“Signorina, have you heard the terrible news?”
The girl’s eyes had at once assumed a totally different expression; but, following the instructions repeated to her a hundred times over by her father, she replied with an air of ignorance which the language of her eyes loudly contradicted:
“I have heard nothing, Monsignore.”
“My First Grand Vicar, poor Fabrizio del Dongo, who is no more guilty than I am of the death of that brigand Giletti, has been arrested at Bologna where he was living under the assumed name of Giuseppe Bossi; they have shut him up in your citadel; he arrived there actually chained to the carriage that brought him. A sort of gaoler, named Barbone, who was pardoned some time ago after murdering one of his own brothers, chose to attempt an act of personal violence against Fabrizio, but my young friend is not the man to take an insult quietly. He flung his infamous adversary to the ground, whereupon they cast him into a dungeon, twenty feet underground, after first putting handcuffs on his wrists.”
“Not handcuffs, no!”
“Ah! Then you do know something,” cried the Archbishop. And the old man’s features lost their intense expression of discouragement. “But, before we go any farther, someone may come out on to this balcony and interrupt us: would you be so charitable as to convey personally to Don Cesare my pastoral ring here?”
The girl took the ring, but did not know where to put it for fear of losing it.
“Put it on your thumb,” said the Archbishop; and he himself slipped the ring into position. “Can I count upon you to deliver this ring?”
“Yes, Monsignore.”
“Will you promise me to keep secret what I am going to say, even if circumstances should arise in which you may find it inconvenient to agree to my request?”
“Why, yes, Monsignore,” replied the girl, trembling all over as she observed the sombre and serious air which the old man had suddenly assumed. …
“Our estimable Archbishop,” she went on, “can give me no orders that are not worthy of himself and me.”
“Say to Don Cesare that I commend to him my adopted son; I know that the sbirri who carried him off did not give him time to take his breviary with him, I therefore request Don Cesare to let him have his own, and if your uncle will send tomorrow to my Palace, I promise to replace the book given by him to Fabrizio. I request Don Cesare also to convey the ring which this pretty hand is now wearing to Signor del Dongo.” The Archbishop was interrupted by General Fabio Conti, who came in search of his daughter to take her to the carriage; there was a brief interval of conversation in which the prelate showed a certain adroitness. Without making any reference to the latest prisoner, he so arranged matters that the course of the conversation led naturally to the utterance of certain moral and political maxims by himself; for instance: “There are moments of crisis in the life of a court which decide for long periods the existence of the most exalted personages; it would be distinctly imprudent to change into personal hatred the state of political aloofness which is often the quite simple result of diametrically opposite positions.” The Archbishop, letting himself be carried away to some extent by the profound grief which he felt at so unexpected an arrest, went so far as to say that one must undoubtedly strive to retain the position one holds, but that it would be a quite gratuitous imprudence to attract to oneself furious hatreds in consequence of lending oneself to certain actions which are never forgotten.
When the General was in the carriage with his daughter: “Those might be described as threats,” he said to her. … “Threats, to a man of my sort!”
No other words passed between father and daughter for the next twenty minutes.
On receiving the Archbishop’s pastoral ring, Clelia had indeed promised herself that she would inform her father, as soon as she was in the carriage, of the little service which the prelate had asked of her; but after the word threats, uttered with anger, she took it for granted that her father would intercept the token; she covered the ring with her left hand and pressed it passionately. During the whole of the time that it took them to drive from the Ministry of the Interior to the citadel, she was asking herself whether it would be criminal on her part not to speak of the matter to her father. She was extremely pious, extremely timorous, and her heart, usually so tranquil, beat with an unaccustomed violence; but in the end the chi va là of the sentry posted on the rampart above the gate rang out on the approach of the carriage before Clelia had found a form of words calculated to incline her father not to refuse, so much afraid was she of his refusing. As they climbed the three hundred and sixty steps which led to the governor’s residence, Clelia could think of nothing.
She hastened to speak to her uncle, who rebuked her and refused to lend himself to anything.
