The sword of wealth

by Henry Wilton Thomas

The Cardinal made no reply, though he stood a second or two weighing the words. Then, with the calmness of one who has schooled himself to avoid fruitless and painful discussion, he turned, smiling, to Mario.

“Shall we go, Honourable?” he said, and the other inclined his head. They gave a parting word to Hera, and, bowing to the rest of the company, moved toward the door. As they passed nearly all made reverence to the Cardinal. Their exit proved the signal for a general departure of the guests, and with scant ceremony the company began to go its way.

CHAPTER XIII
AN INDUSTRIAL INCIDENT

Tarsis gave orders that no bright lights be shown at the windows and that the palace in other respects preserve an air of mourning. He passed the night in the library, writing at his Napoleonic table, smoking and brooding over the utter failure of his efforts to break Hera’s determination. He did not regret the attack he had made on Mario in the presence of the guests. For the New Democracy he harboured a deep hatred, and from a conviction born of this he had linked the doctrines of that party and Mario’s advocacy of them with the assassination of the King. It was easy for him to charge Forza with the loss of the royal visit, and easier to behold him as the author of his marital discord. The last fact clung to his meditations, which lasted into the morning hours.

Hera, alone in her apartments, thought over the events of the day. What dwarfed all else in her consciousness was the discovery that Mario’s love had never faltered. In the joy of this revelation she was able to forget for the moment the bondage into which she had been lured by Tarsis, the price she had paid for obeying an instinct of honour. But in the days that followed she was reminded of it bitterly.

At first the manner of her husband was such as to inform her negatively that he was willing no longer to keep up even a show of compliance. Next it took on a tenor of positive vexation. If she had been keenly sensible before that he exerted himself to win her affection, she was alive now to his studied resentment. He made no effort to mask his feelings. On the contrary, he paraded them resolutely. The details of domestic experience offered opportunities without number, and she observed that he seldom neglected them.

He did not conduct his campaign of protest as a man of finer grain might have done. From open indifference to her wishes he passed to pronounced acts of discourtesy. Once, while she was with her maid dressing for a night at La Scala, he quitted the palace without warning, and did not return until long after the curtain had fallen on the ballet. In the morning he offered an apology, but no word of explanation. Every day brought a new sneer to his lip and to his eye glances of deepened ill-will. This mood never left him. She was made to feel it alike at the breakfast table and when he paid her the parting civilities of the night.

Though all his approaches to her heart were foreordained to failure, she had been disposed to retain a certain spark of respect for him; now this was extinguished because of the discovery she had made about the message from Rome. In its place there burned a detestation of the man which every hour intensified. She realised that his was not a character to accept, even to perceive, that her attitude was, after all, just toward him, surveying it, as she did, in the light of their pre-nuptial agreement. Her blame of him, in consequence, was not so large as her commiseration of self for having been so weak as to heed other counsels than those of her heart. With the feeling that she had wronged herself was compounded a fear that she had wronged Tarsis as well.

But the idea of surrender had never crossed her mind. Reason had no play here; it was merely the intuitive firmness of a fine and wholesome soul, for whom real marriage could never be aught but a profound and moral naturalism; a loving union between man and woman such as the name of Mario Forza conjured up, ardent with a sense of the infinite—the apotheosis of a hallowed passion. When the duplicity of Tarsis was laid bare she had known an impulse to leave his house, to release herself from an obligation he had imposed upon her by deceit. But she listened for the moment to a less selfish voice, and decided to accept the events of her ill-starred wedding—to endure, suffer silently, even stolidly, all that it should entail. She felt so alone. To her father she would not go; his was a nature to be relieved of care, not one to be asked to share it. As to Aunt Beatrice, try as she did, Hera could not think of her except as the projector of the trouble, well meaning as her purpose may have been.

There was only one heart that could give sympathy, only one fellow-being that called to her, and to this one she might not go, in his counsel she might not seek guidance. Nevertheless, chance brought them together one morning in the garden of the General Hospital. Every week Hera sent roses there, and it was on Flower Day, as it had come to be known, that she met Mario in the director’s office. Soon they found themselves walking in the garden, he telling of a plan he had for a hospital where soldiers fallen on the industrial field might be cared for until restored for the struggle.