visit her friends; and he professed to be one of those whom she had thus honoured. Always eager to have his good taste ratified by the envy of his friends, he was urgent with Odo to make the lady’s acquaintance, and it was agreed that, on the first favourable occasion, a meeting should take place at Coeur-Volant’s casino. The weeks elapsed, however, without Odo’s hearing further of the matter, and it had nearly passed from his mind when one August day he received word that the Marquess hoped for his company that evening.
He was in that mood of careless acquiescence when any novelty invites, and the heavy warmth of the summer night seemed the accomplice of his humour. Cloaked and masked, he stepped into his gondola and was swept rapidly along the Grand Canal and through winding channels to the Giudecca. It was close on midnight and all Venice was abroad. Gondolas laden with musicians and hung with coloured lamps lay beneath the palace windows or drifted out on the oily reaches of the lagoon. There was no moon, and the side-canals were dark and noiseless but for the hundreds of caged nightingales that made every byway musical. As his prow slipped past garden walls and under the blackness of low-ached bridges Odo felt the fathomless mystery of the Venetian night: not the open night of the lagoons, but the secret dusk of nameless waterways between blind windows and complaisant gates.
At one of these his gondola presently touched. The gate was cautiously unbarred and Odo found himself in a strip of garden preceding a low pavilion in which not a light was visible. A woman-servant led him indoors and the Marquess greeted him on the threshold.
“You are late!” he exclaimed. “I began to fear you would not be here to receive our guests with me.”
“Your guests?” Odo repeated. “I had fancied there was but one.”
The Marquess smiled. “My dear Mary of the Crucifix,” he said, “is too well-born to venture out alone at this late hour, and has prevailed on her bosom friend to accompany her.—Besides,” he added with his deprecating shrug, “I own I have had too recent an experience of your success to trust you alone with my enchantress; and she has promised to bring the most fascinating nun in the convent to protect her from your wiles.”
As he spoke he led Odo into a room furnished in the luxurious style of a French boudoir. A Savonnerie carpet covered the floor, the lounges and easy-chairs were heaped with cushions, and the panels hung with pastel drawings of a lively or sentimental character. The windows toward the garden were close-shuttered, but those on the farther side of the room stood open on a starlit terrace whence the eye looked out over the lagoon to the outer line of islands.
“Confess,” cried Coeur-Volant, pointing to a table set with delicacies and flanked by silver wine-coolers, “that I have spared no pains to do my goddess honour and that this interior must present an agreeable contrast to the whitewashed cells and dismal refectory of her convent!
No passion,” he continued, with his quaint didactic air, “is so susceptible as love to the influence of its surroundings; and principles which might have held out against a horse-hair sofa and soupe a l’oignon have before now been known to succumb to silk cushions and champagne.”
He received with perfect good-humour the retort that if he failed in his designs his cook and his upholsterer would not be to blame; and the young men were still engaged in such banter when the servant returned to say that a gondola was at the water-gate. The Marquess hastened out and presently reappeared with two masked and hooded figures. The first of these, whom he led by the hand, entered with the air of one not unaccustomed to her surroundings; but the other hung back, and on the Marquess’s inviting them to unmask, hurriedly signed to her friend to refuse.
“Very well, fair strangers,” said Coeur-Volant with a laugh; “if you insist on prolonging our suspense we shall avenge ourselves by prolonging yours, and neither my friend nor I will unmask till you are pleased to set us the example.”
The first lady echoed his laugh. “Shall I own,” she cried, “that I suspect in this unflattering compliance a pretext to conceal your friend’s features from me as long as possible? For my part,” she continued, throwing back her hood, “the mask of hypocrisy I am compelled to wear in the convent makes me hate every form of disguise, and with all my defects I prefer to be known as I am.” And with that she detached her mask and dropped the cloak from her shoulders.
The gesture revealed a beauty of the laughing sensuous type best suited to such surroundings. Sister Mary of the Crucifix, in her sumptuous gown of shot-silk, with pearls wound through her reddish hair and hanging on her bare shoulders, might have stepped from some festal canvas of Bonifazio’s. She had laid aside even the light gauze veil worn by the nuns in gala habit, and no vestige of her calling showed itself in dress or bearing.
“Do you accept my challenge, cavaliere?” she exclaimed, turning on Odo a glance confident of victory.
The Marquess meanwhile had approached the other nun with the intention of inducing her to unmask; but as Sister Mary of the Crucifix advanced to perform the same service for his friend, his irrepressible jealousy made him step hastily between them.
“Come cavaliere,” he cried, drawing Odo gaily toward the unknown nun, “since you have induced one of our fair guests to unmask perhaps you may be equally successful with the other, who appears provokingly indifferent to my advances.”
The masked nun had in fact retreated to a corner of the room and stood there, drawing her cloak about her, rather in the attitude of a frightened child than in that of a lady bent on a gallant adventure.
Sister Mary of the Crucifix approached her playfully. “My dear Sister Veronica,” said she, throwing her arm about the other’s neck, “hesitates to reveal charms which she knows must cast mine in the shade; but I am not to be outdone in generosity, and if the Marquess will unmask his friend I will do the same by mine.”
As she spoke she deftly pinioned the nun’s hands and snatched off her mask with a malicious laugh. The Marquess, entering into her humour, removed Odo’s at the same instant, and the latter, turning with a laugh, found himself face to face with Fulvia Vivaldi. He grew white, and Mary of the Crucifix sprang forward to catch her friend.
“Good God! What is this?” gasped the Marquess, staring from one to the other.
A glance of entreaty from Fulvia checked the answer on Odo’s lips, and for a moment there was silence in the room; then Fulvia, breaking away from her companion, fled out on the terrace. The other was about to follow; but Odo, controlling himself, stepped between them.
“Madam,” said he in a low voice, “I recognise in your companion a friend of whom I have long had no word. Will you pardon me if I speak with her alone?”
Sister Mary drew back with a meaning sparkle in her handsome eyes. “Why, this,” she cried, not without a touch of resentment, “is the prettiest ending imaginable; but what a sly creature, to be sure, to make me think it was her first assignation!”
