In solitude, she put herself face to face with the situation’s hideous fact. Though wounded to the depths of her being, she had no impulse to tears. She felt impelled rather to bitter smiles for her grim failure in striving to serve two masters—to travel any path but that which the heart pointed. So this was the price of her father’s peaceful days, her aunt’s triumph over the bloodhounds of debt, the restoration of a Barbiondi to the palace of her ancestors! Ah, well, she would end it now, and she cared not whether the sequel should be good or ill.
The force of events had awakened in her a latent Titanic element that lifted her superior to weak scruple. She was conscious of a marvellous accession of moral strength. Now she felt that no barrier might rise high enough to baffle her purpose. Fervidly she was thankful that her spirit had come forth unconquered, and that, chained though she was to a rock, her soul could be free. She thought of her father, and weighed the effect upon his fortunes that parting from Tarsis might produce, but not for long did she harbour that consideration; she cast it from her as she might have dashed a cup of hemlock, resolved that her life should be poisoned no more for other people’s good. Come what might, in this crisis she would honour the heart’s edict. She had learned somewhat of her great mistake. It had proved a tree of knowledge, and in eating of the fruit her moral nature had found itself—become well defined and unified—so that she stood now as a law unto her own processes.
Nevertheless, she retained her sense of justice, and drew comfort from the fact that her husband had been the aggressor; that the deceit by which he had obtained her consent to the marriage, his rash accusations, his insults, gave her warrant for quitting his house and ending the mockery of their relation. It never occurred to her mind that the situation left any alternative course. She rang for her maid and directed her to prepare for their departure on the morrow, by an early train. Then she wrote a message to Tarsis, enclosed the sheet in an envelope, and stood it against a mirror, to make sure that it should catch her eye in the morning.
CHAPTER XV
A BILL PAYABLE
In ten hours, or at nine o’clock in the morning, Hera, and her maid, the only servant she had brought from the Brianza, entered a cab that had been summoned to the Via Cappuccini gate and drove to the Central railway station. They took a train that started at about the hour that Tarsis, heavy-eyed after a sleepless night, seated himself at the breakfast table and received her eloquently brief note. It was placed in his hand by Beppe, the velvety man-servant who brought the coffee:
My Husband:
Your groundless accusations leave me no alternative but to withdraw from your house. It is my purpose to make the separation permanent. I go to my father.
Hera dei Barbiondi.
He read it a second time, then leaned back and flecked the sheet with his fingers in a studied show of cool reflection; but his bitten lip spoiled the effect that he strove to produce. When he looked up Beppe’s eyes were riveted upon him in a manner unheard of for that genius in the art of seeing and hearing nothing. The incident, small in itself, proclaimed loudly enough that the palace retainers, from stable-boy to the head of the kitchen, were feasting already on the delicious scandal. It advised Tarsis as well that before nightfall the fashionable world would have the news on its tongue, thence to fly from the twelve gates of Milan to all parts of Italy.
Though contempt for public opinion had marked his career in all else, he had taken a keen pride in standing before the world as the husband of his young and beautiful high-born wife. It was the dearest of all his triumphs because it fed his vanity most. And now he perceived the glare of ridicule into which her desertion must throw him. Oddly enough, it was this realisation that set the first brand to his wrath. He was seized with a wild impulse to follow her to Villa Barbiondi and assert his authority over her—compel her, by main force, if the need should be, to return to the palace.