“Attack! They have only to walk in.”
“Why do you think they mean to harm Signor Tarsis?”
“I heard them crying out for his life. Go, oh, go and save him! There is time for escape by the Corso gate.’”
“Why do you not go to him?” Hera asked.
“I! Oh, Excellency! If you had heard them cry out against us. They will burn and slay. None whom they hate will be spared.”
From her heart sprang a wish that dazzled with its splendid hope, but left her in the next instant filled with shame. “Addio, Excellency,” she heard the Austrian saying; “for me, I am off.” Then she was aware of his waving hand as he withdrew up a narrow way that cut through to Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Her eyes took in the bulk of his receding figure, but her thought was not with him. In the glimmer of an outhung lamp she saw him turn about and with a forefinger stab the air in the direction of Palazzo Barbiondi. She strove to rally the forces of her mind—to set some rule over her contending impulses.
With equal power the voice of moral obligation and that of pure desire made their plea. Now the duty of a wife pointed the way, now her love for Mario. Insistently the prospect of Tarsis dead mingled itself with a vision of her fetters struck off—her heart no longer bond, but free to obey the law it had broken. She had prayed that Mario’s life might be spared, and now she was tempted to leave her husband to his destiny, to go on to the love for which her soul hungered, to claim the happiness that seemed ordained of events. In the minute that she waited, a captive of warring emotions, shop-keepers up and down the street were putting shutters to their windows and shouting to her, “To your home, signora; to your home!” The air grew thick with the roar of the mob. A few seconds and it would be too late to save the life that meant death to her happiness.
“Down with Tarsis!” The cry was so near as to rise distinct out of the fearful dissonance. And in an impulse that came as the words fell upon her ears she gave her horse a stroke of the whip and galloped hard for the palace gates. In the court she sprang from the saddle, ran past the garage and stables, reached the main portico, and hurried up the grand staircase and through the gloom of the corridors, calling the name of her husband—“Antonio! Antonio!” There was no answer save the chuckling echo of the great halls. She gained the Atlantean chamber, and, thinking of the library where he spent so much of his time, made for the door of it, at the farther-most angle of the great room. Knocking stoutly, she called out again:
“It is I, Hera!”
On the other side there was the sound of movement, the striking of a match; then the door was opened, and she beheld Tarsis, a lighted candle in his trembling hand. In that moment all the bitterness he had planted in her soul gave way before a flood of pity.