It did occur to the duchess, that evening, to tell Ferrante she would provide a small income for his children. But she was afraid he might go out from her presence and destroy himself.
Hardly had he left her, when, haunted as she was by gloomy forebodings, she began to muse. “I, too, may die—would to God it might be so, and soon! If I could only find a man worthy of the name, to whom I might confide my poor Fabrizio!”
An idea flashed across the duchess. She took a sheet of paper, and in a document into which she introduced all the few law terms with which she was acquainted, she acknowledged that she had received the sum of twenty thousand francs from Signor Ferrante Palla, on the express condition that she should pay a yearly pension of fifteen hundred francs to Signora Sarasine and her five children. The duchess added: “I further leave a yearly income of three hundred francs to each of her five children, on condition that Ferrante Palla shall professionally attend my nephew Fabrizio del Dongo, and be as a brother to him—I implore him to do this!” She signed the paper, antedated it by a year, and put it away.
Two days later Ferrante reappeared. It was just at the moment when the whole town was stirred by reports of Fabrizio’s approaching execution. Was this gloomy ceremony to take place within the citadel, or under the tree in the public square? Many men of the humbler classes walked up and down in front of the citadel gates that evening, to try and see whether the scaffold was being built. This sight had moved Ferrante. He found the duchess dissolved in tears, and quite unable to speak. She greeted him with her hand, and pointed him to a seat. Ferrante, who was disguised, that day, as a Capuchin friar, behaved magnificently. Instead of seating himself, he knelt down, and began to pray devoutly in an undertone. Seizing a moment when the duchess was a little calmer, and without changing his position, he broke off his prayer for an instant, with the words: “Once again he offers his life.”
“Consider what you say,” exclaimed the duchess, and in her eye there was that wild look which follows upon tears, and warns us that rage is getting the better of emotion.
“He offers his life to place an obstacle in the way of Fabrizio’s fate, or to avenge it.”
“There is a circumstance,” replied the duchess, “in which I might accept the sacrifice of your life.”
She was looking at him, closely and sternly. A flash of joy shone in his eyes; he rose swiftly to his feet and stretched out his arms toward heaven. The duchess fetched a document hidden in a secret drawer in her walnut-wood cabinet. “Read it,” said she to Ferrante. It was the gift in his children’s favour, of which we have just spoken.
Tears and sobs prevented Ferrante from reading to the end; he fell on his knees.
“Give me back that paper,” said the duchess, and she burned it at the taper before his eyes.