“Is Messer Angelo Beroviero within?” inquired the boatman civilly.

“What is your business?” asked the porter in a tone of surly contempt, instead of answering the question.

“There is a rich foreign gentleman here, who desires to speak with him,” answered the boatman.

“Is he the Pope?” asked the porter, with fine irony.

“No, sir,” said the other, intimidated by the fellow’s manner.  “He is a rich—­”

“Tell him to wait, then.”  And the surly head disappeared.

The boatman supposed that the man was gone to speak with his master, and waited patiently by the door.  Aristarchi chewed his pistachio nut till there was nothing left, at which time he reached the end of his patience.  He argued that it was a good sign if Angelo Beroviero kept rich strangers waiting at his gate, for it showed that he had no need of their custom.  On the other hand the Greek’s dignity was offended now that he had been made to wait too long, for he was hasty by nature.  Once, in a fit of irritation with a Candiot who stammered out of sheer fright, the captain had ordered him to be hanged.  Having finished his nut, he stood up in the boat and stepped ashore.

“Knock again,” he said to the boatman, who obeyed.

There was no answer this time.

“I can hear the fellow inside,” said the boatman.

The grating was too high for a man to look through it from outside.  Aristarchi laid his knotty hands on the stone sill and pulled himself up till his face was against the grating.  He now looked in and saw the porter sitting in his chair.

“Have you taken my message to your master?” inquired the Greek.

The porter looked up in surprise, which increased when he caught sight of the ferocious face of the speaker.  But he was not to be intimidated so easily.

“Messer Angelo is not to be disturbed at his studies,” he said.  “If you wait till noon, perhaps he will come out to go to dinner.”

“Perhaps!” repeated Aristarchi, still hanging by his hands.  “Do you think I shall wait all day?”

“I do not know.  That is your affair.”

“Precisely.  And I do not mean to wait.”

“Then go away.”

But the Greek had come on an exploring expedition in which he had nothing to lose.  Hauling himself up a little higher, till his mouth was close to the grating, he hailed the house as he would have hailed a ship at sea, in a voice of thunder.

“Ahoy there!  Is any one within?  Ahoy!  Ahoy!”

This was more than the porter’s equanimity could bear.  He looked about for a weapon with which to attack the Greek’s face through the bars, heaping, upon him a torrent of abuse in the meantime.

“Son of dogs and mules!” he cried in a rising growl.  “Ill befall the foul souls of thy dead and of their dead before them.”

“Ahoy—­oh!  Ahoy!” bellowed the Greek, who now thoroughly enjoyed the situation.