CHAPTER XX
THE HEART’S LAW-MAKING
AUNT Beatrice’s pride of blood was large and her sympathy for the peasant folk small; yet, when it came to expressing a primary emotion she was not above borrowing from the rugged phrases of her humbler neighbours. Thus it fell out that when she had recovered from the shock of Hera’s home-coming so far as to credit her bewildered senses, and hold the appalling situation in perspective, she summed it up in this wise:
“We have indeed returned to our muttons.”
It was in the solitude of her own apartment that she arrived at this homely epitome, and saw, in despair, that the final crash of the House of Barbiondi was near. By her niece’s eccentricity, as she chose to call it, the future of ease her genius designed and made a reality had been transformed into one of poverty, with the abominable insecurities and detestable humiliations that had haunted nearly all her days. A picture of money-lenders, dress-makers, tailors, and purveyors of meat and drink, each with a bill in hand, marching in clamorous phalanx through the villa gateway, rose to her excited fancy and made her flesh creep. She knew that she would never be able again to play Amazon against those storming hosts. Of courage and strategic skill she had proved herself the abundant possessor throughout the family’s uncertain career, but now her spirit lay crushed in the dust, like that of a military commander who has seen a magnificent victory ruthlessly flung away.
The frosty welcome that Hera received from her aunt did not surprise, however it may have pained her; but she had comfort in the assurance that her father’s arms would be open to greet her; she knew the loyalty of his affection and sympathy as well as she comprehended the frailty of his nature in other respects. When he entered the room she flew to his outstretched arms, and without a word being spoken as to the occasion of her return she saw in his eye a light of understanding.
“I have come home to stay, babbo,” was all she felt it needful to tell him.
“Brava, daughter mine!” he said. “Ah, I have longed for the day. I knew it must come.”
It was impossible for Aunt Beatrice to answer to the feeling of relief and gladness that expressed itself in the countenance of father and daughter; her thought turned rather to Tarsis, whom she could see in no other light than that of a man cruelly wronged by his wife. She did not deny herself the privilege of candid observations to this effect, which Don Riccardo and Hera heard with patience. But when she urged Hera to reconsider her act and begged her father to realise, before it might be too late, that ruin to the family must result, Don Riccardo spoke his mind. He had learned somewhat through suffering, and the example of his daughter had quickened his latent strength.
He answered her that he did not care! Ruin or no ruin, he was glad that events had taken this turn. The worst that could betide, he declared, a trifle grandiloquently, was material want; starvation, perhaps. Was not that a better fate than to live on with his daughter a hostage to fortune, held in luxurious thraldom? Hera listened and rejoiced for the sense of respect that came now to mingle with the love she had always borne her father.
The scene was interrupted at this point by a servant’s announcement that Colonel Rosario was in the reception hall. His regiment of Bersaglieri, on the march to Milan in response to a call for reinforcements, had halted near by. The Duke and his daughter went at once to greet him.
“My men,” said the old soldier, “are at your gate, and their commander is at your disposal for luncheon.”
“Bravo! A thousand welcomes!” exclaimed Don Riccardo, as he pressed the other’s hand and checked an impulse to add, “You could not have arrived at a more logical moment; when last you honoured our board we were rejoicing for my daughter’s fancied escape; now we are glad for her real one.” But no hint was given him of the reason for Hera’s presence in the villa.
Donna Beatrice did not appear until just before the hour for luncheon. In solitude she continued her struggle with the new predicament until she had to acknowledge herself beaten. She could not cope at all with this new-born spirit of disdain for consequences evinced by her brother and his amazing daughter. The poor woman’s one hope was that the resourceful Tarsis might find a way to save them from themselves.
When she had taken her place at the table opposite Colonel Rosario, it seemed to her all the more urgent that some strong hand should curb their reckless course. Here she found herself in an atmosphere of cheerfulness, even gaiety, that was scandalously at odds with the gloom demanded by the terrible situation. Actually, the wife who had forsaken her husband because of some foible was able to sit there and eat and drink, and laugh over the rugged jokes of an old soldier. And the father of this disgraced daughter was so lost to shame that he outdid the others in merriment. Misericordia! They were turning the calamity into a jubilee! She breathed a thanksgiving when Colonel Rosario had left the house and she saw the bayonets glinting in the sun, as the Bersaglieri marched toward Milan.
Although convinced from the moment of Hera’s return that Mario Forza was the diabolus ex machina, as she phrased it, Donna Beatrice, by a heroic act of self-restraint, had refrained from speaking her mind to that effect. Bitterly she regretted the omission an hour after luncheon when she saw Hera riding forth alone, as she did in the old days. From a window she watched her, now through breaks in the foliage, now over the tops of the trees, while she moved down the winding road of the park. She saw the white plume of her hat pass under the gateway arch and caught a glimpse of her beyond the wall as she rode away.
“A tryst with Mario Forza!” she assured herself; and, stirred to action by the abhorrent thought, she sent a servant for her brother, that she might break a lance with him on this aspect of the case. The footman informed her that his Excellency was having his afternoon nap.
“Napping!” she exclaimed, audibly; and then to herself: “At this critical moment! Napping when his daughter is in danger!”
Hera followed the margin of Old Adda, light of heart, receiving the joy of verdure, and forgetful of past trials in her new sensation of freedom. She breathed in the fragrance that blossoms gave the surrounding air. Bird voices, few the last time she rode that way, sounded all about. The poplars on either side of the river—grim black brushes a few weeks before—made two noble files of plumes quivering silver or green in response to every wandering breeze. The river was almost as quiet as the lake from which it flowed. Sparrows bathed in the dust and chased one another on the wing close to the ground. White vapours, floating in clearest blue, were motionless as painted clouds.
She passed idlers reclining on the greensward of the roadside—sun-burned men and women who, by the immemorial law of the season, should have been busy in the fields. She saw more idlers before the village tavern. They were gathered about a comrade who read from a big-headlined journal of Milan. The group would have received no attention from her but for one boisterous fellow who crossed the road calling out the news to a neighbour in his window. She heard distinctly the name of Mario Forza, but more than this she was not able to make out. Nevertheless, she had heard enough to send her back to the tavern. As she drew rein the men turned from the reader and one and all bared their uncombed heads. She asked the news from Milan, and the man who had been reading came forward, clearing his throat for a speech.
“Most excellent signora,” he began, “the bugle call has sounded, and throughout the length and breadth of our fair land the battalions of labour are marching. The sun of the social revolution has risen. The invincible industrial army—”
“Shut up, Pietro!” commanded a brawny blacksmith, snatching the journal from the orator’s hand. “If your Excellency would like to read,” he said, offering the paper to Hera.
While she cast her eye over the printed page some of the men gathered about her horse, their bronzed faces upturned to hers and upon them a dull expression of triumph in the story of riot and bloodshed that was unfolded. Presently they saw her start with catching breath, drop the paper to her side, and sit her saddle in silence a moment, oblivious of the many eyes upon her, and staring off in the direction of Milan.
“It is a fine uprising, Excellency, neh?” one of the men said, but Hera had only a nod of the head for reply.
She rode on, carrying an indistinct idea, gained from the huge captions, of a situation with which the Government found itself all but powerless to cope; of anarchy in Milan, of hundreds of men and women laid low or killed by the troops; but the announcement that loomed above all to her mind was that Mario Forza had been shot. “At this hour,” ran the account, “exact details are not obtainable. From what could be gathered concerning the deplorable incident, it appears that the mob in Cathedral Square was at the time stampeding before the charge of a detachment of the Ninth Cavalry. A woman whose name could not be learned, but who is said to be one of the rioters, was knocked down in the mad rush and would have been trampled to death by the horses but for the timely appearance and intrepid action of the Honourable Forza. He sprang in front of the advancing troopers, and catching up the woman in his arms was bearing her out of harm’s way, when a shot, evidently intended for the soldiers, was fired by one of the mob. The mark that the bullet found was Signor Forza. It was not known, however, that he was struck until he had borne the woman to a point of safety. Then he was seen to sway as if swooning, but some bystanders steadied him. He was conveyed to the General Hospital by a friend whose carriage stood by.”
Her instinct to go to him became a mastering purpose. Although she did no more than walk her horse for a while, she kept moving toward Milan. She reflected that the remaining distance was little more than two leagues and that she could travel it easily before dark. In a minute she was resolved, and speaking to her horse she set forward at a smarter pace. For the proprieties of the case she was in no mood to borrow care. He was wounded, perhaps unto death, and her one thought was to go to the hospital and be at his side. As she pursued her way, now in the sunshine of open road, now in the shade of a wood, she had time to consider what idle tongues might say, but it did not make her slacken speed or think of turning back.
On every hand her eye met evidence of the social recoil that had set in. Here, as in the neighbourhood of her father’s house, the farm labourers had been caught in the wave of revolt that surged from Milan. All the fields she passed were deserted. The taverns of the roadside were busy, and, however true the cry of bread famine may have been, there was no famine in juice of the grape and no scarcity of drinkers. In the village of Bosco Largo she heard again the name of Mario Forza. It fell from the lips of an impassioned ploughman haranguing a crowd of excited men and women. Two stern-visaged carbineers stood by, but their presence only fanned the flame of his speech.
“It was the military that shot him down,” he declared. “And would you know why, my comrades? I will tell you: Because he is the friend of the man or woman who toils. That’s why they wanted to kill him—because he is the friend of labour. They don’t want labour to have any friends except dead friends.”
“True, true!” came from the crowd.
“They are trying to tell us that one of the people shot Mario Forza,” the orator went on. “Ha, ha! The capitalistic press wants to ram that down our throats. But they can’t do it. I brand that assertion a lie. The press and the Government are the slaves of capital, and they’ll do anything, say anything to serve their masters. Bah! What right have they to come to us who do the work and say, ‘You may keep one tenth of what you produce; the rest you must hand over to us’? What right, I ask, have they to tax the bread out of our children’s mouths and the coats off our backs? And what do they do with the money that they plunder us of? I will tell you: They use it to pay things like those over there—those things with the carbines—they hire them to shoot us down if we say that our souls are our own. That’s what they spend our earnings for!”
There was a deluge of hisses for the carbineers. They made no reply, by word, look or gesture, although some of the women shook their fists at them and snarled in their faces like tigresses.
“On to Milan, comrades!” the ploughman cried, pointing dramatically toward the city. “On to Milan and help our brothers pull down the capitalistic Bastile!”
“Bravo! On to Milan! Down with the capitalistic Bastile!”
Repeating the cry, they scattered, men and women alike, to their homes, to get rakes, hoes, scythes, shovels, axes, or any other implement with which to arm themselves.
Hera had lingered to catch the words about Mario, and then, impelled by the thought that she might arrive at the hospital only to find him lifeless, she pressed forward, urging her horse to greater speed. Behind her, more than a league, she had left the river, her course lying now through a country green with maize, over a road that slanted to the south-west from the town of San Michele; keeping to this she would enter upon the Monza Road not far from Milan’s Venetian Gate.
She was one of the many now that fared toward the city. The road swarmed with the peasantry, as on festal days, only it was plain that this was no holiday throng. In groups the people moved onward, most of them afoot, a few women on sorry nags, and others with their children in rumbling farm carts. Beneath their sullen demeanour seethed a spirit of contempt for established things. They called to one another in the shrill mezzo canto of their dialect, scoffing at authority and boasting of what they would do to pull it down.
Once or twice Hera came upon a band of farm hands marching with a semblance of line that bespoke service in the army. For weapons they carried scythes and pitchforks. Here and there a woodman, shouldering a glistening axe, swaggered along with fine assurance of success in his mission to fell the oak of capitalism. “Long live the industrial army!” was the cry that greeted the marching ones oftenest as they trudged on, their faces set with determination.
It was an experience that asked a stout heart of Hera. In the cross-currents of her thought she realised that a signora from the world of ease and plenty was not a popular figure in that concourse. But there must have been that in her face which had power to touch those rugged hearts, angry though they were; and she met with no more annoyance than an occasional black scowl.
In the suburb of Villacosa she overtook Colonel Rosario’s regiment. The Bersaglieri were moving with the spirited swing that is their pride, canteens clanking, the long plumes of their hats waving, and the dust of the highway astir in their wake. By people who had a well-fed aspect they were greeted with pleased countenances, but in discreet silence; their less prosperous neighbours had only hisses and hoots for the uniformed marchers. Mothers held up their babes and cried, “Fire now, I beg of you.” Other women threw themselves on the roadside, pulled up tufts of grass, and made as if to eat them—a bit of theatricalism intended to typify the extremity to which they were reduced for food.
As Hera came up with the head of the column the Colonel chanced to look round; their glances met, and he smiled a cordial recognition. But a puzzled look succeeded the smile when Hera had passed ahead and he had seen the foam that whitened the rings of her horse’s bit and the flakes of it that dappled his chest. And she was riding yet as fast as she could in that teeming road. The sun had set when she turned into the Monza highway. An exodus from Milan had begun. She encountered a stream of vehicles loaded with the fugitives and their baggage; most of them were foreigners bound for the more tranquil air of near-by Swiss cantons.
A little longer and she was in the quarter of Milan’s new rich, without the walls—amid dwellings of an architecture that in Rome, Florence or Turin produces much the same impression. Every portico gate was bolted, no fountains leaped in the courts, blinds were drawn at the windows; nowhere in any of the grand houses was there sign of life. She could see the Venetian Gate a short distance ahead; but between her and it rose a barrier of howling men and women that reached from side to side of the road save for a narrow breach through which the refugees passed. Over the heads of the crowd she caught the glitter of a line of bayonets, and drawing near she heard the jibes and maledictions that were poured upon the soldiers. She found that she could proceed no farther. An hour earlier the King had declared Milan in a state of siege.