"If those spies had recognised my voice," said little Bettina, "I should have been stabbed without mercy as soon as I got back to the house, and my poor mistress with me, perhaps."
This terror rendered her charming in Fabrizio's eyes.
"Conte M——," she went on, "is furious, and the Signora knows that he will stick at nothing. . . . She told me to say to you that she would like to be a hundred leagues away from here with you."
Then she gave an account of the scene on St. Stephen's day, and of the fury of M——, who had missed none of the glances and signs of affection which Fausta, madly in love that day with Fabrizio, had directed towards him. The Conte had drawn his dagger, had seized Fausta by the hair, and, but for her presence of mind, she must have perished.
Fabrizio made the pretty Bettina come up to a little apartment which he had near there. He told her that he came from Turin, and was the son of an important personage who happened at that moment to be in Parma, which meant that he had to be most careful in his movements. Bettina replied with a smile that he was a far grander gentleman than he chose to appear. It took our hero some little time to realise that the charming girl took him for no less a personage than the Crown Prince himself. Fausta was beginning to be frightened, and to love Fabrizio; she had taken the precaution of not mentioning his name to her maid, but of speaking to her always of the Prince. Finally Fabrizio admitted to the pretty girl that she had guessed aright: "But if my name gets out," he added, "in spite of the great passion of which I have furnished your mistress with so many proofs, I shall be obliged to cease to see her, and at once my father's Ministers, those rascally jokers whom I shall bring down from their high places some day, will not fail to send her an order to quit the country which up to now she has been adorning with her presence."
Towards morning, Fabrizio arranged with the little lady's maid a number of plans by which he might gain admission to Fausta's house. He summoned Lodovico and another of his retainers, a man of great cunning, who came to an understanding with Bettina while he himself wrote the most extravagant letter to Fausta; the situation allowed all the exaggerations of tragedy, and Fabrizio did not miss the opportunity. It was not until day was breaking that he parted from the little lady's maid, whom he left highly satisfied with the ways of the young Prince.
It had been repeated a hundred times over that, Fausta having now come to an understanding with her lover, the latter was no longer to pass to and fro beneath the windows of the little palazzo except when he could be admitted there, and that then a signal would be given. But Fabrizio, in love with Bettina, and believing himself to have come almost to the point with Fausta, could not confine himself to his village two leagues outside Parma. The following evening, about midnight, he came on horseback and with a good escort to sing under Fausta's windows an air then in fashion, the words of which he altered. "Is not this the way in which our friends the lovers behave?" he asked himself.
Now that Fausta had shewn a desire to meet him, all this pursuit seemed to Fabrizio very tedious. "No, I am not really in love in the least," he assured himself as he sang (none too well) beneath the windows of the little palazzo; "Bettina seems to me a hundred times preferable to Fausta, and it is by her that I should like to be received at this moment." Fabrizio, distinctly bored, was returning to his village when, five hundred yards from Fausta's palazzo, fifteen or twenty men flung themselves upon him; four of them seized his horse by the bridle, two others took hold of his arms. Lodovico and Fabrizio's bravi were attacked, but managed to escape; they fired several shots with their pistols. All this was the affair of an instant: fifty lighted torches appeared in the street in the twinkling of an eye, as though by magic. All these men were well armed. Fabrizio had jumped down from his horse in spite of the men who were holding him; he tried to clear a space round him; he even wounded one of the men who was gripping his arms in hands like a pair of vices; but he was greatly surprised to hear this man say to him, in the most respectful tone:
"Your Highness will give me a good pension for this wound, which will be better for me than falling into the crime of high treason by drawing my sword against my Prince."
"So this is the punishment I get for my folly," thought Fabrizio; "I shall have damned myself for a sin which did not seem to me in the least attractive."