INTRODUCTORY (continued 6)

“Ha!”

The red eyes of the ferret closed a moment, then reopened to an ineffable smile. She held out her hand to me to kiss.

“We find you an invaluable physician, Madame Lavasse. To have eased a poor queen—it is something; but to cure this land of its headache”—

“Ah, madam!” I said, “there I yield to the hangman.”

Both ladies burst out laughing as they moved away. The queen turned and waved her hand.

“You shall not be forgotten,” she cried; and I curtsied.

A few days later M. de’ Medici called upon me. He read out a little indictment he had prepared for my behoof—

“Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, wife to Pasquale Tria de Solis, Neapolitan officer, noble, now deceased: emotional; authoress of some panegyrical sonnets to royalty and the age of gold; since suspect of schemes for the education of the populace; shows a partiality for red; advocates an appropriation of the Punch and Judy shows to the lessons of national virtue; claims the liberty of the press to print her halting rhapsodies;” (Monstrous!) “imputed sympathiser with Ettore Carafa (son to the Duke of Andria, the king’s major-domo, and to the duchess, Her Majesty’s mistress of the robes) in said Ettore’s late conspiracy to print and distribute an Italian version of the ‘Rights of Man,’ which conspiracy resulted in the execution of some companion malignants, and the escape from Naples of said Ettore; finally, convicted of corresponding with said fugitive, to the end of His Majesty’s overthrow and the subversion of his government!”

“Not convicted, M. de’ Medici.”

“That is all one, most beautiful,” said the chief of police, folding his paper. “Madame Lavasse’s word is as good as her bond.”

Within a week the Pimentel was lodged in the prison of the Vicaria.

That was in October; and thenceforward things moved fast, though scarce quick enough for me, who was beginning to beat my wings against the gilded bars of my cage. For what was all the national excitement to me but a means to my personal vengeance? And I feared, feared that while I lay aside for others’ use, my prey would find a means to escape me.

On the 22nd of September I had heard the guns of the citadels down below in the bay welcoming Nelson’s arrival. The sound shook every nerve in my restless heart, so that I could hardly eat or sleep that night; and I laughed myself into hysterics over my little maid Martita’s description of how Madame l’Ambassadrice d’Angleterre had flown up the side of the Vanguard, and cast herself upon the breast of her hero, who was a very little man, and quite unable to support so much emotion.

Still, thereafter, as day by day drums beat, and recruits were gathered, and men hanged themselves to avoid serving, and the English admiral was urging upon the poor fat, wind-blown king one of three alternatives: To advance upon the French, and conquer; to die sword in hand; or to remain and be kicked out—while all Naples was seething and roaring in a vortex about my garden, the garden itself remained silent and empty, an island in the midst of a whirlpool.

But at last His Majesty did set out, and reaching actually as far as Rome, while the republican general Championnet was falling back for a spring, blustered naughtily for a little, killing a few Jews, threatening the wounded enemy in the hospitals, committing to sack and pillage the very sacred city he had come to relieve, and finally, upon the approach of the concentrated French, deserting his demoralised army, and pelting back, with all the might of his perspiring legs, to where?—why, to Caserta.

It was evening of the 19th of December, and a thunderstorm, to terrify one to death in that desolate park, had broken over the town. All the imprisoned electricity of months past seemed to me, as I stood fascinated at an upper window of the Casino, to have torn itself free, and to be hunting in and out of the trees for fugitives from its fury. Far away and below the thousand eyes of the palace shut sickly to each blaze, and blinked and were staring frightened again in the crash that followed. The hand of an incensed God bent the proud necks of the trees, and His wrath drove a roar of leaves and twigs criss-cross about the alleys. It was the anarchy beginning.

In the midst I saw two figures, cloaked and dusk, butt their way to the door below; and a moment later Martita summoned me to receive messengers from the palace. I went down, and found two officers, pale and glaring, awaiting me in the parlour. The rain dripped from their unbonneted locks; their hands were restless with their hats and sword-hilts. I curtsied in wonder; and the elder, with a shaky, conciliatory smile, addressed me.

“You will pardon this intrusion, madam. The occasion is our excuse. You have in your possession some charm, some restorative, by which Her Majesty the queen has already greatly benefited?”

“Assuredly, monsieur. It is in my pocket now.”

“It is much needed at the moment. You will vouchsafe us the loan?”

“You must forgive me, monsieur. Its virtue is incommunicable save by the possessor.”

“That is so? Then will madam, perhaps, administer it in person?”

“To whom, monsieur? Monsieur will consider the night.”

“Alas, madam! But to assure that this night shall not be endless—that the sun of our hopes be not extinguished for ever?”

“Pray, sir, have mercy on me. To whom do you allude?”

“To His Majesty—no less.”

“The king?”

“He has but now ridden—been driven, would be truer—from Albano. For the moment everything seems lost. Ferdinand is at the last extreme of exhaustion and agitation. Madam will come to quiet him?”

“I will come, monsieur.”

“Ah! Dio mercè! Questo benefizio è una grande grazia.”

We set out without delay. My companions took each an arm of me, laughing very gallant scorn of the lightning and my fright thereat. Between them, however, they bruised my poor shoulders horribly, in their instinctive efforts to come together and clutch one another whenever the thunder slammed.

I was so dazed with the rain and uproar that I had little wit left me to note my surroundings as they hurried me, blown and breathless, up a flight of steps into a great hall, blazing with lights, thronged with confusion. Courtiers, nobles, mud-stained soldiers; weeping women, frightened maids—here they stood in gabbling, gesticulating groups, which were constantly detaching and discharging units into other groups, the whole contributing to a sum of frenzy which swayed the candle-flames. And throughout, threading the frantic maze, went scared pages and lackeys; all, from captain to scullion, looking for orders, and receiving none.

There were a few whispers, a few who observed and remarked upon me, as my conductors forced me through the press, crying a passage to the royal closet.

“It is the beautiful English witch! O, quanti vezzi! They are going to try to cure him like King David!”

The opening and swinging-to of a door; as instant a muffling of the tumult; the peace of a lofty anteroom, padded with thick carpets; a muttered challenge, a muttered answer; the passage of a further portal—and I was in the royal presence.

Now, all my life I have had to battle with a fatal sense of humour. I will simply undertake to relate the test to which it was here put.

The room, shut away from all disturbance, was brilliantly lighted. In the midst, at a gorgeous escritoire, sat a secretary in black, biting a pen. Hard by stood a staff officer—in a glittering uniform, but sopped and mud-splashed—who incessantly, with a white, nervous hand, turned down and bit at his moustache, making a motion with his lips as if he were talking to himself. The two all the time followed with their eyes the movements of a third figure, the only other in the room, which went to and fro, up and down, in a sort of tripping dance, gabbling an eternal accompaniment the while to its own chassé, and at odd moments ringing a little gilt bell which it carried in its hand. This in itself, to be sure, was sufficiently remarkable; but O, my friend, for the appearance of this eccentric, who indeed was no other than the monarch himself. Cocked on the top of his large head was a little tie-wig, which, for the last touch to disguise, he had borrowed during his flight from the Duke of Ascoli, after exchanging clothes with that peer, who was a much smaller man. The effect may be imagined. His Majesty’s breeches’ ends were half-way up his thighs; his waistcoat was a mere rope under his arm-pits; his coat-tails stuck apart from the small of his back like ill-fitting wing-cases. Add to this that he was pinned all over with holy pictures, and hung with reliquaries and medals like a mountebank at a fair, and the picture is complete.

The lightning penetrated the ruddy blinds with no more than the silent flicker of a ghost; but no glass could muffle the shattering reports of the thunder, at every clap of which His Majesty whinnied and crossed himself—

“O Lord, spare Thine anointed! Beloved saints, be particular to point out to Him where I am!” (ring). “This, you must know, is not my usual cabinet; but I will withdraw to my own, if you desire it, though it is in the hands of the decorators. There!—O!—San Gennaro, protect me! Caution our Master of the risk of striking among the chimneys, lest the levin brand, following a wrong course, enter this room instead of another, and destroy me in mistake for a lesser man” (ring). “Dio non vóglia! O, saints! I believe I am struck! No, it is my breeches splitting. But they are Ascoli’s. Make no mistake, Lord. I am not Ascoli. Take the breeches, but spare the king!”

He shut his ears distracted to a louder boom, and immediately was off again at a tangent—

“O Lady of Loretto, plead for thy servant!” (crash). “Mea maxima culpa—I will confess—if your Majesty will condescend to keep it to yourself—I am really a stupid man” (loud ring)—“well meaning, holy mother; well meaning, San Gennaro, but dull, as kings go, and surrounded by greater fools than myself. I have been seventeen times a father” (ring)—“at least” (loud ring), “and only once a husband” (groan). “Fool though I be, I have propagated my race for the glory of Holy Mother Church—and the confusion of the learned, her enemies. For the sake of my family, Madonna, succour me!”

He chattered so loud, racing up and down all the time, that I could hear his every word where I stood, awaiting events, by the door. Once, in a lull of the storm, he swooped round my way, and, suddenly becoming aware of me, stopped as if petrified, then rattled out, in a thick, gulping voice—

“Do you know who I am, madam? Do you know who I am?”

I curtsied profoundly.

“Sire,” I murmured, “—such a little cloud—to hide the sun of Majesty!”

He stared at me, and down at himself. “I am the king,” he muttered; “is it not so?”

The officer hurried to him, and whispered in his ear.

“Eh!” he exclaimed, “my wife’s physician? You find me very distraught, madam, very overtasked. I am so constituted I never could abide thunder”—and he was off again.

“Monsieur,” I whispered, “if we could get him prostrated on a sofa.”

“Ah!” replied the officer, “for myself, it would be madness. But you—you are beautiful—you may dare.”

I did not hesitate, but, stealing catlike to a couch, took the opportunity of His Majesty’s passing to seize him by his wing-cases, and with such effect that in a moment he was sprawling on his back on the cushions, with his legs in the air. Then, before he could protest or avoid me, I had clapped the duck-stone to his nostrils. Instantly the convulsion of his limbs relaxed, and a great sigh heaved itself out of his depths. His wig had tumbled off; his brows were dark over goggle eyes; he had a long, aquiline nose falling to a slack jaw. Imagine all this revealing itself in an expression of the most perfect contentment and idiocy.

The soldier tiptoed across, and looked down scared.

“God in heaven, madam!” he whispered, “what have you done to His Majesty? He is not himself.”

“Pardon me, monsieur,” I said; “never so much so.”

He came round in about ten minutes, and gazed at me in a sort of affectionate beatitude.

“Dio mercè!” he murmured; “I dreamt I was in purgatory, and awake to find myself in paradise. Another dose—one more.”

I shook my head.

“Enough is as good as a feast.”

“I will give thee a fortune for thy talisman.”

“Its virtue lies in myself.”

“Ah! Then the casket must be mine too.”

He sat up suddenly, all rumpled, and bellowed out in a thick, slurred voice,—

“Away, dolts and rapscallions! What! are you prying and listening?”

The secretary hurried to the door, and disappeared. The officer lingered only to protest—

“Affairs of urgency, sire”—

“Pooh!” said the king. “I am attending to them.”

I drew away.

“Pardon me, sire”—I began, when a clap of thunder rattled the glass. His Majesty ran at me whimpering—

“You think to leave me? No, no, madam. I am but half recovered yet. I must be watched, or I shall die. For yourself, you are as safe as in a convent.”

He drew himself up, and endeavoured to thrust his hand into the breast of his waistcoat; but not finding any, caught at his braces instead.

“Though all else be lost to Ferdinand, honour remains.”

XXVIII. I RETURN TO NAPLES

What a business I had with that father of babies—himself the greatest baby of all! He would not let me leave him, but took my wits to physic his irresolution as my duck-stone his nerves. As the night sped darker and wilder, bringing distracted generals and ministers, who, desperate to gather some clew out of chaos, would not be denied, he clung ever closer to my presence beside him, goggling at me mutely when faced by a poser, and laughing and applauding hysterically when I supplied an answer to it.

At last a cry rose in the palace that the French were got between Rome and Naples, with only General Mack at Capua a little north of us to oppose them.

“He is not to be trusted,” cried poor Ferdinand, wringing his hands. “He will sit down there and do nothing! Besides, I am not at war with France!”

“He is not everything,” I answered, ignoring the other fatuous pretence. “Quick, now, and light a fire between!”

“A fire!” said he, aghast.

“To be sure,” said I—“the fire of a crusade. Call upon the whole population north of us to fly to arms and exterminate the impious invaders. Declare you are coming to their help, and bid them strive their utmost in the meantime. It may be, in such a war of bigotry, your peasants will do your chief work for you, leaving you no task but to come presently and kill the wounded.”

“But,” cried the king disconsolately, “they must know too well already that I have run a—that I have thought it best to retire!”

“Date your manifesto from Rome, sire, and it will give the lie to—ahem! the truth. Quick! we will compose it together; and within an hour you can have it flying north, east, and west.”

He liked the idea. That thought of being reserved to give the unhazardous coup de grâce tickled him sensibly. But, though we acted upon it with all despatch, it was helpless to still the rumour of coming disaster. The report of the king’s flight and of the army’s demoralisation were too well confirmed. Hordes of robbers and cut-throats rose, it is true, at the word; swarms that committed woeful deeds of plunder and outrage and massacre, making the smiling campagna a hell. But these were without concentration or discipline, and as ready, when the lust had bitten in, to torture Italians as French.

And, in the meanwhile, courier after courier, racing to the palace with distorted legends, finished the last self-control of the king, and drove him near morning to order out his carriage for Naples.

Even then, as he went thundering by the dark fields and long glimmerings of the dawn, I was beside him. He would not part with me—with “his councillor, his dear little nurse”—but lavished upon me the wildest eulogies, the most reckless promises, while entreating me all the time to sit tight against him, for his better sense of security in the event of his dosing. And when he did dose, and fell upon me—good Lord! it was a nightmare, like having a mattress for a quilt, and with a voice! If his nod had failed to shake Olympus, his snore might have uprooted it.

Long before we reached the capital, the signs of a coming anarchy were increasing about us most wild and threatening. Swarms of excited countryfolk; strings of hard-driven carts loaded with household furniture, shedding a tithe of their contents, to be crashed over or spun aside by other pursuing wheels; haggard soldiers sobbing children; cries, threats, vivas, furious banter—all went sweeping in one flurry of uproar and motion towards the gates. Sometimes, when we were recognised, it would be to a shout of jubilation: “Ohi! O me beato! It is our king, our father, come to tell us the devils are singed and scattered!” Sometimes it was to a vision of black menace, that surged up, and showed a moment at the windows, and dropped behind in a wake of curses; more often it was to evoke a scattering volley of laughter, that broke into a regular sing-song refrain: “Venne, vide e fuggì, venne, vide e fuggì! He came, he saw, he fled! Way for Cæsar, way for Cæsar, who marches for Rome hind-first!” The frightened, sweating postilions scourged their sweating cattle, struggling to escape these gadflies, who nevertheless only clung and stung and sung the thicker. But at last we won through, and were in the city, and whipping for the royal palace through denser agitated crowds, which still, through a prescriptive respect, offered no effective bar to our progress.

I will not say but that throughout this ordeal my blood did not come and go the quicker. I will swear, at the same time, that I was always more exhilarated than terrified. To be quit of my weary exile; to find myself in the thick of events once more; best, to know that I had won to active co-operation in my revenge the most powerful instrument of all—these, at least, were a sufficient offset to the perils I must encounter in my race to realise them. And it ended to our credit, when all had been said and sung. We reached in safety the Palazzo Reale, where were being enacted, in a more massed and vehement form, the scenes of Caserta. The king, holding to my hand, drove a way for us, with kicks and curses, through the throng.

“Her Majesty!” he yelled.

She was in her apartments, to which he hurried me, scattering maids of honour like fowls. He shut the door upon her and me and himself alone.

“My love!” he said.

She was in like pass with himself. She was going up and down, muttering entreaties to the saints, her stays stuck full of prayers and pious ejaculations writ on scraps of paper. Every now and again she would pluck out one of these in a spasm, dip it in a plate of broth that stood on a table, and swallow it.

“My soul!” murmured the king.

She noticed us all in a moment, and stopped dead.

“Who are you?” she demanded witheringly.

“Angel of my heart, don’t you know your lord?”

She advanced quickly, and whipped him this way and that. He was still in Ascoli’s clothes.

“Is this all they have left of you, you poor rag of royalty?”

He tried a little bluster.

“How now, madam! I adopted it for a disguise.”

“What!” she said, “by revealing yourself? I should have thought that one exposure had been enough.”

“Hush!” he said, perspiring; “there is a witness.”

“One!” she cried; “the whole nation!” and she left him for me.

“What do you do here?” she demanded.

The king put in a word.

“I bring you your physician, madam—our physician. If it had not been for her, your Ferdinando would have lost his mind.”

“Better that than his kingdom,” she answered bitterly, and stood scowling on me. “I understand, madam, I understand. I called you Circe, and not, it seems, without excellent reason.”

“I was persuaded, madam,” I said, raising my head. “My honour is as precious to me as your Majesty’s. If you have no further use for me, I beg your permission to withdraw.”

At which, if you will believe me, this stormy queen ran to a chair, and flinging herself down on it, began to weep violently.

“I am deserted of all,” she cried; “in the hour of my tribulation they all forsake and disown me.”

The king skipped to her and fell on his knees before.

“My soul,” he wept, “all is not yet lost. General Mack”—

“General post,” she snapped. “What do you know of your own city, or of the anarchy that reigns in it? It only needed this spark to the mine. All is lost, I tell you. They are clamouring for a republic. We shall be sacrificed like the King of France and my sister to the fury of the Jacobins—I feel the knife at my neck—O! O!”

She rose in a frenzy of horror, shuffling her billets like cards to find a trump. “Gennaro, Valentino, Jeromio?” she whispered tearfully, and ended by making a sippet of the hermit. He was old and a misogynist. It was evident for some moments that he disagreed with her.

“Nothing remains to us,” she said at last, with a wry gulp, “but flight. We have foreseen it for days. For days, while you have been playing with tin trumpets, we have been transferring our royal effects to the ships: pictures, plate, jewels; the specie from the banks; the last soldi from the treasury. We have seen to everything, I and my sweet darling Emma, my only, truest, and best of friends. Nelson but awaits our signal to take us on board. You must give it him, at once, for this night, do you hear?”

“I will send a message by Ferreri,” said the king, rising, with a face as scared now as her own. “I will send Ferreri at once,” and he skipped to leave the room.

“Stay!” she cried, in agitation. “Be sure to bind him to the last privacy.”

“O, poor me!” said the king, with a spasm of a smile. “Must I then cheat my excise by smuggling my own orders through?”

“It is no time for fooling,” cried his angry spouse. “My God! do you not understand? Whether our plan should be suspected by Lazzari or Jacobins, the result would be the same. To the one it would mean desertion; to the other escape. They would combine at least to frustrate it.”

He stared, nodded sagely, and this time stole away on tiptoe, so that the Lazzari in the square should not hear him, I suppose. I was following, when the queen stopped me. Her expression in the act had fallen a little piteous, like that of a smiling saint sitting on spikes.

“Has Circe, then, no ministrations for the anguished of her own sex?” she asked.

I hurried to her. “O, madam!” I cried, “if I might serve you alone!”

Nevertheless, the whole present prospect dismayed me. Whither was it their scheme to remove the court, and for how long? and in the meantime, what Government was to represent it? I had immutably ranged myself against my former party, burning my boats behind me. What, now, if that party were to triumph, as I had already seen it triumph wholly and tragically elsewhere? The tables of vengeance would be a trifle turned, I thought.

However, I gained some reassurance on this point from de’ Medici, upon whom, in the midst of a distracted rush and scurry, I stumbled in the course of the afternoon.

“Hush!” he replied to my question. “Whisper it not in Gath. You are indiscreet, most beautiful. Listen: if we go, it will be but as a fowler withdraws from his nets, that the foolish birds may fly more confident into the lure.”

If we go! An event which happened in the morning resolved that question for ever. Ferreri, the poor courier, was hardly sent on his message (luckily a verbal one) when the suspecting mob fell upon him, dragged him all torn and bleeding to the palace square, and there, with savage cries: “A spy! a Jacobin spy,” despatched him with their knives before the very eyes of the king, whom they had insisted should be witness to this proof of their loyalty. The poor monarch tottered back aghast into our midst; and from that moment the end was sure.

As the day waned, the confusion in the palace waxed indescribable. Tendency, no doubt, there was in the seeming chaos: I, as a stranger, could do no more than commit myself blindly to the stream, resolved in one matter alone—that I would not remain stranded and left behind. All questions of precedence but in flight—of etiquette, of privacy even—were blown to the winds. We were become a mere commonwealth of terror. Great ladies issued puffing and lumbering from their apartments, their arms loaded with goods and dresses, which they tripped over like clowns as they ran; nervous warriors got entangled in their swords, and lay gasping on their backs like dying fish. I never laughed so much or so hysterically in my life. With all but the almighty family itself it was sauve qui peut; and I was beginning to formulate my own desperate plans, when de’ Medici whispered quick in my ear—

“Follow me without seeming to!”

It had been impossible in that frantic crowd, had not my wits already noted his every trick and mannerism. Fortunate in being utterly unencumbered, I pursued the shadow. It led me by intricate ways, out of the light into darkness, out of the tumult into silence, by a back passage through the arsenal, and so down to the waterside, where a little boat with dusk figures was waiting. Without ceremony we tumbled in, and sat panting.

“Any more?” said a voice in my own good English tongue.

De’ Medici answered in the negative.

“Give way, men!” cried the officer sharply.

In an instant we were speeding for the bay. The lights quivered and shrunk behind us; the uproar attenuated, and was drawn out to a murmur. Yard by yard there swelled up before our eyes vast ribbon-girded bulks, that rocked lazily on the tide, tracing intricate patterns with their masts among the stars. To one of these, the greatest, we galloped, and came round with a surge and hollow lap of water under its quarter. The next moment we were aboard the Vanguard.

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.

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.

XXX. I AM JUSTIFIED IN MY POLICY

It was a dark and gusty night when I issued forth with de’ Medici from a side door of the palace.

“She is condemned,” he had whispered to me a minute earlier.

A needle of ice had seemed to enter my heart. The question my lips could not ask had flown to my eyes. Comprehending it, he had caught at his throat and lolled out his tongue grotesquely. To the same dumb inquisitors he had answered, as confidently as if I had spoken, “To-morrow.”

Then I had found my voice, as if after a fit of choking—

“And she has not spoken?”

“And she has not spoken.”

He had hesitated, before suggesting deprecatingly, “There remains only to make your appeal to her in person.”

I had struck my hands together, hearing that.

“You might have forced her, had you chosen. Now, leaving it to me, our bargain is dissolved.”

“Madonna, you will not so requite my faithful services?”

“I will answer nothing till I have seen her.”

“Then what time like now?” he had replied desperately, “when she sits buried alive in the darkness, with the spectre of to-morrow whispering in her ear.”

“It is well spoken, then. I will go.”

The town was so full of reek and passion, that, most in the low quarters it was necessary for us to traverse, I doubt if I could have survived without him. But he was too well known and feared to leave my safety much in question. Then the Lazzari and their allies of the conquering army were such sworn blood-brothers, that it needed never more than the smallest bone of dispute to set either tearing at the other’s throat, whereby a flying petticoat, circumnavigating both, was able to avoid shipwreck between. Indeed, we had committed more than one red scrimmage to our wake by the time we were arrived, breathless but whole, at the door of the Carmine.

A roar and drift of torches surged upon us from a side alley at the moment that we reached our goal. Here was a wave of passion broken from the main wastes, and bearing forward on its crest a single victim to its fury, whom it seemed about to fling against the sullen walls of the prison. He was a mere boy, and his face as white as wax. By the door stood a Calabrese sentry, armed with a musket and a great sabre, and a rose in his hand, the gift thorn and all of some amorous contadina. As the boy was hurled up the steps, “Smell to this, poor lad,” said he; “art faint?”—and he thrust the rose violently against the victim’s nostrils. The poor wretch staggered back, uttering a horrible scream, his face bathed in blood. There had been a long pin concealed among the petals, which had stung him almost to the brain. I am not sentimental, but I shall hope some day to be to that Calabrese in the relation of Lazarus to Dives. The mob, however, roared laughter over the jest, clapping their victim with a certain good-humour on the back, as we were all carried together in a confused struggle up the steps and into a vaulted stone hall beyond.

This stronghold, massive and mediæval, had only lately been the scene of the treacherous massacre of a patriot garrison, and its stones were yet mapped and mottled with the story of the deed. And since, being made a State butchery, without regard to accommodation or cleanliness, from every carrion Jacobin, it seemed, had emerged a living swarm, predestined children of the grave, who haunted the corridors with unclean cries, and showed ghastly visions of wounds and suffering at the grates as we hurried by. It was a catacomb, in whose rotting lanes of stone walked a hundred vampires, gloating over their huddled pens of victims.

Typical of the worst was the gaoler who, at de’ Medici’s summons, had risen to attend us. This was a creature, like an obscene lank bird, who hopped before us chuckling and pecking forward with his long nose, as if as he went he sought the corners for offal. At his waist jingled a bunch of keys, and often he cracked, after the Italian habit, a thong of leather with a lash which he carried in one hand, his other being occupied in holding aloft a flaring taper. He led us by a descending passage, so narrow and so low that the flame of his torch made sooty blotches on the roof as he advanced, into a murmuring drain, at whose termination he at length paused before a door sunk in the wall.

“Guái a lei, Messer de’ Medici,” he chuckled, as, groping for the lock, he leered round at us. “Wait till, having opened, I can block the passage. There is another here besides our little bird.”

“Another?”

“Courage, most excellent; ’tis but half a man when all’s said. He was a State prisoner in the Vicaria, until the mob released him with the rest. Then he disappeared, God knew whither; but he was retaken, with a few more, in the prisoner Pissani’s company. Well then, his day will come, no doubt; and in the meantime, waiting orders, we keep them caged together.”

De’ Medici grunted, rubbing his chin, “I should have been told; but, hurry, friend.”

The man waved him back.

“Let me entreat messer, in case of an attempt.”

The chief withdrew a little.

“Open, and come thou too,” said he. “Madam would speak alone with the condemned.”

The key grated in the lock; the creature flung wide the door.

“Pissani!” cried he, on a sharp note; and that was all.

Even as he retreated, having uttered his cry, she stood in the opening. A dank and mortal odour came with her, a reel of filthy darkness unbroken but by the dim splotch of a tiny grating, which, set in the wall opposite, made an aureole behind her head as she stood.

God of mercy! It was a spectre from which I shrunk in instinctive loathing. Had it ever been one with beauty, and with me? Its very tattered gown seemed fallen into harsh, lean folds. Love must have trodden, not sat, in those hollow eyes, so to discolour and bury them. It was a just retribution—the more providential in that so squalid a vision sickened my heart from sympathy.

Yet, to break this withered reed! It seemed a despicable task for my strong hands. They must withhold a little, caress a little first, with whatever reluctance to themselves. Nevertheless, I could not but be conscious how forced and artificial rung the tenderness I sought to convey into my voice.

“Patty—Patty Grant! I have come to offer you life and liberty!”

The tiny smile that broke then from her lips was my first earnest of her reality. The sigh she gave was such as a dead sleeper might yield to the dawn of Judgment. Yet she did not move, or come to me, or show one sign of the collapse I had expected and calculated on. And, as the light of the flaring taper fell upon her figure, a new hate and loathing surged in me, so that the persuasiveness with which I sought to dress my tones shivered into a mockery of itself—

“Did you not expect me? Did you not know that I hold your life in my hands?”

“Else why should you have left me to come to this, Diana?”

I shrunk back. What new knowledge of herself, or me, was implied in the chords of that wasted voice? Yet she smiled still, like one waking out of a frightful dream.

“Is it not strange, Diana, this end to all we have known and experienced together? Do you remember the sundial, and the old green garden, and the nuns in the sleepy village? We are Englishwomen, after all, Diana. I should like to rest in England.”

“It lies with yourself,” I answered, half choking. “You have but to speak—I tell you, it needs but a word from you, and all this false sacrifice is passed by and forgotten.”

Her eyes had been fixed on some vision beyond me. Now in a moment they were scorching my soul.

“Yes,” she said, “and the word?”

The shame of its utterance should be mine, she meant. If I had shrunk from the challenge, it would have been to discredit my claim to the greater wrong.

“Where your husband lies hidden?” I said, with a cold fury at my heart.

“God forgive you,” she answered only, and fell back.

Her assumption of the holier strength, of the worser grievance, stung me to madness. I leapt and clutched her by the wrist.

“Fool!” I shrieked; “do you know what you are bringing on yourself? Do you know how they will kill you? It is not, as in Paris, a shock, and a sob, and forgetfulness. They will push you from a ladder, and one will spring and swing himself by your feet, and another leap upon your shoulders, and squat there like a hideous toad, making sport for the crowd. And you will be minutes choking and dying, and not one to pity or relieve you!”

Her eyes had a smile of agony in them; but still it was a smile, and I could have torn myself in my impotence to change it.

“Ah, yes, one!” she said; “my little unborn baby.”

I sprang back.

“Wretch! Your obstinacy murders it!”

“It gives its life for its father!”

Without sound or warning, she sank at my feet, and lay motionless, her white face turned upward.

A harsh jest was uttered at my shoulder.

“Bravo! It is so they always think to sport with our feelings. But we have an infallible medicine”—and the gaoler, coming from behind me, cut across the senseless face with his whip.

With a roar, a figure bounded out of the darkness of the cell, and whirling long arms about the beast, fell with and upon him, and battered out his brains upon the stone floor. It all passed in a moment; and in that moment I knew my lost monster again, gaunt and foul and tattered, yet even in his wasted strength a god, and glorious. Then against a coming tumult and scurry of feet I flung my body.

“Back!” I shrieked; “the king gives me a life! I claim his—do you hear? If by a hair it is injured, the bitter worse for you all!”

Sobbing, burning, in a flurry of passion, I threw myself, an hour later in the palace, at the king’s knees.

“Sire,” I cried, “I claim your royal promise. I ask mercy for a friend.”

Taken off his guard, bewitched, perhaps, “It is granted,” he said.

Then he recovered himself, and laughed, and patted my shoulder.

“Enfin,” he said; “what has he done?”

“He has killed a gaoler who was ill-treating a prisoner.”

He startled, frowned, then laughed again, but less easily.

“O, well,” he said, “a gaoler is no great matter. But I must know his name first.”

“Sire, it is my own servant Gogo, that you have robbed me of this long time.”

“O, him!” he said, relieved. “Well, perhaps, after all, we owe him a gaoler or two.”

XXXI. I KNOW MY OWN HEART

I had hardly got into the street before a hand touched my arm. I turned and saw Gogo.

“It was you,” he said, “won my deliverance this morning?”

“Yes.”

“From the king?”

“From the king.”

He said not a word more. I questioned him in my turn.

“I sent you a message by the courier. Why did you not come direct to me?”

“I had business first. I answered, ‘If you will tell her that I will witness for her and bring my report this evening, she will understand.’”

“I understood nothing but that you were in no hurry to thank me.”

He made no reply.

“It is only after a struggle with my pride, sir,” I continued, “that I am here to keep your appointment. I think, perhaps, your business might have kept better.”

“Do you? Well, perhaps, after all, you have a shallow wit.”

I looked at him in dumb amaze. We were loitering on, to me aimlessly, though I knew presently how all the time he had been rigidly enforcing our direction. The city was in its hottest night-fever of excitement over the executions that had taken place that day, in a mood already too monstrous to take much heed of the shock and tattered prodigy that stumped by my side. Once, passing a group, I caught a name, and startled, and was hurrying on; but he snatched my wrist, and forced me to linger, absorbing horror to the dregs. I knew his temper by that, and to what I had delivered myself; but I never feared him so much as when he would not speak.

“Gogo,” I whispered suddenly, “you will give me credit for having known nothing of your state all this time. Whenever I asked M. de’ Medici, he assured me of your comfort and prosperity. I am not to blame if he is a cursed liar.”

He did not answer.

“The moment I could,” I said, trembling, “I begged your life. It is the dearest of all I know to me. Are you going to punish me for that?”

Still no answer.

“O!” I said, with a little rally to anger, “if you will not thank me, at least you might say whether or not you received my enclosure this morning?”

“The money?” he muttered. “Yes, I received it.”

I was moved to a little agitated laughter.

“Is everything poisonous that comes from my hands? If you had spent a little of it on food and clothes, my obligation to you would not have been the less.”

“I thought you sent it to me to pay your debts.”

“What debts?”

Again that grim silence. I feared him more than I can tell; feared him so much that no thought of the conquering guile by which I had once been wont to sway him occurred to me to use. I shivered, and drew my cloak faster about me, and hurried by his side without another word.

Whither was he bent? By the roaring quays, it seemed, towards the dark prison from which, only a few hours earlier, she had gone to her self-elected doom.

“Not there!” I sobbed, struggling—“not there! What good can it do now?”

But he turned, short of reaching it, to his left, into a street leading to the great square adjoining, where the gallows was erected; and here, under the shadow of the fortress, stood a church with a lofty tower. Stopping at a door which opened into the base of this last, he tapped three times; and in a moment it yawned, and engulfed us, and the tumult of the living town was become in our ears like the murmur of the sea in a dead cavern.

Our guide, taper in hand, went on before us. The sound of our footsteps reeled and laughed behind, echoing up to unknown altitudes. Ward of that little star of radiance, I had no terror so great as that of its flashing away and committing me to the shadows that seemed always dancing and clutching for me outside its circumference. And then suddenly we were come to a narrow iron gate set in the stone, and to the cowled, motionless figure of a monk who stood thereby.

Without a word uttered by this spectre, the folds of its robe contracted, and a long white hand was thrust forth palm upwards. Gogo put a purse into it.

“Bear witness, Diana,” he said, in a low voice, that boomed and clanged among the stones, “that I deliver the account of my stewardship to the last penny.”

I was sobbing dreadfully, moved by some terror that had in it, nevertheless, no thought of evil intended by him to myself.

“You will take nothing from me?” I gasped.

He addressed the monk.

“It is enough?”

The cowled head bent.

“Then let us through, father, and alone.”

The grate clanked. He gripped my arm, and, seizing the taper from the sacristan, led me down a long flight of steps, through a low doorway, into a crypt. And there, on the damp ground, full in our view, was something lying, and a sheet over.

“No, no!” I screamed. “You have tortured me enough already!”

Never releasing my arm, he set the taper in a crevice, and dragged me to the dreadful bed.

“What!” he said, “are you afraid to look on your work?”

And, pinning me forcibly, he bent and drew the cloth away. And side by side with the other, I saw the dead face of Pissani.

Without a word, I sank down where I stood, and he fell back from me.

“O, woman!” he cried, in a terrible voice, “that you could talk of your pride, with this lying at your heart!”

He clasped his hands, and unclasped them, and struck his forehead, and again writhed them together, as if his grief baffled him from speech. Dragging my body towards him, I huddled cowering at his feet.

“What!” he cried; “no word? no word?”

I moaned, and moved my head in negative.

“Grant he stabbed himself under the gallows,” he said, “since he found he could not look on her agony and live. Are you the more guiltless of his death?”

Again I shook my head.

“At least they are together,” he cried. “By so much you did them service, sending her first. But the price, woman, the price!”

I rose, blind, staggering, to my feet.

“It was my honour. I will go and pay it, and die.”

He caught at and held me.

“To whom?”

“To de’ Medici. Let me go. Only you could have saved me, and you will not; and it is right.”

Never quitting his hold, he turned from me, with a wild gesture of his free arm.

“It was her life or yours,” I said. “Make it my curse, if you will, that I chose the dearer to me.”

With a mad groan, he snatched me from my feet, and, holding me fiercely against his breast, carried me out and to the foot of the steps.

[The End]