of these times was embodied in your brother Carlo. Pleasure-loving, swept off his feet by prima donnas, an idler, a reader of poetry, and a lover of gambling and drink, he was that perennial child who, denied glory in the service of the state, has no taste for quiet courage.”
Andrea paused as if unsure how to proceed. Wearily, he continued: “You know as well as I do that to marry without the permission of the Grand Council is extinction for a patrician. Take a bride without family or fortune and the name Treschi is stricken from the Golden Book forever; your children are nothing but common citizens of the Serenissima.
“And yet he upon whose passion this line depended spent his life in the company of wastrels, spurning the alliances I attempted to forge for him!
“At last he chose a wife for himself as he might choose a mistress. A nameless and dowerless girl, child of a mainland noble, with nothing but her beauty to recommend her. ‘I love her,’ he said to me. ‘I will have no other!’ And when I refused his suit, seeking to direct him as was my duty, he left this house blind with drink, and going to the convent where she was lodged, took her out of it by lies and trickery!”
Andrea grew too heated to continue.
Tonio wanted to put out his hand, to still his father. It gave him physical pain to see his father suffering, and the tale itself appalled him.
Andrea sighed. “Can you at your tender age understand this outrage? Greater men have been banished for such an action, hunted throughout the Veneto, imprisoned.”
Again Andrea stopped. He had no spirit, not even in anger, for the telling of the story. “A son of mine did this,” he said. “The devil in hell he was, I tell you. It was only our name and our position that held back the hand of the state, while I begged for time to use reason.
“But on the Broglio itself at high noon, your brother appeared before me. Drunk, wild-eyed, mumbling obscenities, he vowed his undying love for this ruined girl. ‘Buy her into the Golden Book!’ he demanded of me. ‘You have the wealth. You can accomplish it!’ And there as Councillors and Senators gazed on, he declared: ‘Give your consent or I shall marry her now without it.’
“Do you comprehend this, Tonio?” Andrea was now beside himself. “He was my sole heir. And for this scandalous alliance, he sought to extort my permission! Buy her into the Golden Book, make her a noble, and consent to this marriage I must, or see my seed scattered to the winds, see the end of a House that was as old as Venice!”
“Father.” Tonio was unable to keep quiet. But Andrea was not ready to be interrupted.
“All Venice turned its eyes to me,” Andrea went on, his voice tremulous. “Was I to be the dupe of my youngest son? My kinsmen, my fellow statesmen…all waited in shocked silence.
“And the girl…what of her? I in my rage took it upon myself to see this woman who had turned my son from his duty….”
For the first time in the span of an hour, Andrea’s gaze shifted to Tonio. For a moment is seemed he had lost the drift and was perceiving something for which he had been prepared. But then he continued:
“What did I find?” he sighed. “A Salome who worked her evil spell upon my son’s degraded senses? No. No, she was an innocent child! A child no older than you are now, and boyish of limb, and sweet, and dark and wild with innocence as creatures of the wood are innocent, knowing nothing of this world except that which he had chosen to show her. Oh, I had not expected to feel for this fragile girl, to feel for her lost honor.
“And can you measure then the rage I endured against the man who’d so rashly corrupted her?”
A wordless panic seized Tonio. He could not keep still any longer. “Please believe me, Father,” he whispered, “when I tell you that in me you have an obedient son.”
Andrea nodded. Again his eyes rested on Tonio. “All these years I have watched over you more closely than you know, my son, and you have been the answer to my prayers more fully than you can realize.”
But it was clear nothing could soothe him now; he pressed on as if that were the wiser course and there were little alternative.