. My blood runs warm yet, and
my step is as full of manhood—perhaps my heart as
prompt to be gay—as ever. I mean to say that I am
not too old for a lover. Does my daughter think so?”

“I have been long vain of your beauty, dear father,”
said Francesca, threading her hand in his dark
curls.

“There are other things that might share your
empire in my heart—politics, play, the arts—a hundred
passions which possess themselves of men whose
fortune or position gives them means and leisure.
Now listen, my daughter! You have supplanted all
these! You have filled my heart with yourself.

I am tempted to love—my heart is my daughter's.
I am asked to play—my thoughts are with my child.
I have neither time for politics, nor attention for the
arts—my being breathes through my child. I am
incapable of all else. Do you hear me, Francesca?”

“I do, dear father!”

“Then, one moment more! I can not conceal my
thoughts from you, and you will pardon love like mine
for ungrounded fears. I liked not the stranger at the
duke's palace.”

Francesca stole a quick look at her father, and,
with the rapidity of light, her dark eye resumed its
tranquillity.

“I say I liked him not! No one knew him! He
is gone, no one knows whither! I trust he will never
be seen more in Florence. But I will not disguise
from you that I thought you—pleased with him!”

“Father!”

“Forgive me if I wrong you—but, without pursuing
the subject, let your father implore you, on his
knees, for the confidence of your heart. Will you
tell me your thoughts, Francesca? Will you love
me with but the thousandth part of my adoration, my
devotion, for my child?”

“Father! I will!”

The count rose from the knee on which he had
fallen, gave his daughter a long embrace, and led her
in. And that night she fled over the Tuscan border,
into neighboring Romagna, and, with the stranger at
her side, sped away, under the cover of night, toward
the shores of the Brenta.

Like a city of secrets, sleeps silent Venice. Her
sea-washed foundations are buried under the smooth
glass of the tide. Her palace-entrances are dark caverns,
impenetrable to the eye. Her veiled dames are
unseen in their floating chambers, as they go from
street to street; and mysteriously and silently glide to
and fro those swift gondolas, black as night, yet carrying
sadness and mirth, innocence and guilt, alike
swiftly, mysteriously, and silently. Water, that betrays
no footstep, and covers all with the same mantle
of light, fills her streets. Silence, that is the seal of
secrecy, reigns day and night over her thousand
palaces.

For an hour the smooth mirror of the broad canal
that sweeps under the Rialto, had not been divided by
the steel prow of a gondola. Francesca Spinola stood
at the window of a chamber in a palace of gorgeous
magnificence, watching that still water for the coming
of her husband. The silver lines of the moon stole
back imperceptibly, as her full orb sailed up the
heavens, and the turrets of the old architecture of
Venice, drawn clearly on the unruffled bosom of the
canal, seemed retiring before a consuming sheet of
silver. The silence seemed painful. To the ear of
the beautiful Florentine, the want of the sound of a
footstep, of the echo of some distant wheel, the utter
death of all sound common to even the stillest hour of
a paved city, seemed oppressive and awful. Behind
her burned lamps of alabaster, and perfumes filled the
chamber, and on a cushion of costly velvet lay a mean
and unornamented guitar. Its presence in so costly a
palace was a secret yet withheld. She wished to
toach its strings, if only to disperse the horro of silence.
But she raised her fingers, and again, without
touching it, leaned out and watched the dark arch of
the Rialto.

A gondola, with a single oar, sped swiftly from its
black shadow. It could not be Paletto. He had
gone with his two faithful servants to St. Mark's.
The oar ceased—the bark headed in—the water
splashed on the marble stair—and the gondolier stepped
on shore. Ah, who but Paletto had such a form
as stood there in the moonlight?

“Are we to be married again,” said Francesca, as
her husband entered the chamber, “that you have
once more disguised yourself as a fisherman?”

Paletto turned from the light, and took up the
mysterious guitar. “It is no night to be in-doors, my
Francesca! Come with me to the lagoon, and I will
tell you the story of this despised instrument. Will
you come?” he pursued, as she stood looking at him
in wonder at his strange dress and disturbed look.
“Will you come, my wife?”

“But you have returned without your gondoliers!”
she said, advancing a step to take his hand.

“I have rowed a gondola ere now,” he answered;
and, without further explanation, he led her down the
lofty staircase, and seating her in the stern of the bark
which he had brought with him, stepped upon the
platform, and, with masterly skill and power, drove it
like a shadow under the Rialto.

He who has watched the horn of a quarter-moon
gliding past the towers, pinnacles and palaces of the
drifting clouds, and in his youthful and restless brain,
fancied such must be the smooth delight and changing
vision of a traveller in strange lands—one who has
thus dreamed in his boyhood will scarce shoot though
Venice for the first time in a gondola, without a
sense of familiarity with the scene and motion. The
architecture of the clouds is again drifting past, and
himself seems borne onward by the silver shallop of
the moon.

Francesca sat on the low cushion of the gondola,
watching and wondering. How should her luxurious
Paletto have acquired the exquisite skill with which
he drove the noiseless boat like a lance-fly over the
water. Another gondola approached or was left behind,
the corner of a palace was to be rounded, or the
black arch of a bridge to be shot under, and the
peculiar warning-cry of the gondoliers, giving notice
of their unheard approach, fell from his lips so mechanically,
that the hireling oarsmen of the city, marvelling
at his speed, but never doubting that it was a
comrade of the Piazza, added the “fratello mio” to
their passing salutation. She saw by every broad
beam of light, which, between the palaces, came down
across them, a brow clouded and a mind far from the
oar he turned so skilfully. She looked at the gondola
in which she sat. It was old and mean. In the prow
lay a fisher's net, and the shabby guitar, thrown upon
it, seemed now, at least, not out of place. She looked
up at Paletto once more, and, in his bare throat and
bosom, his loose cap and neglected hair, she could
with difficulty recognise the haughty stranger of the
Boboli. She spoke to him. It was necessary to
break the low-born spell that seemed closing around
her. Paletto started at her voice, and suspending his
oar, while the gondola still kept way as if with its own
irresistible volition, he passed his hand over his eyes
and seemed waking from some painful dream.

The gondola was now far out in the lagoon.—
Around them floated an almost impalpable vapor
just making the moonlight visible, and the soft click
of the water beneath the rising and dropping prow was
the only sound between them and the cloudless heaven.
In that silence Paletto strung his guitar and sang to
his bride with a strange energy. She listened and
played with his tangled locks, but there seemed a spell
upon her tongue when she would ask the meaning of
this mystery.

“Francesca!” he said at last, raising his head from
her lap.

“What says my fisherman?” she replied, holding
up his rough cap with a smile.

Paletto started, but recovering his composure, instantly
took the cap from her jewelled fingers and
threw it carelessly upon his head.

“Francesca! who is your husband?”

“Paletto?”

“And who is Paletto?”

“I would have asked sometimes, but your kisses
have interrupted me. Yet I know enough.”

“What know you?”

“That he is a rich and noble seignior of Venice!”

“Do I look one to-night?”

“Nay—for a masquerade, I have never seen a
better! Where learned you to look so like a fisherman
and row so like a gondolier?”

Paletto frowned.

“Francesca!” said he folding his arms across his
bosom, “I am the son of a fisherman, and I was bred
to row the gondola beneath you!”

The sternness of his tone checked the smile upon
her beautiful lip, and when she spoke it was with a
look almost as stern as his own.

“You mock me too gravely, Paletto! But come!
I will question you in your own humor. Who educated
the fisherman's son?”

“The fisherman.”

“And his palace and his wealth—whence came
they, Signor Pescatore?”

The scornful smile of incredulity with which this
question was asked, speedily fled from her lip as Paletto
answered it.

“Listen! Three months since I had never known
other condition than a fisherman of the lagoon, nor
worn other dress than this in which you see me. The
first property I ever possessed beyond my day's earnings,
was this gondola. It was my father's, Giannotto
the fisherman. When it became mine by his death,
I suddenly wearied of my tame life, sold boat and nets,
and with thoughts which you can not understand,
but which have brought you here, took my way to
the Piazza. A night of chance, begun with the whole
of my inheritance staked upon a throw, left me master
of wealth I had never dreamed of. I became a
gay signore. It seemed to me that my soul had gone
out of me, and a new spirit, demoniac if you will, had
taken possession. I no longer recognised myself. I
passed for an equal with the best-born, my language
altered, my gait, my humor. One strong feeling alone
predominated—an insane hatred to the rank in which
you were born, Francesca! It was strange, too, that
I tried to ape its manners. I bought the palace you
have just left, and filled it with costly luxuries. And
then there grew upon me the desire to humiliate that
rank—to pluck down to myself some one of its proud
and cherished daughters—such as you!”

Francesca muttered something between her teeth,
and folded her small arms over her bosom. Paletto
went on.

“I crossed to Florence with this sole intention.
Unknown and uninvited, I entered the palace at the
fête of the Boboli, and looked around for a victim.
You were the proudest and most beautiful. I chose
you and you are here.”

Paletto looked at her with a smile, and never sunbeam
was more unmixed with shadow than the smile
which answered it on the lips of Spinola's daughter.

“My Paletto!” she said, “you have the soul of a
noble, and the look of one, and I am your bride. Let
us return to the palace!”

“I have no palace but this!” he said, striking his
hand like a bar of iron upon the side of the gondola.

`You have not heard out my tale.”

Francesca sat with a face unmoved as marble.

“This night, at play, I lost all. My servants are
dismissed, my palace belongs to another, and with
this bark which I had repurchased, I am once more
Paletto the fisherman!”

A slight heave of the bosom of the fair Florentine
was her only response to this astounding announcement.
Her eyes turned slowly from the face of the
fisherman, and fixing apparently on some point far out
in the Adriatic, she sat silent, motionless, and cold.

“I am a man, Francesca!” said Paletto after a pause
which, in the utter stillness of the lagoon around them,
seemed like a suspension of the breathing of nature,
and “I have not gone through this insane dream without
some turning aside of the heart. Spite of myself,
I loved you and I could not dishonor you. We
are married, Francesca!”

The small dark brows of the Florentine lowered
till the silken lashes they overhung seemed starting
from beneath her forehead. Her eyes flashed fire
below.

“Bene!” said Paletto, rising to his feet; “one
word more while we have silence around us and are
alone. You are free to leave me, and I will so far repair
the wrong I have done you, as to point out the
way. It will be daylight in an hour. Fly to the
governor's palace, announce your birth, declare that
you were forced from your father by brigands, and
claim his protection. The world will believe you, and
the consequences to myself I will suffer in silence.”

With a sudden, convulsive motion, Francesca thrust
out her arm, and pointed a single finger toward Venice.
Paletto bent to his oar, and quivering in every seam
beneath its blade, the gondola sped on his way. The
steel prow struck fire on the granite steps of the
Piazza, the superb daughter of Spinola stepped over
the trembling side, and with a half-wave of her hand,
strode past the Lion of St. Mark, and approached the
sentinel at the palace-gate. And as her figure was
lost among the arabesque columns shaded from the
moon, Paletto's lonely gondola shot once more silently
and slowly from the shore.