The duchess possessed two special characteristics. What she had desired once she desired always, and she never deliberated a second time concerning anything she had once decided. In this last connection she would quote a remark made by her first husband, the kind-hearted General Pietranera. “What an insolence to my own self! Why should I think I am cleverer to-day than I was when I made the decision?”
From that moment a sort of cheerfulness reappeared in the duchess’s temper. Before that fatal resolution was taken, at every step her mind took, at every new point she noticed, she had felt her own inferiority to the prince, her weakness, and the vile fashion in which she had been tricked. The prince, as she held, had shamefully deceived her, and Count Mosca, as the result of his courtier-like instinct, had, though innocently, seconded the prince’s efforts. Once vengeance was decided on, she felt her own strength, and every fresh working of her mind brought her happiness. I am rather disposed to think that the immoral delight the Italian nature finds in vengeance is connected with the strength of the national imagination. The natives of other countries do not, strictly speaking, forgive—they forget.
The duchess did not see Palla again till toward the end of Fabrizio’s prison days. He it was, as my readers may perhaps have guessed, who suggested the idea of the escape. In the woods, about two leagues from Sacca, stood a half-ruined tower, dating from the middle ages, and over a hundred feet high. Before mentioning the idea of flight a second time to the duchess, Ferrante besought her to send Ludovico with some trusty men, to set a succession of ladders against this tower. In the presence of the duchess he climbed to the top by the ladders, and came down simply on a knotted rope. Three times over he made the experiment, and then set forth his notion again. A week afterward Ludovico also came down from the top of the tower on a knotted rope. Then it was that the duchess suggested the idea to Fabrizio.
During the last days before the attempt, which might possibly, and that in more than one fashion, result in the prisoner’s death, the duchess never knew an instant’s repose, except when Ferrante was with her. The man’s courage stirred her own, but it will be easily understood that she felt obliged to hide this strange connection from the count. She was not afraid of his being horrified by it, but she would have been worried by his objections, which would have doubled her own anxiety. “What! choose an acknowledged madman, sentenced to death, to be her closest counsellor!” “And,” the duchess would add, talking to herself, “a man capable, in the future, of doing such strange things!” Ferrante was in the duchess’s drawing-room when the count entered it to inform her of the prince’s conversation with Rassi. She had much ado, after the count’s departure, in preventing Ferrante from proceeding instantly to the execution of his terrible project.
“I am strong now,” cried the crazy fellow. “I have no doubt at all as to the legitimacy of my action.”
“But in the moment of rage which must inevitably follow, Fabrizio would be put to death.”
“Well, then he would be spared the danger of his descent. It is possible, it is even easy,” he added, “but the young man has had no practice.”
The marriage of the Marchese Crescenzi’s sister was duly celebrated, and at the fête given on that occasion, the duchess was able to meet Clelia, and talk to her, without rousing the suspicions of well-bred lookers-on. In the garden, whither the two ladies had betaken themselves to get a moment’s breath of air, the duchess herself gave Clelia the packet of ropes.
These ropes, most carefully made of hemp and wool mixed, and knotted, were very slight, and fairly flexible. Ludovico had tested their strength, and every yard of them would safely carry eight hundred-weight. They had been compressed into several packets, exactly resembling quarto volumes. Clelia took possession of them, and promised the duchess she would do everything that was humanly possible to get them into the Farnese Tower.
“But your natural timidity alarms me; and besides,” added the duchess politely, “what interest can you feel in a man you do not know?”