At length the servant came to inform him that Signorina Clelia Conti was willing to receive him.
Our hero's courage failed him completely; he almost collapsed with fear as he climbed the stair to the second floor.
Clelia was sitting at a little table on which stood a single candle.
No sooner had she recognised Fabrizio under his disguise than she rose and fled, hiding at the far end of the room.
"This is how you care for my salvation!" she cried to him, hiding her face in her hands. "You know very well, when my father was at the point of death after taking poison, I made a vow to the Madonna that I would never see you.
I have never failed to keep that vow save on that day, the most wretched day of my life, when I felt myself bound by conscience to snatch you from death.
It is already far more than you deserve if, by a strained and no doubt criminal interpretation of my vow, I consent to listen to you."
This last sentence so astonished Fabrizio that it took him some moments to grasp its joyful meaning. He had expected the most fiery anger, and to see Clelia fly from the room; at length his presence of mind returned, and he extinguished the one candle.
Although he believed that he had understood Clelia's orders, he was trembling all over as he advanced towards the end of the room, where she had taken refuge behind a sofa; he did not know whether it would offend her if he kissed her hand; she was all tremulous with love and threw herself into his arms.
"Dear Fabrizio," she said to him, "how long you have been in coming!
I can only speak to you for a moment, for I am sure it is a great sin; and when I promised never to see you, I am sure I meant also to promise not to hear you speak.
But how could you pursue with such barbarity the idea of vengeance that my poor father had?
For, after all, it was he who was first nearly poisoned to assist your escape.
Ought you not to do something for me, who have exposed my reputation to such risks in order to save you?
And besides you are now bound absolutely in Holy Orders; you could not marry me any longer, even though I should find a way of getting rid of that odious Marchese.
And then how did you dare, on the afternoon of the procession, have the effrontery to look at me in broad daylight, and so violate, in the most flagrant fashion, the holy promise that I had made to the Madonna?"
Fabrizio clasped her in his arms, carried out of himself by his surprise and joy.
A conversation which began with such a quantity of things to be said could not finish for a long time.
Fabrizio told her the exact truth as to her father's banishment; the Duchessa had had no part in it whatsoever, for the simple reason that she had never for a single instant believed that the idea of poison had originated with General Conti; she had always thought that it was a little game on the part of the Raversi faction, who wished to drive Conte Mosca from Parma.
This historical truth developed at great length made Clelia very happy; she was wretched at having to hate anyone who belonged to Fabrizio.
Now she no longer regarded the Duchessa with a jealous eye.
The happiness established by this evening lasted only a few days.
The worthy Don Cesare arrived from Turin; and, taking courage in the perfect honesty of his heart, ventured to send in his name to the Duchessa.
After asking her to give him her word that she would not abuse the confidence he was about to repose in her, he admitted that his brother, led astray by a false point of honour, and thinking himself challenged and lowered in public opinion by Fabrizio's escape, had felt bound to avenge himself.
Don Cesare had not been speaking for two minutes before his cause was won: his perfect goodness had touched the Duchessa, who was by no means accustomed to such a spectacle.
He appealed to her as a novelty.
"Hasten the marriage between the General's daughter and the Marchese Crescenzi, and I give you my word that I will do all that lies in my power to ensure that the General is received as though he were returning from a tour abroad.
I shall invite him to dinner; does that satisfy you?
No doubt there will be some coolness at the beginning, and the General must on no account be in a hurry to ask for his place as governor of the citadel.
But you know that I have a friendly feeling for the Marchese, and I shall retain no rancour towards his father-in-law."
Fortified by these words, Don Cesare came to tell his niece that she held in her hands the life of her father, who was ill with despair.
For many months past he had not appeared at any court.
Clelia decided to go to visit her father, who was hiding under an assumed name in a village near Turin; for he had supposed that the court of Parma would demand his extradition from that of Turin, to put him on his trial.
She found him ill and almost insane.
That same evening she wrote Fabrizio a letter threatening an eternal rupture.
On receiving this letter, Fabrizio, who was developing a character closely resembling that of his mistress, went into retreat in the convent of Velleja, situated in the mountains, ten leagues from Parma.
Clelia wrote him a letter of ten pages: she had sworn to him, before, that she would never marry the Marchese without his consent; now she asked this of him, and Fabrizio granted it from his retreat at Valleja, in a letter full of the purest friendship.
On receiving this letter, the friendliness of which, it must be admitted, irritated her, Clelia herself fixed the day of her wedding, the festivities surrounding which enhanced still further the brilliance with which the court of Parma, that winter, shone.
Ranuccio-Ernesto V was a miser at heart; but he was desperately in love, and he hoped to establish the Duchessa permanently at his court; he begged his mother to accept a very considerable sum of money, and to give entertainments.
The Grand Mistress contrived to make an admirable use of this increase of wealth; the entertainments at Parma, that winter, recalled the great days of the court of Milan and of that charming Prince Eugene, Viceroy of Italy, whose virtues have left so lasting a memory.
His duties as Coadjutor had summoned Fabrizio back to Parma; but he announced that, for spiritual reasons, he would continue his retreat in the small apartment which his protector, Monsignor Landriani, had forced him to take in the Archbishop's Palace; and he went to shut himself up there, accompanied by a single servant.
Thus he was present at none of the brilliant festivities of the court, an abstention which won for him at Parma, and throughout his future diocese, an immense reputation for sanctity.
An unforeseen consequence of this retreat, inspired in Fabrizio solely by his profound and hopeless sorrow, was that the good Archbishop Landriani, who had always loved him, began to be slightly jealous of him.
The Archbishop felt it his duty (and rightly) to attend all the festivities at court, as is the custom in Italy.
On these occasions he wore a ceremonial costume, which was, more or less, the same as that in which he was to be seen in the choir of his Cathedral.
The hundreds of servants gathered in the colonnaded ante-chamber of the Palace never failed to rise and ask for a blessing from Monsignore, who was kind enough to stop and give it them.
It was in one of these moments of solemn silence that Monsignor Landriani heard a voice say:
"Our Archbishop goes out to bails, and Monsignor del Dongo never leaves his room!" >
From that moment the immense favour that Fabrizio had enjoyed in the Archbishop's Palace was at an end; but he could now fly with his own wings.
All this conduct, which had been inspired only by the despair in which Clelia's marriage plunged him, was regarded as due to a simple and sublime piety, and the faithful read, as a work of edification, the translation of the genealogy of his family, which reeked of the most insane vanity.