Part 5

She apparently felt satisfied, since he now turned to that tone which she had a right to expect.

"To you," she said, "I'm Princess Smeraldina, who is granting you the permission to long for her favour from afar. Whenever you'll see me putting on this turban, this shall be a sign for you that I'm inclined to chat with you. For I'm more bored than I could bear, considering my youth and my charms. You must know," she continued, suddenly dropping out of character, "that my mistress, the countess, won't permit me at all to have even the slightest love affair, though she herself changes her lovers more frequently than her shirts. She says that she had always thrown her confidante and chamber-maid out of her services as soon as she would have attempted to serve two masters, her and the little winged god. I now have to suffer under her prejudice, and if I wouldn't find some other satisfaction here, and if there wasn't, from time to time, a kind stranger living over there in your room, who'd fall just a little bit in love with me..."

"Who's the current lover of your mistress?" Andrea interrupted her in an unemotional tone. "Does she receive the high aristocracy of Venice? Are the foreign ambassadors among her regular guests?"

"They usually come wearing masks," Smeraldina replied. "But I know that much that young Gritti is her favourite, she likes him more than any other before for as long as I've been in her service; even more than the Austrian ambassador, who courts her so ridiculously much. Do you know my countess, too? She's beautiful."

"I'm a stranger here, dear girl. I don't know her."

"You should know," the girl said with a clever face, "she wears a lot of make-up, though she isn't even thirty, yet. If you'd like to see her some time, nothing's easier than that. A board can bridge the distance between your window and mine. You'll climb across, and I'll lead you to a place where you'll be able to observe her quite clandestinely. The things I'd do for a neighbour! - But for now, it's good night. I'm being summoned."

"Good night, Smeraldina!"

She closed the window. "Poor - and ill," she said to herself, while pulling the curtains completely shut. "Oh well, still good enough to kill the boredom."

He had also closed the window and was now pacing up and down his room in slow strides. "It's good," he said, "it fits well into my plans. If it should come to the worst, I'll be able to use it to my advantage as well."

The expression of his face proved that a love-affair was the furthest thing from his mind.

Now, he unpacked the portmanteau, which contained only little laundry and a few prayer-books, and put everything into the cupboard, standing by the wall. One of the books fell to the floor, and the stone plate made a hollow sound. Instantly, he put out the light, locked the door, and started to examine the floor more closely in the dusk created by the distant shimmer of Smeraldina's lamp. After some work, he succeeded in lifting the stone plate, which had been lodged into place to fit precisely, but without the use of any mortar, and he discovered a rather spacious hole underneath, as deep as the size of a hand and one foot wide in both directions. Swiftly, he threw off his outer garments and removed a heavy belt with several pockets, which he had worn around his waist. He had already placed it inside the hole, when he suddenly stopped to think. "No," he said, "it could be a trap. It wouldn't be the first time for the police to have such hiding places in rented apartments, to know later on, when searching the premises, where they'd have to poke at. This is just too enticingly arranged to be trustworthy."

He lowered the stone plate back into its place and searched for a safe container for his secrets. The window to the blind alley had bars in front of it, wide enough for an arm to fit through. He opened it, reached outside, and groped along the wall. Directly under the ledge, he found a small hole in the wall, which bats seemed to have inhabited in the past. It could not be noticed from below, and from above, it was covered by the ledge. Without making a noise, he widened the opening with his dagger, breaking out mortar and bricks, and soon, his work had progressed so far that he could easily fit the wide belt inside. When he was finished, his brow was covered with cold sweat. Once again, he tried to feel, whether there was no strap or buckle hanging out of the hole, and then he closed the window. One hour later, he lay, still fully dressed, on the bed and slept. The gnats were buzzing over his face, the birds of the night were curiously flapping about the hole outside, in which his treasure lay hidden. But the sleeping man's lips were closed too tightly, to betray any word of his secrets, even in his dreams.

The same night, a man was sitting in Verona by his lonely lamp and was unfolding, after having carefully locked the shutters and the door, a letter, which had been secretly handed to him today in the dusk by a Capuchin begging for alms, while he had been promenading near the amphitheatre. The letter bore no external inscription. But being asked how the messenger would know that he was putting the letter into the right hands, the monk had answered: "Every child in Verona knows the noble Angelo Querini like his own father." Having said this, the messenger had left. But the banished man, whose exile had been eased by the respect which had followed him into his misfortune, had managed to bring the letter back to his lodgings, unnoticed by the spies watching him, and he now read, while the steps of the guard in front of the house echoed menacingly through the silence, the following lines:

"To Angelo Querini.

"I have no reason to hope that you will remember the fleeting hour, when I met you in person. Many years have passed since then. I had grown up with my sister and my brother in the rural peace of our estate in Friaul; only after I had lost both of my parents, I left my sister and my younger brother. After just a few days, the seductive maelstrom of Venice had swallowed me whole.

"Then, one day, I was introduced to you in Morosini Palace. I still feel your glance, examining us young folks, one after another. Your eyes said: `and this is supposed to be the generation on whose shoulders the future of Venice shall rest?' - You were told my name. Unnoticed by the others, you turned the conversation with me to the great history of the state, to which my ancestors had devoted their services. Kindly, you failed to mention the present and the services which I still owed this state.

"Since that conversation, I read day and night in a book, which in the past I had not even regarded worthy of a single glance, the history of my native country. The result of these studies was that I, driven by horror and disgust, left this city forever, which used to rule over foreign countries and seas, but was now the slave of a deplorable tyranny, being as powerless in external affairs as it is internally miserable and violent.

"I returned to my siblings. I succeeded in warning my brother, in revealing the corruption of life to him, which seemed to be shining so brightly when seen from afar. But I never thought that everything I did to save him and us was to destroy us just the more surely.

"You know the jealousy with which the rulers of the city have always looked upon the aristocracy of the Terraferma. Even in times when it was regarded as an honour to serve the republic, they had never stopped fearing that the Terraferma might sever its ties with the city. Now, after self-made and unavoidable evils had brought about a change in the position of Venice in the world, this fear became the source of the most outrageous intrigues and misdeeds.

"Let me keep silent about what I have witnessed of the fate of those living in the neighbourhood of my province, about the cunning means by which they had sought to crush the sovereignty and independence of the aristocracy of Friaul, about the army of bravi, which had been sent against those who refused to comply, and which had been relieved even from the torments of their own conscience by numerous decrees of amnesty. How they sought to bring disagreement into the families, to poison friendships, to buy treason and betrayal even among those who were most closely tied by kinship, all of this you found out even earlier than I.

"And not for long, the fact that my frivolous habits were remembered in Venice even after I had left could protect me from the suspicion that I also might, one day, pose a threat. When I asked on my sister's behalf for the permission for her to marry a noble, German gentleman, the government categorically refused to give its consent. I and my brother were thought to be in agreement with the Kaiser's politics, and they decided to punish us for this.

"A complaint of the province against its governor, which I and my brother had signed among others, provided the inquisition with the pretext they needed to cast out their nets to catch us.

"My brother was summoned to Venice, to answer for himself. As soon as he had arrived, he was imprisoned under the lead roofs, and for many months, they sought, at times with threats and at times with seductive offers, to get a confession out of him. He had no reason to represent that one act we had committed in a more favourable light; it had been legal. There was nothing else for him to confess, since we had not committed any actions against the state. Thus, he finally had to be released. But they did not even consider to pardon him.

"I myself had asked him in a letter not to depart right away, to avoid raising new suspicions. We would rather be willing to miss his company for another few months. When he finally came, we were to lose him for ever after just a few days. He fell victim to a slow acting poison, which had been mixed into his food in one of these illustrious houses he used to visit.

"The stone over his grave had not even been set up yet, when the governor of the province proposed marriage to my sister. She rejected him, feeling deeply offended by the proposal; her pain made her utter certain words, the echos of which were then to be heard in the courtroom of the inquisition's tribunal.

"A new effort by the aristocracy of Friaul to improve the conditions in the country was discussed. I remained absent from their secret endeavours, since I was convinced of their fruitlessness. But the guilty conscience of the rulers of the republic made them think of me first, being the one who had been affected the most, the one who had to avenge a brother. At night, a gang of hired bravi attacked our remote estate in the mountains. I had only my servants for our defence. When this scum found us well armed and determined not to surrender thus easily, they set fire to the house in all four corners. Together with my people, I carried out a desperate counter-attack with my sister, also carrying a pistol, among us. Then suddenly, a blow to the forehead struck me down and rendered me unconscious.

"Only the next morning, I woke up. The place was an abandoned pile of ruins, my sister had perished in the blaze, some of my faithful servants had been slain, some were driven back into the burning house.

"For many hours, I just lay beside the smoking rubble and stared into the empty void, as which my future appeared before me. Only when I saw peasants in the valley, coming up towards mountain, I picked myself up. One thing I knew: For as long as I was believed to be alive, I would be regarded as an enemy and would be pursued to wherever I might go. The burning tomb was spacious enough; if I was to disappear, nobody would doubt that I also rested in there with those who had been close to me. Wandering aimlessly about the rocky mountainside, I found a wallet belonging to one of my servants, who had been born in Brescia and had travelled to all kinds of places. His papers were in it; I took them, just in case, and fled through the dense, craggy forest. I met no one, who would have been able to betray me. When I knelt, parched with thirst, by a murky lake in the forest, I saw that my appearance could not betray me either. My hair had turned gray during the night; my features had aged by many years.