She spoke to Nero and was gone. A moment Forza lingered, looking into the darkness that enveloped her. Once or twice, as she moved up the road, he caught the sparking of her horse’s steel. At a turn in the way she passed into the light of the motor car’s lamps, and he gained one more glimpse of her, and was content. Then he set off for the Bridge of Speranza.
CHAPTER II
TARSIS
Among the chieftains of production who were leading Italy to prosperity and power Antonio Tarsis held the foremost place. Son of a shop-keeper in Palermo, he began life poor and without influence. It had taken him less than twenty years to build up a fortune so large that the journals of new ideals pointed to it as a terrible example. Cartoonists had fallen into the habit of picturing him with a snout and bristled ears. There was a serious portrait of him in the directors’ room of one of the companies he ruled. It was painted by a man whose impulse to please was stronger than his artistic courage. He told all that he dared. In full length, it showed a man under forty, black-bearded, with a well-turned person of middle height; small, adroit eyes heavily browed, prominent nose inclined to squatness, spare lips and broad jaws; the portrait, at a glance, of a fighter of firm grain, fashioned for success in the great battle.
So much for the Tarsis of paint and canvas. The one that faced you in the flesh had harder, crueler eyes; the living clutch of the lips was tighter; the faint yet redeeming human quality of the man in the picture was lacking. And in the hue of his skin, much darker than the painter had ventured, nature did not deny the land of his birth—Sicily. It was there, at the beginning of manhood, that chance threw him into the post of time-keeper for a silk-mill. He did his work so well that never a centesimo went to pay for moments not spent in the service of the company.
One morning Tarsis, at the door with book and pencil ready, waited in vain for the workers to arrive; and his career as a great factor in Italy’s industrial life may be dated from the week that followed, when he assembled gangs of strike-breakers to replace the men and women who had joined in a revolt against many wrongs. A strike-breaker he had been ever since. By laying low the will of others, men or masters of men, and setting up his own will, he had gained over human destinies a dominion so practical that he cared little for the theory of king and Parliament. Of small import was it who made the laws or who executed them so long as they did not take from him the power to decide what share a worker should have of the product of his hand.
For a year or two Tarsis worked at his trade of strike-breaking in the United States, and that was the making of him, so far as external things had to do with the man. He brought back to Sicily some money-winning ideas about manufacturing that lifted him into the place of superintendent of the silk-mill, and some notions about “high finance” that he picked up bore rich fruit. One day the company found itself reorganized, with Tarsis in command. That was his first big victory. He followed it up in due time by laying siege to the large silk makers of the North. His campaign took the form of a proposal to unite their works with those of the South. At first they greeted his project with smiles, but Tarsis played one company against the other so craftily that in the end, obeying the law of self-preservation, all were eager to join the union.
As master mind of the general company Tarsis smashed the idols of custom, tore down everything that retarded the making of money. The methods of generations went by the board. He struck out for new fields, and quickly Italy’s product of spun silk was feeding the looms of Russia, Austria, Great Britain, and the United States in quantities double those of the old days. Mills were set up at places easily reached by the farmer with his cocoons or near to shipping points. At Venice he turned an ancient palace into a buzzing hive and sent forth smoke and steam over the Grand Canal. There were unions of shoe factories, glass and carriage works, steamboat lines, and steel-mills; and never was Antonio Tarsis a factor unless a factor that controlled. The journals of the New Democracy muttered, and likened him to creatures of the brute world noted for their ability to reach or swallow.
One of the things Tarsis learned in the United States was that child labour in factories is a superior device for fattening stock dividends. Mario Forza, from his place in the National Parliament, once denounced him in a speech rebuking the Government for lack of interest in the toiling masses. The bodily health and moral being of thousands of children were ruined every year in Italy, he said, that men like Tarsis might pile up their absurd fortunes—an outburst that brought loud and long applause from the seats of the New Democrats. This speech was green in the memory of Tarsis that night on the riverside when he thanked Forza for the service rendered his promised wife.
A situation created by the want of money had brought Hera and Tarsis together. He had some cold-blooded reasons for wanting the beautiful patrician for his wife. She ministered to his sense of beauty, but it was the principle of success she typified that gave her greatest value in his eyes. The man of peasant blood looked to an alliance with the house of Barbiondi as the crowning triumph of his career. Hera was the fairest prize of the Lombard aristocracy. Men of noble blood and large fortune had failed to win her hand, because she could not rid herself of the conviction that to become the wife of a man for the sake of his fortune would be a mere bartering of her charms. Against such a step her whole being rose in revolt.
Tarsis had conceived the thought to possess her and had planned to do so as he had planned to gain control of the Mediterranean Steamship Line. His faithful ally was Donna Beatrice, Hera’s aunt, who strove mightily in the cause. But it was Hera’s love for her father—her wish to relieve him from the torments of poverty—that made it possible for Tarsis to attain his purpose. The sands of the Barbiondi were almost run. Their villa, built two centuries before Napoleon appeared on that side of the Alps, was all that remained of an estate once the largest in the North. Charts of old days show its forests and hillside fields bordering the river Adda from Lake Lecco in the mountains clear to the Bridge of Lodi. Like his forebears of many generations, Don Riccardo had seen the money-lenders swallow his substance. If in his own time the bites were of necessity small, they were none the less frequent. To Donna Beatrice’s skill in concealing the actual state of their purse was due the fact that the Barbiondi were able to spend a part of the winter in Milan, so that Hera, whom her aunt recognised as the family’s last asset, might be in evidence to the fashionable world. How she accomplished this never ceased to be a riddle to her brother; and he gave it up, as he gave up all riddles. His idea of a master stroke in contrivance was to go to his banker and arrange another mortgage. He was likely to go shooting or for a ride when there was a financial crisis to be met. It was at the moment that the mortgagee’s mouth watered for the last morsel that Hera, in the purest spirit of self-sacrifice, consented to a marriage with Tarsis.