Chapter XXIX: I Still Know How to Wait

I sing Palermo, “_la felice_,” the languorous, the sunny, the lotus island to all shipwrecked mariners. O, those five days in the gulf!--a hundred hours in which to think of nothing but one’s crimes, and one’s mistake, saving the sinfulness, in not having been born a mermaid. I declare I was not ill myself, except in the illness of others; but to hear the groaning of the ship’s ribs mimicked a hundredfold by the straining ribs of my companions was an eternal bone in my throat. As a canary sings the louder the more we talk, so, as the ship talked, the more fervent rose all round the chaunt of suffering--

“O, San Gennaro, grant it passage! O, Santa Maria, I can give no more; you have it all! Father of pity, I am like a squeezed wineskin!”

Then, perhaps, from Lady Hamilton, mistaking, in her prostration, the steward for the admiral: “O, my dear lord! though I cannot rise to thank you, believe me that for all you have done my heart goes out to you.” To which the honest sailor would respond, “Give it went, mum, and take the basin.”

In truth it seemed the stars fought against us with the sea. The _Vanguard_ itself was none too big a vessel. She was what they call, I believe, a seventy-four with two tiers of guns--not a first-rater. I saw her commander sometimes, in the glimpses of the moon. He was not utterly impervious himself to the calls of the deep. His right arm was gone, and the sleeve pinned to his breast. He had a gentle, sober face, blind of one eye, and the scar of a late healed wound on his forehead. Casually met, I should have taken him for a little mild professor, who had once said Bo to a goose and been well pecked for his pains.

We had weighed anchor on the 22nd, and at once run into baffling winds. The day before, the king had received on board a deputation mixed of the marine, the city, and representatives of the Lazzari, who were all aghast to learn that His Majesty projected a withdrawal to his Sicilian capital. He was very short with them. When facts should reassure him of their loyalty, he said, he would return. In the meantime, he left General Pignatelli (a poor bemused creature) as his regent to restore order. He said nothing of his wholesale plunder of the public funds, and was only in a perspiration to escape before it should be discovered. Then he went below, having lighted and flung ashore the brand which was to set the city blazing.

And the following day we sailed for Palermo, in a vessel as full of royal livestock as if it had been a training ship for kings. Besides their Majesties, and as many of their progeny as they could recollect at the moment, there were on board the ineffable Hamiltons; English Acton, their minister and the queen’s lover; princes of the blood Castelcicala and Belmonte, and a few others of condition. Amongst us all, from the first, there was little affectation of state, and none of stateliness. It was just a scurry and tumble--an encumbering mass of royalty, in the thick of which the unhappy crew were hard put to it to find quarters. One of the poor children even died of sickness; and the queen screamed lamentations over it whenever she could recall its name.

At length, more dead than alive, we were all pitchforked ashore out of a battered hulk, and carried piecemeal through the city to the old fortified palace at its southernmost end, where, for the next seven months, was to be enacted the royal intermezzo in the tragedy of Naples.

Those months passed livelily enough for me. The king, what time he could spare from his hunting and fishing and the building of a new country lodge, was quite my devoted servant, paying my gambling debts--when it sometimes grew beyond my own power to liquidate them--and assigning me the new post, fruit of his own incomparable invention, of stillroom maid to his royal person. He was not really a bad-hearted man; and, if he could only have accomplished his eternal wish to be left alone, and not bothered while others were arranging his affairs for him, would probably have resumed his Neapolitan dominions without vindictive bloodshed, when the way was once paved and swept level for him.

We heeded little (I except, in one main question, myself) the volcanic throes which were wrenching that doomed town across the water while we feasted and played. While Lazzaro and Jacobin, each dominant in his turn, were flushing the kennels with blood; while imperious Nelson, now promoted to his _Foudroyant_, was circling and swooping on and off, issuing edicts, arrogating to himself the lead, in infatuated touch all the time with his substantial mistress; while the French were planting the Tree of Liberty in the palace square, and giving birth, amidst song and jubilation, to the new republic; while, following their withdrawal, Cardinal Ruffo was descending, with his brutish swarms, upon the fated walls, which he was destined to retake in the king’s name, the king himself was absorbed in ombre or lansquenet, chuckling over charades, playing practical jokes upon the most reverend Spanish señors of the place, guzzling and drinking, and in every lazy way luxuriating in an utter self-abandonment to pleasure.

And indeed, in that wine-soft climate, there were many temptations to him as to us all. We were like Boccaccio’s company, forgathered out of range of the plague, and telling stories to pass the time. The similarity of our condition, in fact, gave me an idea. I set my wits to work, and became a public _raconteuse_. I invented and told in those days more tales than I can remember, but a selection from which the curious may find included in my _Des Royautés Depouillées_, first published in Paris in 1806.

The series became so popular, that poor Mrs. Hart found her nose quite put out of joint in the matter of her own contributions to the fund of gaiety. She might flop and pose like the most enormous of Greek goddesses; she might assail our ears with her voice, for she had still the remains of a very handsome one; or our hearts with her faculty for mimicry, which, being ill-natured, went deeper. Once my début was made, she must be content to play second fiddle; and that did not suit her at all. The result was a coldness towards me, which, by inevitable process, led to my disgrace with herself and her royal mistress, and my dependence, as much for my interests as my safety, upon the favour of the king. The court, in fact, became divided into the party of Diana and the party of Emma, and was much more concerned over our rivalry than over the ultimate destinies of the kingdom.

It mattered little to me, so long as I could keep the interest alive until the moment when my vengeance on a certain couple should be a _fait accompli_. That once executed, the two Sicilies, for all I cared, might disappear under the sea. O, believe me that Nicola Pissani did an ill thing when he loosed an insulted mistress on his track!

It is not to be supposed that throughout those idle months I had once lost sight of my purpose, or had failed to inform myself, through de’ Medici, of the real progress of events. And when at last the end came, and Ruffo with his bloody Calabrians was master of the city, and the republic had collapsed like a rotten hoarding, I prepared my hands for their share of the price to be exacted, and laughed to think how great a fool he had been who claimed to represent Reason by yielding his soul to the passion of a foolish face.

Now, at this end, Naples had become a shambles. Shot and fire and sharp steel, butchery and festering wounds and starvation, had left of the “patriot” hosts but a little mean swarm, that rotted out its remnant life in the prisons, awaiting the holocaust. Pissani and all his high hopes were scattered. The gods had no desire to be worshipped by Reason, missing their perquisites, as this “long-legged Hebe” might well at the first have assured Liberty’s apostles, if they had not been at the pains to discard her. She had been in Paris; had seen Reason sit in the churches; had heard the millennium proclaimed, and Olympus echo laughter. And what had been the result? Not till the temples of superstition were razed in all the lands, not till Reason sat in the fields, would the first glimmer of that golden dawn appear. This she knew from the table-talk whispers of the new race, which had decreed the old Titan Nature a vulgarity, and, having overthrown it in the common hearts of men, dreaded nothing but the destruction of the countless schools of sophistry on which its own lease of dominion depended. And I, who had preached, who had been ardent again to preach their crusade against a detestable lie, had been insulted by these wise reformers, and been driven back to pour headstrong wine to the gods of rank desire, and help them to hold the world a market to their passions! O, Pissani had done well indeed!

And yet he was not among the captured.

One day, near the finish, de’ Medici accosted me alone in the palace gardens. It was mid-June, and the scent of roses was thick in the air. I looked in his face, and, for all the warmth and fragrance, my heart was winter.

“He still baffles you, monsieur?”

“Most beautiful, the man is a fox, or perhaps already a ghost.”

“Go on. You have something else to say.”

A stealthy smile creased his mouth.

“Keen as thou art fair. Know, then, that his wife is in our hands.”

“Again, go on,” I whispered. I could hardly breathe.

“We found her like a little torn rat in a sewer--ragged, half starved.” He gulped, and looked up with a pallid grin. “Have I not deserved? It is the better half of the bargain. Vouchsafe me my reward in advance.”

I paid no heed to his question, asking him only--

“Where is she?”

“In the Carmine.”

“And a hostage?”

He shivered, and hung his head.

“I understand you, madam,” he muttered. “But she is dumb to all our questions, to all our threats.”

I turned away with a laugh.

“And you are a humane man, monsieur, and a susceptible. Well, it is not for me to teach the inquisitor his trade.”

“Understand,” I said, facing round once more, “that I cannot rest, or live, or love, while this remains unaccomplished.”

He did not answer; but, standing irresolute a moment, shrugged his shoulders and left me.

But I knew at last that the moment was near.

On the 22nd of that same month the penalties of rivalry were ended for Lady Hamilton by the arrival, in the _Foudroyant_, of the Lord Admiral, who came to transport his mistress to Naples, as Her Majesty’s deputy in the latest Reign of Terror inaugurated in that capital.

A fortnight later the king himself, taking me with him as his simpler and nerve-doctor, and leaving the amiable English Ambassador behind to play dry-nurse to his queen in Palermo--followed in the _Sea Horse_, which, after a short fair passage, anchored in the bay. Thence, rather to my annoyance, we were transhipped no farther than to the _Foudroyant_--his mightiness being timid for the moment of venturing into his distracted city--and, there, were scarcely on board before my services were called into requisition in an odd enough connection.

The king--Nelson and his _cara sposa_ being gone ashore--was looking idly out seawards over the taffrail of the quarter-deck, and chattering desultorily with members of his suite behind him, when he broke off abruptly to stare under his palm at some object in the water, which, first seen at a distance, grew rapidly nearer, drifting with the tide upon the ship. Then, in an instant, he gave a hoarse scream; and, seeing him pointing and articulating confusedly, we all ran to the side, and followed with our eyes the direction of his hand.

“_Vátene!_” he shrieked: “_è Caracciolo!_” and he shuddered down, so that nothing but his nose and goggle eyes were peeping over the railing.

I held my breath, staring fascinated, while the others echoed his cry: “_Caracciolo! è Caracciolo! O me miserábile, Caracciolo!_” in a dozen accents of terror.

I had heard of the poor scapegoat admiral,[2] whom Nelson--always bearing a grudge against him for his better seamanship--had caused ten days before to be hanged with every refinement of savagery, and afterwards flung into the water. Now risen, it seemed, from its first sleep on the floor of the bay, the sopt and dreary spectre was come riding to sear the eyeballs of the master, whom it had failed to serve only through being deeper pledged to humanity. Fouling our hawser, the body swung upright, bobbing and reeling as if it were treading water. Its hair and long beard swayed on its cheeks; its dead stiff eyes stared unwinking in the spray; its arms were flung wide, as if inviting its destroyer to a mocking embrace. Turning a moment, it drifted loose, and went dancing towards the shore, where the poor fishermen of Santa Lucia, who had loved the man, were to find and give it Christian burial.

The king staggered back.

“Mother of saints!” he sobbed, “what does the creature want?”

“Sire,” whispered a voice, “he asks for a consecrated grave.”

“Give it him, give it him!” gasped His Majesty, and signed to me to follow him below, where, however, I was not long in laying his “horrors.”

“_Enfin, mon père_,” I said, “the man, by his appearance, was only asking your forgiveness.”

“Magnificent,” he answered, with a shaky laugh. “He was certainly in need of it”--and he turned to me gratefully, but with a rather scared look.

“Little agent of Providence, if thou hast ever a poor friend thou wouldst save in the dark time coming, ask of my Majesty’s mercy, and it will listen. There may be some who err through the mind’s nobility. Of that I know nothing; only--only, I would have something to balance my possible mistakes.”

It was true enough, though the blood-lust was not long in mastering him, when once, without risk to himself, he could taste the spice of vengeance. Even while he spoke the depleting of the gaols and prison-ships was begun, and the hurried trials, and the false testimony, and the hangings. And the wail of the thousand doomed was already mingling itself in the streets with the roar of a grand State lottery, when at last we could venture ashore and to safe quarters in the reconsecrated palace.

We were all triumphant then, or about to be. I remember the last night we spent on the _Foudroyant_. It was a full moon; and, seated under an awning on the upper deck, Lady Hamilton sang “Rule Britannia,” with a cockney fervour which must have pierced reassuringly to the ears of the poor wretches imprisoned behind the floating walls that surrounded us. She was always so much more than equal to the occasion, was Emma.