Marietta: A Maid of Venice by F. Marion Crawford (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📕

Very little was known about George, the Dalmatian, and the servants in the house of Angelo Beroviero, as well as the workmen of the latter's glass furnace, called him Zorzi, distrusted him, suggested that he was probably a heretic, and did not hide their suspicion that he was in love with the master's only daughter, Marietta. All these matters were against him, and people wondered why old Angelo kept the waif in his service, since he would have engaged any one out of a hundred young fellows of Murano, all belonging to the almost noble caste of the glass-workers, all good Christians, all trustworthy, and all ready to promise that the lovely Marietta should never make the slightest impression upon their respectfully petrified hearts. But Angelo had not been accustomed to consider what his neighbours might think of him or his doings, and most of his neighbours and friends abstained with singular unanimity from thrusting their opinions upon him. For this, there were three reasons: he was very rich, he was the greatest living artist in working glass, and he was of a choleric temper. He confessed the latter fault with great humility to the curate of San Piero each year in Lent, but he would never admit it to any one else. Indeed, if any of his family ever suggested that he was somewhat hasty, he flew into such an ungovernable rage in proving the contrary that it was scarcely wise to stay in the house while the fit lasted. Marietta alone was safe. As for her brothers, though the elder was nearly forty years old, it was not long since his father had given him a box on the ears which made him see simultaneously all the colours of all the glasses ever made in Murano before or since. It is true that Giovanni had timidly asked to be told one of the secrets for making fine red glass which old Angelo had learned long ago from old Paolo Godi of Pergola, the famous chemist; and these secrets were all carefully written out in the elaborate character of the late fifteenth century, and Angelo kept the manuscript in an iron box, under his own bed, and wore the key on a small silver chain at his neck.

He was a big old man, with fiery brown eyes, large features, and a very pale skin. His thick hair and short beard had once been red, and streaks of the strong colour still ran through the faded locks. His hands were large, but very skilful, and the long straight fingers were discoloured by contact with the substances he used in his experiments.

He was jealous by nature, rather than suspicious. He had been jealous of his wife while she had lived, though a more devoted woman never fell to the lot of a lucky husband. Often, for weeks together, he had locked the door upon her and taken the key with him every morning when he left the house, though his furnaces were almost exactly opposite, on the other side of the narrow canal, so that by coming to the door he could have spoken with her at her window. But instead of doing this he used to look through a little grated opening which he had caused to be made in the wall of the glass-house; and when his wife was seated at her window, at her embroidery, he could watch her unseen, for she was beautiful and he loved her. One day he saw a stranger standing by the water's edge, gazing at her, and he went out and threw the man into the canal. When she died, he said little, but he would not allow his own children to speak of her before him. After that, he became almost as jealous of his daughter, and though he did not lock her up like her mother, he used to take her with him to the glass-house when the weather was not too hot, so that she should not be out of his sight all day.

Moreover, because he needed a man to help him, and because he was afraid lest one of his own caste should fall in love with Marietta, he took Zorzi, the Dalmatian waif, into his service; and the three were often together all day in the room where Angelo had set up a little furnace for making experiments. In the year 1470 it was not lawful in Murano to teach any foreign person the art of glass-making; for the glass-blowers were a sort of nobility, and nearly a hundred years had passed since the Council had declared that patricians of Venice might marry the daughters of glass-workers without affecting their own rank or that of their children. But old Beroviero declared that he was not teaching Zorzi anything, that the young fellow was his servant and not his apprentice, and did nothing but keep up the fire in the furnace, and fetch and carry, grind materials, and sweep the floor. It was quite true that Zorzi did all these things, and he did them with a silent regularity that made him indispensable to his master, who scarcely noticed the growing skill with which the young man helped him at every turn, till he could be entrusted to perform the most delicate operations in glass-working without any especial instructions. Intent upon artistic matters, the old man was hardly aware, either, that Marietta had learned much of his art; or if he realised the fact he felt a sort of jealous satisfaction in the thought that she liked to be shut up with him for hours at a time, quite out of sight of the world and altogether out of harm's way. He fancied that she grew more like him from day to day, and he flattered himself that he understood her. She and Zorzi were the only beings in his world who never irritated him, now that he had them always under his eye and command. It was natural that he should suppose himself to be profoundly acquainted with their two natures, though he had never taken the smallest pains to test this imaginary knowledge. Possibly, in their different ways, they knew him better than he knew them.

The glass-house was guarded from outsiders as carefully as a nunnery, and somewhat resembled a convent in having no windows so situated that curious persons might see from without what went on inside. The place was entered by a low door from the narrow paved path that ran along the canal. In a little vestibule, ill-lighted by one small grated window, sat the porter, an uncouth old man who rarely answered questions, and never opened the door until he had assured himself by a deliberate inspection through the grating that the person who knocked had a right to come in. Marietta remembered him in his den when she had been a little child, and she vaguely supposed that he had always been there. He had been old then, he was not visibly older now, he would probably never die of old age, and if any mortal ill should carry him off, he would surely be replaced by some one exactly like him, who would sleep in the same box bed, sit all day in the same black chair, and eat bread, shellfish and garlic off the same worm-eaten table. There was no other entrance to the glass-house, and there could be no other porter to guard it.

Beyond the vestibule a dark corridor led to a small garden that formed the court of the building, and on one side of which were the large windows that lighted the main furnace room, while the other side contained the laboratory of the master. But the main furnace was entered from the corridor, so that the workmen never passed through the garden. There were a few shrubs in it, two or three rose-bushes and a small plane-tree. Zorzi, who had been born and brought up in the country, had made a couple of flower-beds, edged with refuse fragments of coloured and iridescent slag, and he had planted such common flowers as he could make grow in such a place, watering them from a disused rain-water cistern that was supposed to have been poisoned long ago. Here Marietta often sat in the shade, when the laboratory was too close and hot, and when the time was at hand during which even the men would not be able to work on account of the heat, and the furnace would be put out and repaired, and every one would be set to making the delicate clay pots in which the glass was to be melted. Marietta could sit silent and motionless in her seat under the plane-tree for a long time when she was thinking, and she never told any one her thoughts.

She was not unlike her father in looks, and that was doubtless the reason why he assumed that she must be like him in character. No one would have said that she was handsome, but sometimes, when she smiled, those who saw that rare expression in her face thought she was beautiful. When it was gone, they said she was cold. Fortunately, her hair was not red, as her father's had been or she might sometimes have seemed positively ugly; it was of that deep ruddy, golden brown that one may often see in Venice still, and there was an abundance of it, though it was drawn straight back from her white forehead and braided into the smallest possible space, in the fashion of that time. There was often a little colour in her face, though never much, and it was faint, yet very fresh, like the tint within certain delicate shells; her lips were of the same hue, but stronger and brighter, and they were very well shaped and generally closed, like her father's. But her eyes were not like his, and the lids and lashes shaded them in such a way that it was hard to guess their colour, and they had an inscrutable, reserved look that was hard to meet for many seconds. Zorzi believed that they were grey, but when he saw them in his dreams they were violet; and one day she opened them wide for an instant, at something old Beroviero said to her, and then Zorzi fancied that they were like sapphires, but before he could be sure, the lids and lashes shaded them again, and he only knew that they were there, and longed to see them, for her father had spoken of her marriage, and she had not answered a single word.

When they were alone together for a moment, while the old man was searching for more materials in the next room, she spoke to Zorzi.

"My father did not mean you to hear that," she said.

"Nevertheless, I heard," answered Zorzi, pushing a small piece of beech wood into the fire through a narrow slit on one side of the brick furnace. "It was not my fault."

"Forget that you heard it," said Marietta quietly, and as her father entered the room again she passed him and went out into the garden.

But Zorzi did not even try to forget the name of the man whom Beroviero appeared to have chosen for his daughter. He tried instead, to understand why Marietta wished him not to remember that the name was Jacopo Contarini. He glanced sideways at the girl's figure as she disappeared through the door, and he thoughtfully pushed another piece of wood into the fire. Some day, perhaps before long, she would marry this man who had been mentioned, and then Zorzi would be alone with old Beroviero in the laboratory. He set his teeth, and poked the fire with, an iron rod.

It happened now and then that Marietta did not come to the glass-house. Those days were long, and when night came Zorzi felt as if his heart were turning into a hot stone in his breast, and his sight was dull, and he