Pitifully acquiescent, she went with them unresisting.

* * * * *

A haze that was not luminous hung in the sky; night was creeping on without a sunset, as they battled their way up the Giudecca against the current which rushed like a boiling torrent around San Giorgio—­the blue calm of the waters turned to a frenzied, foam-lashed green.

The men rowed fast, with tight-furled sail, but the storm came faster; ranks of threatening clouds were hurrying from the east, gathering like armies of vengeful spirits, darker, closer about them, shutting off every breath of air; an oppression, throbbing with nameless fears, was upon them—­a hush, as if life had ceased; then the scorching, withering torment of a fierce sirocco, and the moan of the wind, like a soul in pain.

Marina grew faint and wide-eyed for terror, but they could not soothe her by word or touch; she sat with clasped hands, gasping for breath, listening to the low, long boom on the shores of the Lido, like muffled thunder, ceaselessly recurring—­the terrible noise of the great waves beating against the sea-walls—­beating and breaking in fury, tossing their spray high in air and whirling it in clouds, like rain mists, far across the lagoon.  Would the barriers stand—­or yield and leave them to their doom?  Were the great waters of the Adriatic uprising in vengeance to overwhelm this city in her sin?  Boom upon boom sounded through all the voices of the storm.  Santa Maria! was it this that the Tintoretto had foretold!

A dazzling, frenzied flash of light,—­a vast peal of thunder that was like the wrath of a mighty, offended God,—­then darkness, and a torrent of rain—­the waters in the shifting path of the wind leaping up to meet the waters from the sky!

The vesper bells of Venice came sobbing through the storm, tossed and broken by the tornado into a wraith of a dirge; and now, by some fantastic freak of nature, as the winds rose higher, the iron tongues from every campanile—­for a brief moment of horror—­came wrangling and discordant, as if tortured by some demon of despair.

  “Ave Maria, Gratia plena!”

the women cried together, falling on their knees, while the men toiled and struggled to hold the invincible galley of the Ten outside the whirling path of the storm—­advancing and retreating at the will of the elements, against which their own splendid, human strength was like the feeble, untaught effort of a helpless infant.

“Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.”

The words rose in a wail between the gusts.

For measureless moments, mighty as hours, they battled between San Marco and San Giorgio, tossed to and fro—­now nearer the haven of the great white dome, now—­as a lightning flash unveiled San Marco—­near enough to see a cloud of frightened doves go whirling over the flood which swept the Piazza from end to end and poured out under the great gates of the Ducal Palace into the lagoon.