The Duchessa ran to the lamp, which she blew out, then said to little Cecchina that she forgave her, but on condition that she never uttered a word about this strange episode to anyone in the world.
"The poor Conte," she added in a careless tone, "is afraid of being laughed at; all men are like that."
The Duchessa hastened downstairs to her own apartments.
No sooner had she shut the door of her bedroom than she burst into tears; there seemed to her something horrible in the idea of her making love to Fabrizio, whom she had seen brought into the world; and yet what else could her behaviour imply?
This had been the primary cause of the black melancholy in which the Conte found her plunged; on his arrival she suffered fits of impatience with him, and almost with Fabrizio; she would have liked never to set eyes on either of them again; she was contemptuous of the part, ridiculous in her eyes, which Fabrizio was playing with the little Marietta; for the Conte had told her everything, like a true lover, incapable of keeping a secret.
She could not grow used to this disaster; her idol had a fault; finally, in a moment of frank friendship, she asked the Conte's advice; this was for him a delicious instant, and a fine reward for the honourable impulse which had made him return to Parma.
"What could be more simple?" said the Conte, smiling. "Young men want to have every woman they see, and next day they do not give her a thought.
Ought he not to be going to Belgirate, to see the Marchesa del Dongo?
Very well, let him go.
During his absence, I shall request the company of comedians to take their talents elsewhere, I shall pay their travelling expenses; but presently we shall see him in love with the first pretty woman that may happen to come his way: it is in the nature of things, and I should not care to see him act otherwise… . If necessary, get the Marchesa to write to him."
This suggestion, offered with the air of a complete indifference, came as a ray of light to the Duchessa; she was frightened of Giletti.
That evening, the Conte announced, as though by chance, that one of his couriers, on his way to Vienna, would be passing through Milan; three days later Fabrizio received a letter from his mother.
He seemed greatly annoyed at not having yet been able, thanks to Giletti's jealousy, to profit by the excellent intentions, assurance of which little Marietta had conveyed to him through a mammaccia, an old woman who acted as her mother.
Fabrizio found his mother and one of his sisters at Beigirate, a large village in Piedmont, on the right shore of Lake Maggiore; the left shore belongs to the Milanese, and consequently to Austria.
This lake, parallel to the Lake of Como, and also running from north to south, is situated some ten leagues farther to the west.
The mountain air, the majestic and tranquil aspect of this superb lake which recalled to him that other on the shores of which he had spent his childhood, all helped to transform into a tender melancholy Fabrizio's grief, which was akin to anger.
It was with an infinite tenderness that the memory of the Duchessa now presented itself to him; he felt that in separation he was acquiring for her that love which he had never felt for any woman; nothing would have been more painful to him than to be separated from her for ever, and, he being in this frame of mind, if the Duchessa had deigned to have recourse to the slightest coquetry, she could have conquered this heart by—for instance—presenting it with a rival.
But, far from taking any so decisive a step, it was not without the keenest self-reproach that she found her thoughts constantly following in the young traveller's footsteps.
She reproached herself for what she still called a fancy, as though it had been something horrible; she redoubled her forethought for and attention to the Conte, who, captivated by such a display of charm, paid no heed to the sane voice of reason which was prescribing a second visit to Bologna.
The Marchesa del Dongo, busy with preparations for the wedding of her elder daughter, whom she was marrying to a Milanese Duca, could give only three days to her beloved son; never had she found in him so tender an affection.
Through the cloud of melancholy that was more and more closely enwrapping Fabrizio's heart, an odd and indeed ridiculous idea had presented itself, and he had suddenly decided to adopt it.
Dare we say that he wished to consult Priore Blanes?
That excellent old man was totally incapable of understanding the sorrows of a heart torn asunder by boyish passions more or less equal in strength; besides, it would have taken a week to make him gather even a faint impression of all the conflicting interests that Fabrizio had to consider at Parma; but in the thought of consulting him Fabrizio recaptured the freshness of his sensations at the age of sixteen.
Will it be believed?
It was not simply as to a man full of wisdom, to an old and devoted friend, that Fabrizio wished to speak to him; the object of this expedition, and the feelings that agitated our hero during the fifty hours that it lasted are so absurd that, doubtless, in the interests of our narrative, it would have been better to suppress them.
I am afraid that Fabrizio's credulity may make him forfeit the sympathy of the reader; but after all thus it was; why flatter him more than another?
I have not flattered Conte Mosca, nor the Prince.
Fabrizo, then, since the whole truth must be told, Fabrizio escorted his mother as far as the port of Laveno, on the left shore of Lake Maggiore, the Austrian shore, where she landed about eight o'clock in the evening. (The lake is regarded as neutral territory, and no passport is required of those who do not set foot on shore.) But scarcely had night fallen when he had himself ferried to this same Austrian shore, and landed in a little wood which juts out into the water.
He had hired a sediola, a sort of rustic and fast-moving tilbury, by means of which he was able, at a distance of five hundred yards, to keep up with his mother's carriage; he was disguised as a servant of the casa del Dongo, and none of the many police or customs officials ever thought of asking him for his passport.
A quarter of a league before Como, where the Marchesa and her daughter were to stop for the night, he took a path to the left which, making a circuit of the village of Vico, afterwards joined a little road recently made along the extreme edge of the lake.
It was midnight, and Fabrizio could count upon not meeting any of the police.
The trees of the various thickets into which the little road kept continually diving traced the black outline of their foliage against a sky bright with stars but veiled by a slight mist.
Water and sky were of a profound tranquillity.
Fabrizio's soul could not resist this sublime beauty; he stopped, then sat down on a rock which ran out into the lake, forming almost a little promontory.
The universal silence was disturbed only, at regular intervals, by the faint ripple of the lake as it lapped on the shore.
Fabrizio had an Italian heart; I crave the reader's pardon for him: this defect, which will render him less attractive, consisted mainly in this: he had no vanity, save by fits and starts, and the mere sight of sublime beauty melted him to a tender mood and took from his sorrows their hard and bitter edge.
Seated on his isolated rock, having no longer any need to be on his guard against the police, protected by the profound night and the vast silence, gentle tears moistened his eyes, and he found there, with little or no effort, the happiest moments that he had tasted for many a day.
He resolved never to tell the Duchessa any falsehood, and it was because he loved her to adoration at that moment that he vowed to himself never to say to her that he loved her; never would he utter in her hearing the word love, since the passion which bears that name was a stranger to his heart.
In the enthusiasm of generosity and virtue which formed his happiness at that moment, he made the resolution to tell her, at the first opportunity, everything: his heart had never known love.
Once this courageous plan had been definitely adopted, he felt himself delivered of an enormous burden.
"She will perhaps have something to say to me about Marietta; very well, I shall never see my little Marietta again," he assured himself blithely.
The overpowering heat which had prevailed throughout the day was beginning to be tempered by the morning breeze.
Already dawn was outlining in a faint white glimmer the Alpine peaks that rise to the north and east of Lake Como.
Their massive shapes, bleached by their covering of snow, even in the month of June, stand out against the pellucid azure of a sky which at those immense altitudes is always pure.
A spur of the Alps stretching southwards into smiling Italy separates the sloping shores of Lake Como from those of the Lake of Garda.
Fabrizio followed with his eye all the branches of these sublime mountains, the dawn as it grew brighter came to mark the valleys that divide them, gilding the faint mist which rose from the gorges beneath.
Some minutes since, Fabrizio had taken the road again; he passed the hill that forms the peninsula of Burini, and at length there met his gaze that campanile of the village of Grianta in which he had so often made observations of the stars with Priore Blanes.
"What bounds were there to my ignorance in those days? I could not understand," he reminded himself, "even the ridiculous Latin of those treatises on astrology which my master used to pore over, and I think I respected them chiefly because, understanding only a few words here and there, my imagination stepped in to give them a meaning, and the most romantic sense imaginable."
Gradually his thoughts entered another channel.
"May not there be something genuine in this science?