Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  It was absurd to think of such a thing, and having come to this conclusion in a shorter time than it has taken me to describe his thoughts, he turned abruptly with the intention of buying her for Marco Pesaro’s account.

  Unfortunately, when he saw her face he could not do it.

  ‘I will send a palanquin for you in an hour,’ he said hurriedly, and he made for the door in evident anxiety to get away without exchanging another word with Zoë.

  The negress followed him quickly into the next room, very much surprised at his way of doing business.

  ‘If it please your Glory,’ she began, overtaking him with difficulty, but he would not listen, and hurried on.

  ‘I will settle with Rustan,’ he said.

  But in the room where he had left her, Zoë was leaning back in her chair alone, gazing at the sunlit window. At that very moment, so far as she knew, the gold was being counted out that was the price of her young life. In an hour she would be taken away in a closed litter, as she had been brought last night, she would be carried into another house, the slide would slip back, and she would be told to get down.

  The voice would be a man’s. Who was he? What was his name? What was she to be to him? He was a Venetian, she guessed by his dress, and she felt that his blood was gentle, like her own. But that was all, though she was already his property. It was dreadful; or, at least, it should be dreadful to think of! She felt that she ought to long for death now, a thousand times more earnestly than last night.

  But she did not. For she was a most womanly woman already, though not nineteen, and there are few women of that intensely feminine temper who cannot judge at a first meeting with a man whether they can gain power over him or not. Moreover, this strength is greatest with men who are most profoundly masculine, because it is not the influence of one character over another, but the deeper, stronger, more mysterious power of sex over sex.

  CHAPTER VI

  LITTLE OMOBONO’S THIN legs carried him up and down the stairs of Zeno’s house at an astonishing pace during the next hour; for Carlo gave fifty orders, every one of which he insisted should be executed at once. It was not a small thing to instal a woman luxuriously in a house in which no woman had set foot since Carlo had lived there, and to do this within sixty minutes. It is true that the rich young merchant had great store of thick carpets and fine stuffs, and all sorts of silver vessels, and weapons from Damascus, and carved ivory chessmen from India; but though some of these things quickly furnished the upper rooms which Zeno set apart for the valuable slave’s use while she remained under his roof, yet scimitars, chessmen, and heathen idols of jade were poor substitutes for all the things a woman might be expected to need at a moment’s notice, from hairpins and hand-mirrors to fine linen pillow-cases, sweetmeats, and a lap-dog. Zeno’s ideas of a woman’s requirements were a little vague, but he determined that Zoë should want nothing, and he charged Omobono with the minute execution of his smallest commands.

  He himself lived simply and almost rudely. He slept on a small hard divan with a little hard cushion under his head, and a cloak to cover him in cold weather. He hated hot water, scented soap, and all the soft luxuries of the Roman bath. There was no mirror in his room, no elaborate toilet service of gold and silver, such as fine young gentlemen used even then. He liked a good dinner when he was hungry, good wine when he was thirsty, and a wide easy-chair when he had worked all day; but it never had cost him a moment’s discomfort to exchange such a home as he now lived in for the camp or the sea.

  Women were different beings, however, so he made all allowances for them, and went to extreme lengths in estimating their necessities, as Omobono found to his cost. Yet with all his preoccupation for details, Zeno forgot that Zoë must have a woman to wait on her at once, and when he realised the omission, almost at the last minute, the future conqueror of the Genoese, the terror of the Mediterranean, the victorious general of the Paduan campaign, the hero of thirty pitched battles and a score of sea-fights, felt his heart sink with something like fear. What would have happened if he had not remembered just in time that Marco Pesaro’s slave must have a maid? She should have two, or three, or as many as she needed.

  ‘Omobono,’ he said, as the little secretary came up the stairs for the twentieth time, ‘go out quickly and buy two maids. They must be young, healthy, clean, clever, and silent. Lose no time!’

  ‘Two maids?’ The secretary’s jaw dropped. ‘Two maids?’ he repeated almost stupidly.

  ‘Yes. Is there anything wonderful in that? Did you expect to wait on the lady yourself?’

  ‘The lady?’ Omobono opened his little eyes very wide.

  ‘I mean,’ answered Zeno, correcting himself, ‘the — the young person who is going to be lodged here. Lose no time, I say! Go as fast as you can!’

  Omobono turned and went, not having the least idea where to go. Before he had reached the outer door, Zeno called after him down the stairs.

  ‘Stop!’ cried the merchant. ‘It is too late. You must go and get the lady — the young person. Take two palanquins instead of one, and tell Rustan to let her choose her own slaves. You can put the two into one litter and bring them all together.’

  ‘But the price, sir?’ enquired Omobono, who was a man of business. ‘Rustan will ask what he pleases if I take him such a message!’

  ‘Tell him that if he is not reasonable he shall do no more business with Venetians,’ answered Zeno, from the head of the marble stairs.

  Omobono nodded obediently and followed his instructions. So it came to pass that before long he found himself within Rustan’s outer wall with two palanquins and eight bearers, besides a couple of Zeno’s trusty men-servants, well armed, for he carried a large sum of money in gold. The Bokharian and the secretary went into an inner room to count and weigh the ducats, but before this began Omobono delivered his message in full.

  ‘Forty ducats!’ cried Omobono, casting up his eyes, and preparing to bargain for at least half an hour.

  ‘I have the very thing,’ said Karaboghazji. ‘There are two girls who have waited on her and with whom she is much pleased. As for asking too high a price, forty ducats for the two is nothing. They are a gift, at that.’

  ‘Forty ducats!’ cried Omobono, casting up his eyes, and preparing to bargain for at least half an hour.

  ‘If it is dear,’ said Rustan, his face becoming like stone, ‘may my tongue never speak the truth again!’

  Considering attentively the consequences of such an awful fate Omobono did not think that the Bokharian risked any great inconvenience if the imprecation should take effect.

  ‘It is far from me,’ said the secretary, ‘to suggest that your words are not literally true, according to your own light. But you must be aware that the price of maid-servants has fallen much since yesterday, owing to the arrival of a shipload of them from Tanais.’

  Rustan shook his head and maintained his stony expression.

  ‘They are worthless,’ he said. ‘Do you suppose I should not have bought the best of them? There has been a plague of smallpox in their country, and they are all pitted. They are as oranges, blighted by hail.’

  As Omobono had invented the ship and its cargo, he found it hard to refute Rustan’s argument, which was quite as good as his own.

  ‘May my fingers be turned round in their sockets and close on the back of my hand, if I have asked one ducat too much,’ said the Bokharian with stolid calm.

  Omobono hesitated, for a new idea had struck him. Before he could answer, a door opened and Rustan’s wife, who had put off her finery, ushered in Zoë, closely veiled and wrapped in the cloak she had worn on the previous night. It was, in fact, necessary that she should be delivered up in return for the gold, and the negress had supposed that the counting was almost over.

  ‘My turtle dove,’ said Rustan in dulcet tones, ‘fetch those two girls who have waited on Kokóna Arethusa. The Venetian merchant will buy them for her.’

  The negress grinned and went out. By this tim
e Omobono had made up his mind what to say.

  ‘My dear sir,’ he began, in a conciliatory tone, consider that we are friends, and do not ask an exorbitant price. I beseech you to be obliging, by four toes and five toes.’

  Omobono wondered what would happen after he had pronounced the mysterious words. Rustan looked keenly at him and was silent for a moment. Neither of them noticed that Zoë made a quick movement as she stood by the table between them. The Bokharian rose suddenly and went to shut the door.

  ‘Where?’ he asked as he crossed the small room.

  Omobono’s face fell at the unexpected and apparently irrelevant question. Instantly Zoë bent down and whispered three words in his ear. Before Rustan turned back to hear the clerk’s answer, she was standing erect and motionless again, and he did not suspect that she had moved.

  ‘Over the water,’ answered Omobono, with perfect confidence.

  ‘You may have the two for four-and-twenty ducats,’ said Rustan. ‘But you cannot expect me to take anything off the price of the Kokóna,’ he added. ‘I bargained with your master, and he agreed.’

  ‘No, no! Certainly! And I thank you, sir.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Rustan, ‘that you would do as much for me.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ answered Omobono. ‘Shall we count the ducats?’

  When the operation was almost finished, the negress returned with the two slave-girls, whose commonplace features were wreathed in smiles, and they began to kiss the hem of Zoë’s cloak. Omobono inspected them critically.

  ‘Are you pleased with them, Kokóna?’ he enquired of Zoë. ‘My master is very anxious that you should be satisfied.’

  ‘Indeed I am,’ Zoë answered readily. ‘They are very clever little maids.’

  The two were almost crying with delight, and only a meaning movement of the negress’s hand to her girdle checked them. They were not out of her power yet. Omobono eyed them, and really thought them cheap at twelve ducats each, as indeed they were. He was paying four hundred for Zoë, but Rustan did not mean her to see the gold, and had covered it with one of his loose sleeves as she entered. He now begged his wife take the three slaves to the palanquins while he finished counting and weighing, and wrote out his receipt for the money. He called the negress his pet mouse, his little bird, and the down-quilted waistcoat of his heart, and but for her terrific appearance, and the weapon she carried in her girdle, Omobono would have laughed outright.

  Rustan wrote on a strip of parchment, in bad Greek: —

  In the name of the Holy Trinity, Constantinople, the Saturday before Passion Sunday, the second year of Andronicus Augustus Cæsar, and the fourteenth of the Indiction, I have received from the Most Magnificent Carlo Zeno, a Venetian, the sum of four hundred and forty gold ducats of Venice, for the following merchandise: —

  For one Greek maid slave, slave-born, between seventeen and eighteen years old, answering to the name of Arethusa, without blemish, scar, or birthmark, having natural brown hair, brown eyes, twenty-eight teeth all sound, weighing two Attic talents and five minæ more or less, and speaking Greek, Latin, and Italian

  Ducats 400

  For two maid slaves, from Tanais, slave-born, of fourteen and fifteen, answering to the names of Lucilla and Yulia, sound, healthy, never having been tortured or branded, each having black hair, black eyes, and twenty-eight teeth, trained to wait on a lady, and speaking intelligible Greek, besides a barbarous dialect of their own, warranted docile, and not given to stealing; at 20 ducats each

  Ducats 40

  In all

  Ducats 440

  Rustan Karaboghazji, the son of Daddirján, Merchant.

  (Witness) — Sebastian Omobono, of Venice, Clerk.

  Omobono observed that the receipt acknowledged forty ducats as the price of the two girls, instead of twenty-four.

  ‘Rustan Karaboghazji, surnamed the Truth-speaker, does not sell slaves at twelve ducats,’ answered the Bokharian with dignity. ‘Moreover, your employer will see that he has paid forty, and you can justly keep the sixteen ducats for yourself.’

  ‘That would not be honest,’ protested Omobono, shaking his neat grey beard.

  Rustan smiled, in a pitying way.

  ‘You Venetians do not really understand business,’ he said, tightening the strings of the canvas bag into which he had swept the gold, and knotting them as he rose.

  A few minutes later Omobono was trudging along after the two palanquins, wondering much at certain things that had happened to him during the last twenty-four hours and less. For he was curious, as you know, and it irritated him to feel that something was going on in the world, all about him and near him, of which he could not even guess the nature, manifesting itself in such nonsensical phrases as ‘four toes and five toes,’ and ‘over the water,’ which nevertheless produced such truly astonishing results. Since the previous afternoon he had met four persons who knew those absurd words, — the negress, her Bokharian husband, the sacristan to Saints Sergius and Bacchus, and a Greek slave-girl, whom he was far from recognising as the beautiful creature he had seen yesterday in the ruined house in the beggars’ quarter. She was so closely veiled to-day that he could not in the least guess what her face was like.

  Since she not only knew the first password, but had whispered the second to him, he wondered why she had not used her knowledge to get her freedom. It was incredible that the people who knew the words should not be banded together in some secret brotherhood; but if they were brethren, how could they sell one another into slavery? Omobono was so much interested in these problems that he did not see where he was till the leading palanquin entered Zeno’s gate.

  Zeno himself was not to be seen. The servant at the door gave Omobono a slip of cotton paper on which the merchant had written an order. The secretary was to take his charges to what was now the women’s apartment and leave them there. Zoë obeyed Omobono’s directions in silence, still veiled, and the two maids tripped up the marble stairs after her, as happy as birds on a May morning, and taking in all they saw with wondering eyes; for they had never been in a fine house before.

  ‘This is the Kokóna’s apartment,’ Omobono said, standing aside to let Zoë pass. ‘If the Kokóna desires anything, she will please to send one of her maids to me. I am the master’s secretary.’

  He had been surprised when Zeno spoke of her as a ‘lady,’ but somehow, since she had whispered in his ear at the slave-dealer’s house, and since he had seen her movement and carriage when she walked upstairs, he instinctively treated her and spoke to her as if she were his superior. She nodded her thanks now, but said nothing, and he went away. She looked after him and listened, but no key was turned after the door was closed, and she heard only his retreating steps on the marble stairs. Then she turned to the window, which was open, and she threw aside her veil and looked out upon the Golden Horn.

  The two little maids at once began a minute examination of the rooms, which occupied more than half the upper story of the house, and were, if anything, too crowded with rich furniture, with divans, carved tables, hanging lamps, cushioned seats, and pillows of every size, shape, and colour. There were handsome wardrobes, too, full of the fine clothes Zoë was to wear. The girls touched everything and talked by signs, lest they should disturb Zoë’s meditations. They told each other that the master of the house must be highly pleased with his slave, since he surrounded her with beautiful things; that these things were all new, which was a sign that there was no other woman in the house; and that they were very fortunate and happy to have been sold, after only a month of apprenticeship under the negress’s merciless training. They also explained to each other that they were hungry, for it was past noon. The idea of running away had probably never occurred to either of them, even in Rustan’s house. Where should they go? And besides, the fate of runaway slaves was before their eyes.

  Meanwhile Zeno sat in his balconied room alone. Omobono had delivered the receipt and had simply told him that sixteen ducats had been saved
on the bargain, though Rustan did not wish it known. Thereupon Zeno gave the secretary a couple of ducats for himself, which Omobono saw no reason for not taking.

  Zeno was preoccupied and chose to be alone, so he dismissed his secretary with injunctions to rest after the labour of installing the new arrival, which had not been light, and he walked up and down his room in deep thought. He had acted on an impulse altogether against his own judgment, and now he was faced by the unpleasant necessity of justifying his conduct in his own eyes.