HALF a minute more and they knew the mob had entered the Atlantean chamber. First they heard the howl of triumph and the trampling, rough-shod feet on the marble pavement; then the thud and crash of objects falling and the shattering of glass. They were able to guess that Demos was venting his fury on the Barbiondi portraits, the mirrors, and the carved Atlantes. But these incidents in the attempted remaking of Italy were of little moment to the man and woman in hiding. The only sound they dreaded was that which the tearing away of the drapery before their retreat would make and the trying of the handle of the door. Tarsis had dropped into a chair near the window, the curtain of which he clutched with one hand, and listened, as if with every nerve, for the fateful signal. Hera was on her feet, calm in the consciousness of duty performed, resolved to die bravely, if die she must. Presently the summons came. The drapery was jerked down and a violent hand rattled the door knob.
“We’ve found the fox’s hole!”
“Here’s Tarsis!”
“Axes, comrades! Down with the door!”
It was not many seconds before the oaken barrier yielded to the assault of the axes that had levelled the gates of the Santa Maria convent; for this was the same detachment of the rioters, grown like a snowball as it moved, but led still by Red Errico. The yell of triumph which the insensate crew set up as they poured in stopped suddenly, because it was not the object of their fury that they found. Tarsis had vanished. They beheld in his stead a woman young and of great beauty, standing alone—calm, imperious, unafraid. A hush came over those in front as they fell back, every impassioned face turned to hers, and the black smoke of the torches filling the room.
At length one of the women spoke. “We don’t want you, signora,” she said. “It’s Tarsis. Where is he?”
“I do not know,” Hera answered, and it was the truth, for she had not seen him leave the place at the window where he crouched before the door was assailed; but a general muttering and shaking of heads told her the answer was unsatisfactory.
“You ought to know,” one woman said, shrewdly, going a step nearer. “Why don’t you?”
“I am not the guardian of Signor Tarsis,” she replied, defiantly, but not wisely; and there was a resentful growl from the mob, which had kept pressing into the library.
“Oh, you are not his keeper, eh?” the first questioner snapped back.
“You’d better not play grand with us!” another woman warned her, shaking a finger in Hera’s face.
“We are the bosses now,” a third announced. “And it will serve you, my fine lady, to keep a civil tongue.”
The sentiment was applauded by an outburst of “Bravas!” Some of the invaders had begun to ransack the room in search of Tarsis. They pulled out the drawers of cabinets, flung open the doors beneath the book-shelves, and peered into closets. The next one to speak to Hera was Red Errico, who had pushed his way to the front.
“If you are not his keeper, signora,” he said, with mock deference, “perhaps you will condescend to tell us who you are?”
“I am his wife,” she answered, and the black looks faded from some of the faces. They knew her by her works among the poor of the Porta Ticinese quarter. One woman who had benefited by her charities began to acclaim her praise.
“Donna Hera of the Barbiondi!” she cried. “Evviva! She is a friend of the people!”
“Viva Donna Hera!” chimed in others who had tasted of her bounty.
Red Errico commanded silence. “Where is your husband, signora?” he asked, his suspicion unallayed; but before she could tell them again that she did not know the answer came from the woman who, above all others in that angry horde, wanted to find the master of the palace.
“Here he is!” she exclaimed, her voice weakened with shouting all day, and cracking now in the frenzy of her triumph. “Here he is.”
She had grabbed the nearest torch and was holding it above the face of Tarsis. Every eye turned to the window where she stood, the curtain jerked back, disclosing the man for whose blood she was mad cowering in the embrasure.
“Murderer!” she shrieked at him, shaking a fist in his face. “You killed my child!”
He was like a figure of stone, save for his eyes, which contracted and expanded as fast as he gasped for breath. One of his hands gripped a paper knife that he had caught up when the door began to yield. It was in the hot blood of them to fall upon him then and there, and so it would have been but for Red Errico. He sprang forward and, with one hand pushing back La Ferita, the other upraised, he commanded them to wait.
“Not yet!” he called out. “You forget! We must give the robber a trial. They do as much for us when we take rather than starve. A trial, do you understand? There are some questions we want to ask him, neh, comrades?”
At first he was answered with howls of dissatisfaction, but with them were mingled cries of approval; and presently, the idea of the leader’s joke sinking into their wits and gaining general favour, there were many demands, amid mocking laughter, for a trial.
“Great fun! Bravo, Errico! A trial for the robber of the poor!”
The surge of the crowd did not move Hera from where she stood—backward against the wall. She saw them lay hold of Tarsis, wrench the paper-cutting toy from his grasp, and, lifting him bodily, carry him through the jeering, laughing herd, and set him upon his cherished Napoleonic table. Then they flocked around with vituperative malice. In an hour of mastery they displayed the worse traits of their class. The women put out their claws and scratched his face, pulled his hair, and spat upon him, and covered him with the vilest epithets of their patois. It was the barbarous culmination of a movement which to Tarsis had always seemed so far away. Red Errico, exercising the function of judge, tweaked the prisoner’s nose and ordered him to sit up and look happy.
La Ferita, her scar glowing hideously, kept crying, “Down with him, I say! Bah for your trial! He killed my child!”
The air was stifling with the smoke of torches. Tarsis coughed and was barely able to hold up his head.
“Why do you persecute me?” he said, his voice faintly audible. “I have never harmed you.”
The few who heard burst into derisive laughter and passed the words along; and the whole pack took them up with such rough comments as they could invent.
“And so, my fine fellow,” was Red Errico’s sneer, “you have never harmed us! Bravissimo! But you are a magnificent liar, signore—magnificent! Now for the trial! Question No. 1: How comes it that you are the possessor of millions, that you live in a grand house, eat the fat of the earth, while we who have worked for you, we who have produced the things that have brought your wealth, are scarcely able to keep body and soul together?”
The others had quieted so much that nearly all could hear the question, and they pressed about their prey, brandishing clinched fists in his face and saying, “Answer that, you thief! Answer that!”
Tarsis seemed too weak to articulate. He moved his hand in signal that he had no answer to make, as he did to other questions put by the judge. Haggardly he shook his head once and avowed that he had not robbed them; that he had given thousands of people work, making it possible for them to earn a living; but a blast of malevolent “Bahs!” was their reply to that defence.
“Yes,” Red Errico said, “you have got all the work out of us you could, and paid us enough to keep us from starvation, so that we might go on piling up the millions for you.”
“True! True!” the others chorused. “But it’s our turn now. Neh? Our turn now.”
“Down with him!” was La Ferita’s argument. “He gave my little Giulia work in his mill and paid her fifteen soldi a day. Oh, yes; he gave her work. He worked her to death!”
For prelude to a new attack Errico shook his finger in Tarsis’s face. “You are a common thief!” he declared, savagely; “but there’s no law for your kind of thieving except the law that you’re getting now. You knew how to manage so that we should never get a fair share of what we earned. You have been too keen for us poor devils. You have known how to keep a pound while you gave us a grain; and now you have the gall to say that you have given us a chance to live. It is we, poor fools, who have given you the chance to rob us. But that time is gone. We are awake at last!”
Tarsis was without strength to frame a reply to this exposition of industrial philosophy; but, while the crowd applauded and poured anew their execration upon him, he raised his hand as if for silence. Every head bent forward and every ear strained to catch his words.
“You do me a great injustice,” he said. “I have given much of my fortune to the poor. Others know that.”
He raised his eyes feebly and turned his head toward where Hera stood, in mute appeal. Comprehending, she moved forward to speak, and men and women fell back to make place for her.
“Yes; he has done more than you think,” she began, impressively, standing by her husband’s side. “A while ago you called me the friend of the people. When you did that you were calling my husband your friend. I did but distribute his money. All that I had came from him. Once, when I asked him for funds to carry on my work of helping the poor, what do you think he said?”
She paused, and Red Errico asked, sullenly:
“Well, what did he say?”
“These were his words: ‘My whole fortune is at your disposal.’ And so it has been. He gave to the needy with generous hand. My family is poor. I had no fortune of my own. Believe me, all that has been done for you in my name has been done with his money. Men and women of Milan, you do my husband a great injustice.”
She did her best to save him. No plea could have carried deeper in that moment. That it smothered, for the time, the flame of their temper, cooled their wrath against him, was evinced in the softening of their faces, the fading somewhat of the frenzy in their eyes. And what might have been the ending of the chapter is lost in its actual outcome. Even as Hera spoke, the murmur of the street changed to a multitude’s panic-stricken cries. Those nearest the window were first to catch the note of alarm. It caused them to start and stand motionless, ears alert. The word “soldiers” passed from lip to lip. Volleys of musketry, ominously large, sounding in quick succession, and crackling ever nearer, proclaimed the approach of troops in overwhelming force.
An impulse to save their own lives ruled them now. Red Errico began the cry of “Away, away!” and the others took it up. With not so much as a parting glance of contempt at Tarsis, the leader shouldered the women aside and pushed toward the door, with the others moving in that direction. As they passed the man on the table they forgot to jeer him. The resounding salvos of artillery, the answering shrieks of the mob, coming to them ever plainer from the Corso, were matters of greater import than the baiting of a poor capitalist.
It was not so, however, with one woman in that tattered collection—La Ferita. Her deed was performed with the ease of instinctive prompting, conviction, decision. She alone was aware of her purpose. No one saw the blade steal from the folds of her gown; they saw it only at the instant that it flashed the light of the torches and descended, true, firm, cold, resting a second, as if with lingering joy, between the shoulders of Tarsis.
“Let him die; he killed my child,” she said, and joined the throng moving toward the door.
The effect of the thrust on the man who received it was, oddly enough, to make him sit erect for the moment, and it brought back to his countenance some of the alertness that abject, crushing terror had bereft it of; it was the animation of strong surprise, puzzled amazement. Hera, whenever she lived the scene again in memory, saw that look of bewildered astonishment on his face at the moment the blow was delivered. La Ferita’s comrades seemed little impressed by what she had done. They were fighting each other for a chance to get out of the room—to flee from the soldiers.