The Sword of Wealth

By

Henry Wilton Thomas

Author of “The Last Lady of Mulberry.”

G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1906

Copyright, 1906
BY
HENRY WILTON THOMAS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

CONTENTS

The Sword of Wealth

CHAPTER I
THE UNEXPECTED MAN

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

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

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

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

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

“Turn back, signora, I beg of you!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And then?”

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

“What I mean to do is——”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” she answered, positively, gladly.

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

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

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

“Ah, yes; we shall fight on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Again Heaven be praised!” said Don Riccardo.

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

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

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

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

“I am sorry, but to-night I cannot.”

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

“Wednesday I should be glad.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Until Wednesday.”

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

CHAPTER II
TARSIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The coffee! I speak of Hera.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III
A DREAM REALISED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And in mine,” she said. “Good-bye.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV
A FACT OF LIFE

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

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

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

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

“And is in the chapel no longer?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And I of finding you.”

“When, my darling?”

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

“Have I your permission to enter?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes; let us go.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V
THE SCALES OF HONOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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