A DREAM REALISED
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.