The gondolier came running to the steps, catching up the long oar as he sprang to position.
“Whither, Excellence?” he asked.
A burst of music, borne on the air across roofs and up echoing canals, came faintly to Gordon from the far-away Square of St. Mark.
“To the Piazza,” he said.
CHAPTER XXIX
TERESA’S AWAKENING
Teresa, meanwhile, had been facing her problem—how to warn the Englishman of his danger. During the slow hours while Gordon sat gazing into the distorted mirror of his own thought, she had traversed every causeway of risk, sounded every well of possibility. To a young girl of the higher class in Venice, a night trip, uncavaliered, held elements of grave peril. Discovery spelled lasting disgrace perhaps, certainly the anger of her father. All this she was ready to hazard. But beyond was the looming probability that she could not find the object of her search after all. However, it was a chance, and fear, with another sentiment that she did not analyze, impelled her to take it.
It was an easy task to win Tita, for he would have denied her nothing. To him, however, she told only a part of the truth—that she wished once to see the Piazza by night. Only an hour in the music and lights in his care, and then quick and safe return to the Palazzo Albrizzi. The house servants she could answer for. Who would be the wiser?
So, a little while after Gordon had been set down that night at the Molo, another gondola, lampless and with drawn tenda, stole swiftly to a side landing, and Teresa, closely veiled, with Tita by her side, stepped into the square, beneath the flare of its flambeaux, into its currents of eddying maskers where the white fazzioli of the lower orders mingled with the rich costumes of patricians, all alike stung by the tarantula of gaiety: a flashing sea of motion and color surging endlessly beneath a sky alive with winged spots of gray and black—the countless pigeons that circled there undisturbed.
She had chosen the Piazza after much deliberation. It was the last night of the carnival, when all the world of Venice was on the streets. At the new Fenice Theater the latest opera of Rossini’s was playing, and there was the ball of the Cavalchina, the final throb before the dropping of the pall of Lent. The sadness in Gordon’s face and speech, she felt, had no part in these things. She felt instinctively that he would be spectator rather than actor, would choose the open air of the square rather than the indoors. The danger she feared for him would not seek him in a crowd; it would lurk in some silent byway and strike unseen. The thought made her tremble as she peered about her.
The center of the Piazza was a pool, fed and emptied by three streams of people: one flowing under the clock-tower with its blue and gold dial and bronze figures, one through the west entrance under the Bocca di Piazza, and still another rounding the Doges’ Palace and meeting the thronged Riva. It was on the fringe of this second stream that she saw him, when the hour was almost ended. He was standing in the shadow of the pillars, watching, she thought, yet abstracted. With a whispered word to Tita she ran and touched the moveless figure on the arm.