THE following afternoon Mario, on horseback, appeared at the villa and said he had stopped to accompany the Barbiondi in their ride to the Social Dairy. It was a proffer Donna Beatrice could not regard with favour. From the first the trip across the river had seemed to her a project of questionable taste; but now that it was to include the company of a man in whom Hera had betrayed a “scandalous interest,” it stood in her mind as a distinctly improper proceeding. Drawing her brother aside, she said as much to him while they waited for the horses to be brought from the stables.
But Don Riccardo failed to view the affair in that light. He was glad to see Forza, and glad of the opportunity the three-mile ride afforded for a chat with the son of his old comrade. His expectation in regard to the chat, however, was not realised, for what Aunt Beatrice pronounced a shocking display of indiscretion on the part of her niece occurred before they had reached the Bridge of Speranza. When the cavalcade, after a brisk trot, had dropped into a walk, Hera and Mario fell behind and rode side by side. And in the rest of the journey Donna Beatrice could not see that they made any appreciable effort to lessen the distance separating them from the others.
The day was a true one of the freakish month. In the morning hours the clouds had played their many games, now gambolling on the blue in fleecy flocks, now rolling sublimely in great white billows or tumbling in darker shapes that shed big drops of rain. But the present hour was one of purest sky, and all the land was gloried in sunshine. Mysterious heralds of the springtime spoke to the spirit and senses of the younger riders. The river was in gentler mood; the grey brush of the poplars no longer strained in the wind, maple twigs were dimpling with buds, and the green mantle of the hills seemed to grow brighter with every glance. Their cheeks were smoothed by the new breath that comes stealing over the land in April days. They talked of the things about them. Hera rejoiced in the life of the outer air. She knew the wild growths and the architecture of the birds, and he, if saddened easily by the ugliness men impart to life, was ever awake to the beauties of the world. They saw here and there a last year’s nest in the leafing branches.
“There was the home of an ortolan,” she would say, or, “There a blackbird lived, there a thrush.”
“And soon, when passing Villa Barbiondi,” he added once, “a friend may say, ‘There Donna Hera lived.’”
“Yes,” she said; “I shall part from the dear old nest, as the birds part from theirs.”
Where the road branched upward to the dairy Don Riccardo and his sister were waiting. Together the four made the ascent of the zigzag way, passing under oaks that had clung to their brown leaves through all the assaults of winter and moving beneath the mournful green of the needle-pines. They walked about the scrupulously clean, well-ordered houses and yards of the Social Dairy, where moral enlightenment and manual energy worked in concert. It was one of the several hundred places, Mario told them, that the new, industrial plan had brought into being. He explained the genius of co-operation, and how in this instance it brightened the lives of thousands of poor farmers. Hera remarked the air of well-being that pervaded the place—the neat apparel of the men and women, the interest they showed in their work, and the absence from their eyes of the driven look she had observed in a factory of Milan.
“How bright and fresh and—happy they are!” she said to Mario.
“They are not overworked,” he explained. “They have only themselves and their families to provide for.”
“I see nothing unusual in that,” observed Donna Beatrice.
“I mean,” Mario went on, “that there are no ladies and gentlemen to be fed and clothed out of the profits of their work. That makes it possible for them to earn in seven hours a day enough for their needs and a little to spare for the bank—the bank that gives them an interest in the earnings of their deposits.”
“Wonderful!” exclaimed Don Riccardo. “I don’t profess to understand it at all. But tell me, Honourable, how it is possible that you, the busiest man in Rome, can find time from your Parliamentary work for—this sort of thing?”
“I like the country,” Mario answered, “and this is the part of my work that is recreation.”
Going back to Viadetta they rode beside the pasture lands, where herds of cattle browsed. In one field Mario pointed out a black heifer that was frisking alone.
“That is the wayward youngster I started after with my lariat the other day,” he said. “She came back this morning. I am grateful to her, Donna Hera. But for that dash for liberty I should not be with you to-day.”
She could have told him that her gratitude ought to be more than his, and yet was not so, for the fate the river had offered now seemed kinder than the one in store for her.
“I perceive that the heifer soon tired of her liberty,” Donna Beatrice remarked, complacently. “Do you not think, Signor Forza, it would be the same with your common people? Give them what they think they want, and quickly they will be whining for what they had before and which was better for them.”
“I suppose they would,” Mario assented, smiling, “if the new condition left them hungry and shelterless, as it did our heifer. She dreamed of freedom, but woke to find that her two stomachs were exceedingly real affairs. So she came home and sold her freedom for a mess of pottage.”
“Precisely!” Donna Beatrice exclaimed, triumphantly. “In the practical brute kingdom as well as in the human world dreamers are likely to come to grief.”
“That is true,” Mario agreed, “and yet the dreamer’s airy product often becomes a reality. The dream of yesterday is the architect’s plan of to-day on which the builders will be at work to-morrow. There was our great compatriot who dreamed of having the people of Italy pull together under some well-laid plan, and do away with the necessity that drives so many to seek prosperity in foreign lands. That man is dead, but part of his vision lives in the Social Dairy. The farmers whose lot has been bettered by this system of co-operation are stout believers in that dream, you may be sure.”
“In what way are the farmers benefited?” Donna Beatrice asked, sceptically.
“They get a fair share of the profit of their toil. They send their milk here, and by processes that are moral as well as scientific it is turned first into butter, then into coin of the realm.”
“But, Signor Forza,” Donna Beatrice protested, “I call this establishment eminently practical.”
“Everyone does now. Nevertheless, it was no more than a theory two years ago—as much a dream then as the Employers’ Liability bill is now.”
“Will you interpret this new dream, Honourable?” Don Riccardo asked. “What is the Employers’ Liability bill?”
“A Parliamentary measure to oblige the employers of men and women in dangerous work to insure their lives; to take care of them, too, should they meet with injury.”
“Then the industrial army,” said Don Riccardo, “would fare better at the hands of the state than the military.”
“And it ought to,” Mario returned. “Work is the hope of the world, war is its despair.”
Don Riccardo, with a shake of the head, bespoke his doubt as to that idea, and his sister, looking into the face of Hera, was alarmed anew to read there a frank expression of sympathy with Forza’s sentiment. Mario rode with them as far as the gates of the villa, and at parting Hera gave him her hand.
“The day will live in my memory,” he told her.
“And in mine,” she said. “Good-bye.”
Tarsis dined with the Barbiondi next day and took them in an automobile to Milan for the opera. Hera, by his side, spent much of the ten-mile journey in reflections that gave her no peace. Before meeting Mario Forza she had begun to know the calm there is in accepted bitterness. For the sake of others she had resolved to be patiently unhappy. Now the future had a changed outlook—had opened to a sudden gleam, as a cloud opens to sheet lightning at sunset. The sacrifice demanded of her seemed far greater than it did a few days before, and she was conscious of a growing doubt that her strength should prove equal to it. There came a throb of resentment, too, that what she had been calling duty should interpret its law so remorselessly.
Not until after the meeting with Forza had the sense of renunciation, of impending loss, been of a positive nature. She had felt only that the future could hold no happiness for her; now she was aware of a joy to be killed, of a destiny that should deny what her soul was quickening with desire to possess. It was as if happiness had come back from the tomb and she dared not receive it.
In the box at La Scala she looked on the stage spectacle, but the eyes of her mind saw Mario Forza, and she heard his voice above the music of the drama. The knowledge that she cared for him so brought no feeling of shame, but shame assailed her when she looked upon the ring and the man who had placed it on her hand. In the gold circle and the clear stone she saw only the badge of a hideous bargain.
They went to a restaurant where fashionable Milan assembles after the opera. At a table apart from the one where they seated themselves she saw Mario Forza in the company of some men known as leaders of Italy’s political thought; and when Tarsis perceived that Hera had caught sight of him he could not refrain from venting his feelings. Without any leading up to the subject, he spoke contemptuously of the new ideas of government in the air.
“I have no patience with them,” he said. “They are no more than the wild flowering of poetic oratory in Parliament.”
“And like all wild flowers, they soon will fade,” chimed in Donna Beatrice.
“Nevertheless,” Tarsis went on, “these dreamers are doing much harm. They clog the wheels of Italy’s true progress.”
“Can nothing be done to put down these dangerous men?” asked Donna Beatrice, in alarm.
“Oh, no. Parliament is a talking machine, wound up for all time. There’s no stopping it. These demagogues delude the masses by telling them that labour is the parent of wealth.”
“I wonder if it isn’t?” mused Don Riccardo, lighting a cigarette.
“Admitting it,” Tarsis retorted, “should the parent try to strangle its offspring? That is what these rainbow statesmen would do. They proclaim capital a despoiler of labour, yet keep their addled wits at work concocting schemes for the despoiling of capital. Take, for example, the Employers’ Liability bill—simply a device to plunder the employer under the cloak of law.”
“I agree with you fully!” exclaimed Donna Beatrice. “I have heard of that iniquitous measure.”
“But capital will not flinch,” pursued the man of millions. “It has a mission to redeem Italy by making her industriously great. On that mission it will press forward in spite of the demagogues, and bestow the blessing of employment on the poor in spite of themselves.”
Don Riccardo yawned behind his coffee cup, but his sister brought her hands together in show of applause, and uttered a little “Bravo!” For Hera, she gave no sign. When Tarsis was talking, somewhat heavily, with his air of a rich man, his small, keen eyes looking into hers now and then, she wondered what her life would be with such a companion; but when they were moving homeward past the darkened shop windows of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, out through the Venetian Gate, and speeding in the moonlight of the open country, her reflections took a different cast. Her soul cried out to be free, and to the cry for freedom came an answering call to revolt.
In the afternoon of the next day—the one before that set for the wedding—she had her horse saddled, heedless of Donna Beatrice’s warning that the skies foreboded a tempest. A few paces from the villa gates she heard at her back the sound of galloping hoofs, and presently Mario was riding at her side.
“I crossed the river yesterday,” he said, “in the hope that you would ride, but met—disappointment.”
“I am sorry,” she told him, simply, yet he understood that she meant, “It must not be.”
“Frowning skies invite us at times,” he went on, “and by that I made my hope in to-day.”
“Yesterday was beautiful—far better for a ride,” she admitted, as if to tell him that he had divined the truth.
For a while they rode in silence. They passed the ruins of a monastery known of old as the Embrace of the Calm Valley. It had been one of the many religious settlements in the domain of the Barbiondi in the days of their power.
“I went there yesterday,” he told her, “and found a strange sympathy in its desolate picture.”
“To me it always has been dear,” Hera said. “My mother loved the old place. Often we went there and gathered the wild roses and camellias that grew in the cloister.”
For a mile or more they rode on, then started homeward because of danger signals not to be ignored. There were glimmers of far-away lightning, and they caught the distant roll of thunder. Suddenly a black curtain unfolded over the skies.
Before them was a long stretch of open road, at the end of which, where the wood began, they could see the dark shape of the monastery walls; and towards this they were making, their horses lifted to a quicker pace, when they heard an ominous rattling in the upper air.