THE warning was a terribly familiar one to the people of Lombardy. They knew it presaged one of the severe storms of hail that plague the region—visitations which the farmer folk dread even more than the sprees of the river. Within the space of ten minutes the growing crops of a whole province had been devastated by one of these onslaughts. The pellets of ice were so big as to fell cattle and kill the herdsmen. Roof tiles of terra cotta were smashed like thin glass. Of such grave import were the bombardments that official means had been devised to ward them off; and now, while the keepers hurried their droves to places of safety, the air was filled with a thunder that did not come from the clouds. On the hilltops and in the sloping fields cannon flashed and roared. With pieces aimed at the blackness above, the peasant gunners fired volley after volley in a scientific endeavor to choke the hailstorm. The picture, as they saw it from their windows, was one to carry old soldiers back to Solferino and Magenta, when the target was not clouds, but Austrians, and the missiles were shot and shell.
Mario and Hera set their horses to a gallop and made for the cover of the monastery, as troopers might have dashed across a battle-field. They gained the crumbling portico at the moment that the white bullets began to fall, crackling in the ivy of the wall and dancing on the ground. A few columns of the cloister were standing, and some of the roof remained. Here they left their horses to paw the pavement where monks had walked in the ages long buried. He took her hand and they made their way over a difficult mound of earth and fallen stone to the chapel. Once or twice in the centuries something had been done to save the little church from time’s ravage, though it stood open yet, as to door and window, for the attacks of wind and weather. Rooks had nested there, and the flutter of invisible wings sounded from a dark corner beneath the ceiling. She told him that the chapel was built by the first Riccardo of her line. Standing by a window, they looked out and saw the hailstones beating on the tombs of her ancestors.
Hera pointed to a place on the wall where a fresco painting once had been. Fragments of a cornice carved in marble still clung about it; to the eye there was only a patch of blank wall.
“It was the portrait of Arvida, a woman of our race,” she said, regarding the spot and its remnant of frame thoughtfully. “At one time her tomb was here, under the picture.”
“And is in the chapel no longer?”
“No; they branded her a heretic and drove her to her grave, as our chronicles say; and still not satisfied, they disinterred her body and burned it in Milan.”
“How strange it all seems in this day,” he mused, “when one may think as he will about his soul without putting his body in peril before or after it has returned to the ground.”
“And yet,” she said, quickly, as if in an outburst of feeling long restrained, “there is still a power that persecutes—that takes the soul and enchains the body.”
“The power you mean is duty,” he said, positively, as one who understood.
“Yes,” she affirmed, eagerly, glad in the knowledge that he read her thought.
There was silence between them as they moved to a part of the chapel where a broad window looked out on the landscape of ploughed fields that stretched high into the rainy distance. When he spoke again it was in the tone of one who had come to a decision.
“The world’s cruelest wrongs have been committed in the name of duty,” he said. “Fortunately for the happiness of the race, we have cut loose from many ancient notions of obligation. The zealots who persecuted Arvida acted from a sense of duty. With new ideals of justice rise new conceptions of what we owe to others.”
“How can we know what to do?” she asked of him, humbly.
“Ah, it is hard to know what to do—to decide what is right. But there is a path that we may follow with safety at all times. It is the path which keeps us true to ourselves. We have a right to be true to ourselves!” he asserted, warmly—“a right no man may deny.”
“And when one renounces that right for the sake of others?” she asked. “What then?”
“That is the noblest of all self-sacrifices,” he answered her, reverently.
But in her sudden release of a breath and the drooping of her eyes he read, with the magic sensitivity of love, that his answer was a disappointment; that for the bread of censure the woman asked he had given a stone of praise. When he spoke again Hera, with quickening pulse, knew the calm of his character was going; and she was glad for the passion in his tone and the anger that hardened his voice.
“The sacrifice is divine!” he exclaimed. “But the demand for it, the permitting of it, that is monstrous! No human interest can justify the ruin of a life, the desecration of a soul!”
He drew closer to her, his studied control of the past all gone.
“Donna Hera!” he cried, “this must not be—this marriage to-morrow. It is hideous in the eye of God and man.”
There was command in his words, and the glow of a splendid hope filled her soul. But it lived only a moment, assailed by the thought that commiseration was all that he had for her.
“Well may you pity me,” she said, the doubt that had risen bringing a dreary smile to her lips.
“Pity!” he exclaimed, taking her hand, fervidly. “Ah, no! It is greater than that! I love you, Hera. From the first it has been so—from the very first. Knowing all and realising all, I have loved you with the whole power of my being. I will not silence the cry of this love, and you, too, must listen.”
An alarming yet rapturous shudder went through her frame, and she shrank from him. With hands at his temples, he stood like one dizzy from a blow.
“Are you sorry?” he asked, and she made him no answer. “Oh, not that!” he pleaded. “Not that!”
She saw her life of despair whirling away, and a new life dawning, beautiful, glorious.
“Sorry?” she said at last, her breath going with the words. “No; I am glad.” And he drew her to him, bent his head above hers, and kissed her lips.
The shower had ceased and the sky was clearing. From rifts in the speeding clouds streams of sunshine found their way to earth. A golden shaft came in by the open clerestory and lingered upon them. Two bluebirds talked blithely on a window ledge. The rook and his mate came down from their dark corner to fly out into the sparkling air.
Beholding the sunshine, Mario said: “See, the glory of heaven falls upon this unison.”
They laughed together like careless children, forgetting all but their new-found joy, and feared no more.
“I was lost; I have found my way,” she murmured.
“And the mariner sailing under sealed orders has learned his destiny,” he said. “I dreaded the hour that was to take you from me, dear, and reason lost hope; but not so the heart. And now you are my own, my own for ever.”
“Yes; they shall not part us now,” she said, nestling to him.
“Hera, how often have I dreamed of finding you!”
“And I of finding you.”
“When, my darling?”
For answer he had her eyes turned upward, timorously, fluttering under the depths of his, and then downcast, while she whispered the words, “Always, Mario, always.” Again their lips were locked.
“Have I your permission to enter?”
The words rang grimly in the old temple, sending their echo from wall to wall. Mario and Hera knew the voice. They turned toward the door, a low opening arched in the Gothic form, and saw standing there a dark figure sharply defined against the sunshine that flooded the cloister. It was the figure of Antonio Tarsis. His posture was that of one quite calm, his arms folded, on his lips an evil smile. He surveyed the others with a mock air of amusement; then, taking off his motoring cap, he made a low bow, and advanced with a broad affectation of humility.
“I thank you for permitting me to enter,” he began, the hoarseness of his tone betraying the anger that consumed him. “My apology is offered—my apology, you understand—for breaking up a love scene between the woman who is to be my wife to-morrow and another man.”
He paused as if expectant of some word from them, but they did not speak; nor did they stir from the spot where they stood when first they beheld him.
“I was passing at the time of the hailstorm, and came in for shelter,” Tarsis continued, feigning the tone of one who felt obliged to explain an intrusion. “I saw your horses out there, and recognising one of them, I judged that Donna Hera was near by. Uncertain of the other horse, I jumped to the natural—possibly you will say foolish—conclusion that it was her father’s.”
He paused again, and waited for one of the others to speak, but both remained silent.
“I say this much in extenuation of the fact that I began to look about in search of my friends,” Tarsis went on, retaining his tone of apology. “Otherwise it might appear that I was spying upon my promised wife. I assure you that it never occurred to me to set a watch upon you, Donna Hera. At the door I saw you and—waited until the scene should come to an end. I have been waiting some time. I hope my conduct in the somewhat trying situation meets with your approval—yours, Donna Hera, and yours, Honourable Forza?”
He gave the “Honourable” a long-drawn emphasis on the first syllable, and the sound came back in a blood-chilling echo from the glistening damp walls.
Mario moved forward and looked him squarely in the eye. “Signor Tarsis,” he began, his voice without a quaver, “I am sorry, helplessly sorry. We are confronted with an invincible fact of life. I love Donna Hera. She loves me. By every natural law we belong to each other.”
A flush of anger overspread the face of Tarsis. He returned a derisive laugh and put on his cap.
“Law of nature, eh!” he flung back. “Society is not governed by laws of nature, and will not be until your anarchistic wishes prevail!”
“Do you mean,” Mario asked, retaining his self-control, “that after what you have seen and what I have told you it is still your intention to hold Donna Hera to her engagement?”
“I will not answer your question,” Tarsis replied, snapping his upturned fingers at Mario in the Southern manner. “Whatever my intention may be is not your affair. It is a subject for myself and my promised wife. Of course, you will have some theory about what I ought to do,” he added, his lip curving to the sneer.
Humanly sensible that the other’s provocation was great, Mario quelled the words of resentment that came to his tongue, and said, calmly: “There is no question of theory here. It is a fact inexorable.”
“And one, I suppose, in which I am not to be reckoned with,” Tarsis retorted, his mouth twitching and his thick neck red with the mounting blood. “You plot to rob me of the woman who is pledged to me—you do me the greatest wrong one man can do another—and you call it a fact inexorable. Bah! I know your breed! My factories are full of fellows like you!”
Hera laid a restraining hand on Mario’s arm, saying, “Bear it, we have given him cause,” and in that instant the enormity of the situation their love had produced came fully to their minds. It was a realisation that made Hera recoil in dread of the consequences; but Mario, convinced of the larger justice in the course they had taken, advanced a step toward Tarsis and said—all regret, all suggestion of considerateness gone from his manner:
“When you say that I plotted to rob you of her you speak falsely. There was no plot, no premeditated act. Donna Hera is wholly without blame. My love for her began in the moment of our first meeting. It bore me on irresistibly, despite the hopelessness of it ever present to my thought. Had she loved you I should never have spoken. I knew she did not love you; I knew she was going to a life of thraldom, to be a hostage to the fortune of others. Understand, I do not tell you this in a spirit of excuse, but only for the purpose of acquainting you with the facts. I do not try to make excuse to you; I do not seek self-justification.”
Tarsis laughed at him scornfully. “Oh, bravissimo!” he sneered. “You do not see any wrong in making love to the woman who is to be my wife!”
“She is not to be your wife,” Mario said. “You must know that Donna Hera cannot be your wife now.”
Tarsis was at the point of another outburst of wrath, but checked himself as if with a purpose suddenly conceived. He riveted his gaze first upon Hera, then upon the other, and stood silent, with knitted brows, the subtlest forces of his nature waked by Mario’s last words. These words warned him that from his grasp was slipping the prize he valued above any on which he had ever set his powerful will. He moved off from them and paced slowly to and fro, with bowed head. The sound of his footfalls was all that broke the stillness of the chapel. Once or twice he looked up, toward Mario and Hera, and they saw the despair written in his strong face. They were stirred to a feeling of pity, of guilt, as they contemplated what seemed to them their work. A little while, and he paused, drew near to Hera, and said to her, his voice that of a man crushed in spirit:
“Is it true? Has he prevailed upon you to break off our marriage?”
Pale and resolute, she answered: “No; he has not prevailed upon me. It is my choice—the only way.”
Tarsis made a show of submission by twice inclining his head. “I suppose you are right,” he said, as if resigned. “Of your purpose in engaging yourself to me I was aware, but I hoped in time to win your affection. It is the hand of fate.”
Hera’s eyes were moistening. “I am to blame,” she said, contritely. “It was wrong of me to consent to a marriage with you; but I was driven, oh, I was driven. Forgive me, I beg of you.”
Tarsis looked into her eyes and extended his hand, as the act of one who in the stress of his emotion was unable to speak. “There is a request I would make,” he said. “It is that you help me to come out of this in as good a light as possible before the world. Help to mitigate the disgrace it puts upon me. If the marriage could be postponed, not definitely broken off; at least, if the world could be told so at first——”
“I will do as you wish,” Hera assured him, willingly.
“I thank you, sincerely. Will you return with me to the villa, that we may make some arrangement while there is yet time?”
“Yes; let us go.”
She bade Mario adieu and started for the door with Tarsis. They had gone only a few paces when they heard the voice of Mario. “A word, Donna Hera, if you will be good enough to wait,” he said.
Tarsis wheeled quickly, with flashing eye, and the others saw that once more he was his aggressive self; but this time, as before, he checked the impulse to pour forth his anger on Mario, remembering that he had more important work to do. He bowed his head and drooped his shoulders, as became a crushed spirit, and waited, ears alert.
“Hera,” Mario said, when they stood a little apart from Tarsis, “I wish to tell you that I am summoned to Rome to-night. I meant to leave Viadetta on the train that meets the Roman express at Milan. If you need me I will not go. If you have the slightest misgiving, the faintest sense that you want me at your side, I will go with you now to Villa Barbiondi.”
The fists of Tarsis doubled and relaxed and his eyes were sidelong as he watched her face and listened. The smile of the cheat who takes a trick came to his lips when he caught her answer.
“It will be kinder if you are absent,” she said—“kinder to him. It is all that we can do,” and she added, trustfully, “I have no misgiving.”
With a soft word of farewell, she turned from him and walked with Tarsis to the cloister, where their horses stood. From his place in the chapel Mario saw Tarsis help her to mount and follow her through the broken portico. Then the masonry hid them from his view, and the next minute the noise of an automobile told him they were on the road.
“God Almighty bless and keep you, Hera!” he murmured. In the chapel he lingered, looking upon the flaming west and darkening hillside, until his lonely horse called to him with impatient neighs.