A heavy weight seemed to have been lifted from the serjeant's mind.
"Very well, General, you are under arrest and I shall take you to Milan.
And you, who are you?" he said to Fabrizio.
"My son," replied the Contessa; "Ascanio, son of the Divisional General Pietranera."
"Without a passport, Signora Contessa?" said the serjeant, in a much gentler tone.
"At his age, he has never had one; he never travels alone, he is always with me."
During this colloquy General Conti was standing more and more on his dignity with the constables.
"Not so much talk," said one of them; "you are under arrest, that's enough!"
"You will be glad to hear," said the serjeant, "that we allow you to hire a horse from some contadino; otherwise, never mind all the dust and the heat and the Chamberlain of Parma, you would have to put your best foot foremost to keep pace with our horses."
The General began to swear.
"Will you kindly be quiet!" the constable repeated. "Where is your general's uniform?
Anybody can come along and say he's a general."
The General grew more and more angry.
Meanwhile things were looking much brighter in the carriage.
The Contessa kept the constables running about as if they had been her servants.
She had given a scudo to one of them to go and fetch wine, and, what was better still, cold water from a cottage that was visible two hundred yards away.
She had found time to calm Fabrizio, who was determined, at all costs, to make a dash for the wood that covered the hill.
"I have a good brace of pistols," he said.
She obtained the infuriated General's permission for his daughter to get into the carriage.
On this occasion the General, who loved to talk about himself and his family, told the ladies that his daughter was only twelve years old, having been born in 1803, on the 27th of October, but that, such was her intelligence, everyone took her to be fourteen or fifteen.
"A thoroughly common man," the Contessa's eyes signalled to the Marchesa.
Thanks to the Contessa, everything was settled, after a colloquy that lasted an hour.
A constable, who discovered that he had some business to do in the neighbouring village, lent his horse to General Conti, after the Contessa had said to him:
"You shall have ten francs."
The serjeant went off by himself with the General; the other constables stayed behind under a tree, accompanied by four huge bottles of wine, almost small demi-johns, which the one who had been sent to the cottage had brought back, with the help of a contadino, Clelia Conti was authorised by the proud Chamberlain to accept, for the return journey to Milan, a seat in the ladies' carriage, and no one dreamed of arresting the son of the gallant General Pietranera.
After the first few minutes had been devoted to an exchange of courtesies and to remarks on the little incident that had just occurred, Clelia Conti observed the note of enthusiasm with which so beautiful a lady as the Contessa spoke to Fabrizio; certainly, she was not his mother. The girl's attention was caught most of all by repeated allusions to something heroic, bold, dangerous to the last degree, which he had recently done; but for all her cleverness little Clelia could not discover what this was.
She gazed with astonishment at this young hero, whose eyes seemed to be blazing still with all the fire of action.
For his part, he was somewhat embarrassed by the remarkable beauty of this girl of twelve, and her steady gaze made him blush.
A league outside Milan Fabrizio announced that he was going to see his uncle, and took leave of the ladies.
"If I ever get out of my difficulties," he said to Clelia, "I shall pay a visit to the beautiful pictures at Parma, and then will you deign to remember the name: Fabrizio del Dongo?"
"Good!" said the Contessa, "that is how you keep your identity secret.
Signorina, deign to remember that this scape-grace is my son, and is called Pietranera, and not del Dongo."
That evening, at a late hour, Fabrizio entered Milan by the Porta Renza, which leads to a fashionable gathering-place.
The despatch of their two servants to Switzerland had exhausted the very modest savings of the Marchesa and her sister-in-law; fortunately, Fabrizio had still some napoleons left, and one of the diamonds, which they decided to sell.
The ladies were highly popular, and knew everyone in the town.
The most important personages in the Austrian and religious party went to speak on behalf of Fabrizio to Barone Binder, the Chief of Police.
These gentlemen could not conceive, they said, how anyone could take seriously the escapade of a boy of sixteen who left the paternal roof after a dispute with an elder brother.
"My business is to take everything seriously," replied Barone Binder gently; a wise and solemn man, he was then engaged in forming the Milan police, and had undertaken to prevent a revolution like that of 1746, which drove the Austrians from Genoa.
This Milan police, since rendered so famous by the adventures of Silvio Pellico and M. Andryane, was not exactly cruel; it carried out, reasonably and without pity, harsh laws.
The Emperor Francis II wished these over-bold Italian imaginations to be struck by terror.
"Give me, day by day," repeated Barone Binder to Fabrizio's protectors, "a certified account of what the young Marchesino del Dongo has been doing; let us follow him from the moment of his departure on the 8th of March to his arrival last night in this city, where he is hidden in one of the rooms of his mother's apartment, and I am prepared to treat him as the most well-disposed and most frolicsome young man in town.
If you cannot furnish me with the young man's itinerary during all the days following his departure from Grianta, however exalted his birth may be, however great the respect I owe to the friends of his family, obviously it is my duty to order his arrest.
Am I not bound to keep him in prison until he-has furnished me with proofs that he did not go to convey a message to Napoleon from such disaffected persons as may exist in Lombardy among the subjects of His Imperial and Royal Majesty?
Note farther, gentlemen, that if young del Dongo succeeds in justifying himself on this point, he will still be liable to be charged with having gone abroad without a passport properly issued to himself, and also with assuming a false name and deliberately making use of a passport issued to a common workman, that is to say to a person of a class greatly inferior to that to which he himself belongs."
This declaration, cruelly reasonable, was accompanied by all the marks of deference and respect which the Chief of Police owed to the high position of the Marchesa del Dongo and of the important personages who were intervening on her behalf.
The Marchesa was in despair when Barone Binder's reply was communicated to her.
"Fabrizio will be arrested," she sobbed, "and once he is in prison, God knows when he will get out!
His father will disown him!"
Signora Pietranera and her sister-in-law took counsel with two or three ultimate friends, and, in spite of anything these might say, the Marchesa was absolutely determined to send her son away that very night.
"But you can see quite well," the Contessa pointed out to her, "that Barone Binder knows that your son is here; he is not a bad man."