“Mark me,” said he, “thou wilt turn out a brave fellow, that I can see already. It is now time that you should earn that bread for yourself which hitherto you have owed to our bounty. Look! Here thou hast a dagger of the finest steel; you must charge for its use by the inch. If you plunge it only one inch deep into the bosom of his foe, your employer must reward you with only one sequin: if two inches, with ten sequins; if three, with twenty; if the whole dagger, you may then name your own price. Here is next a glass poniard; whomsoever this pierces, that man’s death is certain. As soon as the blow is given, you must break the dagger in the wound. The flesh will close over the point which has been broken off, and which will keep its quarters till the day of resurrection! Lastly, observe this metallic dagger; its cavity conceals a subtle poison, which, whenever you touch this spring, will immediately infuse death into the veins of him whom the weapon’s point hath wounded. Take these daggers. In giving them I present you with a capital capable of bringing home to you most heavy and most precious interest.”
Abellino received the instruments of death, but his hand shook as it grasped them.
“Possessed of such unfailing weapons, of what immense sums must your robberies have made you master!”
“Scoundrel!” interrupted Matteo, frowning and offended, “amongst us robbery is unknown. What? Dost take us for common plunderers, for mere thieves, cut-purses, housebreakers, and villains of that low, miserable stamp?”
“Perhaps what you wish me to take you for is something worse; for, to speak openly, Matteo, villains of that stamp are contented within plundering a purse or a casket, which can easily be filled again; but that which we take from others is a jewel which a man never has but once, and which stolen can never be replaced. Are we not, then, a thousand times more atrocious plunderers?”
“By the house at Loretto, I think you have a mind to moralise, Abellino?”
“Hark ye, Matteo, only one question. At the Day of Judgment, which think you will hold his head highest, the thief or the assassin?”
“Ha! ha! ha!”
“Think not that Abellino speaks thus from want of resolution. Speak but the word, and I murder half the senators of Venice; but still—”
“Fool! know, the bravo must be above crediting the nurse’s antiquated tales of vice and virtue. What is virtue? What is vice? Nothing but such things as forms of government, custom, manners, and education have made sacred: and that which men are able to make honourable at one time, it is in their power to make dishonourable at another, whenever the humour takes them; had not the senate forbidden us to give opinions freely respecting the politics of Venice, there would have been nothing wrong in giving such opinions; and were the senate to declare that it is right to give such opinions, that which to-day is thought a crime would be thought meritorious to-morrow. Then, prithee, let us have no more of such doubts as these. We are men, as much as the Doge and his senators, and have reasons as much as they have to lay down the law of right and wrong, and to alter the law of right and wrong, and to decree what shall be vice, and what shall be virtue.”