"How could I do otherwise?" said young Zuan, simply, and at that the woman broke into a little sobbing laugh of joy and triumph and tenderness.
"Oh, lord!" she cried, "that were love indeed! Oh, lord, I did not know that there were men so faithful and so good.
"And yet," she said, presently, as if in argument with herself – "yet noble lords of Venice and of Genoa and of Naples and of many Italian cities have married queens and princesses no better than the Princess Yaga."
"It is not that only," said young Zuan. "There are many evil women in high places – fawned before, bowed down to – in Italy; but you have done one very terrible and shameful thing, princess, which alone must make you hated in Venice forever, and must make marriage between you and me impossible there."
"I – do not understand," she said, wondering.
"You or your brigands," he said, "carried off from Ragusa Natalia Volutich. I was to have married her."
The woman screamed, dragging herself backward over the turf away from him.
"You – you," she cried, in a breathless whisper, her hands at her mouth, – "you are – Zuan – Gradenigo?"
"Why – yes!" said he. "I thought you knew."
She stumbled to her feet, staring and sobbing.
"Oh, what have I done? What have I done?" she cried, over and over again, and she moved still farther away, staring at him as if he were a ghost risen against her.
"What have I done?" she whispered. Then all at once she began a sobbing, hysterical laugh – a laugh that shook all her slim body, like weeping, and it seemed that she would never have done with it. She covered her face with her hands, leaning against a tree which grew near by, and the fit of endless laughter swept her like a storm. Young Zuan watched her under his brows with a sort of gloomy resentment. Women, he had been told by those of experience, were creatures of strange and incomprehensible moods, ruled, like a horse, by divers vagaries and not at all by reason. This mad fit of hysteria was, he took it, therefore to be endured as patiently as might be, but he had small store of patience.
"Oh, lord," said the woman, presently, gasping between her fits of laughter, tears in her eyes – "lord, there is a thing which I must tell you – an amazing thing. I do not know whether you will be glad or angry of it. In any case I must tell you at once – "
"Wait!" said Zuan, and held up a hand. "I must know first about this maid, Natalia Volutich, whom you stole away. What have you done with her, princess?" His tone was very grave and stern.
"The maid Natalia," said she, "has been well treated, lord. She has come to no harm. If this war had not arisen she would have been sent back safely to her father before now."
"Unharmed?" said Zuan Gradenigo, watching the woman's eyes.
"Unharmed, lord," she said. "A maid, as she came. Indeed" – there seemed to be a glimmer of a smile at the woman's lips – "indeed, I think she has not been unhappy, this Natalia of Ragusa. I think she has learned to feel a certain fondness for her mistress. I think she would serve her in any way she could." The smile was a wry smile now. "Even so vile a thing as I, lord," said the woman of abomination, "can be tender and – faithful. Even so vile a thing as I is sometimes loved. An evil woman, Messer Zuan, is not all evil. There is something of good in the very lowest."
"Princess! Princess!" cried the man.
"And now," she said, "I must tell you what must be told; but, lord, before I tell it will you say to me once more what you have said – that for my sake, to be with me alone, you stand willing – nay, glad – to give up your city and your rank and your friends? Will you say to me that I, woman of infamy though men call me, am dearer to you than everything else in the world?" She came close to him, putting out her two hands upon his breast, and her great eyes burned up into his, and her face seemed for the instant to sharpen, to pale, and her lips trembled.
"Will you tell me once again?" she said, pleading.
"I could not – live without you – child," he said, and she cried out with joy at the name. He had called her "child" on the night before when he did not know who she was.
She stood away from him at arm's-length.
"Now then, at last," she said, "I will tell you what you must know. Lord, I – " Her voice failed suddenly as if she had been stricken ill, and all the rosy color which had risen to her cheeks began to die slowly away. She seemed to be staring over young Zuan's shoulder towards the north. She raised her hand a little way, but it dropped again weakly by her side. "The – ships!" she said, in a strained whisper. "The – ships!" Zuan turned to look.
Round a little wooded point of the island, scarcely more than a mile to the north of where they stood, came, before the wind, three great Venetian galleys, looming high and stately in that narrow strait.
Zuan gave a great shout. "My ships!" he cried. "My galleys!" His voice ran up into an odd falsetto note which was almost a scream. "Trapani has found Il Lupo, and they are going to attack the city by sea!" He sprang for his cloak, which lay near, as if he would wave it to attract the attention of those on the galleys, but the woman caught him by the arm, white-faced and breathless.
"No, no!" she cried, swiftly. "No! You – must not go. They must not attack – now. The city could be taken in an hour. Those men – fools! fools! – of ours have destroyed the – engines of defence. They did not know how to use them. And they have – sunk the ships in the harbor. Lord, you must not let your ships attack. We must not lose the city. Oh, it would be cruel, cruel!" She clung to his arms, sobbing, panic-stricken, stumbling desperately over her words.
"Lord, they must not take Arbe!" she wailed. "All we have done – all I have done – gone for nothing – nothing! It is not to be borne. Stop them, lord! You would not be so cruel as to allow this. You do not know – Oh, stop them! Stop them!" She was quite beside herself with terror, but Zuan put her out away from him at arm's-length and held her there.
"Listen!" he said, sharply. "Listen to me!"
And her wild incoherence checked itself – dropped into breathless sobbing.
"I cannot stop those galleys," he said. "They have come here to retake Arbe, which you seized from us, and if what you say is true they will take it easily. Remember, nothing I can do will save the city for you. The city is lost to you already. You must let me signal to the galleys and go on board. You must let me lead this force in the attack, as I was to have done when I left Venice."
The woman cried out upon him again in a panic, but he quieted her sharply as before, speaking in quick, emphatic words as one speaks to a terrified child.
"You must let me go!" he said. "Surely you see that my honor is in this. Whether I go or stay here in hiding, the result will be the same for the city, but if I do not go I am dishonored for life. You would be hurt by that as much as I, so let me go. If I retake the city, the council in Venice will perhaps allow me to marry you without banishment. At any rate, there is the bare chance of it. Let me go!"
She stood away from him, drooping, downcast eyes averted, and she made an odd little despairing gesture – as it were of defeat. Arbe went from her hands in that gesture. Triumph was renounced that her lover's honor might rest unstained.
"Yes," she said – "yes, you must go, lord. I will not dishonor you. But oh, if there is a God who hears lovers' prayers, I pray that he will not let you come to harm. If you are killed this day I shall not live."
The ships were drawing nearer, down the coast of the island.
"I shall be," said the woman of abomination, "in the city, lord, when you take it." She smiled again her wry smile, as if something grimly amused her.
"No!" said he. "Wait here or in the wood north of the Land Gate. I will come for you. You must not put yourself in danger."
"I shall be in the city, lord," she said again, "but not in danger. Oh, I pray God to keep you safe!"
"I must go," said he, looking over his shoulder at the three high galleys. "I must go, but oh, my dear, never doubt me! I shall come to you if I have to crawl on hands and knees!" He took her into his arms and kissed her mouth. It was the first time. Then he caught up his mantle and stood, sharply outlined on the brink of the cliff, waving it about his head, until through the still morning air he heard cries from the men of the nearest ship and saw that he had attracted their attention.
Near where he stood a fissure rent the wall of rock – a watercourse half filled with earth and shale and grown up with low shrubs. Down this he made his way, plunging recklessly among bowlders, and so reached the tiny strip of beach at the cliff's foot. The first galley was already hove to, and from it a skiff put out to take him aboard. In ten minutes more the three ships bore away again southward, and Zuan Gradenigo was in command.
And, after all, they had very little fighting for their pains – too little to please them. For it seems that an hour before the three ships came into sight of the city the Venetians and Arbesani of the garrison, too carelessly guarded by their barbarian captors, rose, in street and market-place and improvised prison – rose at a preconcerted signal – and fell upon the Huns tooth and nail. Some of them had weapons, some sticks or stones, one – an Arbesan called Spalatini, and his name deserves to go down in history along with Messer Samson's – the thigh-bone of an ox which the Huns had killed and roasted whole in the Via Venezia.
When, therefore, the three galleys under Zuan Gradenigo drew into the harbor and hurriedly made fast to the landing-place, a running hand-to-hand fight was in progress from one end of the city to the other. It was not a battle, for it had no organization whatever. It was a disgraceful mêlée. Naturally enough the Venetian reinforcements incontinently decided the day. Something over three hundred of the ban's barbarians – Huns, Slavs, and Croats – gave themselves up. Nearly two hundred killed themselves by leaping over the high westward sea-wall, and a hundred more were killed in fight or escaped by water. It was an inglorious ending to a matter which had promised so fine a struggle.
An hour after the landing, as soon as ever his duties gave him a moment's breathing space, young Zuan made up the Via Venezia – that single long street which runs north and south through the city – to the castle which sits at the street's northern end, and under which is the Land Gate, the only means of entering the town except by sea.
In the loggia of the castle he came upon the count – Jacopo Corner – a round old man with a red face, gouty, so that he went upon crutches. At this moment he was surrounded by a group of gentlemen – Arbesani for the most part, heads of the city's great families – De Dominis, Galzigna, Nemira, Zudeneghi, and such; but he turned from them to greet young Gradenigo.
"Ah, Zuan, my lad!" he cried out, "you come in the nick of time – you and your archers! You've saved the day, for those dogs were just getting the better of us. Another hour and – St. Mark! – our heads would have been on pike-staves!"
Young Zuan struggled to preserve a face of civil sympathy, but his eyes were upon the open doors beyond. Old Jacopo seemed to read his thought.
"Ay, we have the queen bee in there! She's in my private audience-chamber, bound to a chair. Queen bee, say I? Hussy! Strumpet! Daughter of abomination! Mother of sins!" He shook a crutch at the bronze doors. "Ay, she's there!" he said. "But the wench has cheated us, for all that. She has robbed me of the pleasure of tearing her evil bones apart – alive, that is."
Gradenigo, one hand on the door, turned slowly backward a masklike face. He felt that he was shaking and swaying like a drunken man.
"What do you – mean?" he said, in a flat voice.
Old Jacopo hobbled nearer and touched the younger man's arm. "Eh, lad!" he croaked. "Come! come! You're not yourself. The sun has got to you. You've a bound-up head, I see. Better have a rest!"
"What was it you said?" asked young Gradenigo, looking down at the ground, which swung slowly back and forth under him.
"Yaga?" said old Jacopo. "Oh, she's dead. The wanton's dead. She got a serving-maid to stab her while she sat bound in her – "