With a droll look and a rolling walk, the Dalmatian went on his way.
I went home and began to wait. A good part of the waiting I spent in my chamber, shaping and fledging arrows, and in this I could take pride; but no small part of it I stood at a casement watching the entrance ways. I was fifteen and a half. Youths of like tender age had commanded galleys in bloody strife at sea. They had no fathers or mothers when the great catapults began to hurl quarter-ton stones. They stood or fell by their own manhood.
Several festooned gondolas passed our door. There was many a flurry of people on the bridge, but not two tall travelers, in black velvet, with their attendants. The long day died; twilight gave way to night; I supped, lay down, listened, and at last slept. My reason told me that the travelers’ names were Giovanni and Roderico Crispi. But in my dreams I wept. . . .
“Master Marco, you’re white in the face,” said an old charwench who had served my mother. “I fear that one of those tall ships you love has brought you the plague.”
“I’m plagued if I know,” I answered, laughing like a loon.
But the sand ran on in the glass. A servant maid had turned it twice, thrice, four times, since the Angelus. She was very Cronus, I thought, he who had castrated his father and eaten his sons so he could never be overthrown. The shadow of the style moved across the sundial, and beneath it, deep-carven in the stone, was this terrible legend:
Every hour wounds. The last hour kills.
We sat down to our big, rich midday meal. I could not eat, but I showed a bright face when the porter blew his horn. There were visitors at the door. I felt nothing more in my heart and instead was rallying all my physical and mental forces, exactly, it seemed, as I did when I drew my longbow for a difficult shot. I was almost pleasantly conscious of coolness and steadiness.
“They are Venetian merchants, newly returned from the East, with their attendants, and they seek admittance to your Honor’s presence,” the servant said.
“Why, you may show them in, and welcome,” replied my uncle Zane. For the merchants of Venice were her true lords.
They came in, the older leading the way, and as he passed the threshold I saw that he did not fill the doorway as did the younger. Their eyes were set alike and both had an imperious look, but the older man’s, although less bright, were not as cold. He was the more rugged-looking, but not the strongest. Their surcoats and leg gear were dark-blue velvet; and in addition they wore mantles of ceremony, lined with red silk and fastened at the throat with gold chains. Most of their train remained in the anteroom, but the two handsome youths, richly and elegantly dressed, followed them still.
“Welcome, my lords, to my humble abode, and will you honor me by sitting at my board?” quoth my uncle Zane.
“Why now, we’ll not sit yet,” answered the younger brother with great courtesy, “but we may beg to do so, when we’re sure of our welcome. Zane—and I address you so by right—do you know me?”
I did not know him. He had addressed my uncle by right, he said, but there seemed to be something wrong. I had thought about it a hundred times since yesterday. I had always understood that Nicolo Polo, my father, was the younger brother of Maffeo Polo. Actually I could not remember being told so and very easily could have got the wrong impression when a little child and carried it all these years. That was the way of it, surely—because the younger of these two brothers was not old enough to have a son fifteen and a half, and hardly sons fourteen and twelve. In that case, it stood to reason that the older, plainer, less arresting man was Nicolo Polo.
He was the better man in the way of goodness than the younger man. He could have darkened my mother’s ways but not cracked her heart. He could have neglected me from sheer unwillingness to bear responsibility for me, not ignored me on purpose. If he were my father, not the other, I would be happier . . . and safer. . . .
“Why, there’s something familiar in your face——” So spoke Zane, my uncle, and now there was a pallor in his own face and a tremor in his voice.
The taller, youthful brother turned to my Aunt Flora.
“Lady, have I no resemblance to someone you knew?”
“Oh, you have,” she answered, so white and faint that I thought she might swoon, “but I dare not speak——”
“Be bold. If you miscall me, I’ll not be offended.”
“If you are who I think you are, you were barely eighteen when you left here, sixteen years ago. It would be no wonder that you’ve changed greatly. But you”—and my aunt turned to the older brother—“you will I address with a bold heart. Of you, I’m almost sure.”
“Who am I, Flora?”
“By blessed Jesus, who died for me, I believe you’re my brother Maffeo, as though risen from the grave.”
“And who stands beside me?”
“It must be Nicolo—and it is!”
2
I had been going on fifteen, but suddenly I had become a full man.
I looked upon my father. The air in the room seemed to have become crystalline as after a rain. At the moment he was being greeted by the embracings and tears of his long-lost sister, while his long-lost son looked on. It was like him to return the greetings with great warmth, for no fish was he, instead a full-blooded, passionate, and strong man. More than that, he was a magnificent man.
“And this fine youth is our nephew and your dear son,” my uncle Maffeo exclaimed as he greeted Leo.
“He’s asked about you almost daily, it seemed to me, and longed for your return,” Uncle Zane replied. But he looked at Nicolo, not Maffeo. He was not one to mistake the buttered side of his bread.
“Why, Nicolo, he was only a toddler when we left here, but now he’s of an age to return with us,” Maffeo went on when both had greeted my smirking cousin.
“It’s a pity we can’t take him,” Nicolo replied, settling that matter once and for all. “Now I have a surprise for you, my dear kinsmen!”
With a proud expression, my father turned to the two splendid youths behind him. “Maffeo!” he called. “Andrea! Come forth and embrace your aunt whom you’ve never seen.”
I had been waiting, with a queer, cold patience, for the pair to be presented. Until the last second I had maintained the possibility that my uncle Maffeo might do the presenting. The handsome boys resembled him at least as much as I resembled my sire.
“Nicolo, you don’t mean——” my aunt gasped.
“I do, and they’re my legitimate sons. When news came of poor Lucia’s death, I took another wife, the daughter of a noble Venetian, Angelo Trevisen, dwelling in Constantinople.”
You took her in a hurry, Papa, by the look of things.
“Oh, I can hardly believe it,” my aunt cried, when she had kissed them both. “They’re so tall and fine.”
“About eleven and ten, but well grown for their years, I grant you.” My father beamed on them.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You’ve been gone over sixteen years.”
So he had—leaving Venice six months before I was born. And time dries all wounds, my aunt should have added to smooth everything over. And we all knew that my mother had been dead nearly twelve years, so who could find fault with the widower’s having a son of eleven? Actually the fine fellow was at least thirteen, but what did it matter? Perhaps he had divorced my mother in absentia and had had plenty of time.
“Now I’ve lost Felicia as well,” my father went on. “It was well that I had my boys—and my great ventures with Maffeo—to help heal the wound.”
My father’s voice became resonant and he was deeply moved.
“And you’ve traveled to the ends of the earth!” my uncle Zane exclaimed.