“Signor Tarsis can tell you, perhaps,” the other suggested.
“A labour agitator?” Tarsis repeated. “Why, I should define him as a breeder of discontent and a foe to the public peace.”
“If that definition be fair,” Hera rejoined earnestly, “Heribert was indeed a labour agitator. Undeniably he sowed discontent, but discontent against injustice.”
“And what was his particular method?” asked Tarsis, smiling as if to make light of her remark and keeping his eyes on the mimic warfare.
“He gave tongue to a hitherto voiceless people,” she answered, “and made them into an army, so that they were able not only to express their wrongs but to fight for their rights.” The words seemed to have a present-day meaning, and with her companions’ perception of the fact the name of Mario Forza leaped into their minds. It stirred them, one and all, to a fresh appreciation that the man she had made no secret of loving was still a prevalent force in her life; her thoughts were in sympathy with his, the colours he gave to the world were the colours in which she beheld it.
To her father’s face the incident brought a look of pity; it caused Donna Beatrice to screw up her little features into wrinkles of disgust, and in the changing glances of Tarsis it was easy to read a rising tide of resentment. When he spoke it was in the cold vein of mockery whereof on occasion he could be master.
“The rights of labour,” he said, “are, of course, the only rights that a nation should consider. We have a new wisdom in Italy—it has come in with the New Democracy—the wisdom that is blind to the rights of capital and laughs at the idea of its having any virtue; all the prosperity our country enjoys to-day, understand, is due to the champions of the horny-fisted—the dreamers of the Camera. Is not that the fact, Don Riccardo?”
“To be precise,” the Duke answered, “I don’t know.”
“Surely you must be aware,” his son-in-law asserted, “that it is not men like myself who are giving the country what she needed so long—the breath of industrial life. Oh, no; it is our critics who are doing this, the silver-tongued doctrinaires. They would give us a very different sort of industry—the sort you see in that picture. Strife and bloodshed were the business of that day, and will be in ours, depend upon it, unless a stronger hand rules at Rome.”
“What do you think ought to be done?” asked Donna Beatrice, frightened by the black forecast.