“Had it been opened in transmission?”
“There was not a sign of that. I must tell you that it was written on the most horrible paper; the address is in a woman’s handwriting, and bears the name of an old washerwoman who is related to my waiting-maid. The washerwoman believes the letters have to do with a love affair, and Cecchina repays her the charges for delivery, and gives her nothing more.” The count, who had now quite taken up the tone of a business man, endeavoured, in talking the matter over with the duchess, to discover on what day Fabrizio might have been carried off from Bologna. It was only then that he, generally so full of tact, discovered that this was the tone he had better take. These details interested the unhappy woman, and seemed to distract her thoughts a little. If the count had not been so desperately in love, this simple idea would have occurred to him as soon as he entered her room.
The duchess dismissed him, so that he might send orders to the faithful Bruno without delay. When they touched, for a moment, on the question of finding out whether the sentence had actually been pronounced, when the prince had signed the note addressed to the duchess, she, with a sort of eagerness, seized the opportunity of saying to the count: “I will not reproach you with having omitted the words ‘unjust proceedings’ from the note which you wrote, and he signed. That was your courtier’s instinct, which was too strong for you. Unconsciously, you were preferring the interests of your master to the interests of your friend. Your acts, my dear count, have been subservient to my orders, and that for a very long time. But it is not within your power to change your nature. As a minister you have great talents, but you have the instincts of your trade as well. The suppression of the word ‘unjust’ has worked my ruin. But far be it from me to reproach you with it in any way. The fault lay with your instincts, and not with your will.
“Remember,” she added in an altered voice, and in the most imperious fashion, “that I am not too much overwhelmed by Fabrizio’s imprisonment, that it has never occurred to me to leave this country, and that my feeling for the prince is one of the most profound respect. That is what you have to say. And this is what I have to say to you: As I propose, in future, to direct my course alone, I wish to part from you ‘à l’amiable’—that is to say, as good old friends. You must consider that I am sixty years old, that youth is dead within me, that I can never feel anything very strongly again, that love is no longer possible to me. But I should be still more miserable than I am if I should happen to compromise your future. It may become part of my plans to give myself the appearance of having taken a young lover, and I should not like to see you pained on that account. I can swear to you, on Fabrizio’s happiness”—and she paused a minute on the words—“that I have never been unfaithful to you once in all these five years—that is a very long time,” she said. She tried to smile; there was a movement on her pallid cheeks, but there was no curve upon her lips. “I will even swear to you that I have never planned such a thing, nor even thought of it. Now I have made that clear, so pray leave me.”
The count left the Palazzo Sanseverina in a state of despair. He saw the duchess was thoroughly resolved to separate from him, and he had never been so desperately in love with her. This is one of the matters to which I am constantly obliged to return, because, outside Italy, their improbability is so great. As soon as he reached his own house he sent off six different people along the road from Castelnovo and Bologna, all of them carrying letters. “But this is not all,” said the unhappy count to himself. “The prince may take it into his head to have the unhappy boy executed, just to avenge himself for the tone the duchess took with him on the day of that fatal note. I felt then that the duchess had overstepped a boundary beyond which one should never go, and it was to patch things up that I fell into the incredible folly of suppressing the words ‘unjust proceedings,’ the only ones which bound the sovereign. But pooh! is there anything that binds a man in his position? It was certainly the greatest mistake of my whole life, and has risked everything which made it worth living to me. I must use all my activity and skill to repair the blunder now. But if I utterly fail to gain anything, even by sacrificing a certain amount of my dignity, I will leave this man in the lurch, and we’ll see whom he will find to replace me, and realize his mighty political dreams, and his idea of making himself constitutional King of Lombardy! Fabio Conti is a mere fool, and Rassi’s talent amounts to finding legal reasons for hanging a man whom the ruler dislikes.”
Once the count had thoroughly made up his mind to resign his post if the severity with which Fabrizio was treated exceeded that of an ordinary imprisonment, he said to himself: “If an imprudent defiance of that man’s vain whim costs me my life, I will preserve my honour at all events.… By the way, now that I snap my fingers at my ministerial portfolio, I can venture to do a hundred things which would have seemed impossible to me, even this morning. For instance, I will attempt anything within the bounds of human possibility to help Fabrizio to escape.… Good God!” exclaimed the count, breaking off suddenly, and his eyes dilated immensely, as if he had caught sight of some unexpected joy. “The duchess said nothing about escape to me! Can she have failed in sincerity for once in her life, and is her quarrel with me merely founded on her desire that I should deceive the prince? My faith, the thing is done!”
The count’s eyes had regained their old expression of satirical shrewdness. “That charming creature Rassi is paid by his master for all those sentences of his which dishonour us in the eyes of Europe. But he is not the man to refuse payment from me for betraying his master’s secrets. The brute has a mistress and a confessor. But the mistress is too vile a creature for me to converse with; all the fruit hucksters in the neighbourhood would know the details of our interview by the next morning.” The count, revived by this gleam of hope, was already on his way to the cathedral. Astounded at the hastiness of his own action, he laughed, in spite of his sorrow. “See what it is,” he said, “to be no longer minister.”
This cathedral, like many Italian churches, was used as a passage from one street to another. In the distance the count noticed one of the archbishop’s grand vicars crossing the aisle.
“As I have met you,” said he, “I am sure you will be good enough to save my gouty feet from the deadly fatigue of climbing up the archbishop’s staircase. I should be profoundly grateful to him if he would be so kind as to come down to the sacristy.” The archbishop was delighted at the message. He had a thousand things to say to the minister about Fabrizio; but the minister guessed these things were nothing but empty phrases, and would not listen to any of them.
“What sort of a man is Dugnani, the curate of San Paolo?”