He despises me, and, as soon as he is able to write to the Duchessa, he will tell her of my want of consideration, and the Duchessa will think me a very deceitful little girl; for, after all, this evening she must have thought me full of sympathy with her in her trouble."
Clelia noticed that someone was approaching, apparently with the intention of taking his place by her side on the iron balcony of this window; she could not help feeling annoyed, although she blamed herself for being so; the meditations in which she was disturbed were by no means without their pleasant side.
"Here comes some troublesome fellow to whom I shall give a warm welcome!" she thought.
She was turning her head with a haughty stare, when she caught sight of the timid face of the Archbishop, who was approaching the balcony by a series of almost imperceptible little movements.
"This saintly man has no manners," thought Clelia. "Why come and disturb a poor girl like me?
My tranquillity is the only thing I possess."
She was greeting him with respect, but at the same time with a haughty air, When the prelate said to her:
"Signorina, have you heard the terrible news?"
The girl's eyes had at once assumed a totally different expression; but, following the instructions repeated to her a hundred times over by her father, she replied with an air of ignorance which the language of her eyes loudly contradicted:
"I have heard nothing, Monsignore."
"My First Grand Vicar, poor Fabrizio del Dongo, who is no more guilty than I am of the death of that brigand Giletti, has been arrested at Bologna where he was living under the assumed name of Giuseppe Bossi; they have shut him up in your citadel; he arrived there actually chained to the carriage that brought him.
A sort of gaoler, named Barbone, who was pardoned some time ago after murdering one of his own brothers, chose to attempt an act of personal violence against Fabrizio, but my young friend is not the man to take an insult quietly.
He flung his infamous adversary to the ground, whereupon they cast him into a dungeon, twenty feet underground, after first putting handcuffs on his wrists."
"Not handcuffs, no!"
"Ah!
Then you do know something," cried the Archbishop. And the old man's features lost their intense expression of discouragement. "But, before we go any farther, someone may come out on to this balcony and interrupt us: would you be so charitable as to convey personally to Don Cesare my pastoral ring here?"
The girl took the ring, but did not know where to put it for fear of losing it.
"Put it on your thumb," said the Archbishop; and he himself slipped the ring into position. "Can I count upon you to deliver this ring?"
"Yes, Monsignore."
"Will you promise me to keep secret what I am going to say, even if circumstances should arise in which you may find it inconvenient to agree to my request?"
"Why, yes, Monsignore," replied the girl, trembling all over as she observed the sombre and serious air which the old man had suddenly assumed… . "Our estimable Archbishop," she went on, "can give me no orders that are not worthy of himself and me."
"Say to Don Cesare that I commend to him my adopted son; I know that the sbirri who carried him off did not give him time to take his breviary with him, I therefore request Don Cesare to let him have his own, and if your uncle will send to-morrow to my Palace, I promise to replace the book given by him to Fabrizio.
I request Don Cesare also to convey the ring which this pretty hand is now wearing to Signor del Dongo."
The Archibishop was interrupted by General Fabio Conti, who came in search of his daughter to take her to the carriage; there was a brief interval of conversation in which the prelate shewed a certain adroitness.
Without making any reference to the latest prisoner, he so arranged matters that the course of the conversation led naturally to the utterance of certain moral and political maxims by himself; for instance: "There are moments of crisis in the life of a court which decide for long periods the existence of the most exalted personages; it would be distinctly imprudent to change into personal hatred the state of political aloofness which is often the quite simple result of diametrically opposite positions."
The Archbishop, letting himself be carried away to some extent by the profound grief which he felt at so unexpected an arrest, went so far as to say that one must undoubtedly strive to retain the position one holds, but that it would be a quite gratuitous imprudence to attract to oneself furious hatreds in consequence of lending oneself to certain actions which are never forgotten.
When the General was in the carriage with his daughter:
"Those might be described as threats," he said to her… . "Threats, to a man of my sort!"
No other words passed between father and daughter for the next twenty minutes.
On receiving the Archbishop's pastoral ring, Clelia had indeed promised herself that she would inform her father, as soon as she was in the carriage, of the little service which the prelate had asked of her; but after the word threats, uttered with anger, she took it for granted that her father would intercept the token; she covered the ring with her left hand and pressed it passionately.
During the whole of the time that it took them to drive from the Ministry of the Interior to the citadel, she was asking herself whether it would be criminal on her part not to speak of the matter to her father.
She was extremely pious, extremely timorous, and her heart, usually so tranquil, beat with an unaccustomed violence; but in the end the chi va la of the sentry posted on the rampart above the gate rang out on the approach of the carriage before Clelia had found a form of words calculated to incline her father not to refuse, so much afraid was she of his refusing.
As they climbed the three hundred and sixty steps which led to the governor's residence, Clelia could think of nothing.
She hastened to speak to her uncle, who rebuked her and refused to lend himself to anything.
Chapter 3
"Well," cried the General, when he caught sight of his brother Don Cesare, "here is the Duchessa going to spend a hundred thousand scudi to make a fool of me and help the prisoner to escape!"
But, for the moment, we are obliged to leave Fabrizio in his prison, at the very summit of the citadel of Parma; he is well guarded and we shall perhaps find him a little altered when we return to him.
We must now concern ourselves first of all with the court, where certain highly complicated intrigues, and in particular the passions of an unhappy woman are going to decide his fate.
As he climbed the three hundred and ninety steps to his prison in the Torre Farnese, beneath the eyes of the governor, Fabrizio, who had so greatly dreaded this moment, found that he had no time to think of his misfortunes.
On returning home after the party at Conte Zurla's, the Duchessa dismissed her women with a wave of the hand; then, letting herself fall, fully dressed, on to her bed,
"Fabrizio," she cried aloud, "is in the power of his enemies, and perhaps to spite me they will give him poison!"
How is one to depict the moment of despair that followed this statement of the situation in a woman so far from reasonable, so much the slave of every passing sensation, and, without admitting it to herself, desperately in love with the young prisoner?
There were inarticulate cries, paroxysms of rage, convulsive movements, but never a tear.
She had sent her women away to conceal her tears; she thought that she was going to break into sobs as soon as she found herself alone; but tears, those first comforters in hours of great sorrow, completely failed her.
Anger, indignation, the sense of her own inferiority when matched with the Prince, had too firm a mastery of this proud soul.
"Am I not humiliated enough?" she kept on exclaiming; "I am outraged, and, worse still, Fabrizio's life is in danger; and I have no means of vengeance!
Wait a moment, my Prince; you kill me, well and good, you have the power to do so; but afterwards I shall have your life.
Alas! Poor Fabrizio, how will that help you?
What a difference from the day when I was proposing to leave Parma, and yet even then I thought I was unhappy … what blindness!
I was going to break with all the habits and customs of a pleasant life; alas! without knowing it, I was on the edge of an event which was to decide my fate for ever.