Chapter 24 Venetian Masque by Rafael Sabatini
EMANCIPATION
Firmly on the morrow Lallemant went as far as Villetard gave him leave. And Villetard himself was present to see that he went no further. For the rest Villetard loyally supported him in the assertion that they must retain the drafts in their possession, and that Vendramin must rest content with their assurance that they would not be employed to his detriment unless he himself provoked it.
Vendramin on his side was no less firm. A night's reflection had hardened him in his purpose. Unless by this act of treachery to Venice he could break the intolerable fetters in which Melville held him, he would not undertake it.
What he said to Lallemant was that without a definite guarantee he would not act; and that no guarantee would serve him short of delivery to him of the actual drafts upon his fulfilment of what was required of him.
Upon this he was actually on the point of taking his leave when Villetard intimated surrender.
'Since he sets such store by it, Lallemant, let him have his way.'
And Lallemant, venting his reluctance in a sigh, had felt constrained to yield.
When, later that day, Marc-Antoine called at the embassy to inquire whether Vendramin had been enlisted, the uncomfortable Lallemant disingenuously brushed the matter aside.
'I have no doubt,' he said, 'that he will come to it,' and he changed the subject.
The ambassador had been able to simplify the task ahead of Vendramin by putting him in communication with a survivor of the associates of Sartoni. This man procured two others who were willing to work with him. But since the fate of their predecessors went to show with what terrible risks the task was fraught, these scoundrels required very substantial emoluments.
Vendramin found the embassy accommodatingly liberal. Lallemant did not stint supplies. Not only did he furnish the necessary funds for those wages of treachery, but he made no difficulty about adding fifty ducats, as a douceur to relieve the temporary embarrassment which Vendramin had not hesitated to confess to him.
As a result, and also because driven by anxiety to obtain possession of those incriminating drafts, Vendramin went to work with zealous and assiduous diligence.
Each morning when Zanetto—the chief of the men employed—brought him a rough note of the night's labours, he would spend some hours in carefully recording the figures on the chart he had prepared to receive them.
This, however, did not prevent him from making simultaneously a fuller parade than ever of his patriotic zeal at the Palazzo Pizzamano, where he was an almost daily visitor. There was, however, little to be done just then. Hope was encouraged by the persistent rumour that although Bonaparte was now in great strength, and although the Archduke Charles at Udine was not relaxing his warlike preparations, negotiations for peace were actively on foot.
Vendramin displayed a shrewdness, which he thought that future events might well come to establish, by refusing to share this optimism. He declared that the perceptible underground activities of the French contradicted these rumours. Venice, he reminded them, was full of French agents and French propagandists, working incalculable mischief.
One day, meeting Catarin Corner at the Casa Pizzamano, he actually expressed himself with some bitterness on the subject of the comparative inertia of the inquisitors.
'The danger,' he declared, 'is perhaps more to be feared than the guns of Bonaparte. It is an invasion of ideas, creeping insidiously into the foundations of the State. It is the hope of the apostles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, that if the Venetian oligarchy is not to be destroyed by force of arms, it shall nevertheless succumb to Jacobin intrigue.'
Corner assured him that the inquisitors were by no means either indifferent or inert. Idleness on the part of the inquisitors was not to be assumed from the absence of signs of their activities. It was not the way of the Three to leave footprints. If those responsible for military measures had been one half as active, the Republic today would stand delivered of every menace.
Vendramin deplored so much secrecy at such a time. A parade of the functioning of the inquisitors must prove a salutary deterrent to enemy agents.
Pizzamano listened and approved him, and in this way Ser Leonardo improved his credit with the Count, and at the same time increased the despair of Isotta.
She moved wan and listless in those days, and Vendramin's attitude towards her was not calculated to lighten her burden. Whilst outwardly the perfect courtier, yet his courtship held now an indefinable undercurrent of irony, which, whilst so slight and elusive that it was impossible to seize upon it, was nevertheless perceptible to her keen senses.
Sometimes, when Marc-Antoine was with them, she would detect on Vendramin's lip a faint curl that was not merely the secret mockery of one in whom he perceived a defeated rival; and in his glance at moments she would surprise a malevolence that made her almost afraid. Of the meeting between the two men she knew nothing, and of the open enmity between them they had tacitly agreed to allow nothing to transpire here. The fact that they had no love for each other was beyond dissembling: but at least they used towards each other a cold and distant civility.
Sometimes, when Vendramin leaned over her with words of flattery, there was a smile on his lips that made her soul shudder. He had a trick of alluding to her innocence of the world's evil and to the purity of her inexperience in terms so exaggerated that it was impossible not to suspect their sarcasm, far though she might be from understanding it. She could not guess the bitterness festering in his soul, the hatred which at times surged up in him for this woman whom he was to marry, but by whom he accounted himself so basely cheated. He would make her his wife so that he might win an established position and escape from the life of makeshifts which had hitherto been his. But he could never forgive that, whilst she might gratify his ambition, she cheated him of all else to which he was entitled, cheated him even of the satisfaction of telling her that he knew her stately calm, her cold, virginal austerity for the brazen masks with which she covered her impurity. One day that satisfaction might yet be his; and nearer at hand lay that other satisfaction of striking at her through her paramour, and thus at one blow avenging himself upon both. There should be, he thought, a measure of solace for him there.
To this end he worked so diligently that, within a fortnight of having set his hand to the task, he was able secretly to repair to the French Legation one night and lay before Lallemant the chart which he had completed.
The two Frenchmen examined it carefully. Lallemant still had in his possession some of the details supplied to him by Rocco Terzi before he was taken. By these he checked as far as possible the work of Vendramin, and found it accurate.
They behaved generously. From a strong-box Lallemant took the drafts that had been cashed at Vivanti's and surrendered them. After that he counted out a hundred ducats in gold, which he had promised the Venetian as a further gratuity when the task should be accomplished.
Vendramin pocketed first the heavy bag of gold, and then, when he had carefully examined them, the incriminating drafts.
Villetard, who had looked on with his habitual cynical smile, spoke at last.
'Now that you know where good money is to be earned, you may find it suits you to continue in our service.'
Vendramin looked at him in resentment of both tone and words.
'I shall not again find myself at your mercy.'
The cynicism of Villetard's smile deepened. 'You are not the first escroc I've met who could be lofty in words. It's part of your stock-in-trade, my lad, and we're not deceived. You'll remember my offer.'
Vendramin went out, secretly fuming at the insolence of such assumptions. But the feeling did not last. It was outweighed by the exhilaration of possessing those drafts on Vivanti's Bank. He was like a man whose fetters have been knocked off. He was emancipated; free at last to settle accounts with Mr. Melville without dread of consequences. At last—as he expressed it to himself—he was in a position to repair his honour.
He lost no time in setting about it. With a definite purpose he made his way to Saint Mark's.
Payment of his debts would consume all of the hundred ducats in his pocket. But Vendramin was not thinking of paying his debts. He was not even thinking of wooing fortune with this money at the Casino del Leone, which is probably how he would have employed it, his creditors notwithstanding, but that he knew of a still sweeter use for it.
He strolled the length of the Procuratie, scanning the occupants of the tables at Florian's, greeted here with a nod and there with a wave of the hand. Those who hailed him were chiefly fellow-barnabotti taking the spring air, and a little wine at somebody's expense. For some time he did not find what he sought. Having come to the end, he passed round again to the middle of the Piazza, and so retraced his steps towards Saint Mark's. It was only as he was returning that his glance met that of a middle-aged, vigorous man in a rusty suit with tarnished lace, who walked with his hands behind him, a cane swinging from them, and a sword worn through the pocket of his coat.
Ser Leonardo halted in this man's path. They greeted each other, and Vendramin, turning, fell into step beside him.
'There's a service I am needing, Contarini,' he said. 'If you can render it there are fifty ducats for you, and another thirty to be shared between any two likely lads you may know who will lend a hand.'
The expression on Contarini's sallow, hungry-looking face scarcely changed.
'Does it need three of us?' he asked.
'I am making certain. I want no accidents. And there will be four of us. For I shall be of the party.'