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[Illustration: THE DOGE SAT ALONE IN A GREAT CARVEN CHAIR]




[Illustration]


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                              THE ISLAND
                            OF ENCHANTMENT

                                  BY
                          JUSTUS MILES FORMAN

                            ILLUSTRATED BY
                              HOWARD PYLE

                            [Illustration]

                          NEW YORK AND LONDON

                           HARPER & BROTHERS
                          PUBLISHERS  *  MCMV




                Copyright, 1905, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

                        _All rights reserved._
                      Published September, 1905.

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Contents


                                             PAGE

  I. YOUNG ZUAN GRADENIGO                       1

  II. THE WOMAN OF ABOMINATION                 59




Illustrations


  "THE DOGE SAT ALONE IN A GREAT
  CARVEN CHAIR"                    _Frontispiece_

  HE LAID THE MANTLE OVER THE
  GIRL'S SHOULDERS                _Facing p._  32

  "HE LAY AWHILE, CONSCIOUS OF
  GREAT COMFORT"                  _Facing p._  60

  SHE HUNG DROOPING IN THE GREAT
  CHAIR OF STATE                  _Facing p._  98

       *       *       *       *       *




The Island of Enchantment




I

Young Zuan Gradenigo


Evil tidings have their own trick of spreading abroad. You cannot
bury them. The news which had come secretly to Venice was known from
the Giudecca to Madonna dell'Orto in two hours. Before noon it was in
Murano.

Young Zuan Gradenigo, making his way on foot from the crowded Merceria
into the Piazza di San Marco, ran upon his friend, the young German
captain, whom men called Il Lupo--his name was Wölfart--and learned,
what almost every other man in the city already knew, how Lewis of
Hungary, taking excuse of a merchant ship looted in Venetian waters,
was on his way to a second invasion, and had given over the Dalmatian
towns to the ban of Bosnia to ravage.

The two men were still eagerly discussing the matter and its probable
outcome, half an hour later, standing beside one of the gayly painted
booths which, at this time--the spring of 1355--were clustered about
the foot of the great Campanile, when a servant in the livery of the
doge touched young Zuan's arm and, in a low tone, gave him a message.

Gradenigo turned back to the German.

"My uncle wishes to see me at once in the palace," he said. "If you are
not pressed, go to my house and wait for me there. I may have important
news for you." Then, with a parting wave of the hand, he went quickly
across the Piazzetta and under the gateway to the right of St. Mark's.

At the head of the great stair two men were awaiting him, and they led
him at once through a narrow passage with secret sliding-doors to an
inner cabinet of the private apartments of the newly elected doge, his
uncle, Giovanni Gradenigo.

The doge sat alone in a great carven chair before a table which was
littered with papers and with maps and with writing-materials. From a
high window at one side  beams of light slanted down and rested
in crimson and blue splashes upon the dark oak of the table and what
lay there, and upon the rich velvet of the doge's robe, and upon his
peculiar cap of office. He was not a very old man, but he was far from
strong. Indeed, even at this time he was slowly wasting away with the
disease which carried him off a year later, but as he sat there, bowed
before the table, he looked old and very worn and tired. His face had
no color at all. It was like a dead man's face--cold and damp.

And yet, although he was ill and seemed quite unfit for labors or
duties of any sort, he was in reality an unusually keen and shrewd
man, capable of unremitting toil. There burned somewhere within the
shrunken, pallid body an astonishingly fierce flame of life. He had
been elected to office hard upon the Faliero catastrophe partly because
his name was one of the very greatest in Venice--two others of his
house had worn the cap and ring within the century past--but chiefly
because his sympathies were as remote as possible from the liberal
views of the poor old man who had preceded him. He was patrician
before all else, and fiercely tenacious of patrician rights--fiercely
proud of his name and possessions.

He did not move as his nephew entered the room, only his pale eyes rose
slowly to the young man's face and as slowly dropped again to the table
before him. Young Zuan pulled forward one of the heavy, uncomfortable
chairs of carved wood and sat down in it. He was wondering very busily
what his uncle wanted of him, but he knew the old man too well to ask
questions. Besides that, it would not have been respectful.

Presently the pale eyes rose again.

"You have--heard?" asked the doge, in his thin voice.

Young Zuan nodded.

"It is all over Venice," he said. "That Angevin devil Lewis is coming
westward again, and, to begin with, has set his friend the ban on Zara
and Spalato. He chose his time well, God knows!" He paused a moment as
if in expectation of comment, but old Giovanni's face was a death-mask,
immobile, and he went on: "As Il Lupo, the German captain, said to me
a quarter of an hour ago, 'Venice is a very sick man--poison within,
wounds without.' We shall lose Dalmatia."

Old Giovanni nodded once or twice, and for a moment he closed his pale
eyes, sitting quite motionless in his great chair. It was as if he
ceased even to breathe. Then, quite suddenly, the eyes snapped open
and a swift flame of rage seemed to leap up in the old man, amazing in
its unexpectedness. A momentary patch of crimson glowed upon each of
the gray cheeks.

"That dog may have Dalmatia," he cried, "but, by God and by my ring of
office! I'm damned if he shall have Arbe! I won't give up Arbe! I want
to die there!"

Now Arbe needs a very brief word of comment. It was, and is, one of the
northern Dalmatian islands--a tiny island, claw-fashioned, ten miles
long, perhaps, not more than a mile wide at its thickest. It is hemmed
about by greater isles--Veglia to the north, Cherso and Lussin Grande
to the west, Pago to the south. Eastward the high, bare, rocky rampart
of the Croatian hills rises sheer from the sea, almost throwing its
shadow over the island that nestles under it. The northern expanse of
Arbe is wooded, but at the extremity of one south-stretching claw sits
a city in miniature.

It was at this time, and had been for more than a century, a summer
resort for several of the great Venetian families, who had built there
villas and campanili and churches as beautiful as anything beside the
Grand Canal, though no more beautiful than those of the true, native,
Arbesan families, such as the De Dominis and Nemira and Zudeneghi.
As a witness that I do not lie, you may see the ruins of them even
now--magnificent ruins, dwelt in by a horde of fishermen. And among
these great families, by far the foremost had been the Gradenigo.
There were three Gradenigo villas, cloistered and courtyarded, which
were magnificent enough to be called palaces; a Gradenigo had, early
in the thirteenth century, built the highest and finest of the four
campanili--it still stands; a Gradenigo had been several times count
of the island. Hence, as you see, Arbe was peculiarly a Gradenigo
pride. It was the apple of their eye. Hence also you will comprehend
old Giovanni's sudden flare of rage. His withered heart was wrung with
fear. He saw, I have no doubt, hideous visions of the ban's barbarians
slaying, looting, wielding torch and hammer in his fairy-land.

Young Zuan looked up with new concern.

"A-ah!" he said, half under his breath. "Arbe!--I had not thought of
Arbe." His tone took on a shade of doubt.

"Is it likely," he wondered, aloud, "that the ban will go out of his
way to attack the island? It's of no value whatever, strategically. It
would be mere wanton vandalism."

"And what," snarled old Giovanni, "is that mongrel Bosnian but a
vandal? 'Likely,' say you? It is more than that. The dog has sworn to
take Arbe and give it to that Magyar strumpet of his, Yaga. He knows
nothing would hurt me more. He went about Zara, a week ago, boasting
openly of what he meant to do--so the word comes."

Young Zuan flushed red and cursed under his breath.

"That is beyond bearing!" he said. "That woman in Arbe? That shameless,
thieving wanton who stole away Natalia Volutich?"

The doge nodded, licking his blue lips. "The same," he said. "The ban's
Yaga would appear to have a grudge against the house of Gradenigo."

About a year before this time, for the sake of cementing a closer union
between the two republics, a marriage had been arranged between young
Zuan Gradenigo and the daughter of the Ragusan Senator Volutich. But
before Zuan had reached Ragusa to make his visit of ceremony and see
his prospective bride, the girl, riding with her women a little way
beyond the land gate of the town, had been stolen by brigands. Such
things were by no means extraordinary. Nothing had been heard of her
since, save that, a fortnight after her capture, a letter, couched in
most insulting terms, had come to Ragusa from the Princess Yaga, that
infamous favorite of the ban, saying that the girl was in her household
and somewhat preferred it to her former home.

"It's beyond bearing!" said young Zuan again, and he was so angry that
his voice shook. Then, after the two had for a moment stared into each
other's eyes, he threw out his hands with a little laugh of sheer
exasperation.

"But what can we do?" he cried. "Madonna Santissima, what can we do?
With this war upon our hands the council will never consent to sending
aid to Arbe, which is, after all, of importance to only a few families."

"They _must_ consent!" said the doge, fiercely. "I will not lose Arbe!
Look you! Who are the families concerned? Loredan, Morosini, Dandolo,
Celsi, Venier, Contarini, Corner. All of them members of the Ten. I
will see them, and, among us, we shall be able to arrange it. The thing
must remain a private matter. We who love Arbe must go to Arbe's aid
unofficially. Three galleys will suffice. They must leave to-night,
and the council must not know of it until after they have sailed."

Young Zuan looked up with a certain awe, for the scheme, when one
considered the state of internal affairs in Venice at that time, was
almost madness.

"It is a desperate plan," he said, gravely. "You must feel very deeply
to risk such a scheme, after the Faliero affair."

Old Giovanni Gradenigo beat his yellow hand upon the table before him,
and once again the two spots of color came out upon his sunken cheeks.

"I will not lose Arbe!" he cried for the third time. "Leave the risk
and the arrangements to me. As for you, Zuan, you must go at the head
of the expedition. I want a Gradenigo to rescue my island, and you are
the only one of the house who is experienced in warfare."

"Oh yes, of course I should go," said Zuan. "I have the best right."
He rose to take his leave. "I shall have a busy day of it," he said,
"but I can have the three galleys ready before midnight, and secretly
at that. I shall take Il Lupo with me. He is very faithful and a better
man than I. When shall I come to you for instructions and authority? I
must have authority to clear the galleys, of course."

"Come to-night when I send for you," said the doge. "Everything shall
be ready for you." He had sunk wearily back in his great chair once
more, and all signs of life had faded from his face. It seemed to his
nephew that he looked more than ever like a dead man. He raised one
feeble hand a little way as if in sign of dismissal, but the hand
dropped back upon the carved wood of the chair-arm with a sort of dry
rattle, and Zuan left him so, still, silent, deathly, with the bars of
 light from the high window slanting across his velvet robes in
billets and lozenges of vert and gules and azure.

       *       *       *       *       *

The three galleys which slipped gently out of the