CHAPTER XIII
AN INDUSTRIAL INCIDENT
TARSIS gave orders that no bright lights be shown at the windows and that the palace in other respects preserve an air of mourning. He passed the night in the library, writing at his Napoleonic table, smoking and brooding over the utter failure of his efforts to break Hera’s determination. He did not regret the attack he had made on Mario in the presence of the guests. For the New Democracy he harboured a deep hatred, and from a conviction born of this he had linked the doctrines of that party and Mario’s advocacy of them with the assassination of the King. It was easy for him to charge Forza with the loss of the royal visit, and easier to behold him as the author of his marital discord. The last fact clung to his meditations, which lasted into the morning hours.
Hera, alone in her apartments, thought over the events of the day. What dwarfed all else in her consciousness was the discovery that Mario’s love had never faltered. In the joy of this revelation she was able to forget for the moment the bondage into which she had been lured by Tarsis, the price she had paid for obeying an instinct of honour. But in the days that followed she was reminded of it bitterly.
At first the manner of her husband was such as to inform her negatively that he was willing no longer to keep up even a show of compliance. Next it took on a tenor of positive vexation. If she had been keenly sensible before that he exerted himself to win her affection, she was alive now to his studied resentment. He made no effort to mask his feelings. On the contrary, he paraded them resolutely. The details of domestic experience offered opportunities without number, and she observed that he seldom neglected them.
He did not conduct his campaign of protest as a man of finer grain might have done. From open indifference to her wishes he passed to pronounced acts of discourtesy. Once, while she was with her maid dressing for a night at La Scala, he quitted the palace without warning, and did not return until long after the curtain had fallen on the ballet. In the morning he offered an apology, but no word of explanation. Every day brought a new sneer to his lip and to his eye glances of deepened ill-will. This mood never left him. She was made to feel it alike at the breakfast table and when he paid her the parting civilities of the night.
Though all his approaches to her heart were foreordained to failure, she had been disposed to retain a certain spark of respect for him; now this was extinguished because of the discovery she had made about the message from Rome. In its place there burned a detestation of the man which every hour intensified. She realised that his was not a character to accept, even to perceive, that her attitude was, after all, just toward him, surveying it, as she did, in the light of their pre-nuptial agreement. Her blame of him, in consequence, was not so large as her commiseration of self for having been so weak as to heed other counsels than those of her heart. With the feeling that she had wronged herself was compounded a fear that she had wronged Tarsis as well.
But the idea of surrender had never crossed her mind. Reason had no play here; it was merely the intuitive firmness of a fine and wholesome soul, for whom real marriage could never be aught but a profound and moral naturalism; a loving union between man and woman such as the name of Mario Forza conjured up, ardent with a sense of the infinite—the apotheosis of a hallowed passion. When the duplicity of Tarsis was laid bare she had known an impulse to leave his house, to release herself from an obligation he had imposed upon her by deceit. But she listened for the moment to a less selfish voice, and decided to accept the events of her ill-starred wedding—to endure, suffer silently, even stolidly, all that it should entail. She felt so alone. To her father she would not go; his was a nature to be relieved of care, not one to be asked to share it. As to Aunt Beatrice, try as she did, Hera could not think of her except as the projector of the trouble, well meaning as her purpose may have been.
There was only one heart that could give sympathy, only one fellow-being that called to her, and to this one she might not go, in his counsel she might not seek guidance. Nevertheless, chance brought them together one morning in the garden of the General Hospital. Every week Hera sent roses there, and it was on Flower Day, as it had come to be known, that she met Mario in the director’s office. Soon they found themselves walking in the garden, he telling of a plan he had for a hospital where soldiers fallen on the industrial field might be cared for until restored for the struggle.
“I come as a student,” he explained. “It is my second visit this week. The organisation here has no superior in Europe, and in many respects we shall take it as our model.”
“In what respect will you not take it?” she asked, as they passed a broad lawn where pale men and women sat in the sun.
“In our dealing with such as those,” he answered, indicating the convalescents.
“They seem to be dealt with kindly,” she observed. “They look contented.”
“Now, yes. Most of them, you can see, are persons who in health are accustomed to work, and not at light employment. They belong to the class who can rest without starving only when they fall sick and go to a hospital. Most of those patients on the lawn are done with the doctor and the nurse. Time, fresh air, good nourishment, and rest are their needs. In a few days they will be dismissed as cured. The demand for beds is pressing. Their room in the wards is wanted. They must go. They will not be strong enough to do heavy work, the only kind for which most of them are fitted. If a man is friendless he has an excellent chance to starve because the hospital turns him out before he is well enough to earn a living. No employer wants a gaunt-visaged convalescent.”
“You would provide for him until he is able to provide for himself,” she said, comprehendingly.
“Yes. We should not pronounce him cured until he was strong enough to earn his living.”
They entered an avenue of poplars, on either side of which stood the rows of isolated wards, and were alone except for the flitting presence here and there of a white-jacketed attendant or a nurse in sombre gown. Mario told her that what she had made known to him at Palazzo Barbiondi had lit up his world again. When the news of the wedding reached him, he said, his thoughts were black indeed. It was as if the sun had fallen just as it had begun to fill the east with glory. The love of her had given him a new heart, a new mind, new senses. Suddenly all life had been transfigured with an infinite beauty. It was in the railway carriage returning to Milan that he learned of the wedding. He told her of the change that came over his spirit. Bitterly he cried out against her and the universal heart. The rapture that had raised him into heaven broke and he dropped into the pit of hell. And so it was until he learned that she was the dupe of—the forged message. He was glad for the warmth of sympathy that then suffused his being. He saw the cruel facts that had ruled her, the forces that had driven her to the other’s wish.
“Our temple is in ruins,” he said, filled with pity for her and himself; “but perhaps it will some time be rebuilt. It must be!” he declared, passionately. “This love is a necessity of my life, and will be so long as life shall endure.”
“But it must be content now,” she warned him, “to live as does the edelweiss of the Alps—that lonely plant which grows amid the snow.”
“But always with a flower ready to bloom safe and warm in its heart,” he added. And he told her how hope had come to him the day before in the ruined monastery, where he had gone to live again, in its delicious memories, that hour they passed during the hailstorm.
“The leaves were thick on the eglantine,” he said, “and the chapel was gay with sunshine and the voices of birds. All the growing, living things had entered upon their heritage of joy, and then it was that the light of a great hope, as if from prophecy, filled——”
She had started a little and admonished him to silence at sight of a familiar figure in the arched entrance to the main wards, whither their steps had led them. It was the large frame, ruddy face, flaxen hair and beard of Ulrich the Austrian. The man who had sent Hera the false telegram stood wide-eyed with astonishment and comprehension to behold her in the company of Mario Forza. But he quickly recovered his air of effusive good nature. With uncovered head and smiling he approached to greet her.
“I have been through the wards,” said Tarsis’s most confidential retainer, “and everywhere are the beautiful flowers your Excellency has given. Ah! the rooms are filled with their fragrance—and,” he added, bowing low, one hand pressed upon his chest, “with the praises of your Excellency.”
Wondering that chance should have brought the man there, and conscious for the first time that in this walk and converse with Mario there was aught of indiscretion, and preoccupied as well with an intuition that the Austrian’s presence boded a new ill, Hera replied to his compliments with few words, and she and Mario passed on.
The meeting, in itself a trivial occurrence, proved a source of much illumination for the Austrian. It explained what had puzzled his mind ever since the night he had performed for Tarsis the service of sending the message that made Hera listen to his plea. He had tried in vain to account for that affair as some ruse in a political game where his resourceful master had set his skill against that of the leader of the New Democracy. Now he divined that a woman—no other than she who became his wife—was the stake that Tarsis had won. He recalled the words of the telegram, and felt sure that he had hit the mark.
The Honourable Forza, he reasoned, was a rival before the marriage, and, plainly, was a rival still. The thought of intrigue obtruded itself in his survey of the situation, and, in the light of his new knowledge, duty demanded that in this branch of his master’s affairs he perform another confidential service. It was only just, he told himself, that Signor Tarsis, too great a man to keep a watch on his wife, should know that she had an interest in the General Hospital that was not confined to visiting the sick and cheering their lot with gifts of flowers.
Together Mario and Hera entered a ward for women, and he was with her still as she moved through the great sick-room, pausing here and there for a word to some patient. She told him that she wished above all to visit a certain little girl, because it was the last opportunity she would have to do so. “The doctor says that she will not be here when I come next week. They cannot save her. She is only twelve years old, but she worked in a mill ten hours a day.”
“Was it there she contracted the disease?” Mario asked.
“The doctors think the bad air of the place did as much as the work and long hours to break down her health.”
“Is she alone in the world?”
“No; her mother, also a mill-worker, is alive, but she was disabled for a time, and the girl had to toil for both. In the same mill the mother met with an accident which left her face scarred terribly. She is here now with her daughter. Only yesterday was she let out of prison.”
Hera indicated a bed a few yards away where a woman was kneeling in prayer.
“It is a cruel, often-told tale,” Mario said. “In the days when most of our factories were built the world had not thought much about the moral welfare or health of those obliged to work in them. With our enlightenment about other things, we have learned that forces for combating foes of the public health are as important to the state as the army or navy. New laws are compelling builders of factories to have a care for the health of the workers.”
“The laws that the New Democracy has given the country,” she said, aware that Mario more than any man in Italy had worked to this end.
“Something has been accomplished,” he told her, “but the work is only begun. Do you know what mill this girl worked in?”
“Yes,” she answered, but said no more, and he understood. In all the Tarsis silk-mills child labour was employed.
They saw the woman rise from prayer, look down upon the face of her child, and, with a shriek that resounded through the ward, bringing patients up from their pillows and nurses running to the bedside, fall upon the girl’s body, wailing, and beseeching the ashen lips to speak.
“Don’t go, Giulia! Don’t leave me! You are all I have!”
With the others Hera drew near and yielded to an impulse to speak to the mother so alone in her grief. The sound of her voice hushed the woman’s sobbing. She looked into Hera’s face, heavily at first, then set her gaze more sharply and passed a hand over her brow like one of bewildered senses. Another moment and she sprang to her feet, a malediction on her tongue, and the scar across her eyelid and cheek glowing angrily, as it had that day in the Cathedral square when she shook her fist at Tarsis and his bride.
“It’s her husband’s work!” La Ferita cried, pointing her finger at Hera. “He killed my Giulia. He worked the life out of her in his factory; gave her fifteen soldi for ten hours, and when she could toil no more left her to die like a whelp. And for what? That he might have a palace for her Excellency, and horses, carriages, jewels, and servants. Look at the two! There she, there my Giulia!”
Hera, full of pity, could find no word to speak to her, and the others in the group about the bed stood speechless, divided in sympathy between the great lady so mercilessly arraigned and the stricken woman malevolent in her sorrow. In the moment of silence a physician who had been listening at the girl’s heart arose and nodded his head. This brought a fresh outburst from La Ferita.
“Oh, it’s death! Never fear!” she exclaimed. “His work was well done, your Excellency! Well done, friends, neh?”
Mario, who had moved to Hera’s side, touched her arm. “Let us go,” he said, and as they drew away La Ferita filled the air with new imprecations against Tarsis. The doctor and the nurses tried to calm her, but without avail.
“My day will come!” were the last words of hers that Hera caught as she passed from the room. “He shall pay. He killed her. He shall pay!”