She sat quite still, looking silently before her, conscious only of horror. The threatened imminence of this step made her realize poignantly the impossibility of taking it.
Yet, if she refused, she would rightly be accounted a cheat, defrauding Vendramin of the wages at which he had been hired by her father, wages which once, perceiving no other use for herself, she had consented to be.
Guessing perhaps something of the conflict in her spirit, he sought slyly to assist her decision.
'If you consent, then your father will conclude that my explanation to you must have been satisfactory, and no more need be said about the matter. If you don't, I shall be under the odious necessity of explaining to him, in justice to myself; and my explanation must be as full as it has been to you.'
'Oh, that is brave! That is brave!' she cried. 'It is worthy of a man who hires bullies to assassinate a rival. What solid foundations of respect you are laying upon which to build this marriage of ours.'
'So that we build it, I do not care upon what we build. That is how I love you, Isotta. With the recklessness that belongs to real love.'
She pondered the evils that confronted her and of which she must make choice, and choice grew more impossible the more she pondered them.
She could no more brave the anger of her father in his inevitable assumptions, and in the shame which he would account that she had brought upon their house, than she could brave the alternative of taking to husband this man who daily grew more odious, who daily revealed himself more vile.
Decision being impossible, it but remained to obtain postponement.
'When Lent is out, you said?' she half-questioned.
'You consent, then, Isotta?'
'Yes,' she answered, and reddened at her own disingenuousness. 'When Lent is out. You may tell my father that I will appoint the date at Easter.'
But at this he frowned. Then uttered the short laugh of the man who sees the trap, and refuses to be taken in it. 'That will not serve. You will appoint the date now.'
Her trouble of spirit was betrayed only by the old gesture of wringing the slim white hands that lay in her lap. Then she perceived her course. Knowing where his interest lay, she played boldly. She rose to answer him, and never was she more stately.
'Am I to be hectored so even before marriage?' She thrust out her chin. 'I will appoint the date at Easter, or I will never appoint it; at your choice.'
His prominent eyes scanned her face and found it resolute. There was no faltering in the glance that met his own. He inclined his head after a moment, accepting defeat upon the minor point. 'So be it. I will wait until Easter.'
To seal the bargain, to stress perhaps his right, he leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
She suffered it with a statuesque impassivity that maddened him.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE QUEST
Isotta and her brother sat alone once more in her boudoir.
Despair had stripped her of her stateliness. She was in tears.
Domenico sat on a painted coffer, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, misery in his face. He had heard from her all that had passed at her interview with Vendramin, and his present consternation chiefly concerned the indiscretion of her visit to Marc-Antoine.
'That you should have taken so foolish a step is nothing. That Vendramin should have knowledge and proof of it is terrible. It places you in that fellow's power. If he were to publish this thing . . . Oh, my God!' He got up, and stamped about the room.
'I fear that much less than the alternative of marrying him, a profligate, an escroc, a murderer. That is the husband my father imposes on me out of his loyalty to Venice. God of pity! When I consider that I am the bribe, the decoy to lure this villain into patriotic activity, I ask myself, is that less shameful than to be branded for a wanton? What honour do you suppose that his wife will enjoy? Will it be any higher than the dishonour with which he threatens me if I refuse the marriage?'
Domenico went down on one knee beside her and put his arms about her in a sheltering gesture of compassion.
'My poor Isotta! Poor child! Courage, courage! We are not at the marriage yet, and please God we never shall be. Do you think I want that nasty rogue for a brother-in-law? You were clever to compel postponement of the decision. We have a month. And in a month . . . What cannot happen in a month?' He kissed her tenderly, and as she clung to him, fondly, gratefully, he pursued his encouragements. 'I'll not be idle in the time. I'll begin by trying to discover something more about his quarrel with Marc, and how it came, after all, to be fought. It may be known. Leave me to investigate. Then perhaps we can decide on something.'
But for all his earnest brotherly intentions, Domenico, like his father, having always held aloof from the more frivolous groups of Venetian society, which both Vendramin and Marc-Antoine had been frequenting at the time of the duel, did not find it easy to penetrate it now. Moreover, his opportunities were curtailed by an increase of military duties. The consternation caused by the revolts of Bergamo and Brescia was not allayed by the news that reached Venice as the month of March wore on.
Bonaparte, having forced the passage of the Tagliamento, had steadily thrust the Austrian army back and back until before the end of the month the Archduke Charles was assembling the broken remnants of it at Klagenfurth, and the Army of Italy stood on enemy territory and the road to Vienna.
Lodovico Manin had not even been constrained to face the agony of a pronouncement in the matter of that eleventh-hour alliance with the Austrians, nor had the Grand Council ever been assembled to debate the matter. By the time that Count Pizzamano had placed before the Doge his information concerning the French plan, the Army of Italy was already advancing. It was too late for any measure beyond that of fortifying the actual city of Venice in a deluded hope of preserving her from violation, whatever happened.
For this the Council of Ten had issued the necessary orders, and it may have occurred to them that, considering the anger of the inhabitants with a government whose ineptitude seemed now completely established, if the troops assembled in the capital could not ultimately be used to protect the city from the French, they could certainly be used in the meantime to protect the government from the city.
Meanwhile, as a further measure of pacification, rumours were diligently being circulated. It was said, untruly, that the Emperor was sending down yet another army of seventy thousand men. Less untruthful—but of a significance not yet realized by the people—was the rumour that peace was about to be made.
The display of activity was not confined to the military. The agents of the inquisitors of state were now of an extraordinary diligence, and arrests upon denunciations of Jacobinism, of espionage, or other forms of treason were taking place on every hand. Disappearances in those days of panic were commonplace.
It was to a Venice scarcely recognizable that Marc-Antoine at last returned when he emerged from his convalescence at the legation. This did not happen until the early days of April, on the morrow, in fact, of the battle of Judenburg in which the Austrians suffered the final defeat of the campaign.
Although in Venice it was not yet suspected, the war was over, and within a week the suspension of hostilities would be signed.
The Vicomtesse had remained at the legation to tend Marc-Antoine until there was no longer a shadow of an excuse to justify her in neglecting the insidious propagandist work that Lallemant was demanding of her, the careful, gradual preparation of Venetian minds for what was to come. It was a work in which he was employing by now a small army of agents, many of whom were actually Venetian.