“I am going to lock you up in this room. I must run and tell the doctor that the illness is caused by laudanum. But, great heavens! how am I to tell him that I have found it out myself! Then I will come back and release you. But,” said Clelia, hurrying back from the door, “did Fabrizio know anything about this laudanum?”
“No, indeed, signorina. He never would have consented. And besides, what was the good of confiding in an unnecessary person? We act with the strictest caution; our object is to save Monsignore Fabrizio, who will be poisoned within three weeks. The order has been given by a person whose will meets, as a rule, with no obstacles. But if the signorina must know all, it is believed that the duty has been confided to the terrible Chief-Justice Rassi!”
Clelia fled in horror. She had such confidence in Don Cesare’s perfect uprightness that she ventured to tell him, with a certain amount of reticence, that the general had been given laudanum, and nothing more. Without replying, without asking a question, Don Cesare hastened to the doctor.
Clelia returned to the drawing-room into which she had locked Ludovico, intending to ply him with questions concerning the laudanum. She did not find him there; he had contrived to escape. Lying on a table, she perceived a purse of sequins and a little box containing several sorts of poisons. The sight of the poison made her shudder. “How can I be sure,” she thought, “that nothing but laudanum has been administered to my father, and that the duchess has not tried to avenge herself for the attempt made by Barbone?
“Great God!” she exclaimed, “I am holding intercourse with my father’s poisoners, and I have allowed them to escape. And perhaps, if that man had been closely questioned, he would have confessed to something more than laudanum.”
Bursting into tears, Clelia instantly fell upon her knees, and prayed fervently to the Madonna.
Meanwhile the doctor of the citadel, greatly astonished by the information conveyed to him by Don Cesare, according to which laudanum was the cause of all the trouble, administered suitable remedies, which soon removed the most alarming symptoms. At daybreak the general came to his senses a little. His first act on returning to consciousness was to pour volleys of abuse on the colonel, his second in command of the citadel, who had ventured, while the general lay unconscious, to give a few orders of the most simple description.
The governor then flew into a violent rage with a kitchen maid who had brought him a bowl of broth, and who ventured to pronounce the word “apoplexy.”
“Is a man of my age,” he exclaimed, “likely to have an apoplexy? Only my bitterest enemies could possibly take pleasure in putting such a story about. Besides, have I been bled, so as to give even slanderers a right to talk about apoplexy?”
Fabrizio, deep in preparations for his own departure, could not conceive the meaning of the strange noises that filled the citadel when the governor was carried back to it half dead. At first he fancied his sentence had been altered, and that he was about to be put to death. Then, when nobody appeared in his room, he concluded that Clelia had been betrayed, that the ropes which she had probably been conveying back into the fortress had been taken from her, and that, in fact, all the plans for his escape had been rendered impossible. At dawn the following morning he saw an unknown man enter his room, and, without uttering a word, set down a basket of fruit. Under the fruit was hidden a letter, couched in the following terms: