"Your Excellency knows far more than I do," said Lodovico with a troubled air, "and I am very much afraid of displeasing him seriously, whatever he may say, if I add a certain remark."
"I am not such a fool as you think me," replied Fabrizio, "and, whatever you may say, you will always be in my eyes a faithful servant of my aunt, and a man who has done everything in the world to get me out of a very awkward scrape."
Many more protestations still were required before Lodovico could be prevailed upon to speak, and when at last he had made up his mind, he began with a preamble which lasted for quite five minutes.
Fabrizio grew impatient, then said to himself:
"After all, whose fault is it?
It is due to our vanity, which this man has very well observed from his seat on the box."
Lodovico's devotion at last impelled him to run the risk of speaking plainly.
"What would not the Marchesa Raversi give to the messenger you are going to send to Parma to have these two letters?
They are in your handwriting, and consequently furnish legal evidence against you.
Your Excellency will take me for an inquisitive and indiscreet fellow; in the second place, he will perhaps feel ashamed of setting before the eyes of the Signora Duchessa the wretched handwriting of a coachman like myself; but after all, the thought of your safety opens my mouth, although you may think me impertinent. Could not Your Excellency dictate those two letters to me?
Then I am the only person compromised, and that very little; I can say, at a pinch, that you appeared to me in the middle of a field with an inkhorn in one hand and a pistol in the other, and that you ordered me to write."
"Give me your hand, my dear Ludovico?' cried Fabrizio, "and to prove to you that I wish to have no secret from a friend like yourself, copy these two letters jest as they are."
Lodovico fully appreciated this mark of confidence, and was extremely grateful for it, but after writing a few lines, as he saw the boat coming rapidly downstream:
"The letters will be finished sooner," he said to Fabrizio, "if Your Excellency will take the trouble to dictate them to me."
The letters written, Fabrizio wrote an A and a B on the closing lines, and on a little scrap of paper which he afterwards crumpled up, put in French: "Croyez A et B."
The messenger would be told to hide this scrap of paper in his clothing.
The boat having come within hailing distance, Lodovico called to the boatmen by names which were not theirs; they made no reply, and put into the bank a thousand yards lower down, looking all round them to make sure that they had not been seen by some doganiere.
"I am at your orders," said Lodovico to Fabrizio; "would you like me to take these letters myself to Parma? Or would you prefer me to accompany you to Ferrara?"
"To accompany me to Ferrara is a service which I was hardly daring to ask of you.
I shall have to land, and try to enter the town without shewing my passport.
I may tell you that I feel the greatest repugnance towards travelling under the name of Giletti, and I can think of no one but yourself who would be able to buy me another passport."
"Why didn't you speak at Casalmaggiore?
I know a spy there who would have sold me an excellent passport, and not dear, for forty or fifty francs."
One of the two boatmen, whose home was on the right bank of the Po, and who consequently had no need of a foreign passport to go to Parma, undertook to deliver the letters.
Lodovico, who knew how to handle the oars, set to work to propel the boat with the other man.
"We shall find on the lower reaches of the Po," he said, "several armed vessels belonging to the police, and I shall manage to avoid them."
Ten times at least they were obliged to hide among little islets flush with the water, covered with willows.
Three times they set foot on shore in order to let the boat drift past the police vessels empty.
Lodovico took advantage of these long intervals of leisure to recite to Fabrizio several of his sonnets.
The sentiments were true enough, but were so to speak blunted by his expression of them, and were not worth the trouble of putting them on paper; the curious thing was that this ex-coachman had passions and points of view that were vivid and picturesque; he became cold and commonplace as soon as he began to write.
"It is the opposite of what we see in society," thought Fabrizio; "people know nowadays how to express everything gracefully, but their hearts have nothing to say."
He realised that the greatest pleasure he could give to this faithful servant would be to correct the mistakes in spelling in his sonnets.
"They laugh at me when I lend them my copy-book," said Lodovico; "but if Your Excellency would deign to dictate to me the spelling of the words letter by letter, the envious fellows wouldn't have anything left to say: spelling doesn't make genius."
It was not until the third night of his journey that Fabrizio was able to land in complete safety in a thicket of alders, a league above Pontelagoscuro.
All the next day he remained hidden in a hempfield, while Lodovico went ahead to Ferrara; he there took some humble lodgings in the house of a poor Jew, who at once realised that there was money to be earned if one knew how to keep one's mouth shut.
That evening, as the light began to fail, Fabrizio entered Ferrara riding upon a pony; he had every need of this support, for he had been touched by the sun on the river; the knife-wound that he had in his thigh, and the sword-thrust that Giletti had given him in the shoulder, at the beginning of their duel, were inflamed and had brought on a fever.
Chapter 12
The Jew, the owner of the bouse, had procured a discreet surgeon, who, realising in his turn that there was money in the case, informed Lodovico that his conscience obliged him to make his report to the police on the injuries of the young man whom he, Lodovico, called his brother.
"The law is clear on the subject," he added; "it is evident that your brother cannot possibly have injured himself, as he says, by falling from a ladder while he was holding an open knife in his hand."
Lodovico replied coldly to this honest surgeon that, if he should decide to yield to the inspirations of his conscience, he, Lodovico, would have the honour, before leaving Ferrara, of falling upon him in precisely the same way, with an open knife in his hand.
When he reported this incident to Fabrizio, the latter blamed him strongly, but there was not a moment to be lost; they must fly.
Lodovico told the Jew that he wished to try the effect of a little fresh air on his brother; he went to fetch a carriage, and our friends left the house never to return.
The reader is no doubt finding these accounts of all the manoeuvres that the absence of a passport renders necessary extremely wearisome; this sort of anxiety does not exist in France; but in Italy, and especially in the neighbourhood of the Po, people talk about passports all day long.
Once they had left Ferrara without hindrance, as though they were taking a drive, Lodovico sent the carriage back, then re-entered the town by another gate and returned to pick up Fabrizio with a sediola which he had hired to take them a dozen leagues.
Coming near Bologna, our friends had themselves taken through the fields to the road which leads from Florence to Bologna; they spent the night in the most wretched inn they could find, and on the following day, Fabrizio feeling strong enough to walk a little, they entered Bologna like ordinary pedestrians.
They had burned Giletti's passport; the comedian's death must by now be common knowledge, and there was less danger in being arrested as people without passports than as bearing the passport of a man who had been killed.
Lodovico knew at Bologna two or three servants in great houses; it was decided that he should go to the them and find out how the land lay.
He explained to them that, while he was on his way from Florence, travelling with his younger brother, the latter, wanting to sleep, had let him come on by himself an hour before sunrise. He was to have joined him in the village where he, Lodovico, would stop to escape the midday heat.
But Lodovico, seeing no sign of his brother, had decided to retrace his steps; he had found his brother injured by a blow from a stone and with several knife-wounds, and, in addition, robbed by some men who had picked a quarrel with him.
This brother was a good-looking boy, knew how to groom and drive horses, read and write, and was anxious to find a place with some good family.