The work of concealing his watch, which occupied him for hours, did not seem to him at all long; he was thinking of the different ways of attaining his object and of what he himself could do in the way of carpentering.
"If I get to work the right way," he said to himself, "I shall be able to cut a section clean out of the oak plank which will form the screen, at the end which will be resting on the window-sill; I can take this piece out and put it back according to circumstances; I shall give everything I possess to Grillo, so that he may be kind enough not to notice this little device."
All Fabrizio's happiness was now involved in the possibility of carrying out this task, and he could think of nothing else.
"If I can only manage to see her, I am a happy man… . No," he reminded himself, "she must also see that I see her."
All night long his head was filled with devices of carpentering, and perhaps never gave a single thought to the court of Parma, the Prince's anger, etc., etc.
We must admit that he did not think either of the grief in which the Duchessa must be plunged.
He waited impatiently for the morrow; but the carpenter did not appear again: evidently he was regarded in the prison as a Liberal.
They took care to send another, a sour-faced fellow who made no reply except a growl that boded ill to all the pleasant words with which Fabrizio sought to cajole him.
Some of the Duchessa's many attempts to open a correspondence with Fabrizio had been discovered by the Marchesa Raversi's many agents, and, by her, General Fabio Conti was daily warned, frightened, put on his mettle.
Every eight hours six soldiers of the guard relieved the previous six in the great hall with the hundred pillars on the ground floor: in addition to these, the governor posted a gaoler on guard at each of the three successive iron gates of the corridor, and poor Grillo, the only one who saw the prisoner, was condemned to leave the Torre Farnese only once a week, at which he shewed great annoyance.
He made his ill humour felt by Fabrizio, who had the sense to reply only in these words:
"Plenty of good nebiolo d'Asti, my friend." And he gave him money.
"Well now, even this, which consoles us in all our troubles," exclaimed the indignant Grillo, in a voice barely loud enough to be heard by the prisoner, "we are forbidden to take, and I ought to refuse it, but I accept; however, it's money thrown away; I can tell you nothing about anything.
Go on, you must be a rare bad lot, the whole citadel is upside down because of you; the Signora Duchessa's fine goings on have got three of us dismissed already."
"Will the screen be ready before midday?" This was the great question which made Fabrizio's heart throb throughout that long morning; he counted each quarter as it sounded from the citadel clock.
Finally, when the last quarter before noon struck, the screen had not yet arrived; Clelia reappeared and looked after her birds.
Cruel necessity had made Fabrizio's daring take such strides, and the risk of not seeing her again seemed to him so to transcend all others that he ventured, looking at Clelia, to make with his finger the gesture of sawing through the screen; it is true that as soon as she had perceived this gesture, so seditious in prison, she half bowed and withdrew.
"How now!" thought Fabrizio in amazement, "can she be so unreasonable as to see an absurd familiarity in a gesture dictated by the most imperious necessity?
I meant to request her always to deign, when she is attending to her birds, to look now and again at the prison window, even when she finds it masked by an enormous wooden shutter; I meant to indicate to her that I shall do everything that is humanly possible to contrive to see her.
Great God! Does this mean that she will not come tomorrow owing to that indiscreet gesture?"
This fear, which troubled Fabrizio's sleep, was entirely justified; on the following day Clelia had not apppeared at three o'clock, when the workman finished installing outside Fabrizio's windows the two enormous screens; they had been hauled up piecemeal, from the terrace of the great tower, by means of ropes and pulleys attached to the iron bars outside the windows.
It is true that, hidden behind a shutter in her own room, Clelia had followed with anguish every movement of the workmen; she had seen quite plainly Fabrizio's mortal anxiety, but had nevertheless had the courage to keep the promise she had made to herself.
Clelia was a little devotee of Liberalism; in her girlhood she had taken seriously all the Liberal utterances which she had heard in the company of her father, who thought only of establishing his own position; from this she had come to feel a contempt, almost a horror for the flexible character of the courtier; whence her antipathy to marriage.
Since Fabrizio's arrival, she had been racked by remorse:
"And so," she said to herself, "my unworthy heart is taking the side of the people who seek to betray my father!
He dares to make me the sign of sawing through a door! … But," she at once went on with anguish in her heart, "the whole town is talking of his approaching death! To-morrow may be the fatal day!
With the monsters who govern us, what in the world is not possible?
What meekness, what heroic serenity in those eyes, which perhaps are about to close for ever!
God! What must be the Duchessa's anguish!
They say that she is in a state of utter despair.
If I were she, I would go and stab the Prince, like the heroic Charlotte Corday."
Throughout this third day of his imprisonment, Fabrizio was wild with anger, but solely at not having seen Clelia appear.
"Anger for anger, I ought to have told her that I loved her," he cried; for he had arrived at this discovery. "No, it is not at all from greatness of heart that I am not thinking about prison, and am making Blanes's prophecy prove false: such honour is not mine.
In spite of myself I think of that look of sweet pity which Clelia let fall on me when the constables led me out of the guard-room; that look has wiped out all my past life.
Who would have said that I should find such sweet eyes in such a place, and at the moment when my own sight was offended by the faces of Barbone and the General-governor.
Heaven appeared to me in the midst of those vile creatures.
And how can one help loving beauty and seeking to see it again?
No, it is certainly not greatness of heart that makes me indifferent to all the little vexations which prison heaps upon me."
Fabrizio's imagination, passing rapidly over every possibility in turn, arrived at that of his being set at liberty.
"No doubt the Duchessa's friendship will do wonders for me.
Well, I shall thank her for my liberty only with my lips; this is not at all the sort of place to which one returns!
Once out of prison, separated as we are socially, I should practically never see Clelia again!
And, after all, what harm is prison doing me?
If Clelia deigned not to crush me with her anger, what more should I have to ask of heaven?"
On the evening of this day on which he had not seen his pretty neighbour, he had a great idea: with the iron cross of the rosary which is given to every prisoner on his admission to prison, he began, and with success, to bore a hole in the shutter.
"It is perhaps an imprudence," he told himself before he began. "Did not the carpenters say in front of me that the painters would be coming to-morrow in their place?
What will they say if they find the shutter with a hole in it?
But if I do not commit this imprudence, to-morrow I shall not be able to see her.
What!
By my own inactivity am I to remain for a day without seeing her, and that after she has turned from me in an ill humour?"