IN ten hours, or at nine o’clock in the morning, Hera, and her maid, the only servant she had brought from the Brianza, entered a cab that had been summoned to the Via Cappuccini gate and drove to the Central railway station. They took a train that started at about the hour that Tarsis, heavy-eyed after a sleepless night, seated himself at the breakfast table and received her eloquently brief note. It was placed in his hand by Beppe, the velvety man-servant who brought the coffee:
MY HUSBAND:
Your groundless accusations leave me no alternative but to withdraw from your house. It is my purpose to make the separation permanent. I go to my father.
HERA DEI BARBIONDI.
He read it a second time, then leaned back and flecked the sheet with his fingers in a studied show of cool reflection; but his bitten lip spoiled the effect that he strove to produce. When he looked up Beppe’s eyes were riveted upon him in a manner unheard of for that genius in the art of seeing and hearing nothing. The incident, small in itself, proclaimed loudly enough that the palace retainers, from stable-boy to the head of the kitchen, were feasting already on the delicious scandal. It advised Tarsis as well that before nightfall the fashionable world would have the news on its tongue, thence to fly from the twelve gates of Milan to all parts of Italy.
Though contempt for public opinion had marked his career in all else, he had taken a keen pride in standing before the world as the husband of his young and beautiful high-born wife. It was the dearest of all his triumphs because it fed his vanity most. And now he perceived the glare of ridicule into which her desertion must throw him. Oddly enough, it was this realisation that set the first brand to his wrath. He was seized with a wild impulse to follow her to Villa Barbiondi and assert his authority over her—compel her, by main force, if the need should be, to return to the palace.
When he rose from the table the servant was not too busy to take notice that he caught up the bit of writing and crushed it in his fist. What step this man of the South would take in the case at hand was a question of absorbing interest to the Northern men and maids of the household. They believed, one and all—and in hushed voices uttered their belief as a black forecast—that the life of some one would be demanded in payment of the bill, and that it would not be the life of their master. Every item of news that could be carried to the kitchen and stables was awaited avidly, and Beppe, there on the spot, knew that many ears yawned for the report of his observations. Tarsis was aware not only that the man’s eyes followed him when he moved from the breakfast room, but that a neck was craned to keep him in view as he made his way across the Atlantean chamber.
The splendours of that great room played upon his feelings with a strange subtlety. He felt the power for mockery which at certain moments resides in lifeless things. With its spell upon him the marble Atlantes began to breathe; their hollow eyes had the gift of sight, and from their high stations between the windows they looked down upon him with cynical interest. He noted for the first time that all the portraits of the Barbiondi were painted with a broad grin. The very walls of the palace chuckled in their re-echo of his solitary footfalls.
Entering the library, he closed the door and paced before the printed wisdom of ages; but no quieting message was there for him in all that treasury of placid thought, divine inspiration, human experience. It was as if no Greek had ever meditated, no Christ ever lived, no fellow-being ever suffered. In his own life the tragedy of ages was on for its hour, and the spirit that swayed him was the spirit of the cave-dweller robbed of his female in the dawn of the centuries. The events of the last two weeks rose before him. A vision of all that had come and gone grew vivid in his mind. At first Donna Beatrice and Don Riccardo and Hera were there, each standing in proper relation to the whole; but one by one these faded out to disclose with infuriating boldness the face and figure of Mario Forza.
A few minutes more and Tarsis ceased walking to take a seat at the Napoleonic table. He rested one arm on the mosaic and drummed meditatively with the tips of his fingers. There was naught in his bearing now to indicate the storm through which he had passed. Nor was there any sign that he had reached a terrible decision. Again he was the self-centred man of business, calmly at work upon the details of an important project. The prophecy of the kitchen and the stable yard was in the first stage of its realisation. To Mario Forza the account was to be rendered and payment demanded in full.
His native impulse was to present the bill in person, to exact a settlement with his own hand; it would be no more than the honouring of a law sacred to his island birthplace. By that method the honey of revenge was sweetest. Nevertheless, for a man of his estate its disadvantages were undeniably real. With a cool head he counted the possible cost and found it too great. An ancient Sicilian proverb ran with his thoughts—“’Tis easier to shed blood than to wash out its stains.” Here was a reasoning that appealed to his mind, accustomed as it was to weigh all in the balance of profit and loss; and so it fell out that he shaped a plan of vengeance that should enlist the service of another. Some one else, skilled in the art, but of smaller importance to himself and the world, should wait upon Signor Forza and—present the bill.
So much for the main design; that was clear. But there were indispensable details, and over these Tarsis puzzled until he opened his other hand—the one not resting on the table—and looked at the scrap of paper it had been clutching. It was Hera’s note crushed into a ball. A moment he weighed the thing on his open palm and regarded it in bitter reflection. Here lay the epitome of his fondest ambition, his capital disappointment. It was the first and only time she had written to him; and with the rising of this fact in his mind flashed an idea that grew and supplied the details. He dramatised the future on a stage set with the ruins of a cloister and an old church for the background; it was a scene redeemed from total darkness by the glimmer of a moon that hung far on the slope of the heavens and there was no sound save the breathing of him who watched and waited in the shadow, with a keen blade ready for work. The conception touched some artistic chord of his nature, and he smiled and told himself it was good. In the old monastery Mario Forza had contracted the debt; in the old monastery he should pay.
He picked open the crumpled paper and spread it flat on the marble. He smoothed out the creases as best he could, then got blank paper, a pen, and a well of ink. It may have been for an hour that he sat there copying again and again the few lines his wife had written. In the first essays his eye travelled often from the copy to the pen as he fashioned each letter after Hera’s hand observing minutely and matching the slightest peculiarity. Patiently he went over and over the precise curl of a y’s tail, the loop of an l, or the dot of an i. At length he was able to write off the missive, Hera’s signature included, to his satisfaction without once looking at the model.
His next step was to leave the library, locking the door to make sure that no one should enter and see the table littered with the evidence of his work; the next to go to the chamber that was Hera’s. There he took from a desk some of the dainty paper and envelopes that bore her monogram. A few minutes and he was back in the library making a copy of her note on that paper. He held the finished product at arm’s length, then at closer view, and pronounced it perfect. He was about to carry this part of his plan to its fruition by writing a note of his own wording in the hand of his wife when a knock stayed his purpose. Instead of calling to the visitor to enter he rose and opened the door a few inches, mindful of the scraps on the table. Beppe was there with a card on his tray.
“Ask Signor Ulrich to wait a few minutes,” Tarsis said, after glancing at the name. He appreciated the value of finishing his critical task while the knack of it was warm in his brain and fingers. With composure unaffected and care unrelaxed he wrote the letter that he had shaped in his mind. It began with “My Beloved Mario” and closed with the words, “Yours, though all the world oppose, Hera.” He inscribed the envelope, “To the Honourable Mario Forza, 17, Via Senato, Milan,” sealed it, and placed it in an inner pocket of his coat.
Beppe knocked again. “I beg your pardon, signore,” he began when Tarsis had swung the door no farther than before; “but the gentleman is so urgent. He says he must see you—that he has news which you ought to have at once. He seems very full of it, signore,” he added, gravely. “I am afraid the poor gentleman will explode if he is not admitted very soon.”
“Ask him to wait another five minutes,” Tarsis said, and Beppe made off with a submissive “Very good, signore,” but his head shaking dubiously.
One by one his master gathered the sheets on the table into an orderly pile, folded the lot deliberately, and slipped them into his pocket; he looked under the table and the chair to be certain that no trace of his work remained. Then he lit a cigarette, rang for Beppe, and told him to show in Signor Ulrich.
The superintendent-general of the Tarsis Silk Company bustled into the library, his lips puffing, eyes big with excitement. Tarsis greeted him standing, waved his hand to a chair, and asked what had happened.
“Happened!” exclaimed Signor Ulrich. “Per Dio, I could tell you sooner what has not happened.”
“Let us have what has happened first,” was the other’s quiet command. “Be good enough to give me the facts briefly.”
“Briefly, then,” cried the Austrian, too much agitated to sit down, “hell is at large!”
“A strike?”
“No; a revolution!”
Tarsis had schooled himself not to take the man too seriously; he valued the ardour that he gave to his tasks, but took care to divide the chaff from the wheat of his enthusiasm.
“What are the particulars?” he inquired.
“All our mills are shut down.”
“All in Milan?”
“In three provinces—Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venetia. They called the hands out by telegraph. But that was only the beginning. The mob is shouting for bread and rioting; not alone the silk workers, but hundreds of others—all the lazy rabble of the quarter”; and the man of practical notions fumed in wrath against this unexpected phase of social phenomena.
“A bread riot is hardly our affair,” Tarsis remarked, dropping into a chair. “It’s a case for the police.”
“But they have made it our affair,” Ulrich said. “Every window in the Ticinese Gate mill is smashed, and what is more, the place would have been in flames but for the carbineers.”
“Are the soldiers out?” Tarsis asked, blowing the ashes from his cigarette.
“Soldiers out! Horns of the devil! The soldiers have been attacked, they have discharged a volley into the crowd, killed two, and wounded nobody knows how many.”
The Austrian looked in vain for any sign of alarm on the face of his master. To Tarsis it seemed a petty incident, indeed, by contrast with the revolt in his own soul and the deed upon which he had determined.
“This has happened before,” he said, “and I have no doubt that order will be restored in a few hours. Now, let us consider the strike. That is more to our concern. What do they want this time?”
“I confess that I do not know and am unable to ascertain,” Ulrich answered, quelled in a measure by the other’s belittlement of the situation, but not convinced.
“Have they presented a demand?”
“No, signore. It came about in this way at the Ticinese Gate mill: Every Tuesday I make a visit of inspection there. I arrived as usual at 8 o’clock this morning. In the weaving department I noted a strange, brazen-faced fellow going from loom to loom distributing leaflets. I guessed that he was up to some mischief. Quietly I got a look at one of the circulars and saw that the rascal was sowing socialism in our own ground—under our noses, in truth.”
“What was in the circular?”
“Oh, it was a seditious, scurrilous, shameful thing. The heading of it was ‘To the Golden Geese,’ and it asked them how much longer they were going to lay golden eggs for Tarsis and his gang of conspirators against the poor. Tarsis and his gang! Those were the words, signore! Anarchism, rank anarchism!”
“And then?” Tarsis asked, glancing up while Ulrich paused for breath.
“I had the fellow arrested, of course. But not a word of protest had I uttered before. Ha! They all thought I was afraid to speak. While he was distributing the papers I telephoned to the Questura of Police. Quickly two Civil Guards came and nabbed him. Then what happened? Red Errico, foreman of a group of the weavers, began to cry out against me. He called me a slave, a tyrant, a jackal, all in the same breath. Think of it, signore. What ingratitude! You yourself will remember that it was I who appeared before the Board of Directors and asked that the wages of the children be advanced from twelve to fifteen soldi a day. And now they call me tyrant! The whole crew of them did it, and to my teeth, signore, to my teeth!”
“And then?” asked Tarsis.
“The ringleader and the men near him began squawking like geese and hissing. The whole room took it up. Red Errico started a cry of ‘No more golden eggs for Tarsis and his gang!’ and joining in this every man left his loom and made for the door. Most of them did not wait to stop their machines. They rushed down-stairs and at each floor called to the others to follow. Every man, woman, and child of them ran pell-mell into the yard as if the mill were on fire. All the time they hissed and shouted, ‘No more golden eggs!’ The rabble of the quarter came up, joined the strikers, and before I knew it every window was smashed. It was a taste of what we may expect from that man Forza’s preaching.”
Signor Ulrich perceived, not without a feeling of triumph, that his recital had moved Tarsis at last.
“I have heard enough!” he exclaimed, springing to his feet. “The Government is to blame. It has been too soft with these Parliamentary mischief-makers. As to the strike,” he went on, “come to me to-morrow, and I shall have some plan. Should the unions send a committee meantime, refuse them audience. Until to-morrow, then, Signor Ulrich.”
But the Austrian did not take himself off. “I beg your pardon,” he ventured, “but I cannot go without giving you a word of warning. There is great danger. I beg you not to expose yourself to it.”
“What would you have me do, my friend? Go into hiding?”
“No; and still——”
“Bah! I am not afraid.”
“Nevertheless, signore, if you had heard what I heard. Oh, the way they cried out against you! Believe me, their passions are roused, and there is no telling what a mob may do.”
“It is considerate of you,” said Tarsis, “but I think I know how to take care of myself. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, sir; and again I beg of you not to expose yourself until after order is restored.”
That the superintendent’s admonition was not wasted appeared when he had gone from the room. Tarsis paced the floor awhile, striving for some way to enter the furnace without getting burnt. To the quarter of the Ticinese Gate he was resolved to go to-night at whatsoever cost.
If it were possible to sharpen his thirst for the blood of Mario Forza the turn of events, as narrated by the Austrian, had done the work. He felt that he could not compose himself to sleep again until a decisive step had been taken. As usual, his thinking bore fruit in definite ways and means; and in three hours, when the street lamps were lit, the master of the palace watched his chance and stole out by the Via Cappuccini gate. He had clipped his beard; instead of a white collar he wore a dark silk muffler; his hat was a broad-brimmed one of felt, and a pair of coloured goggles concealed his eyes.