CHAPTER VI
A CENSORED DESPATCH
THOUGH expectant of some shocking disclosure, and nerved for it, Donna Beatrice was not equal to an utter smash-up of all that she had planned and executed so satisfactorily to herself.
“Mario Forza!” she shrieked when the power to articulate was hers once more. “Oh, I knew it would be! From the first I saw the danger! We are ruined! To-morrow they will be here with their bills, a pack of hungry wolves. Hera! Wicked, heartless, cruel! Have you no mercy for me, for your father?”
In her violent agitation of mind, only half conscious of her words and acts, she moved into the corridor, beating her temples and wailing.
“Riccardo! Oh, my brother, where are you in this most terrible of moments?” she cried out with all the voice she could muster. “Calamity has befallen us! Search for him, everybody. Search for Don Riccardo!”
It was an outburst that startled the domestics above and below stairs, and carried ominously to the Duke himself, who had just entered the house and was about to greet Tarsis in the reception hall. Guessing that the trouble concerned his appointed son-in-law, he turned away from him, dreading an appeal for assistance. To his sister’s resonant signals of distress, however, he started to respond, but with more deliberation than eagerness. He could not have made his way up the staircase with less haste if the wonted calm of the villa had been undisturbed. Instinctively he paused in the ante-chamber of Donna Beatrice’s apartments, hesitating to become a part of the catastrophe, whatever it might be.
“What is the meaning of this awful affair?” he heard his sister ask of Hera.
“It means that my love is for Mario Forza. To be the wife of another is impossible unless he bids me do so.”
“Unless who bids you do so?” Donna Beatrice gasped.
“Mario Forza.”
“Heaven and the saints!” exclaimed the elder woman. “What new madness is this? And when do you expect to have his permission?” she asked, with all the sarcasm she could summon to the words.
“Signor Tarsis says we may have his answer by midnight.”
“Signor Tarsis! Oh, spare me these mysteries!”
“At the request of Signor Tarsis,” Hera explained, “I shall send a telegram to Signor Forza, who is on the way to Rome. In the message I shall ask him what to do.”
“And your promised husband?” said Donna Beatrice. “Is he by chance to be consulted—to have a voice in the matter?”
“He has agreed to abide by what Signor Forza says,” Hera answered.
“Agreed to abide! Monstrous! Perfectly monstrous! Abide, indeed! Will you be good enough to tell me what alternative he has when you are capable of breaking your promise in this conscienceless manner? But it is not you. The daughter of my brother, a Barbiondi, could not commit this crime of her will. It is the man under whose dreadful influence she has fallen.”
“Dear aunt,” Hera pleaded, going up to her, “try to calm yourself. There has been no influence. Believe me, I do but obey the prompting of my heart.”
“Prompting of the heart!” the other repeated, vixenishly. “That is a luxury we cannot afford. Oh, where is your father?”
She rang for a servant, and unconsciously sounded as well the signal for Don Riccardo to withdraw from the ante-room. The Duke was well content with the step Hera had taken. It was the one he had longed to advise since the night of Mario’s visit in the villa, but always he had lacked the courage. Like Hera, he felt confident that Mario, his love alone inspiring the answer to the telegram, would tell her to be true to the call of her soul; and he had no misgiving for the outcome of his daughter’s adventure.
So he went for a stroll in the villa park, taking care to walk where no servant sent by his sister should be likely to find him. That poor lady was in the last despair when Hera left the room to go to her own apartments to write the message. She assigned a footman to hunt for Don Riccardo, and although the man did his best he brought back only the customary G’he minga. A little while and Hera, the message in hand, was in the reception hall, where Tarsis waited alone.
“This is what I have written,” she said. He cast his eye quickly over the lines at first, reread them slowly, and folding the sheet nodded his head in approval.
“You have put the case fairly,” he said, returning the paper to her hands. “It is most gracious of you.” And then, as if in sudden memory of an appointment, he added: “I must set off for Milan. Will you make my compliments to your aunt, and say that I am unable to stay for dinner? A meeting of directors to-night calls me to the city. By midnight I shall be back—for his answer, and yours. Au revoir.”
He held out his hand, and when she had taken it he started for the door. At the threshold he paused, turned about, and said, approaching her again: “We pass the post-office in Castel-Minore, where there is a telegraph bureau. If you wish it I will carry the message there. Thus we shall save time. In five minutes, with my car, we shall be in Castel-Minore. You will appreciate that it is of importance the telegram be sent at once.”
Without the slightest hesitation she handed him the message.
“I will arrange with them to bring you the answer as soon as it is received,” he said, and left the house.
Once beyond the park gates and moving along the Adda bank, he crushed the paper in his fist and thrust it into a coat pocket. It had no place in the plan he began to lay. Every detail of the scheme stood definitely in his mind by the time he told Sandro, the driver, to stop before the post-office. He entered the telegraph bureau, but the message he wrote and gave to the operator was not the one written by Donna Hera; yet it was addressed precisely as hers had been—“To the Station Master at Rome, for Hon. Mario Forza, to arrive by Roman express.” He had scribbled the words, “All is well,” and signed them “H.”
“Milan,” he said to Sandro, as he entered the automobile, “and at the top speed.”
The false telegram was intended only to keep his trail clear—to put his undertaking beyond risk of failure through mischance. If Hera by hazard inquired she would learn that a telegram had been sent to Mario Forza. Tarsis had no fear that she might carry the inquiry further, at least until after it would be too late to alter an accomplished fact—the fact of their wedding. Tarsis’s next need was a telephone. He could have found one in Castel-Minore, but provincial “centrals” have wide ears and long tongues, so he put off the most important part of the undertaking until he should reach the big town.
It was a run of eight miles in the moonlight, and in a few minutes they were at the Venetian Gate with the Dogana guards asking Tarsis if he had any dutiable goods. Their pace was not diminished much when they were under way again on the pavement of the Corso. There was a man in Rome whom Tarsis wanted to catch on the wire before he should leave his home for the opera, and time was valuable. Pedestrians cursed Sandro as he flew by with tooting horn. At Via Monte Napoleone, where they left the Corso, Tarsis smiled as he thought of the mythical directors’ meeting he told Hera he had to attend. Another minute and he was entering the door of his private offices in Piazza Pellico. All the clerks had gone to their homes, and no one but the old porter saw him enter the building. With a key he let himself into that part of the suite where his exclusive apartment was, and went at once to his desk and took up the receiver of a telephone.
“Put me in communication with 16 A, Quirinale, Rome,” he said. In the wait that followed he drew from his pocket the writing of Hera, spread out the crumpled paper, and to make sure that his plan should fit in with the words she had written, he read again the message intended for Mario Forza:
“He would hold me to engagement. I have told him it cannot be. He maintains that if guided by justice I must keep my word, and asks me to appeal to you. He is willing to abide by your decision. Answer at once.
“H.”
He smiled to think how well Hera had played into his hands in the wording of the message—how easy she had made it for him to give practical form to his project of withholding it from Mario and arranging with a confederate in Rome to send an answer supposably from Mario that should counsel Hera to stand by her engagement of marriage. About the day of reckoning, when his treachery should be disclosed, Tarsis was not the sort of man to worry. Time enough, he told himself to meet that difficulty when it appeared. In this moment, his crowning ambition at stake, every consideration of life dwindled to nothingness before that of making certain of performance the ceremony appointed for the following day. The telephone bell jingled.
“This is Rome?” he asked, the receiver at ear. “Quirinale, 16 A? And it is you, Signor Ulrich? Is there any one within sound of your voice? Your voice, I say. Is there any one in the room with you? Alone? Good. This is Signor Tarsis. I have a commission of great moment. You will pay strict attention to what I say, and if you have the slightest doubt that you hear aright do not hesitate to stop me, and I will repeat. You will go to the Central Railway station to-night, and await the arrival of the Roman express from the north. One of its passengers is Mario Forza. Forza. F-o-r-z-a. Yes; of the Chamber of Deputies. You know him by sight? Very good. As soon as he has left the station you will send by telegraph the message that I now will dictate. You will write it down. Are you ready?
“‘To Donna Hera dei Barbiondi, Castel-Minore, Brianza. Justice gives him first claim. Let justice be your guide. M.’
“You have that? Read it slowly. Good. You will put that message on the wire as soon as Mario Forza has left the station. Now, repeat my instructions from the beginning. All right. One thing more. When you have sent the message call me up. Yes; I am in Milan. I shall await your call in Piazza Pellico. That is all. Addio.”
Signor Ulrich was the only man in Italy to whom Tarsis would have intrusted the errand—Ulrich the Austrian, as he was known to the toilers; superintendent of all the Tarsis silk works. As a crusher of labor revolts he had proved himself a master, and Tarsis, perceiving a sound investment of capital, had made him rich while making him loyal. He knew that the little device of the telegram would remain as deep a secret as if it were known to himself alone.
“You may go and return at 11:30,” he said to Sandro, at the door, and the hungry driver sent his machine forward like an arrow. On the way to Café Cova for dinner Tarsis reflected complacently that the particulars of his scheme had been well executed. He had no concern, therefore, as to the outcome. Take care of the details and the generalities will take care of themselves, was a business adage of his own making that he had followed, to the consternation many a time of his larger-visioned rivals.