CHAPTER XIV
AN HOUR OF RECKONING
TWO days afterward, when Hera and Tarsis were dining alone, he asked her about the work she had begun among the poor of the Ticinese quarter, and she told him that she had subscribed 150,000 liras to a fund to build a settlement there after the London plan, and that she had been chosen an officer of the Society of Help, and intended to take an active part in its service.
“By the way,” he remarked, affecting a manner of light concern, “I have decided to withdraw my offer of funds for your charitable enterprises.”
“Have you changed your opinion of the work?”
“No; but I’ve changed my opinion of you,” he answered, and she saw his cold smile at play. “Perhaps it is as well you should know,” he added, “that my eyes have been opened.”
In his mind the tale that Ulrich had carried about the meeting with Mario at the hospital, he regarded her narrowly, studying the effect of his words; she was aware of a note of challenge in them; their meaning puzzled her, and she broke the rule of silence she had observed hitherto toward his displays of malevolence.
“Your eyes have been opened?” she said. “May I ask what you have seen?”
“I—have—seen—your—subterfuge!” he responded, leaning forward and striking the table with the tip of his forefinger.
“Subterfuge?”
“Yes; and let me tell you that it is not worth while to continue the masquerade of charity. I am aware of your secret designs.”
“I do not understand you.”
“My belief is that you do,” he returned, speaking fast and vehemently, “though you may make yourself believe that you do not, just as you delude yourself with the idea that you are exceptionally noble to wrong me, your husband, that you may be faithful to another man.”
Hera had risen from the table; it was his first open blow, and she met it standing. A deep flush of colour dyed her temples, but she compressed her lips resolutely, obedient to an instinct which forbade her to quarrel with him, as it would have forbidden her to bandy words with the domestic who appeared just then with the cordial and glasses. She moved to the open window and stood with her back to him. Before her lay the garden with its stately white urns, the rich foliage of the trees, and beyond the wall the moonlit roofs of the workers’ homes, all touched with the mystery of the night, and Hera, looking out upon the picture, endeavoured to think clearly; she tried to pacify her warring emotions, to detach right from wrong, to stand them far apart, and with the eye of justice survey each in its naked proportions. As to what might be the whole meaning of the suspicions he had expressed she gave no thought; she contemplated only the cause of the angry spirit that was roused in him, and of which she saw herself the author; and for this her conscience adjudged her guilty.
“The fault is mine,” she said, at length, turning toward him, sadness in her face. “I have done you a great wrong. By reason of it I am suffering more than you can know. I ought never to have become your wife.”
“Still, it is a wrong that you may redress,” he returned, more gently, as he paused in his measured pacing of the room.
“No; it is impossible,” she avowed, painfully.
“It is your plain obligation to do so,” he asserted, his manner harsh again. “What right have you to accept all that your husband bestows and give nothing in return?”
She answered him slowly, measuring every word: “The wrong I did you was in yielding to your solicitations—in allowing you to persuade me to marry you. I should have been stronger. For the rest, I am giving you all that I promised. Can you deny this?”
He did not answer the question. Instead, he swept her with a contemptuous glance. “I perceive that with all this pretty show of remorse,” he said, “you are determined to keep up your defiance of me.”
“Indeed, I am acting in no spirit of defiance,” she replied. “You must believe that. I tell you that, in the circumstances, I should deem myself on a plane with the women of the Galleria if I became to you what you wish.”
She turned again to the window, and his coarse laugh sounded in her ears.
“You would have me believe,” she heard him sneering, as he drew nearer to her, “that you are living up to some poetic ideal. At the outset I was fool enough to swallow that fiction. I thought that you were merely carrying idealism to the verge of absurdity, and at that point you would come to your senses and turn back. I credited my wife with being honest, you see.”
“Will you spare me these insinuations?” she said. “I beg of you to speak out.”
“Oh, your counterfeit of lofty virtue is skilful,” he went on, mocking her manner. “Though a little cheap at times, on the whole it would deceive a critic who did not know the truth. I happen to know the truth, signora.”
Now she faced him with flashing eyes. “Tell me what you mean!”
He snapped his fingers in her face. “Bah! Your imperious airs do not fool me. I know something of the blue blood now. It is like any other—has the same passions and gratifies them in the same way. As a noblewoman you ought at least to have the courage of your vices.”
She started for the door, but stopped suddenly and faced him again. “Say what you mean in direct words or I shall go.”
“Oh, I will be plain!” he flung back, going close to her. “The man by whom you pretend to be inspired so grandly is simply one who provokes your appetite more than I do. You have never given him up. He cannot come to you. That would destroy the pretty illusion of virtue; so you go to him. To this end you employ a shrewd subterfuge. Suddenly you are seized with a fever of pity for the poor of Milan. You have a burning desire to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked. You select the Porta Ticinese quarter for your field of labour, although the same conditions prevail not a stone’s throw from this spot,” and he pointed towards the roofs that showed above the garden wall.
She had turned her back to him. “Why do you go to the Porta Ticinese?” he went on. “You wish plain speech. I answer, then, because Mario Forza is to be found there in his Co-operative Society offices. He, too—snivelling demagogue!—loves the poor. That you may go to him, whom you love, you come to me, whom you choose to despise, for money!—that you may carry on your intrigue under the cloak of charity! I was blind before, signora, but now——”
“Stop!” she commanded him, wheeling suddenly. “What you say is false, madly, monstrously false!” She rose before him a queenly young figure, erect and tall. Had it been given to Tarsis to know he would have perceived in that moment, as he looked upon her, that his anger had driven him to a terrible misjudgment. The poise of her head, the intrepid, direct message of her eyes, her bearing, so superior to vulgar graces—these were her clear ensigns of a disdain profound for the mean, the low, the perfidious; but to all this Tarsis was blind, as an enraged bull is blind to the glories of the sunset. She turned from him and moved once more toward the door to the passage that led to her private apartments; but still the impassioned voice of Tarsis was at her ear.
“Oh, don’t play the grand nobility with me”; he muttered. “I have been too easy with you, too eager to serve, to please you. I have been weak—I, who was never weak before. But that is past. I don’t care what you do. Henceforth I shall be strong. Do you hear? I know my rights. In Sicily we have a way of spoiling such games as you have been playing.”
Hera kept moving toward the door, but always she felt his breath panting beside her. At the threshold she turned and paused long enough to say, her voice issuing without a tremor:
“I repeat that what you have said is false, absolutely false!”
Then she went her way down the corridor.
In solitude, she put herself face to face with the situation’s hideous fact. Though wounded to the depths of her being, she had no impulse to tears. She felt impelled rather to bitter smiles for her grim failure in striving to serve two masters—to travel any path but that which the heart pointed. So this was the price of her father’s peaceful days, her aunt’s triumph over the bloodhounds of debt, the restoration of a Barbiondi to the palace of her ancestors! Ah, well, she would end it now, and she cared not whether the sequel should be good or ill.
The force of events had awakened in her a latent Titanic element that lifted her superior to weak scruple. She was conscious of a marvellous accession of moral strength. Now she felt that no barrier might rise high enough to baffle her purpose. Fervidly she was thankful that her spirit had come forth unconquered, and that, chained though she was to a rock, her soul could be free. She thought of her father, and weighed the effect upon his fortunes that parting from Tarsis might produce, but not for long did she harbour that consideration; she cast it from her as she might have dashed a cup of hemlock, resolved that her life should be poisoned no more for other people’s good. Come what might, in this crisis she would honour the heart’s edict. She had learned somewhat of her great mistake. It had proved a tree of knowledge, and in eating of the fruit her moral nature had found itself—become well defined and unified—so that she stood now as a law unto her own processes.
Nevertheless, she retained her sense of justice, and drew comfort from the fact that her husband had been the aggressor; that the deceit by which he had obtained her consent to the marriage, his rash accusations, his insults, gave her warrant for quitting his house and ending the mockery of their relation. It never occurred to her mind that the situation left any alternative course. She rang for her maid and directed her to prepare for their departure on the morrow, by an early train. Then she wrote a message to Tarsis, enclosed the sheet in an envelope, and stood it against a mirror, to make sure that it should catch her eye in the morning.