He held out his hand, and when she had taken it he started for the door. At the threshold he paused, turned about, and said, approaching her again: “We pass the post-office in Castel-Minore, where there is a telegraph bureau. If you wish it I will carry the message there. Thus we shall save time. In five minutes, with my car, we shall be in Castel-Minore. You will appreciate that it is of importance the telegram be sent at once.”
Without the slightest hesitation she handed him the message.
“I will arrange with them to bring you the answer as soon as it is received,” he said, and left the house.
Once beyond the park gates and moving along the Adda bank, he crushed the paper in his fist and thrust it into a coat pocket. It had no place in the plan he began to lay. Every detail of the scheme stood definitely in his mind by the time he told Sandro, the driver, to stop before the post-office. He entered the telegraph bureau, but the message he wrote and gave to the operator was not the one written by Donna Hera; yet it was addressed precisely as hers had been—“To the Station Master at Rome, for Hon. Mario Forza, to arrive by Roman express.” He had scribbled the words, “All is well,” and signed them “H.”
“Milan,” he said to Sandro, as he entered the automobile, “and at the top speed.”
The false telegram was intended only to keep his trail clear—to put his undertaking beyond risk of failure through mischance. If Hera by hazard inquired she would learn that a telegram had been sent to Mario Forza. Tarsis had no fear that she might carry the inquiry further, at least until after it would be too late to alter an accomplished fact—the fact of their wedding. Tarsis’s next need was a telephone. He could have found one in Castel-Minore, but provincial “centrals” have wide ears and long tongues, so he put off the most important part of the undertaking until he should reach the big town.
It was a run of eight miles in the moonlight, and in a few minutes they were at the Venetian Gate with the Dogana guards asking Tarsis if he had any dutiable goods. Their pace was not diminished much when they were under way again on the pavement of the Corso. There was a man in Rome whom Tarsis wanted to catch on the wire before he should leave his home for the opera, and time was valuable. Pedestrians cursed Sandro as he flew by with tooting horn. At Via Monte Napoleone, where they left the Corso, Tarsis smiled as he thought of the mythical directors’ meeting he told Hera he had to attend. Another minute and he was entering the door of his private offices in Piazza Pellico. All the clerks had gone to their homes, and no one but the old porter saw him enter the building. With a key he let himself into that part of the suite where his exclusive apartment was, and went at once to his desk and took up the receiver of a telephone.
“Put me in communication with 16 A, Quirinale, Rome,” he said. In the wait that followed he drew from his pocket the writing of Hera, spread out the crumpled paper, and to make sure that his plan should fit in with the words she had written, he read again the message intended for Mario Forza:
“He would hold me to engagement. I have told him it cannot be. He maintains that if guided by justice I must keep my word, and asks me to appeal to you. He is willing to abide by your decision. Answer at once.
“H.”