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ARETHUSA




  [Illustration: ARETHUSA]




     ARETHUSA

     BY
     F. MARION CRAWFORD

     AUTHOR OF "SARACINESCA," "A LADY OF ROME,"
     ETC., ETC.

     _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
     GERTRUDE DEMAIN HAMMOND_

     New York
     THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
     LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
     1907

     _All rights reserved_




     COPYRIGHT, 1906, 1907,
     BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING CO.

     COPYRIGHT, 1907,
     BY F. MARION CRAWFORD.

     Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1907.

     Norwood Press
     J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
     Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




     THE STORY-TELLER OF THE BAZAAR
     DEDICATES
     THIS TALE OF CONSTANTINOPLE
     TO HIS DEAR DAUGHTER
     ELEANOR




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


     Arethusa                                           _Frontispiece_

                                                           FACING PAGE

     He was talking with an old beggar woman                        30

     She tenderly kissed the wrinkled face                          44

     'Yes,' replied the negress. 'Rustan is very affectionate. He
     says that I am his Zoe, his "life," because he would surely
     die of starvation without me!'                                 66

     'Tell me your story,' he said in a lower tone. 'Do not be afraid!
     no one shall hurt you.'                                        88

     'Forty ducats!' cried Omobono, casting up his eyes, and preparing
     to bargain for at least half an hour                           94

     All sorts of confused thoughts crowded her brain, as Zeno sat
     down on a seat beside the divan                               108

     There was something so oddly fixed in his look and so dull in his
     voice that Omobono began to fear that he might be a lunatic   128

     'I know them,' Zoe answered. 'If I am not telling you the
     truth, sell me in the market to-morrow.'                      164

     'I did not mean to love you!'                                 194

     The captain's wife obeyed, less frightened than she had been at
     first                                                         218

     Saw her sink down there exhausted, and draw a heavy silk shawl
     across her body                                               240

     'Tell me what you see,' she said to the maids                 262

     'Yes!' roared the Tartar. 'Ten thousand ducats! And if I do
     not find the money in the house, you two must find it in
     yours! Do you understand?'                                    274

     Then, all at once, he felt that she had received one of those
     inspirations of the practical sense which visit women who
     are driven to extremities                                     310

     'Am I not your bought slave?' she asked. 'I must obey.'       352




CHAPTER I


Carlo Zeno, gentleman of Venice, ex-clerk, ex-gambler, ex-soldier of
fortune, ex-lay prebendary of Patras, ex-duellist, and ex-Greek
general, being about twenty-nine years of age, and having in his tough
body the scars of half-a-dozen wounds that would have killed an
ordinary man, had resolved to turn over a new leaf, had become a
merchant, and was established in Constantinople in the year 1376.

He had bought a house in the city itself because the merchants of
Genoa all dwelt in the town of Pera, on the other side of the Golden
Horn. A Venetian could not have lived in the same place with Genoese,
for the air would have poisoned him, to a certainty; and besides, the
sight of a Genoese face, the sound of the Genoese dialect, the smell
of Genoese cookery, were all equally sickening to any one brought up
in the lagoons. Genoa was not fit to be mentioned within hearing of
polite Venetian ears, its very name was unspeakable by decent Venetian
lips; and even to pronounce the syllables for purposes of business was
horribly unlucky.

Therefore Carlo Zeno and his friends had taken up their abode in the
old city, amongst the Greeks and the Bokharians, the Jews and the
Circassians, and they left the Genoese to themselves in Pera,
pretending that they did not even exist. It was not always easy to
keep up the pretence, it is true, for Zeno had extremely good eyes and
could not help seeing those abominations of mankind on the other side
of the Golden Horn when he sat in his balcony on spring evenings; and
his only consolation was to dream of destroying them wholesale, of
hewing them in pieces by the hundred and the thousand, and of piling
up pyramids of their ugly grinning heads. Why were they Genoese? Carlo
Zeno would rather have taken a box on the ear from Sultan Amurad, the
Turk, over there in Asia Minor, than a civil word from the least
objectionable of those utterly unspeakable monsters of Genoese.
'Behold,' said Tertullian one day in scorn, 'how these Christians love
one another.' Matters had not improved in eleven hundred years, since
that learned Doctor of the Church had departed this life, presumably
for a more charitable world; but Carlo Zeno would have answered that
the Genoese were no more Christians than mules, and much less so than
the pigs, which are all under the special protection of the blessed
Saint Anthony.

At the very time, too, when my story begins, those obnoxious villains
of Genoa were on the successful side of a revolution; for they had
helped Emperor Andronicus to imprison his father, Emperor John, in the
tall Amena tower on the north side of the city, by the Golden Horn,
and to lock up his two younger brothers in a separate dungeon. It was
true that Emperor John had ordered Andronicus and his little son of
five to be blinded with boiling vinegar, but Genoese money had
miraculously converted the vinegar into bland white wine, and had
reduced the temperature from the boiling point to that of a healthful
lotion, so that neither the boy nor the man were any the worse after
the application than before; but Andronicus had resented the mere
intention on the part of his father, and had avenged himself by taking
the Empire, such as it was, for the present, while reserving the
delight of murdering his parent and his brothers at a convenient
season in the future.

All this was very well, no doubt, and Andronicus was undisputed
Emperor for the time being, because the Genoese and Sultan Amurad were
willing that he should be; but Amurad had not always been his friend,
and the Genoese had not always had the upper hand of the Venetians;
the wind might change in a moment and a tempest might whirl him away
from the throne even more quickly than the fair breeze had wafted him
towards it.

Zeno thought so too, and wondered whether it would please fate to make
him the spirit of the storm. He cared very little about Handsome John,
as Paleologus was nicknamed, but he cared a great deal for a possible
chance of driving the Genoese out of Pera and of getting the island of
Tenedos for the Venetian Republic.

And now he had transacted the business of the day, and had dined on a
roasted palamit, for it was a Friday and the palamit is the best fish
that swims, from the Dardanelles to the Black Sea; and Zeno would no
more have eaten meat on a day of abstinence than he would have sat
down to table with a Genoese. He had been brought up to be a
churchman, and though the attempt to make a priest of him had failed
for obvious reasons, he was constant in observing those little rules
and regulations which he had been taught to believe conducive to
salvation, seeing that he was of