“If you, who travel to improve your mind, would give me the addresses of a few such magistrates, you would do me a real kindness. I would write to them before I went to bed to-night.”
“If I were a minister this lack of upright judges would wound my vanity.”
“But it strikes me,” rejoined the count, “that your Excellency, who is so fond of the French, and once upon a time even lent them the help of your invincible arm, is forgetting one of their great maxims, ‘It is better to kill the devil than that the devil should kill you?’ I should very much like to see how anybody could govern these eager beings who read the history of the French Revolution all day long, with judges who would acquit the persons I accused. They would end by acquitting rascals whose guilt was perfectly evident, and every man of them would think himself a Brutus. But I have a bone to pick with you. Does not your sensitive soul feel some remorse concerning that fine horse, rather too lean, which you have just turned loose on the shores of the Maggiore?”
“I certainly intend,” said Fabrizio very gravely, “to send the owner of the horse whatever sum may be necessary to pay him the expenses of advertising, and any others he may have incurred in recovering the beast from the peasants who must have found it. I propose to read the Milanese newspaper carefully, so as to find any advertisement touching a strayed horse. I am quite familiar with the appearance of this one.”
“He really is primitive,” said the count to the duchess. “And what would have become of your Excellency,” he continued, laughing, “if, while you were galloping along on that horse’s back, he had happened to stumble? You would have found yourself at the Spielberg, my dear young nephew, and with all my credit, I should barely have contrived to get some thirty pounds struck off the weight of the shackles on each of your legs. In that delightful retreat you would have spent quite ten years; your legs would possibly have swelled and mortified. Then they would have been neatly cut off for you.”
“Ah, for pity’s sake, don’t carry the wretched story any further,” broke in the duchess with tears in her eyes. “He is back, and safe——”
“And I am even more glad of it than you, you may be sure of that,” responded the minister very gravely. “But pray, since this boy was set on going into Lombardy, why did he not ask me to get him a passport in a fitting name? The moment I heard of his arrest I should have hurried off to Milan, and my friends there would have been willing enough to close their eyes and pretend their police had taken up one of the Prince of Parma’s subjects. The story of your trip is entertaining and amusing enough, I am quite ready to admit that,” the count continued, and his tone grew less gloomy. “Your leap on to the high-road decidedly enchants me. But between ourselves, since that serving-man held your life in his hands, you had a right to deprive him of his. We propose to raise your Excellency to a brilliant position—at least, such are the orders this lady gives me, and I do not think my bitterest enemies can accuse me of ever having neglected her commands. What a heartbreak it would have been to her if that lean horse of yours had happened to make a false step while you were riding a steeple-chase upon his back! It would almost have been better if he had broken your neck outright.”
“You are very tragic to-night, dear friend,” said the duchess, quite overcome.
“Because tragic events are happening all around us,” replied the count, and he, too, was moved. “This is not France, where everything ends with a song or a sentence of imprisonment, and I really am wrong to laugh when I talk to you of such matters. Well, nephew mine, granting that I find a chance some day of making you a bishop—for, frankly, I can not begin with making you Archbishop of Parma, as the duchess here would very reasonably have me do. Supposing you were settled in your bishopric, and far from the sound of our wise counsels; tell us what your policy would be.”
“I would kill the devil sooner than let him kill me, as my friends the French so sensibly say,” answered Fabrizio, with shining eyes. “I would hold the position you gave me by every means, even with my pistols. I have read the story of our ancestor, who built Grianta, in the Del Dongo Genealogy. Toward the end of his life his good friend Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, sent him to inspect a fortified castle on our lake. There was some fear of a fresh invasion by the Swiss. ‘I really must send a civil word to the commandant of the fortress,’ said the duke, just as he was dismissing him. He wrote two lines, and gave him the letter; then he took it back. ‘It will be more courteous if I seal it,’ said the prince. Vespasiano del Dongo departed. But as he was sailing over the lake he remembered an old Greek story, for he was a learned man. He opened his good master’s letter, and found it was an order to the commandant of the fortress to put him to death the moment he arrived. So absorbed had Sforza been in his effort to make the deception he had been playing on our ancestor life-like, that he had left a considerable space between the last line of his note and his signature. Vespasiano del Dongo inserted an order to recognise him as governor-general of all the lake castles, in the blank space, and tore the upper part of the letter off. When he had reached the fortress, and his authority had been duly acknowledged, he threw the commandant down a well, declared war on Sforza, and, after a few years, exchanged his strong castle for the huge estates which have enriched every branch of our family, and which will one day benefit me to the extent of four thousand francs a year.”