was not arrested. He was not banished. It was I who had him apprehended and placed on the ship for Istanbul. It was I who obtained his appointment there, giving him to know that as long as I lived he would never see his native city.
“It was I who impounded his wealth, withholding all support until he had bowed his head and accepted the post offered him.
“And it was I—it was I who then took a wife in my old age who gave me that child upon whom the life of this family is now dependent.”
He stopped. He was weary, but he had not finished.
“Much harsher punishment might have befallen him!” he declared, looking again directly at Tonio. “Perhaps it was the love of his mother that restrained me. He’d been her joy since the day he was born, everyone knew it.” And Andrea’s eyes misted suddenly as if for the first time his thoughts were not clear to him. “He’d been so loved by his brothers. His frivolity was no irritant to them. No, they loved his jests, the poems he wrote, his idle chatter. Oh, how they all doted upon him. ‘Carlo, Carlo.’ And by the grace of God, none of them lived to see that irrepressible charm turned to the seduction of an innocent girl, that impetuosity sharpened to defiance.
“Dear God, what was I to do? I chose the only honorable course before me.”
His brows came together. His voice was thinned with weariness, and for a moment he was communing with himself. Then he regained his power.
“I dealt with him lightly!” he insisted. “Yes, lightly. Soon he accepted his duties. He has done well with the allowance granted him. And laboring obediently in the services of the Republic in the East, he has petitioned again and again to be allowed to return. He has begged my forgiveness.
“But I will never allow him to return home!
“Yet this state of affairs will not endure forever. He has his young friends in the Grand Council, the Senate, boys who shared his youth with him. And when I die, he will return to this house from which he has never been disinherited. But you, Tonio, will be master here, you in the years to come will take the wife I have already chosen for you. Your children shall inherit the fortune and the name of Treschi.”
The morning sun exploded on the golden lion of San Marco. It drenched in sparkling white light the long graceful arms of the arcades which disappeared into the motley shifting crowds, the great spear of the Campanile rising abruptly to heaven.
He stood before the glittering mosaics above the doors of the church. He gazed at the four great bronze horses on their pedestals.
He let himself be jostled by the crowd; he moved in an unconscious rhythm now and then, but his eyes remained fixed on the immense scheme of porticoes and domes that rose around him.
Never had he felt such love for Venice, such purified and painful devotion. And he knew in some way he was much too young really to grasp the tragedy that had befallen her. She seemed too solid; too substantial, too full of the magnificent.
Turning to the open water, the gleaming motionless sea, he felt himself for the first time in full possession of life itself as he stood in possession of history.
But a drawn and exhausted figure had left him only an hour before with an air of resignation in the face of old age that only filled him with dread. And there came back to him now his father’s concluding words: “He will come home when I die. He will make this house a battleground again.
“Not six months passes that I do not receive some letter from his hand pledging he will marry the wife I choose for him, if only I will allow him to see his beloved Venice again.
“But he shall never marry!
“Would that I could, with my own eyes, see you at the altar with your bride, see your sons, see you put on your patrician robes for the first time and take your rightful place in the Council.
“But there isn’t time for this, and God has given me clear signs that I must prepare you for what awaits you.
“Now, do you know why I send you out into the world, why I take your childhood from you with this fairy tale that you must be the escort of your mother? I send you out because you