The sword of wealth

by Henry Wilton Thomas

“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.