So saying, Rassi fled; he had got out of his scrape with a sharp reprimand and half-a-dozen kicks. On leaving the Palace he started for his estate of Riva; he had some fear of a dagger-thrust in the first impulse of anger, but had no doubt that within a fortnight a courier would summon him back to the capital. He employed the time which he spent in the country in organising a safe method of correspondence with Conte Mosca; he was madly in love with the title of Barone, and felt that the Prince made too much of that sublime thing, nobility, ever to confer it upon him; whereas the Conte, extremely proud of his own birth, respected nothing but nobility proved by titles anterior by the year 1400.
The Fiscal General had not been out in his forecast: he had been barely eight days on his estate when a friend of the Prince, who came there by chance, advised him to return to Parma without delay; the Prince received him with a laugh, then assumed a highly serious air, and made him swear on the Gospel that he would keep secret what was going to be confided to him. Rassi swore with great solemnity, and the Prince, his eye inflamed by hatred, cried that he would no longer be master in his own house so long as Fabrizio del Dongo was alive.
“I cannot,” he went on, “either drive the Duchessa away or endure her presence; her eyes defy me and destroy my life.”
Having allowed the Prince to explain himself at great length, Rassi, affecting extreme embarrassment, finally exclaimed:
“Your Highness shall be obeyed, of course, but the matter is one of a horrible difficulty: there is no possibility of condemning a del Dongo to death for the murder of a Giletti; it is already a masterly stroke to have made twelve years’ imprisonment out of it. Besides, I suspect the Duchessa of having discovered three of the contadini who were employed on the excavations at Sanguigna, and were outside the trench at the moment when that brigand Giletti attacked del Dongo.
“And where are these witnesses?” said the Prince, irritated.
“Hiding in Piedmont, I suppose. It would require a conspiracy against Your Highness’s life. …”
“There is a danger in that,” said the Prince, “it makes people think of the reality.”
“Well,” said Rassi with a feint of innocence, “that is all my official arsenal.”
“There remains poison. …”
“But who is to give it? Not that imbecile Conte?”
“From what one hears, it would not be his first attempt. …”
“He would have to be roused to anger first,” Rassi went on; “and besides, when he made away with the captain he was not thirty, and he was in love, and infinitely less of a coward than he is in these days. No doubt, everything must give way to reasons of State; but, taken unawares like this and at first sight, I can see no one to carry out the Sovereign’s orders but a certain Barbone, registry clerk in the prison, whom Signor del Dongo knocked down with a cuff in the face on the day of his admission there.”
Once the Prince had been put at his ease, the conversation was endless; he brought it to a close by granting his Fiscal General a month in which to act; Rassi wished for two. Next day he received a secret present of a thousand sequins. For three days he reflected; on the fourth he returned to his original conclusion, which seemed to him self-evident: “Conte Mosca alone will have the heart to keep his word to me, because, in making me a Barone, he does not give me anything that he respects; secondly, by warning him, I save myself probably from a crime for which I am more or less paid in advance; thirdly, I have my revenge for the first humiliating blows which Cavaliere Rassi has received.” The following night he communicated to Conte Mosca the whole of his conversation with the Prince.
The Conte was secretly paying his court to the Duchessa; it is quite true that he still did not see her in her own house more than once or twice in a month, but almost every week, and whenever he managed to create an occasion for speaking of Fabrizio, the Duchessa, accompanied by Cecchina, would come, late in the evening, to spend a few moments in the Conte’s gardens. She managed even to deceive her coachman, who was devoted to her, and believed her to be visiting a neighbouring house.
One may imagine whether the Conte, after receiving the Fiscal’s terrible confidence, at once made the signal arranged between them to the Duchessa. Although it was the middle of the night, she begged him by Cecchina to come to her for a moment. The Conte, enraptured, lover-like, by this prospect of intimate converse, yet hesitated before telling the Duchessa everything. He was afraid of seeing her driven mad by grief.
After first seeking veiled words in which to mitigate the fatal announcement, he ended by telling her all; it was not in his power to keep a secret which she asked of him. In the last nine months her extreme misery had had a great influence on this ardent soul, this had fortified her courage, and she did not give way to sobs or lamentations. On the following evening she sent Fabrizio the signal of great danger:
“The castle has taken fire.”
He made the appropriate reply:
“Are my books burned?”
The same night she was fortunate enough to have a letter conveyed to him in a leaden ball. It was a week after this that the marriage of the Marchese Crescenzi’s sister was celebrated, when the Duchessa was guilty of an enormously rash action of which we shall give an account in its proper place.
XXI
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