The sword of wealth

A WEEK before the day set for her wedding, in a bright hour of early April, Hera rode forth from the park of Villa Barbiondi. Following the margin of the river, she trotted her horse to where the shores lay coupled by a bridge of pontoons--an ancient device of small boats and planking little different from the sort Cæsar’s soldiers threw across the same stream. She drew up and watched the strife going on between the bridge and the current--the boats straining at their anchor-chains and the water rioting between them.

Italy has no lovelier valley than the one where flowed the river on which she looked, and in the gentler season there is no water-course more expressive of serene human character. But the river was tipsy to-day. The springtime sun, in its passages of splendour from Alp to Alp, had set free the winter snows, and Old Adda, flushed by his many cups, frolicked ruthlessly to the sea.

Peasant folk in that part of the Brianza had smiled a few days earlier to see the great stream change its sombre green for an earthy hue, because it was a promise of the vernal awakening. Yet their joy was shadowed, as it always is in freshet days, by dread of the havoc so often attending the spree of the waters.

Time and again Hera had ridden over when the river was in such mood, and known only a keen enjoyment in the adventure. Now she spoke to Nero, and he went forward without distrust in the hand that guided him; still, the pose of his ears and the quivering nostrils betrayed a preference for roads that neither swayed nor billowed. Less than half the crossing had been accomplished when the crackle of sundering timber startled her; then events confused themselves strangely amid the rustle of the wind and the scream of the water.

A few paces ahead, at the middle of the stream, where the current’s play was fiercest, two pontoons tore free from their anchorage, and here the bridge parted. With her consciousness of this rose the blurred vision of a horse and rider flying over the breach. Then she was aware of the beat of swift-moving hoofs, and, in the next instant, it seemed, of a voice at her side:

“Turn back, signora, I beg of you!”

She brought her horse around, but while she did so there was a second rending of woodwork, a snapping, too, of anchor-chains, and the part of the bridge on which they stood--severed by a new breach from the rest of the structure--began to go with the tide.

It was an odd bark on which they found themselves being swept toward the sea. It consisted of six of the pontoons, held together none too securely by the planking that made the deck.

Round and round it swung, tossed like a chip on the racing flood. The temper of Hera’s horse was less equal to the swirling, rocking situation than that of her companion’s mount. In vain she tried to quiet him. From side to side of the raft the beast caracoled or rose with fore legs in the air when she drew him up, perilously near the edge.

“Dismount, dismount!” the other called to her.

Before she could heed the warning Nero began to back near the brink, leaving her powerless to prevent him carrying her into the water. But the stranger had swung out of the saddle. A spring forward and he had Nero by the head in a grip not to be shaken off. The animal’s effort to go overboard was checked, but only for the moment, and when Hera had dismounted her deliverer passed his own bridle-reins to her that he might be free to manage her more restive steed.

“There, there, boy!” he said in the way to quiet a nervous horse. “No fear, no fear. We shall be out of this soon. Patience! Steady, steady!”

A minute and he had Nero under such control that he stood with four hoofs on the deck at one time and balked only fitfully at the restraining hand on the bridle.

Silently Hera watched the man at his task, struck by the calmness with which he performed it. By neither look nor word did he betray to her that fear had any place in his emotions. Swifter the river tossed them onward. Louder their crazy vessel creaked and groaned. But his mastery of himself, his superiority to the terrors that bounded them, his disdain for the hazard of events while he did the needful work of the moment, awoke in her a feeling akin to security. It was as if he lifted her with him above the danger in which the maddest whim of fortune had made them partners.

“Do you see any way out of it?” she asked, presently, following his example of coolness.

He seemed not to hear her voice. With feet set sure and a steady grip on the bridle, he peered into the distance ahead--far over the expanse of violent water, now tinted here and there with rose, caught from the glowing west, where the sun hung low over dark, wooded hills. She wondered what it was that he sought so eagerly, but did not ask. She guessed it had to do with some quickly conceived design for breaking their captivity, and when at length he turned to her she saw in his eye the light of a discovered hope.

“Yes,” he said, “we have a good chance. The current bears us toward the point at the bend of the river. We must pass within a few yards of that if I judge rightly.”

“And then?”

“I shall make use of that,” he answered, pointing to a coil of rope that hung on his saddle-bow.

“What I mean to do is----”

The sound of breaking planks signalled a danger with which he had not reckoned. He saw one of the end pontoons wrench itself free. Hera saw it too, as it bore away to drift alone; and they knew it for a warning grimly clear that all the members of their uncertain bark must part company ere long.

In the silence that fell between them she looked toward the Viadetta bank, where peasants awoke the echoes with their hue and cry. He kept his gaze on the spear of land that marked the river’s sharpest turn. Once or twice he measured with his eye the lessening distance between them and the shore.

“We hold to the right course,” he said, confidently. “There will be time.”

Piece by piece Hera saw the thing that bore them scatter its parts over the river.

“What shall we do?” she asked, a shudder of fear mingling strangely with trust in him.

At first he made her no answer, but continued to watch the shore as if striving to discern some signal. Another pontoon broke loose, carrying off a part of the deck and leaving the rest of the planks it had supported hanging in the water. The sound of the breaking timbers did not make him turn his head. When at last he faced her it was to speak in tones all at odds with their desperate state.

“See the Old Sentinel!” he exclaimed, gleefully. “He shall save us!”

Not far to the south she could see the projecting land, a flat place and bare except for some carved stones lying there in a semblance of order--the bleached ruins, in fact, of a temple raised by one of her ancestors. The wash of ages had brought the river much nearer than it was in the days of that rude conqueror, and one stone, bedded deep in the mould, stood erect at the water’s edge. Its base was hidden, but enough remained above ground to tell what part it had played in architecture--a section of a rounded column. Brianza folk knew it by the name of the Old Sentinel. Always it had been there, they told the stranger. Now the magic of the low sun changed it into a shaft of gold. From childhood Hera had known the ancient landmark, and was the more puzzled to divine how it could serve them now.

“Can I help?” she asked, as he turned toward her again.

“Yes,” he answered, quickly. “Hold my horse. Can you manage both?”

“I will try,” she said, moving closer to him.

“We must not lose the horses,” he warned her. “They will be useful in case I--even after we are connected once more with the land.”

She took the other bridle, which he passed to her, and grasped it firmly. Then she saw him lift from the saddle-bow the rope--a lariat of the plainsman’s sort, fashioned of horsehair, light of weight, but stronger than if made of hemp. He gathered it in an orderly coil and made sure of his footing. Now she knew what he was going to attempt, and the desperate chance of the feat came home to her. In a flash she comprehended that upon the success of it their lives depended even if the dismembering raft held together so long. If his aim proved false, if the lariat missed the mark, a second throw might not avail; before he could make it they must be swept past the column of stone.

Calmly he awaited the right moment, which came when their rickety outfit, in the freak of the current, was moving yet toward the land. He poised a second and raised the coil. Twice he swung it in a circle above his head--the horses were watching him--and with a mighty fling sent it over the water. Steadily it paid out, ring for ring, straight as an arrow’s course, until the noose caught the column fairly, spread around it, and dropped to the ground.

“Bravo, Signor Sentinella!” he cried, pulling the line taut. “A good catch!”

“Bravo, Signor--” she amended, pausing for his name.

“Forza is my name,” he said, hauling for the shore, hand over hand.

It was work that had to be done quickly. A few seconds and their craft would swing past the column to which it was moored. To haul it back then would mean a tug against the current. In this he knew that no strength of his could avail even if the lariat did not part. His sole chance was to keep the float moving in a slanting line toward land before it should be carried beyond the Sentinel. The bulk of woodwork and pontoons was of great weight, and the task took all the strength he could muster.

“Let me help you,” Hera said, seeing that he strained every muscle.

“No, no! Hold the horses! Now is our time. We are in shallow water.”