The Island of Enchantment

"Row to the galley!" he said, and as the two sailor-men bent to their work, standing at their oars gondolier fashion, and the skiff leaped forward through the wet gloom, he laid his face in his hands and it twisted and worked bitterly. He was by no means a coward, and he was not a particularly imaginative man, but the picture of that leaping fire and the leaping, chanting devils about it persisted before his eyes, and he looked forward to the struggle which was to come, and an odd premonition of disaster took possession of him and would not be driven away.

In the tiny sheltered cove of rendezvous, two miles above the city, they anchored the galley and disembarked. There is a rocky headland beside the cove, high at its outer end, and here certain trusty officers took their station, with lanterns muffled in their cloaks, to watch for the approach of the other two ships. Young Zuan went within a deserted fisherman's hut which stood where wood and beach met, and there held council with his sailing-master and his chief lieutenant. He was still strong in the belief that Il Lupo's ship and the other were safe and would arrive in a few hours – it was by now somewhat after midnight – but the old sailing-master again shook a gloomy head. He had served Venice for forty years on land and sea, and he was a pessimist.

There arose cries and shoutings without, and a petty officer burst into the hut, puffed with importance and pride.

"Prisoners, lord!" he reported. "Three spies caught skulking and peeping in the wood."

"Bring them in!" said young Zuan. "And keep those men quiet outside. Do you wish the whole island to know we are here?"

The prisoners were thrust into the room – great, squat, hairy fellows in the barbaric dress of Huns, surly and villanous. They would not speak. It was evident that they understood neither Italian nor Greek, and they affected not to comprehend the sailing-master's halting efforts at their own tongue. They only stared under their shaggy brows, silent and stolid, and tugged at the hands which were bound behind them.

"Are these men?" cried out young Zuan, in fine Venetian scorn. "Take the cattle away! Bind their feet and set a guard over them. Hark! What is that?"

That was a woman's scream from without, low and very angry.

"But a woman, lord," explained the officer who had brought in the prisoners – "a young wench who was prowling with these fellows and was taken with them. Asking your lordship's pardon, I thought it idle to bring her to you – a common wench."

"Take these men away," said young Gradenigo, "and bring in the woman. It may be that she speaks a Christian tongue."

She crept into the hut, pressing against the side of the doorway, and stood against the farther wall – a girl, a mere slip of a girl, with her long brown hair down over her eyes. And there against the wall she stood, shaking, her hands twisting together over her breast, and her eyes, like the eyes of a hunted, cornered animal, went swiftly from one face to another of the men across the room, and finally settled upon the face of Zuan Gradenigo, and did not stir for a long time.

She stood in her thin white shift, and on her bared arms were marks as if rough hands and none too clean had been there.

When young Zuan spoke his voice was gentle and kindly, the maid was so sore beset, so full of fear, so alone.

"Do you – understand Italian?" he asked. The maid did not answer him, but when she spoke she spoke in perfectly fluent Venetian dialect – as good Venetian as Gradenigo's own. And the fear seemed to go from her, giving place to anger.

"My garments, lord!" she said, and laid her bruised arms across her bosom in a little, pitiful gesture of outraged modesty. "Your men have taken them from me. I am ashamed, lord. They – laid their foul hands on my arms." Her face twisted as at the memory of insult, and the lieutenant who stood across the room laughed aloud. Young Zuan turned upon him fiercely.

"Hold your laughter for a fitter excuse!" he said. "Are we Huns, to insult women? Go out to those men and find the maid's garments. Bring them here." The man went, staring, and, at a motion of Gradenigo's head, the sailing-master followed him, leaving the two alone.

"I am sorry, child," said Zuan Gradenigo. "We did not come here to ill-treat women. I shall see that my men are punished for what they have done. Meanwhile – " He took up the mantle which he had put aside over a near-by bench, and, crossing the room, laid it over the girl's shoulders. It covered her almost to the feet. And when he had done this he stood, for what he imagined to be a moment, looking down into the eyes that held his so steadily – brave eyes, unafraid, unclouded, unwavering. One could not be harsh or cruel in the gaze of such – even though they looked from the face of an enemy. An enemy? Nonsense! A girl taken by chance as she wandered through the wood – as she peeped, full of childish curiosity, at the disembarkment of a ship's load of soldiers. Brave eyes, unafraid. That was why they held him so, because they fronted him without fear – even with trust.

Ay, doubtless that was why they held him so, and yet – He stirred restlessly. Such great eyes! With such illimitable depths! How came a wandering child by such eyes? They moved him oddly. The child would seem to be an uncommon child. Those steady, burning eyes of hers had some uncommon power, worked some strange spell, some sorcery, not evil, but unfamiliarly sweet, unknown to his experience.

He gave a little, confused laugh and raised an uncertain hand towards his head, but the girl had, at the same moment, put out one of her own hands to fasten the clasp of Zuan's mantle at her throat, and his fingers touched her arm.

At that, as if it brought back her injuries to mind, she dropped her eyes, and the man was loosed incontinently from his chains.

"Lord!" she cried again, flushing red in the light of the lanterns, "they put their foul hands upon me! They put their hands upon me!" The very present peril in which she might well have believed herself to stand seemed not to occur to her. It seemed that only those rough, befouling hands were in her mind. Her face gave once more its little, shivering twist of anger and repulsion.

"They shall be punished, child!" said Zuan Gradenigo, between tight lips. "Oh, they shall suffer for it, you may be sure. And now" – he took a turn away from her, for her great eyes were upon him again, level and unafraid – "now will you tell me who you are and how you came to be found with those barbarians to-night? Surely you can have no traffic with such. Surely you are a lady. I have seen that." And indeed he had seen, while the girl stood in her thin white shift, how beautifully she was made – deep-bosomed, slim-waisted, with tapering wrists and ankles, and round white throat. No common wench was there. There was good blood under that white skin of hers.

"Surely you are a lady," said young Zuan, but the girl bent her head from him.

"Nay, lord," she said, very low, "I am only – a serving-maid to the Princess Yaga."

The red flamed into Zuan's cheeks.

"That woman!" he cried. "You serve that vile fiend in human flesh, that royal strumpet, that wanton at whose name men spit? You?" The girl stared at him under her brows.

"Oh!" cried Zuan Gradenigo. "Where is God that hell could devise such a wrong? What was God doing that you should stray into such clutches and He not know? That – that monster of vice and uncleanness!" He pointed a shaking hand towards the south.

"There she sits," said he, "polluting the castle where Jacopo Corner has sat for so many years, where my grandfather sat before him, and his father before him. There she sits gloating; but, by God and St. Mark's lion! before this week is over I shall tear her head from her body and throw it to the dogs. Nay! better than that! I shall send it, in the name of Venice, to the ban who sent her here to shame us."

"Lord!" said the maid, very low – "lord! Oh, you do not know! You – speak wildly. You do not know what you say."

"I know," said Zuan Gradenigo, "that all I say is true. That woman's name is infamous throughout Europe. It is a name of scorn. It means all that is vile – as you must know. Will Arbe ever be clean from her – even when we have washed its stones with her blood? But you!" he cried, in a new voice. "Oh, child, that you should have to serve her – be near to her! I cannot think of it with calmness."

The maid turned a little away from him and moved over to the wooden bench where Zuan's mantle had lain. And she seated herself at one end of the bench, looking across the room at him very soberly.

"And why not I, lord," she asked, "as well as another? What do you know of me? I am – a serving-maid, and such must serve whomever they may." He came nearer and stared into her face, and his own was oddly troubled, frowning.

"I cannot think of you – so," he said. "A serving-maid? There's something strange here. Oh, child, you have something about you – I cannot say what it is, for I have no words. I fight, I am not a poet, but were I such, I think – your eyes – their trick of looking – their – I cannot say what I mean. A serving-maid? Oh, child, you are fitter for velvets and jewels! I do not understand. Something breathes from you," he said, with that trouble upon his frowning face, an odd trouble in his eyes – bewildered, uncomprehending – like a child's eyes before some mystery. "Something breathes from you. I do not know what it is."

The maid looked at him in the yellow, flickering lantern-light, and she made as though she would speak, but in the end shook her head and turned it a little aside, and sat once more silent. And for a time the man also was silent, watching her averted face and thinking how amazingly beautiful it was; not white with the pallor which the Venetian women so prized, but sumptuously rich of color, sun-kissed, free, unashamed of the wholesome blood which flowed under its golden skin and stained it with red on either cheek. He found himself possessed of a mad desire to touch that cheek which was nearest him with his finger, and the sheer folly, the childishness of the thought would in any other mood have shaken a laugh of scorn from him. He was not a woman's man, as he had said, but a fighter.

One of the maid's hands stirred in her lap and dropped beside her on the wooden bench. The lantern-light fell upon it – long, slender, tapering.

"Your hand, child!" said young Zuan. "It is not the hand of a serving-maid. It has never done rough tasks."

"My princess is kind to me, lord," she said. "My tasks are easy."

He put out an uncertain hand and touched the hand that lay in the lantern-light. The maid drew a little, quick, gasping breath, and her eyes turned to him, great and dark. Then, like two silly, half-grown children caught holding hands, they both flushed red and their eyes turned aside once more.

Zuan raised a hand to his temples, where the blood throbbed.

"I – do not know what has come over me," he said, and turned a few steps away across the room. In a moment he was back again, on one knee before her.

"You lay a spell upon me!" he cried, whispering into her bent face. "I am unmanned. Strange things stir my heart, child – mount to my head like wine. You lay a spell upon me."

"No, lord," she said, very low. "I am but a maid. I cannot work spells or sorcery. It is only that I am alone and beset and miserable. It is pity that you feel, lord. Ah, you are kind and merciful. Lord, I – wish that I might do you a service for the service you have done me."

"Pity?" said young Zuan.

"Pity, lord," she said again, and to his awkward, unskilful tongue and to his unaccustomed hands no occupation seemed to come, so that he knelt silent and troubled before her in the lantern-light.

If it seem that enchantment came overswiftly upon him, overprecipitately, it must be borne in mind that he was a soldier, wholly unused to a woman's company, and that this girl, young, beautiful, and in sore straits, was brought before him in the manner most certain to waken his chivalry – ay, to stir his ready heart. The maid spoke shrewdly. It was pity he felt. But other emotions wait hard upon pity's threshold. Further, in young Zuan's day, love came swiftly or not at all. It was not the day of courtship. Love was born of a look – a smile – a hand-touch. And such love has wrecked empires. It is a sober truth that no great passion was ever of slow maturing.

There came from without the door eager voices and quick steps, and the lieutenant whom Zuan had sent to fetch the maid's outer garments – krozet, saruk, and girdle – burst into the room. His eyes were round, starting out of his head, and his face was flushed with excitement.

"She's still here, lord?" he cried out, almost before he had entered. "The woman is here? You have not let her go?" His gaze searched the hut swiftly.

"She is here," said Zuan Gradenigo, "but you will speak more respectfully. Give me the garments!" The man's excitement was too great to heed reproofs. He thrust the things he held into his master's arms.

"See!" he cried. "See the girdle – the necklace – the charm she wore about her neck! See whom we have taken!"

Young Zuan looked at the jewels, and they slipped from his fingers and fell, flashing in the light, and lay about his feet. He turned very slowly towards the girl, who stood against the farther side of the wall, and his eyes were once more like a child's eyes – bewildered, hurt, uncomprehending. He stretched out a hand towards her, and the hand shook and wavered.