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.