Chapter XXV: I Declare for the King

We were landed upon the Mole, not far from the Castel Nuovo, a vast, sullen pile like the Bastille, on whose ruins I had danced. It was a dark and rainy night. Pissani, who had been squatted amongst some boats down by the water, rose, came forward in two or three swift strides, and exclaimed, in an eager, agitated undertone, “Mother of God! You are accompanied?”

I could not see his face, but my heart responded unerringly to the dear remembered tones. I went quickly to him, and put up my hands to his breast.

“Nicola _mio_--my brother, my comrade!” I whispered, “by all that, next to you, I hold most dear.”

“What? Whom?” he asked, in a low voice of amazement. “Not--?”

“Yes,” I said, “by my servant and my sister. You called and I came, Nicola, ‘bringing my sheaves with me.’”

He was breathing fast, but he did not answer.

“Are you not pleased,” I said, “that I give up everything for you and to you; that I devote my best to the cause--our cause, Nicola; that at the bidding of my brother I have moved my tent into the wilderness? Are you not pleased with me?”

“There is danger in the wilderness,” he muttered. “No, I am not pleased.”

I fell back with a little shiver. “No more for her than for me,” I answered.

“It is not the same,” he said; “it is not the same thing at all.” In an instant he had gripped my wrist. “Send her back into safety. She shall not risk her life here--by God, she shall not!”

And then I think I understood. I was calm as death, and as cold. It had needed but these few words to turn me into stone. My God! all my fervour and self-sacrifice--and this for their reward! I laughed out quite gaily--

“O, _mon chéri_! in the rain and the dark? Are you mad? Please to convey us to some shelter.”

He hesitated a moment; then beckoned to Patty, who came running like a dog to the whistle. Pissani turned his back as she approached.

“Tell your servant to await your orders here,” he muttered; “and, for you, follow me.”

Patty stole by my side, dumb over her reception. The fool! the little adorable traitress! How would she have chattered, teeth and heart, had she seen my nails, hid under my cloak, dug into the soft palms they were clinched on. Yet I had an admiration for her, even while I crouched to spring. That she, self-obliterating, undemonstrative with men, could all the time have been softly insinuating herself between me and my love! I had not credited her with so much cleverness.

Our sombre patriot led us to a little _osteria_ in a sewer hard by, where the rain beat on a lurid scrap of window, and a mutter of voices from within seemed to mingle in a throaty discussion with a gurgling water-pipe at our feet. There were two or three wine-drinkers revealed as he pushed open the door--strangely respectable folk in these incongruous surroundings. They but glanced up as we entered and passed on by a stone passage to a little remote room, where were a bare table and a single taper glimmering sickly on the wall.

Pissani shut the door and faced us. He was very pale and grim; grown sterner than my memory of him, but still the melancholy, romantic brigand of my heart. For a moment he seemed unable to speak; and in that moment I could see my little sister’s hand shake on the table on which she had leaned it for support. The truth was confessed amongst us all in that silence. And I--I knew it suddenly, instantly, for what I had long suspected but struggled to conceal from myself; knew it for the real solution of this my conscious unconscious caprice in bringing Patty with me. It had been to force it, to satisfy myself of the best or the worst, that I had acted as I had done. That I recognised now. And, after all, I was the first to speak.

“Well, M. Pissani,” I said, “it seems that one of us at least is _de trop_.”

His mouth twitched with nervousness.

“She cannot help the cause,” he said. “She will only be in the way. What is her use in this pass?”

“Patty,” I said, turning on the child, “M. Pissani does not want you. You can go back.”

She looked at me, the helpless fool. Her lip trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. But Pissani by that was smiling.

“I do not want you, child, _I_?” he said, in a sick voice, and held out his hands fondly to her across the table. “Ah, but we know better the truth of our hearts! When the battle is won, then, O gentle my love, that betakest thyself to love as the lark to heaven, come to me, as you promised! But not now--not now, when the storm is in the air, and this so dear shrine of my hopes might be struck and violated. You have not changed, you could not change: it is enough, I have seen you. Come now with me, Pattia, and I will take you back to the boat, to my friends, that they may see you secured in Rome until I can send to you and say, ‘It is time, most dear wife, it is time. Return to me, and give thyself to be the mother of patriots!’”

She moved, and gave a little sob. Her response was not to him but to me--to the stunned questioning of my eyes. She had no wit but to utter her whole self-condemnation in it.

“Diana! I did not know! I have not been untrue to you.”

I struck her on the mouth, and she staggered back, with that red lie printed on it for the delectation of her paramour. She clutched at the table, reeled, and sank down beside it moaning. It was too much. My fury had flashed to an explosion in that wicked falsehood.

Pissani, with a sudden and terrible cry at the sight of his mistress’s disgrace, drew a knife from his hip, and leapt like a goat across the table. Stumbling as he alighted, she caught him frantic round the knees, and held him raging and snarling while he stabbed at the air in his frenzy. I stood fallen back a little, white and scornful, but with not a thrill of fear at my heart; and, so standing, saw how, in the thick blindness of his rage, he was yet tender of her in his struggles to free himself. And then in a moment he had fallen upon his knees, the blade yet in his hand, and was kissing and caressing her, moaning inarticulate love into her ear. She tried feebly to repulse him; to drag herself away and towards me. I had always known that she was of the fools who caress the hands that scourge them. But I sprang back, loathing her neighbourhood.

“Don’t come near me,” I cried.

He had kissed the blood from her mouth to his own. He struck the spot there with a furious hand, as he turned on me.

“By this,” he said, “your death or mine!”

I laughed scornfully.

“So brutes revenge themselves on the innocence they have despoiled!”

“It is a lie!” he raged; and, on the word, put a fierce arm about his _wife_. “Believe it is a lie, thou!”

But she was still struggling to reach me.

“Diana! Not this end to all our love! Not this end to the high hopes with which we came. It is not ourselves, but Liberty, sister. See, he will be good; he will not hurt you” (she was groping eagerly for the knife, which he ended by letting her secure). “I did not know,” she cried, “I did not guess--until this moment I did not. I will never see him again, if you wish. I will be no man’s wife to your hurt. Diana! It is the truth!”

I let her rave. I never took my eyes from his devil’s face.

“So,” I said, deeper now, and with my hands upon my storming bosom, “you would make your sacrifice to Reason, monsieur, in me--me! _My_ mission was to be the Pucelle’s, and her glorious fate, with which, I suppose, you were to assure your little after-paradise of loves. O, a grateful use for this poor heart, to be a stepping-stone to the respectable amours of Monsieur and Madame Pissani! Only I renounce the honour, as I renounce the cause of the paragon of taste who could prefer that for this.”

I tore at my dress.

“You have made your choice,” I cried; “it is all said. Only think, monsieur, think sometimes of what you have lost, before you talk of the battle being won!”

I hurried from the room, even as my false friend called to me again in agony, “Diana! Believe me! Listen to me! O, what shall I do?” But, even in my frenzy, I had the wit to pause the other side of the door, listening for his response.

“Thou shalt go back to Rome, my dearest, my heart,” he said. “Hearken to me, my Pattia.”

But she only sobbed dreadfully, “Not like this--not in this disgrace. I must follow her, even if she kills me.”

“By my soul, no,” he said; “for your life is mine.”

I could hear them wrestling together; till, in a moment, he prevailed, even before I had guessed he would.

“Hush, my bird,” he panted softly; “there is one other way--if it must be so indeed.”

There followed a pause. I could have laughed in the mad joy of my revenge. He was an upstart, this patriot; a son of the people. He would commit her to his own--wive her, I most fervently prayed--and deposit his jewel, this little pet of luxury, in the squalid cabin at Camaldoli where he was born. He had often told me of it; of his early experiences of the joys of life in a place where the peasant could not fasten his coat against cold, or take refuge from the sun under a tree, or borrow a stone from the hill for his paths, or renew his starved patch with manure of leaves, or set a water-butt to catch the showers, or be buried decently when he dropped at the plough-tail and died, because buttons, and the shade of trees, and stones, and dead leaves, and rain-water, and a dead peasant were all taxed alike--items in a hundred other feudal impositions which left existence hardly its own shadow to prevail by. And now these joys would be hers; for I knew that she had not the strength to oppose him, though enough to damn her own fool fortune by insisting on the Church’s sanction to her possession of an estate of mud and wattles. I listened eagerly for the next.

“If thou wilt be my mother’s daughter?” he said.

I could have clapped my hands. I hurried down the passage and out into the night, fierce, burning, but with an exultation in my rage. The sight of men risen, scared and listening, as I passed through the wineshop, served to recall me to myself and to my danger. I was outcast from these conspirators--if only they had known!

With an effort I composed myself, and turned to them with a smile--

“Messieurs, but the door is between me and the street!”

One of them at that stepped forward, opened it, and gravely bowed me forth. As gravely I stepped into the rain, and made without hurry for the beach.

So this was the end to all my exaltation, to my dreams of love and sacrifice! I stamped in the puddles. “_Vive la tyrannie! vive les Bourbons!_” I cried to myself as I sped on. So shamed, so wronged, so spurned! was not the worst justified to me? I saw the shadow of my loved monster standing solemn sentinel over the single trunk we had brought with us. Our heavy baggage we had left in Rome. O, _mon fidèle_! how at that moment I could have stormed my wounded heart out on thy breast!

“Canst thou lift it and follow me?” I said only.

He answered, the dear Caliban, by obeying.

“Whither?” he growled.

I looked desperately about me. Near at hand it was all a tangle of spars and sheds, and the rain driving between. But inland, the night went up in glistening terraces, scattered constellations all shaken in the thunder of a great city. Far south, what looked like the red light of a forge alternately glared, and faded, and grew again, battling, it seemed, with drowning flaws of tempest. It was the glimmering bonfires of Vesuvius, those hot ashes of a consumed empire, from which, according to Pissani, the phœnix Liberty was to arise. I laughed: “Not yet, my poet, my friend; since thou choosest another than Pucelle to breed thee thy patriots!”

I turned to the north. There, upon a huddle of tall buildings, looming near and enormous in the dark, the stars of the hills seemed to have drifted down, clinging thickly over all, like primroses under a bank.

“It is the royal palace,” said Gogo.

“It is _our_ way, then,” I panted, on fire. “Follow me, and quickly; we are not safe here.”

Along wharfs and causeways, plashing over the filthy stones, by squalid alley and reeking wall, I fled and he pursued. I had no lodestar save my hate; but it served. The growing scream and thunder of the town drove towards us as we advanced; but few people in that bitter night; until, skirting the massed buildings of the arsenal and palace, we emerged suddenly through a little lane into the Strada di St. Lucia, and paused a moment undecided and amazed.

It was as if the devil had taken his glowing pencil and ruled off this quarter of the city for his own. A noisome ravine of houses it was, with life like a fiery torrent brawling along its bed. Song and tumult and mad licence; fingers quick to stab, or to snap like castanets to a dancing child; doorways that were the mouths of tributary sewers vomiting filth and tatters into the main; fishermen, at their flaring stalls, bawling crabs and oysters, _frutti di mare_--my God! what fruit, and from what a sea that drained a shambles; women out in the rain and the open, making their shameless toilettes, and screaming the while such damnation by the calendar on their sister doxies for a word, a retort, a mere flea-bite (the commonest experience, after all) as to leave themselves, one would have thought, no vocabulary for the more strenuous encounters of fists and claws; children swarming everywhere in the double sense, and scattering shrill oaths like vermin; rags and nakedness and insolence--a loafing melodrama--an epitome of the worst squalor and viciousness in all Naples--such was the district upon which we had alighted, the mid-ward of the Lazzaroni.

As we stood, a ruffian, swaggering past, swerved, and approached a handsome, impudent face. Gogo, without a word, heaved his shoulder between. But I had no fear. These Lazzari were the king’s friends--and mine. I pushed aside my henchman.

“_Pour le roi!_” I cried, and pointed towards the palace.

He understood, and whipped off his greasy hat.

“_Viva il re!_” he answered enthusiastically, showing his white teeth, and motioned us to a street going eastwards up the hill. I saw and recognised the same fellow once or twice afterwards. He was a Michele di Laudo--Mad Michael, they called him--who, as chief of his vagabonds, was to take a prominent part in the defence of the suburbs against the French.

We crossed the street under his protection, and on its farther side, before waving us on, he bent and snatched a kiss. The rank sweet touch of his lips was like a _visé_ on my passport into hell. It seemed to bring the blaze, the colour, the stench of the reeling streets clashing to a focus in my brain, and it sent me speeding on half drunk and half sick, loathing and hugging myself. I was an angel in Sodom, running blindly for the refuge of God’s wing in a dazzle of roaring lights, and confused by the glare, knowing not whether I turned to the self I had left or to the self that was awaiting me. Gogo, straining in my wake, panted as I hurried before him--

“For every dog but the watch-dog, a bone.”

I turned on him, with a stamp.

“A bone! I am meat for your masters, I tell you.”

“I serve no Pissani,” he said sullenly.

I shook him in my anger.

“Never breathe his name to me again, or we part.”

“Very well,” he said. “I thought as much. He has got his deserts.”

“_Has_ he?”

I glared at him one moment, then turned and sped on--up the street of the Giant, passing the north flank of the palace, where sentries stood on guard, and so into an open piazza, the Largho S. Ferdinando, into which the palace itself stuck a shoulder, and where were churches and the flaring portico of a theatre, and other buildings strangely fine in their contiguity to the slums we had left.

And here, amidst the wild drift and gabble of a throng less foul but as aimless, we plunged and were absorbed, and stood together again to breathe.

All Naples, it seemed, was bent on shouting down its brother.

“What next?” bawled Gogo in my ear.

A handsome inn, the “Orient,” stood comparatively quiet and isolated in an odd corner of the _Place_.

“Rooms--there!” I answered.

“Its exclusiveness makes it prominent,” boomed Gogo, with as much dryness as he could put into a roar.

I beckoned him on imperiously.

_On n’a jamais bon marché de mauvaise marchandise._

In a little we were installed in comfortable rooms.

“Now order wine,” I said, “and we will drink.”

I sipped, while he sat on a stool at my feet, soothing the weariness from them with a touch that was only my monster’s. The Chianti and the sorcery of his hand began to drug me.

“Drink you too,” I murmured.

He reached for his glass.

“To whom?” he said. “What are we now? It makes no difference; only I must know.”

“Death to all republics,” I cried, “and long life to the King of Naples!”

“Ah!” he said, between a groan and a sigh. “Well--the poor child--you have cast her off, I suppose,” and he drained his glass.

I stared at him a moment, then fell sobbing upon his shoulder.

“You pity everyone but me,” I cried, “and my heart is broken.”

“What, in the old place?” said he.

But I was too miserable to retort; and half the night afterwards he held me, fallen fast asleep, in his arms.