Читать книгу Caravan to Xanadu, A Novel of Marco Polo - Эдисон Маршалл - Страница 8

I had been going on fifteen, but suddenly I had become a full man.

I looked upon my father. The air in the room seemed to have become crystalline as after a rain. At the moment he was being greeted by the embracings and tears of his long-lost sister, while his long-lost son looked on. It was like him to return the greetings with great warmth, for no fish was he, instead a full-blooded, passionate, and strong man. More than that, he was a magnificent man.

“And this fine youth is our nephew and your dear son,” my uncle Maffeo exclaimed as he greeted Leo.

“He’s asked about you almost daily, it seemed to me, and longed for your return,” Uncle Zane replied. But he looked at Nicolo, not Maffeo. He was not one to mistake the buttered side of his bread.

“Why, Nicolo, he was only a toddler when we left here, but now he’s of an age to return with us,” Maffeo went on when both had greeted my smirking cousin.

“It’s a pity we can’t take him,” Nicolo replied, settling that matter once and for all. “Now I have a surprise for you, my dear kinsmen!”

With a proud expression, my father turned to the two splendid youths behind him. “Maffeo!” he called. “Andrea! Come forth and embrace your aunt whom you’ve never seen.”

I had been waiting, with a queer, cold patience, for the pair to be presented. Until the last second I had maintained the possibility that my uncle Maffeo might do the presenting. The handsome boys resembled him at least as much as I resembled my sire.

“Nicolo, you don’t mean——” my aunt gasped.

“I do, and they’re my legitimate sons. When news came of poor Lucia’s death, I took another wife, the daughter of a noble Venetian, Angelo Trevisen, dwelling in Constantinople.”

You took her in a hurry, Papa, by the look of things.

“Oh, I can hardly believe it,” my aunt cried, when she had kissed them both. “They’re so tall and fine.”

“About eleven and ten, but well grown for their years, I grant you.” My father beamed on them.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You’ve been gone over sixteen years.”

So he had—leaving Venice six months before I was born. And time dries all wounds, my aunt should have added to smooth everything over. And we all knew that my mother had been dead nearly twelve years, so who could find fault with the widower’s having a son of eleven? Actually the fine fellow was at least thirteen, but what did it matter? Perhaps he had divorced my mother in absentia and had had plenty of time.

“Now I’ve lost Felicia as well,” my father went on. “It was well that I had my boys—and my great ventures with Maffeo—to help heal the wound.”

My father’s voice became resonant and he was deeply moved.

“And you’ve traveled to the ends of the earth!” my uncle Zane exclaimed.

“To the very kingdom of Cathay on the shores of the Ocean Sea! Zane—Flora—neither of you can dream what we’ve seen! And I must tell you now—in our first hour together—that in just a little while we must go again. Such we have promised the King—Kublai Khan we call him—the greatest king on the earth.”

“He’s made us the bearer of great tidings to his Holiness the Pope,” Maffeo explained when my father paused. “He entreats him to send one hundred priests, learned men and pious, to his Court, there to instruct and baptize the heathen hosts—and we, Nicolo and I, are to lead them there.^[3] I want you to be the first to know of the great honor paid us, and anyway, it can’t be kept secret any longer.”

“Not only honor,” my father added. “The one of us whom he favors most will be made his viceroy—virtually the king—of a realm as great as France, to have and hold its revenues for five years. The other will sit on his Council for the same period. Then we’ll both return to Venice, rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

This was the news I was waiting for. It was natural enough for my father to reveal it in the first half-hour of his own and Maffeo’s return. It was the meat of the coconut, as Mustapha used to say.

The news itself was of such prodigious moment in my fate that I did not instantly perceive a strange fact of its transmission. I had not merely overheard it, as seemed the case with the previous announcements; I had been included in the audience. Perhaps he had become conscious of my presence without realizing or even suspecting who I was. It might be so, but I did not believe it. Instead I believed that the news was for my ears more than any, and in this degree he had acknowledged me at last.

At that instant, Aunt Flora took notice of me too. Perhaps she had never forgotten I was here, but one shock after another had caused her to neglect me until now. The immediate stimulus was some echo of the silent communication between my father and me. She stiffened and changed color.

“I’ll leave my boys here, with allowances for their care and schooling,” my father was saying. “Then when the new Pope is elected——”

Aunt Flora gave forth a gasp so deep it sounded like a sob. “Nicolo!”

“What is it, Flora?”

“You haven’t spoken to Marco!”

She spoke rapidly in an excited tone. That caused the slow voicing and quiet of his reply to be all the more marked.

“No doubt you mean this young man.” And very slowly he turned and looked me in the face.

“Don’t you know who he is? Blessed Jesus, forgive my sin!”

“If he’s the one of whom you have written me—you call him Marco Polo—I know only too well who he is.”

“Oh God, there’s some awful mistake. He’s your son. Nicolo, he’s your firstborn, by your wife Lucia. Your own begotten——”

“I regret to tell you, Flora, that Lucia bore me no son. De mortuis nil nisi bonum—yet I must speak.”

“Jesus, mercy!”

“If this is Lucia’s son, which I have no doubt, he’s the son of her lover, one Antonello, a wandering jongleur from Perugia. Only for the sake of her fame have I suffered him to bear my name.”^[4]