He struck the water with a terrific splash and plunged through it with scarcely less speed. His feet hit mud and went into it as though it were butter. For an instant he panicked, fearing that it would trap him; but his knees had bent double and, as he jerked himself erect, with one wild wriggle he also freed his feet. Automatically he drew in breath. The water gushed up his nostrils, causing him acute pain at the back of his nose. He choked and took in another mouthful of the horrid sewage tainted water. Then with bulging eyes and straining lungs he came to the surface.
As his head bobbed up its appearance was greeted with a chorus of excited shouts. At this middle-day hour the Grand Canal was full of traffic. Although he had fallen into the Barnaba Canal, scores of people had seen him. Malderini's people were leaning over the balcony yelling, 'Stop thief! Stop thief!' and half a dozen boats had already turned in his direction.
Desperately he struck out up the narrower canal. Fifty yards ahead, where the Malderini palace ended, he could see a flight of steps leading up onto the canal's side-walk. If he could reach them and land there was still a chance that he might escape from his pursuers.
But a broad-bottomed boat, loaded high with vegetables, was coming down the canal towards him. The man who was steering the boat gave a swift twist with his long sweep and its prow veered round, barring Roger's passage. Glancing over his shoulder he saw that Malderini's gondola, with its two liveried men urged on by their fellow servants craning over the balcony, was bearing down upon him.
Caught between the two, he temporarily accepted the lesser evil and allowed a thick-necked peasant to haul him onto the vegetable boat. No sooner was he on it than he gave his rescuer a violent shove, which sent him over backwards upon a great pile of artichokes, then dived back into the canal on the boat's far side.
As he came up again, once more shaking the foul water from his eyes, he realised that the odds were hopelessly against him. He was now like a bear in a bear-pit surrounded by a pack of fierce dogs. With swift strokes, craft of all sorts had moved up from both directions. They were full of excited shouting people and their boats now formed a solid ring only ten feet away all round him.
The Malderini gondola shot out from the circle that hemmed him in. Stooping, the liveried servant in its prow seized him by the arm. He resisted wildly, but someone threw an empty bottle that hit him on the head. It did not stun him but temporarily dazed him to a degree that robbed him of the strength to break free.
Muzzy, panting, soaking and exhausted he was dragged on board. The excitement now being over, the other craft disengaged themselves and the mass of boats began to break up. Overhead from the balcony Pietro was shouting down to Malderini's gondoliers. 'Don't let him escape! Have a care that he does not escape! Bring him into the palace! Quickly! Quickly!'
Roger's bemused brain took in the shouted order. Again it was borne in upon him that once he became a captive inside the palace there would be little chance of his getting out of it alive. Desperately he looked round for some means of saving himself. Suddenly his glance fell on a gondola not far off which had as passengers four French soldiers. Struggling into a sitting position he called to them:
'A moi! A moi! C'est un Frangais qui vous appel! Au secours! Mes braves! Au secours!'
Hearing his cries the soldiers immediately took a renewed interest. Shouting back to him, they had their gondola turned in his direction. It arrived at the same moment as Malderini's at the steps of the palace. Still half dazed, Roger was hauled out onto the landing place by the two gondoliers, bat while struggling with them he called again to the Frenchmen:
'Help comrades; help! I am a Frenchman! Don't let them take me inside the palace. They mean to murder me.'
The soldiers promptly jumped ashore, and their leader, a Sergeant cried in execrable Italian, 'Let this man go. Take your hands off him.'
Pietro, meanwhile, had run downstairs, and now appeared with three of the other servants at his heels. At a glance he took in the situation. Pointing at Roger he shouted in French as execrable as the Sergeant's Italian. 'This man is an Englishman, an assassin and a thief. He has stolen jewels from my mistress. We must take him in and search him for them.'
Roger was getting his wits back. Swiftly he denied the charge and offered to be searched there and then.
A heated wrangle ensued during which most of those participating could understand less than half of what the others said. But one thing at least appeared beyond dispute to the soldiers Roger spoke French with the fluency and accent of a native; so he must be a Frenchman. Therefore, whether he was a thief or not, they were not going to let him be maltreated by a bunch of Italians. They insisted that he should be taken to the Municipality, and that they would accompany him to see fair play.
Forced to give in, Pietro, now brandishing a stiletto as a threat to Roger should he make a further attempt to escape, made him get back into the gondola and got in beside him. The soldiers reboarded theirs, and the two craft set off side by side down the canal.
The Municipality had taken over the administrative offices in the Doge's Palace, and, owing to the epidemic of lawlessness that had swept the city since the fall of the old regime, a magistrate's court was maintained in perpetual session there.
Roger was marched through the great courtyard of the palace to the part of it in which the court sat and handed over to its officers. Pietro having charged him with theft, he was taken to a cell and searched. During the process, he thanked his gods that while in Venice he had followed his usual practice, when living under an assumed identity, of hiding his papers and most of his money under a floor-board in his room; for the discovery of his Bills on London and, above all, Mr. Pitt's letter, would have been the end of him. His one chance of regaining his freedom was, he felt sure, to continue to maintain that he was a Frenchman, in the hope that he would reap the benefit of the licence which the French forced the Venetians to extend to their nationals whenever one of them committed a crime that was not of a really serious nature.
Twenty minutes later he was taken into the court, and he saw at a glance that it inspired a little more confidence in the dispensation of strict justice than had the tribunals he had often attended in Paris during the Revolution. It differed only in that there was no crowd of sans-culottes and shrewish women to throw gibes at the unfortunate prisoners. But a group of French soldiers leaned against one wall smoking short clay pipes and frequently spitting, a handful of lawyers, some unshaven and others with their feet up, lounged on the benches, the straw on the floor did not look as though it had been changed for a month, and the place smelled foul.
Three men sat up on a dais behind a table littered with papers. Two wore tricolour sashes of office in the new Italian colours. One of them was a quite young man with the burning eyes of a fanatic, and wearing a workman's blouse; the other who, as he sat in the centre, was evidently the President, was much older, well but untidily dressed, and with a mean little pursed-up mouth. The third, to Roger's great relief, was a French Captain, evidently acting as a Provost-Marshal.