The Sword of Wealth, by Henry Wilton Thomas

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[Pg 2] 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[Pg 3] 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:

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.

Before she could heed the warning Nero began[Pg 4] 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[Pg 5] 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.”

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

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.[Pg 7] 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.

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.

“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[Pg 9] 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!”

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.

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[Pg 11] 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.”

“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[Pg 13] 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.”

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;[Pg 14] 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.

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

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

“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[Pg 15] is possible for all her children to live and prosper in their own land?”

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.

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[Pg 16] light. A motor car came to a standstill, and the older of the two occupants, a tall man in the fifties, sprang down nimbly.

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.”

“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.”

“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[Pg 18] 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.”

She spoke to Nero and was gone. A moment[Pg 19] 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.

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[Pg 21] 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[Pg 22] 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[Pg 23] 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[Pg 24] 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[Pg 25] 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[Pg 26] 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[Pg 27] 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[Pg 28] 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!”

“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[Pg 29] 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[Pg 30] 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[Pg 31] 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.

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

“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.[Pg 32] “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.”

“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[Pg 33] 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.

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

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[Pg 36] 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[Pg 37] 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[Pg 38] 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.

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

“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[Pg 39] 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[Pg 40] 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.”

“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[Pg 42] 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.

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[Pg 43] 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,[Pg 44] 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.”

“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.”

“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[Pg 45] 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[Pg 46] 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[Pg 47] 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.

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[Pg 49] 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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!”

“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[Pg 54] 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.

“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.”

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.

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[Pg 56] 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[Pg 57] 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[Pg 59] 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[Pg 60] 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:

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[Pg 61] 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 thank you, sincerely. Will you return with me to the villa, that we may make some arrangement while there is yet time?”

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[Pg 62] 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.

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[Pg 65] 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.”

“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.

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Oh, yes,” he broke in, with a shrug. “I accepted the situation, but it was only pretence.[Pg 67] 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.”

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

“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[Pg 68] 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[Pg 69] 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[Pg 70] 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.”

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:

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?”

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[Pg 74] 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.”

“Heaven and the saints!” exclaimed the elder woman. “What new madness is this? And when do you expect to have his permission?” she asked,[Pg 75] with all the sarcasm she could summon to the words.

“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?”

“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[Pg 77] 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.”

“I will arrange with them to bring you the[Pg 78] 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[Pg 79] 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[Pg 80] 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 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[Pg 81] 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?

“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[Pg 83] 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.

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[Pg 85] Montenevica, was far from being a poor man—as yet.

“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[Pg 86] wonder, and then we shall hear of it no more. Better a nine-day wonder than a lifetime of regret.”

“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[Pg 87] 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[Pg 88] 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.

“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.[Pg 89] 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,[Pg 90] 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.

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[Pg 91] 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.

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

“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[Pg 92] 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[Pg 93] 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.”

“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[Pg 94] 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.”

“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[Pg 95] 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.”

“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[Pg 96] 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.

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[Pg 98] 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[Pg 99] 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[Pg 100] 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[Pg 101] 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:

A deep tide of colour dyed Hera’s cheeks, and, without making other reply, she turned her head[Pg 102] 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[Pg 103] 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!

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[Pg 106] 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[Pg 107] 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[Pg 108] 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,

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,[Pg 110] 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[Pg 111] 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.”

“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[Pg 112] 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.”

“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[Pg 113] 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[Pg 114] 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[Pg 115] 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[Pg 118] 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[Pg 119] 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[Pg 121] 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[Pg 122] 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 first labour agitator. Isn’t that so?” put in Don Riccardo, keeping a straight face.

“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[Pg 124] 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?”

“Surely you must be aware,” his son-in-law[Pg 125] 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.

“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[Pg 127] 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.

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[Pg 129] 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.”

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

“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.”

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

“In the end? Oh, bravo!” she exclaimed,[Pg 130] 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.”

“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.”

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

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.”

“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[Pg 132] 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:

“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,[Pg 133] 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[Pg 134] 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.

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.

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[Pg 137] 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.[Pg 138] 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[Pg 139] 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[Pg 140] 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[Pg 141] 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[Pg 142] 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[Pg 144] 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.”

“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[Pg 145] 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[Pg 146] 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.”

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

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.

“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.”

“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.[Pg 148] 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.”

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,”[Pg 149] observed her companion, with a movement of his head toward Donna Beatrice, who was approaching with Tarsis.

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

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

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[Pg 150] all save the fortissimo attacks. Mario and the Cardinal stood near by that they might hear the quieter passages.

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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?”

“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[Pg 152] hungry. I want my dinner.” He screwed his fists into his eyes and whined like a schoolboy.

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

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[Pg 153] 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,[Pg 154] 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[Pg 155] 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.

“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 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.”

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[Pg 157] 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.

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 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.[Pg 159] He moved closer to him, fists clinched at his side. “What do you mean?” he demanded.

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!”

“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.

“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[Pg 160] 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.

“The assertion is absurd, and it is a lie!” Mario declared. “I regret that I have to say this to you[Pg 161] 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[Pg 162] 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[Pg 163] 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.[Pg 164] 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[Pg 165] 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.

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[Pg 167] 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,[Pg 168] 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[Pg 169] 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[Pg 170] 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[Pg 171] 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[Pg 172] 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[Pg 173] 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[Pg 175] 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.”

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

“No; her mother, also a mill-worker, is alive,[Pg 176] 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.”

“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[Pg 177] 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.

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[Pg 178] 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!”

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.”

“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[Pg 180] in them; their meaning puzzled her, and she broke the rule of silence she had observed hitherto toward his displays of malevolence.

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

“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.”

“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[Pg 181] 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.

“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.”

“You would have me believe,” she heard him sneering, as he drew nearer to her, “that you are[Pg 183] 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.”

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[Pg 184] 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.[Pg 185] “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[Pg 186] she felt his breath panting beside her. At the threshold she turned and paused long enough to say, her voice issuing without a tremor:

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[Pg 187] 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[Pg 188] 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.

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:

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[Pg 190] 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[Pg 191] 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[Pg 192] 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[Pg 193] 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,[Pg 194] 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[Pg 195] 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,[Pg 196] 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[Pg 197] 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!”

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.

“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[Pg 199] would have been in flames but for the carbineers.”

“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.

“No, signore. It came about in this way at the Ticinese Gate mill: Every Tuesday I[Pg 200] 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.”

“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!”

“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?[Pg 201] 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!”

“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[Pg 202] 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.”

“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.

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[Pg 205] 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,[Pg 206] 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[Pg 207] 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[Pg 208] 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[Pg 209] 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[Pg 210] 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:

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[Pg 211] 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[Pg 212] 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.

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[Pg 214] 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[Pg 215] 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.

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[Pg 217] 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[Pg 218] 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[Pg 219] 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[Pg 220] 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[Pg 221] 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[Pg 222] 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[Pg 223] 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[Pg 224] 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;[Pg 225] 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[Pg 226] 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[Pg 227] 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[Pg 228] 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.

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[Pg 229] 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[Pg 230] 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.

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[Pg 234] 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.

“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[Pg 235] 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.

“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!”

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[Pg 237] 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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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[Pg 241] 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?”

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[Pg 242] 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[Pg 243] 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.

“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[Pg 245] prior in bidding adieu. “Some day you will come and tell us the story?”

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[Pg 246] 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[Pg 247] 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.”

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:

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.”

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.

“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:

“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.

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[Pg 252] 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[Pg 253] 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[Pg 254] 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.

“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.”

Tarsis sprang up and began to pace the floor, but stopped suddenly, and, with a smile intended[Pg 255] 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,[Pg 256] 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.”

“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[Pg 258] 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[Pg 259] 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[Pg 260] 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[Pg 261] 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.

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:

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[Pg 264] 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[Pg 265] 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[Pg 266] 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[Pg 267] 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[Pg 268] 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[Pg 269] 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[Pg 270] 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[Pg 271] 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,[Pg 272] 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[Pg 273] 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.”

“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[Pg 274] 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!”

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[Pg 276] 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[Pg 277] 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.[Pg 278] 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.

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[Pg 280] 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.

“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[Pg 282] 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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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[Pg 285] mocked me. The mob has broken through the military lines and is sweeping this way.”

“I heard them crying out for his life. Go, oh, go and save him! There is time for escape by the Corso gate.’”

“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.[Pg 286] 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[Pg 287] 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:

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.

He seemed to be in a stupor of fear. “I[Pg 288] thought I heard them,” he said, huskily. “Are they coming to the palace?”

“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[Pg 289] 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.

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[Pg 290] 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.

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[Pg 292] jerked down and a violent hand rattled the door knob.

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[Pg 293] 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.

“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,[Pg 294] 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!”

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.

The surge of the crowd did not move Hera from[Pg 296] 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[Pg 297] 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,[Pg 299] 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?”

“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[Pg 300] 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[Pg 301] 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[Pg 302] 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.

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:

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:

Even to give him comfort in his last moments she could not deny the truth of his words. “Destiny[Pg 304] 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!”

“He will die by my command. His end is[Pg 305] decreed—decreed by me,” Tarsis went on with a hideous chuckle.

“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.”

“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[Pg 307] 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,[Pg 308] 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[Pg 309] 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.

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.

“All but one, your Excellency. The thirty-horse touring car is far back in the house, and the devils did not get to it.”

“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[Pg 313] 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[Pg 314] 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.[Pg 315] 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.

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[Pg 316] 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[Pg 317] 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[Pg 318] 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.

“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
black, net, $1.50. Full red leather,
net, $2.00. Antique calf,
net, $2.50. Lavender
silk, net, $3.50

The thousands who have enjoyed the gentle humor, the story-telling skill, and the delicate sentiment of “Lavender and Old Lace” will find the same qualities in “A Spinner in the Sun.” While striking the 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

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

New York London

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

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, Bardioni has been changed to Barbiondi.

All other spelling and hyphenation has been retained as typeset.

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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 Despatch	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 Project Gutenberg eBook of The sword of wealth

The Sword of Wealth

CHAPTER I
THE UNEXPECTED MAN

CHAPTER II
TARSIS

CHAPTER III
A DREAM REALISED

CHAPTER IV
A FACT OF LIFE

CHAPTER V
THE SCALES OF HONOUR

CHAPTER VI
A CENSORED DESPATCH

CHAPTER VII
A MESSAGE FROM ROME

CHAPTER VIII
A WEDDING JOURNEY

CHAPTER IX
A SEED OF GRATITUDE

CHAPTER X
THE DOOR OF FRA PANDOLE

CHAPTER XI
BY ROYAL COMMAND

CHAPTER XII
AN UNBIDDEN GUEST

CHAPTER XIII
AN INDUSTRIAL INCIDENT

CHAPTER XIV
AN HOUR OF RECKONING

CHAPTER XV
A BILL PAYABLE

CHAPTER XVI
HUNTING THE PANTHER

CHAPTER XVII
THE POT BOILS OVER

CHAPTER XVIII
MARIO PLAYS THE DEMAGOGUE

CHAPTER XIX
WHAT MONEY COULD NOT BUY

CHAPTER XX
THE HEART’S LAW-MAKING

CHAPTER XXI
A CALL TO SERVICE

CHAPTER XXII
TARSIS ARRAIGNED

CHAPTER XXIII
FETTERS STRUCK OFF

CHAPTER XXIV
A CHASE IN THE MOONLIGHT

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The sword of wealth

The Sword of Wealth

CHAPTER I THE UNEXPECTED MAN

CHAPTER II TARSIS

CHAPTER III A DREAM REALISED

CHAPTER IV A FACT OF LIFE

CHAPTER V THE SCALES OF HONOUR

CHAPTER VI A CENSORED DESPATCH

CHAPTER VII A MESSAGE FROM ROME

CHAPTER VIII A WEDDING JOURNEY

CHAPTER IX A SEED OF GRATITUDE

CHAPTER X THE DOOR OF FRA PANDOLE

CHAPTER XI BY ROYAL COMMAND

CHAPTER XII AN UNBIDDEN GUEST

CHAPTER XIII AN INDUSTRIAL INCIDENT

CHAPTER XIV AN HOUR OF RECKONING

CHAPTER XV A BILL PAYABLE

CHAPTER XVI HUNTING THE PANTHER

CHAPTER XVII THE POT BOILS OVER

CHAPTER XVIII MARIO PLAYS THE DEMAGOGUE

CHAPTER XIX WHAT MONEY COULD NOT BUY

CHAPTER XX THE HEART’S LAW-MAKING

CHAPTER XXI A CALL TO SERVICE

CHAPTER XXII TARSIS ARRAIGNED

CHAPTER XXIII FETTERS STRUCK OFF

CHAPTER XXIV A CHASE IN THE MOONLIGHT

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

CHAPTER I
THE UNEXPECTED MAN

CHAPTER II
TARSIS

CHAPTER III
A DREAM REALISED

CHAPTER IV
A FACT OF LIFE

CHAPTER V
THE SCALES OF HONOUR

CHAPTER VI
A CENSORED DESPATCH

CHAPTER VII
A MESSAGE FROM ROME

CHAPTER VIII
A WEDDING JOURNEY

CHAPTER IX
A SEED OF GRATITUDE

CHAPTER X
THE DOOR OF FRA PANDOLE

CHAPTER XI
BY ROYAL COMMAND

CHAPTER XII
AN UNBIDDEN GUEST

CHAPTER XIII
AN INDUSTRIAL INCIDENT

CHAPTER XIV
AN HOUR OF RECKONING

CHAPTER XV
A BILL PAYABLE

CHAPTER XVI
HUNTING THE PANTHER

CHAPTER XVII
THE POT BOILS OVER

CHAPTER XVIII
MARIO PLAYS THE DEMAGOGUE

CHAPTER XIX
WHAT MONEY COULD NOT BUY

CHAPTER XX
THE HEART’S LAW-MAKING

CHAPTER XXI
A CALL TO SERVICE

CHAPTER XXII
TARSIS ARRAIGNED

CHAPTER XXIII
FETTERS STRUCK OFF

CHAPTER XXIV
A CHASE IN THE MOONLIGHT