But in vain did spies ransack every lurking place in Venice; no Abellino was to be found. In vain did the luxurious, the avaricious, and the hungry stretch their wits to the utmost, incited by the tempting promise of a thousand sequins. Abellino’s prudence set all their ingenuity at defiance.
But not the less did every one assert that he had recognised Abellino, sometimes in one disguise, and sometimes in another, as an old man, a gondolier, a woman, or a monk. Everybody had seen him somewhere; but, unluckily, nobody could tell where he was to be seen again.
CHAPTER IV.
THE VIOLET.
I informed my readers, in the beginning of the last chapter, that Flodoardo was become melancholy, and that Rosabella was indisposed, but I did not tell them what had occasioned this sudden change.
Flodoardo, who on his first arrival at Venice was all gaiety, and the life of every society in which he mingled, lost his spirits on one particular day; and it so happened that it was on the very same day that Rosabella betrayed the first symptoms of indisposition.
For on this unlucky day did the caprice of accident, or perhaps the Goddess of Love (who has her caprices too every now and then), conduct Rosabella into her uncle’s garden, which none but the Doge’s intimate friends were permitted to enter; and where the Doge himself frequently reposed in solitude and silence during the evening hours of a sultry day.
Rosabella, lost in thought, wandered listless and unconscious along the broad and shady alleys of the garden. Sometimes, in a moment of vexation, she plucked the unoffending leaves from the hedges and strewed them upon the ground; sometimes she stopped suddenly, then rushed forward with impetuosity, then again stood still, and gazed upon the clear blue heaven. Sometimes her beautiful bosom was heaved with quick and irregular motion, and sometimes a half-suppressed sigh escaped from her lips of coral.
“He is very handsome!” she murmured, and gazed with such eagerness on vacancy, as though she had there seen something which was hidden from the sight of common observers.
“Yet Camilla is in the right,” she resumed, after a pause, and she frowned as had she said that Camilla was in the wrong.
This Camilla was her governess, her friend, her confidante, I may almost say her mother. Rosabella had lost her parents early. Her mother died when her child could scarcely lisp her name; and her father, Guiscardo of Corfu, the commander of a Venetian vessel, eight years before had perished in an engagement with the Turks, while he was still in the prime of life. Camilla, one of the worthiest creatures that ever dignified the name of woman, supplied to Rosabella the place of mother, had brought her up from infancy, and was now her best friend, and the person to whose ear she confided all her little secrets.