WHAT MONEY COULD NOT BUY
TARSIS spared no pains in the laying of a plan, but that done, and the
work of execution satisfactorily begun, he awaited the result with
confidence and equable temper. It was so with even such an exceptional
emprise as that of taking the life of Mario Forza. With the decoying
letter in the post-office, he felt that the affair was well in train;
so he went to his bed and slept soundly. It lacked something less than
two hours of mid-day when he rang for his _valet de chambre_. Instead
of the usual prompt appearance of that individual, he was surprised by
the sleek face of Beppe at the door; it was a pale and haggard face
as well this morning, with alarm looking out from its heavy eyes. His
voice and his hand trembled while he explained that all the other
domestics had quit the palace an hour before.
“What is the matter?” Tarsis asked, eyeing him keenly.
“Signore, they were afraid to stay any longer.”
“Of what are they afraid?”
“The mob, signore; the mob! Much has happened since you went to bed.
The working people have gone mad. A gang of them entered the palace
of the Corvini and sacked it, they say, from cellar to roof besides
killing the young Duke and three of the servants who tried to drive
them back. It is war, signore. Look!”
He went to the window and swept back the drapery, to reveal the scene
of a military camp. On the opposite side of the Corso, within the
paling of the Public Gardens, a regiment of infantry was bivouacked.
For an absorbed minute Tarsis stared out, as Beppe thought, upon the
rows of white tents and patrolling sentries; but he had seen a solitary
figure moving toward the Venetian Gate that had more interest for him.
There was no mistaking that forward bend of the head and slinking
movement. It was the Panther. Tarsis consulted his watch and wondered
if his accomplice were thus early on his way to the monastery. Then he
turned to Beppe and remarked, in the tone of one coolly weighing the
situation:
“This part of the city, I take it, has been saved from disorder so far?”
“Yes, signore. The troops have cut off the quarters of the Porta
Romana, Porta Ticinese, and Porta Garibaldi from the rest of the town;
but, if the signore will permit me, there is no telling how long they
will be able to hold their position. Signor Ulrich says the rioters may
break through and attack this part of the city at any moment.” He spoke
with a shudder and gave a look of warning to his master.
“Signor Ulrich?” Tarsis repeated. “When have you seen him?”
“This moment, signore. He is without.”
“Ask him to wait.”
When seated at the breakfast table, meagrely spread with what Beppe had
contrived to prepare, Tarsis allowed the superintendent to be ushered
in. If the servant’s disquieting report had needed verification, here
it was. Those rosy cheeks were not puffing now with excitement and
indignation against ungrateful strikers; his lips were ashen, his
voice subdued; the events of the morning had given him an enlarged
appreciation of the meaning and possibilities of the power that had
risen in Italy; and the new light frightened him.
Believing that bad news of the man who held secret meetings with his
wife would be pleasing to Tarsis, the visitor’s first announcement
was that Mario Forza had been wounded. Of the episode in Cathedral
Square--the stampede of the mob, the saving of La Ferita from
the rushing cavalry, and the inadvertent blow that cut Forza’s
forehead--Signor Ulrich was able to narrate only so much as he had
learned from the hastily gathered accounts of the journals.
“Is it known if the wound is severe?” Tarsis inquired, feigning a
casual interest in the detail.
“One account--that of the _Secolo_, I think--says it is not likely to
prove mortal.”
“But it is enough to keep him from journeying to the Brianza to-night,”
Tarsis told himself, and cursed the woman whose fall and rescue had
thwarted his purpose. He saw the Panther waiting vainly in the gloom
of the cloister and the return to its sheath of his blade unstained
with blood. But Tarsis did not rage or brood over the miscarried plan.
He knew how to bide his time. Moreover, there had begun to run in his
veins a terror that made all other considerations small indeed.
Signor Ulrich told his story as one might have recounted the
devastations of a tornado. His recital was grimly quiet until he
touched upon the part played by the women. Then the pictures of what he
saw, filling his mind again, caused him to roll up the whites of his
eyes and shake his head in token that the world had gone to the dogs.
Per Bacco! They were no longer women, but devils from the under world!
Did they not go through fire and wreck like fiends of inferno? Did they
not bare their breasts to musket fire and invite death?
Tarsis betrayed no sign of impatience, as he was wont to do when Signor
Ulrich indulged his gift for detailed narrative. Indeed, he himself
lengthened the story by putting questions to bring out salient facts.
The general superintendent could not credit the startling deduction,
at first, but he became positive, as the evidence increased, that his
master--Antonio Tarsis, possessor of untold wealth, the industrial
ruler who in the past had only a smile for the demonstrations of
labour--Signor Ulrich perceived that he was concerned, in this
avalanche of rage, for the security of his person.
“Do you think the military will be able to hold them at bay until
re-enforcements come?” he asked.
“I am afraid not, signore,” the other replied.
“Why?”
“Because there is no certainty of the re-enforcements.”
“Two classes of reserves, you say, have been summoned. Will they not
respond?”
“Some of them tried to respond, but they were halted by the rioters
and turned back. A thousand started this morning from Piacenza. Men
and women threw themselves in front of the train to prevent them from
proceeding. The city’s southern gates are held by the rioters, and they
are reinforced hourly by agricultural labourers bent on making common
cause with them. I tell you, signore, the situation is critical.”
“What do you think will happen?”
“The rioters will be masters of the city before another sunrise.”
Tarsis sprang up and began to pace the floor, but stopped suddenly,
and, with a smile intended to be taken as one of amusement, said, “I
think you are over-counting their strength.”
“I hope so, signore; but General Bellori told me that he thought every
available man would be needed to hold the gates.”
As if to bear out his words, the roll of drums fell upon their ears.
Looking out, Tarsis beheld the regiment whose nearness had given him
no slight sense of security wheeling out of the Public Gardens and
moving toward Cathedral Square. With fists clinched, he stared after
the retreating bayonets until the last one had disappeared behind the
bend of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, while the superintendent, standing by,
had eyes only for the face of his employer. He saw the tide of Tarsis’s
helpless anger mount and strain the veins of his neck and crimson his
cheeks and temples.
“Maledictions upon the weak-backed Government!” he burst out, turning
from the window. “If they shot down the anarchists wherever they found
them, killed them by the thousand, they would put a stop to this
nonsense.”
“You are right, signore,” chimed in the Austrian. “They have been too
easy with them, particularly with the women, who are ten times worse
than the men.”
Signor Ulrich had not overdrawn the danger. The insurgents were nearer
to a mastery of the city than he or any one else supposed. At one point
they had cut off a large body of troops by entrapping them into a ring
of barricades. At least half an army corps was needed if the Government
was to retain control of the situation.
“The palace is wholly without defence,” Tarsis said, after a moment
of silence. “Something must be done. I shall call up the Questura and
demand a force sufficient to protect my property.”
He went into the library and caught up the receiver of the telephone;
for some minutes he stood with it pressed to his ear, but there came no
response from the central station.
“I think communication is broken,” Signor Ulrich ventured to tell him.
“I saw rioters cutting down wires and stringing them across Via Torino
to impede cavalry charges.”
“Then we must get a message to them some other way,” Tarsis said.
“Probably it would not be--advisable for me to go out.”
The other uttered an emphatic negative. “I think it would be
exceedingly unwise, Signor Tarsis.”
“Why?”
“The cries they raise are for blood.”
“What do they say?”
“Oh, signore! Something terrible!”
“Speak!”
“I heard them shouting, ‘Down with the robbers of the poor!’”
“And you think they mean me?”
“I don’t think, signore.”
“They cry my name?”
The Austrian answered with a nodding of the head.
“What do they say, for example?” Tarsis asked.
“Some of them cry, ‘Down with Tarsis!’ Others revile you, oh, with
awful epithets, signore. They have gone mad!”
Tarsis threw himself in a chair, rested an arm on the Napoleonic table,
and tapped it nervously. “I see,” he said; “the beasts would bite the
hand that has put food in their mouths. We must act at once. Signor
Ulrich, you will go to the Questura and give my message. Say that I
demand a guard for Palazzo Barbiondi.”
The little colour that had remained to the superintendent left his
face; but he said he would go, and taking up his hat he started for the
door.
“Tell them,” Tarsis called after him, and the other paused--“tell them
that my servants have deserted me; that I am here absolutely alone.
Make haste, and return at all speed with their answer.”
Signor Ulrich bowed his acquiescence and left the library. When he
had crossed the grand saloon and moved through the echoing corridors
a shudder came over him to see how deserted was the great house. The
homely proverb about rats forsaking the sinking ship occurred to his
mind and made him quicken his steps. He glanced into the open doors
that he passed, and in the ante-room called out the name of Beppe;
but it was as the master had said--he was alone. At the foot of the
staircase, in the portico, he stood a moment irresolute, then turned
and struck across the rear court, past the stables and garage, to the
Via Cappuccini gateway. In taking this back street the Austrian yielded
to a hunted feeling that had possessed him since he heard the rioters
cry, “Down with Tarsis and his crew!” By following Via Cappuccini he
would come out by the Cathedral, and from that point it was a few rods
to the Questura.
Tarsis emerged from the Library and paced the long course of the
Atlantean chamber, a little humbled in spirit, yet angry in the
realisation that there had risen a tyrant, somehow, from somewhere, who
kept him a prisoner in his own house. He was conscious of a power that
had awakened to render him powerless. Too rich he was to think much
about his wealth, but now he could not avert the recurrent thought that
with all his millions he was a supplicant for life’s barest necessity.
It irritated him to reflect that he had been obliged to send his man
to beg the authorities for protection. To be sure, from fixed habit
of assertive, self-important procedure, he had used the word demand;
but he knew--and the knowledge redoubled his vexation--that it was a
demand he could not enforce. An hour had come to him when the whole
of his vast fortune was not able to purchase the one thing that he
wanted--bodily safety. He was sensible, too, of a dread, an invincible
foreboding of calamity. And while his vanity sustained a hope that the
authorities must send word of assurance, his newly illumined reason
said the message more likely would show him how a beggar might be
answered.
The sun neared its setting. All the afternoon its light had played
through the glazed dome down on the tessellated pavement; now those
cheerful beams had stolen away. Everything in the great chamber upon
which his eye fell seemed to mock his wretchedness. With hideous leers
the vacant orbs of the Atlantes followed him, and he ended by bowing
his head to shut out the sight. Twice he walked the length of the room,
then stopped at a window, drew the curtain, and peered out, first upon
the gold-tipped foliage of the Public Gardens, then upon the reach of
broad Corso northward as far as the Venetian Gate.
The sidewalks were alive with moving throngs. They had the aspect of
people of the class he had seen walking there on other evenings--a
stratum of the bourgeois who had an hour to spare before dinner,
returning from their promenade on the Bastions. He remembered that
he and Hera had watched them together more than once after a drive.
At close range anxiety might have been read in the faces of some and
heard in the voices of others; but from where he looked there was
naught to suggest that in another part of the town riot and bloodshed
had held the stage since sunrise. It was a peaceful enough concourse of
citizens; and yet, the scene filled Tarsis with a shuddering dismay.
That terror which makes of the stoutest heart a trembling craven was
upon him--the terror of the mob.
He was about to turn from the window, impatient that Signor Ulrich did
not come back--although the man had not had time, without the loss of
a minute, to reach the Questura, submit the “demand,” and retrace his
steps--when he noted that the faces of the people were turning all in
one direction; their gaze was setting upon some one who approached
from a point toward Cathedral Square that was beyond his range of
vision. Waiting to see who or what it might be that attracted so
much attention, he stood there, the curtains scarcely parted, dimly
conscious of the rose flush in the sky beyond the trees.
Down the Corso he heard “Vivas!” shouted; a minute more and he saw a
man on horseback drawing near; he wore no head covering save a bandage
about his brows. The grim smile that was common to Tarsis in moments
of triumph curved his lips. He needed no glass to know the rider; the
sight of him stirred a nest of stinging memories.
“Cheer, you fools, cheer!” he muttered, glancing toward a group of
acclaiming men. “It is your last chance. Never again will you see him
alive!”
In the sinister delight of the certainty that there would be work for
the Panther after all, he forgot for a moment the perils that hedged
him round. He went to the last window of the palace’s long row, that
he might keep the horseman in view as long as possible. At length he
turned away well content, for he had seen him pass through the Venetian
Gate.