"Hush, Piero!" she implored; "it breaks my heart! This also may be counted against Venice, for it is the Holy Madonna who hath granted me the vision."
If Piero was silent he was only restrained by deference to Marina from invoking the aid of every saint in the calendar, in copious malediction, on this miserable Jacopo who had so increased the trouble in Marina's eyes—since women had such foolish faith in pictures.
"Jacopo Robusti, posing for a seer, and foretelling the end of the world, like a prophet or a saint! Goffone!"[9] Piero was paddling furiously. "Jacopo, of the Fondamenta del Mori—not better than others—with that boastful sentence blazoned on his door!—'The coloring of Titian, with the drawing of Angelo!'"
[9] Great fool!
But he forgot even his resentment against Jacopo in his anxiety as he watched Marina, asking himself if it would be possible for her to pray herself back into healthful life again, even in the dominions of the Holy Father; for he realized that nothing could help her but this one thing on which her heart was set—while he was yet, if possible, more utterly without sympathy for the fear that moved her than her father or Marcantonio had been. But if the one woman in Venice had but one desire, however desperate and incomprehensible,—"Basta! It is enough," said Piero to himself,—she should not die with it unfulfilled, if he could compass it.
Yet, at the thought of death his heart sank. "It was the Madonna which thou beheldest in thy vision—not the cross?" he asked her quickly, making the fateful sign as he spoke, to avert this dread presage of death, and afraid of her answer; for Marina was failing before his eyes, and doubtless, in her vision, there had been some apparition of a cross; and even the less devout among the gondoliers were still dominated by some of the superstitions which gave a picturesque color to the habits of the people.
But she, too earnest in her faith to take any note of a less serious mood, answered simply:
"It was the very Madonna herself, as thou knowest her in San Donato, who came to me in the palazzo one night when I slept not, and gave me the mission to save Venice,—scarce able to speak for her great sadness, and the tears dropping, as thou knowest her in San Donato,—commanding me to go before the Holy Father and pray for mercy to Venice. She it was who told me that our prayers pass not up beyond the clouds which hang above a city under doom of interdict. Oh, Piero, hasten; for my strength is little, and Rome is far!"
When the Lady of the Giustiniani had sent for Piero to meet her in Santa Maria dell' Orto, to ask him to manage her escape to Rome, it had not been possible to refuse her; all his attempts at reasoning were in vain. "I must go," she said, with that invincible persistence which he never could combat. "If thou wilt not help me, I go alone." She was kneeling before the terrible "Judgment" of the Tintoret, and the face she had lifted to him in appeal was white with agonized comprehension.
The journey had been long and wearisome; all day they had been slowly toiling against the tide; and long since Piero had summoned to his aid a trusted gondolier who had been ordered to follow them at a little distance, and who, at a sign from the gastaldo, had silently left his bark to drift and taken his place at the other end of the gondola in which the fugitives were making their way to Padua.