The thought brought a tinge of sadness to his face. But near midday, at last, to his inexpressible delight, after long waiting and much watching, Clelia came to attend to her birds. Fabrizio, motionless and almost breathless, stood upright, close against the huge bars of his window. He remarked that she did not raise her eyes to him, but there was a something shy about her movements, as though she felt she was being looked at. Even if she had desired it, the poor girl could not have forgotten the subtle smile which had flickered on the prisoner’s lips, just as he was being led out of the guard-room on the preceding night.
Though according to all appearances she was keeping the most careful watch upon her actions, she reddened visibly as she drew near the window of the aviary. Fabrizio’s first impulse, as he stood close against his iron window bars, was to indulge in the childish freak of rapping a little on the iron, so as to make a slight noise. But the very idea of such a lack of delicacy disgusted him. “It would serve me right if she sent her maid to look after her birds for a week afterward.” This tender scruple would not have occurred to him at Naples or at Novara.
He watched her hungrily, saying to himself: “She will surely not go away without condescending to glance at this poor window, and yet she is just opposite it.” But as she moved from the back of the room, into which, thanks to the superior height of his position, Fabrizio could clearly see, Clelia could not prevent herself from glancing up at him as she walked, and this was sufficient to make Fabrizio venture to salute her. “Are we not alone in the world here?” said he, to give himself courage. When he saluted her the young girl stopped short and dropped her eyes. Then Fabrizio saw her raise them again, very slowly and with an evident effort, and she greeted the prisoner with the gravest and most distant gesture. But she could not prevent her eyes from speaking. Without her knowledge, probably, they held, for one instant, an expression of the liveliest pity. Fabrizio noticed she was colouring so deeply that the rosy tinge was spreading rapidly even on to her shoulders, from which the heat had caused her to drop a black lace shawl, as she entered the aviary. The involuntary glance by which Fabrizio answered her salute doubled the young girl’s agitation. “How happy that poor woman would be,” said she to herself, thinking of the duchess, “if she could only see him as I see him, just for one moment!”
Fabrizio had nursed a tiny hope that he might have been able to send her another greeting ere she departed, but to avoid this fresh attention, Clelia executed a skilful retreat in échelon from one cage to another, as though she had necessarily to end her task by attending to the birds nearest to the door. She left the room at last, and Fabrizio stood motionless, gazing at the door through which she had just disappeared. He was a changed man.
From that instant the one object of his thoughts was to discover how he might continue to see her, even after that odious screen should have been placed over the window looking on to the governor’s palace.
Before going to bed on the previous night, he had performed the tedious and tiresome duty of concealing most of his gold coins in several of the rat holes which adorned his wooden room. “To-night,” he thought, “I must hide my watch. Have I not heard that with patience and the jagged spring of a watch, a man may cut through wood and even through iron? So I may be able to saw through the screen.” The work of hiding the watch, which lasted for several hours, did not seem lengthy to him. He pondered over the various methods whereby he might attain his end, and his own knowledge of carpentering matters. “If I set about it properly,” he mused, “I can simply cut out a compartment of the oaken board of which the screen will consist, at the place where it will rest on the window-sill. I will take this bit of wood in and out, according to circumstances. I will give everything I have to Grillo, so as to induce him to overlook this little manœuvre.” All Fabrizio’s future happiness seemed to depend on the possibility of carrying out this undertaking, and he thought of nothing else. “If I can only contrive to see her, I am happy.… But, no,” he went on, “she must see that I see her.” All night long his head was full of carpentering schemes, and in all probability he never gave a thought to the court of Parma, the prince’s anger, and all the rest. We must acknowledge, too, that he did not trouble himself a whit concerning the distress in which the duchess must be plunged. He waited eagerly for the morning, but the carpenter did not reappear. He was apparently considered too much of a Liberal by the prison authorities, and they carefully sent another, a gruff-looking fellow, who deigned no answer except a threatening grunt to all the pleasant things which Fabrizio was inspired to say to him. Some of the duchess’s endless attempts to enter into correspondence with Fabrizio had been discovered by the marchesa’s numerous agents, and General Fabio Conti received daily warnings from her, which both startled him, and nettled his vanity. Every eight hours six soldiers relieved each other in the great ground-floor hall, with its hundred pillars. Besides this, the governor placed a jailer on each of the three iron gates in the passage, and poor, unlucky Grillo, the only person who saw the prisoner, was forbidden to go outside the Farnese Tower oftener than once a week, which vexed him sorely. He made Fabrizio conscious of his ill-temper. Fabrizio had wit enough to reply with these words only, “Plenty of nébieu d’Asti, my good fellow,” and he gave him some money.
“Well, even this, which consoles us for every misfortune,” exclaimed the angry Grillo in a voice so low that the prisoner could hardly catch it, “we are forbidden to accept, and I ought to refuse it. But I shall take it. Yet, indeed, it is money wasted, for I can not tell you anything about nothing. Why, you must be guilty indeed! The whole citadel is upside down because of you, and the duchess’s fine tricks have got three of us sent away already.”
“Will the screen be ready before noon?” That was the great question which made Fabrizio’s heart thump all through that long morning. He counted up every quarter of an hour as it rang on the citadel clock. However, when the third quarter after eleven struck, the screen had not yet arrived, and Clelia reappeared to attend to her birds. Cruel necessity had so emboldened Fabrizio, and the danger of never seeing her again seemed to him so greatly to exceed anything else in the whole world, that he dared, as he gazed at Clelia, to make a gesture with his finger as of sawing the wooden screen. It must be added that as soon as she perceived this very seditious gesture on the part of the prisoner, she made him a sort of half bow, and retired.
“Bless me!” exclaimed Fabrizio in astonishment. “Can she have been so unreasonable as to take a sign dictated by the most imperious necessity for a piece of ridiculous familiarity? I wanted to entreat her to condescend to look up sometimes at my prison window when she came to see her birds, even if she should find it masked by a huge wooden shutter! I wanted to make her understand that I would do everything that was humanly possible to contrive to see her. Good God! Will she abstain from coming to-morrow on account of that indiscreet gesture of mine?” This dread, which disturbed Fabrizio’s slumbers, was thoroughly well founded. By three o’clock the next day, when the two huge screens were set up on each of Fabrizio’s windows, Clelia had not appeared. The various sections of these screens had been drawn up from the platform of the great tower, by means of cords and pulleys, fastened outside the iron bars of the windows. It is true, indeed, that Clelia, hidden behind one of the sun blinds in her room, had anxiously watched all the workman’s actions. She had clearly perceived Fabrizio’s mortal anxiety, but, nevertheless, she had found courage to keep the promise she had made herself.