She bade him not to
be in too great haste, and she promised that if he would wait, he should
have with her more gold than her new master had given for her, for she
would take all he had from him, little by little; and when they had
enough they would leave Venice secretly, and live in a grand manner in
Florence, or in Rome, or in Sicily. For she never doubted but that he
would find some way of coming to her, though she were guarded more
closely than in the slave-dealers' house, where the windows were grated
and armed men slept before the door, and one of the dealers watched all
night.
More than a year had passed since then; the strong Greek knew every
corner of the house of the Agnus Dei, and every foothold under Arisa's
windows, from the water to the stone sill, by which he could help
himself a little as he went up hand over hand by the knotted silk rope
that would have cut to the bone any hands but his. She kept it hidden in
a cushioned footstool in her inner room. Many a risk he had run, and
more than once in winter he had slipped down the rope with haste to let
himself gently into the icy water, and he had swum far down the dark
canal to a landing-place. For he was a man of iron.
So it came about that Jacopo Contarini lived in a fool's paradise, in
which he was not only the chief fool himself, but was moreover in bodily
danger more often than he knew.
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