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Title: The sword of wealth

Author: Henry Wilton Thomas

Release date: July 2, 2022 [eBook #68448]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: G. P. Putnams's Sons

Credits: D A Alexander and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was made using scans of public domain works put online by Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SWORD OF WEALTH ***





  The Sword of Wealth

  By

  Henry Wilton Thomas

  Author of “The Last Lady of Mulberry.”

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons
  New York and London

  The Knickerbocker Press

  1906




COPYRIGHT, 1906

BY

HENRY WILTON THOMAS


The Knickerbocker Press, New York




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER      PAGE

      I.--THE UNEXPECTED MAN                   1
     II.--TARSIS                              20
    III.--A DREAM REALISED                    35
     IV.--A FACT OF LIFE                      48
      V.--THE SCALES OF HONOUR                63
     VI.--A CENSORED DISPATCH                 73
    VII.--A MESSAGE FROM ROME                 84
   VIII.--A WEDDING JOURNEY                   97
     IX.--A SEED OF GRATITUDE                109
      X.--THE DOOR OF FRA PANDOLE            128
     XI.--BY ROYAL COMMAND                   136
    XII.--AN UNBIDDEN GUEST                  158
   XIII.--AN INDUSTRIAL INCIDENT             166
    XIV.--AN HOUR OF RECKONING               179
     XV.--A BILL PAYABLE                     189
    XVI.--HUNTING THE PANTHER                204
   XVII.--THE POT BOILS OVER                 216
  XVIII.--MARIO PLAYS THE DEMAGOGUE          233
    XIX.--WHAT MONEY COULD NOT BUY           249
     XX.--THE HEART’S LAW-MAKING             263
    XXI.--A CALL TO SERVICE                  279
   XXII.--TARSIS ARRAIGNED                   291
  XXIII.--FETTERS STRUCK OFF                 303
   XXIV.--A CHASE IN THE MOONLIGHT           310




The Sword of Wealth




CHAPTER I

THE UNEXPECTED MAN


A WEEK before the day set for her wedding, in a bright hour of early
April, Hera rode forth from the park of Villa Barbiondi. Following the
margin of the river, she trotted her horse to where the shores lay
coupled by a bridge of pontoons--an ancient device of small boats and
planking little different from the sort Cæsar’s soldiers threw across
the same stream. She drew up and watched the strife going on between
the bridge and the current--the boats straining at their anchor-chains
and the water rioting between them.

Italy has no lovelier valley than the one where flowed the river on
which she looked, and in the gentler season there is no water-course
more expressive of serene human character. But the river was tipsy
to-day. The springtime sun, in its passages of splendour from Alp to
Alp, had set free the winter snows, and Old Adda, flushed by his many
cups, frolicked ruthlessly to the sea.

Peasant folk in that part of the Brianza had smiled a few days earlier
to see the great stream change its sombre green for an earthy hue,
because it was a promise of the vernal awakening. Yet their joy was
shadowed, as it always is in freshet days, by dread of the havoc so
often attending the spree of the waters.

Time and again Hera had ridden over when the river was in such mood,
and known only a keen enjoyment in the adventure. Now she spoke to
Nero, and he went forward without distrust in the hand that guided
him; still, the pose of his ears and the quivering nostrils betrayed a
preference for roads that neither swayed nor billowed. Less than half
the crossing had been accomplished when the crackle of sundering timber
startled her; then events confused themselves strangely amid the rustle
of the wind and the scream of the water.

A few paces ahead, at the middle of the stream, where the current’s
play was fiercest, two pontoons tore free from their anchorage, and
here the bridge parted. With her consciousness of this rose the
blurred vision of a horse and rider flying over the breach. Then she
was aware of the beat of swift-moving hoofs, and, in the next instant,
it seemed, of a voice at her side:

“Turn back, signora, I beg of you!”

She brought her horse around, but while she did so there was a second
rending of woodwork, a snapping, too, of anchor-chains, and the part of
the bridge on which they stood--severed by a new breach from the rest
of the structure--began to go with the tide.

It was an odd bark on which they found themselves being swept toward
the sea. It consisted of six of the pontoons, held together none too
securely by the planking that made the deck.

Round and round it swung, tossed like a chip on the racing flood.
The temper of Hera’s horse was less equal to the swirling, rocking
situation than that of her companion’s mount. In vain she tried to
quiet him. From side to side of the raft the beast caracoled or rose
with fore legs in the air when she drew him up, perilously near the
edge.

“Dismount, dismount!” the other called to her.

Before she could heed the warning Nero began to back near the brink,
leaving her powerless to prevent him carrying her into the water. But
the stranger had swung out of the saddle. A spring forward and he had
Nero by the head in a grip not to be shaken off. The animal’s effort to
go overboard was checked, but only for the moment, and when Hera had
dismounted her deliverer passed his own bridle-reins to her that he
might be free to manage her more restive steed.

“There, there, boy!” he said in the way to quiet a nervous horse. “No
fear, no fear. We shall be out of this soon. Patience! Steady, steady!”

A minute and he had Nero under such control that he stood with
four hoofs on the deck at one time and balked only fitfully at the
restraining hand on the bridle.

Silently Hera watched the man at his task, struck by the calmness with
which he performed it. By neither look nor word did he betray to her
that fear had any place in his emotions. Swifter the river tossed them
onward. Louder their crazy vessel creaked and groaned. But his mastery
of himself, his superiority to the terrors that bounded them, his
disdain for the hazard of events while he did the needful work of the
moment, awoke in her a feeling akin to security. It was as if he lifted
her with him above the danger in which the maddest whim of fortune had
made them partners.

“Do you see any way out of it?” she asked, presently, following his
example of coolness.

He seemed not to hear her voice. With feet set sure and a steady grip
on the bridle, he peered into the distance ahead--far over the expanse
of violent water, now tinted here and there with rose, caught from
the glowing west, where the sun hung low over dark, wooded hills. She
wondered what it was that he sought so eagerly, but did not ask. She
guessed it had to do with some quickly conceived design for breaking
their captivity, and when at length he turned to her she saw in his eye
the light of a discovered hope.

“Yes,” he said, “we have a good chance. The current bears us toward the
point at the bend of the river. We must pass within a few yards of that
if I judge rightly.”

“And then?”

“I shall make use of that,” he answered, pointing to a coil of rope
that hung on his saddle-bow.

“What I mean to do is----”

The sound of breaking planks signalled a danger with which he had not
reckoned. He saw one of the end pontoons wrench itself free. Hera saw
it too, as it bore away to drift alone; and they knew it for a warning
grimly clear that all the members of their uncertain bark must part
company ere long.

In the silence that fell between them she looked toward the Viadetta
bank, where peasants awoke the echoes with their hue and cry. He kept
his gaze on the spear of land that marked the river’s sharpest turn.
Once or twice he measured with his eye the lessening distance between
them and the shore.

“We hold to the right course,” he said, confidently. “There will be
time.”

Piece by piece Hera saw the thing that bore them scatter its parts over
the river.

“What shall we do?” she asked, a shudder of fear mingling strangely
with trust in him.

At first he made her no answer, but continued to watch the shore as if
striving to discern some signal. Another pontoon broke loose, carrying
off a part of the deck and leaving the rest of the planks it had
supported hanging in the water. The sound of the breaking timbers did
not make him turn his head. When at last he faced her it was to speak
in tones all at odds with their desperate state.

“See the Old Sentinel!” he exclaimed, gleefully. “He shall save us!”

Not far to the south she could see the projecting land, a flat place
and bare except for some carved stones lying there in a semblance of
order--the bleached ruins, in fact, of a temple raised by one of her
ancestors. The wash of ages had brought the river much nearer than it
was in the days of that rude conqueror, and one stone, bedded deep
in the mould, stood erect at the water’s edge. Its base was hidden,
but enough remained above ground to tell what part it had played in
architecture--a section of a rounded column. Brianza folk knew it by
the name of the Old Sentinel. Always it had been there, they told the
stranger. Now the magic of the low sun changed it into a shaft of gold.
From childhood Hera had known the ancient landmark, and was the more
puzzled to divine how it could serve them now.

“Can I help?” she asked, as he turned toward her again.

“Yes,” he answered, quickly. “Hold my horse. Can you manage both?”

“I will try,” she said, moving closer to him.

“We must not lose the horses,” he warned her. “They will be useful in
case I--even after we are connected once more with the land.”

She took the other bridle, which he passed to her, and grasped it
firmly. Then she saw him lift from the saddle-bow the rope--a lariat
of the plainsman’s sort, fashioned of horsehair, light of weight, but
stronger than if made of hemp. He gathered it in an orderly coil and
made sure of his footing. Now she knew what he was going to attempt,
and the desperate chance of the feat came home to her. In a flash she
comprehended that upon the success of it their lives depended even if
the dismembering raft held together so long. If his aim proved false,
if the lariat missed the mark, a second throw might not avail; before
he could make it they must be swept past the column of stone.

Calmly he awaited the right moment, which came when their rickety
outfit, in the freak of the current, was moving yet toward the land.
He poised a second and raised the coil. Twice he swung it in a circle
above his head--the horses were watching him--and with a mighty fling
sent it over the water. Steadily it paid out, ring for ring, straight
as an arrow’s course, until the noose caught the column fairly, spread
around it, and dropped to the ground.

“Bravo, Signor Sentinella!” he cried, pulling the line taut. “A good
catch!”

“Bravo, Signor--” she amended, pausing for his name.

“Forza is my name,” he said, hauling for the shore, hand over hand.

It was work that had to be done quickly. A few seconds and their craft
would swing past the column to which it was moored. To haul it back
then would mean a tug against the current. In this he knew that no
strength of his could avail even if the lariat did not part. His sole
chance was to keep the float moving in a slanting line toward land
before it should be carried beyond the Sentinel. The bulk of woodwork
and pontoons was of great weight, and the task took all the strength he
could muster.

“Let me help you,” Hera said, seeing that he strained every muscle.

“No, no! Hold the horses! Now is our time. We are in shallow water.”

He looped the rope about his right hand, and with this alone held them
to the shore. Kneeling on the half-submerged planks at the edge, he
leaned over the water, and, with his left hand, passed the end of the
lariat under and around a yet staunch timber of the deck. In his teeth
he caught the end and held it; then clutched it again in his free hand,
and, with the quick movement of one sure of his knot, made it fast.

“Now for it,” he said, on his feet once more, as their raft, tugging
hard at the line, swung around with the current, and another pontoon
broke away.

Before she was aware of his purpose he had lifted her into the saddle
and mounted his own horse.

“Come along,” he said, cheerfully. “It is only wet feet at the worst,”
and he put spur to his horse.

Their animals sprang into the water together just as the lariat
snapped, and the raft, set free, went on with the rushing flood. Side
by side they splashed their way to the pebbled beach and up to where
the ruins of Alboin’s temple reposed.

Before them was a ride in the growing dusk over open lengths of
hillside pass and by sylvan roads to Villa Barbiondi. On high the wind
blew swiftly; clouds that had lost their lustre raced away, and the
shadows fell long on hills that were dull and bare as yet, but soon to
be lightened with passionate blossoming. Before her, in the gloaming
distance, were glimpses over the trees of her father’s dark-walled
house--a grand old villa, impressive by contrast with its trim white
neighbours pointing the perspective. Glad to feel solid ground beneath
their hoofs once more, the horses galloped away, and their riders let
them go. Not until the partial darkness of a grove enclosed them did
they slacken speed; there the road wore upward, and the horses of their
will came to a walk. Beyond the black stocks and naked boughs the
crimson glow of sunset lingered.

“Now that it is past,” Hera said, as if musing, “I see how great was
the danger.”

“I think you were alive to it at the time,” he returned in the manner
of one who had observed and judged. “You are brave.”

“It was confidence more than bravery,” she told him frankly.

“But you made it easy for me to do my part,” he insisted.

“That was because--well, as I see it now--because there was no moment
when I did not feel that we should come out of it all right.”

“Then I must tell you,” he said, “to whom we are indebted for our
escape. Somewhere in the woods, the fields, or the highways on the
other side of the river is a Guernsey heifer living just now in the joy
or sorrow of newly gained freedom. But for that we might not be here in
fairly dry clothes.”

They had emerged from the grove, and he pointed toward the opposite
shore, where the white buildings of the Social Dairy were still
visible, though the twilight was almost gone.

“The heifer was born and bred in our little colony over there,” he went
on, “and until an hour ago her world was bounded by its fences. But she
jumped our tallest barrier, and I was after her with the lariat when
the bridge broke.”

“I admit our debt to the heifer,” she said, laughing. “To her we owe
the rope--but not the throwing. I was unaware that anyone short of the
American cowboy could wield a lasso so well.”

“It was in America that I got an inkling of the art,” he explained.
“Once the life of a California ranchero seemed to me the one all
desirable--a dream which I pursued even to the buying of a ranch.”

“And the awakening?” she asked, a little preoccupied. His reference to
the Social Dairy had solved for her the riddle of his identity. She
knew him now for the leader of a certain radical group in the Chamber
of Deputies.

“The awakening came soon enough,” he said. “At the end of two years the
gentleman of whom I bought the dream consented to take it back at a
handsome profit to himself.”

“Then you paid dearly, I am afraid, for your lessons in lariat
throwing.”

“I thought so until to-day,” he replied, turning to meet her eyes.

They rode on at a smarter gait. She had looked into his clear face,
and it seemed boyish for one of whom the world heard so much--for the
leader of Italy’s most serious political cause. He was, like her, a
noble type of the North’s blue-eyed race; only the blood of some
dark-hued genitor told in his hair and color, while her massing tresses
had the caprice of gold. They came to a hill and the horses walked
again.

“My deliverer, it appears, is Mario Forza, the dangerous man,” she
said, with a playful accent of dismay.

“Yes; the title is one with which my friends the enemy have honoured
me.”

She leaned forward and patted her horse, saying the while:

“I have it in mind from some writer that to dangerous men the world
owes its progress.”

“Do you believe that?” he asked, seriously.

“Yes; in the way that I understand it. Perhaps I do not get the true
meaning of my author.”

“One can never be certain of knowing the thought of another,” he said.

“True. For example, I am far from certain that I know the thought of
your New Democracy--what you are striving to do for Italy. And yet,”
she added, reflectively, “I think I know.”

“Do you understand that we aim to fill our country with true
friends--to teach Italy that it is possible for all her children to
live and prosper in their own land?”

“Yes,” she answered, positively, gladly.

“Then you know the thought of the New Democracy.”

Evincing an interest that he felt was not feigned, she asked him how
the cause fared, and he told her that among the people it gained, but
in Parliament set-backs, discouragements, were almost the rule.

“But you will fight on!” she exclaimed, out of the conviction he gave
her of valour.

“Ah, yes; we shall fight on.”

The hush of the night’s first moments had fallen upon the scene. What
light tarried in the west showed the mountain’s contour, but relieved
the darkness no longer. Yellow windows studded the lower plains and
the woody heights. They could see above the trees the shadowy towers
of Villa Barbiondi, and only a little way before them now, but still
invisible, stood the gates of the villa park.

They had reached the foot of a sharp rise in the road when two blazing
orbs shot over the crest of the hill, bathing horses and riders in a
stream of light. A motor car came to a standstill, and the older of
the two occupants, a tall man in the fifties, sprang down nimbly.

“Hera! Hera!” he cried. “Heaven be praised!”

As he approached he snatched a mask from his face, and there was her
father, Don Riccardo.

“And to think that you are here, all of you, safe as ever!” he
exclaimed, caressing her hand. “Ah, my daughter, this is a joyous
moment.”

“Yes; all of me saved, _babbo_ dear,” she said. “But indeed it came
near being the other way.”

“Again Heaven be praised!” said Don Riccardo.

“Heaven and this gentleman,” Hera amended, turning to Mario. “The
Honourable Forza--my father.”

“Your hand, sir!” cried Don Riccardo, going around her horse to where
Mario stood. “Believe me, you have saved my life as well. My debt to
you is so great that I can never hope to pay.”

Mario told him that it was not such a big debt. “In plain truth,” he
added, “I was obliged to save Donna Hera in order to save myself. So
it was the sort of activity, you see, that comes under the head of
self-preservation.”

“Ah, is it so?” returned Don Riccardo, genially. “Nevertheless, sir,
I shall look further into your report of the affair. To-night I
shall sound it. In your presence we shall have the testimony of an
eyewitness. At least we shall if you will give us your company at
dinner, which, by the way, is waiting.”

“I am sorry, but to-night I cannot.”

“Then to-morrow, or Wednesday, Thursday, Friday?”

“Wednesday I should be glad.”

“Good! On Wednesday, then, we shall tarnish your fame for veracity,
and, if I mistake not, brighten it for modesty.”

The final tones of the sunset’s colours had given way to deepest
shadow. At Hera’s side, listening to her account of the river episode,
stood Don Riccardo’s companion of the motor car--a dark, bearded man of
middle height, whose face was hard and cruel, and seemed the more so in
the grim flare of the machine’s lamps.

“Signor Tarsis!” Don Riccardo called to him. “Let me present you. The
Honourable Forza. Probably you have met.”

Tarsis, drawing nearer, gave Mario no more than a half nod of
recognition, while he said, in a manner of one merely observing the
civilities:

“I have to thank you for the service I hear you have rendered my
affianced wife.”

There was a pause before Mario replied that he counted it a great
privilege to be at hand in the moment of Donna Hera’s need. The last
word was still on his lips when Tarsis turned to Don Riccardo and asked
if he were ready to go back to the villa, and the older man answered
with a bare affirmative. Presently the car was brought about; as it
shot away Hera and Mario followed. Now and again the highway bore close
to the river’s margin, and the splash of the rampant water sounded in
the dark. A little while and they stopped at the Barbiondi gates, where
their ways parted--hers up the winding road to the house, his onward to
the nearest bridge, that he might cross and ride back to Viadetta.

“I regret that I cannot be with you to-night,” he told her. “An hour
and I must start for Rome.”

“Until Wednesday, then?” she said, giving him her hand.

“Until Wednesday.”

She spoke to Nero and was gone. A moment Forza lingered, looking into
the darkness that enveloped her. Once or twice, as she moved up the
road, he caught the sparking of her horse’s steel. At a turn in the way
she passed into the light of the motor car’s lamps, and he gained one
more glimpse of her, and was content. Then he set off for the Bridge of
Speranza.




CHAPTER II

TARSIS


AMONG the chieftains of production who were leading Italy to prosperity
and power Antonio Tarsis held the foremost place. Son of a shop-keeper
in Palermo, he began life poor and without influence. It had taken him
less than twenty years to build up a fortune so large that the journals
of new ideals pointed to it as a terrible example. Cartoonists had
fallen into the habit of picturing him with a snout and bristled ears.
There was a serious portrait of him in the directors’ room of one of
the companies he ruled. It was painted by a man whose impulse to please
was stronger than his artistic courage. He told all that he dared.
In full length, it showed a man under forty, black-bearded, with a
well-turned person of middle height; small, adroit eyes heavily browed,
prominent nose inclined to squatness, spare lips and broad jaws; the
portrait, at a glance, of a fighter of firm grain, fashioned for
success in the great battle.

So much for the Tarsis of paint and canvas. The one that faced you
in the flesh had harder, crueler eyes; the living clutch of the
lips was tighter; the faint yet redeeming human quality of the man
in the picture was lacking. And in the hue of his skin, much darker
than the painter had ventured, nature did not deny the land of his
birth--Sicily. It was there, at the beginning of manhood, that chance
threw him into the post of time-keeper for a silk-mill. He did his work
so well that never a centesimo went to pay for moments not spent in the
service of the company.

One morning Tarsis, at the door with book and pencil ready, waited in
vain for the workers to arrive; and his career as a great factor in
Italy’s industrial life may be dated from the week that followed, when
he assembled gangs of strike-breakers to replace the men and women who
had joined in a revolt against many wrongs. A strike-breaker he had
been ever since. By laying low the will of others, men or masters of
men, and setting up his own will, he had gained over human destinies a
dominion so practical that he cared little for the theory of king and
Parliament. Of small import was it who made the laws or who executed
them so long as they did not take from him the power to decide what
share a worker should have of the product of his hand.

For a year or two Tarsis worked at his trade of strike-breaking
in the United States, and that was the making of him, so far as
external things had to do with the man. He brought back to Sicily
some money-winning ideas about manufacturing that lifted him into the
place of superintendent of the silk-mill, and some notions about “high
finance” that he picked up bore rich fruit. One day the company found
itself reorganized, with Tarsis in command. That was his first big
victory. He followed it up in due time by laying siege to the large
silk makers of the North. His campaign took the form of a proposal to
unite their works with those of the South. At first they greeted his
project with smiles, but Tarsis played one company against the other
so craftily that in the end, obeying the law of self-preservation, all
were eager to join the union.

As master mind of the general company Tarsis smashed the idols of
custom, tore down everything that retarded the making of money.
The methods of generations went by the board. He struck out for new
fields, and quickly Italy’s product of spun silk was feeding the
looms of Russia, Austria, Great Britain, and the United States in
quantities double those of the old days. Mills were set up at places
easily reached by the farmer with his cocoons or near to shipping
points. At Venice he turned an ancient palace into a buzzing hive and
sent forth smoke and steam over the Grand Canal. There were unions
of shoe factories, glass and carriage works, steamboat lines, and
steel-mills; and never was Antonio Tarsis a factor unless a factor that
controlled. The journals of the New Democracy muttered, and likened him
to creatures of the brute world noted for their ability to reach or
swallow.

One of the things Tarsis learned in the United States was that child
labour in factories is a superior device for fattening stock dividends.
Mario Forza, from his place in the National Parliament, once denounced
him in a speech rebuking the Government for lack of interest in the
toiling masses. The bodily health and moral being of thousands of
children were ruined every year in Italy, he said, that men like
Tarsis might pile up their absurd fortunes--an outburst that brought
loud and long applause from the seats of the New Democrats. This speech
was green in the memory of Tarsis that night on the riverside when he
thanked Forza for the service rendered his promised wife.

A situation created by the want of money had brought Hera and Tarsis
together. He had some cold-blooded reasons for wanting the beautiful
patrician for his wife. She ministered to his sense of beauty, but it
was the principle of success she typified that gave her greatest value
in his eyes. The man of peasant blood looked to an alliance with the
house of Barbiondi as the crowning triumph of his career. Hera was the
fairest prize of the Lombard aristocracy. Men of noble blood and large
fortune had failed to win her hand, because she could not rid herself
of the conviction that to become the wife of a man for the sake of his
fortune would be a mere bartering of her charms. Against such a step
her whole being rose in revolt.

Tarsis had conceived the thought to possess her and had planned to do
so as he had planned to gain control of the Mediterranean Steamship
Line. His faithful ally was Donna Beatrice, Hera’s aunt, who strove
mightily in the cause. But it was Hera’s love for her father--her wish
to relieve him from the torments of poverty--that made it possible for
Tarsis to attain his purpose. The sands of the Barbiondi were almost
run. Their villa, built two centuries before Napoleon appeared on that
side of the Alps, was all that remained of an estate once the largest
in the North. Charts of old days show its forests and hillside fields
bordering the river Adda from Lake Lecco in the mountains clear to the
Bridge of Lodi. Like his forebears of many generations, Don Riccardo
had seen the money-lenders swallow his substance. If in his own time
the bites were of necessity small, they were none the less frequent.
To Donna Beatrice’s skill in concealing the actual state of their
purse was due the fact that the Barbiondi were able to spend a part
of the winter in Milan, so that Hera, whom her aunt recognised as the
family’s last asset, might be in evidence to the fashionable world.
How she accomplished this never ceased to be a riddle to her brother;
and he gave it up, as he gave up all riddles. His idea of a master
stroke in contrivance was to go to his banker and arrange another
mortgage. He was likely to go shooting or for a ride when there was a
financial crisis to be met. It was at the moment that the mortgagee’s
mouth watered for the last morsel that Hera, in the purest spirit of
self-sacrifice, consented to a marriage with Tarsis.

Matchmakers of Milan’s fashionable world, who had known that the Tarsis
millions were knocking at the Barbiondi gate, received the announcement
of the betrothal as the extinguishment of their last hope, but in the
world of creditors there was a wild rejoicing. The mortgagee lost his
appetite for the last morsel of the estate. Milliners, makers of gowns
and boots, purveyors of food and drink, sent in humble prayers for
patronage instead of angry demands for pay. Everywhere the bloodhounds
of debt slunk off the scent.

A day of mid-April was chosen for the wedding, and as it drew near Hera
retained her studied air of cheerfulness, that Don Riccardo might not
divine the price his peace of mind demanded of her. She rode about the
countryside, sometimes with her father, oftener alone, while the task
of preparation for the nuptials went forward under the willing hand
of Aunt Beatrice. To that contented woman the bride-elect’s lukewarm
interest in the affair was a source of wonder. With eyes uplifted and
hands clasped she paused now and then to ask if ever Heaven had given
an aunt a niece of such scant enthusiasm. Such was the situation the
day that Hera had her adventure on the river. No experience of life had
dwelt so pleasantly in her thought as the meeting and converse with
Mario Forza. No coming event had ever interested her so warmly as that
he was going to dine in Villa Barbiondi--that she was going to meet him
again.

She spent the closing hours of Wednesday afternoon at her window
looking over the river toward the fields and buildings of the Social
Dairy. She saw one herd after another wind its way homeward up the
pass and watched eagerly for the coming forth of Mario. When the file
of poplars that bordered the highway by the river were casting their
longest shadows she saw him ride out and begin the descent of the hill.
For some time she was able to keep him in view as he trotted his horse
along the level road. When he came upon the Bridge of Speranza--the
waters had not ended their spree--she was conscious of a new anxiety,
and when he had gained the nearer shore she felt a strange relief. A
little while and the shadows of the poplars were neither short nor
long, and darkness hid him from sight. Presently the voice of her
father, raised in welcome, mingled with the most genial tones of Donna
Beatrice, sounding up the staircase, told her that he had arrived.

“Ha, my friend!” she heard Don Riccardo saying, “this is the greatest
of delights. Why, I knew your father, sir. The Marquis and I served the
old king. And a gay service it was for blades who knew how to be gay.
Magnificent old days!”

“I heard much of you, Don Riccardo, from my father,” Mario said.

“And I have heard much of you since you came to Milan,” the other
returned. “But I never recognised you without the title; nor in the dim
light of the other night did I see my old comrade in your face. But I
see him now. By my faith! you take me back thirty years. And pictures
of you--marvellous pictures--have I seen in the newspapers. I remember
one in particular,” he ran on, a gleam in his eye. “It portrayed the
Honourable Forza in action, if you please. I think he was performing a
feat no more difficult than getting out of a carriage; but the camera
immortalised him as an expert in the art of standing on one foot and
placing the other in his overcoat pocket.”

Hera was with them now joining in the laughter. Donna Beatrice thanked
Mario effusively for saving the life of Hera. The more she had
reflected on the deed the more heroic it had grown in her sight. Her
gratitude had its golden grain, for the fact loomed large to her mind
that but for his timely action there might have been no forthcoming
marriage with Antonio Tarsis, no saving of the Barbiondi ship. She was
prodigal in her praise of his knightly valour, as she called it, and
declared that the age of chivalry still lived. At this point a footman
came to Mario’s rescue by announcing that the vermouth was served.

“And what of the progress toward peace in the human family,
Honourable?” asked Don Riccardo, merrily, as they took their places at
table.

Mario answered that the progress, as to the branch of the human family
known as Italian, was for the time being somewhat backward. “The
trouble with our party,” he said, “is that we can’t break ourselves
of the habit of being right at the wrong time. Our foes are better
strategists. They are wise enough to be wrong at the right time.”

“And what is this New Democracy all about, Signor Forza?” asked Donna
Beatrice, as she might have asked concerning some doing on the island
of Guam.

“It is an effort to mend a social machine that is badly out of repair,”
he answered. “The hewer of wood is demanding a fire, the drawer of
water a drink. The producer is striving to keep a little more of what
he produces.”

He held up a side of the industrial picture that was the reverse of
what Don Riccardo’s prospective son-in-law liked to present. His words
did not square with Tarsis’s assertion that the heart of a statesman
should be in his head. He gave reasons why some are rich and some are
poor, and though new to those at the table, they felt that they were
listening to no sentimental dreamer. He struck the key-note of the
century’s new thought. If his head did lift itself toward the clouds at
times, his feet remained firmly planted on the earth, and his ideals
were those of a man determined to be useful in the world.

It was good, Hera thought, to look upon him; good to hear his voice,
good to feel that one admired him. And Donna Beatrice, looking over the
rims of her pince-nez, was seized with alarm. Their guest’s discourse
might be interesting, she told herself, but she was positive there was
nothing in it to command such wrapt attention on the part of her niece.
When they had risen, and Mario and Hera were leading the way to the
reception hall, she pulled at her brother’s coat sleeve to hold him
in the alcoved passage; and, standing there amid the tapestries and
trophies of shields and arms, the poor woman made known her doubts and
fears.

“Riccardo, what does this mean? I say it is most extraordinary.”

“Yes, the coffee was not delicious,” he observed. “The cook is drinking
absinthe again.”

“The coffee! I speak of Hera.”

“In what has she offended now?” he inquired, clasping his hands behind
him and looking up at an ancestral portrait dim with the centuries.

“You ask that?” she rejoined sceptically. “But no; it is impossible
that even a man could be so blind. I thank Heaven Antonio Tarsis was
not present.”

“I always thank Heaven when he is not present,” Don Riccardo confessed,
and his sister winced. “What crime has Hera committed?”

“On the eve of her marriage she is showing a scandalous interest in a
man who is not to be her husband.”

Don Riccardo gave a low laugh of depreciation. “Mario Forza saved her
life,” he reminded her. “If the fact has slipped your memory, it is not
so with Hera.”

“I know,” Donna Beatrice argued, “but there are things to remember as
well as things not to forget.”

“My dear sister, let our girl indulge this natural sentiment of
thankfulness.”

“Thankfulness?” the other questioned, raising her brows.

“And what else? Come, my Beatrice, the strain of this wedding business
has wrought upon your nerves. When the fuss is over you must go to the
Adriatic for a rest.”

She said it was considerate of him, but she did not feel the need of
rest. In a corner of the reception hall they found Hera at the piano,
Mario beside her, turning the page. They asked him to sing, and he
began a ballad of the grape harvest in Tuscany. It pictured the beauty
of the rich clusters, the sun-burned cheeks and rugged mirth of the
peasant maids, stolen kisses, troths plighted, and the ruby vintage
drunk at the wedding feast. The song was manly and sung in a manly
voice.

While his clear baritone filled the room and Hera played the
accompaniment the feelings of Don Riccardo were stirred deeply. From
his chair by the wall he looked sadly upon his daughter and his old
comrade’s son, and hoped, for her sake, that what might have given him
gladness at one time would not happen now. The words of his sister had
moved him more than he let her know. What if Mario Forza had come into
her heart? What if the marriage to which she was to go should prove the
funeral of a true love? What if that were added to the price she was
going to pay for helping her father? His impulse was to take her in his
arms, tell her to accept any happiness that destiny had to offer, and
defy the issue whatever it might be. Instead, he rang for a glass of
cognac.

When Hera had sung a romance of old Siena Don Riccardo asked Mario
about that “idealistic experiment,” the Social Dairy, and learned that
it was no longer an experiment, but a prosperous object lesson for
those willing to listen to the New Democracy. Mario told them a little
of the life of the place, and Don Riccardo suggested that they all go
and see for themselves.

“It would give me pleasure,” Mario assured him.

“I should like to go very much,” Hera said.

“Then we shall visit you to-morrow.” Don Riccardo decided, with an
enthusiasm which Aunt Beatrice did not share.




CHAPTER III

A DREAM REALISED


THE following afternoon Mario, on horseback, appeared at the villa and
said he had stopped to accompany the Barbiondi in their ride to the
Social Dairy. It was a proffer Donna Beatrice could not regard with
favour. From the first the trip across the river had seemed to her
a project of questionable taste; but now that it was to include the
company of a man in whom Hera had betrayed a “scandalous interest,”
it stood in her mind as a distinctly improper proceeding. Drawing her
brother aside, she said as much to him while they waited for the horses
to be brought from the stables.

But Don Riccardo failed to view the affair in that light. He was glad
to see Forza, and glad of the opportunity the three-mile ride afforded
for a chat with the son of his old comrade. His expectation in
regard to the chat, however, was not realised, for what Aunt Beatrice
pronounced a shocking display of indiscretion on the part of her niece
occurred before they had reached the Bridge of Speranza. When the
cavalcade, after a brisk trot, had dropped into a walk, Hera and Mario
fell behind and rode side by side. And in the rest of the journey Donna
Beatrice could not see that they made any appreciable effort to lessen
the distance separating them from the others.

The day was a true one of the freakish month. In the morning hours
the clouds had played their many games, now gambolling on the blue in
fleecy flocks, now rolling sublimely in great white billows or tumbling
in darker shapes that shed big drops of rain. But the present hour was
one of purest sky, and all the land was gloried in sunshine. Mysterious
heralds of the springtime spoke to the spirit and senses of the younger
riders. The river was in gentler mood; the grey brush of the poplars
no longer strained in the wind, maple twigs were dimpling with buds,
and the green mantle of the hills seemed to grow brighter with every
glance. Their cheeks were smoothed by the new breath that comes
stealing over the land in April days. They talked of the things about
them. Hera rejoiced in the life of the outer air. She knew the wild
growths and the architecture of the birds, and he, if saddened easily
by the ugliness men impart to life, was ever awake to the beauties of
the world. They saw here and there a last year’s nest in the leafing
branches.

“There was the home of an ortolan,” she would say, or, “There a
blackbird lived, there a thrush.”

“And soon, when passing Villa Barbiondi,” he added once, “a friend may
say, ‘There Donna Hera lived.’”

“Yes,” she said; “I shall part from the dear old nest, as the birds
part from theirs.”

Where the road branched upward to the dairy Don Riccardo and his sister
were waiting. Together the four made the ascent of the zigzag way,
passing under oaks that had clung to their brown leaves through all
the assaults of winter and moving beneath the mournful green of the
needle-pines. They walked about the scrupulously clean, well-ordered
houses and yards of the Social Dairy, where moral enlightenment and
manual energy worked in concert. It was one of the several hundred
places, Mario told them, that the new, industrial plan had brought
into being. He explained the genius of co-operation, and how in this
instance it brightened the lives of thousands of poor farmers. Hera
remarked the air of well-being that pervaded the place--the neat
apparel of the men and women, the interest they showed in their work,
and the absence from their eyes of the driven look she had observed in
a factory of Milan.

“How bright and fresh and--happy they are!” she said to Mario.

“They are not overworked,” he explained. “They have only themselves and
their families to provide for.”

“I see nothing unusual in that,” observed Donna Beatrice.

“I mean,” Mario went on, “that there are no ladies and gentlemen
to be fed and clothed out of the profits of their work. That makes
it possible for them to earn in seven hours a day enough for their
needs and a little to spare for the bank--the bank that gives them an
interest in the earnings of their deposits.”

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Don Riccardo. “I don’t profess to understand
it at all. But tell me, Honourable, how it is possible that you,
the busiest man in Rome, can find time from your Parliamentary work
for--this sort of thing?”

“I like the country,” Mario answered, “and this is the part of my work
that is recreation.”

Going back to Viadetta they rode beside the pasture lands, where herds
of cattle browsed. In one field Mario pointed out a black heifer that
was frisking alone.

“That is the wayward youngster I started after with my lariat the other
day,” he said. “She came back this morning. I am grateful to her, Donna
Hera. But for that dash for liberty I should not be with you to-day.”

She could have told him that her gratitude ought to be more than his,
and yet was not so, for the fate the river had offered now seemed
kinder than the one in store for her.

“I perceive that the heifer soon tired of her liberty,” Donna Beatrice
remarked, complacently. “Do you not think, Signor Forza, it would be
the same with your common people? Give them what they think they want,
and quickly they will be whining for what they had before and which
was better for them.”

“I suppose they would,” Mario assented, smiling, “if the new condition
left them hungry and shelterless, as it did our heifer. She dreamed of
freedom, but woke to find that her two stomachs were exceedingly real
affairs. So she came home and sold her freedom for a mess of pottage.”

“Precisely!” Donna Beatrice exclaimed, triumphantly. “In the practical
brute kingdom as well as in the human world dreamers are likely to come
to grief.”

“That is true,” Mario agreed, “and yet the dreamer’s airy product often
becomes a reality. The dream of yesterday is the architect’s plan of
to-day on which the builders will be at work to-morrow. There was
our great compatriot who dreamed of having the people of Italy pull
together under some well-laid plan, and do away with the necessity that
drives so many to seek prosperity in foreign lands. That man is dead,
but part of his vision lives in the Social Dairy. The farmers whose lot
has been bettered by this system of co-operation are stout believers in
that dream, you may be sure.”

“In what way are the farmers benefited?” Donna Beatrice asked,
sceptically.

“They get a fair share of the profit of their toil. They send their
milk here, and by processes that are moral as well as scientific it is
turned first into butter, then into coin of the realm.”

“But, Signor Forza,” Donna Beatrice protested, “I call this
establishment eminently practical.”

“Everyone does now. Nevertheless, it was no more than a theory two
years ago--as much a dream then as the Employers’ Liability bill is
now.”

“Will you interpret this new dream, Honourable?” Don Riccardo asked.
“What is the Employers’ Liability bill?”

“A Parliamentary measure to oblige the employers of men and women in
dangerous work to insure their lives; to take care of them, too, should
they meet with injury.”

“Then the industrial army,” said Don Riccardo, “would fare better at
the hands of the state than the military.”

“And it ought to,” Mario returned. “Work is the hope of the world, war
is its despair.”

Don Riccardo, with a shake of the head, bespoke his doubt as to that
idea, and his sister, looking into the face of Hera, was alarmed anew
to read there a frank expression of sympathy with Forza’s sentiment.
Mario rode with them as far as the gates of the villa, and at parting
Hera gave him her hand.

“The day will live in my memory,” he told her.

“And in mine,” she said. “Good-bye.”

Tarsis dined with the Barbiondi next day and took them in an automobile
to Milan for the opera. Hera, by his side, spent much of the ten-mile
journey in reflections that gave her no peace. Before meeting Mario
Forza she had begun to know the calm there is in accepted bitterness.
For the sake of others she had resolved to be patiently unhappy. Now
the future had a changed outlook--had opened to a sudden gleam, as a
cloud opens to sheet lightning at sunset. The sacrifice demanded of her
seemed far greater than it did a few days before, and she was conscious
of a growing doubt that her strength should prove equal to it. There
came a throb of resentment, too, that what she had been calling duty
should interpret its law so remorselessly.

Not until after the meeting with Forza had the sense of renunciation,
of impending loss, been of a positive nature. She had felt only that
the future could hold no happiness for her; now she was aware of a
joy to be killed, of a destiny that should deny what her soul was
quickening with desire to possess. It was as if happiness had come back
from the tomb and she dared not receive it.

In the box at La Scala she looked on the stage spectacle, but the eyes
of her mind saw Mario Forza, and she heard his voice above the music of
the drama. The knowledge that she cared for him so brought no feeling
of shame, but shame assailed her when she looked upon the ring and the
man who had placed it on her hand. In the gold circle and the clear
stone she saw only the badge of a hideous bargain.

They went to a restaurant where fashionable Milan assembles after the
opera. At a table apart from the one where they seated themselves she
saw Mario Forza in the company of some men known as leaders of Italy’s
political thought; and when Tarsis perceived that Hera had caught sight
of him he could not refrain from venting his feelings. Without any
leading up to the subject, he spoke contemptuously of the new ideas of
government in the air.

“I have no patience with them,” he said. “They are no more than the
wild flowering of poetic oratory in Parliament.”

“And like all wild flowers, they soon will fade,” chimed in Donna
Beatrice.

“Nevertheless,” Tarsis went on, “these dreamers are doing much harm.
They clog the wheels of Italy’s true progress.”

“Can nothing be done to put down these dangerous men?” asked Donna
Beatrice, in alarm.

“Oh, no. Parliament is a talking machine, wound up for all time.
There’s no stopping it. These demagogues delude the masses by telling
them that labour is the parent of wealth.”

“I wonder if it isn’t?” mused Don Riccardo, lighting a cigarette.

“Admitting it,” Tarsis retorted, “should the parent try to strangle its
offspring? That is what these rainbow statesmen would do. They proclaim
capital a despoiler of labour, yet keep their addled wits at work
concocting schemes for the despoiling of capital. Take, for example,
the Employers’ Liability bill--simply a device to plunder the employer
under the cloak of law.”

“I agree with you fully!” exclaimed Donna Beatrice. “I have heard of
that iniquitous measure.”

“But capital will not flinch,” pursued the man of millions. “It has
a mission to redeem Italy by making her industriously great. On that
mission it will press forward in spite of the demagogues, and bestow
the blessing of employment on the poor in spite of themselves.”

Don Riccardo yawned behind his coffee cup, but his sister brought her
hands together in show of applause, and uttered a little “Bravo!” For
Hera, she gave no sign. When Tarsis was talking, somewhat heavily,
with his air of a rich man, his small, keen eyes looking into hers now
and then, she wondered what her life would be with such a companion;
but when they were moving homeward past the darkened shop windows of
Corso Vittorio Emanuele, out through the Venetian Gate, and speeding
in the moonlight of the open country, her reflections took a different
cast. Her soul cried out to be free, and to the cry for freedom came an
answering call to revolt.

In the afternoon of the next day--the one before that set for the
wedding--she had her horse saddled, heedless of Donna Beatrice’s
warning that the skies foreboded a tempest. A few paces from the villa
gates she heard at her back the sound of galloping hoofs, and presently
Mario was riding at her side.

“I crossed the river yesterday,” he said, “in the hope that you would
ride, but met--disappointment.”

“I am sorry,” she told him, simply, yet he understood that she meant,
“It must not be.”

“Frowning skies invite us at times,” he went on, “and by that I made my
hope in to-day.”

“Yesterday was beautiful--far better for a ride,” she admitted, as if
to tell him that he had divined the truth.

For a while they rode in silence. They passed the ruins of a monastery
known of old as the Embrace of the Calm Valley. It had been one of the
many religious settlements in the domain of the Barbiondi in the days
of their power.

“I went there yesterday,” he told her, “and found a strange sympathy in
its desolate picture.”

“To me it always has been dear,” Hera said. “My mother loved the old
place. Often we went there and gathered the wild roses and camellias
that grew in the cloister.”

For a mile or more they rode on, then started homeward because of
danger signals not to be ignored. There were glimmers of far-away
lightning, and they caught the distant roll of thunder. Suddenly a
black curtain unfolded over the skies.

Before them was a long stretch of open road, at the end of which, where
the wood began, they could see the dark shape of the monastery walls;
and towards this they were making, their horses lifted to a quicker
pace, when they heard an ominous rattling in the upper air.




CHAPTER IV

A FACT OF LIFE


THE warning was a terribly familiar one to the people of Lombardy.
They knew it presaged one of the severe storms of hail that plague the
region--visitations which the farmer folk dread even more than the
sprees of the river. Within the space of ten minutes the growing crops
of a whole province had been devastated by one of these onslaughts. The
pellets of ice were so big as to fell cattle and kill the herdsmen.
Roof tiles of terra cotta were smashed like thin glass. Of such grave
import were the bombardments that official means had been devised to
ward them off; and now, while the keepers hurried their droves to
places of safety, the air was filled with a thunder that did not come
from the clouds. On the hilltops and in the sloping fields cannon
flashed and roared. With pieces aimed at the blackness above, the
peasant gunners fired volley after volley in a scientific endeavor to
choke the hailstorm. The picture, as they saw it from their windows,
was one to carry old soldiers back to Solferino and Magenta, when the
target was not clouds, but Austrians, and the missiles were shot and
shell.

Mario and Hera set their horses to a gallop and made for the cover of
the monastery, as troopers might have dashed across a battle-field.
They gained the crumbling portico at the moment that the white bullets
began to fall, crackling in the ivy of the wall and dancing on the
ground. A few columns of the cloister were standing, and some of the
roof remained. Here they left their horses to paw the pavement where
monks had walked in the ages long buried. He took her hand and they
made their way over a difficult mound of earth and fallen stone to the
chapel. Once or twice in the centuries something had been done to save
the little church from time’s ravage, though it stood open yet, as to
door and window, for the attacks of wind and weather. Rooks had nested
there, and the flutter of invisible wings sounded from a dark corner
beneath the ceiling. She told him that the chapel was built by the
first Riccardo of her line. Standing by a window, they looked out and
saw the hailstones beating on the tombs of her ancestors.

Hera pointed to a place on the wall where a fresco painting once had
been. Fragments of a cornice carved in marble still clung about it; to
the eye there was only a patch of blank wall.

“It was the portrait of Arvida, a woman of our race,” she said,
regarding the spot and its remnant of frame thoughtfully. “At one time
her tomb was here, under the picture.”

“And is in the chapel no longer?”

“No; they branded her a heretic and drove her to her grave, as our
chronicles say; and still not satisfied, they disinterred her body and
burned it in Milan.”

“How strange it all seems in this day,” he mused, “when one may think
as he will about his soul without putting his body in peril before or
after it has returned to the ground.”

“And yet,” she said, quickly, as if in an outburst of feeling long
restrained, “there is still a power that persecutes--that takes the
soul and enchains the body.”

“The power you mean is duty,” he said, positively, as one who
understood.

“Yes,” she affirmed, eagerly, glad in the knowledge that he read her
thought.

There was silence between them as they moved to a part of the chapel
where a broad window looked out on the landscape of ploughed fields
that stretched high into the rainy distance. When he spoke again it was
in the tone of one who had come to a decision.

“The world’s cruelest wrongs have been committed in the name of duty,”
he said. “Fortunately for the happiness of the race, we have cut loose
from many ancient notions of obligation. The zealots who persecuted
Arvida acted from a sense of duty. With new ideals of justice rise new
conceptions of what we owe to others.”

“How can we know what to do?” she asked of him, humbly.

“Ah, it is hard to know what to do--to decide what is right. But there
is a path that we may follow with safety at all times. It is the
path which keeps us true to ourselves. We have a right to be true to
ourselves!” he asserted, warmly--“a right no man may deny.”

“And when one renounces that right for the sake of others?” she asked.
“What then?”

“That is the noblest of all self-sacrifices,” he answered her,
reverently.

But in her sudden release of a breath and the drooping of her eyes
he read, with the magic sensitivity of love, that his answer was a
disappointment; that for the bread of censure the woman asked he had
given a stone of praise. When he spoke again Hera, with quickening
pulse, knew the calm of his character was going; and she was glad for
the passion in his tone and the anger that hardened his voice.

“The sacrifice is divine!” he exclaimed. “But the demand for it, the
permitting of it, that is monstrous! No human interest can justify the
ruin of a life, the desecration of a soul!”

He drew closer to her, his studied control of the past all gone.

“Donna Hera!” he cried, “this must not be--this marriage to-morrow. It
is hideous in the eye of God and man.”

There was command in his words, and the glow of a splendid hope filled
her soul. But it lived only a moment, assailed by the thought that
commiseration was all that he had for her.

“Well may you pity me,” she said, the doubt that had risen bringing a
dreary smile to her lips.

“Pity!” he exclaimed, taking her hand, fervidly. “Ah, no! It is greater
than that! I love you, Hera. From the first it has been so--from the
very first. Knowing all and realising all, I have loved you with the
whole power of my being. I will not silence the cry of this love, and
you, too, must listen.”

An alarming yet rapturous shudder went through her frame, and she
shrank from him. With hands at his temples, he stood like one dizzy
from a blow.

“Are you sorry?” he asked, and she made him no answer. “Oh, not that!”
he pleaded. “Not that!”

She saw her life of despair whirling away, and a new life dawning,
beautiful, glorious.

“Sorry?” she said at last, her breath going with the words. “No; I am
glad.” And he drew her to him, bent his head above hers, and kissed her
lips.

The shower had ceased and the sky was clearing. From rifts in the
speeding clouds streams of sunshine found their way to earth. A golden
shaft came in by the open clerestory and lingered upon them. Two
bluebirds talked blithely on a window ledge. The rook and his mate
came down from their dark corner to fly out into the sparkling air.

Beholding the sunshine, Mario said: “See, the glory of heaven falls
upon this unison.”

They laughed together like careless children, forgetting all but their
new-found joy, and feared no more.

“I was lost; I have found my way,” she murmured.

“And the mariner sailing under sealed orders has learned his destiny,”
he said. “I dreaded the hour that was to take you from me, dear, and
reason lost hope; but not so the heart. And now you are my own, my own
for ever.”

“Yes; they shall not part us now,” she said, nestling to him.

“Hera, how often have I dreamed of finding you!”

“And I of finding you.”

“When, my darling?”

For answer he had her eyes turned upward, timorously, fluttering under
the depths of his, and then downcast, while she whispered the words,
“Always, Mario, always.” Again their lips were locked.

“Have I your permission to enter?”

The words rang grimly in the old temple, sending their echo from wall
to wall. Mario and Hera knew the voice. They turned toward the door, a
low opening arched in the Gothic form, and saw standing there a dark
figure sharply defined against the sunshine that flooded the cloister.
It was the figure of Antonio Tarsis. His posture was that of one quite
calm, his arms folded, on his lips an evil smile. He surveyed the
others with a mock air of amusement; then, taking off his motoring cap,
he made a low bow, and advanced with a broad affectation of humility.

“I thank you for permitting me to enter,” he began, the hoarseness
of his tone betraying the anger that consumed him. “My apology is
offered--my apology, you understand--for breaking up a love scene
between the woman who is to be my wife to-morrow and another man.”

He paused as if expectant of some word from them, but they did not
speak; nor did they stir from the spot where they stood when first they
beheld him.

“I was passing at the time of the hailstorm, and came in for shelter,”
Tarsis continued, feigning the tone of one who felt obliged to
explain an intrusion. “I saw your horses out there, and recognising
one of them, I judged that Donna Hera was near by. Uncertain of
the other horse, I jumped to the natural--possibly you will say
foolish--conclusion that it was her father’s.”

He paused again, and waited for one of the others to speak, but both
remained silent.

“I say this much in extenuation of the fact that I began to look
about in search of my friends,” Tarsis went on, retaining his tone of
apology. “Otherwise it might appear that I was spying upon my promised
wife. I assure you that it never occurred to me to set a watch upon
you, Donna Hera. At the door I saw you and--waited until the scene
should come to an end. I have been waiting some time. I hope my conduct
in the somewhat trying situation meets with your approval--yours, Donna
Hera, and yours, _Honourable_ Forza?”

He gave the “Honourable” a long-drawn emphasis on the first syllable,
and the sound came back in a blood-chilling echo from the glistening
damp walls.

Mario moved forward and looked him squarely in the eye. “Signor
Tarsis,” he began, his voice without a quaver, “I am sorry, helplessly
sorry. We are confronted with an invincible fact of life. I love Donna
Hera. She loves me. By every natural law we belong to each other.”

A flush of anger overspread the face of Tarsis. He returned a derisive
laugh and put on his cap.

“Law of nature, eh!” he flung back. “Society is not governed by laws of
nature, and will not be until your anarchistic wishes prevail!”

“Do you mean,” Mario asked, retaining his self-control, “that after
what you have seen and what I have told you it is still your intention
to hold Donna Hera to her engagement?”

“I will not answer your question,” Tarsis replied, snapping his
upturned fingers at Mario in the Southern manner. “Whatever my
intention may be is not your affair. It is a subject for myself and my
promised wife. Of course, you will have some theory about what I ought
to do,” he added, his lip curving to the sneer.

Humanly sensible that the other’s provocation was great, Mario quelled
the words of resentment that came to his tongue, and said, calmly:
“There is no question of theory here. It is a fact inexorable.”

“And one, I suppose, in which I am not to be reckoned with,” Tarsis
retorted, his mouth twitching and his thick neck red with the mounting
blood. “You plot to rob me of the woman who is pledged to me--you do
me the greatest wrong one man can do another--and you call it a fact
inexorable. Bah! I know your breed! My factories are full of fellows
like you!”

Hera laid a restraining hand on Mario’s arm, saying, “Bear it, we
have given him cause,” and in that instant the enormity of the
situation their love had produced came fully to their minds. It was a
realisation that made Hera recoil in dread of the consequences; but
Mario, convinced of the larger justice in the course they had taken,
advanced a step toward Tarsis and said--all regret, all suggestion of
considerateness gone from his manner:

“When you say that I plotted to rob you of her you speak falsely.
There was no plot, no premeditated act. Donna Hera is wholly without
blame. My love for her began in the moment of our first meeting. It
bore me on irresistibly, despite the hopelessness of it ever present
to my thought. Had she loved you I should never have spoken. I knew
she did not love you; I knew she was going to a life of thraldom, to
be a hostage to the fortune of others. Understand, I do not tell you
this in a spirit of excuse, but only for the purpose of acquainting
you with the facts. I do not try to make excuse to you; I do not seek
self-justification.”

Tarsis laughed at him scornfully. “Oh, _bravissimo_!” he sneered. “You
do not see any wrong in making love to the woman who is to be my wife!”

“She is not to be your wife,” Mario said. “You must know that Donna
Hera cannot be your wife now.”

Tarsis was at the point of another outburst of wrath, but checked
himself as if with a purpose suddenly conceived. He riveted his gaze
first upon Hera, then upon the other, and stood silent, with knitted
brows, the subtlest forces of his nature waked by Mario’s last words.
These words warned him that from his grasp was slipping the prize he
valued above any on which he had ever set his powerful will. He moved
off from them and paced slowly to and fro, with bowed head. The sound
of his footfalls was all that broke the stillness of the chapel. Once
or twice he looked up, toward Mario and Hera, and they saw the despair
written in his strong face. They were stirred to a feeling of pity, of
guilt, as they contemplated what seemed to them their work. A little
while, and he paused, drew near to Hera, and said to her, his voice
that of a man crushed in spirit:

“Is it true? Has he prevailed upon you to break off our marriage?”

Pale and resolute, she answered: “No; he has not prevailed upon me. It
is my choice--the only way.”

Tarsis made a show of submission by twice inclining his head. “I
suppose you are right,” he said, as if resigned. “Of your purpose in
engaging yourself to me I was aware, but I hoped in time to win your
affection. It is the hand of fate.”

Hera’s eyes were moistening. “I am to blame,” she said, contritely. “It
was wrong of me to consent to a marriage with you; but I was driven,
oh, I was driven. Forgive me, I beg of you.”

Tarsis looked into her eyes and extended his hand, as the act of one
who in the stress of his emotion was unable to speak. “There is a
request I would make,” he said. “It is that you help me to come out of
this in as good a light as possible before the world. Help to mitigate
the disgrace it puts upon me. If the marriage could be postponed, not
definitely broken off; at least, if the world could be told so at
first----”

“I will do as you wish,” Hera assured him, willingly.

“I thank you, sincerely. Will you return with me to the villa, that we
may make some arrangement while there is yet time?”

“Yes; let us go.”

She bade Mario adieu and started for the door with Tarsis. They had
gone only a few paces when they heard the voice of Mario. “A word,
Donna Hera, if you will be good enough to wait,” he said.

Tarsis wheeled quickly, with flashing eye, and the others saw that once
more he was his aggressive self; but this time, as before, he checked
the impulse to pour forth his anger on Mario, remembering that he had
more important work to do. He bowed his head and drooped his shoulders,
as became a crushed spirit, and waited, ears alert.

“Hera,” Mario said, when they stood a little apart from Tarsis, “I
wish to tell you that I am summoned to Rome to-night. I meant to
leave Viadetta on the train that meets the Roman express at Milan. If
you need me I will not go. If you have the slightest misgiving, the
faintest sense that you want me at your side, I will go with you now to
Villa Barbiondi.”

The fists of Tarsis doubled and relaxed and his eyes were sidelong as
he watched her face and listened. The smile of the cheat who takes a
trick came to his lips when he caught her answer.

“It will be kinder if you are absent,” she said--“kinder to him. It is
all that we can do,” and she added, trustfully, “I have no misgiving.”

With a soft word of farewell, she turned from him and walked with
Tarsis to the cloister, where their horses stood. From his place in the
chapel Mario saw Tarsis help her to mount and follow her through the
broken portico. Then the masonry hid them from his view, and the next
minute the noise of an automobile told him they were on the road.

“God Almighty bless and keep you, Hera!” he murmured. In the chapel he
lingered, looking upon the flaming west and darkening hillside, until
his lonely horse called to him with impatient neighs.




CHAPTER V

THE SCALES OF HONOUR


THAT Mario and Hera were taken in by the counterfeit despair and
make-believe submission of Tarsis proved how little they knew the man
with whom they had to deal. Tarsis had as much thought of giving up
Hera as he had of parting with his life. In the last words spoken to
him by Mario--“She is not to be your wife”--he knew that he had heard
the declaration of a resolute strike against his fondest design; and to
set about breaking it by means of craft instead of open resistance was
only the instinctive recourse of a character schooled in devices. The
art of throwing the antagonist off his guard had become a second nature
with him. Always this was the first move he made in a fight with his
fellow-man. He had achieved his earlier successes in the business world
by causing powerful rivals to despise him--to regard him as a factor
not worth reckoning with. He had won victories by feigning acceptance
of defeat.

He hated failure as a shark hates the land. All over Italy the wedding
day had been heralded, and he was determined that the marriage should
take place. Labour unions with which he had to do knew something of
his granite will when set to the breaking of a strike. While he moved
toward the villa, holding the motor car to the pace of Hera’s horse, he
had time to think out the details of his plan.

Arrived at the villa, a maid informed Hera that Donna Beatrice
was absent in Milan. As to Don Riccardo, the serving woman said,
_Gh’e minga_, which is the Lombardian equivalent for “not about” or
“missing.” He had set out on horseback in the direction of Lodi a
half-hour before. Sadly Hera reflected that with her father, whom she
loved for his endearing frailties, it had always been _G’he minga_. She
knew his soul rebelled against the alliance with Tarsis, but that he
lacked the strength to put away the cup of ease it held to his lips.
She had hoped that he would be at hand now, as one at least in the
household to rejoice at the course she had chosen. She noted that the
news of their being alone brought a gleam of satisfaction to the eyes
of Tarsis. When they entered the reception hall the old sternness had
settled on his countenance, replacing the broken-spirited humility that
had moved her so deeply in the chapel.

“I hope it will not be presuming on your favour,” were his opening
words, “if I ask you for light on one or two points?”

“No,” she answered. “It is your right. I wish to be frank--to tell you
all.”

“How long have you been under the influence of this man?”

“The question is unfair to him and to me,” she said. “I will answer any
question that you have a right to ask, but I will not quarrel with you.”

Tarsis rose from where he was seated, walked the width of the room and
back, and when he spoke again his manner was milder.

“How long have you known him?” he inquired.

“We met last week for the first time. It was on the day the bridge
broke.”

“Do you think it just to me that you have kept the affair secret?”

“Not until this hour have we spoken of our love.”

“But all the time you were plotting my disgrace,” he argued, eyeing her
shrewdly.

“There was no plot,” she averred, rising, impatiently. “If you cannot
be fair discussion is useless.”

“Be fair!” he flung out, drawing nearer to her. “Let me ask if you
think it fair to discard me at this hour--to degrade me before the
world?”

Without hesitation she answered: “I was on the point of doing you a
great injury. My love for Mario Forza has saved me.”

“Saved you from the crime of marrying me?” he suggested, querulously.

“Say, rather, the crime of marriage with a man I do not love,” she
corrected.

“As you will; but I cannot see how it has saved you,” he told her,
coolly.

“What do you mean?”

“Merely that engagements of marriage are contracts, and not to be
treated so lightly as you and your--friend seem to think. I hold you to
your promise.”

“In the chapel you said----”

“Oh, yes,” he broke in, with a shrug. “I accepted the situation, but it
was only pretence. I did not feel called upon to discuss the subject
then and there. The fact is, Donna Hera, the marriage must take place
to-morrow, just as it has been arranged.”

“No, no!” she exclaimed, a note of entreaty in her voice. “You must
release me.”

“I will not release you!” he declared, calmly, relentlessly. “You will
become my wife to-morrow in the cathedral of Milan. And do you know
why? Because the honour of a Barbiondi will hold you to the right.”

“Oh, I cannot!” she cried, and moved from him, but he followed.

“I am sure that you will,” he persisted. “I am sure that your better
self will guide you when you pause to think.”

“Oh, it is impossible!” was all she could answer.

“It was not so impossible a few days ago,” he reminded her, cynically.

“I know, I know,” she owned, helplessly, looking into his hard face.
“If you were a woman you would understand why it is different now.”

“I think I understand you,” he pursued. “For the moment you are
governed by notions of right and wrong that are not yours, that are
unworthy of you. You are swayed alone by a desire for your own
happiness. In the end you will look with less selfish eyes and see
where your duty is.”

To her mind rose the assertion of Mario that from a sense of duty
great wrongs might spring, and she knew the force of it now, with her
promised husband demanding the sacrifice of her love, and conscience
whispering that his demand was just. Tarsis smiled in content to
perceive that he had brought her to a troubled state of mind.

“I am convinced,” he went on, “that you do not realise the extent of
the cruelty, the wickedness of the act you contemplate. You can not be
aware of the severity of the blow you would deal me. I have bought the
old Barbiondi palace in Milan, and men are at work preparing it for our
occupancy. I have the promise of the King to dine with us on our return
from abroad. All Italy awaits--but enough. You need not be told the
details. To consummate the deed you have undertaken would be infamous.
For me it means a disaster that time could not repair, and for you--you
would reproach yourself for ever; it would haunt you all your days, and
be a curse to you. But you will not do it, Donna Hera. Ah, no; you
will not. Nor would Mario Forza have asked it of you had he paused to
see the terrible injustice to me. I say he would not, provided, of
course, he is the high-souled gentleman you believe him to be. Could he
see the wrong in the magnitude that you see it now, I am sure that he
as well as I would beg you to desist--to stand true to your promise.”

It was not by chance that Tarsis brought the name of Mario into his
plea, and in the effect he perceived it had on Hera he knew he had
reckoned well. She stood with her back to him now, a hand pressed to
each temple.

“So confident am I that Signor Forza would do me justice,” Tarsis
continued, “that I beg you in the name of your honour to appeal to him,
to send for him at once and put my fate in his hands. I pledge myself
to abide by what he says.”

Slowly she moved away and sank into a chair, preoccupied with the
thought he had suggested.

“I will do as you wish,” she said, presently, confident that Mario
would hold her to the path their love had chosen. “But that is
impossible,” she added, after a glance at the clock. “He said he would
leave Viadetta in time to join the Roman express at Milan.”

“Signor Forza goes to Rome to-night?” the other asked, in astonishment
that was spurious, for he had heard all that Mario said to her at the
parting in the chapel.

“Yes; and it is too late to reach him,” she replied, precisely as
Tarsis had expected.

“Signor Forza’s departure for Rome,” he hastened to tell her, “does not
present any serious difficulty in the way of communicating with him, if
it is still your wish to pursue that course.”

“It is my wish; of that you may be assured,” she said, positively, in
the full belief that there could be only one decision by Mario Forza.
“How can I communicate with him?”

“By making use of the telegraph. A message to Rome, delivered in the
railway station at the instant of his arrival, if answered at once,
would make it possible for you to have his advice by midnight.”

“Ahem!”

It was Donna Beatrice. She had paused on the threshold, and stood
looking from one to the other, puzzled by the serious aspect of the
scene.

“Ah, how do you do, Signor Tarsis?” she said, breezily, going forward
to take his hand. “I have come from Milan. The finishing touch has been
given to the arrangements. All is in readiness. They say there has been
a terrible hailstorm. Hera, my dear, I warned you a storm was brewing.
I hope you were not caught in it, and you, Signor Tarsis?”

He answered that they both had been overtaken and both had found
shelter in the monastery.

“Indeed! How interesting!” Donna Beatrice exclaimed. “A most romantic
coincidence, upon my word!”

Neither of the others joined to her tittering the shadow of a smile,
but Donna Beatrice was not surprised, for she had guessed that some
grave disturbance of the peace had occurred. She shivered at the
thought that the great consummation booked for to-morrow might be in
jeopardy.

“I beg your pardon, Signor Tarsis,” she chirped, “but I am going to ask
Hera to come with me for a little while--just a moment before dinner.
You will not mind, I am sure. It is--let us say--the last pre-nuptial
secret. After to-day no more secrets.”

Her small laugh sounded again, and slipping her arm within Hera’s
she drew her toward the door. Hera held back a little as they passed
Tarsis, and, to the elder woman’s deeper mystification, said to him,
softly:

“I will write the telegram.”

Tarsis returned a low bow, saying, “At your pleasure.”

They ascended to Donna Beatrice’s apartments. “Hera, I am positive that
something dreadful has happened!” the aunt announced, when they were
alone.

“Something dreadful was about to happen,” Hera explained, “but I have
averted it.”

“I beseech you,” cried Donna Beatrice, “not to speak in riddles. In the
name of heaven, what have you done?”

“I have told Signor Tarsis that I cannot be his wife.”




CHAPTER VI

A CENSORED DESPATCH


THOUGH expectant of some shocking disclosure, and nerved for it, Donna
Beatrice was not equal to an utter smash-up of all that she had planned
and executed so satisfactorily to herself.

“Mario Forza!” she shrieked when the power to articulate was hers once
more. “Oh, I knew it would be! From the first I saw the danger! We are
ruined! To-morrow they will be here with their bills, a pack of hungry
wolves. Hera! Wicked, heartless, cruel! Have you no mercy for me, for
your father?”

In her violent agitation of mind, only half conscious of her words and
acts, she moved into the corridor, beating her temples and wailing.

“Riccardo! Oh, my brother, where are you in this most terrible of
moments?” she cried out with all the voice she could muster. “Calamity
has befallen us! Search for him, everybody. Search for Don Riccardo!”

It was an outburst that startled the domestics above and below stairs,
and carried ominously to the Duke himself, who had just entered the
house and was about to greet Tarsis in the reception hall. Guessing
that the trouble concerned his appointed son-in-law, he turned away
from him, dreading an appeal for assistance. To his sister’s resonant
signals of distress, however, he started to respond, but with more
deliberation than eagerness. He could not have made his way up the
staircase with less haste if the wonted calm of the villa had been
undisturbed. Instinctively he paused in the ante-chamber of Donna
Beatrice’s apartments, hesitating to become a part of the catastrophe,
whatever it might be.

“What is the meaning of this awful affair?” he heard his sister ask of
Hera.

“It means that my love is for Mario Forza. To be the wife of another is
impossible unless he bids me do so.”

“Unless who bids you do so?” Donna Beatrice gasped.

“Mario Forza.”

“Heaven and the saints!” exclaimed the elder woman. “What new madness
is this? And when do you expect to have his permission?” she asked,
with all the sarcasm she could summon to the words.

“Signor Tarsis says we may have his answer by midnight.”

“Signor Tarsis! Oh, spare me these mysteries!”

“At the request of Signor Tarsis,” Hera explained, “I shall send a
telegram to Signor Forza, who is on the way to Rome. In the message I
shall ask him what to do.”

“And your promised husband?” said Donna Beatrice. “Is he by chance to
be consulted--to have a voice in the matter?”

“He has agreed to abide by what Signor Forza says,” Hera answered.

“Agreed to abide! Monstrous! Perfectly monstrous! Abide, indeed! Will
you be good enough to tell me what alternative he has when you are
capable of breaking your promise in this conscienceless manner? But it
is not you. The daughter of my brother, a Barbiondi, could not commit
this crime of her will. It is the man under whose dreadful influence
she has fallen.”

“Dear aunt,” Hera pleaded, going up to her, “try to calm yourself.
There has been no influence. Believe me, I do but obey the prompting of
my heart.”

“Prompting of the heart!” the other repeated, vixenishly. “That is a
luxury we cannot afford. Oh, where is your father?”

She rang for a servant, and unconsciously sounded as well the signal
for Don Riccardo to withdraw from the ante-room. The Duke was well
content with the step Hera had taken. It was the one he had longed to
advise since the night of Mario’s visit in the villa, but always he had
lacked the courage. Like Hera, he felt confident that Mario, his love
alone inspiring the answer to the telegram, would tell her to be true
to the call of her soul; and he had no misgiving for the outcome of his
daughter’s adventure.

So he went for a stroll in the villa park, taking care to walk where
no servant sent by his sister should be likely to find him. That poor
lady was in the last despair when Hera left the room to go to her own
apartments to write the message. She assigned a footman to hunt for Don
Riccardo, and although the man did his best he brought back only the
customary _G’he minga_. A little while and Hera, the message in hand,
was in the reception hall, where Tarsis waited alone.

“This is what I have written,” she said. He cast his eye quickly over
the lines at first, reread them slowly, and folding the sheet nodded
his head in approval.

“You have put the case fairly,” he said, returning the paper to her
hands. “It is most gracious of you.” And then, as if in sudden memory
of an appointment, he added: “I must set off for Milan. Will you
make my compliments to your aunt, and say that I am unable to stay
for dinner? A meeting of directors to-night calls me to the city. By
midnight I shall be back--for his answer, and yours. _Au revoir._”

He held out his hand, and when she had taken it he started for the
door. At the threshold he paused, turned about, and said, approaching
her again: “We pass the post-office in Castel-Minore, where there is
a telegraph bureau. If you wish it I will carry the message there.
Thus we shall save time. In five minutes, with my car, we shall be
in Castel-Minore. You will appreciate that it is of importance the
telegram be sent at once.”

Without the slightest hesitation she handed him the message.

“I will arrange with them to bring you the answer as soon as it is
received,” he said, and left the house.

Once beyond the park gates and moving along the Adda bank, he crushed
the paper in his fist and thrust it into a coat pocket. It had no
place in the plan he began to lay. Every detail of the scheme stood
definitely in his mind by the time he told Sandro, the driver, to
stop before the post-office. He entered the telegraph bureau, but the
message he wrote and gave to the operator was not the one written
by Donna Hera; yet it was addressed precisely as hers had been--“To
the Station Master at Rome, for Hon. Mario Forza, to arrive by Roman
express.” He had scribbled the words, “All is well,” and signed them
“H.”

“Milan,” he said to Sandro, as he entered the automobile, “and at the
top speed.”

The false telegram was intended only to keep his trail clear--to put
his undertaking beyond risk of failure through mischance. If Hera by
hazard inquired she would learn that a telegram had been sent to Mario
Forza. Tarsis had no fear that she might carry the inquiry further,
at least until after it would be too late to alter an accomplished
fact--the fact of their wedding. Tarsis’s next need was a telephone. He
could have found one in Castel-Minore, but provincial “centrals” have
wide ears and long tongues, so he put off the most important part of
the undertaking until he should reach the big town.

It was a run of eight miles in the moonlight, and in a few minutes they
were at the Venetian Gate with the Dogana guards asking Tarsis if he
had any dutiable goods. Their pace was not diminished much when they
were under way again on the pavement of the Corso. There was a man in
Rome whom Tarsis wanted to catch on the wire before he should leave his
home for the opera, and time was valuable. Pedestrians cursed Sandro
as he flew by with tooting horn. At Via Monte Napoleone, where they
left the Corso, Tarsis smiled as he thought of the mythical directors’
meeting he told Hera he had to attend. Another minute and he was
entering the door of his private offices in Piazza Pellico. All the
clerks had gone to their homes, and no one but the old porter saw him
enter the building. With a key he let himself into that part of the
suite where his exclusive apartment was, and went at once to his desk
and took up the receiver of a telephone.

“Put me in communication with 16 A, Quirinale, Rome,” he said. In the
wait that followed he drew from his pocket the writing of Hera, spread
out the crumpled paper, and to make sure that his plan should fit in
with the words she had written, he read again the message intended for
Mario Forza:

  “He would hold me to engagement. I have told him it cannot be. He
  maintains that if guided by justice I must keep my word, and asks me
  to appeal to you. He is willing to abide by your decision. Answer at
  once.

                                                  “H.”

He smiled to think how well Hera had played into his hands in the
wording of the message--how easy she had made it for him to give
practical form to his project of withholding it from Mario and
arranging with a confederate in Rome to send an answer supposably from
Mario that should counsel Hera to stand by her engagement of marriage.
About the day of reckoning, when his treachery should be disclosed,
Tarsis was not the sort of man to worry. Time enough, he told himself
to meet that difficulty when it appeared. In this moment, his crowning
ambition at stake, every consideration of life dwindled to nothingness
before that of making certain of performance the ceremony appointed for
the following day. The telephone bell jingled.

“This is Rome?” he asked, the receiver at ear. “Quirinale, 16 A? And
it is you, Signor Ulrich? Is there any one within sound of your voice?
Your voice, I say. Is there any one in the room with you? Alone? Good.
This is Signor Tarsis. I have a commission of great moment. You will
pay strict attention to what I say, and if you have the slightest doubt
that you hear aright do not hesitate to stop me, and I will repeat. You
will go to the Central Railway station to-night, and await the arrival
of the Roman express from the north. One of its passengers is Mario
Forza. Forza. F-o-r-z-a. Yes; of the Chamber of Deputies. You know him
by sight? Very good. As soon as he has left the station you will send
by telegraph the message that I now will dictate. You will write it
down. Are you ready?

“‘To Donna Hera dei Barbiondi, Castel-Minore, Brianza. Justice gives
him first claim. Let justice be your guide. M.’

“You have that? Read it slowly. Good. You will put that message on
the wire as soon as Mario Forza has left the station. Now, repeat my
instructions from the beginning. All right. One thing more. When you
have sent the message call me up. Yes; I am in Milan. I shall await
your call in Piazza Pellico. That is all. Addio.”

Signor Ulrich was the only man in Italy to whom Tarsis would have
intrusted the errand--Ulrich the Austrian, as he was known to the
toilers; superintendent of all the Tarsis silk works. As a crusher of
labor revolts he had proved himself a master, and Tarsis, perceiving a
sound investment of capital, had made him rich while making him loyal.
He knew that the little device of the telegram would remain as deep a
secret as if it were known to himself alone.

“You may go and return at 11:30,” he said to Sandro, at the door, and
the hungry driver sent his machine forward like an arrow. On the way to
Café Cova for dinner Tarsis reflected complacently that the particulars
of his scheme had been well executed. He had no concern, therefore, as
to the outcome. Take care of the details and the generalities will
take care of themselves, was a business adage of his own making that he
had followed, to the consternation many a time of his larger-visioned
rivals.




CHAPTER VII

A MESSAGE FROM ROME


DON RICCARDO, from his secluded ground in the villa park, saw Tarsis’s
car pass in the twilight, and guessed that the message to Rome was on
its way. He thought the moment a good one, therefore, to take shelter
indoors from the dewy air. Hera greeted him with a more cheerful
countenance than he had seen her wear for many days, although she had
made a brave effort to conceal her feelings. She told him what he
already knew from the dialogue he had overheard a half-hour before.
He made no concealment of his delight that Tarsis, after all, was not
to be his son-in-law. Knowing that the blow was a heavy one for his
sister, he went to her apartments to console her with some news he
had heard that afternoon from his old friend Colonel Rosario, whose
regiment of infantry was stationed at Castel-Minore. Over cognac and
cigars in his quarters the commandant told Don Riccardo that Mario
Forza, having inherited the large estate of his father, the Duke of
Montenevica, was far from being a poor man--as yet.

“What do you mean by that ‘as yet’?” Don Riccardo had asked.

“It expresses the state of mind of certain of his heirs expectant,”
the Colonel explained. “You see, Forza has contracted the helping
habit--spends money for the good of others. His dreams for the
betterment of the under dog are expensive, and his poor relations are
alarmed lest he come to want.”

Don Riccardo suppressed the rumor of future destitution, and told
Beatrice only enough to show her that the exchange of bridegrooms
need not be attended by financial disaster. He found his sister down
with a headache, and as for consoling her, try as he would, that was
impossible with the hateful name of Mario Forza on his lips. The mere
pronouncing of it caused her face to wrinkle in an expression of deep
contempt.

“Oh, Riccardo!” she wailed. “Do you not feel the shame of it? Our house
will be disgraced forever!”

“Not forever, dear Beatrice,” he said in an effort to comfort. “It will
give the gossips a nine-day wonder, and then we shall hear of it no
more. Better a nine-day wonder than a lifetime of regret.”

“Regret?” she asked in genuine amazement. “For whom?”

“For all of us, my sister. With Tarsis Hera’s life could be no other
than one of misery. In the end you will be glad that matters have taken
this turn. Of that I am sure.” But the other only shook her head and
dried her eyes.

The dinner was not such a gloomy affair as it had promised to be,
although only three of the company of five expected were present--the
Duke, Hera, and Colonel Rosario. The hearty old soldier marvelled at
the absence of the bridegroom-elect, but Don Riccardo asked him how
Tarsis could go on being the richest man in Italy if he did not put
business before dinner. It was an explanation that did not satisfy the
Colonel, but he accepted it with a laugh and the comment, “Italy is no
longer a country; it is a machine for making money.” Donna Beatrice had
sent word that she would have a bowl of broth above stairs. It was well
for her feelings she was not there to witness the good spirits that
prevailed at the board. Don Riccardo called for one of the precious
bottles of Lacrimae Christi put in the cellar by his grandfather.
The Colonel gave the toast “To the wedding to-morrow,” but the Duke
secretly drank to Hera’s narrow escape.

The dinner ended, and the Colonel gone to his barracks, Hera, alone
with her father in a corner of the reception hall where the piano
stood, ran over, in a resurge of sweet memory, the ballad of the
vintage Mario gave that night. She remembered it all, and sang as one
whose soul overflowed with joy. For hours, awaiting the answer from
Rome--the answer their hearts had already given--they sat together in
the great old room, where portraits, one above the other, dimmed by
time, covered the walls. The wings of the broad, mullioned casements,
beneath their transoms of stained glass, stood ajar to the breath of
spring, and the mysterious night lispings of the new-born season toned
the silence at times, foretelling long sunny days, roses, and music in
the woods.

Hera was first to hear the clatter of hoofs, and she rose, keen for the
tidings. A footman entered with a message from the Castel-Minore bureau
of telegraphs. She held it under a light, read it first with puzzled
countenance, and again with clearer, too certain understanding. Her
father saw her catch her breath and press a hand to her side.

“What is it?” he asked, and she handed him the message.

“Justice gives him first claim,” he read. “Let justice be your guide.”

He asked her what it meant, but she stood as one turned to stone.

“God!” exclaimed Don Riccardo. “He gives you up--puts justice before
love! That is the meaning. Bah! Then you are well rid of him, my
daughter. The bloodless reasoner! Ah, lovers did not so in my day.
Indeed it is an age of machine-made men.”

For Hera it was a withering disappointment. Hers was no romantic
schoolgirl’s attachment, but the full-powered, storm-surviving passion
of a woman of twenty-four--a passion heeding no call before that of
itself. And fondly she had dreamed that with Mario it was the same.
But the message told her--what a different story! He confessed a love
stronger, higher than that which he bore for her--the love of justice,
a lifeless abstraction. Suddenly he became little in her eyes, and she
recoiled from the chill of such a nature. Here then was the desolate
ending of the sweet poem life had begun to read for her; the shattering
of a beautiful faith, the farewell to an ideal that had budded in
girlhood and blossomed with woman’s estate.

The sound of an affected cough startled her and Don Riccardo from their
gloomy reflections. They looked up and beheld Tarsis at the threshold,
but they were not in time to see the contented smile of comprehension
that had curved his lip.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, moving toward them. “The outer door was
open, and I took the liberty of entering unannounced. I did not know
you were here.”

Hera arose and walked to where her father stood surveying Tarsis
with eyes that betrayed an emotion of anger strange indeed to the
happy-go-lucky Duke. She asked him for the telegram, and absently he
placed it in her hand.

“It is better, I think, that you leave us for the present,” she said,
in a low voice.

“What shall you do?” Don Riccardo asked, his impulse to intercede
going the way it had gone often before.

“That which honor commands,” she answered, coldly, desperately. So Don
Riccardo, torn by warring impulses, but unable to be more than nature
had ordained, made off slowly, to wait in the library, with a glass at
his elbow and a cigar in his lips.

“The answer from Rome has arrived,” Hera said, and gave Tarsis the
message.

Without betrayal of his eagerness to know that his scheme had not
miscarried, he began to read it. “I was sure Signor Forza’s sense of
justice would prevail,” he said, looking up from the paper, not the
faintest note of triumph in his tone. “Believe me, Hera, it is better
so--better for you as well as me. You will be glad that he did not
counsel you to do me a wrong. I honor him greatly.”

It needed no words from her to tell him that his appreciation of such
heroism was not shared by the woman whom it sacrificed--a fact he had
counted upon to make his victory certain.

“Oh, it is impossible,” Hera exclaimed, as one yielding to an
unconquerable aversion. “Heaven help me! I cannot!”

Tarsis perceived that his victory was yet to be won. He drew nearer to
her, and stood by the table on which she leaned, head in hands.

“What do you mean?” he demanded.

“I cannot, oh, I cannot,” was all she could answer.

“Do you mean that you would break your last promise as well as the
first?” he asked, aggressively.

“My last promise?” she repeated, as if bewildered in mind.

“Yes. You gave me your word that you would accept Signor Forza’s
decision. He has pointed to you the right way. All the world will say
as much. Honor leaves you but one course. Unless you persist wickedly,
recklessly, in following your own desire, putting from you every
consideration of right or wrong, spurning justice, moral obligation,
and the wishes of all save yourself--unless you do all this, you will
keep your promise.”

The facts were driving Hera overhard. Her eyelids burned, but she kept
back the tears that wanted to flow. When she turned to Tarsis she felt
more like a supplicant for mercy than one asserting a right which
a few hours earlier had seemed not to be gainsaid--the right to be
happy in her love. With the solemnity of a woman laying bare the most
intimate secrets of her soul, she told him that all her being revolted
against surrendering herself without affection merely because of the
concurrence that marriage implied; it seemed a bestowal of authority to
destroy her spiritual existence.

“Having this sentiment,” Tarsis asked, “why did you promise yourself to
me?”

“It is true,” she answered, “that in the interest of others I consented
to become your wife; but that was before I knew the meaning of love.”

Frankly she told him that the thought of the union he wished was
hideous in her sight; it would be a sacrilege, the defilement of a
sacred emotion and her nature rebelled in a degree that was beyond her
control.

“Sincerely I wish to do all that honor requires,” she said, humbly,
“but to live in such a state I cannot, come what may.”

Tarsis comprehended fully the difficulty as it now presented itself,
and he was equal to it. An effectual method of his in business was to
make it easy for the other party to yield to his interest. It mattered
little to him on what terms she accepted him as her husband. He would
have given the greater part of his fortune to assure the performance of
the ceremony which the world awaited at noon.

“There is an alternative,” he said, solemnly, “that would satisfy the
obligation honor puts upon you and at the same time leave inviolate the
sentiment you have just expressed.”

“An alternative?” she repeated, wondering.

“Yes. I will be satisfied if you become my wife only in name--in the
eyes of society, the Church, and the civil law.”

Hera understood as she had not until then how desperate was the strait
to which her refusal had brought him. For a moment she did not answer
the entreaty in his eyes. She walked to the open window and looked out
on the night. Tarsis had planned shrewdly in keeping this for the last
card to play. In her state of mind it was the one appeal that could
have the effect he desired. To Hera the offer did seem the only way
that remained of serving honor as well as saving herself from what she
contemplated as a loathsome degradation. The inevitable misery of the
sort of relation he proposed rose before her mind; but of her happiness
she thought no more, so eager was she to mitigate in some degree the
wrong of which she perceived he must be the greater victim. Presently
Tarsis was at her side again, saying:

“Will you do this? Be my wife only in name. On these terms, if you
will, you may redeem your promise--you may save me.”

And wishing to do that--wishing to save him, to do him justice--swayed,
too, by pity for him and remorse for her broken promise, and crushed in
spirit by her disappointment in Mario--she yielded.

“There is no other way,” she said, turning to him, wearily--“no other
way to screen you--to meet the demand of honor.”

He caught up her hand and kissed it.

“You will never regret this act of justice,” he said, confident that
his complete triumph was only a matter of time. Perhaps he betrayed the
working of his mind in some unguarded gleam of the eye, some play of
the lip, for she said to him, her manner showing grave determination:

“Don’t think I shall change--that you can swerve me in the least from
this position. You must foster no false hopes. When I become your
wife I shall remain to the last only that in appearance--in the eyes
of the world. In reality I shall be as far removed from you as if I
were actually married to another. I tell you this as emphatically as
possible, because it is only just that you clearly understand what our
marriage will mean to both.”

“All is quite clear,” Tarsis returned, cunningly.

“Oh, it is a terrible deed!” she exclaimed, the consequences rising
to her mind and filling it with horror. “Think well, I beg of you. In
despoiling me of my life’s happiness you are going to ruin your own.
Perhaps you did not think I should make the conditions so absolute,
so irrevocable. If you wish to withdraw your offer do so, and save us
from a lot that can not fail to be one of misery so long as we both are
alive.”

She had only multiplied his motives for wishing to make her his wife.
She understood him even less than he understood her. At no time before
had her beauty made such a living appeal to him. Until now it had never
been his privilege to behold her when emotion was at play. Her outward
image of loveliness was all she had ever revealed to him. The voice she
gave him in the past was not the passionate one he had just heard; the
soul her eyes had mirrored was not the one that looked from them when
she spoke the name of Mario Forza. The heave of her bosom, the come and
go of carnation in her cheeks, the tides of tenderness that rose amid
her promises of a vehement strength, portrayed to him a Hera he had not
known before--a woman he would have given all his vast fortune to win.

“What you have said does not deter me,” he told her, “though I
apprehend the situation as fully as you wish me to. I accept.”

And thus the thread of the story took a new twist, but one of which
Aunt Beatrice never learned, nor did Don Riccardo.




CHAPTER VIII

A WEDDING JOURNEY


AT noon they kneeled before the Cardinal of Milan, in the great white
cathedral, speaking the words that welded their bonds. It was an hour
of gray skies, and the many-hued sunshine that often had sifted through
the great stained glass windows to felicitate a bride did not fall upon
Hera. The gay world of Lombardy was there, filling the transept with
its silks and jewels, and in the backward parts of the nave and aisles
common folk looked on at the famous wedding.

There was to be a breakfast in Villa Barbiondi, and when the ceremony
at the altar was over some of the princes and dukes and marquises, with
their dames, followed Tarsis and his bride to the main door. In the
journals of that evening were the names of the ladies and gentlemen who
composed the brilliant procession, with details, more or less accurate,
as to the gowns.

Other particulars of the event, within the cathedral and without, were
set down minutely by press men and press women. They told of the
concourse of people in the square--hundreds of them idle working folk;
how they crowded the steps before the church, and how the Civil Guards
kept open a lane to the carriages of the bridal party; but no mention
was made of the sullen faces bordering that lane.

Nor was there any account of the doings of La Ferita, the woman of the
scarred face, who shook her fist at Tarsis. Before he came from the
church she had annoyed the Civil Guards by crying out: “Joy to the
bridegroom! Death to the children in his factories!” The guards gave
her a final warning, which she understood; and when Tarsis passed by
her tongue was stilled, but the long scar glowed and her eyes looked
savage hatred. Tarsis saw the woman shaking her fist at him, and so did
Hera. In after days he was aware of that face, with its deep red mark
running across one eyelid from forehead to cheekbone. Another detail
overlooked or purposely omitted by the conservative press was the low
muttering against the bridegroom that sounded here and there in the
crowd.

The nuptial cortege started for the railway station. In Corso Vittorio
Emanuele it passed a café where a youthful artist, in satirical mood,
was amusing some comrades with his pencil. He threw off a cartoon of
the wedding. It depicted the bridegroom receiving a blow on the nose
from the brawny fist of a workman; and in the place of blood there
flowed--gold pieces! The editor of a revolutionary journal picked it
up, and while the merry breakfast at the villa was in progress the
thing circulated, filling many of the Milanese with delight and moving
others to indignation.

Tarsis and his bride set off for Paris by the night express. The
station master at Milan greeted them as they alighted from the train
that bore them from the Brianza, and with many a bow and smile
conducted them to the private car in which they were to travel as only
the King and the Queen travel in Italy. The ceremonious tribute of the
conductor and the guards as they passed along the platform tickled
the vanity of Tarsis in no small degree. To the keen eye his manner
betrayed the pride he felt in this public display of his husbandship to
the beautiful daughter of the aristocracy who walked by his side.

That was Hera’s thought when they were seated in their moving
drawing-room. Oddly enough she found herself studying his attire. She
recalled that hitherto it had never given her any distinct impression;
he had always appeared dressed in the height of fashion, with a certain
mercantile brilliancy best described, perhaps, as stylish. Now it
seemed that he looked a trifle too much like a bridegroom. In this
moment she awoke sharply to the truth that he was, irreparably, for
better or for worse, her husband. Again she heard the solemn voice of
the cardinal proclaiming, “This bond may not be severed so long as
you do live.” Before, the fact had not assumed a phase of such vivid
actuality; it all had been so utterly opposed to the current of her
thoughts and the desire of her heart. Now the trial she had accepted
in a sentiment of duty came home to her in its practical aspect. And
in the spirit of a gentlewoman she resolved to meet the situation with
good grace. As well look the fact in the eye and make the best of it.
Then and there she decided that under the chafing of the yoke she would
not fret and lose her peace.

It turned out that the wedding journey began with a pleasant surprise
for Tarsis. He found his wife a most cheerful companion. She talked
with him lightly and let her laughter ripple. Of course, she overplayed
the part in her first essay. But Tarsis, in his exultation, was
completely _hors de critique_. This unexpected melting of his iceberg
produced cups of vanity which went to his head and intoxicated him to
the verge of blindness. All he could see was his own supposed success
in making himself agreeable to his wife. After dinner, when the
attendant had set out the Marsala and cigars, she bade him smoke, and
while he did so she read to him from the Milanese _Firefly_. Together
they laughed over the droll jests and anecdotes told so quaintly in the
Lombardian patter. He told her about his career in the money-making
world; how success there was once his only aspiration, but that now
he was aware of a waning zest in the game. He paused to look into her
eyes, while a certain softness, as of meek appeal, showed in his own.
Then he said, rising and standing near her chair:

“Life holds only one prize for me to-day. It is your tender regard.”

A deep tide of colour dyed Hera’s cheeks, and, without making other
reply, she turned her head and gazed upon the sparkling electric lamps
of a village that was sailing by. A moment more, and she rose, but only
to bid him good-night and withdraw to the compartment prepared for her.
Tarsis followed her with his eyes, an amused smile on his lips, and
when she had disappeared he took a cigar from the box, lighted it, and
threw himself into a long-cushioned chair. For an hour he stayed there,
meditative, cheerful, while the train wound and climbed and burrowed
its way across the Alps.

In the late afternoon they rolled into a gloomy terminal station of
the French capital. It had been a day of rain clouds with short-lived
intervals of clear sky; and while on their way to an obscure but
aristocratic hotel on the left bank of the Seine they saw Paris in one
of her happiest moments--a period of sunshine between showers. There
was an air of gladness about the passing throngs--a momentary lift of
spirits imparted by the smiling heavens; the wet pavements glistened,
as did the oil-cloths of cabmen and gendarmes, and the moving life
everywhere gave forth a lightened resonance. But before they reached
the hotel umbrellas were up, and Paris was cross again.

So the weather served them nearly every hour of their week’s stay.
Tarsis made no effort to reapproach the theme of “tender regard,” and
Hera seemed to enter heartily into the enjoyment of the amusements
he provided. The opera had no auditor more pleased than she, and
when they drove in the Bois--between showers--she saw so many things
in the spring’s unfolding, and talked about them so brightly, that
Tarsis found himself interested for once in the wonders of nature’s
workshop. She had put on the armour of contentment, believing he would
perceive that she wore it not only in kindness but from a sense of duty
consequent upon the giving of her hand. She believed that he would
comprehend as well that it was meant no less for self-defence than for
self-effacement. Upon his keenness of intellect she had counted, and
not in vain. He read her declaration as clearly as if she had written
it in the plainest of Tuscan words: The lot he had chosen was the one
by which he must abide; her armour of contentment was so frail that it
might be broken by even an essay on his part at disturbing the status
quo to which he had agreed. All this he appreciated and made believe to
accept as her immutable law.

The wedding journey took its course over the English Channel. In London
Hera found many letters from Italy. From Aunt Beatrice there were four
precisely written pages, over which the sage spinster had spread her
dictum, with a fine tone of authority, on the amenities of wifehood.
The letter from Don Riccardo breathed tenderness and sympathy, but
proved a fresh reminder of the frail nature that was her father’s. He
charged her that the Barbiondi were not made for slavery. Never must
she sink under the burden of her marriage. If ever it became too heavy
to bear with honour she must cast it off, come what might. Well he knew
the sacrifice she was making. Was the father’s heart to be deceived
because the daughter was too brave to come to him with her trouble? Ah,
no!

  “Beloved Hera,” he went on, “your absence tears my heart. Oh, fate!
  Why could it not have spared us enough to live in our humble peace?
  But no--ah, well, why weep over the irreparable? _A chi tocca, tocca._
  Is it not so? With my warmest blessing and prayers most ardent for
  your happiness, I am your affectionate

                                                  “BABBO.”

Hera was able to utter a heartfelt thanksgiving that her father had
not urged her to the marriage. She was glad he had done nothing in
that affair to lessen the respect for him which she mingled with her
love. There was a letter from a comrade of the Brianza--the little
Marchioness di Tramonta; she wrote from the eminence of almost a year
of married life. Letters from girl friends--dainty missives in cream
and lilac--conveyed glowing wishes for a bright future.

Typewritten letters in printed envelopes had haunted Tarsis from the
hour of his arrival in Paris. And now they pursued him to London.
Thanks to the eclipse of the honeymoon, he found opportunity to read
and answer many of them, as well as to spend a part of the day in
Lombard street on “urgent matters of business,” as he explained to his
bride.

Hera sent her father a most cheerful reply. “To-day,” she said, in
closing, “I have had an interesting experience in dreary London. I
promised you to pay a visit to the Duchess of Claychester. I did so
this afternoon, and I am glad indeed. You did not tell me, _babbo_,
that the Duchess is one of those English ladies of whom we read in
Italy because of their work among the poor. We had luncheon in her
house in Cavendish Square, then went to a place called a ‘settlement,’
of which she is chief patroness. It is a large modern building in the
midst of the most squalid section of Marylebone--a quarter, I am told,
that for human wretchedness is worse than the East End one hears so
much about in the novels. My heart turned sick at the sights. Is it
possible that we have anything so bad in Milan? Signor Forza told me of
the poor of our Porta Ticinese quarter and I have heard about them from
others. I have never been there, yet I cannot believe it equals the
miserable life of this London slum. Now, what I saw gave me an idea.
And what do you think it is? That I may be useful in the world! Yes,
and in the way that the Duchess of Claychester is; but among our own
people in Milan. I learned all that I could about the work.

“They have women called ‘visitors’ who go to the homes of the poor
people, and with one of these I went for an hour or more. It was an
experience I shall never forget. She told me that she had to employ
rare tact sometimes, because there were men and women in the slums who
objected to being ‘elevated’ or ‘ameliorated.’ It was so that my guide
expressed it. We had a striking proof of the fact in one place. The
family consisted of a very small woman, a very large man, and two wee
girls. That they were in need anyone could see. As soon as we entered
the man acted like a hunted animal at bay. The visitor was a woman of
severe manner, and I must say that I did not detect in the way she
went about this case any of that ‘rare tact’ which she said was so
necessary. ‘Charity!’ the man roared back at her (I give it in his own
language), ‘who asks yer bloody charity? What we wants is justice, we
do. An’ justice we’ll ’ave some day, yer bet yer boots!’ He shook his
fist in the visitor’s face, and his wife tugged at his coat, saying:
‘Be-ive yerself, ’Enry; be-ive yerself!’

“The visitor thought it time to go, and I agreed with her. These
English! These English!

“It has rained every day since we left Italy. In France we caught a
peep of the sun now and then; here, never. If ever again I stand under
our skies I shall rejoice. Before I thought of being useful it seemed
that those skies could never be bright, and I dreaded going back. But
now, oh, how eager I am to be there! Ever your affectionate daughter,
who counts the hours until she shall see you,

                                                  “HERA.”




CHAPTER IX

A SEED OF GRATITUDE


IN the evening they departed from Charing Cross, and without
interruption their journey to France was accomplished. When a day had
come and gone the Alpine solitudes were behind them, and they beheld
once more the Arcadian valleys of Vaudois. Soon after that they moved
in the sunlight over stretches of Lombardian plain. Now the azure above
them resembled the sky color of pictures in old missals. How beautiful
it was to Hera’s eyes! She felt the irresistible charm of the prospect,
even as the barbarians did in ancient days. She wondered if it was any
different then. Through all time those plains seemed to have been under
the husbandman’s rule, ever fruitful, ever smiling in their bright
verdure.

Tarsis lowered a window and the breath of springtime fanned their
faces. It brought a delicious freshness from the little man-made
streamlets that, catching the heavens’ mood, wove a blue network over
the land, and sparkled in the sun-play like great strings of precious
stones. In their purpose of irrigation they crossed the white highroads
and the by-paths, coursed in sluices under the railway, and cut the
fields how and where they pleased, too well bent upon practical service
to care for symmetry of form. They drew near one another, they rambled
far apart, but in the end always meeting in the wide canal that bore
elsewhere their enriching flood; and so forever running, yet never
wasted. A few weeks, and this pampered soil would render its marvellous
account; the meadows would yield their many harvests; the rice stalks
would be crowded with ears; the clover would be like a blossoming
thicket, the cornfields like canebrakes; but the men and women who
toiled to produce this abundance would live on in their poverty. The
clod-breakers were there again to-day--as they had been with the
returning springtime for ages, about their work--boys digging trenches,
ploughmen at their shafts, women and girls planting seed.

Hera noticed that the villages along the way had not the neat and
cheerful look of the French and Swiss hamlets. Seen from afar, crowning
a hilltop, their tiled roofs brightly red in the sun-glare, and the
yellow walls gleaming like burnished gold, the pictorial expression
of them was full of beauty; but when the train halted in the heart of
one, and its wretchedness lay bare, her spirit was saddened by the grim
reality.

“I mean to do something to help the poor of Milan,” she said to Tarsis,
one of the gloomy pictures haunting her memory.

“You have chosen a wide field of good endeavour,” he returned, in a
slight tone of banter.

“And I wonder why the field is so wide,” she pursued. “Milan is called
our City Prosperous.”

“I think the reason is not difficult to find,” he said, with assurance.

“Do you mean that the poor are unworthy?”

“No; I should not give that as the first cause; it is a result. This
sentimental nonsense called the New Democracy has turned working
people’s heads. It gives them puffed-up notions of their value, and
they will not work for the wages that the masters offer--the wages
that it is possible for them to pay. They spend too much time talking
about the dignity of labour. If only they would work for what they can
get and not squander their wages in the wine-shops they would be well
enough off. They want too much; more than they will ever get. Their
warfare against capital only hurts themselves.”

“Do they want more than they need?” she asked.

“I am not familiar with their needs,” he answered, with a note of
petulance. “I do know, however, that they often demand more than it
is possible to pay. I am not a theorist. I happen to have gained my
knowledge in the school of practice, as you may be aware.”

“Still, suffering exists among them,” she reasoned, “and, while the
fault may be as you say, the families of these men--misguided though
they may be--are the victims rather than the culprits. I suppose it
would be only common humanity to give them help.”

“Oh, yes; that is true,” he acknowledged. “The women and children have
to play martyr while the men indulge in what our new economists delight
to call divine discontent. By the way,” he went on, “I am paying some
charitable concern five thousand liras a year.”

His manner told her that it was a benefice ungraced by a sense of
moral obligation; that he merely had followed the example of modern
rich men by returning a part of his tremendous revenue in benefactions
to the public.

“It is good to give heart to the disheartened, relief to the
suffering,” she said, holding up a journal they had obtained at Turin.
“Have you seen this account of disorders in the Porta Ticinese quarter?
I fear there is a hungry mouth in Milan that will show its teeth some
day.”

Tarsis could hear the voice of Mario Forza. He betrayed a twitching of
the lips, but tried to carry it off with a careless smile, as he said:

“I suppose the money is put to good use. Precisely how they disburse it
I do not know. The secretary sends printed reports, but I have not read
them.”

There was a quality of absence in his manner, accounted for by the fact
that his mind was busying itself with Hera’s remark about the hungry
mouth. While in Paris he had received by post from unknown senders
not one but many copies of the newspaper that contained the picture
of his punched nose and its plenteous flow of gold pieces. Then the
cartoon had seemed to him merely one more shaft of malice aimed at
a successful man. In his career of achievement he had steeled his
sensibility against criticism, rating it as the twin brother of envy,
and borrowing no disquiet on either score; but now, grace to the chance
observation of Hera, he saw the cartoon with a new and clearer eye. He
perceived the force at work behind it--the popular ill-will, which gave
such point to the product of the artist’s pencil; and he apprehended,
as he never had before, that herein smouldered an ember easily fanned
to flame.

He had accustomed himself to meeting difficulties promptly, and
turning apparent disadvantage to a factor of self-service. Now he
reflected--and the thought gleamed shrewdly in his half-closed
eyes--that this ember of peril might be smothered with a few handfuls
of those coins, which were his by right of conquest, though the growing
madness of the time found them so ignoble. Indeed, it was an excellent
idea--this one of his wife--to throw a bone to the snarling dogs. He
would give her charitable whim his countenance, even his unstinted
support. He would let his wife scatter largesse among the malcontents;
let her shine as the doer of good deeds, but the world would know--the
house of Barbiondi had no name for wealth--the workers would applaud
Antonio Tarsis, friend of the poor. Moreover, this co-operation would
place his wife under an obligation to him, give her one more proof of
his desire to gratify her every wish. So he said to her, at the moment
that the train entered the suburbs of Milan:

“I count it noble of you, Hera, to have a care for the unfortunate. A
little thought convinces me that you are right in your view. There are
times when we should not stop to reason why.”

“I am glad that we can see alike in this,” she said. “There is joy, I
know, in giving.”

“And I wish to be in accord with you. Believe me, you have my warmest
sympathy in whatever work you contemplate. As to funds, I need not tell
you that my fortune is at your disposal.”

“You are most generous; I thank you,” she said, and told him of the
plan conceived in London.

In the station they saw Don Riccardo and his sister coming down the
platform to welcome them.

“_Babbo!_” Hera cried out before her father caught sight of her, and
the next moment she was in his arms.

“Ah, truant!” he said, holding her hands and swinging them, while he
looked into her eyes as if to read their secret. “I have you again. And
you come to stay. Is it not so, my treasure?”

“You may be sure of that, _babbo_!” she laughed, and turned to receive
her aunt’s caresses. “Here I am and here I stay. Long live Italia is my
song, and I think Antonio will join in the chorus.”

“With all my heart!” Tarsis said genially, his hopes taking a sudden
bound. It was the first time she had addressed him by his Christian
name.

Never had anyone seen Hera in better spirits. It was good to be once
more in the land she loved, to hear again the familiar “minga” and
“lu” of her native patter; but the real inspiration of her gladness,
although the fact did not appear to her mind, was that she had come to
dwell in the city whose walls enclosed Mario Forza, and whose air he
breathed. Aunt Beatrice accepted her lightness of heart triumphantly as
a tribute to her own splendid work as a matchmaker. Tarsis’s automobile
awaited them, and they got in, all four. Hera noted that the crest of
her house was painted none too small on the olive green sides of the
car.

Through the spick and span wide, modern streets they rolled to the
Barbiondi palace. Milan was gayly picturesque in her springtime magic
of light and colour. An impress of the Gothic feeling met the eye
in buildings that recalled where they did not typify the pointed
architecture of the north. They passed a procession of priests and
acolytes following a crozier that flashed the sunlight. Here and there,
at a street corner, a public porter slept peacefully while awaiting a
call to work. For a minute or two they were in the busy movement of Via
Manzoni. Cavalry officers in bright uniforms lounged at the outdoor
tables of the cafés, or dragged their sabres lazily amid the throngs of
civilians.

Then they entered a quieter way, that yielded vistas of courtyards with
frescoed walls, arcades clad in climbing greenery, playing fountains;
and at the next turning they were in sight of Palazzo Barbiondi. For
two months artisans had been at work restoring the ancient family seat
to life and splendour. In point of splendour Tarsis had done somewhat
more than recall the past. As they approached the arched gateway Don
Riccardo exclaimed at sight of the newly-coloured iron palings tipped
with gilt. The fountain in the court was playing. Out of the pool rose
an Apollo Musagetes, and from his crown a sparkling shower shot down
in diverging lines to symbolise the sun’s rays, or--as the Greeks had
it--the arrows of Apollo. The side walls of the court were frescoed
with the Barbiondi crown and the “Lux in tenebras lucet” of the once
haughty and powerful house.

A corps of domestics in livery of white and olive were waiting, lined
on either side of the main entrance. The fountain statues and all the
marble ornamenture of the court had been despoiled of their yellow
_patina_, and showed once more in native white. The façade of the
palace--accounted one of the noblest in the North--had been spared by
the renovator, but its grand staircase, rising from one side of the
wide portico, and its carved balustrade, were as white as St. Bernard’s
peak. Everywhere that the artisans could turn back the clock they had
done so by dint of scouring and scraping, painting and stuccoing,
chiselling and carving, tearing out and building in.

Don Riccardo paused at the opening to the grand staircase and looked
up at the armorial bearings of his house done in stone.

“Bacco!” he exclaimed, “we are the first Barbiondi to set foot here for
more than a hundred years.”

It was in the Duke’s heart to denounce the fungous nobility and
shop-keeping snobs who had from time to time violated his ancestral
home with their occupancy; but in the presence of Tarsis he bridled his
tongue.

“Yes, it is indeed more than a hundred years,” remarked Donna Beatrice,
adjusting her lorgnette. “Our eighteenth Riccardo was the last of the
line to dwell here. With this day, Antonio,” she added, beaming upon
the bridegroom, “we may say with literal truth that the restoration
begins. Ah, that eighteenth Duke was an open-handed nobleman--a lord
of regal expenditure. Lombardy never had so liberal a patron of the
beautiful arts. These mural paintings, I believe, are the fruit of his
munificence.”

“Yes; our great grandfather,” mused the living Duke, casting his eye
about the stairway. “Still, I should be none the less proud of him had
he lavished less on his walls and more on his posterity.”

They ascended the broad steps, and Donna Beatrice, primed with the
lore of the place, began to radiate her knowledge. The staircase, with
its balustrade of richly carved Carrara, she announced was a product
of Vanitelli, and the solitary work Milan possessed of that great
architect. This acquisition, as well as many more to which she drew
his attention, proved a surprise to the new lord of the palace. The
idea of buying the mediæval pile came to Tarsis--so he believed--as
an inspiration, and he had lost not a second in giving it practical
form. Accompanied by the owner--a Genoese money-lender--he went there
one morning, and spent something less than half an hour looking about
the palace, the stables, and the grounds. Before the day was out he
had bound the bargain with his check. Within twenty-four hours the
contractor and his gang attacked the house, armed with authority to
renovate and restore.

It was with a newly-awakened interest, therefore--not unmixed with
an appreciation of its humorous side--that Tarsis listened to Donna
Beatrice’s running talk. In a manner that made him think of the guides
in the Brera Gallery she reeled off the history of this painting or
that medallion, explained the frescoes of the ceiling, and identified
the busts in the niches, with their age-old faces shining again like
newly scrubbed schoolboys.

A sculptured frieze that bordered the staircase pictured a battle
between the Lombards and the Barbiondi in the days of King Alboin.
Above it, following the long flight of steps, unfolded a panorama of
scenes from the life of Mary. At the top of the staircase, set in
the wall, was a trophy that had been sawed out of a church by some
conquering Barbiondi. It depicted St. Mark preaching at Alexandria. In
the banquet hall were some less pious conceptions of beauty. Here the
mural art found expression in a hunting scene and a mediæval dance with
the hills of the Brianza in the background.

The grand saloon--a gorgeous chamber in marble and gold--was worthy
of a royal abode. It had been known for centuries as the Atlantean
chamber. Engaging the eye before all else were two rows of Atlantes
supporting the ceiling on either side, all of heroic size. They were
equal in number to the windows, between which they rested on pedestals
of grained marble. A huge fist of each gripped a bronze candelabra of
many lights. Their torsos were undraped, but the rest of them was lost
in chiselled oak leaves. On the ceiling pink sea nymphs sported in
silvery foam and gods and angels revelled in rosy vapours. Through the
stained glass of a dome the sun flowed down upon the mellow fairness of
the tessellated pavement.

They all paused before a large painting. It was a vivid picture
of Italy’s chief industry during the era of her free cities--men
slaying one another in furious combat. Where the glory of war shone
brightest--where the blood flowed fastest--there could be seen a great
car, drawn by oxen, flying the standard of Milan, and bearing an altar
with the host. The leather-clad warriors of the time called it their
_caroccio_. Like the Israelites’ ark of the covenant, it was a rallying
point in battle, and reminded the artisans that they had a church as
well as a city to fight for.

“It is the car of Heribert,” said Hera, for the enlightenment of
Tarsis, “an Archbishop of Milan. He was of our race.”

“And the inventor of the _caroccio_,” added Donna Beatrice, proudly.

“And the first labour agitator. Isn’t that so?” put in Don Riccardo,
keeping a straight face.

“I don’t know what that is,” replied his sister.

“Signor Tarsis can tell you, perhaps,” the other suggested.

“A labour agitator?” Tarsis repeated. “Why, I should define him as a
breeder of discontent and a foe to the public peace.”

“If that definition be fair,” Hera rejoined earnestly, “Heribert
was indeed a labour agitator. Undeniably he sowed discontent, but
discontent against injustice.”

“And what was his particular method?” asked Tarsis, smiling as if to
make light of her remark and keeping his eyes on the mimic warfare.

“He gave tongue to a hitherto voiceless people,” she answered, “and
made them into an army, so that they were able not only to express
their wrongs but to fight for their rights.” The words seemed to have
a present-day meaning, and with her companions’ perception of the fact
the name of Mario Forza leaped into their minds. It stirred them, one
and all, to a fresh appreciation that the man she had made no secret
of loving was still a prevalent force in her life; her thoughts were in
sympathy with his, the colours he gave to the world were the colours in
which she beheld it.

To her father’s face the incident brought a look of pity; it caused
Donna Beatrice to screw up her little features into wrinkles of
disgust, and in the changing glances of Tarsis it was easy to read a
rising tide of resentment. When he spoke it was in the cold vein of
mockery whereof on occasion he could be master.

“The rights of labour,” he said, “are, of course, the only rights
that a nation should consider. We have a new wisdom in Italy--it
has come in with the New Democracy--the wisdom that is blind to the
rights of capital and laughs at the idea of its having any virtue; all
the prosperity our country enjoys to-day, understand, is due to the
champions of the horny-fisted--the dreamers of the Camera. Is not that
the fact, Don Riccardo?”

“To be precise,” the Duke answered, “I don’t know.”

“Surely you must be aware,” his son-in-law asserted, “that it is
not men like myself who are giving the country what she needed so
long--the breath of industrial life. Oh, no; it is our critics who are
doing this, the silver-tongued doctrinaires. They would give us a very
different sort of industry--the sort you see in that picture. Strife
and bloodshed were the business of that day, and will be in ours,
depend upon it, unless a stronger hand rules at Rome.”

“What do you think ought to be done?” asked Donna Beatrice, frightened
by the black forecast.

“Done? The thing is simple. The Government should take measures to
silence these mischief-makers, these plotters against industrial peace.
We build up the wealth of the nation, they would tear it down. They
delude themselves with the notion that they are the only patriots. How
delicious! They are Italy’s deadliest foes.”

“I tremble to think of the consequences,” said Donna Beatrice. “Why,
our heads would not be safe. See how those blacksmiths and clod-hoppers
lay about them with their pikes and terrible swords! I suppose the
heads they are cracking are the heads that wouldn’t take in their new
ideas! Ugh!”

“Still, the world is somewhat hard for many,” Don Riccardo observed,
for the sake of a word in support of Hera, who had moved away, resolved
not to join issue with her husband.

“I have always found the world what I made it,” Tarsis returned, and
they passed on toward the door of the library. The contractor had
stocked the massive oak shelves with volumes old and new, and supplied
the room with modern leather furniture.

“Oh, the Napoleonic relic!” exclaimed Donna Beatrice at sight of a
large oblong table of Florentine mosaic. Tarsis was all attention.

“Napoleonic relic?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

“Ah, you must know,” she told him, “that when the conqueror came to
Milan he made the palace his headquarters. This table was once in Villa
Barbiondi, and my great-grandfather gave it to Napoleon.”

Tarsis drew a chair to the table, and, with a nod of apology to the
others, seated himself; resting his arms on the polished surface, he
moved his right hand in simulation of the act of writing.

“It is of convenient height,” he said, “and I shall use it. I cannot
tell you how pleased I am to find this relic. Napoleon Bonaparte is the
man above all the world’s heroes whom I admire.”

“Truly a marvellous man, a matchless genius,” attested Donna Beatrice,
gravely contemplative.

“From childhood his life has been my guiding star,” Tarsis continued.
“And to possess, to use the table that he used, is a privilege I never
thought to enjoy. And the work itself,” he added, rising and drawing
back to admire it, with an interest which no other object of art in the
palace had been able to awaken in him, “is it not magnificent?”

“Quite a treasure,” acquiesced Don Riccardo, showing more concern
in the bookcases, which he was sweeping with his eyes; but for
Hera--explain it she could not--the thing inspired a strange
aversion--a feeling that came vividly to her mind in after days when
that table played its tragic part in the destiny of the man she called
husband.




CHAPTER X

THE DOOR OF FRA PANDOLE


THEY followed Donna Beatrice and Tarsis across the figured expanse
of pavement, down the grand staircase and through the portico to the
gardens. Beyond the yellow wall at the backward limit they could see
the red roofs of Via Cappuccini--humble abodes of workmen partly
screened by the trees. All about them nature had opened her poetry
book. Plants in the great urns were dappled with snowy fairness, the
maples showed richly green, the magnolias were unfolding their eager
beauty, and the air was rapturous with the voices of birds. When they
had looked upon the row of swishing tails in the stable and surveyed
the store of motor cars Donna Beatrice remarked to Tarsis, she and he
standing apart from the others:

“I perceive that your wife cannot escape happiness. You are giving her
all that mortal heart can wish.”

“I am following your advice,” he said, with a smile that his companion
did not see was cunning--“striving to win her gratitude, you perceive.
But I fear there is no short road to her affection.”

“My friend,” Donna Beatrice announced, impressively, “you are nearer to
it than you believe.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because it is inevitable,” she answered, positively. “Besides, I have
never seen our Hera in happier mood.”

“Still, it may be studied,” Tarsis suggested, out of his deeper
knowledge.

“Oh, no: it is genuine; depend upon that. Listen to her laughter.
Has it not the true ring? Indeed, Antonio, I confess astonishment at
your wonderful progress. For an hour I have been aching to offer my
felicitations.”

Tarsis bowed his acknowledgment, but with an air of slight incertitude.

“I fear,” he observed, “that your felicitations, in their kindly
eagerness, come a trifle early.”

“Not a minute, I am sure,” Donna Beatrice insisted.

“Of course, I shall succeed in the end,” he said, with cold assurance.

“In the end? Oh, bravo!” she exclaimed, in a pretty effort of
raillery. “This modesty! It is most amusing! Why, the end is already
attained. Let me tell you something: At this moment your wife is
exceedingly fond of you.”

“Do you know this?” he asked, a covetous gleam in his eye.

“As well as I know that you are her husband.”

“Has she told you so?”

“Yes.”

“Ha! What did she say?”

“She has not spoken by word of mouth. Ah, no. A woman has other ways
of revealing such a secret. Take the word of a woman of experience who
knows how to look into the heart of her sex.”

“Have you looked into my wife’s heart?”

“Yes.”

“And did you see there, for example, Mario Forza?”

Donna Beatrice emitted a low, gurgling titter. “Oh, my dear friend! How
little you understand womankind.”

“Did you hear what she said before the picture of Heribert?”

“Every syllable.”

“Couldn’t you see that it was Forza talking?”

She gave him a depreciatory glance. “How interesting! That one so
keen in all else should be in an affair like this so--so--well, so
short-sighted! To be sure, the Forza fever lingers,” she explained,
“but it is merely running its course.”

“Perhaps you are right,” he said, his self-love overcoming doubt.

“Right? Let us reflect. She realises what a narrow escape she had from
that sickness. Still, a woman does not surrender too easily. Our Hera
is no fool. How can she, in the light of reason--in any light--prefer
Mario Forza to Antonio Tarsis? The idea is absurd.”

       *       *       *       *       *

At dinner Hera, queenly in a gown that effected the complement of her
own beautiful coloring, was gracious, kindly, captivating. Like an
actress who had played a rôle many times, she was settling into her
part. To the land of self-conceit where Tarsis dwelt the voice of this
human heart did not penetrate; he heard only its delusive echo. Even
the clear admonition she had sounded at Paris failed to weigh now
against his self-exaltation and the false notion that Donna Beatrice
had planted in his mind. Thus it fell out that when Don Riccardo
and his sister had taken themselves away he said to her, while they
lingered at the window, looking upon the lights of the Corso:

“It affords me infinite pleasure, my wife, to see you so happy.”

“All the worldly means are at hand,” she responded, in the manner of
one conceding a point, “and I should be lacking in a sense of values if
I were not content. You can do no more, Antonio.”

“It is all paltry enough,” he declared, in a sudden burst of feeling,
“when I reflect that it is done for you. There is nothing that I would
not do for your sake.”

With the words he caught up her hand and kissed it fervidly. She did
not turn her eyes from the window or withdraw her hand; for a moment he
stood holding it, looking into her averted face, like one who had asked
a question and was awaiting the answer.

“The dinner was delightful,” she said, at length, moving from him.
“There is much to do to-morrow, and I shall retire early. You have
your occupations, no doubt. For your many kindnesses I thank you.”

She disengaged her hand and wished him good-night, all with an
admirable effect of significance, tempered by well-bred dignity:
but the peasant cunning that was in his blood asserted itself. Even
while she spoke he bowed again and again, with an insinuating air of
comprehension, and instead of returning her good-night he offered an
“Au revoir, eh?” to which Hera gave no response.

He followed her with his eyes, foolishly believing that she might pause
at the threshold and look back. When she had passed from the room and
he could see her no longer, but heard still the quick rustle of silk,
he moved to another point of view, and watched her retreating figure
until it disappeared at a door, where a maid waited, far down the
mirrored passage. It was the entrance to that regal chamber whither
he had conducted her a few hours before and proclaimed with plebeian
delight--on the authority of Donna Beatrice--that it was a part of the
private suite occupied by many dukes and duchesses of her house and in
times yet older by the rulers of Milan, for the Barbiondi had given
the free city seven of its lords. The couch was modern, but its tester
and rich hanging of tapestries, though new from the loom, retained the
genius of the past in pattern and phase of colour. And yonder the lord
was wont to repose, in a chamber likewise beautiful, set apart by a
mid-room, and beyond this a door of mahogany, embellished with Madonnas
and saints and cherubs, carved for the glory of God by Fra Pandole,
famed for his pictures in wood.

Presently the reflection of Tarsis passed from one to another of the
corridor mirrors and he entered the bed-chamber of the Barbiondi lords.
He found his valet there, busy yet with his task of unpacking and
putting in order. When the man had helped him into his dressing-gown
and gone his way, Tarsis turned low the light and threw himself on a
settle so placed as to hold in view the corridor through his half-open
door. There he watched and waited, puffing a cigarette.

From Via Cappuccini came the familiar sounds of a conscript’s
_festa_--some newly-drafted soldier and his comrades celebrating a
long-dreaded event in wine-born merriment.

“Long live the army! Long live the King! Long live the people!”

A minute more and Tarsis’s vigil ended. He saw Hera’s maid pass in
the corridor on her way to the servants’ quarters. Then he arose
and approached the door of Fra Pandole. It was closed, but his
interpretations of the past hour made him blindly confident that it
would yield to the turning of the knob. He was on the point of turning
it when he heard the sharp click of a key in the lock, then the sound
of receding footsteps.

In the sudden impulse of his rage he threw himself against the door,
crying, “Open, open! I am your husband! It is my right!”

But the door did not swing, and from the other side came no answer.
With a Sicilian malediction on his lips, Tarsis moved away to the
window to stand in the cool of the night air. The new conscript and his
comrades, passing below, sent up a fresh gust of tipsy laughter.




CHAPTER XI

BY ROYAL COMMAND


PUBLIC announcement was made next day that the King would arrive within
the week at his summer palace in Monza--a peaceful town reposing at the
end of two rows of stately poplars ten miles long, with a level white
road between, that stretch in direct lines from the Venetian Gate.
Toward evening a courier in scarlet dashed into the Barbiondi court
bearing a message from the King. It concerned the reception and dinner
to follow at which their Majesties would honour the subject who had
done so much to build up the industries of the realm. The message was
a command that Signor Tarsis render at his earliest convenience a list
of the persons to be bidden. This was done at once, and in two days the
list came back with a line drawn through some of the names and other
names added.

“His Majesty directs me to say,” wrote the secretary, “that in view
of the fact that a political colour was deducible from the list as it
stood, he has made the changes to the end that the assemblage may be
representative of all his subjects in the Province of Milan, so far as
political complexion is concerned. It appeared that certain elements
were overlooked, others conspicuously recognised. Therefore, he has
replaced some of the latter with the names of two Republicans, Signor
Lingua and Signor Quattrini; one Radical, Signor Parlari, and one
leader of the New Democracy, the Honourable Mario Forza. His Majesty
directs me to inform you that he will arrive at Palazzo Barbiondi at
seven o’clock.”

It was patent to Tarsis that the situation offered no alternative; the
man who had come between him and the success he prized above all else
must be asked to partake of the hospitality of his house. And it was
equally patent to Mario Forza, when he received the invitation, that
the royal wish might not be disregarded. He had seen Hera driving on
the Bastions; once or twice their eyes had met; he believed that they
shared alike a yearning to speak, to have an exchange of confidence--a
desire which might not be gratified with honour; but now by the
King’s gift this opportunity was to be theirs. It seemed to him a
gift eminently worthy of a king. Tarsis did not deem it necessary to
acquaint his wife with what had chanced. On the contrary, he decided to
take these lovers unawares, to watch them, and satisfy his mind as to a
suspicion that had crept into it and was gaining strength.

Probably no man of intelligence in Italy was further from understanding
Mario’s political aims, or caring to understand them, than Tarsis. And
no one understood them better than the King; he knew that in the leader
of the New Democracy he had a stalwart friend, law and order a genuine
champion. Mario’s party had frankly accepted the monarchy, convinced
that the industrial reforms Italy needed could be accomplished by
improving rather than pulling down the existing form of government.

The duty on breadstuffs had been so high that many thousands of mouths
found it difficult to get bread. In the past few weeks there had
been outbreaks of the people. In towns of middle and southern Italy
and Sicily mobs of men and women had busied themselves taking food
wherever they could find it. This imitation of the fowls of the air
and the beasts of the forest worked well enough for the feeders until
the soldiers arrived and the bullets began to whistle. One day the
King, who had never relished the campaign against his hungry subjects,
issued a decree reducing the duty on breadstuffs. It was submitted to
Parliament and passed without speeches for or against.

There was a notion in the heads of the law-makers that if some measure
of relief was not adopted the full stomachs might not be able to hold
the empty ones at bay. Mario Forza had much to do with inculcating that
idea. He proved himself the dangerous man his foes pronounced him by
pointing out the peril and the means of averting it. Upon his motion
the Chamber remitted taxes on many things that the people needed to
support life, and planned public works to give the idle an opportunity
to earn food. It voted 100,000 liras to aid the poor, and then, feeling
that it had smothered the volcano, adjourned for a fortnight to attend
the Turin exposition, leaving the throne and the cabinet to keep an eye
on the crater.

It was at this juncture that the King chose to visit the Barbiondi
palace. He had shown his sympathy with the suffering by adding to the
Parliamentary fund for their relief 150,000 liras from his private
purse. Long before the hour for his appearance the Milanese began to
assemble, for the most part, it is believed, bent upon giving him an
evidence of good will. They gathered about the gates of the palace and
along Corso Venezia, through which the royal equipage was to pass. Soon
the halls and reception chambers of the house pulsated with the voices
and laughter, the rustle and movement, that attend the arrival of
guests. A line of carriages set them down at the portico.

In that stream of Lombard aristocracy was Hera’s father, with Donna
Beatrice by his side, and many like them--men bearing noble names who
owed much to the peasant-born Tarsis. He had swollen their fortunes
by casting them for lucrative parts in the drama that had attracted
so many gentlemen of quality--the drama of the factory, the bank, the
steamship line. Their families made up the fashionable world of Milan.
Most of them had grand dwellings in town and villas on the Lakes or in
the Brianza; they entertained with radiant hospitality, drove blooded
horses, and stirred the dust of country roads with their automobiles.
Most of them were willing to forget their titles. They belonged to
the group that was fast going away from old ideas; the notions their
fathers respected, and which they too once respected, seemed to them
absurd and ridiculous.

Hera was gowned in something that shimmered softly like the petals of
a tea rose. What happened before the day was over caused the journals
to give a more circumstantial account of the reception than they might
have done otherwise. One of the chroniclers thus pictured Hera as she
stood, Tarsis at her side, receiving the guests, with Heribert and
his slashing warriors for a background: “Her deep grey eyes were full
of life and expression. She moved with marvellous grace. Her voice
was sweet and melodious. Never had anyone seen in the person of one
woman so much charm, so much beauty, united with such brightness of
intellect. She was graceful without affectation, witty without malice,
and captivating to every guest.”

The Honourable Mario Forza was among the last to appear. He came in
with the Cardinal, a hale man of sixty, with kindly blue eyes. As
they drew near Hera felt her blood ebb and flow and her breath catch.
The elder man was the first to be greeted, and while he paid her some
hearty compliments Mario stood alone, for Tarsis did not offer his
hand. When the Cardinal had moved away, and they were face to face,
Hera noted with a sinking heart that the rugged glow had gone from his
cheeks, and from his eyes the boyish lustre that had reflected a soul
without bitterness.

“It is a pleasure for which I am indebted to His Majesty,” he said, as
they clasped hands, and their glances met.

“I am glad to see you again,” she returned, while Tarsis, his back to
the oncoming guests, held her and the other in full survey. So intent
was he watching them that the Mayor of Milan, a rotund little man,
who stood in full regalia waiting to be noticed, was obliged to cough
diplomatically once or twice. The hosts turned to receive the Mayor,
and Forza, with a ceremonious bow, joined the Cardinal and passed on to
mingle with the throng.

The guests walked and chatted or stood in groups, awaiting the coming
of the King. There were staff officers of the garrison in gold lace;
poor noblemen of leisure and rich ones in trade, both with their
ribbons and the latter with jewelled stars of knighthood; municipal
dignitaries in showy insignia of office; Senators and Deputies of the
several political shades; dowagers plump or scrawny, spangled with
gems, and matrons more youthful in smart gowns. Then there were the
amusing men and women who did not profess to be anybody in particular,
yet the sort that fashionable Milan was glad to have at its receptions.

In time the clatter of tongues filled the broad corridors as well as
the great chamber, and resounded cheerfully in the gardens, now rich
with the foliage, the blossoms, and fragrance of May. Mario and the
Cardinal joined those of the company who had sought the cooler air,
where fountains played and magnolias cast their shadows on statuary. A
close friendship had grown with the prelate and the statesman. The man
of the Church had taken to his heart easily the man of the World whom
he found combating a common foe. Once he had said to him, “Caro Forza,
the New Democracy is an ally in the campaign for His kingdom.” At the
angle of a shaded avenue, they met Hera on the arm of Colonel Rosario.
In genuine enthusiasm the Cardinal gave his felicitations on the return
of a Barbiondi to the ancestral home, and Mario spoke to her of the
beauty of the palace and gardens.

“Colonel Rosario will not agree with you, Signor Forza,” she said. “He
deplores it all.”

“Pardon, Donna Hera,” the old soldier protested. “I have not been
quoted accurately, as the politicians say. Deplore all? Far from that.
In truth, my regret is for only one thing--the restoration.”

“Why?” asked the Cardinal.

“Because, the restoration has taken unto itself the charm of the old
place.”

“Indeed?” the prelate inquired, looking up at the scoured and scraped
walls. “And has so much been lost in this refinding?”

“Yes, your Eminence,” the soldier assured him, as they walked away
together, the man of the sword bemoaning the passage of old Italy and
he of the red robe answering that all which is of time must go with
time. Thus it fell out that Mario and Hera, standing there at the turn
of the path beside the southern wall, for a moment found themselves
alone. He approached at once the subject of the marriage that had torn
their hearts.

“You said that Colonel Rosario deplored it all,” he began, repeating
her words. “I interpret that as an expression of your remorse for
what--you have done. I should not refer to the affair but for the
lingering hope that other than a sordid motive impelled you. Must you
tell me,” he went on, a suggestion of contempt in his tone, “that you
broke faith with me because you could not resist the pomp of great
wealth--that you preferred it to my love?”

At first, unable to realise that the words were falling from his lips,
she stood as one dazed; then came the thought, and in the next instant
the delicious certainty, that there had been a misunderstanding; that
Mario, of his will, had never surrendered her to another, that he had
never put a frigid sentiment of justice above his love for her. But
before she could speak he had misread in her first look of bewilderment
and in her quick-going breath an acknowledgment of what he hated
to believe. He gave voice to his anger in phrases that wronged her
immeasurably, yet thrilled her with rapture, for they proved that
somehow he had been cheated of her, that he had never put her away, and
that after all his was a great passion crying out in glorious wrath.

“It was a hideous crime to wreck two lives,” he exclaimed. “It has
wrecked your life; that is the penalty. When you bartered for money all
that----”

“Mario, stop,” she said, softly, touching his arm, while her face lit
up in anticipation of the joyous message she had for him. “We are the
victims of a misunderstanding.”

“Are you not his wife?” he demanded, puzzled by her smile and sparkling
eyes.

“Yes; but only in the view of the world,” she told him, yielding to an
impulse, and glad in the consciousness that this was so. “Even that I
should not have been,” she went on, “but for a message that bore your
name. The will of others did not prevail. Ah, no! When I became the
wife of Antonio Tarsis it was the will, as I believed, of Mario Forza.”

“Hera!” he exclaimed. “Of what message do you speak?”

“Your despatch from Rome,” she answered, blissful in the conviction
that it was not his.

“I sent no message from Rome. I have never sent you a message.”

Hera laughed for sheer joy. “Nor did you receive one from me the night
you went away,” she surmised, seeing the hand of Tarsis in it all.

“Yes; I received a message from you.”

“Ah, where?”

“At Rome. It was handed to me by the station-master on my arrival.”

“And you made no answer to that?”

“None was required. It had only three words; but those were enough to
make me happy indeed, for they dispelled all fear that your strength
might fail at the last.”

“And those three words?”

“You said, ‘All is well.’”

“No; it was not that,” she laughed; and with a gaiety which he
understood now, and shared as well, she told him of the message
despatched at the request of Tarsis, asking what she should do--keep
or break her engagement of marriage. In that moment they forgot the
trickery by which he had gained her hand. Enough to know that each in
spirit had been true to the promise given and taken in the monastery;
that, however great the disaster to their hopes, the power of their
love had never lessened. She would have told him more of the events in
Villa Barbiondi after his departure for Rome but for Donna Beatrice,
who came toward them, her face a picture of vexation.

“His Majesty is expected at any moment,” she informed Hera, with
shaking voice; “and you with your husband are to be in readiness to
receive him.”

“Yes, Aunt,” she answered. “I will go.”

The three walked together across the garden to the grand portico, up
the staircase swarming with guests, and into the Atlantean chamber,
where Mario took leave of the others. The company was becoming
impatient, for it was the dinner hour in many houses.

“Something of a change from their coop in Via Monte Leone,” remarked a
certain Nobody-in-particular, as Hera and her father passed by.

“Yes; and there’s the magic hand that did it,” observed her companion,
with a movement of his head toward Donna Beatrice, who was approaching
with Tarsis.

“Donna Beatrice! You are right. A noble fisher maiden.”

“Who hooked a golden whale.”

“She has a carriage not shared with other branches of the family _now_.”

“How is that?”

“Family secret. I’m the only outsider who knows. Some time I may
tell--you.”

“Tarsis looks as if he’d like to bite somebody.”

“Old instinct. You know the beginning of his career?”

“Yes; watch-dog in a silk-mill.”

“Time-keeper. I suppose that’s the kind of face he used to pull when a
hand turned up late.”

“Perhaps he’ll dock the King for arriving after the whistle has blown.”

“Is there anything that you respect?”

“Nothing but you.”

They laughed and went up to Donna Beatrice and Tarsis to say pleasant
things. An orchestra of picked players from La Scala made music, but
the hum of talk and the laughter drowned all save the _fortissimo_
attacks. Mario and the Cardinal stood near by that they might hear the
quieter passages.

The Nobodies-in-particular continued:

“Do you know, I have an impression that the honey in the moon has
curdled.”

“I didn’t know that honey curdled. Still, I’ll waive the point. Why do
you think so?”

“Have you detected any sign of sweetness between them?”

“No; but would you have them bill and coo in public?”

“Certainly not. Nor would I have them cat and dog in public.”

“You have a prolific fancy.”

“Oh, of course. It is natural that you, belonging to the blind sex,
should look straight at them and see nothing.”

“What was there to see?”

“View one: His melodramatic stare when she gave Forza her hand. I
wonder if Tarsis knows anything.”

“Let us revel in a thrill of charity and wonder if there is anything to
know.”

“You may. I shall continue to use my eyes and wits.”

“Upon my word, I see nothing sensational in a man looking at his wife.”

“Modest of you, Reni, and considerate. To the pure all things are pure.
You were too noble to say it and crush me.”

“I’m afraid I might have done so, only the deuced proverb is always
taking another shape in my mind--to the poor all things are forbidden.”

“Is that the reason our Hera forbid you?”

He coloured, but had to join his laugh with hers. “I see that the
shared carriage is not the only family secret you are guarding,” he
said. “How many people have you kept this one from?”

“I could answer with one word, but will not.”

“The word ‘all’ or the word ‘none’?”

“Think of being so rich that you can ignore money!” was her irrelevant
response. “I could tell you what happened to Donna Hera of the
Barbiondi not long ago--before her marriage--when she ordered some
things at a certain shop, but I will not. It’s a family secret. Now
she’s lavishing money on the unfashionable poor.”

“I wish we might go,” he said restively. “I’m hungry. I want my
dinner.” He screwed his fists into his eyes and whined like a schoolboy.

“What a savage that fellow Tarsis is, though!”

“Of course. We are all savages under the skin. Come and have some
champagne on an empty stomach.”

“Thank you. I’m not savage enough for that.”

In the banquet hall servants stood with folded arms about the waiting
board. Long ago they had laid the napery and set the crystal and silver
for six persons--the King, the Queen, Don Riccardo, Donna Hera, Donna
Beatrice, and Signor Tarsis. By this hour the reception should have
been over, the guests’ carriages rolling from the court, and the dinner
reaching the period of _poisson_.

In the kitchen a great composer beat his temples and walked the floor
frantically. Had not the symphony been commanded for half-past seven?
And at half-past seven the prelude was ready, with all the delicious
harmonies that were to follow cooking to such tempo that perfection
would attend their serving. And the wines! The golden Chablis, the
garnet Margaux, and the sparkling ruby of Asti, the last by his
Majesty so beloved--all in the ice, their cooling timed to a minute.
Every second that passed made his symphony less fit for the palate of
gods and dimmed the lustre of his noble art. Even at this moment the
dinner was a wreck. Magnificent devil! What right had a king to ruin a
masterpiece!

The people in the street called to one another and made jokes after
the manner of a crowd that has waited long enough to have a sense of
acquaintance. Soldiers held back the multitude on either side of the
Corso, but the space before the palace gates was kept clear by the
Civil Guards. At the latter now and then was hurled a coarse jibe, to
the delight of many; for the stovepipe hat of their policemen, the
black gloves, and the club that is like a walking stick never cease to
be comic in the eyes of the Milanese.

La Ferita, the woman of the scarred face, who shook her fist at Tarsis
on his wedding day, was in the crowd before the palace. She cried out
several times against Tarsis. Once a Civil Guard pushed her back, with
a warning that he would take her in charge if she did not hold her
tongue.

“Arrest the man in there!” she shouted, pointing toward Palazzo
Barbiondi. “He takes the life-blood of children! He works them to death
in the factories; pays them fifteen _soldi_ a day! The children die,
but he lives on in his grand house! Who pays for it?” she shrieked,
facing the crowd and waving her upraised arms. “We do, comrades; we----”

A tirade against his Majesty’s host, within hearing almost of the
distinguished man himself, was not to be permitted, and, weary of
admonishing her, the Civil Guard lugged La Ferita off to the Questura.

Tarsis and Donna Beatrice went to a window and peered up the Corso, but
there was no sign of the royal equipage, no flutter in the crowd to
denote its coming. Although the daylight was failing, they could still
see the city gate and Sandro in the motor car, stationed there, charged
to bear word as soon as the King and Queen were sighted, that the host
and hostess might have time to go down to the portico to receive them.
To this part of the function Tarsis had looked forward eagerly. He had
even rehearsed the scene, going through the act of bowing low to the
Queen and offering her his arm, while in imagination his wife, on the
King’s arm, led the way up the staircase.

“I was not prepared to see Mario Forza here,” Donna Beatrice said to
Tarsis, compressing her lips and patting one hand with her closed fan.

“It is by the King’s wish,” he told her.

“Strange!”

“Oh, no,” he explained. “A political consideration. I hope no accident
has prevented his Majesty from coming.”

“It is only that athletic exhibition, I am positive,” she said. “As he
is to distribute the prizes I suppose he cannot leave graciously until
the bore is at an end. I was at one once. The waits between the events
were the chief feature. If there is anything that would delight to keep
a king waiting it is an athletic exhibition.”

But Tarsis did not hear. His attention was held by a dialogue at his
shoulders between a man who leaned against the lintel and one who stood
within the room.

“There are two sorts of women you must not know,” said the nearer man.
“They are the women who love you and the women who do not.”

“You are right. I know; I have suffered.”

“You make a mistake to suffer,” the first speaker continued. “If a
woman insults you, bow to her. If she strikes you, protect yourself.
If she deceives you, say nothing for fear of compromising her. Kill
yourself, if you please, but suffer--never!”

“To this point I agree with you,” said his companion: “Some life should
pay--yours, hers or his.”

The other shrugged his shoulders. “That, of course, is a matter of
taste.”

Tarsis had glanced quickly at the men and turned his back again. Now
he stood staring into the rain of the fountain in the court below, his
hard face set like stone, preoccupied darkly with what he had heard. So
deep was his absorption that he failed to hear Donna Beatrice exclaim
that the King was approaching.

“Antonio!” she repeated, rousing him with a touch on his sleeve. “Come,
let us find Hera and go down to receive his Majesty.”

He looked out over the throngs far up the Corso, and saw Sandro
speeding toward them. In the quick sweep of his eye he noted too, that
the soldiers at the Venetian Gate were forming in marching order,
leaving the people free to break their lines along the street sides.
And as he followed Donna Beatrice from the window he was aware of a
changed note in the murmur of the crowds--a note that was not of glad
acclaim. In the group near the orchestra were the Cardinal and Hera
with an arm about her chum of the Brianza, the little Marchioness
of Tramonta, and near them Don Riccardo and Mario Forza. While they
listened to the music Donna Beatrice and Tarsis were searching for
Hera. Before they came upon her the motor car was panting in the court
and Sandro had started up the staircase with his tidings.




CHAPTER XII

AN UNBIDDEN GUEST


THE inarticulate voice of the crowd had grown to a roar and the ominous
note Tarsis caught was now a distinct expression of horror. It rose
above the tittle-chat, the tinkling of wine-glasses, the laughter and
all the clack and fizzle of the gay assemblage, sending the guests to
the windows and bringing the music to a stop. Hera took the arm of her
husband, and they started for the staircase. A few steps and they were
face to face with Sandro.

“I beg your pardon, Signore,” he said, his lips twitching.

“What is it?” Tarsis asked.

“I have to tell you, Signore, that his Majesty will not be here”--an
odd fling of cynicism, innocent as it was untimely, born of the
servant’s awe of his master rather than of an instinct to break the
news by degrees.

Tarsis looked as if he would strike the man. He moved closer to him,
fists clinched at his side. “What do you mean?” he demanded.

“The King is dead!”

Those within hearing echoed the words, pressing nearer to Sandro, and
from the windows, by which the news had come from the street, guests
swept toward the group about Tarsis, exclaiming, “The King is slain!”

Tarsis gripped Sandro’s arm. “Tell what you know!” he commanded him.

“I know only this, Signore,” he began--and the jewelled women and
decorated men narrowed the circle about him: “I got it from a customs
guard at the gate. His Majesty had just started from the athletic
grounds. A young workman walked up to the carriage and shot him at
three paces.”

“At three paces!” several women repeated, shocked anew by this detail
of the crime.

“What kind of man is the assassin?”

“The guard said he is a silk-weaver and an anarchist. That was the
rumor from Monza. They have him in charge.”

At the word anarchist, Tarsis, with a quick movement, turned from
Sandro and set his gaze on Mario Forza. The act was so marked that
every eye followed his. Mario returned a steady look, and for a moment
they stood thus, to the amazement of all.

Electric light flooded the scene, flashing back from the gems of the
women. There was the hubbub of the crowd in the street, with its hue
and cry. From the gardens the scent of magnolia came in on the evening
breeze. With a shuddering fear Hera saw the veins of her husband’s neck
strain, as she remembered them in that hour of wrath in the monastery.
He moved a pace closer to Mario. “Honourable Forza,” he said, his voice
like an edged blade, “the worst has happened. Are you content?”

The others were mystified, but Mario had an inkling of what he meant.
“Why do you ask that?” he inquired, striving to be calm.

“Because it is your work!” the other answered, savagely.

“Do you mean, Signor Tarsis, that I have had a hand in this
assassination?”

“That is precisely what I mean.”

“The assertion is absurd, and it is a lie!” Mario declared. “I regret
that I have to say this to you in your own house, but you have forced
me to it.”

Tarsis tossed his head and laughed mockingly. His studied decorum of
the gentleman was forgotten, and he stood forth in the truth of his
native self. A moment he eyed the man he hated in a vulgar effect of
shrewdness, then shook an index finger sidewise before Mario’s face, as
the Sicilian peasant uses to denote that he is not to be gammoned.

“Signori,” he began, turning to the astonished guests at his side,
“this man knows how to play the traitor and at the same time act the
innocent. He and I understand each other excellently. We shall have no
denial from him on that point, I think,” he added, throwing a glance at
his wife. “There are one or two more here who understand.”

“I thought he knew something,” whispered Signora Nobody-in-particular
to her companion. “Delicious! He’s going to tell!”

A similar thought must have impelled Mario. He stepped forward a
little, and, with the sole purpose of saving an insensate husband from
sullying his wife’s name, he spoke to Tarsis, his tone severe, but not
without a shade of entreaty.

“Guard your tongue,” he said. “If you have a quarrel with me, this is
not the time or place.”

Tarsis faced him, with blazing eyes, his last vestige of restraint
thrown off. “I will be judge of the time and place to speak!” he
exclaimed. “You know too well what I meant when I said this is your
work. Perhaps there are some here who do not catch my meaning. You and
your crew of demagogues are to blame for the King’s death. I charge
you with it publicly. You poison the minds of ignorant people, set the
workers against their betters, teach them to hate authority, incite
them to riot and bloodshed. I say that you have plotted against the
King’s life, and are just as much the taker of it as the miscreant who
fired the shot.”

It was so different from what he had expected and dreaded that Mario
felt more of relief than resentment. That Tarsis had omitted Hera’s
name seemed a full requital for the wrong done him in that reckless
accusation. Nevertheless, he would have replied to it but for the
Cardinal, who raised his hand and invoked peace in the name of heaven.

“It is hard to hold one’s peace,” Tarsis protested sullenly, “when such
a deed is done, and the instigator of it stands before one’s eyes
under his own roof.”

Mario was about to leave the palace, but the Cardinal touched his arm.
“Stay a while,” he said, “and I will go with you.” For a moment he held
Tarsis in the regard of his kindly though keen eyes, as if studying
him. “Much of the injustice that man does his neighbour is by reason
of his seeing him through the glass but darkly,” he affirmed, in the
manner of one who would dispel a misunderstanding. “It is not the first
time that the Honourable Forza has been called a demagogue, but always
it has been a calumny. I, who am his friend and know him, can do no
less than say this. To be a demagogue, I take it, is to be at war with
truth--to strive for popular favour by inflaming the selfish passions
of men. I am sure he has not done that. He has wielded a lance, and
an able one, but always it has been the lance of truth and valour. He
has striven to mellow the world’s hard hopes with even-handed justice.
Wrong is not a mender of wrong. The sorrow we all feel in this hour
and revengeful passions go ill together. The occasion does not call
for denunciation or abuse of men or doctrines. Let us try to find
the use there may be in this as in all adversity. Anarchy has no more
determined foe than Signor Forza. His war is upon offenders against
human justice, and that is the same as war upon anarchy. No one loves
his country more than he, no one loved the King more. I know that his
public services are in harmony with the things that we all should hold
best--the Church, which is of Christ, and Italy, which is our country.”

In the hush that reigned Mario said, “I thank your Eminence,” and Hera,
silently, breathed a thanksgiving.

Tarsis had not spoken his last word. His lips were curving with the
sarcastic smile that he could summon. “I perceive,” he remarked, “that
your Eminence has become an apostate to the New Democracy.”

The Cardinal made no reply, though he stood a second or two weighing
the words. Then, with the calmness of one who has schooled himself to
avoid fruitless and painful discussion, he turned, smiling, to Mario.

“Shall we go, Honourable?” he said, and the other inclined his
head. They gave a parting word to Hera, and, bowing to the rest of
the company, moved toward the door. As they passed nearly all made
reverence to the Cardinal. Their exit proved the signal for a general
departure of the guests, and with scant ceremony the company began to
go its way.




CHAPTER XIII

AN INDUSTRIAL INCIDENT


TARSIS gave orders that no bright lights be shown at the windows and
that the palace in other respects preserve an air of mourning. He
passed the night in the library, writing at his Napoleonic table,
smoking and brooding over the utter failure of his efforts to break
Hera’s determination. He did not regret the attack he had made on Mario
in the presence of the guests. For the New Democracy he harboured
a deep hatred, and from a conviction born of this he had linked
the doctrines of that party and Mario’s advocacy of them with the
assassination of the King. It was easy for him to charge Forza with the
loss of the royal visit, and easier to behold him as the author of his
marital discord. The last fact clung to his meditations, which lasted
into the morning hours.

Hera, alone in her apartments, thought over the events of the day. What
dwarfed all else in her consciousness was the discovery that Mario’s
love had never faltered. In the joy of this revelation she was able
to forget for the moment the bondage into which she had been lured by
Tarsis, the price she had paid for obeying an instinct of honour. But
in the days that followed she was reminded of it bitterly.

At first the manner of her husband was such as to inform her negatively
that he was willing no longer to keep up even a show of compliance.
Next it took on a tenor of positive vexation. If she had been keenly
sensible before that he exerted himself to win her affection, she was
alive now to his studied resentment. He made no effort to mask his
feelings. On the contrary, he paraded them resolutely. The details
of domestic experience offered opportunities without number, and she
observed that he seldom neglected them.

He did not conduct his campaign of protest as a man of finer grain
might have done. From open indifference to her wishes he passed to
pronounced acts of discourtesy. Once, while she was with her maid
dressing for a night at La Scala, he quitted the palace without
warning, and did not return until long after the curtain had fallen
on the ballet. In the morning he offered an apology, but no word of
explanation. Every day brought a new sneer to his lip and to his eye
glances of deepened ill-will. This mood never left him. She was made to
feel it alike at the breakfast table and when he paid her the parting
civilities of the night.

Though all his approaches to her heart were foreordained to failure,
she had been disposed to retain a certain spark of respect for him; now
this was extinguished because of the discovery she had made about the
message from Rome. In its place there burned a detestation of the man
which every hour intensified. She realised that his was not a character
to accept, even to perceive, that her attitude was, after all, just
toward him, surveying it, as she did, in the light of their pre-nuptial
agreement. Her blame of him, in consequence, was not so large as her
commiseration of self for having been so weak as to heed other counsels
than those of her heart. With the feeling that she had wronged herself
was compounded a fear that she had wronged Tarsis as well.

But the idea of surrender had never crossed her mind. Reason had
no play here; it was merely the intuitive firmness of a fine and
wholesome soul, for whom real marriage could never be aught but a
profound and moral naturalism; a loving union between man and woman
such as the name of Mario Forza conjured up, ardent with a sense of the
infinite--the apotheosis of a hallowed passion. When the duplicity of
Tarsis was laid bare she had known an impulse to leave his house, to
release herself from an obligation he had imposed upon her by deceit.
But she listened for the moment to a less selfish voice, and decided
to accept the events of her ill-starred wedding--to endure, suffer
silently, even stolidly, all that it should entail. She felt so alone.
To her father she would not go; his was a nature to be relieved of
care, not one to be asked to share it. As to Aunt Beatrice, try as
she did, Hera could not think of her except as the projector of the
trouble, well meaning as her purpose may have been.

There was only one heart that could give sympathy, only one
fellow-being that called to her, and to this one she might not go, in
his counsel she might not seek guidance. Nevertheless, chance brought
them together one morning in the garden of the General Hospital. Every
week Hera sent roses there, and it was on Flower Day, as it had come
to be known, that she met Mario in the director’s office. Soon they
found themselves walking in the garden, he telling of a plan he had for
a hospital where soldiers fallen on the industrial field might be cared
for until restored for the struggle.

“I come as a student,” he explained. “It is my second visit this week.
The organisation here has no superior in Europe, and in many respects
we shall take it as our model.”

“In what respect will you not take it?” she asked, as they passed a
broad lawn where pale men and women sat in the sun.

“In our dealing with such as those,” he answered, indicating the
convalescents.

“They seem to be dealt with kindly,” she observed. “They look
contented.”

“Now, yes. Most of them, you can see, are persons who in health are
accustomed to work, and not at light employment. They belong to the
class who can rest without starving only when they fall sick and go
to a hospital. Most of those patients on the lawn are done with the
doctor and the nurse. Time, fresh air, good nourishment, and rest
are their needs. In a few days they will be dismissed as cured. The
demand for beds is pressing. Their room in the wards is wanted. They
must go. They will not be strong enough to do heavy work, the only kind
for which most of them are fitted. If a man is friendless he has an
excellent chance to starve because the hospital turns him out before
he is well enough to earn a living. No employer wants a gaunt-visaged
convalescent.”

“You would provide for him until he is able to provide for himself,”
she said, comprehendingly.

“Yes. We should not pronounce him cured until he was strong enough to
earn his living.”

They entered an avenue of poplars, on either side of which stood the
rows of isolated wards, and were alone except for the flitting presence
here and there of a white-jacketed attendant or a nurse in sombre gown.
Mario told her that what she had made known to him at Palazzo Barbiondi
had lit up his world again. When the news of the wedding reached him,
he said, his thoughts were black indeed. It was as if the sun had
fallen just as it had begun to fill the east with glory. The love of
her had given him a new heart, a new mind, new senses. Suddenly all
life had been transfigured with an infinite beauty. It was in the
railway carriage returning to Milan that he learned of the wedding. He
told her of the change that came over his spirit. Bitterly he cried out
against her and the universal heart. The rapture that had raised him
into heaven broke and he dropped into the pit of hell. And so it was
until he learned that she was the dupe of--the forged message. He was
glad for the warmth of sympathy that then suffused his being. He saw
the cruel facts that had ruled her, the forces that had driven her to
the other’s wish.

“Our temple is in ruins,” he said, filled with pity for her and
himself; “but perhaps it will some time be rebuilt. It must be!” he
declared, passionately. “This love is a necessity of my life, and will
be so long as life shall endure.”

“But it must be content now,” she warned him, “to live as does the
edelweiss of the Alps--that lonely plant which grows amid the snow.”

“But always with a flower ready to bloom safe and warm in its heart,”
he added. And he told her how hope had come to him the day before
in the ruined monastery, where he had gone to live again, in its
delicious memories, that hour they passed during the hailstorm.

“The leaves were thick on the eglantine,” he said, “and the chapel was
gay with sunshine and the voices of birds. All the growing, living
things had entered upon their heritage of joy, and then it was that the
light of a great hope, as if from prophecy, filled----”

She had started a little and admonished him to silence at sight of a
familiar figure in the arched entrance to the main wards, whither their
steps had led them. It was the large frame, ruddy face, flaxen hair
and beard of Ulrich the Austrian. The man who had sent Hera the false
telegram stood wide-eyed with astonishment and comprehension to behold
her in the company of Mario Forza. But he quickly recovered his air of
effusive good nature. With uncovered head and smiling he approached to
greet her.

“I have been through the wards,” said Tarsis’s most confidential
retainer, “and everywhere are the beautiful flowers your Excellency has
given. Ah! the rooms are filled with their fragrance--and,” he added,
bowing low, one hand pressed upon his chest, “with the praises of your
Excellency.”

Wondering that chance should have brought the man there, and conscious
for the first time that in this walk and converse with Mario there
was aught of indiscretion, and preoccupied as well with an intuition
that the Austrian’s presence boded a new ill, Hera replied to his
compliments with few words, and she and Mario passed on.

The meeting, in itself a trivial occurrence, proved a source of much
illumination for the Austrian. It explained what had puzzled his mind
ever since the night he had performed for Tarsis the service of sending
the message that made Hera listen to his plea. He had tried in vain
to account for that affair as some ruse in a political game where his
resourceful master had set his skill against that of the leader of
the New Democracy. Now he divined that a woman--no other than she who
became his wife--was the stake that Tarsis had won. He recalled the
words of the telegram, and felt sure that he had hit the mark.

The Honourable Forza, he reasoned, was a rival before the marriage,
and, plainly, was a rival still. The thought of intrigue obtruded
itself in his survey of the situation, and, in the light of his new
knowledge, duty demanded that in this branch of his master’s affairs
he perform another confidential service. It was only just, he told
himself, that Signor Tarsis, too great a man to keep a watch on his
wife, should know that she had an interest in the General Hospital that
was not confined to visiting the sick and cheering their lot with gifts
of flowers.

Together Mario and Hera entered a ward for women, and he was with her
still as she moved through the great sick-room, pausing here and there
for a word to some patient. She told him that she wished above all to
visit a certain little girl, because it was the last opportunity she
would have to do so. “The doctor says that she will not be here when I
come next week. They cannot save her. She is only twelve years old, but
she worked in a mill ten hours a day.”

“Was it there she contracted the disease?” Mario asked.

“The doctors think the bad air of the place did as much as the work and
long hours to break down her health.”

“Is she alone in the world?”

“No; her mother, also a mill-worker, is alive, but she was disabled
for a time, and the girl had to toil for both. In the same mill the
mother met with an accident which left her face scarred terribly.
She is here now with her daughter. Only yesterday was she let out of
prison.”

Hera indicated a bed a few yards away where a woman was kneeling in
prayer.

“It is a cruel, often-told tale,” Mario said. “In the days when most
of our factories were built the world had not thought much about the
moral welfare or health of those obliged to work in them. With our
enlightenment about other things, we have learned that forces for
combating foes of the public health are as important to the state as
the army or navy. New laws are compelling builders of factories to have
a care for the health of the workers.”

“The laws that the New Democracy has given the country,” she said,
aware that Mario more than any man in Italy had worked to this end.

“Something has been accomplished,” he told her, “but the work is only
begun. Do you know what mill this girl worked in?”

“Yes,” she answered, but said no more, and he understood. In all the
Tarsis silk-mills child labour was employed.

They saw the woman rise from prayer, look down upon the face of her
child, and, with a shriek that resounded through the ward, bringing
patients up from their pillows and nurses running to the bedside, fall
upon the girl’s body, wailing, and beseeching the ashen lips to speak.

“Don’t go, Giulia! Don’t leave me! You are all I have!”

With the others Hera drew near and yielded to an impulse to speak to
the mother so alone in her grief. The sound of her voice hushed the
woman’s sobbing. She looked into Hera’s face, heavily at first, then
set her gaze more sharply and passed a hand over her brow like one
of bewildered senses. Another moment and she sprang to her feet, a
malediction on her tongue, and the scar across her eyelid and cheek
glowing angrily, as it had that day in the Cathedral square when she
shook her fist at Tarsis and his bride.

“It’s her husband’s work!” La Ferita cried, pointing her finger at
Hera. “He killed my Giulia. He worked the life out of her in his
factory; gave her fifteen _soldi_ for ten hours, and when she could
toil no more left her to die like a whelp. And for what? That he might
have a palace for her Excellency, and horses, carriages, jewels, and
servants. Look at the two! There she, there my Giulia!”

Hera, full of pity, could find no word to speak to her, and the others
in the group about the bed stood speechless, divided in sympathy
between the great lady so mercilessly arraigned and the stricken woman
malevolent in her sorrow. In the moment of silence a physician who had
been listening at the girl’s heart arose and nodded his head. This
brought a fresh outburst from La Ferita.

“Oh, it’s death! Never fear!” she exclaimed. “His work was well done,
your Excellency! Well done, friends, neh?”

Mario, who had moved to Hera’s side, touched her arm. “Let us go,”
he said, and as they drew away La Ferita filled the air with new
imprecations against Tarsis. The doctor and the nurses tried to calm
her, but without avail.

“My day will come!” were the last words of hers that Hera caught as she
passed from the room. “He shall pay. He killed her. He shall pay!”




CHAPTER XIV

AN HOUR OF RECKONING


TWO days afterward, when Hera and Tarsis were dining alone, he asked
her about the work she had begun among the poor of the Ticinese
quarter, and she told him that she had subscribed 150,000 liras to a
fund to build a settlement there after the London plan, and that she
had been chosen an officer of the Society of Help, and intended to take
an active part in its service.

“By the way,” he remarked, affecting a manner of light concern, “I have
decided to withdraw my offer of funds for your charitable enterprises.”

“Have you changed your opinion of the work?”

“No; but I’ve changed my opinion of you,” he answered, and she saw his
cold smile at play. “Perhaps it is as well you should know,” he added,
“that my eyes have been opened.”

In his mind the tale that Ulrich had carried about the meeting with
Mario at the hospital, he regarded her narrowly, studying the effect
of his words; she was aware of a note of challenge in them; their
meaning puzzled her, and she broke the rule of silence she had observed
hitherto toward his displays of malevolence.

“Your eyes have been opened?” she said. “May I ask what you have seen?”

“I--have--seen--your--subterfuge!” he responded, leaning forward and
striking the table with the tip of his forefinger.

“Subterfuge?”

“Yes; and let me tell you that it is not worth while to continue the
masquerade of charity. I am aware of your secret designs.”

“I do not understand you.”

“My belief is that you do,” he returned, speaking fast and vehemently,
“though you may make yourself believe that you do not, just as you
delude yourself with the idea that you are exceptionally noble to wrong
me, your husband, that you may be faithful to another man.”

Hera had risen from the table; it was his first open blow, and she
met it standing. A deep flush of colour dyed her temples, but she
compressed her lips resolutely, obedient to an instinct which forbade
her to quarrel with him, as it would have forbidden her to bandy words
with the domestic who appeared just then with the cordial and glasses.
She moved to the open window and stood with her back to him. Before her
lay the garden with its stately white urns, the rich foliage of the
trees, and beyond the wall the moonlit roofs of the workers’ homes, all
touched with the mystery of the night, and Hera, looking out upon the
picture, endeavoured to think clearly; she tried to pacify her warring
emotions, to detach right from wrong, to stand them far apart, and with
the eye of justice survey each in its naked proportions. As to what
might be the whole meaning of the suspicions he had expressed she gave
no thought; she contemplated only the cause of the angry spirit that
was roused in him, and of which she saw herself the author; and for
this her conscience adjudged her guilty.

“The fault is mine,” she said, at length, turning toward him, sadness
in her face. “I have done you a great wrong. By reason of it I am
suffering more than you can know. I ought never to have become your
wife.”

“Still, it is a wrong that you may redress,” he returned, more gently,
as he paused in his measured pacing of the room.

“No; it is impossible,” she avowed, painfully.

“It is your plain obligation to do so,” he asserted, his manner harsh
again. “What right have you to accept all that your husband bestows and
give nothing in return?”

She answered him slowly, measuring every word: “The wrong I did you was
in yielding to your solicitations--in allowing you to persuade me to
marry you. I should have been stronger. For the rest, I am giving you
all that I promised. Can you deny this?”

He did not answer the question. Instead, he swept her with a
contemptuous glance. “I perceive that with all this pretty show of
remorse,” he said, “you are determined to keep up your defiance of me.”

“Indeed, I am acting in no spirit of defiance,” she replied. “You must
believe that. I tell you that, in the circumstances, I should deem
myself on a plane with the women of the Galleria if I became to you
what you wish.”

She turned again to the window, and his coarse laugh sounded in her
ears.

“You would have me believe,” she heard him sneering, as he drew nearer
to her, “that you are living up to some poetic ideal. At the outset I
was fool enough to swallow that fiction. I thought that you were merely
carrying idealism to the verge of absurdity, and at that point you
would come to your senses and turn back. I credited my wife with being
honest, you see.”

“Will you spare me these insinuations?” she said. “I beg of you to
speak out.”

“Oh, your counterfeit of lofty virtue is skilful,” he went on, mocking
her manner. “Though a little cheap at times, on the whole it would
deceive a critic who did not know the truth. I happen to know the
truth, signora.”

Now she faced him with flashing eyes. “Tell me what you mean!”

He snapped his fingers in her face. “Bah! Your imperious airs do
not fool me. I know something of the blue blood now. It is like any
other--has the same passions and gratifies them in the same way. As a
noblewoman you ought at least to have the courage of your vices.”

She started for the door, but stopped suddenly and faced him again.
“Say what you mean in direct words or I shall go.”

“Oh, I will be plain!” he flung back, going close to her. “The man by
whom you pretend to be inspired so grandly is simply one who provokes
your appetite more than I do. You have never given him up. He cannot
come to you. That would destroy the pretty illusion of virtue; so you
go to him. To this end you employ a shrewd subterfuge. Suddenly you are
seized with a fever of pity for the poor of Milan. You have a burning
desire to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked. You select the Porta
Ticinese quarter for your field of labour, although the same conditions
prevail not a stone’s throw from this spot,” and he pointed towards the
roofs that showed above the garden wall.

She had turned her back to him. “Why do you go to the Porta Ticinese?”
he went on. “You wish plain speech. I answer, then, because Mario
Forza is to be found there in his Co-operative Society offices.
He, too--snivelling demagogue!--loves the poor. That you may go to
him, whom you love, you come to me, whom you choose to despise, for
money!--that you may carry on your intrigue under the cloak of charity!
I was blind before, signora, but now----”

“Stop!” she commanded him, wheeling suddenly. “What you say is
false, madly, monstrously false!” She rose before him a queenly young
figure, erect and tall. Had it been given to Tarsis to know he would
have perceived in that moment, as he looked upon her, that his anger
had driven him to a terrible misjudgment. The poise of her head, the
intrepid, direct message of her eyes, her bearing, so superior to
vulgar graces--these were her clear ensigns of a disdain profound for
the mean, the low, the perfidious; but to all this Tarsis was blind, as
an enraged bull is blind to the glories of the sunset. She turned from
him and moved once more toward the door to the passage that led to her
private apartments; but still the impassioned voice of Tarsis was at
her ear.

“Oh, don’t play the grand nobility with me”; he muttered. “I have been
too easy with you, too eager to serve, to please you. I have been
weak--I, who was never weak before. But that is past. I don’t care what
you do. Henceforth I shall be strong. Do you hear? I know my rights. In
Sicily we have a way of spoiling such games as you have been playing.”

Hera kept moving toward the door, but always she felt his breath
panting beside her. At the threshold she turned and paused long enough
to say, her voice issuing without a tremor:

“I repeat that what you have said is false, absolutely false!”

Then she went her way down the corridor.

       *       *       *       *       *

In solitude, she put herself face to face with the situation’s hideous
fact. Though wounded to the depths of her being, she had no impulse to
tears. She felt impelled rather to bitter smiles for her grim failure
in striving to serve two masters--to travel any path but that which the
heart pointed. So this was the price of her father’s peaceful days,
her aunt’s triumph over the bloodhounds of debt, the restoration of a
Barbiondi to the palace of her ancestors! Ah, well, she would end it
now, and she cared not whether the sequel should be good or ill.

The force of events had awakened in her a latent Titanic element that
lifted her superior to weak scruple. She was conscious of a marvellous
accession of moral strength. Now she felt that no barrier might rise
high enough to baffle her purpose. Fervidly she was thankful that her
spirit had come forth unconquered, and that, chained though she was to
a rock, her soul could be free. She thought of her father, and weighed
the effect upon his fortunes that parting from Tarsis might produce,
but not for long did she harbour that consideration; she cast it from
her as she might have dashed a cup of hemlock, resolved that her life
should be poisoned no more for other people’s good. Come what might,
in this crisis she would honour the heart’s edict. She had learned
somewhat of her great mistake. It had proved a tree of knowledge,
and in eating of the fruit her moral nature had found itself--become
well defined and unified--so that she stood now as a law unto her own
processes.

Nevertheless, she retained her sense of justice, and drew comfort
from the fact that her husband had been the aggressor; that the
deceit by which he had obtained her consent to the marriage, his rash
accusations, his insults, gave her warrant for quitting his house and
ending the mockery of their relation. It never occurred to her mind
that the situation left any alternative course. She rang for her maid
and directed her to prepare for their departure on the morrow, by an
early train. Then she wrote a message to Tarsis, enclosed the sheet in
an envelope, and stood it against a mirror, to make sure that it should
catch her eye in the morning.




CHAPTER XV

A BILL PAYABLE


IN ten hours, or at nine o’clock in the morning, Hera, and her maid,
the only servant she had brought from the Brianza, entered a cab that
had been summoned to the Via Cappuccini gate and drove to the Central
railway station. They took a train that started at about the hour that
Tarsis, heavy-eyed after a sleepless night, seated himself at the
breakfast table and received her eloquently brief note. It was placed
in his hand by Beppe, the velvety man-servant who brought the coffee:

  MY HUSBAND:

  Your groundless accusations leave me no alternative but to withdraw
  from your house. It is my purpose to make the separation permanent. I
  go to my father.

                                                  HERA DEI BARBIONDI.

He read it a second time, then leaned back and flecked the sheet with
his fingers in a studied show of cool reflection; but his bitten lip
spoiled the effect that he strove to produce. When he looked up
Beppe’s eyes were riveted upon him in a manner unheard of for that
genius in the art of seeing and hearing nothing. The incident, small
in itself, proclaimed loudly enough that the palace retainers, from
stable-boy to the head of the kitchen, were feasting already on the
delicious scandal. It advised Tarsis as well that before nightfall the
fashionable world would have the news on its tongue, thence to fly from
the twelve gates of Milan to all parts of Italy.

Though contempt for public opinion had marked his career in all else,
he had taken a keen pride in standing before the world as the husband
of his young and beautiful high-born wife. It was the dearest of all
his triumphs because it fed his vanity most. And now he perceived
the glare of ridicule into which her desertion must throw him. Oddly
enough, it was this realisation that set the first brand to his wrath.
He was seized with a wild impulse to follow her to Villa Barbiondi and
assert his authority over her--compel her, by main force, if the need
should be, to return to the palace.

When he rose from the table the servant was not too busy to take
notice that he caught up the bit of writing and crushed it in his fist.
What step this man of the South would take in the case at hand was a
question of absorbing interest to the Northern men and maids of the
household. They believed, one and all--and in hushed voices uttered
their belief as a black forecast--that the life of some one would be
demanded in payment of the bill, and that it would not be the life of
their master. Every item of news that could be carried to the kitchen
and stables was awaited avidly, and Beppe, there on the spot, knew
that many ears yawned for the report of his observations. Tarsis was
aware not only that the man’s eyes followed him when he moved from the
breakfast room, but that a neck was craned to keep him in view as he
made his way across the Atlantean chamber.

The splendours of that great room played upon his feelings with a
strange subtlety. He felt the power for mockery which at certain
moments resides in lifeless things. With its spell upon him the marble
Atlantes began to breathe; their hollow eyes had the gift of sight, and
from their high stations between the windows they looked down upon
him with cynical interest. He noted for the first time that all the
portraits of the Barbiondi were painted with a broad grin. The very
walls of the palace chuckled in their re-echo of his solitary footfalls.

Entering the library, he closed the door and paced before the printed
wisdom of ages; but no quieting message was there for him in all that
treasury of placid thought, divine inspiration, human experience.
It was as if no Greek had ever meditated, no Christ ever lived, no
fellow-being ever suffered. In his own life the tragedy of ages was
on for its hour, and the spirit that swayed him was the spirit of the
cave-dweller robbed of his female in the dawn of the centuries. The
events of the last two weeks rose before him. A vision of all that had
come and gone grew vivid in his mind. At first Donna Beatrice and Don
Riccardo and Hera were there, each standing in proper relation to the
whole; but one by one these faded out to disclose with infuriating
boldness the face and figure of Mario Forza.

A few minutes more and Tarsis ceased walking to take a seat at the
Napoleonic table. He rested one arm on the mosaic and drummed
meditatively with the tips of his fingers. There was naught in his
bearing now to indicate the storm through which he had passed. Nor was
there any sign that he had reached a terrible decision. Again he was
the self-centred man of business, calmly at work upon the details of an
important project. The prophecy of the kitchen and the stable yard was
in the first stage of its realisation. To Mario Forza the account was
to be rendered and payment demanded in full.

His native impulse was to present the bill in person, to exact a
settlement with his own hand; it would be no more than the honouring
of a law sacred to his island birthplace. By that method the honey
of revenge was sweetest. Nevertheless, for a man of his estate its
disadvantages were undeniably real. With a cool head he counted the
possible cost and found it too great. An ancient Sicilian proverb ran
with his thoughts--“’Tis easier to shed blood than to wash out its
stains.” Here was a reasoning that appealed to his mind, accustomed
as it was to weigh all in the balance of profit and loss; and so it
fell out that he shaped a plan of vengeance that should enlist the
service of another. Some one else, skilled in the art, but of smaller
importance to himself and the world, should wait upon Signor Forza
and--present the bill.

So much for the main design; that was clear. But there were
indispensable details, and over these Tarsis puzzled until he opened
his other hand--the one not resting on the table--and looked at the
scrap of paper it had been clutching. It was Hera’s note crushed into
a ball. A moment he weighed the thing on his open palm and regarded it
in bitter reflection. Here lay the epitome of his fondest ambition, his
capital disappointment. It was the first and only time she had written
to him; and with the rising of this fact in his mind flashed an idea
that grew and supplied the details. He dramatised the future on a stage
set with the ruins of a cloister and an old church for the background;
it was a scene redeemed from total darkness by the glimmer of a moon
that hung far on the slope of the heavens and there was no sound save
the breathing of him who watched and waited in the shadow, with a keen
blade ready for work. The conception touched some artistic chord of
his nature, and he smiled and told himself it was good. In the old
monastery Mario Forza had contracted the debt; in the old monastery he
should pay.

He picked open the crumpled paper and spread it flat on the marble.
He smoothed out the creases as best he could, then got blank paper, a
pen, and a well of ink. It may have been for an hour that he sat there
copying again and again the few lines his wife had written. In the
first essays his eye travelled often from the copy to the pen as he
fashioned each letter after Hera’s hand observing minutely and matching
the slightest peculiarity. Patiently he went over and over the precise
curl of a y’s tail, the loop of an l, or the dot of an i. At length he
was able to write off the missive, Hera’s signature included, to his
satisfaction without once looking at the model.

His next step was to leave the library, locking the door to make sure
that no one should enter and see the table littered with the evidence
of his work; the next to go to the chamber that was Hera’s. There he
took from a desk some of the dainty paper and envelopes that bore
her monogram. A few minutes and he was back in the library making a
copy of her note on that paper. He held the finished product at arm’s
length, then at closer view, and pronounced it perfect. He was about
to carry this part of his plan to its fruition by writing a note of his
own wording in the hand of his wife when a knock stayed his purpose.
Instead of calling to the visitor to enter he rose and opened the door
a few inches, mindful of the scraps on the table. Beppe was there with
a card on his tray.

“Ask Signor Ulrich to wait a few minutes,” Tarsis said, after glancing
at the name. He appreciated the value of finishing his critical task
while the knack of it was warm in his brain and fingers. With composure
unaffected and care unrelaxed he wrote the letter that he had shaped in
his mind. It began with “My Beloved Mario” and closed with the words,
“Yours, though all the world oppose, Hera.” He inscribed the envelope,
“To the Honourable Mario Forza, 17, Via Senato, Milan,” sealed it, and
placed it in an inner pocket of his coat.

Beppe knocked again. “I beg your pardon, signore,” he began when Tarsis
had swung the door no farther than before; “but the gentleman is so
urgent. He says he must see you--that he has news which you ought to
have at once. He seems very full of it, signore,” he added, gravely.
“I am afraid the poor gentleman will explode if he is not admitted very
soon.”

“Ask him to wait another five minutes,” Tarsis said, and Beppe made off
with a submissive “Very good, signore,” but his head shaking dubiously.

One by one his master gathered the sheets on the table into an orderly
pile, folded the lot deliberately, and slipped them into his pocket; he
looked under the table and the chair to be certain that no trace of his
work remained. Then he lit a cigarette, rang for Beppe, and told him to
show in Signor Ulrich.

The superintendent-general of the Tarsis Silk Company bustled into the
library, his lips puffing, eyes big with excitement. Tarsis greeted him
standing, waved his hand to a chair, and asked what had happened.

“Happened!” exclaimed Signor Ulrich. “_Per Dio_, I could tell you
sooner what has not happened.”

“Let us have what has happened first,” was the other’s quiet command.
“Be good enough to give me the facts briefly.”

“Briefly, then,” cried the Austrian, too much agitated to sit down,
“hell is at large!”

“A strike?”

“No; a revolution!”

Tarsis had schooled himself not to take the man too seriously; he
valued the ardour that he gave to his tasks, but took care to divide
the chaff from the wheat of his enthusiasm.

“What are the particulars?” he inquired.

“All our mills are shut down.”

“All in Milan?”

“In three provinces--Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venetia. They called
the hands out by telegraph. But that was only the beginning. The mob
is shouting for bread and rioting; not alone the silk workers, but
hundreds of others--all the lazy rabble of the quarter”; and the man
of practical notions fumed in wrath against this unexpected phase of
social phenomena.

“A bread riot is hardly our affair,” Tarsis remarked, dropping into a
chair. “It’s a case for the police.”

“But they have made it our affair,” Ulrich said. “Every window in the
Ticinese Gate mill is smashed, and what is more, the place would have
been in flames but for the carbineers.”

“Are the soldiers out?” Tarsis asked, blowing the ashes from his
cigarette.

“Soldiers out! Horns of the devil! The soldiers have been attacked,
they have discharged a volley into the crowd, killed two, and wounded
nobody knows how many.”

The Austrian looked in vain for any sign of alarm on the face of his
master. To Tarsis it seemed a petty incident, indeed, by contrast with
the revolt in his own soul and the deed upon which he had determined.

“This has happened before,” he said, “and I have no doubt that order
will be restored in a few hours. Now, let us consider the strike. That
is more to our concern. What do they want this time?”

“I confess that I do not know and am unable to ascertain,” Ulrich
answered, quelled in a measure by the other’s belittlement of the
situation, but not convinced.

“Have they presented a demand?”

“No, signore. It came about in this way at the Ticinese Gate mill:
Every Tuesday I make a visit of inspection there. I arrived as usual
at 8 o’clock this morning. In the weaving department I noted a strange,
brazen-faced fellow going from loom to loom distributing leaflets. I
guessed that he was up to some mischief. Quietly I got a look at one of
the circulars and saw that the rascal was sowing socialism in our own
ground--under our noses, in truth.”

“What was in the circular?”

“Oh, it was a seditious, scurrilous, shameful thing. The heading of
it was ‘To the Golden Geese,’ and it asked them how much longer they
were going to lay golden eggs for Tarsis and his gang of conspirators
against the poor. Tarsis and his gang! Those were the words, signore!
Anarchism, rank anarchism!”

“And then?” Tarsis asked, glancing up while Ulrich paused for breath.

“I had the fellow arrested, of course. But not a word of protest had I
uttered before. Ha! They all thought I was afraid to speak. While he
was distributing the papers I telephoned to the Questura of Police.
Quickly two Civil Guards came and nabbed him. Then what happened? Red
Errico, foreman of a group of the weavers, began to cry out against
me. He called me a slave, a tyrant, a jackal, all in the same breath.
Think of it, signore. What ingratitude! You yourself will remember that
it was I who appeared before the Board of Directors and asked that the
wages of the children be advanced from twelve to fifteen _soldi_ a day.
And now they call me tyrant! The whole crew of them did it, and to my
teeth, signore, to my teeth!”

“And then?” asked Tarsis.

“The ringleader and the men near him began squawking like geese and
hissing. The whole room took it up. Red Errico started a cry of ‘No
more golden eggs for Tarsis and his gang!’ and joining in this every
man left his loom and made for the door. Most of them did not wait to
stop their machines. They rushed down-stairs and at each floor called
to the others to follow. Every man, woman, and child of them ran
pell-mell into the yard as if the mill were on fire. All the time they
hissed and shouted, ‘No more golden eggs!’ The rabble of the quarter
came up, joined the strikers, and before I knew it every window was
smashed. It was a taste of what we may expect from that man Forza’s
preaching.”

Signor Ulrich perceived, not without a feeling of triumph, that his
recital had moved Tarsis at last.

“I have heard enough!” he exclaimed, springing to his feet. “The
Government is to blame. It has been too soft with these Parliamentary
mischief-makers. As to the strike,” he went on, “come to me to-morrow,
and I shall have some plan. Should the unions send a committee
meantime, refuse them audience. Until to-morrow, then, Signor Ulrich.”

But the Austrian did not take himself off. “I beg your pardon,” he
ventured, “but I cannot go without giving you a word of warning. There
is great danger. I beg you not to expose yourself to it.”

“What would you have me do, my friend? Go into hiding?”

“No; and still----”

“Bah! I am not afraid.”

“Nevertheless, signore, if you had heard what I heard. Oh, the way they
cried out against you! Believe me, their passions are roused, and there
is no telling what a mob may do.”

“It is considerate of you,” said Tarsis, “but I think I know how to
take care of myself. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, sir; and again I beg of you not to expose yourself until
after order is restored.”

That the superintendent’s admonition was not wasted appeared when he
had gone from the room. Tarsis paced the floor awhile, striving for
some way to enter the furnace without getting burnt. To the quarter of
the Ticinese Gate he was resolved to go to-night at whatsoever cost.

If it were possible to sharpen his thirst for the blood of Mario Forza
the turn of events, as narrated by the Austrian, had done the work. He
felt that he could not compose himself to sleep again until a decisive
step had been taken. As usual, his thinking bore fruit in definite
ways and means; and in three hours, when the street lamps were lit,
the master of the palace watched his chance and stole out by the Via
Cappuccini gate. He had clipped his beard; instead of a white collar he
wore a dark silk muffler; his hat was a broad-brimmed one of felt, and
a pair of coloured goggles concealed his eyes.




CHAPTER XVI

HUNTING THE PANTHER


BY threading one crooked back street and another he came out behind the
Cathedral, upon whose southern wall and forest of spires a moon almost
round poured its light. That he might keep in the shadow of the great
Gothic pile he went to the northern side and walked there. The organ
was pealing for even-song, and its strains floated out sublimely as he
passed the transept door. He reflected that the last time he had heard
those tones they sounded for his wedding march; and, his impulse to
square accounts with Mario Forza quickened, he struck across the square
at faster pace.

To the bright Victor Emanuel Gallery, its throng of promenaders, or
the laughing, talking men and women at the outdoor tables of the
cafés, he gave no heed. The news of the day--set forth in the journals
hysterically--was not taken with much seriousness in that company.
The conflict of the morning, in Milan, between the workers and the
soldiers was no worse in its result of killed and wounded than like
conflicts in other towns of the kingdom that day and the day before.
All of the newspapers appreciated the importance of what had befallen;
a small number were sensitive of the danger that seemed to be in the
air. An alarmist editor declared that from one end of the Peninsula to
the other the word had passed to revolutionary centres to rise against
the Government.

The trouble was due chiefly to the dearness of bread. In the country
districts it was aggravated by the strike of the agricultural
labourers. Tuscany and Sicily, Naples and Romagna were seething with
discontent. Parma, Piacenza, and Pavia in the North, Arcoli, Malpetra,
and Chieti in the South, had been scenes of bloodshed. Nevertheless, in
the luxurious harbours of life there was a tendency to discredit the
journals, to judge them over-zealous in the concocting of a sensation.

Tarsis gained the busy highway that leads toward Porta Ticinese.
Passing a man he knew, he looked at him squarely to test the efficacy
of his disguise; the other gave no sign of recognition, and he went
on with renewed confidence. He was aware that the Milanese carried
themselves with an odd mien to-night. There was a certain anxiety
in the faces of some, notably the better-dressed class. Those who
belonged to what is called the lower populace had a saucy, lightly
defiant air; they walked with a swagger and stared the better-dressed
out of countenance; some of the young men had in their gait the swing
acquired by service in a regiment of Bersaglieri, but when they passed
a conscript from the barracks they made sport of him.

Tarsis’s course lay past the Chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where
the _Last Supper_ of Leonardo da Vinci survives. Thence, by one or two
turnings, he reached the Corso Porta Ticinese. Never had he seen that
thoroughfare, always teeming with life, so crowded. The people swarmed
in from all directions and overran the sidewalks. He encountered groups
of workmen singing labour songs or listening to heated oratory which
was a confusion of old prejudice and new thought.

A little farther and he was in the heart of the quarter. There were
now no vistas of gardens through arched porticos. Here and there a
withering flower on a window ledge struggled for life. The champion
of vested interests was vaguely sensible of a sneer in the air--an
impalpable ghost that grinned at stock ideas. A dead cat whizzed from
somewhere and struck a passing carbineer, who looked back with a curse,
which the men returned in kind and the women with hisses. In a café
that had a marionette show a drama was under way. It was called _The
Man and the Master_. Every time the Man belaboured the Master with a
club--which was very often--the bravos of the audience were loud and
long.

Tarsis was seeing the social picture at close range, but it did not
give him a new appreciation. His mind was not receptive that night.
He had not entered poverty’s region for observation and study, but to
seek out the one human creature in the world to whom he was willing to
intrust the task of exacting payment from Mario Forza. For the time
being his whole existence was centred upon that design.

He came to the old octagonal church of San Lorenzo. From a pulpit
outside a priest was preaching the gospel of peace. Most of the
auditors were bare-headed women, whose faces, as they listened, were
blank; some of them wore a look of dull scepticalness. On the skirts
of the assemblage younger persons larked among themselves or scoffed
in an undertone at what the priest said--an irreverence that did not
seem to grate upon anybody’s sensibilities. At times the preacher’s
voice was drowned by the _Marseillaise_ coming in mighty chorus from a
tavern. When a bag on the end of a long pole wielded by a brawny-armed
sacristan was passed among the congregation the coppers chinked, as of
old, to the honour of the Lombardian proverb, “The hand of the poor is
the purse of God.”

News-sellers shouted the name of a revolutionary journal. In big
headlines the revolt of the silk workers was heralded and the military
berated for shooting down the window-smashers. The papers were so held
in the arms of the vendors that Tarsis saw the cartoon that had been
dashed off and published on his wedding day. The editor “had judged the
events of the morning a fit reason for recalling it to patriotic use,
as the Minister of War had recalled some of his reserves to service.”
Wherever Tarsis looked he beheld his punched nose and the flow of gold
pieces.

Beyond the church, serene in the moonlight, as if a spirit of the
eternal chiding men for their vain turmoil, rose the ancient colonnade
of San Lorenzo, the only large fragment of her remote past that Milan
possesses. The great Corinthian columns had stood there since the
third century, when “Mediolanum,” second only to Rome, was affluent in
the dignity and beauty of an imperial city. An orator of the quarter,
sowing discontent, once made use of the noble relic to point a moral.
“There are two sorts of ruins, my comrades,” he said; “one is the work
of time, the other of men.”

The place for which Tarsis was making lay a little farther on. It was
a café of the cheap and gaudy grade; its large front windows bore the
legend in yellow and green, “Café of the Ancient Colonnade.” Before he
could traverse the Corso there swung into view from another street a
vociferous collection of men and women marching without order of line.
They were the striking silk-workers. Tarsis had no taste for breaking
through their ranks, which he must have done to reach the point upon
which he had his eye. He waited until they had gone by.

They made a great hubbub with their songs and outcries against facts
of the existing order. At their head a blacksmith bore a huge banner
inscribed “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Men and Women.”
Scattered through the jumbled mass of marchers were placards bearing
such declarations as:

  “We are the golden geese.”
  “We want more of the golden eggs.”
  “Down with the tax on bread.”
  “Down with Tarsis and his gang.”

From windows and sidewalk the onlookers filled the air with their
shouts of “Bravo!” Now and then a group of them would join the
marchers. One placard read, “We Are the Heart-blood of Wealth,” but to
Tarsis the demonstration did not seem a pulse-beat of society; in his
view it was merely another howl from the ungrateful proletariat. He was
annoyed because he had to wait and indignant that the authorities did
not put a stop to the incendiary display. In due course it was broken
up by the carbineers--_ultima ratio legis_. Grape shot was scattered
freely, undertakers enjoyed a revival of trade, and the wards of the
General Hospital were over-crowded. Tarsis heard the firing from a
distance, and thought it high time the authorities took the case in
hand. The last of the marching mob had passed before that act of the
drama was played, leaving him free to cross to the Café of the Ancient
Colonnade.

He saw the Panther--the man he sought--seated at a table by the
window engrossed in a game of _mora_. While he had faith enough in
his disguise as an outdoor device, he was unwilling to tempt fate by
entering the café. It was possible, he reflected, that one of the rough
fellows there, playful in his cups, might pull the goggles from his
eyes. That the sound of his voice alone would be sufficient to make
the one he wanted recognise him he felt sure, but it might reveal his
identity to others as well. So he walked on, to return again and again.
For two hours he passed and repassed the place, striving to catch the
eye of his man and give the signal that would not fail to bring him
forth. When at last his perseverance bore fruit, the fellow who came
out did not look suitable for the employment that Tarsis had to offer.
He was small of stature and of sickly mien. His eyes were those of a
fish, but he moved with the tread of a panther. Tarsis kept on walking,
and the other followed at a discreet distance. In that order they
proceeded amid the throngs of the corsos and in the streets so quiet
that they caught the sound of each other’s footfalls.

So certain was Tarsis of the Panther that he did not once glance
behind. Before he turned to speak to him they had crossed Via Pier
Capponi, the last illuminated street, and were beyond the roofs of the
town standing in the great level plain of Army square. There was no
mincing matters. In the Sicilian patter, which was the mother tongue
of each, Tarsis unfolded his scheme. The wind had blown an opaque
shade over the moon and stars. To the northward, where the long line
of barrack buildings stood, they could discern lights flitting to and
fro and the shadowy movements of men. They hushed their voices once
or twice when there came out of the blackness near by the tramp of
manœuvring soldiers, the clank of arms, the low-keyed commands of the
officers.

When the affair had been arranged, to the smallest detail, the Panther
closed his paw on a thousand-lira note and vanished in the darkness.
Tarsis waited a minute before he made off; then took a path around
by the cavalry barracks, and came into the light of the street lamps
behind the Dal Verme Theatre. There he found a cabman dozing on his
seat. He roused him and named a certain wine-shop hard by the Monforte
Gate beyond the walls.

“Don’t drive across the city,” he said.

“How then, signore?”

“Go by the Girdle Road. I wish to have a drive.”

“As the signore desires,” said the other, clucking to his nag.

Soon they were moving in the wide thoroughfare that girts Milan without
the ramparts. The night was far spent, but men and women kept it alive
in the taverns that clustered about the Ticinese and other gates that
they passed. Tarsis had no intention of visiting the wine-shop, and
when the cabman had set him down there he tossed him his fare and
walked away. Entering the city at once, he followed the Bastion drive
as far as Via Cappuccini, and by this reached the rear gates of Palazzo
Barbiondi. Before stopping to press the electric button concealed in
the iron-work he took off the goggles, turned up the brim of his hat,
and removed the muffler. Beppe answered the summons, rubbing his eyes.
He was about to close the small opening he had made to admit his master
when Tarsis commanded him to throw wide both the gates. The astonished
retainer obeyed, and wondered what new sensation was brewing. Presently
he saw two streams of light shoot from the garage, then the swiftest of
the motor cars with the master at the lever.

“I will return in an hour,” he said, rolling into Via Cappuccini.
Quickly he was beyond the walls on the highway that he had travelled
often in his visits to the Brianza. The moon hung low, but the road
was all his own, and he let his machine go. When he stopped it was
before the post-office in Castel-Minore. The village was asleep and the
post-office was dark; but Tarsis knew of the iron box set in the wall,
with its slot for letters, and, assured that no eye beheld him, he drew
from a pocket the forgery he had prepared with such patience and skill.
A moment he held it in the light of the motor car’s lamps to make
certain that it was no other than the missive addressed to Mario Forza;
then he went to the box and dropped it in. The hour which he told Beppe
he would consume had not elapsed when he was back in Via Cappuccini
touching the secret button at the palace gate.




CHAPTER XVII

THE POT BOILS OVER


THE following day at dawn La Ferita and forty thousand fellow mill and
factory hands broke the time-honoured rule of their lives. Instead of
going to the work that awaited them, they joined the battalions of the
unemployed and set about the business of redressing their wrongs. They
adopted the extraordinary course of throwing up barricades and taking
possession of half of the town. To Ulrich the Austrian and masters of
labour in general this boiling over of the social pot was a puzzle.
And the municipal authorities were astonished that so many thousands
of the people should follow the banner of anarchy; that men and women,
hundreds of them, should stand their ground and die when cavalry
charged the barricades. The military officers could not comprehend it
at all, but agreed, over their cognac in the cafés, that such heroism
was worthy of the conventional battle-field.

Mario Forza and his party in the Camera had striven to avert the
disaster, but always the Government had been deaf to the warning. Why
workers should cease work and wish to upset the established order
was as much a riddle to the cabinet as to the shop-keeper and the
manufacturer. The editor of the newspaper that printed the famous
“punched nose” of Tarsis was asked what he thought of the situation.
He defined it as a mixture of labour war and hunger begotten of
incompetent, unenlightened government.

At one gate the troops--most of them country lads--had to fight
thousands of peasants armed with pitchforks and scythes who tried to
re-enforce the rebels within the walls. Cavalry rushes and volleys from
the infantry were used against them, but their barricades did not fall
until cannon was discharged into them. Many of the rioters had had more
experience as soldiers than the uniformed farm hands against whom they
fought; a condition difficult to avoid in a country where military
service is the price of citizenship.

On an outer boulevard a large body of insurgents, after a company of
Bersaglieri had given them a peppering from their muskets, advanced
on the soldiers and showed them what could be done with stones flung
by enthusiasts. They drove the soldiers into the moat that runs round
the city wall, then returned to the barricades they were building of
overturned carts and carriages of the gentry and an automobile they had
captured.

Every one arrested was heard before a court martial; all prisoners
were committed to cells. From behind their bars they launched curses
against their captors and defiance of authority. Some of the newspapers
hailed the uprising as the birth of a new and glorious Italy. These
were seized promptly. Men with swords sat at the desks where men with
pens had done their work. The Queen of Holland, who was expected,
was advised by the Minister of the Interior not to proceed to Milan.
Wherever workmen were found grouped an unceremonious shower of bullets
dispersed them.

It had been all fun for the rebels the night before, when Tarsis and
the Panther, in the gloom of Piazza dell’ Armi, arranged to square the
account against Mario Forza. There were not enough soldiers about then
to interfere with the mobs that took the ordering of pleasures into
their own hands. They swept into the Dal Verme Theatre and occupied
excellent seats. The manager, wise in his hour, accepted the situation
and instructed his singers to do their best. It turned out as he
expected. Listening to the arias of _The Huguenots_ proved tame work
for revolutionists, and before the act was over they rushed into the
street, following a leader who had shouted, in a voice heard above the
music, “On to the bakeries, comrades! On to the meat-shops!”

The same cry had begun to ring in every part of the town where the
revolt was in progress. It was an epitome of the new movement. After
all, the reform chiefly desired was a full stomach instead of an empty
one. Bakery windows were broken, haunches of meat were lifted from
their hooks, slaughter-houses were sacked of dripping carcasses. Bread!
It was piled up at the street corners! A new type of butcher presided
over the meat. He gave it for the asking and used no scales.

All this was pleasing and satisfactory to the Panther, who witnessed
such scenes of the drama as were enacted in the neighbourhood of the
Café of the Ancient Colonnade. It seemed to him that affairs had taken
a distinctly lucky turn, in view of the service Tarsis had engaged him
to perform. As he sipped his coffee or puffed his “Cavour” he reflected
that the minds of the officials, press, and public were preoccupied by
doings of great moment. Therefore, they would have scant attention to
spare on the result of the small commission intrusted to his skill.
In this carnival of bloodshed and pillage who would care whether the
Honourable Mario Forza were alive or dead? He had no misgiving, but
it was pleasant to feel that in case his work were done awkwardly the
police would be too busy to meddle with his business of escape.

“Easy money, and more to come,” he told himself, complacently, and
the hand in his pocket touched the thousand-lira note that had been
transferred from the wallet of Tarsis.

In other cities there had been similar risings, and the rulers,
appalled by the power of the people to help themselves, decided
suddenly to give them the measures of relief that Mario Forza and his
Parliamentary group had been asking for months. The General Government
issued a decree suspending the entire duty on wheat; the municipal
authorities of Milan put forth a proclamation saying that the price
of bread would be reduced at the public expense. But the concessions
were too late. Not by bread alone was the madness to be appeased. The
fire of insurrection had entered the blood, and the masses went on with
their object lesson in the science of bettering social conditions.
Refused the reasonable, they demanded the unreasonable.

Emblems of refinement and luxury enraged them. A blind fury which none
could foresee attacked the statues in the public squares, the ornaments
on the fountains, the treasure houses of painting, sculpture, and
letters. A few who loved and revered such things risked their lives to
save them.

Ulrich the Austrian, on his way to Palazzo Barbiondi to learn how it
fared with his master, saw and heard things that took the high colour
from his cheeks and made him continue his journey with the cab-shade
drawn. He had seen women place their children on the top of barricades,
bare their breasts to musket fire, and invite death. Once above the
wave of the mob’s rage he had heard the tremulous cry of a child; a
mother, in the front rank of the rebels, was holding it at arms’ length
while the cavalry dashed upon her. And he had seen women, when struck,
bandage their wounds and return to the battle.

Wherever the mob fought most savagely there was La Ferita, the long
scar on her face dulled now by the grime of the struggle. Often it
was her hand that applied the torch. With the women that followed
her she urged on the men, or dashed alone in front of the soldiers,
calling them cowards, assassins, “slaves of Tarsis, who killed little
children.” Now and then the soldiers charged their tormentors. Although
some of them stood their ground or were carried away wounded, La Ferita
was never among the number.

“I can die!” she told her comrades. “But it is not time. I have work to
do.”

In Via Torino she led her women to a roof, from which they poured such
a destructive fire on the troops that they had to retire for shelter.
This was achieved without other weapons than bits of terra cotta,
and by a form of attack not set down in any manual of war. The women
tore up the tiles and chimney pots and dropped them on the heads of
the soldiers. A little while and women lay dead on those roofs. An
officer of the military, tired of seeing his men felled, stationed
sharpshooters on other roofs to pick them off. But even from this
danger La Ferita escaped unharmed.

Inured to long hours of toil, the day of battling had told little upon
her strength, and the deed of vengeance her mind was set upon spurred
her forward. Then there was the _grappa_, that fiery liquor dear to the
Milanese workman. It was as free as the bread and the meat to-day, and
La Ferita did not miss her share. In Via Torino she fell in with a part
of the mob that was sweeping toward the Cathedral. Vainly she strove
to lead them on to Palazzo Barbiondi, but they lacked courage to hurl
themselves against the wall of men and horses that reached across the
square.

Yet they drew nearer by inches, until their irregular front had pressed
beyond Via Silvio Pellico, closing that entrance to the square and
blocking its traffic. The carriage of the Cardinal of Milan, conveying
his Eminence to the railway station, happened to be one of the vehicles
stopped, and a footfarer unable to proceed for the same reason was
Mario Forza. From his carriage window the Cardinal hailed Mario. It
was their first meeting since the day in Palazzo Barbiondi when Tarsis
blamed the leader of the New Democracy for the assassination of the
King. Together they looked on while the legions of lawless force, fired
with passion, approached the cool champions of constituted power,
reviling them the while and provoking a reply by such irritants as
stones and bottles often well aimed.

Presently the reply was delivered. A bugle blast, and the line of
cavalry dashed forward. La Ferita, instead of joining the stampede of
her comrades, kept to the tactics she had employed so successfully in
the face of other cavalry charges. She ran toward the right flank of
the onrushing troopers, thinking to gain the shelter of the portico of
Victor Emanuel Gallery where it ends at Via Silvio Pellico. She would
have succeeded this time but for that last glass of _grappa_, gulped
down after her escape from the sharpshooters on the roofs.

A few feet from the intended refuge she stumbled and fell at full
length. The thunder of hoofs and the clank of arms were loud above her
head; but in the next moment Mario Forza had her in his arms, the
cavalcade was flying by, and she stood safe under the portico. She
never knew who saved her, nor did she care; enough for her that she had
cheated the soldiers once more, and she shook her fist after them and
cursed them as they went on with their task of driving the mob from the
square.

Nor was Mario aware that the woman he had saved was she who cried out
so bitterly against Tarsis in the hospital. Although she came out
of the incident unscathed, her rescuer had not fared so well. The
dangling scabbard of the last trooper of the file struck him a glancing
blow, but one that dazed his senses and brought from his forehead a
crimson stream. When full consciousness returned he found himself in
the Cardinal’s carriage, which had come to a standstill in the square
before La Scala Theatre.

With a handkerchief the Cardinal had done what he could to bandage
Mario’s wound. “It is only a little one,” he told him, “but we shall
look to it.” He had ordered the coachman to drive to the convent of
Santa Maria delle Grazie. “A few minutes, Honourable,” he said, “and
our friends the Bernardines will stanch that flow of blood and make
you more comfortable.”

“The Bernardines?” Mario repeated. “They are in Corso Magenta, and your
Eminence was bound for the railway station, in the opposite direction.”

“Never fear,” the other returned, cheerfully. “The trains for Como or
anywhere else are not departing or arriving on the mark to-day, and if
I miss one I shall take another. Ah, what have we here?”

The way was blocked again. A detachment of the mob which took the
soldiers unawares and succeeded in gaining the square had attempted
to pull down the statue of Leonardo da Vinci. The rope was ready,
but before they could throw it over the figure and haul it from the
pedestal a battalion of infantry had arrived at double quick. As the
insurgents retreated up Via Manzoni they filled the air with shouts of
defiance, mingled with a hideous uproar of mocking laughter. It was the
laughter of those who had taken up the cry, “On to the Supper! Down
with the Supper!”

The words came distinctly enough to the ears of Mario and the Cardinal,
in spite of the din all about, but they did not attach to them the
meaning of the grinning mob. Had they grasped the purpose expressed
in that grim cry they would have been keener to reach the Bernardine
community to which they were bound, and for a more potent reason
than that of caring for the wound of Mario Forza. For centuries the
refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie had held the
painting by which the world knows Leonardo da Vinci best--his _Last
Supper_. It had survived the periods of desecration begun by the monks
themselves and ended by the French soldiers in 1796, under command
of the general whose gift to the House of Barbiondi--the Napoleonic
table--Tarsis prized so highly. The picture must have been lost but
for the devoted service of other painters, who, with reverent hands,
from age to age, brought back its beauty of form and colour. Now the
monks were its guardians; and now it was a frenzied populace that
would desecrate it--not in the old way, by neglect or rough usage,
but by tearing it out of the wall and putting an end forever to the
restorations.

Via Alberto was clear again, and the carriage moved forward, while the
voice of the destroyers, growing fainter, sounded as a hoarse murmur
behind La Scala Theatre. In Piazza Mercanti hands used to far heavier
tasks laid hold of the horses’ heads and stopped the vehicle with a
jerk that threw the Cardinal and Mario from their seats. The doors were
flung open and jeering men and women surged about them.

“Make the gentlemen walk!”

“To the barricade with the carriage!”

“Come, let us see you use your legs!”

And the gentlemen would have walked but for the timely recognition of
Mario by one of the masters of the situation. “Back, comrades!” he
cried to them. “It is Mario Forza, the friend of labour.”

Quickly the horses were released, and the carriage rolled on amid
“Vivas!” for the Honourable Forza. Without mishap Corso Magenta was
attained, and they drew up at the portal of the convent. The chubby
face and mournful eyes of Brother Sebastiano greeted the Cardinal, and
the iron-bound door swung wide to him. Swift were the movements of the
brothers when they realised what had occurred. Not only his Eminence
under their roof, but with him the Honourable Forza, wounded and in
need of succour! Suddenly the calm of the place was changed to bustling
activity. Two of the brothers lugged a cot into a large high-ceiled
room where sunshine entered, and the prior Sebastiano sent others here
and there for liniment, water, lint for the bandage, and a flask of
brandy.

“You have placed me in good hands,” Mario said to the Cardinal from the
cot on which he reclined; “and I beg of you to retard your journey no
longer. Here you may leave me and have no anxiety.”

“Of that I am certain,” the Cardinal agreed, with a nod of confidence
to Brother Sebastiano. “Therefore I shall try for that train.” He
looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes after the hour. That the delays
to-day are of long duration is my hope; a forlorn one, yet I’ll pursue
it, for to Como I must go.”

Brother Sebastiano and his fellows held up their hands in dismay.
Passion was rioting without, but on their side of the convent walls
they knew a sense of security, as if the turmoil of the world, which
had turned humanity back to the instincts of the jungle, was far away.
They shuddered at the thought that violent hands might be laid on the
Cardinal. Heaven would not permit it, but suppose--suppose his Eminence
should receive a black eye!

“Travelling to-day within the city walls or without,” Brother
Sebastiano ventured to admonish him, “is a most perilous undertaking.”

“Difficult we have found it,” the Cardinal owned, “but hardly perilous.”

There was a low murmur of respectful dissent from the monks. “Perilous,
too, for the body, we can assure your Eminence. Ah, what if harm should
befall you!”

“Allay your fear, my dear brothers,” the other said, lightly, with an
assuring smile. “Suppose they do take my carriage? I can call a cab.
Failing there I can walk. The problem, you see, is exceedingly simple.
As to harm corporeal--come, now, why should the people harm me? To my
knowledge I have not harmed them.”

“True, true,” Brother Sebastiano hastened to assent. “And yet, if your
Eminence will pardon, there is our Brother Ignazio. He, too, did them
no harm; but look at his eye!”

Brother Ignazio had just entered the room, carrying a vessel of water.
One of his eyelids and the flesh above and below were of deep violet
shading down to sickly yellow.

“Alas, your Eminence,” he sighed, “those whom we would serve raised
their hand against me. It happened this morning in the Corso at our
gate, after the service of tierce. As I turned the corner they fell
upon me. They pulled my hair, my ears and--my nose. But, with no
bitterness in my soul, I passed on. Then, without warning, as I was
about to enter here, one of them ran up and gave me--this.” He pointed
to his discoloured eye.

The Cardinal admitted that the evidence was conclusive. In his offering
of consolation to Brother Ignazio he told him that the spirit abroad
to-day was no respecter of persons.

“Nevertheless,” he added, “I shall go to Como if I can get a train.
Addio, Honourable,” he said, going up to the cot, where the brothers
were busy with their patient. “If the railway is impossible I will
return. In any event, my friend, I will send the carriage to take you
to Via Senato.”

The prior and all the monks not in immediate service to Mario
accompanied the visitor to the door, and they gave a concurrent sigh of
anxiety as his carriage rolled away. A little while and their patient,
his wound dressed, was sitting up and telling them how it happened. He
had reached the point in the narrative where La Ferita fell and the
cavalry was rushing on, when his ear caught a familiar, ominous murmur
and he paused. It was the voice of the mob as he had heard it last
rising from behind La Scala. Only now it grew louder. All at once it
burst forth like a fury that had broken bounds, and coming in by the
open windows filled the convent in every part. And above the roar and
mocking laughter Mario heard again the cry, “Down with the Supper!” Now
he understood its import, and the white faces of the brothers told that
they too comprehended the jest of the savage throng.




CHAPTER XVIII

MARIO PLAYS THE DEMAGOGUE


  The workman sweats
  And little gets;
  The rich and fine
  On capons dine.
  Is this fair play?
  Oh, yes! priests say,
  For the good God wills it so.
            Song of the Bread Rioters._

MARIO sprang from the couch and asked the brothers the way to the
refectory--a small building on the Corso Magenta side of the convent’s
domain separated by tortuous passages and a courtyard from the rest
of the structure. It was on the southern wall of this humble edifice
that Leonardo painted the Nazarene and the Twelve at table. Here the
picture had spoken to the Milanese four hundred years ago, and here,
for all who wished to look, it told still the story of the hour before
Gethsemane. By long custom the Bernardines had thrown the place open
every day at a certain hour; but Brother Sebastiano, in the light of
Brother Ignazio’s black eye, had decided to break the rule to-day.
Thus it fell out that when the frenzied reformers of society reached
the gate to the arched passage on which the refectory opened they
found it locked and bolted and barred. That was a condition calling
for the use of axes, and it was the sound of these on the massive oak,
ringing across the inner court and penetrating the crooked hallways,
that brought Mario from his couch resolved to do something--he knew not
what--to save the picture.

“The _Last Supper!_ Our Leonardo!” he exclaimed. “It must be defended!”

“But what can we do, Signor Forza?” asked Brother Sebastiano in
despair. “Who can avail against their madness? Heaven shield us! The
gate is yielding!”

Mario, trusting to chance to find the way, started off in the direction
of the clamour and the sound of crackling oak. With a common impulse
the brothers followed, but he turned and besought them not to add fuel
to the wrath of the mob. In a flash he realised that the religious as
well as every other established order was an object of hatred to-day,
and that the wild beast out there would be infuriated the more at sight
of the cowl and the tonsured head.

“Let me, at least, go with you!” Brother Sebastiano entreated him.

“Yes; come and guide me to the refectory,” Mario said, catching his arm
and leading him away, and with an upraised hand warning the others to
stay behind. “But you will go back when I bid you?”

“As you will, Honourable,” the prior acquiesced sadly, and they moved
on toward the din at the gate. When they had threaded the gloom of many
angular passages and emerged into the sunlight of the courtyard, Mario,
seeing on the opposite side the little building that held the picture,
asked Brother Sebastiano to return.

“Not yet,” said the other. “If you enter it must be by the postern
door, and I have the key.”

“No, no!” Mario protested firmly. “You must come no farther. Give me
the key. Go back, I beg you!”

  The workman sweats
  And little gets;
  The rich and fine
  On capons dine.
  Is this fair play?
  Oh, yes! priests say,
  For the good God wills it so.

When his ear caught the last lines, jerked out in mighty chorus by
the throng in Corso Magenta, Brother Sebastiano handed Mario the key.
“Addio,” he said to him, pressing his hand. “Heaven guard you in this
danger.”

“Be of good cheer,” Mario returned, and struck across the courtyard. A
moment the prior stood there, puzzled to know what the Honourable meant
to do, and striving to reconcile his own inactivity with his duty as
head of the convent. But, faithful to his promise, he returned to the
brothers’ inner sanctum to pray and commit the issue to divine care.

At the moment Mario turned the key in the postern the outer gate gave
way, and the rioters, with a yell of triumph, surged into the passage.
Between them and the _Last Supper_ stood yet the refectory’s front
door, and the sound of axes on this greeted Mario as he entered. The
place was in deep gloom, relieved only by faint gleams that stole under
the heavy curtains at the windows. To one of these he groped his way,
threw back the hanging, and let in a stream of light that fell upon the
picture but left the rest of the room in half darkness. He would have
let in more light, but there was not time. The door came down, and the
axemen, the women with torches, and all the vandal crew rushed into
the house made sacred by a painter’s art. At the head of them was Red
Errico--he who started the revolt in the Tarsis silk-mill. Before they
saw the Narazene and the Twelve they beheld Mario standing in front of
the picture--a mysterious figure at first sight, his bandaged forehead
and upraised hand thrown into weird relief by the narrow shaft of light
that played upon him from the window. It was an apparition that made
Red Errico halt and checked for the moment the rush of those at his
back.

“Mario Forza!” the leader exclaimed, and the name passed from mouth to
mouth, as those in the room moved nearer, pushed by the crowd behind.

“Long live Mario Forza!” a stout-lunged carpenter shouted. “But down
with the Supper!”

“Well spoken! On, comrades! Down with it!” a dozen of them chimed in,
and there was a general move toward the painting.

“You have right on your side!” Mario proclaimed, in a voice sounding
above the growl of the mob. “When you wish to pull down this work of
Leonardo it is your right to do so, and no one may say no. You are the
people, and the people must rule!”

“Come on, then, let us rule!” the carpenter cried, raising his axe,
ready to spring forward, but Red Errico pulled him back.

“Wait!” he commanded. “Wait until the Honourable has spoken.”

“Just a minute, men and women,” Mario went on. “Just a minute let us
look at the picture before we blot it out forever. Let us have a last
look at the face of that Blessed Workman at the middle of the table.
You all know He was a carpenter, and let me tell you that He made as
good a fight in His time to help the workingman as you are making
to-day.”

“Bravo!” the carpenter exclaimed, lowering his axe.

“He told the rich man to sell all that he had and give to the poor,”
Mario began again, the dissentient outbursts of his audience succeeded
now by sullen murmurs here and there. “He told him, too, that it was
harder for him to get into Paradise than for a camel to go through a
needle’s eye. He always had a good word for the poor, and He was never
afraid to speak out. And what happened? You all know. So I ask you,
for your good,--men and women of Milan,--before you kill His beautiful
likeness there, as the heedless ones of old killed Him--before you do
this let us look well upon His face, that we may remember long the man
who dared to tell the wearers of purple and fine linen that their gifts
were not so great as the widow’s mite.”

He paused a moment and no voice in the crowd made reply.

“Most of you have looked upon this picture before,” he continued, every
ear attentive now, “for I see among you the faces of those who live in
the neighbourhood, and the door here has always been open.”

“It wasn’t open to-day!” broke in one fellow. “But we got in all the
same. Eh, comrades?”

“Shut up!” commanded Red Errico, and he was supported by others hissing
for silence. “Can’t you wait till Signor Forza has finished?”

“I am not here to make a long speech, friends,” Mario said, smiling.
“It is only that I thought it would be good for all of us to have one
more calm look at the faces in this group of famous workingmen. They
were toilers, like yourselves, those men seated on each side of Christ.
It is the hour before Gethsemane. He is going to leave them soon, to be
nailed to the cross for telling the world that the labourer is worthy
of his hire, and other things just as true. See what honest faces those
men have--all but one! Do you see which this is? Can you point out
Judas the traitor?”

“Yes, yes!” a score of voices answered.

“The one next to Christ.”

“Donkey! There’s one on each side of Him!”

“He of the long nose.”

“The fellow that’s grasping the bag of silver!”

“Give us more light!” cried others in the rear of the throng. “We can’t
see much!”

Mario told them to pull back the hangings at the windows, and this was
done so promptly and with such vigour by many hands that some of the
curtains were jerked from their fastenings.

“Yes; Judas has his pieces of silver,” Mario resumed, glancing toward
the man who had observed Iscariot’s hand gripping the bribe; “and when
Christ says ‘One of you shall betray me’ the traitor holds up one hand
as if to say ‘Really, I can’t believe that.’ But you see that the brand
of guilt is on his face none the less. What a picture it is, and how
proud your forefathers have been of it, men and women of Milan. Do you
know how long it has been on that wall?”

“I do!” Red Errico called out. “Four hundred years!”

Mario told him he was right, and the leader’s friends looked at Errico
in awe as there rose about his head the halo that knowledge creates for
the ignorant. “Yes; it was on this very day four centuries ago that
Leonardo gave it the last touch. Through all that time it has told its
wondrous story, and may go on telling it to you and your children. Who
among you will be, like Judas, the first to strike a traitorous blow
against the best friend the wage-earner ever had?”

There was no response for what seemed a long space, during which the
insurgents looked one another in the face and exchanged decisive
shakings of the head. Even Red Errico had no words to utter except
“Come away, comrades,” as he pushed through the crowd, which went with
him toward the door. But the wild beast was still in their bosoms,
lulled to sleep only for the moment by the words of an adroit orator.
They gave forth a sullen growl as they moved into the street, looking
back darkly at Mario, as if resentful at heart of the power that had
killed their desire to violate the old picture.

For Mario, it was all he could do to keep on his feet and make
his way back across the courtyard to where the Bemardines awaited
him anxiously. The task just accomplished had almost exhausted
his strength, ebbed to a low point, as it was, by the blow of the
cavalryman’s scabbard and the resultant loss of blood. The wound in his
forehead throbbed painfully, and he staggered now rather than walked.
From the farther side of the close, to which they had ventured, the
brothers saw him approach. They had caught a glimpse as well of the
grumbling mob as it retreated from the passage, and they knew their
_Cenacolo_[A] was saved.

“But at what cost!” exclaimed Brother Sebastiano, hurrying forward with
the others to the aid of Mario. “Ah, Signor Forza,” he said, taking him
by the arm, “you have made all mankind your debtor to-day. But do not
speak now, we beg of you. Some time you will tell us the story. Now you
must rest.”

Scarcely had they attained the inner sanctum when there was the sound
of a halting carriage in Via Fiori, followed by a ring of the door
bell. Presently the Cardinal appeared, his step quickened by the
account of the event in the refectory given by Brother Ignazio on the
way from the outer door.

“Ah, your Eminence,” the young monk was saying, “we feared never to
look upon the Honourable’s living face again.”

“Indeed, it is most wonderful that we do so now,” was the prelate’s
comment, as he seated himself beside Mario. “Why were you left
single-handed to cope with them?” he asked, in reproof meant for the
Bemardines.

[Footnote A: The _Lord’s Supper_.]

“Single-voiced, rather,” Mario amended, smiling at the Cardinal’s
notion of the encounter. “It was at my behest and against their wish
that the brothers took no part.”

“I think I understand,” the Cardinal said. “There was a bull to be
tamed and it was better to keep red rags out of sight. A stroke of mind
against muscle. But in taming the bull you have almost lost--yourself.”

With words that his looks did not bear out, Mario strove to assure them
all that save for the pain where his head was cut his suffering was
slight.

“If your Eminence will drive me there,” he said, “I will go to my
apartments.”

The Bemardines protested in chorus. “Let us care for you here,” Brother
Sebastiano pleaded.

“It is most kind of you,” Mario said, rising, “but sooner or later we
must part, and now I feel able to go.”

Seeing him resolute, the Cardinal rose as well and with the brothers
all about them they went to the door.

“To our meeting again, Signor Forza,” said the prior in bidding adieu.
“Some day you will come and tell us the story?”

“Yes, and you may expect me soon.”

When the rumble of the carriage had drowned the distant roar and
crackle of musketry which told that the unequal conflict was still on,
Mario spoke his regret that the Cardinal for his sake had lost the
train to Como, and an important engagement.

“I would lose all the trains in the world in such a cause,” the other
returned. “Did your going to the convent not save our Leonardo? As
to the journey, I shall accomplish it yet by some means. The railway
strike is general. Traffic has ceased on all the lines north and south.
When, I wonder, shall we give to the greatest of our problems the
reason we apply to the solution of smaller ones?”

“We are still in social darkness,” Mario said, and the Cardinal
detected a note of despair that was strange to him. To the leader
of the New Democracy the last two days had been a season of broken
illusion, humiliation, and quailing hope for the cause to which he
had devoted his life. He had seen the peasantry of many provinces
encouraged and uplifted by the co-operative works his party had
fostered; he had endured abuse in their behalf, for his foes delighted
to brand the movement a nursery of revolt against the established
order. It was true that he had not rested content to develop mere
industrial concord. He had striven to keep alive the ideal, the
sentimental side of the cause. Those who had risen to the idea of
his Democracy knew that it touched humanity at every point, that its
aspiration was to imbue government with the scientific leaven of to-day
as well as the Golden Rule, to the end that Italy’s many ills might
be cured. But now, in the face of this outbreak of class hatred, so
hostile to the spirit he had striven to awaken, he apprehended as
he never had before how little was the progress made. He felt as a
gardener who contemplates the weeds growing faster than he can uproot
them. He must have betrayed his gloomy reflections, for the Cardinal
said, as they turned into Via Senato, and the carriage stopped at
Mario’s door:

“The seed has taken root, but is not growing to your wish. For this, my
dear friend, do not despair. We set the twig in the earth, and heaven
sends the storm to bend it to the tree’s course. We regret the storm;
but better always a storm than a calm. Beware of calms in any form.
They are nearly akin to death. Life is action, battle, achievement.
Real success bids us shape ourselves into God’s plan as fast as it is
revealed to us.”

“I thank you,” Mario said, cordially, grasping the Cardinal’s hand.
“It is the true, the clear way, and it is full of hope. I thank your
Eminence, too, for all the kindness shown me this day. _Addio_.”

“_Addio, caro_ Forza.”

The man-servant who admitted Mario exclaimed in horror at sight of his
bandaged head, and forgot for a time to hand him a letter inscribed
“Urgent” that had arrived by the only post delivered in Milan that day.
But he brought it in, with many excuses, at the moment that his master
was about to seek the grateful repose of his own bed. It was the letter
Tarsis had prepared the day before when he decided to exact payment of
Forza--the writing forged in Hera’s hand, that should make simple the
task of the Panther in collecting the bill:

  CASTEL-MINORE, BRIANZA, Tuesday.

  MY BELOVED MARIO:

 I have left Antonio Tarsis and returned to my father’s house. Of your
 counsel I have need. Come to the old monastery to-morrow (Wednesday)
 night at nine. Wait for me in the cloister. Yours, though all the
 world oppose,

                                                  HERA.

  P.S.--Destroy this letter.

The effect was precisely what Tarsis counted upon when he made the
midnight run in the motor car to Castel-Minore and dropped the
letter into the post-office. Mario gave the sheet to a candle flame,
destroying the only scrap that might be used against Tarsis should the
Panther, by chance, bungle his work. Next he looked at the clock and
saw that with a good horse there was time to reach the monastery at
the hour. The new excitement brought back the heavy throbbing at his
temples and sharper pain from the wound. He rang for the servant and
astounded him by saying:

“I must go to the Brianza. There are no trains. Have Bruno saddled at
once.”




CHAPTER XIX

WHAT MONEY COULD NOT BUY


TARSIS spared no pains in the laying of a plan, but that done, and the
work of execution satisfactorily begun, he awaited the result with
confidence and equable temper. It was so with even such an exceptional
emprise as that of taking the life of Mario Forza. With the decoying
letter in the post-office, he felt that the affair was well in train;
so he went to his bed and slept soundly. It lacked something less than
two hours of mid-day when he rang for his _valet de chambre_. Instead
of the usual prompt appearance of that individual, he was surprised by
the sleek face of Beppe at the door; it was a pale and haggard face
as well this morning, with alarm looking out from its heavy eyes. His
voice and his hand trembled while he explained that all the other
domestics had quit the palace an hour before.

“What is the matter?” Tarsis asked, eyeing him keenly.

“Signore, they were afraid to stay any longer.”

“Of what are they afraid?”

“The mob, signore; the mob! Much has happened since you went to bed.
The working people have gone mad. A gang of them entered the palace
of the Corvini and sacked it, they say, from cellar to roof besides
killing the young Duke and three of the servants who tried to drive
them back. It is war, signore. Look!”

He went to the window and swept back the drapery, to reveal the scene
of a military camp. On the opposite side of the Corso, within the
paling of the Public Gardens, a regiment of infantry was bivouacked.
For an absorbed minute Tarsis stared out, as Beppe thought, upon the
rows of white tents and patrolling sentries; but he had seen a solitary
figure moving toward the Venetian Gate that had more interest for him.
There was no mistaking that forward bend of the head and slinking
movement. It was the Panther. Tarsis consulted his watch and wondered
if his accomplice were thus early on his way to the monastery. Then he
turned to Beppe and remarked, in the tone of one coolly weighing the
situation:

“This part of the city, I take it, has been saved from disorder so far?”

“Yes, signore. The troops have cut off the quarters of the Porta
Romana, Porta Ticinese, and Porta Garibaldi from the rest of the town;
but, if the signore will permit me, there is no telling how long they
will be able to hold their position. Signor Ulrich says the rioters may
break through and attack this part of the city at any moment.” He spoke
with a shudder and gave a look of warning to his master.

“Signor Ulrich?” Tarsis repeated. “When have you seen him?”

“This moment, signore. He is without.”

“Ask him to wait.”

When seated at the breakfast table, meagrely spread with what Beppe had
contrived to prepare, Tarsis allowed the superintendent to be ushered
in. If the servant’s disquieting report had needed verification, here
it was. Those rosy cheeks were not puffing now with excitement and
indignation against ungrateful strikers; his lips were ashen, his
voice subdued; the events of the morning had given him an enlarged
appreciation of the meaning and possibilities of the power that had
risen in Italy; and the new light frightened him.

Believing that bad news of the man who held secret meetings with his
wife would be pleasing to Tarsis, the visitor’s first announcement
was that Mario Forza had been wounded. Of the episode in Cathedral
Square--the stampede of the mob, the saving of La Ferita from
the rushing cavalry, and the inadvertent blow that cut Forza’s
forehead--Signor Ulrich was able to narrate only so much as he had
learned from the hastily gathered accounts of the journals.

“Is it known if the wound is severe?” Tarsis inquired, feigning a
casual interest in the detail.

“One account--that of the _Secolo_, I think--says it is not likely to
prove mortal.”

“But it is enough to keep him from journeying to the Brianza to-night,”
Tarsis told himself, and cursed the woman whose fall and rescue had
thwarted his purpose. He saw the Panther waiting vainly in the gloom
of the cloister and the return to its sheath of his blade unstained
with blood. But Tarsis did not rage or brood over the miscarried plan.
He knew how to bide his time. Moreover, there had begun to run in his
veins a terror that made all other considerations small indeed.

Signor Ulrich told his story as one might have recounted the
devastations of a tornado. His recital was grimly quiet until he
touched upon the part played by the women. Then the pictures of what he
saw, filling his mind again, caused him to roll up the whites of his
eyes and shake his head in token that the world had gone to the dogs.
Per Bacco! They were no longer women, but devils from the under world!
Did they not go through fire and wreck like fiends of inferno? Did they
not bare their breasts to musket fire and invite death?

Tarsis betrayed no sign of impatience, as he was wont to do when Signor
Ulrich indulged his gift for detailed narrative. Indeed, he himself
lengthened the story by putting questions to bring out salient facts.
The general superintendent could not credit the startling deduction,
at first, but he became positive, as the evidence increased, that his
master--Antonio Tarsis, possessor of untold wealth, the industrial
ruler who in the past had only a smile for the demonstrations of
labour--Signor Ulrich perceived that he was concerned, in this
avalanche of rage, for the security of his person.

“Do you think the military will be able to hold them at bay until
re-enforcements come?” he asked.

“I am afraid not, signore,” the other replied.

“Why?”

“Because there is no certainty of the re-enforcements.”

“Two classes of reserves, you say, have been summoned. Will they not
respond?”

“Some of them tried to respond, but they were halted by the rioters
and turned back. A thousand started this morning from Piacenza. Men
and women threw themselves in front of the train to prevent them from
proceeding. The city’s southern gates are held by the rioters, and they
are reinforced hourly by agricultural labourers bent on making common
cause with them. I tell you, signore, the situation is critical.”

“What do you think will happen?”

“The rioters will be masters of the city before another sunrise.”

Tarsis sprang up and began to pace the floor, but stopped suddenly,
and, with a smile intended to be taken as one of amusement, said, “I
think you are over-counting their strength.”

“I hope so, signore; but General Bellori told me that he thought every
available man would be needed to hold the gates.”

As if to bear out his words, the roll of drums fell upon their ears.
Looking out, Tarsis beheld the regiment whose nearness had given him
no slight sense of security wheeling out of the Public Gardens and
moving toward Cathedral Square. With fists clinched, he stared after
the retreating bayonets until the last one had disappeared behind the
bend of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, while the superintendent, standing by,
had eyes only for the face of his employer. He saw the tide of Tarsis’s
helpless anger mount and strain the veins of his neck and crimson his
cheeks and temples.

“Maledictions upon the weak-backed Government!” he burst out, turning
from the window. “If they shot down the anarchists wherever they found
them, killed them by the thousand, they would put a stop to this
nonsense.”

“You are right, signore,” chimed in the Austrian. “They have been too
easy with them, particularly with the women, who are ten times worse
than the men.”

Signor Ulrich had not overdrawn the danger. The insurgents were nearer
to a mastery of the city than he or any one else supposed. At one point
they had cut off a large body of troops by entrapping them into a ring
of barricades. At least half an army corps was needed if the Government
was to retain control of the situation.

“The palace is wholly without defence,” Tarsis said, after a moment
of silence. “Something must be done. I shall call up the Questura and
demand a force sufficient to protect my property.”

He went into the library and caught up the receiver of the telephone;
for some minutes he stood with it pressed to his ear, but there came no
response from the central station.

“I think communication is broken,” Signor Ulrich ventured to tell him.
“I saw rioters cutting down wires and stringing them across Via Torino
to impede cavalry charges.”

“Then we must get a message to them some other way,” Tarsis said.
“Probably it would not be--advisable for me to go out.”

The other uttered an emphatic negative. “I think it would be
exceedingly unwise, Signor Tarsis.”

“Why?”

“The cries they raise are for blood.”

“What do they say?”

“Oh, signore! Something terrible!”

“Speak!”

“I heard them shouting, ‘Down with the robbers of the poor!’”

“And you think they mean me?”

“I don’t think, signore.”

“They cry my name?”

The Austrian answered with a nodding of the head.

“What do they say, for example?” Tarsis asked.

“Some of them cry, ‘Down with Tarsis!’ Others revile you, oh, with
awful epithets, signore. They have gone mad!”

Tarsis threw himself in a chair, rested an arm on the Napoleonic table,
and tapped it nervously. “I see,” he said; “the beasts would bite the
hand that has put food in their mouths. We must act at once. Signor
Ulrich, you will go to the Questura and give my message. Say that I
demand a guard for Palazzo Barbiondi.”

The little colour that had remained to the superintendent left his
face; but he said he would go, and taking up his hat he started for the
door.

“Tell them,” Tarsis called after him, and the other paused--“tell them
that my servants have deserted me; that I am here absolutely alone.
Make haste, and return at all speed with their answer.”

Signor Ulrich bowed his acquiescence and left the library. When he
had crossed the grand saloon and moved through the echoing corridors
a shudder came over him to see how deserted was the great house. The
homely proverb about rats forsaking the sinking ship occurred to his
mind and made him quicken his steps. He glanced into the open doors
that he passed, and in the ante-room called out the name of Beppe;
but it was as the master had said--he was alone. At the foot of the
staircase, in the portico, he stood a moment irresolute, then turned
and struck across the rear court, past the stables and garage, to the
Via Cappuccini gateway. In taking this back street the Austrian yielded
to a hunted feeling that had possessed him since he heard the rioters
cry, “Down with Tarsis and his crew!” By following Via Cappuccini he
would come out by the Cathedral, and from that point it was a few rods
to the Questura.

Tarsis emerged from the Library and paced the long course of the
Atlantean chamber, a little humbled in spirit, yet angry in the
realisation that there had risen a tyrant, somehow, from somewhere, who
kept him a prisoner in his own house. He was conscious of a power that
had awakened to render him powerless. Too rich he was to think much
about his wealth, but now he could not avert the recurrent thought that
with all his millions he was a supplicant for life’s barest necessity.

It irritated him to reflect that he had been obliged to send his man
to beg the authorities for protection. To be sure, from fixed habit
of assertive, self-important procedure, he had used the word demand;
but he knew--and the knowledge redoubled his vexation--that it was a
demand he could not enforce. An hour had come to him when the whole
of his vast fortune was not able to purchase the one thing that he
wanted--bodily safety. He was sensible, too, of a dread, an invincible
foreboding of calamity. And while his vanity sustained a hope that the
authorities must send word of assurance, his newly illumined reason
said the message more likely would show him how a beggar might be
answered.

The sun neared its setting. All the afternoon its light had played
through the glazed dome down on the tessellated pavement; now those
cheerful beams had stolen away. Everything in the great chamber upon
which his eye fell seemed to mock his wretchedness. With hideous leers
the vacant orbs of the Atlantes followed him, and he ended by bowing
his head to shut out the sight. Twice he walked the length of the room,
then stopped at a window, drew the curtain, and peered out, first upon
the gold-tipped foliage of the Public Gardens, then upon the reach of
broad Corso northward as far as the Venetian Gate.

The sidewalks were alive with moving throngs. They had the aspect of
people of the class he had seen walking there on other evenings--a
stratum of the bourgeois who had an hour to spare before dinner,
returning from their promenade on the Bastions. He remembered that
he and Hera had watched them together more than once after a drive.
At close range anxiety might have been read in the faces of some and
heard in the voices of others; but from where he looked there was
naught to suggest that in another part of the town riot and bloodshed
had held the stage since sunrise. It was a peaceful enough concourse of
citizens; and yet, the scene filled Tarsis with a shuddering dismay.
That terror which makes of the stoutest heart a trembling craven was
upon him--the terror of the mob.

He was about to turn from the window, impatient that Signor Ulrich did
not come back--although the man had not had time, without the loss of
a minute, to reach the Questura, submit the “demand,” and retrace his
steps--when he noted that the faces of the people were turning all in
one direction; their gaze was setting upon some one who approached
from a point toward Cathedral Square that was beyond his range of
vision. Waiting to see who or what it might be that attracted so
much attention, he stood there, the curtains scarcely parted, dimly
conscious of the rose flush in the sky beyond the trees.

Down the Corso he heard “Vivas!” shouted; a minute more and he saw a
man on horseback drawing near; he wore no head covering save a bandage
about his brows. The grim smile that was common to Tarsis in moments
of triumph curved his lips. He needed no glass to know the rider; the
sight of him stirred a nest of stinging memories.

“Cheer, you fools, cheer!” he muttered, glancing toward a group of
acclaiming men. “It is your last chance. Never again will you see him
alive!”

In the sinister delight of the certainty that there would be work for
the Panther after all, he forgot for a moment the perils that hedged
him round. He went to the last window of the palace’s long row, that
he might keep the horseman in view as long as possible. At length he
turned away well content, for he had seen him pass through the Venetian
Gate.




CHAPTER XX

THE HEART’S LAW-MAKING


AUNT Beatrice’s pride of blood was large and her sympathy for the
peasant folk small; yet, when it came to expressing a primary emotion
she was not above borrowing from the rugged phrases of her humbler
neighbours. Thus it fell out that when she had recovered from the shock
of Hera’s home-coming so far as to credit her bewildered senses, and
hold the appalling situation in perspective, she summed it up in this
wise:

“We have indeed returned to our muttons.”

It was in the solitude of her own apartment that she arrived at this
homely epitome, and saw, in despair, that the final crash of the House
of Barbiondi was near. By her niece’s eccentricity, as she chose to
call it, the future of ease her genius designed and made a reality had
been transformed into one of poverty, with the abominable insecurities
and detestable humiliations that had haunted nearly all her days. A
picture of money-lenders, dress-makers, tailors, and purveyors of meat
and drink, each with a bill in hand, marching in clamorous phalanx
through the villa gateway, rose to her excited fancy and made her flesh
creep. She knew that she would never be able again to play Amazon
against those storming hosts. Of courage and strategic skill she had
proved herself the abundant possessor throughout the family’s uncertain
career, but now her spirit lay crushed in the dust, like that of a
military commander who has seen a magnificent victory ruthlessly flung
away.

The frosty welcome that Hera received from her aunt did not surprise,
however it may have pained her; but she had comfort in the assurance
that her father’s arms would be open to greet her; she knew the loyalty
of his affection and sympathy as well as she comprehended the frailty
of his nature in other respects. When he entered the room she flew
to his outstretched arms, and without a word being spoken as to the
occasion of her return she saw in his eye a light of understanding.

“I have come home to stay, _babbo_,” was all she felt it needful to
tell him.

“Brava, daughter mine!” he said. “Ah, I have longed for the day. I
knew it must come.”

It was impossible for Aunt Beatrice to answer to the feeling of relief
and gladness that expressed itself in the countenance of father and
daughter; her thought turned rather to Tarsis, whom she could see in no
other light than that of a man cruelly wronged by his wife. She did not
deny herself the privilege of candid observations to this effect, which
Don Riccardo and Hera heard with patience. But when she urged Hera to
reconsider her act and begged her father to realise, before it might be
too late, that ruin to the family must result, Don Riccardo spoke his
mind. He had learned somewhat through suffering, and the example of his
daughter had quickened his latent strength.

He answered her that he did not care! Ruin or no ruin, he was glad that
events had taken this turn. The worst that could betide, he declared,
a trifle grandiloquently, was material want; starvation, perhaps. Was
not that a better fate than to live on with his daughter a hostage to
fortune, held in luxurious thraldom? Hera listened and rejoiced for the
sense of respect that came now to mingle with the love she had always
borne her father.

The scene was interrupted at this point by a servant’s announcement
that Colonel Rosario was in the reception hall. His regiment of
Bersaglieri, on the march to Milan in response to a call for
reinforcements, had halted near by. The Duke and his daughter went at
once to greet him.

“My men,” said the old soldier, “are at your gate, and their commander
is at your disposal for luncheon.”

“Bravo! A thousand welcomes!” exclaimed Don Riccardo, as he pressed the
other’s hand and checked an impulse to add, “You could not have arrived
at a more logical moment; when last you honoured our board we were
rejoicing for my daughter’s fancied escape; now we are glad for her
real one.” But no hint was given him of the reason for Hera’s presence
in the villa.

Donna Beatrice did not appear until just before the hour for luncheon.
In solitude she continued her struggle with the new predicament until
she had to acknowledge herself beaten. She could not cope at all with
this new-born spirit of disdain for consequences evinced by her
brother and his amazing daughter. The poor woman’s one hope was that
the resourceful Tarsis might find a way to save them from themselves.

When she had taken her place at the table opposite Colonel Rosario, it
seemed to her all the more urgent that some strong hand should curb
their reckless course. Here she found herself in an atmosphere of
cheerfulness, even gaiety, that was scandalously at odds with the gloom
demanded by the terrible situation. Actually, the wife who had forsaken
her husband because of some foible was able to sit there and eat and
drink, and laugh over the rugged jokes of an old soldier. And the
father of this disgraced daughter was so lost to shame that he outdid
the others in merriment. Misericordia! They were turning the calamity
into a jubilee! She breathed a thanksgiving when Colonel Rosario had
left the house and she saw the bayonets glinting in the sun, as the
Bersaglieri marched toward Milan.

Although convinced from the moment of Hera’s return that Mario Forza
was the _diabolus ex machina_, as she phrased it, Donna Beatrice, by a
heroic act of self-restraint, had refrained from speaking her mind to
that effect. Bitterly she regretted the omission an hour after luncheon
when she saw Hera riding forth alone, as she did in the old days. From
a window she watched her, now through breaks in the foliage, now over
the tops of the trees, while she moved down the winding road of the
park. She saw the white plume of her hat pass under the gateway arch
and caught a glimpse of her beyond the wall as she rode away.

“A tryst with Mario Forza!” she assured herself; and, stirred to action
by the abhorrent thought, she sent a servant for her brother, that she
might break a lance with him on this aspect of the case. The footman
informed her that his Excellency was having his afternoon nap.

“Napping!” she exclaimed, audibly; and then to herself: “At this
critical moment! Napping when his daughter is in danger!”

Hera followed the margin of Old Adda, light of heart, receiving the
joy of verdure, and forgetful of past trials in her new sensation
of freedom. She breathed in the fragrance that blossoms gave the
surrounding air. Bird voices, few the last time she rode that way,
sounded all about. The poplars on either side of the river--grim black
brushes a few weeks before--made two noble files of plumes quivering
silver or green in response to every wandering breeze. The river was
almost as quiet as the lake from which it flowed. Sparrows bathed in
the dust and chased one another on the wing close to the ground. White
vapours, floating in clearest blue, were motionless as painted clouds.

She passed idlers reclining on the greensward of the
roadside--sun-burned men and women who, by the immemorial law of the
season, should have been busy in the fields. She saw more idlers before
the village tavern. They were gathered about a comrade who read from
a big-headlined journal of Milan. The group would have received no
attention from her but for one boisterous fellow who crossed the road
calling out the news to a neighbour in his window. She heard distinctly
the name of Mario Forza, but more than this she was not able to make
out. Nevertheless, she had heard enough to send her back to the tavern.
As she drew rein the men turned from the reader and one and all bared
their uncombed heads. She asked the news from Milan, and the man who
had been reading came forward, clearing his throat for a speech.

“Most excellent signora,” he began, “the bugle call has sounded, and
throughout the length and breadth of our fair land the battalions of
labour are marching. The sun of the social revolution has risen. The
invincible industrial army--”

“Shut up, Pietro!” commanded a brawny blacksmith, snatching the journal
from the orator’s hand. “If your Excellency would like to read,” he
said, offering the paper to Hera.

While she cast her eye over the printed page some of the men gathered
about her horse, their bronzed faces upturned to hers and upon them a
dull expression of triumph in the story of riot and bloodshed that was
unfolded. Presently they saw her start with catching breath, drop the
paper to her side, and sit her saddle in silence a moment, oblivious of
the many eyes upon her, and staring off in the direction of Milan.

“It is a fine uprising, Excellency, neh?” one of the men said, but Hera
had only a nod of the head for reply.

She rode on, carrying an indistinct idea, gained from the huge
captions, of a situation with which the Government found itself all
but powerless to cope; of anarchy in Milan, of hundreds of men and
women laid low or killed by the troops; but the announcement that
loomed above all to her mind was that Mario Forza had been shot. “At
this hour,” ran the account, “exact details are not obtainable. From
what could be gathered concerning the deplorable incident, it appears
that the mob in Cathedral Square was at the time stampeding before
the charge of a detachment of the Ninth Cavalry. A woman whose name
could not be learned, but who is said to be one of the rioters, was
knocked down in the mad rush and would have been trampled to death by
the horses but for the timely appearance and intrepid action of the
Honourable Forza. He sprang in front of the advancing troopers, and
catching up the woman in his arms was bearing her out of harm’s way,
when a shot, evidently intended for the soldiers, was fired by one of
the mob. The mark that the bullet found was Signor Forza. It was not
known, however, that he was struck until he had borne the woman to a
point of safety. Then he was seen to sway as if swooning, but some
bystanders steadied him. He was conveyed to the General Hospital by a
friend whose carriage stood by.”

Her instinct to go to him became a mastering purpose. Although she
did no more than walk her horse for a while, she kept moving toward
Milan. She reflected that the remaining distance was little more than
two leagues and that she could travel it easily before dark. In a
minute she was resolved, and speaking to her horse she set forward at
a smarter pace. For the proprieties of the case she was in no mood to
borrow care. He was wounded, perhaps unto death, and her one thought
was to go to the hospital and be at his side. As she pursued her way,
now in the sunshine of open road, now in the shade of a wood, she had
time to consider what idle tongues might say, but it did not make her
slacken speed or think of turning back.

On every hand her eye met evidence of the social recoil that had set
in. Here, as in the neighbourhood of her father’s house, the farm
labourers had been caught in the wave of revolt that surged from Milan.
All the fields she passed were deserted. The taverns of the roadside
were busy, and, however true the cry of bread famine may have been,
there was no famine in juice of the grape and no scarcity of drinkers.
In the village of Bosco Largo she heard again the name of Mario Forza.
It fell from the lips of an impassioned ploughman haranguing a crowd of
excited men and women. Two stern-visaged carbineers stood by, but their
presence only fanned the flame of his speech.

“It was the military that shot him down,” he declared. “And would you
know why, my comrades? I will tell you: Because he is the friend of the
man or woman who toils. That’s why they wanted to kill him--because he
is the friend of labour. They don’t want labour to have any friends
except dead friends.”

“True, true!” came from the crowd.

“They are trying to tell us that one of the people shot Mario Forza,”
the orator went on. “Ha, ha! The capitalistic press wants to ram that
down our throats. But they can’t do it. I brand that assertion a lie.
The press and the Government are the slaves of capital, and they’ll do
anything, say anything to serve their masters. Bah! What right have
they to come to us who do the work and say, ‘You may keep one tenth
of what you produce; the rest you must hand over to us’? What right,
I ask, have they to tax the bread out of our children’s mouths and
the coats off our backs? And what do they do with the money that they
plunder us of? I will tell you: They use it to pay things like those
over there--those things with the carbines--they hire them to shoot us
down if we say that our souls are our own. That’s what they spend our
earnings for!”

There was a deluge of hisses for the carbineers. They made no reply, by
word, look or gesture, although some of the women shook their fists at
them and snarled in their faces like tigresses.

“On to Milan, comrades!” the ploughman cried, pointing dramatically
toward the city. “On to Milan and help our brothers pull down the
capitalistic Bastile!”

“Bravo! On to Milan! Down with the capitalistic Bastile!”

Repeating the cry, they scattered, men and women alike, to their homes,
to get rakes, hoes, scythes, shovels, axes, or any other implement with
which to arm themselves.

Hera had lingered to catch the words about Mario, and then, impelled
by the thought that she might arrive at the hospital only to find him
lifeless, she pressed forward, urging her horse to greater speed.
Behind her, more than a league, she had left the river, her course
lying now through a country green with maize, over a road that slanted
to the south-west from the town of San Michele; keeping to this she
would enter upon the Monza Road not far from Milan’s Venetian Gate.

She was one of the many now that fared toward the city. The road
swarmed with the peasantry, as on festal days, only it was plain that
this was no holiday throng. In groups the people moved onward, most of
them afoot, a few women on sorry nags, and others with their children
in rumbling farm carts. Beneath their sullen demeanour seethed a spirit
of contempt for established things. They called to one another in
the shrill _mezzo canto_ of their dialect, scoffing at authority and
boasting of what they would do to pull it down.

Once or twice Hera came upon a band of farm hands marching with a
semblance of line that bespoke service in the army. For weapons they
carried scythes and pitchforks. Here and there a woodman, shouldering a
glistening axe, swaggered along with fine assurance of success in his
mission to fell the oak of capitalism. “Long live the industrial army!”
was the cry that greeted the marching ones oftenest as they trudged on,
their faces set with determination.

It was an experience that asked a stout heart of Hera. In the
cross-currents of her thought she realised that a signora from the
world of ease and plenty was not a popular figure in that concourse.
But there must have been that in her face which had power to touch
those rugged hearts, angry though they were; and she met with no more
annoyance than an occasional black scowl.

In the suburb of Villacosa she overtook Colonel Rosario’s regiment. The
Bersaglieri were moving with the spirited swing that is their pride,
canteens clanking, the long plumes of their hats waving, and the dust
of the highway astir in their wake. By people who had a well-fed aspect
they were greeted with pleased countenances, but in discreet silence;
their less prosperous neighbours had only hisses and hoots for the
uniformed marchers. Mothers held up their babes and cried, “Fire now,
I beg of you.” Other women threw themselves on the roadside, pulled
up tufts of grass, and made as if to eat them--a bit of theatricalism
intended to typify the extremity to which they were reduced for food.

As Hera came up with the head of the column the Colonel chanced to look
round; their glances met, and he smiled a cordial recognition. But a
puzzled look succeeded the smile when Hera had passed ahead and he
had seen the foam that whitened the rings of her horse’s bit and the
flakes of it that dappled his chest. And she was riding yet as fast as
she could in that teeming road. The sun had set when she turned into
the Monza highway. An exodus from Milan had begun. She encountered a
stream of vehicles loaded with the fugitives and their baggage; most of
them were foreigners bound for the more tranquil air of near-by Swiss
cantons.

A little longer and she was in the quarter of Milan’s new rich, without
the walls--amid dwellings of an architecture that in Rome, Florence
or Turin produces much the same impression. Every portico gate was
bolted, no fountains leaped in the courts, blinds were drawn at the
windows; nowhere in any of the grand houses was there sign of life. She
could see the Venetian Gate a short distance ahead; but between her and
it rose a barrier of howling men and women that reached from side to
side of the road save for a narrow breach through which the refugees
passed. Over the heads of the crowd she caught the glitter of a line
of bayonets, and drawing near she heard the jibes and maledictions
that were poured upon the soldiers. She found that she could proceed
no farther. An hour earlier the King had declared Milan in a state of
siege.




CHAPTER XXI

A CALL TO SERVICE


HERA found herself one of the hundreds of peaceful visitors shut out
in company with the rabble that was eager to feed the furnace of
rebellion. Awhile she sat her horse wondering what she might do to
gain entrance to the city. There was no recourse but to make herself
known to the guards and entreat them for leave to pass; and she was on
the point of that appeal, which must have proved vain, when a burst
of martial music and the acclaim a crowd gives marching men made her
pause. She knew it must be the regiment of Colonel Rosario, and her
heart leaped with gladness.

First the plumes and shining brass of the musicians came into view,
then the figure of her father’s old comrade at the head of his men. For
a minute she watched the Bersaglieri wheel into the broad highway and
swagger toward the town; but when she saw the column halt before all of
it had made the turning she rode as fast as she could through the ruck
of men and vehicles to the Colonel’s side.

“Donna Hera!” the commander exclaimed, saluting her in military form
and covering his amazement with a smile.

“They will not let me go on,” she told him without ado.

“And you are obliged to return to Villa Barbiondi to-night,” he added,
as if comprehending. “That is a difficulty, to be sure, but one not
insurmountable. For example, I will send Major Quaranta with you to the
villa if you do not object.”

“No, no!” she said, impulsively. “You are kind, but--oh, I cannot go
back to-night. I must enter the city at once. It is an affair--of life
and death.”

Colonel Rosario was not the man to question when a lady--and the
daughter of his life-long friend--spoke thus, although a king’s command
and the wall of a besieged city stood between him and the attainment of
her wish.

“If you do not mind helping me lead the regiment,” he said, his eyes
beaming, “we shall manage it.”

He gave the order to advance. The drum-major’s baton went up, and the
column moved, Hera riding beside the Colonel. The latter kept his eyes
straight ahead, as if unconscious of the radiant woman whose skirts
almost touched his stirrup, and Hera looked neither to right nor
left. Her presence was a breach of military decorum that puzzled the
officers’ minds, but pleased their eyes, as it did those of the crowd
that flanked the way. Few jibes were hurled at the soldiers, and more
than once a cheer was given for the beautiful signora. At the gate the
musicians gave forth the national quickstep, to which the Bersaglieri
march best, and the guards posted to maintain the siege marvelled to
see a whole regiment escort one lady into Milan.

They passed to the inner side of the wall at the moment that Mario
Forza, in response to the spurious call of Tarsis, set out from his
house in Via Senato. As the head of the line wheeled into the Bastion
drive by the Public Gardens Hera, with only a look into the Colonel’s
face to speak her gratitude, kept on her way in the Corso. By this time
Mario too had entered that street, and had she continued in it they
must have met under the eyes of Tarsis and set at naught his scheme of
revenge. As it was she turned into Via Borghetto, meaning to reach the
hospital in a detour through by-ways. It could not have been more than
two minutes after she had left the Corso when Tarsis, behind the window
drapery, saw Mario pass on his way to the monastery.

From little Via Borghetto Hera moved into the Monforte Bastions and
followed that broad highway to Via Cappuccini, the narrow street that
bordered the rear gardens of Palazzo Barbiondi. She had gone a few
paces beyond the gateway of the palace when the crackle of musketry not
far off startled her senses. As the reverberations died out there rose
in stronger volume a hoarse din of human voices sounding, it seemed,
from a point between where she was and the General Hospital. And she
wondered if she would be able, after all to reach the place where they
said Mario lay.

At a crook in the street an unseen hand gave the bridle a violent pull
and brought her horse to a standstill. The dusk of the narrow way had
become heavy, but in the affrighted, yellow-bearded face of the man who
had stopped her she recognised Signor Ulrich.

“A thousand pardons!” he began, out of breath. “There is great danger.
Your Excellency had best go to the palace at once.”

Perceiving him unaware that the palace was no longer her abode, she
thanked him and would have ridden on. “I must keep on my way,” she said.

But he held fast to the bridle rein.

“Excellency, go and warn your husband,” he entreated her. “In the face
of his deadly peril he is alone--all alone. There is not a second to
lose.”

While he spoke he turned her horse around.

“Of what would you have me warn him?” she asked, displeased with his
meddling.

“Of that!” he answered, pointing to where the firing and human roar
arose from the huddle of narrow streets. “It is no time for a lady to
ride,” he added, offensively, “even--even if the Honourable Forza is
not afraid to be abroad.”

“Signor Forza?” she repeated, puzzled to know his meaning.

“Yes, Excellency. Oh, I saw him not very far away,” he asserted, with
an insolent effect of shrewdness.

A moment she looked him in the eye, conscious that in the lawless
spirit of the hour, he had spoken as he would not have dared in a
calmer day; but, eager for the news of Mario, she ignored the insult
conveyed in the Austrian’s insinuating phrases and manner.

“The journals,” she said, “have it that Signor Forza is in the
hospital, dying.”

“That is false. He is not in the hospital, and he is far from dying, if
I am a judge.”

“When did you see Signor Forza?”

“Not five minutes ago.”

“Where?”

“In the Corso, going toward the Venetian Gate.”

“But he has been wounded.”

“Not enough to keep him from the saddle.”

“He was on horseback?”

“Yes, Excellency. Oh I beg you, go and warn your husband of his danger.”

“He must know,” Hera said, absently, her mind dwelling on the assurance
that Mario was alive and would live.

“He does not know the worst,” the other told her. “I went to demand
protection--soldiers to guard him. At the Questura they almost mocked
me. The mob has broken through the military lines and is sweeping this
way.”

“Will they attack the palace?”

“Attack! They have only to walk in.”

“Why do you think they mean to harm Signor Tarsis?”

“I heard them crying out for his life. Go, oh, go and save him! There
is time for escape by the Corso gate.’”

“Why do you not go to him?” Hera asked.

“I! Oh, Excellency! If you had heard them cry out against us. They will
burn and slay. None whom they hate will be spared.”

From her heart sprang a wish that dazzled with its splendid hope, but
left her in the next instant filled with shame. “Addio, Excellency,”
she heard the Austrian saying; “for me, I am off.” Then she was aware
of his waving hand as he withdrew up a narrow way that cut through to
Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Her eyes took in the bulk of his receding
figure, but her thought was not with him. In the glimmer of an outhung
lamp she saw him turn about and with a forefinger stab the air in the
direction of Palazzo Barbiondi. She strove to rally the forces of her
mind--to set some rule over her contending impulses.

With equal power the voice of moral obligation and that of pure desire
made their plea. Now the duty of a wife pointed the way, now her love
for Mario. Insistently the prospect of Tarsis dead mingled itself with
a vision of her fetters struck off--her heart no longer bond, but
free to obey the law it had broken. She had prayed that Mario’s life
might be spared, and now she was tempted to leave her husband to his
destiny, to go on to the love for which her soul hungered, to claim
the happiness that seemed ordained of events. In the minute that she
waited, a captive of warring emotions, shop-keepers up and down the
street were putting shutters to their windows and shouting to her, “To
your home, signora; to your home!” The air grew thick with the roar of
the mob. A few seconds and it would be too late to save the life that
meant death to her happiness.

“Down with Tarsis!” The cry was so near as to rise distinct out of the
fearful dissonance. And in an impulse that came as the words fell upon
her ears she gave her horse a stroke of the whip and galloped hard for
the palace gates. In the court she sprang from the saddle, ran past the
garage and stables, reached the main portico, and hurried up the grand
staircase and through the gloom of the corridors, calling the name of
her husband--“Antonio! Antonio!” There was no answer save the chuckling
echo of the great halls. She gained the Atlantean chamber, and,
thinking of the library where he spent so much of his time, made for
the door of it, at the farther-most angle of the great room. Knocking
stoutly, she called out again:

“It is I, Hera!”

On the other side there was the sound of movement, the striking of
a match; then the door was opened, and she beheld Tarsis, a lighted
candle in his trembling hand. In that moment all the bitterness he had
planted in her soul gave way before a flood of pity.

“I knew your voice,” he said, weakly. “Why have you come back?”

“To tell you to fly! The mob will be here!”

He seemed to be in a stupor of fear. “I thought I heard them,” he
said, huskily. “Are they coming to the palace?”

“Yes; they have broken through the military lines. Signor Ulrich told
me.”

“Signor Ulrich! You saw him?”

“Yes; he has fled. He said that he heard them crying out against you!”

“What did they say at the Questura? Am I not to have my guard of
carbineers?”

“There is no time for a guard,” she answered, taking hold of his
sleeve. “I tell you that the mob is approaching up Via Cappuccini.
Come! We can go out by the Corso gate.”

“Yes; let us go,” he said, and started across the vast apartment, Hera
at his side, while the candle in his shaking hand made their shadows do
a strange fandango. In their ears was the roar of human fury, sifted by
the encompassing walls into a haunting murmur. They passed the picture
of Heribert and his warriors and were at the point of setting foot in
the corridor, when they halted and looked each other in the face.

“My God!” Tarsis breathed, and would have let fall the candle, but
Hera caught it and held it still lighted. “It is too late!”

He was in the last extremity of fright, with a face the colour of clay
and his limbs quaking as one who has an ague.

“We must go back,” Hera said, and drew at his coat sleeve, for he
seemed to have lost power to move from where he stood. Her thought flew
to the library as a harbour of safety.

“Come,” she said to him; “they may not think to look there.”

Across the field of tessellated marble they retraced their steps, he
following her, clinging close to her, as a child might have clung to
its guardian. A sudden horror had mastered him, a sense of retribution
at hand. The monster of poverty, which he had belittled as a bogey of
the demagogue, was speaking to him with no uncertain voice. He could
hear the workers, whom he had never thought of before as an army of
might, coming in their corporate strength to be his executioner.

Tarsis entered the library first, and would have taken no precaution
other than to close the door and lock it; but Hera bethought herself
to draw to the silken hanging that hid the entrance from view on the
other side. Then she closed the door and turned the key. Silently,
powerlessly, they awaited the hazard of events.




CHAPTER XXII

TARSIS ARRAIGNED


HALF a minute more and they knew the mob had entered the Atlantean
chamber. First they heard the howl of triumph and the trampling,
rough-shod feet on the marble pavement; then the thud and crash of
objects falling and the shattering of glass. They were able to guess
that Demos was venting his fury on the Barbiondi portraits, the
mirrors, and the carved Atlantes. But these incidents in the attempted
remaking of Italy were of little moment to the man and woman in hiding.
The only sound they dreaded was that which the tearing away of the
drapery before their retreat would make and the trying of the handle
of the door. Tarsis had dropped into a chair near the window, the
curtain of which he clutched with one hand, and listened, as if with
every nerve, for the fateful signal. Hera was on her feet, calm in the
consciousness of duty performed, resolved to die bravely, if die she
must. Presently the summons came. The drapery was jerked down and a
violent hand rattled the door knob.

“We’ve found the fox’s hole!”

“Here’s Tarsis!”

“Axes, comrades! Down with the door!”

It was not many seconds before the oaken barrier yielded to the assault
of the axes that had levelled the gates of the Santa Maria convent; for
this was the same detachment of the rioters, grown like a snowball as
it moved, but led still by Red Errico. The yell of triumph which the
insensate crew set up as they poured in stopped suddenly, because it
was not the object of their fury that they found. Tarsis had vanished.
They beheld in his stead a woman young and of great beauty, standing
alone--calm, imperious, unafraid. A hush came over those in front as
they fell back, every impassioned face turned to hers, and the black
smoke of the torches filling the room.

At length one of the women spoke. “We don’t want you, signora,” she
said. “It’s Tarsis. Where is he?”

“I do not know,” Hera answered, and it was the truth, for she had not
seen him leave the place at the window where he crouched before the
door was assailed; but a general muttering and shaking of heads told
her the answer was unsatisfactory.

“You ought to know,” one woman said, shrewdly, going a step nearer.
“Why don’t you?”

“I am not the guardian of Signor Tarsis,” she replied, defiantly, but
not wisely; and there was a resentful growl from the mob, which had
kept pressing into the library.

“Oh, you are not his keeper, eh?” the first questioner snapped back.

“You’d better not play grand with us!” another woman warned her,
shaking a finger in Hera’s face.

“We are the bosses now,” a third announced. “And it will serve you, my
fine lady, to keep a civil tongue.”

The sentiment was applauded by an outburst of “Bravas!” Some of the
invaders had begun to ransack the room in search of Tarsis. They
pulled out the drawers of cabinets, flung open the doors beneath the
book-shelves, and peered into closets. The next one to speak to Hera
was Red Errico, who had pushed his way to the front.

“If you are not his keeper, signora,” he said, with mock deference,
“perhaps you will condescend to tell us who you are?”

“I am his wife,” she answered, and the black looks faded from some
of the faces. They knew her by her works among the poor of the Porta
Ticinese quarter. One woman who had benefited by her charities began to
acclaim her praise.

“Donna Hera of the Barbiondi!” she cried. “Evviva! She is a friend of
the people!”

“Viva Donna Hera!” chimed in others who had tasted of her bounty.

Red Errico commanded silence. “Where is your husband, signora?” he
asked, his suspicion unallayed; but before she could tell them again
that she did not know the answer came from the woman who, above all
others in that angry horde, wanted to find the master of the palace.

“Here he is!” she exclaimed, her voice weakened with shouting all day,
and cracking now in the frenzy of her triumph. “Here he is.”

She had grabbed the nearest torch and was holding it above the face of
Tarsis. Every eye turned to the window where she stood, the curtain
jerked back, disclosing the man for whose blood she was mad cowering in
the embrasure.

“Murderer!” she shrieked at him, shaking a fist in his face. “You
killed my child!”

He was like a figure of stone, save for his eyes, which contracted and
expanded as fast as he gasped for breath. One of his hands gripped a
paper knife that he had caught up when the door began to yield. It was
in the hot blood of them to fall upon him then and there, and so it
would have been but for Red Errico. He sprang forward and, with one
hand pushing back La Ferita, the other upraised, he commanded them to
wait.

“Not yet!” he called out. “You forget! We must give the robber a trial.
They do as much for us when we take rather than starve. A trial, do you
understand? There are some questions we want to ask him, neh, comrades?”

At first he was answered with howls of dissatisfaction, but with them
were mingled cries of approval; and presently, the idea of the leader’s
joke sinking into their wits and gaining general favour, there were
many demands, amid mocking laughter, for a trial.

“Great fun! Bravo, Errico! A trial for the robber of the poor!”

The surge of the crowd did not move Hera from where she stood--backward
 against the wall. She saw them lay hold of Tarsis, wrench the
paper-cutting toy from his grasp, and, lifting him bodily, carry him
through the jeering, laughing herd, and set him upon his cherished
Napoleonic table. Then they flocked around with vituperative malice.
In an hour of mastery they displayed the worse traits of their class.
The women put out their claws and scratched his face, pulled his hair,
and spat upon him, and covered him with the vilest epithets of their
patois. It was the barbarous culmination of a movement which to Tarsis
had always seemed so far away. Red Errico, exercising the function of
judge, tweaked the prisoner’s nose and ordered him to sit up and look
happy.

La Ferita, her scar glowing hideously, kept crying, “Down with him, I
say! Bah for your trial! He killed my child!”

The air was stifling with the smoke of torches. Tarsis coughed and was
barely able to hold up his head.

“Why do you persecute me?” he said, his voice faintly audible. “I have
never harmed you.”

The few who heard burst into derisive laughter and passed the words
along; and the whole pack took them up with such rough comments as
they could invent.

“And so, my fine fellow,” was Red Errico’s sneer, “you have
never harmed us! Bravissimo! But you are a magnificent liar,
signore--magnificent! Now for the trial! Question No. 1: How comes it
that you are the possessor of millions, that you live in a grand house,
eat the fat of the earth, while we who have worked for you, we who have
produced the things that have brought your wealth, are scarcely able to
keep body and soul together?”

The others had quieted so much that nearly all could hear the question,
and they pressed about their prey, brandishing clinched fists in his
face and saying, “Answer that, you thief! Answer that!”

Tarsis seemed too weak to articulate. He moved his hand in signal that
he had no answer to make, as he did to other questions put by the
judge. Haggardly he shook his head once and avowed that he had not
robbed them; that he had given thousands of people work, making it
possible for them to earn a living; but a blast of malevolent “Bahs!”
was their reply to that defence.

“Yes,” Red Errico said, “you have got all the work out of us you could,
and paid us enough to keep us from starvation, so that we might go on
piling up the millions for you.”

“True! True!” the others chorused. “But it’s our turn now. Neh? Our
turn now.”

“Down with him!” was La Ferita’s argument. “He gave my little Giulia
work in his mill and paid her fifteen soldi a day. Oh, yes; he gave her
work. He worked her to death!”

For prelude to a new attack Errico shook his finger in Tarsis’s face.
“You are a common thief!” he declared, savagely; “but there’s no law
for your kind of thieving except the law that you’re getting now. You
knew how to manage so that we should never get a fair share of what we
earned. You have been too keen for us poor devils. You have known how
to keep a pound while you gave us a grain; and now you have the gall
to say that you have given us a chance to live. It is we, poor fools,
who have given you the chance to rob us. But that time is gone. We are
awake at last!”

Tarsis was without strength to frame a reply to this exposition of
industrial philosophy; but, while the crowd applauded and poured anew
their execration upon him, he raised his hand as if for silence. Every
head bent forward and every ear strained to catch his words.

“You do me a great injustice,” he said. “I have given much of my
fortune to the poor. Others know that.”

He raised his eyes feebly and turned his head toward where Hera stood,
in mute appeal. Comprehending, she moved forward to speak, and men and
women fell back to make place for her.

“Yes; he has done more than you think,” she began, impressively,
standing by her husband’s side. “A while ago you called me the friend
of the people. When you did that you were calling my husband your
friend. I did but distribute his money. All that I had came from him.
Once, when I asked him for funds to carry on my work of helping the
poor, what do you think he said?”

She paused, and Red Errico asked, sullenly:

“Well, what did he say?”

“These were his words: ‘My whole fortune is at your disposal.’ And so
it has been. He gave to the needy with generous hand. My family is
poor. I had no fortune of my own. Believe me, all that has been done
for you in my name has been done with his money. Men and women of
Milan, you do my husband a great injustice.”

She did her best to save him. No plea could have carried deeper in that
moment. That it smothered, for the time, the flame of their temper,
cooled their wrath against him, was evinced in the softening of their
faces, the fading somewhat of the frenzy in their eyes. And what might
have been the ending of the chapter is lost in its actual outcome.
Even as Hera spoke, the murmur of the street changed to a multitude’s
panic-stricken cries. Those nearest the window were first to catch
the note of alarm. It caused them to start and stand motionless, ears
alert. The word “soldiers” passed from lip to lip. Volleys of musketry,
ominously large, sounding in quick succession, and crackling ever
nearer, proclaimed the approach of troops in overwhelming force.

An impulse to save their own lives ruled them now. Red Errico began
the cry of “Away, away!” and the others took it up. With not so much
as a parting glance of contempt at Tarsis, the leader shouldered the
women aside and pushed toward the door, with the others moving in that
direction. As they passed the man on the table they forgot to jeer him.
The resounding salvos of artillery, the answering shrieks of the mob,
coming to them ever plainer from the Corso, were matters of greater
import than the baiting of a poor capitalist.

It was not so, however, with one woman in that tattered collection--La
Ferita. Her deed was performed with the ease of instinctive prompting,
conviction, decision. She alone was aware of her purpose. No one saw
the blade steal from the folds of her gown; they saw it only at the
instant that it flashed the light of the torches and descended, true,
firm, cold, resting a second, as if with lingering joy, between the
shoulders of Tarsis.

“Let him die; he killed my child,” she said, and joined the throng
moving toward the door.

The effect of the thrust on the man who received it was, oddly
enough, to make him sit erect for the moment, and it brought back to
his countenance some of the alertness that abject, crushing terror
had bereft it of; it was the animation of strong surprise, puzzled
amazement. Hera, whenever she lived the scene again in memory, saw
that look of bewildered astonishment on his face at the moment the blow
was delivered. La Ferita’s comrades seemed little impressed by what she
had done. They were fighting each other for a chance to get out of the
room--to flee from the soldiers.




CHAPTER XXIII

FETTERS STRUCK OFF


WHEN they all had gone Hera groped on the wall for the electric key,
found it, and redeemed the darkness with a flood of light. There was
Tarsis, ashen to the lips, prostrate on the table, one arm hanging limp
over the side. She threw open all the casements, and the smoke poured
out. Her next impulse was to go for aid, but she turned first to her
husband, lifted him to a sitting position, and by a supreme effort bore
his sheer weight to a lounge. Then, obeying a motion of his hand, she
bowed her head and heard him whisper:

“I--am--dying.”

His lips continued to move, but so feeble was his voice that only
fragments of what he said were audible. Seeing her strive to hear, he
exerted himself pitifully to speak louder, and she made out the words:

“You will be glad when I am gone.”

Even to give him comfort in his last moments she could not deny the
truth of his words. “Destiny has served us cruelly,” she said. “I am
sorry--sorry for all that has come and gone. If I have acted harshly,
ungenerously, forgive, oh, forgive me!”

A smile that chilled her blood just curved his lip. “If you had not
been so bitter against me,” he answered, his voice gaining strength,
“destiny would have been kinder.”

“God help me if that is true!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I tried to be--yes,
I was--all that I promised. If there was bitterness in my heart before,
believe me, it is not so now. If I have wronged you grant me your
pardon.”

A grimace that frightened her came over his face, where death hues
began to show. He rose a little on one elbow, but sank back again,
making a gesture of distress.

“I will go for aid,” she said, and would have left him, but he spoke,
and she paused to listen.

“If I go _he_ shall not live--he for whom you hated me,” he said, with
a passion of malice that shook his frame. “He shall not live!”

She thought he meant that Mario would die from his wound.

“He will die by my command. His end is decreed--decreed by me,” Tarsis
went on with a hideous chuckle.

Now she thought it the raving of a delirious brain.

“You do not believe me,” he said, striving to laugh. “But you will
believe when you see his white face in the night. By my hand he will
die within the hour.”

She turned away to shut out the sight of his face.

“Still you do not believe,” she could hear him saying. “You think I do
not know; but I know. You think he is safe. He is not. I saw him go by.
Yes; with my own eyes I saw him pass--a moment before you came to the
door. Now he is on the way to the monastery--the monastery where you
held your trysts and deceived me; the monastery where a knife awaits
his heart.”

She wheeled suddenly, fearful now that he spoke the truth. “What do you
mean?” she asked.

A paroxysm of agony stifled the words he tried to speak. When it had
passed somewhat he answered, straining every resource of his ebbing
powers to the effort:

“I lured him to the monastery to-night. The Panther will not fail. Not
he! I did it--I!”

She comprehended, she believed. At her heart a heavy aching began,
the sinking sense of an irreparable loss. She strangled a cry, and
fell upon her knees before the chair and buried her face in her hands.
And Tarsis, seeing her thus affected, shook and choked with gloating
laughter.

“I wrote the letter,” he went on, in a pitiful effort. “I copied your
hand; the letter that bid him go to you--and he has gone,--fool, dog
that bit me!--and you will not have him when I am gone. I saw him
pass--pass to his doom! He thinks you are there awaiting him with your
kisses. The knife will be there! The kiss of steel will greet him!”

She could not credit her senses. The man lying there in the last breath
of his life was choking and laughing--a mocking, malevolent laughter,
as hideous a sound as human ear ever heard. She shrank from him; she
wished to flee where neither eye could see that face, twitching in
hateful glee, nor ear know the horror of such dying words. But soon
enough his features and tongue became composed. The voices of the
street had dwindled to a dull rumble. She drew near to him, and looked
upon his face. On his lip lingered a foam that no breath disturbed; and
in his open, staring eyes she read the message that set her free.

She kneeled again and prayed, asking mercy for him and pardon for
herself if, in following the light of conscience, she had wronged
her husband. When a little time had passed she rose and went on the
balcony to stand in the coolness of the night. From the street came no
longer sounds of strife or pain; order reigned again in the dwelling
quarter of the well-to-do; with bullets and bayonets the revolution had
been driven across Cathedral Square, back to the Porta Ticinese. The
quieter phase checked her whirling thoughts, helped her to take facts
at a clearer value. She had seen the chain that held her parted, as a
silken thread might have been snapped, but only to give her into a new
bondage, that of despair, if what Tarsis said was truth; nor could she
doubt those terrible words. Mario was well on his way. More than half
an hour before he had set out for the monastery. It was too late, she
perceived, to overtake him, unless--unless she rode like the gale.

She thought of her horse and the hard-ridden miles he had done that
afternoon, and knew that with him it would be impossible; but there
was the palace stable with its long rows of horses, and some of them
fleet-footed under the saddle, as she knew. The thought kindled a
beautiful hope. Her lips set in the firmness of resolve; she threw a
glance toward the lounge with its silent occupant, and started for the
door. Over the wreckage of the grand saloon she made her way without
mischance, for the moon was sending its flood through the glass dome;
there was a streaming of light, too, from the corridor, and she beheld
a man standing in the doorway arch wringing his hands. It was Beppe,
quaking from causes other than fright.

He assured her Excellency that he was not one of those who had deserted
the palace; he had done no more than observe the precaution to secrete
himself in the wine cellar that he might be at hand when the master
wanted him. The velvet had gone from his voice and the steadiness
from his speech. Plainly he had not been idle while hiding amid the
bottles. With an upward roll of the eyes and more wringing of the
hands, he gasped the wish that no harm had befallen Signor Tarsis.

Hera pointed across the great hall to where the light poured from the
library, and kept on her way. In her veins there was a new leaping of
life--hopeful, eager. The invaders had swung their axes and bludgeons
at the corridor mirrors, and she had to choose her steps over broken
glass and shattered woodwork. The grand staircase was illuminated;
there and in the portico she met servants returning because assured
that the storm had passed.

In the rear court she looked around for her horse. The shapes of things
all about were visible in the moonlight, but of her horse there was no
sign. Lamps were lit in the stables, and she heard the excited voices
of hostlers. When she told the head man to saddle the swiftest horse,
he asked her Excellency’s pardon and pointed to the rows of empty
stalls. While the rioters within the palace were reforming society by
destroying art objects and baiting their owner, their brothers below
had been plundering the stable. Every horse was gone.




CHAPTER XXIV

A CHASE IN THE MOONLIGHT


HERA asked if the automobiles, too, were gone. The excited servants
told her the garage had been attacked and everything smashed. Had any
one seen Sandro? Yes; he was there looking through the ruins. She ran
to the door of the place, and called the name of the chauffeur. From
amid the wreckage he answered her, and came forth, cap in hand.

“Are all the machines damaged?” she asked.

“All but one, your Excellency. The thirty-horse touring car is far back
in the house, and the devils did not get to it.”

“Can it be used at once?”

“Oh, yes, your Excellency. There is not so much as a scratch upon it.”

“I wish to go to Villa Barbiondi as swiftly as you can make it carry
us.”

“The moon is bright, and if the road is half clear,” he said, delighted
with the hazardous mission, “we can do it in thirty minutes.”

Then he called to the hostlers and other servants to come and clear
away the useless cars, for Donna Hera was going to make a dash in
the night. With a will they fell to, and one wreck after another was
dragged out of the garage. Sandro touched something in the surviving
machine, and smiled to hear it respond with coughs and sobs. He took
a minute to crawl under it, measure things with critical eye by the
light of an electric lantern, and was on his feet again throwing in lap
cloths and handing a mask to Hera. He sprang in, pulled the lever and
shot the machine out to the court. Once or twice he ran it back and
forth, cutting figures after the manner of fancy skaters, and with a
satisfied “All right” he descended again and opened the door for Hera.
When she had her seat it was touch and go. With the hostlers standing
wide-eyed, and Beppe, no longer tipsy, running from the portico big
with the news of what he had found in the library, the car swung out of
the court, headed for the Venetian Gate.

“I wish you to make the best speed that you can,” Hera said, when they
were bumping over the cobbles of Via Borghetto.

He patted the air reassuringly as he glanced back at her. “Your
Excellency need have no anxiety,” he said. “Leave it to me.”

As he spoke they leaped into a swifter pace, and this was held in the
Corso and through the streets beyond the walls; but when the crowds of
soldiers and civilians were behind them, and Hera sighted once more the
far horizon, set with stars, he sent the speed lever home and, like a
spurred horse, the machine plunged out upon the wide, white road. In
the suburb of Villacosa she received an impression of dimly-lighted
street, carbineers and gesturing workmen, bare heads at windows,
barking dogs, and a thumping rise and fall over a cobbled bridge.

A few seconds and all this was far at their back, and they were
spinning over plains that stretched in the silver night for miles on
either hand, level as a table. Now and then they came upon a market
wagon labouring along, but the way was wide, and they curved around it
like a shooting star.

The wind had swept all the clouds from heaven; only a few vapours thin
as the moonlight flitted across the stars; to footfarers the wind did
no more than whisper; for Hera and Sandro it was a gale that whipped
around them with a high, thin yell and caught up the powder of the road
and smote them with it in clouds that must have blinded but for their
masks.

They swerved northward into a narrow byway that was a short crossing to
the road that followed Adda’s margin. It was a precipitate dive into
the woods. There was no light save that cast by the car’s lamps, and
the course was difficult with many a sharp crook. Every minute they
were on the point of vaulting into the thicket or trying conclusions
with a sturdy oak. They rocked and swayed at times as if their carrier
was a boat in a choppy sea. Hera was occupied in holding fast, but
Sandro seemed not to know that the experience was at all unusual.
Forgetting himself and all the world except the road and the dangers
that the lamps revealed, he became a part of the dodging, spinning
thing, meeting emergencies with a passive certainty that was more
automatic than human. He had seen in Hera’s eye that more than a lady’s
caprice had inspired this nocturnal flight, and he had prayed that none
of his steed’s airy feet might know puncture, or heart-failure attack
it through the carbureter.

When they had struck again into a straight run, and through the vista
of foliage could see the river’s sheening face, Sandro shouted, in an
access of pride for his achievement:

“It was very amusing, that little bit there! I know my trade, do I not,
your Excellency?”

Hera gave him an appreciative smile and a nod, although he had not made
his words carry above the roar and yell that were with them always.

The wheels on one side clear of the earth, they rounded a corner and
darted forth on the fine river road. Now the way was as level as a
plank. Sandro moved the speed lever, and the file of poplars, yards
apart, chased away like giants close upon one another’s heels. Houses
on the passing hillside, with lighted windows, winked at them and were
gone. All the details of the landscape were on the move. Villages
streamed by in jumbled masses of low masonry.

The bridge of Speranza swept past to join other landmarks, and Hera
caught sight of a horseman, so far ahead as to be beyond the range
of the lamps but showing distinctly in the paleness of the night.
Standing up and leaning forward so that she might pour all the power
of her voice against Sandro’s ear-drum, she told him to “Stop!” It was
two miles yet to Villa Barbiondi, and he answered her with only an
assurance that there was no danger. And not until she had shaken him
by the shoulder and pointed to the figure now in the lamp glare did he
shut off speed and set his brake down.

The rider had gone from the highway into the little road that ran
uphill to the monastery ruins. Within a few feet of the turning Sandro
brought the car to a halt. He looked around for the lady, but she had
disengaged herself from the lap covering, thrown off the mask, and was
on the ground, running toward the horseman. With all her strength she
called his name, and the grove of maples into whose darkness he had
passed gave back her voice.

“Mario, Mario! It is I, Hera!”

He heard, and his horse, checked violently, reared and curvetted in
turning, then came toward her at a gallop, out into the moonlight.
Quickly she told him of the emancipating event in Milan and the dying
words that had sent her to warn him; but there was no bitterness for
any one now in either heart. All the world was love for the man and
woman standing there beneath the stars, prisoners of honour and despair
suddenly made free. The shadow of a solitary yew tree touched them--a
symbol of what had been. The lonely cry of a bird sounded; somewhere
in the distance a dog barked; and as they started for the highway a
swishing of leafy bush drew their gaze toward a figure with loping
carriage that slunk away toward the bridge of Speranza. He never looked
back, but went like a panther balked of his prey.

       *       *       *       *       *

When a year had passed they met once more in the cloister ruins, amid
the sleeping fragrance of the wild flowers. As careless children they
roamed in the age-old garden, thrilled with the thought of Love set
free. The afternoon had faded far; the sun touched only the capitals of
the low Doric columns, where ivy and honeysuckle cleaved and iridescent
sun-birds dipped into flowery cups. The gentlest wind that ever tried
its wings stole in by the clefts of grey wall and made the tiny white
bells of the vale lilies tremble. Bees murmured over the tufts of
fragrant thyme.

Once they wandered a little apart, she to cull the blooms of a
strawberry plant, he to pluck white and pink and gold from the many
grasses for the garland that she said she would make; and they called
to one another over the bushes in sheer transport of joy. They came
upon a bud of eglantine, called by them _rosa salvatica_, but for
their garland they did not take it, because it was a symbol of love
unfulfilled.

A while and they left the bright aspect of the cloister to enter the
gloom of the chapel, he carrying the big cluster of blossoms. Suddenly
she turned and looked back, and with a little cry ran to regain the hat
she had tossed on a grassy bank; and the trifle was enough to set their
laughter pealing again.

They moved to the window near the square of blank wall where Arvida’s
portrait had been. For a space they stood there, while the west caught
first the faint hue of rose, then flamed in ruby fire. His kiss was
fresh upon her lips, and in their eyes the ardour of a passion no
longer to be conquered. From a far-off hamlet, where a steeple rose
out of the haze, the Angelus came to them; they watched the toilers
bow their heads in reverence and plod their way homeward. The broad
landscape lay in the mysterious hush of folding night, but they took no
thought for time or circumstance. They seated themselves on a low stone
bench of the pattern that mediæval builders were wont to carry around
the interior walls of churches. He joined the ends of the garland to
fashion a chaplet, and, placing it on her massing tresses, crowned her
his queen forever.

                               THE END.




       *       *       *       *       *

“_Myrtle Reed has certainly an instinct for the exquisite phrase,
delicate touch for an allegory, a capacity for using words somewhat
after the fashion of notes in music, to weave together into a melody._”

                                                  _Milwaukee Sentinel._


A Spinner in the Sun

_By_ MYRTLE REED

Author of “Lavender and Old Lace,” “The Master’s Violin,” etc.

  Uniform with “Lavender and Old Lace,” etc. Crown
     8vo. Cloth, extra gilt top, printed in red and
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The thousands who have enjoyed the gentle humor, the story-telling
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chords of humor, pathos, and sentiment, which formerly have never
failed to charm Miss Reed’s admirers, it is more likely to please the
exacting critic than anything else she has written--and this because
it evinces a firmer grasp of character and a more serious grappling
with the problems of life. It also has the advantage of an interesting
entanglement of plot which throws over it the glamour of romance.

_A complete descriptive circular of Miss Reed’s books sent on
application_




       *       *       *       *       *

_An exceptionally good book_


A Son of the People

A Romance of the Hungarian Plains

By Baroness Orczy

_Author of “The Scarlet Pimpernel” etc._


Baroness Orczy needs no introduction to lovers of good fiction. The
scene of her new story is Hungary--the hero a handsome young peasant
who, having inherited a fortune from his thrifty father, is enabled
to save a Hungarian nobleman from losing all his lands, and in return
receives the hand of the lord’s daughter whom he has long worshipped
from afar. Immediately after the wedding the peasant bridegroom
discovers that his wife despises him and has merely allowed herself to
be sold as payment of her father’s debt. How he tries to overcome this
feeling and what effect his generous and big-hearted nature finally has
upon her must be left for the reader to find out for himself. Like _The
Scarlet Pimpernel_, the present story is of intense dramatic interest
and shows great emotional strength.

_Crown 8vo. $1.50_


  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
  New York     London




       *       *       *       *       *

“_Signor Fogazzaro is at the present moment undoubtedly the greatest
of Italian novelists. His nobility of feeling, his wide sympathy, his
kindliness and breezy humor entitle him to a high place among writers
of fiction._”

                         Villari’s “Italian Life in Town and Country.”


The Saint

(IL SANTO)

By ANTONIO FOGAZZARO

While _The Saint_ concerns itself with the present-day religious
questions and political problems of Italy, the author has not allowed
the purpose of his story to overweigh and impair its dramatic quality.
The story is most interesting as a description of Italian life both
high and low. It is being read by thousands in Italy who care little or
nothing about the religious problem and who find themselves literally
entranced by its strong human interest.

  _Authorized Translation by M. Agnetti Pritchard
  With an Introduction by William Roscoe Thayer
  Crown 8vo. $1.50_


  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
  New York     London




       *       *       *       *       *

“A romance to stir the pulse.”--_N. Y. Telegram._


No. 101

By

Wymond Carey

Author of “Monsieur Martin,” etc.


A stirring story of adventure during the war of the Austrian
Succession. =No. 101= was the cipher used as a signature by a daring
spy through whose agency the English were supplied with exact and
unerring information concerning the French plans.

  “It abounds in strong incident and sharp and abundant anfractuosities
  of plot. If the reader does not like it he is a realist and we pity
  him.”--_N. Y. Sun._

  “We speak enthusiastically of this romance. It possesses
  originality--very great originality--in plot and character drawing.
  The women are so well drawn that the reader will fall in love with
  them--Yvonne of the Spotless Ankles in particular.”--_Baltimore Sun._

  “An exciting story, full of action, mystery, love, and passion, and
  the glitter of a fascinating court.”

                                                  _Chicago Inter-Ocean._

  Illustrated by Wal Paget.      Crown octavo, $1.50


  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
  New York     London




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

On page 22, silk-milk has been changed to silk-mill.

On page 104, spinister has been changed to spinster.

On page 122, tesselated has been changed to tessellated.

On page 138, where-ever has been changed to wherever.

On pages 164 and 166, Tarsus has been changed to Tarsis.

On page 209, silk makers has been changed to silk-makers.

On page 249, eying has been changed to eyeing.

On page 256, Uhlich has been changed to Ulrich.

On page 294, Bardiondi has been changed to Barbiondi.

All other spelling and hyphenation has been retained as typeset.



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