He turned now to Marina with the question:  “If thou hadst told thy father of thy wish mayhap he might have come with thee?”

She shook her head sadly and made no answer, but after awhile she said, “He is like the others.  They cannot understand the need, for to them the Madonna hath not revealed the desperate state of Venice.”

“Yet thou knowest, Marina, that already the great cardinal—­but lately come from France—­hath started for Rome to make up this quarrel?”

“That is what the Senate will not understand!” she cried, with flashing eyes.  “The Holy Father will have submission and penance, in place of embassies and pomp.  One must go to him quite simply, from the people, saying, ‘We have sinned; have mercy upon Venice!’ Piero, thou knowest that awful vision of the Tintoret?  It is Venice that he hath painted in her doom—­the great floods bursting in upon her—­all the agony and the anguish and the desolation of God’s wrath!  Santa Maria!  I cannot bear it!” She closed her eyes, shuddering and sick with terror.

“It was the way with Jacopo,” said Pietro irreverently.  “He was full of freaks, and some demon hath tormented him.  He was a man like others—­not one for a revelation.”

“Hush, Piero!” she implored; “it breaks my heart!  This also may be counted against Venice, for it is the Holy Madonna who hath granted me the vision.”

If Piero was silent he was only restrained by deference to Marina from invoking the aid of every saint in the calendar, in copious malediction, on this miserable Jacopo who had so increased the trouble in Marina’s eyes—­since women had such foolish faith in pictures.

“Jacopo Robusti, posing for a seer, and foretelling the end of the world, like a prophet or a saint! Goffone!"[9] Piero was paddling furiously.  “Jacopo, of the Fondamenta del Mori—­not better than others—­with that boastful sentence blazoned on his door!—­’The coloring of Titian, with the drawing of Angelo!’”

  [9] Great fool!

But he forgot even his resentment against Jacopo in his anxiety as he watched Marina, asking himself if it would be possible for her to pray herself back into healthful life again, even in the dominions of the Holy Father; for he realized that nothing could help her but this one thing on which her heart was set—­while he was yet, if possible, more utterly without sympathy for the fear that moved her than her father or Marcantonio had been.  But if the one woman in Venice had but one desire, however desperate and incomprehensible,—­“Basta!  It is enough,” said Piero to himself,—­she should not die with it unfulfilled, if he could compass it.

Yet, at the thought of death his heart sank.  “It was the Madonna which thou beheldest in thy vision—­not the cross?” he asked her quickly, making the fateful sign as he spoke, to avert this dread presage of death, and afraid of her answer; for Marina was failing before his eyes, and doubtless, in her vision, there had been some apparition of a cross; and even the less devout among the gondoliers were still dominated by some of the superstitions which gave a picturesque color to the habits of the people.