Almost a year before the time of these calamities the Duchessa had made
a singular acquaintance: one day when she had the _luna_, as they say in
those parts, she had gone suddenly, towards evening, to her villa of
Sacca, situated on the farther side of Colorno, on the hill commanding
the Po. She was amusing herself in improving this property; she loved
the vast forest which crowned the hill and reached to the house; she
spent her time laying out paths in picturesque directions.
"You will have yourself carried off by brigands, fair Duchessa," the
Prince said to her one day; "it is impossible that a forest in which it
is known that you take the air should remain deserted." The Prince threw
a glance at the Conte, whose jealousy he hoped to quicken.
"I have no fear, Serene Highness," replied the Duchessa with an innocent
air, "when I go walking in my woods; I reassure myself with this
thought: I have done no harm to anyone, who is there that could hate
me?" This speech was considered daring, it recalled the insults offered
by the Liberals of the country, who were most insolent people.
On the day of the walk in question, the Prince's words came back to the
mind of the Duchessa as she observed a very ill dressed man who was
following her at a distance through the woods. At a sudden turn which she
took in the course of her walk, this person came so near her that she
felt alarmed. Her first impulse was to call her game-keeper whom she had
left half a mile away, in the flower-garden close to the house. The
stranger had time to overtake her and fling himself at her feet. He was
young, extremely good-looking, but horribly badly dressed; his clothes
had rents in them a foot long, but his eyes burned with the fire of an
ardent soul.
_FERRANTE_
"I am under sentence of death, I am the physician, Ferrante Palla, I am
dying of hunger, I and my five children."
The Duchessa had noticed that he was terribly thin; but his eyes were so
fine, and filled with so tender an exaltation that they took from him
any suggestion of crime. "Pallagi," she thought, "might well have given
eyes like those to the Saint John in the Desert he has just placed in
the Cathedral." The idea of Saint John was suggested to her by the
incredible thinness of the vagabond. The Duchessa gave him three sequins
which she had in her purse, with an apology for offering him so little,
because she had just paid her gardener's account. Ferrante thanked her
effusively. "Alas!" he said to her, "once I lived in towns, I used to
see beautiful women; now that in fulfilment of my duties as a citizen I
have had myself sentenced to death, I live in the woods, and I was
following you, not to demand alms of you nor to rob you, but like a
savage fascinated by an angelic beauty. It is so long since I last saw a
pair of lovely white hands."
"Rise, then," the Duchessa told him; for he had remained on his knees.
"Allow me to remain like this," said Ferrante; "this posture proves to
me that I am not for the present engaged in robbery, and that soothes
me; for you must know that I steal to live, now that I am prevented from
practising my profession. But at this moment I am only a simple mortal
who is adoring sublime beauty." The Duchessa gathered that he was
slightly mad, but she was not at all afraid; she saw in the eyes of the
man that he had a good and ardent soul, and besides she had no objection
to extraordinary physiognomies.
"I am a physician, then, and I was making love to the wife of the
apothecary Sarasine of Parma: he took us by surprise and drove us from
the house, with three children whom he supposed, and rightly, to be mine
and not his. I have had two since then. The mother and five children are
living in the direst poverty in a sort of hut which I built with my own
hands a league from here, in the wood. For I have to keep away from the
police, and the poor woman refuses to be parted from me. I was sentenced
to death, and quite justly; I was conspiring. I abominate the Prince,
who is a tyrant. I did not fly the country, for want of money. My
misfortunes have greatly increased, and I ought to have killed myself a
thousand times over; I no longer love the unhappy woman who has borne me
these five children and has ruined herself for me; I love another. But
if I kill myself, the five children will literally starve to death." The
man spoke with an accent of sincerity.
"But how do you live?" inquired the Duchessa, moved to compassion.
"The children's mother spins; the eldest girl is kept in a farm by some
Liberals, where she tends the sheep; I am a highwayman on the road
between Piacenza and Genoa."
"How do you harmonise highway robbery with your Liberal principles?"
"I keep a note of the people I rob, and if ever I have anything I shall
restore to them the sums I have taken. I consider that a Tribune of the
People like myself is performing work which, in view of its danger, is
well worth a hundred francs monthly; and so I am careful not to take
more than twelve hundred francs in a year.
"No, I am wrong, I steal a small sum in addition, for in that way I am
able to meet the cost of printing my works."
"What works?"
"_Is ---- ever to have a Chamber and a Budget?_"
"What," said the Duchessa in amazement, "it is you, Sir, who are one of
the greatest poets of the age, the famous Ferrante Palla?"
"Famous perhaps, but most unfortunate; that is certain."
"And a man of your talent, Sir, is obliged to steal in order to live?"
"That is perhaps the calling for which I have some talent. Hitherto all
our authors who have made themselves famous have been men paid by the
government or the religion that they sought to undermine. I, in the
first place, risk my life; in the second place, think, Signora, of the
reflexions that disturb my mind when I go out to rob! Am I in the right,
I ask myself. Does the office of Tribune render services that are really
worth a hundred francs a month? I have two shirts, the coat in which you
see me, a few worthless weapons, and I am sure to end by the rope; I
venture to think that I am disinterested. I should be happy but for this
fatal love which allows me to find only misery now in the company of the
mother of my children. Poverty weighs upon me because it is ugly: I like
fine clothes, white hands. . . ."
He looked at the Duchessa's in such a fashion that fear seized hold of
her.
"Good-bye, Sir," she said to him: "can I be of any service to you in
Parma?"
"Think sometimes of this question: his task is to awaken men's hearts
and to prevent them from falling asleep in that false and wholly
material happiness which is given by monarchies. Is the service that he
renders to his fellow-citizens worth a hundred francs a month? . . . My
misfortune is that I am in love," he said in the gentlest of tones, "and
for nearly two years my heart has been occupied by you alone, but until
now I have seen you without alarming you." And he took to his heels with
a prodigious swiftness which astonished the Duchessa and reassured her.
"The police would have hard work to catch him," she thought; "he must be
mad, after all."
"He is mad," her servants informed her; "we have all known for a long
time that the poor man was in love with the Signora; when the Signora is
here we see him wandering in the highest parts of the woods, and as soon
as the Signora has gone he never fails to come and sit in the very
places where she has rested; he is careful to pick up any flowers that
may have dropped from her nosegay and keeps them for a long time
fastened in his battered hat."
"And you have never spoken to me of these eccentricities," said the
Duchessa, almost in a tone of reproach.
"We were afraid that the Signora might tell the Minister Mosca. Poor
Ferrante is such a good fellow! He has never done harm to anyone, and
because he loves our Napoleon they have sentenced him to death."
She said no word to the Minister of this meeting, and, as in four years
it was the first secret that she had kept from him, a dozen times she
was obliged to stop short in the middle of a sentence. She returned to
Sacca with a store of gold. Ferrante shewed no sign of life. She came
again a fortnight later: Ferrante, after following her for some time,
bounding through the wood at a distance of a hundred yards, fell upon
her with the swiftness of a hawk, and flung himself at her feet as on
the former occasion.
"Where were you a fortnight ago?"
"In the mountains, beyond Novi, robbing the muleteers who were returning
from Milan where they had been selling oil."
"Take this purse."
Ferrante opened the purse, took from it a sequin which he kissed and
thrust into his bosom, then handed it back to her.
"You give me back this purse, and you are a robber!"
"Certainly; my rule is that I must never possess more than a hundred
francs; now, at this moment, the mother of my children has eighty
francs, and I have twenty-five; I am five francs to the bad, and if they
were to hang me now I should feel remorse. I have taken this sequin
because it comes from you and I love you."
The intonation of this very simple speech was perfect. "He does really
love," the Duchessa said to herself.
That day he appeared quite distracted. He said that there were in Parma
people who owed him six hundred francs, and that with that sum he could
repair his hut in which now his poor children were catching cold.
"But I will make you a loan of those six hundred francs," said the
Duchessa, genuinely moved.
"But then I, a public man--will not the opposite party have a chance to
slander me, and say that I am selling myself?"
The Duchessa, in compassion, offered him a hiding-place in Parma if he
would swear that for the time being he would not exercise his
magistrature in that city, and above all would not carry out any of
those sentences of death which, he said, he had _in petto_.
"And if they hang me, as a result of my rashness," said Ferrante
gravely, "all those scoundrels, who are so obnoxious to the People, will
live for long years to come, and by whose fault? What will my father say
to me when he greets me up above?"
The Duchessa spoke to him at length of his young children, to whom the
damp might give fatal illnesses; he ended by accepting the offer of the
hiding place in Parma.
The Duca Sanseverina, during the solitary half-day which he had spent in
Parma after his marriage, had shewn the Duchessa a highly singular
hiding place which exists in the southern corner of the _palazzo_ of
that name. The wall in front, which dates from the middle ages, is eight
feet thick; it has been hollowed out inside, so as to provide a secret
chamber twenty feet in height but only two in width. It is close to
where the visitor admires the reservoir mentioned in all the accounts of
travels, a famous work of the twelfth century, constructed at the time
of the siege of Parma by the Emperor Sigismund, and afterwards enclosed
within the walls of the _palazzo_ Sanseverina.
One enters the hiding place by turning an enormous stone on an iron axis
which runs through the middle of the block. The Duchessa was so
profoundly touched by Ferrante's madness and by the hard lot of his
children, for whom he obstinately refused every present of any value,
that she allowed him to make use of this hiding place for a considerable
time. She saw him again a month later, still in the woods of Sacca, and
as on this occasion he was a little more calm, he recited to her one of
his sonnets which seemed to her equal if not superior to any of the
finest work written in Italy in the last two centuries. Ferrante
obtained several interviews; but his love grew exalted, became
importunate, and the Duchessa perceived that this passion was obeying
the laws of all love-affairs in which one conceives the possibility of a
ray of hope. She sent him back to the woods, forbade him to speak to her
again: he obeyed immediately and with a perfect docility. Things had
reached this point when Fabrizio was arrested. Three days later, at
nightfall, a Capuchin presented himself at the door of the _palazzo_
Sanseverina; he had, he said, an important secret to communicate to the
lady of the house. She was so wretched that she had him admitted: it was
Ferrante. "There is happening here a fresh iniquity of which the Tribune
of the people ought to take cognisance," this man mad with love said to
her. "On the other hand, acting as a private citizen," he added, "I can
give the Signora Duchessa Sanseverina nothing but my life, and I lay it
before her."
So sincere a devotion on the part of a robber and madman touched the
Duchessa keenly. She talked for some time to this man who was considered
the greatest poet in the North of Italy, and wept freely. "Here is a man
who understands my heart," she said to herself. The following day he
reappeared, again at the _Ave Maria_, disguised as a servant and wearing
livery.
"I have not left Parma: I have heard tell of an atrocity which my lips
shall not repeat; but here I am. Think, Signora, of what you are
refusing! The being you see before you is not a doll of the court, he is
a man!" He was on his knees as he uttered these words with an air which
made them tell. "Yesterday I said to myself," he went on: "She has wept
in my presence; therefore she is a little less unhappy."
"But, Sir, think of the dangers that surround you, you will be arrested
in this town!"
"The Tribune will say to you: Signora, what is life when duty calls? The
unhappy man, who has the grief of no longer feeling any passion for
virtue now that he is burning with love, will add: Signora Duchessa,
Fabrizio, a man of feeling, is perhaps about to perish, do not repulse
another man of feeling who offers himself to you! Here is a body of iron
and a heart which fears nothing in the world but your displeasure."
"If you speak to me again of your feelings, I close my door to you for
ever."
It occurred to the Duchessa, that evening, to announce to Ferrante that
she would make a small allowance to his children, but she was afraid
that he would go straight from the house and kill himself.
No sooner had he left her than, filled with gloomy presentiments, she
said to herself: "I too, I may die, and would to God I might, and that
soon! If I found a man worthy of the name to whom to commend my poor
Fabrizio."
An idea struck the Duchessa: she took a sheet of paper and drafted an
acknowledgment, into which she introduced the few legal terms that she
knew, that she had received from Signor Ferrante Palla the sum of 25,000
francs, on the express condition of paying every year a life-rent of
1,500 francs to Signora Sarasine and her five children. The Duchessa
added: "In addition, I bequeath a life-rent of 300 francs to each of
these five children, on condition that Ferrante Palla gives his
professional services as a physician to my nephew Fabrizio del Dongo,
and behaves to him as a brother. This I request him to do." She signed
the document, ante-dated it by a year and folded the sheet.
Two days later, Ferrante reappeared. It was at the moment when the town
was agitated by the rumour of the immediate execution of Fabrizio. Would
this grim ceremony take place in the citadel, or under the trees of the
public mall? Many of the populace took a walk that evening past the gate
of the citadel, trying to see whether the scaffold were being erected;
this spectacle had moved Ferrante. He found the Duchessa in floods of
tears and unable to speak; she greeted him with her hand and pointed to
a seat. Ferrante, disguised that day as a Capuchin, was superb; instead
of seating himself he knelt, and prayed devoutly in an undertone. At a
moment when the Duchessa seemed slightly more calm, without stirring
from his posture, he broke off his prayer for an instant to say these
words: "Once again he offers his life."
"Think of what you are saying," cried the Duchessa, with that haggard
eye which, following tears, indicates that anger is overcoming emotion.
"He offers his life to place an obstacle in the way of Fabrizio's fate,
or to avenge it."
"There are circumstances," replied the Duchessa, "in which I could
accept the sacrifice of your life."
She gazed at him with a severe attention. A ray of joy gleamed in his
eye; he rose swiftly and stretched out his arms towards heaven. The
Duchessa went to find a paper hidden in the secret drawer of a walnut
cabinet.
"Read this," she said to Ferrante. It was the deed in favour of his
children, of which we have spoken.
Tears and sobs prevented Ferrante from reading it to the end; he fell on
his knees.
"Give me back the paper," said the Duchessa, and, in his presence,
burned it in the flame of a candle.
"My name," she explained, "must not appear if you are taken and
executed, for your life will be at stake."
"My joy is to die in harming the tyrant: a far greater joy is to die for
you. Once this is stated and clearly understood, be so kind as to make
no further mention of this detail of money. I might see in it a
suspicion that would be injurious to me."
"If you are compromised, I may be also," replied the Duchessa, "and
Fabrizio as well as myself: it is for that reason, and not because I
have any doubt of your bravery, that I require that the man who is
lacerating my heart shall be poisoned and not stabbed. For the same
reason which is so important to me, I order you to do everything in the
world to save your own life."
"I shall execute the task faithfully, punctiliously and prudently. I
foresee, Signora Duchessa, that my revenge will be combined with your
own: were it not so, I should still obey you faithfully, punctiliously
and prudently. I may not succeed, but I shall employ all my human
strength."
"It is a question of poisoning Fabrizio's murderer."
"So I had guessed, and, during the twenty-seven months in which I have
been leading this vagabond and abominable life, I have often thought of
a similar action on my own account."
"If I am discovered and condemned as an accomplice," went on the
Duchessa in a tone of pride, "I do not wish the charge to be imputed to
me of having corrupted you. I order you to make no further attempt to
see me until the time comes for our revenge: he must on no account be
put to death before I have given you the signal. His death at the
present moment, for instance, would be lamentable to me instead of being
useful. Probably his death will occur only in several months' time, but
it shall occur. I insist on his dying by poison, and I should prefer to
leave him alive rather than see him shot. For considerations which I do
not wish to explain to you, I insist upon your life's being saved."
Ferrante was delighted with the tone of authority which the Duchessa
adopted with him: his eyes gleamed with a profound joy. As we have said,
he was horribly thin; but one could see that he had been very handsome
in his youth, and he imagined himself to be still what he had once been.
"Am I mad?" he asked himself; "or will the Duchessa indeed one day, when
I have given her this proof of my devotion, make me the happiest of men?
And, when it comes to that, why not? Am I not worth as much as that doll
of a Conte Mosca, who when the time came, could do nothing for her, not
even enable Monsignor Fabrizio to escape?"
_PREPARATIONS_
"I may wish his death to-morrow," the Duchessa continued, still with the
same air of authority. "You know that immense reservoir of water which
is at the corner of the _palazzo_, not far from the hiding-place which
you have sometimes occupied; there is a secret way of letting all that
water run out into the street: very well, that will be the signal for my
revenge. You will see, if you are in Parma, or you will hear it said, if
you are living in the woods, that the great reservoir of the _palazzo_
Sanseverina has burst. Act at once but by poison, and above all risk
your own life as little as possible. No one must ever know that I have
had a hand in this affair."
"Words are useless," replied Ferrante, with an enthusiasm which he could
ill conceal: "I have already fixed on the means which I shall employ.
The life of that man has become more odious to me than it was before,
since I shall not dare to see you again so long as he is alive. I shall
await the signal of the reservoir flooding the street." He bowed
abruptly and left the room. The Duchessa watched him go.
When he was in the next room, she recalled him.
"Ferrante!" she cried; "sublime man!"
He returned, as though impatient at being detained: his face at that
moment was superb.
"And your children?"
"Signora, they will be richer than I; you will perhaps allow them some
small pension."
"Wait," said the Duchessa as she handed him a sort of large case of
olive wood, "here are all the diamonds that I have left: they are worth
50,000 francs."
"Ah! Signora, you humiliate me!" said Ferrante with a gesture of horror;
and his face completely altered.
"I shall not see you again before the deed: take them, I wish it," added
the Duchessa with an air of pride which struck Ferrante dumb; he put the
case in his pocket and left her.
The door had closed behind him. The Duchessa called him back once again;
he returned with an uneasy air: the Duchessa was standing in the middle
of the room; she threw herself into his arms. A moment later, Ferrante
had almost fainted with happiness; the Duchessa released herself from
his embrace, and with her eyes shewed him the door.
"There goes the one man who has understood me," she said to herself;
"that is how Fabrizio would have acted, if he could have realised."
There were two salient points in the Duchessa's character: she always
wished what she had once wished; she never gave any further
consideration to what had once been decided. She used to quote in this
connexion a saying of her first husband, the charming General
Pietranera. "What insolence to myself!" he used to say; "Why should I
suppose that I have more sense to-day than when I made up my mind?"
From that moment a sort of gaiety reappeared in the Duchessa's
character. Before the fatal resolution, at each step that her mind took,
at each new point that she saw, she had the feeling of her own
inferiority to the Prince, of her weakness and gullibility; the Prince,
according to her, had basely betrayed her, and Conte Mosca, as was
natural to his courtier's spirit, albeit innocently, had supported the
Prince. Once her revenge was settled, she felt her strength, every step
that her mind took gave her happiness. I am inclined to think that the
immoral happiness which the Italians find in revenge is due to the
strength of their imagination; the people of other countries do not
properly speaking forgive; they forget.
The Duchessa did not see Palla again until the last days of Fabrizio's
imprisonment. As the reader may perhaps have guessed, it was he who gave
her the idea of his escape: there was in the woods, two leagues from
Sacca, a mediæval tower, half in ruins, and more than a hundred feet
high; before speaking a second time to the Duchessa of an escape,
Ferrante begged her to send Lodovico with a party of trustworthy men, to
fasten a set of ladders against this tower. In the Duchessa's presence
he climbed up by means of the ladders and down with an ordinary knotted
cord; he repeated the experiment three times, then explained his idea
again. A week later Lodovico too was prepared to climb down this old
tower with a knotted cord; it was then that the Duchessa communicated
the idea to Fabrizio.
In the final days before this attempt, which might lead to the death of
the prisoner, and in more ways than one, the Duchessa could not secure a
moment's rest unless she had Ferrante by her side; the courage of this
man electrified her own; but it can be understood that she had to hide
from the Conte this singular companionship. She was afraid, not that he
would be revolted, but she would have been afflicted by his objections,
which would have increased her uneasiness. "What! Take as an intimate
adviser a madman known to be mad, and under sentence of death! And,"
added the Duchessa, speaking to herself, "a man who, in consequence,
might do such strange things!" Ferrante happened to be in the Duchessa's
drawing-room at the moment when the Conte came to give her a report of
the Prince's conversation with Rassi; and, when the Conte had left her,
she had great difficulty in preventing Ferrante from going straight away
to the execution of a frightful plan.
"I am strong now," cried this madman; "I have no longer any doubt as to
the lawfulness of the act!"
"But, in the moment of indignation which must inevitably follow,
Fabrizio would be put to death!"
"Yes, but in that way we should spare him the danger of the climb: it is
possible, indeed easy," he added; "but the young man lacks experience."
The marriage was celebrated of the Marchese Crescenzi's sister, and it
was at the party given on this occasion that the Duchessa met Clelia,
and was able to speak to her without causing any suspicion among the
fashionable onlookers. The Duchessa herself handed to Clelia the parcel
of cords in the garden, where the two ladies had gone for a moment's
fresh air. These cords, prepared with the greatest care, of hemp and
silk in equal parts, were knotted, very slender and fairly flexible;
Lodovico had tested their strength, and, in every portion, they could
bear without breaking a load of sixteen hundredweight. They had been
packed in such a way as to form several packets each of the size and
shape of a quarto volume; Clelia took charge of them, and promised the
Duchessa that everything that was humanly possible would be done to
deliver these packets in the Torre Farnese.
"But I am afraid of the timidity of your nature; and besides," the
Duchessa added politely, "what interest can you feel in a stranger?"
"Signor del Dongo is in distress, _and I promise you that he shall be
saved by me_!"
But the Duchessa, placing only a very moderate reliance on the presence
of mind of a young person of twenty, had taken other precautions, of
which she took care not to inform the governor's daughter. As might be
expected, this governor was present at the party given for the marriage
of the Marchese Crescenzi's sister. The Duchessa said to herself that,
if she could make him be given a strong narcotic, it might be supposed,
at first, that he had had an attack of apoplexy, and then, instead of
his being placed in his carriage to be taken back to the citadel, it
might, with a little arrangement, be possible to have the suggestion
adopted of using a litter, which would happen to be in the house where
the party was being given. There, too, would be gathered a body of
intelligent men, dressed as workmen employed for the party, who, in the
general confusion, would obligingly offer their services to transport
the sick man to his _palazzo_, which stood at such a height. These men,
under the direction of Lodovico, carried a sufficient quantity of cords,
cleverly concealed beneath their clothing. One sees that the Duchessa's
mind had become really unbalanced since she had begun to think seriously
of Fabrizio's escape. The peril of this beloved creature was too much
for her heart, and besides was lasting too long. By her excess of
precaution, she nearly succeeded in preventing his escape, as we shall
presently see. Everything went off as she had planned, with this one
difference, that the narcotic produced too powerful an effect; everyone
believed, including the medical profession, that the General had had an
apoplectic stroke.
Fortunately, Clelia, who was in despair, had not the least suspicion of
so criminal an attempt on the part of the Duchessa. The confusion was
such at the moment when the litter, in which the General, half dead, was
lying, entered the citadel, that Lodovico and his men passed in without
challenge; they were subjected to a formal scrutiny only at the Slave's
Bridge. When they had carried the General to his bedroom, they were
taken to the kitchens, where the servants entertained them royally; but
after this meal, which did not end until it was very nearly morning, it
was explained to them that the rule of the prison required that, for the
rest of the night, they should be locked up in the lower rooms of the
_palazzo_; in the morning at daybreak they would be released by the
governor's deputy.
These men had found an opportunity of handing to Lodovico the cords with
which they had been loaded, but Lodovico had great difficulty in
attracting Clelia's attention for a moment. At length, as she was
passing from one room to another, he made her observe that he was laying
down packets of cords in a dark corner of one of the drawing-rooms of
the first floor. Clelia was profoundly struck by this strange
circumstance; at once she conceived atrocious suspicions.
"Who are you?" she asked Lodovico.
And, on receiving his highly ambiguous reply, she added:
"I ought to have you arrested; you or your masters have poisoned my
father! Confess this instant what is the nature of the poison you have
used, so that the doctor of the citadel can apply the proper remedies;
confess this instant, or else, you and your accomplices shall never go
out of this citadel!"
"The Signorina does wrong to be alarmed," replied Lodovico, with a grace
and politeness that were perfect; "there is no question of poison;
someone has been rash enough to administer to the General a dose of
laudanum, and it appears that the servant who was responsible for this
crime poured a few drops too many into the glass; this we shall
eternally regret; but the Signorina may be assured that, thank heaven,
there is no sort of danger; the Signore must be treated for having
taken, by mistake, too strong a dose of laudanum; but, I have the honour
to repeat to the Signorina, the lackey responsible for the crime made no
use of real poisons, as Barbone did, when he tried to poison Monsignor
Fabrizio. There was no thought of revenge for the peril that Monsignor
Fabrizio ran; nothing was given to this clumsy lackey but a bottle in
which there was laudanum, that I swear to the Signorina! But it must be
clearly understood that, if I were questioned officially, I should deny
everything.
"Besides, if the Signorina speaks to anyone in the world of laudanum and
poison, even to the excellent Don Cesare, Fabrizio is killed by the
Signorina's own hand. She makes impossible for ever all the plans of
escape; and the Signorina knows better than I that it is not with
laudanum that they wish to poison Monsignore; she knows, too, that a
certain person has granted only a month's delay for that crime, and that
already more than a week has gone by since the fatal order was received.
So, if she has me arrested, or if she merely says a word to Don Cesare
or to anyone else, she retards all our activities far more than a month,
and I am right in saying that she kills Monsignor Fabrizio with her own
hand."
Clelia was terrified by the strange tranquillity of Lodovico.
"And so," she said to herself, "here I am conversing formally with my
father's poisoner, who employs polite turns of speech to address me! And
it is love that has led me to all these crimes! . . ."
Her remorse scarcely allowed her the strength to speak; she said to
Lodovico.
"I am going to lock you into this room. I shall run and tell the doctor
that it is only laudanum; but, great God, how shall I tell him that I
discovered this? I shall come back afterwards to release you. But," said
Clelia, running back from the door, "did Fabrizio know anything of the
laudanum?"
"Heavens, no, Signorina, he would never have consented to that. And,
besides, what good would it have done to make an unnecessary confidence?
We are acting with the strictest prudence. It is a question of saving
the life of Monsignore, who will be poisoned in three weeks from now;
the order has been given by a person who is not accustomed to find any
obstacle to his wishes; and, to tell the Signorina everything, they say
that it was the terrible Fiscal General Rassi who received these
instructions."
Clelia fled in terror; she could so count on the perfect probity of Don
Cesare that, taking certain precautions, she had the courage to tell him
that the General had been given laudanum, and nothing else. Without
answering, without putting any question, Don Cesare ran to the doctor.
Clelia returned to the room in which she had shut up Lodovico, with the
intention of plying him with questions about the laudanum. She did not
find him: he had managed to escape. She saw on the table a purse full of
sequins and a box containing different kinds of poison. The sight of
these poisons made her shudder. "How can I be sure," she thought, "that
they have given nothing but laudanum to my father, and that the Duchessa
has not sought to avenge herself for Barbone's attempt?
"Great God!" she cried, "here am I in league with my father's poisoners.
And I allow them to escape! And perhaps that man, when put to the
question, would have confessed something else than laudanum!"
Clelia at once fell on her knees, burst into tears, and prayed to the
Madonna with fervour.
Meanwhile the doctor of the citadel, greatly surprised by the
information he had received from Don Cesare, according to which he had
to deal only with laudanum, applied the appropriate remedies, which
presently made the more alarming symptoms disappear. The General came to
himself a little as day began to dawn. His first action that shewed any
sign of consciousness was to hurl insults at the Colonel who was second
in command of the citadel, and had taken upon himself to give certain
orders, the simplest in the world, while the General was unconscious.
The governor next flew into a towering rage with a kitchenmaid who, when
bringing him his soup, had been so rash as to utter the word apoplexy.
"Am I of an age," he cried, "to have apoplexies? It is only my deadly
enemies who can find pleasure in spreading such reports. And besides,
have I been bled, that slander itself dare speak of apoplexy?"
Fabrizio, wholly occupied with the preparations for his escape, could
not understand the strange sounds that filled the citadel at the moment
when the governor was brought in half dead. At first he had some idea
that his sentence had been altered, and that they were coming to put him
to death. Then, seeing that no one came to his cell, he thought that
Clelia had been betrayed, that on her return to the fortress they had
taken from her the cords which probably she was bringing back, and so,
that his plans of escape were for the future impossible. Next day, at
dawn, he saw come into his room a man unknown to him, who, without
saying a word, laid down a basket of fruit: beneath the fruit was hidden
the following letter:
"Penetrated by the keenest remorse for what has been done, not, thank
heaven, by my consent, but as the outcome of an idea which I had, I have
made a vow to the Blessed Virgin that if, by the effect of Her holy
intercession my father is saved, I will never refuse to obey any of his
orders; I will marry the Marchese as soon as he requires me to do so,
and I will never see you again. However, I consider it my duty to finish
what has been begun. Next Sunday, when you return from mass, to which
you will be taken at my request (remember to prepare your soul, you may
kill yourself in the difficult enterprise); when you return from mass, I
say, put off as long as possible going back to your room; you will find
there what is necessary for the enterprise that you have in mind. If you
perish, my heart will be broken! Will you be able to accuse me of having
contributed to your death? Has not the Duchessa herself repeated to me
upon several occasions that the Raversi faction is winning? They seek to
bind the Prince by an act of cruelty that must separate him for ever
from Conte Mosca. The Duchessa, with floods of tears, has sworn to me
that there remains only this resource: you will perish unless you make
an attempt. I cannot look at you again, I have made my vow; but if on
Sunday, towards evening, you see me dressed entirely in black, at the
usual window, it will be the signal that everything will be ready that
night so far as my feeble means allow. After eleven, perhaps at midnight
or at one o'clock, a little lamp will appear in my window, that will be
the decisive moment; commend yourself to your Holy Patron, dress
yourself in haste in the priestly habit with which you are provided, and
be off.
"Farewell, Fabrizio, I shall be at my prayers, and shedding the most
bitter tears, as you may well believe, while you are running such great
risks. If you perish, I shall not outlive you a day; Great God! What am
I saying? But if you succeed, I shall never see you again. On Sunday,
after mass, you will find in your prison the money, the poison, the
cords, sent by that terrible woman who loves you with passion, and who
has three times over assured me that this course must be adopted. May
God preserve you, and the Blessed Madonna!"
Fabio Conti was a gaoler who was always uneasy, always unhappy, always
seeing in his dreams one of his prisoners escaping: he was loathed by
everyone in the citadel; but misfortune inspiring the same resolutions
in all men, the poor prisoners, even those who were chained in dungeons
three feet high, three feet wide and eight feet long, in which they
could neither stand nor sit, all the prisoners, even these, I say, had
the idea of ordering a _Te Deum_ to be sung at their own expense, when
they knew that their governor was out of danger. Two or three of these
wretches composed sonnets in honour of Fabio Conti. Oh, the effect of
misery upon men! May he who would blame them be led by his destiny to
spend a year in a cell three feet high, with eight ounces of bread a day
and _fasting_ on Fridays!
_JUSTICE_
Clelia, who left her father's room only to pray in the chapel, said that
the governor had decided that the rejoicings should be confined to
Sunday. On the morning of this Sunday, Fabrizio was present at mass and
at the _Te Deum_; in the evening there were fireworks, and in the lower
rooms of the _palazzo_ the soldiers received a quantity of wine four
times that which the governor had allowed; an unknown hand had even sent
several barrels of brandy which the soldiers broached. The generous
spirit of the soldiers who were becoming intoxicated would not allow the
five of their number who were on duty as sentries outside the _palazzo_
to suffer accordingly; as soon as they arrived at their sentry-boxes, a
trusted servant gave them wine, and it was not known from what hand
those who came on duty at midnight and for the rest of the night
received also a glass each of brandy, while the bottle was in each case
forgotten and left by the sentry-box (as was proved in the subsequent
investigations).
The disorder lasted longer than Clelia had expected, and it was not
until nearly one o'clock that Fabrizio, who, more than a week earlier,
had sawn through two bars of his window, the window that did not look
out on the aviary, began to take down the screen; he was working almost
over the heads of the sentries who were guarding the governor's
_palazzo_, they heard nothing. He had made some fresh knots only in the
immense cord necessary for descending from that terrible height of one
hundred and eighty feet. He arranged this cord as a bandolier about his
body: it greatly embarrassed him, its bulk was enormous; the knots
prevented it from being wound close, and it projected more than eighteen
inches from his body. "This is the chief obstacle," said Fabrizio.
This cord once arranged as well as possible, Fabrizio took the other
with which he counted on climbing down the thirty-five feet which
separated his window from the terrace on which the governor's _palazzo_
stood. But inasmuch as, however drunken the sentries might be, he could
not descend exactly over their heads, he climbed out, as we have said,
by the second window of his room, that which looked over the roof of a
sort of vast guard-room. By a sick man's whim, as soon as General Fabio
Conti was able to speak, he had ordered up two hundred soldiers into
this old guard-room, disused for over a century. He said that after
poisoning him, they would seek to murder him in his bed, and these two
hundred soldiers were to guard him. One may judge of the effect which
this unforeseen measure had on the heart of Clelia: that pious girl was
fully conscious to what an extent she was betraying her father, and a
father who had just been almost poisoned in the interests of the
prisoner whom she loved. She almost saw in the unexpected arrival of
these two hundred men an act of Providence which forbade her to go any
farther and to give Fabrizio his freedom.
But everyone in Parma was talking of the immediate death of the
prisoner. This grim subject had been discussed again at the party given
on the occasion of the marriage of Donna Giulia Crescenzi. Since for
such a mere trifle as a clumsy sword-thrust given to an actor, a man of
Fabrizio's birth was not set at liberty at the end of nine months'
imprisonment, and when he had the protection of the Prime Minister, it
must be because politics entered into the case. And in that event, it
was useless to think any more about him, people said; if it was not
convenient to authority to put him to death in a public place, he would
soon die of sickness. A locksmith who had been summoned to General Fabio
Conti's _palazzo_ spoke of Fabrizio as of a prisoner long since
dispatched, whose death was being kept secret from motives of policy.
This man's words decided Clelia.