“These may be called threats,” he cried. “Threats, to a man like me!” Not another word was exchanged between father and daughter during their twenty minutes’ drive.
When Clelia had received the pastoral ring from the archbishop, she had fully determined that when she was in the carriage with her father she would speak to him of the trifling service the prelate had asked of her. But when she heard the word “threats,” and the furious tone in which it was uttered, she became convinced that her father would intercept the message. She hid the ring with her left hand and clasped it passionately. All the way from the minister’s house to the citadel she kept asking herself whether it would be a sin not to speak to her father. She was very pious, very timid, and her heart, usually so quiet, was throbbing with unaccustomed violence. But the challenge of the sentinel on the rampart above the gate rang out over the approaching carriage before Clelia could pitch on words appropriate to persuade her father not to refuse, so great was her fear that he might do so. Neither could she think of any as she climbed the three hundred and eighty steps which led up to the governor’s palace.
She lost no time in speaking to her uncle; he scolded her, and refused to have anything to do with the business.
CHAPTER XVI
“Well,” cried the general, as soon as he caught sight of his brother Don Cesare, “here is the duchess ready to spend a hundred thousand crowns to make a fool of me and save the prisoner.”
But for the present we must leave Fabrizio in his prison, high up in the citadel of Parma. He is well guarded there, and when we come back we shall find him safe enough, though perhaps a trifle changed. We must now turn all our attention to the court, where his fate is to be decided by the most complicated intrigues, and, above all, by the passions of a most unhappy woman. As Fabrizio, watched by the governor, climbed the three hundred and eighty steps which led to his dungeon in the Farnese Tower he felt, greatly as he had dreaded that moment, that he had no time to think of his misfortune.
When the duchess reached home after leaving Count Zurla’s party she waved her women from her, and then, throwing herself, fully dressed, upon her bed, she moaned aloud: “Fabrizio is in the hands of his enemies, and, because of me, perhaps they will poison him.” How can I describe the moment of despair which followed this summing up of the situation in the heart of a woman so unreasonable, so enslaved by the sensation of the moment, and, though she did not acknowledge it to herself, so desperately in love with the young prisoner?
There were inarticulate exclamations, transports of rage, convulsive movements, but not one tear. She had sent away her women that they might not see her weep. She had thought she must burst into sobs the moment she was left alone, but tears, the first relief of a great sorrow, were denied her utterly. Her haughty soul was too full of rage, indignation, and the sense of her own inferiority to the prince.