CHAPTER XII.[3]--Of a Visit to Pompeji in 1798, in which there were

Lovers, and of the Supper in the Inn at Resina.

[3] Much of this chapter is taken from an account of a visit to "Pompeii" written in 1802.

The Admiral "found more to detain him in Naples than he had anticipated." I write these words with a smile: they were his own. We did not sail for Malta till October 15th, and then we had to go all round Sicily. My Lady, partly, I suppose, for reasons to which I have already alluded, was never satisfied without the Admiral went somewhere by _barca_ or carriage. She loved open-air parties, and I firmly believe loved the getting-up of them as much as any part of the expedition. The Admiral said, with the very best grace, that he was under his hostess's orders, and she was so infinitely charming and full of entertainment that it did not cost a man much to be at her orders. In good truth, she tried to anticipate every wish of his, except it might be that of leaving him to rest in some pleasant corner of her palace within hail of her voice. She certainly did not at this time plan for secret meetings with him, though her manner was more caressing to him in public than a prudent woman would have allowed herself. For one kind of expedition he was always ready: he was much interested in the monuments of Roman and Greek history--especially Roman, for the Admiral had in his heart a profound respect for the Romans as lords of the world, and as anticipating the place that he meant England should have; and he had a sneaking contempt for the Greeks, holding that they never fought like men save when they had a bridge broken down behind them, or mere Asiatics opposed to them.

The city of Naples is not rich in such monuments, although the whole half of the bay, from Naples to the ancient Misenum at the end of one of the enclosing horns, is full of the villas and what not of the most famous people of the court of Cæsar Augustus. And there are at the foot of Mount Vesuvius cities of late years begun to be excavated. At Forum Pompeji especially there is almost a whole city to be seen, and the ancients have told us so much about the eruption which caused its destruction that every traveller of intelligence who proceeds to Naples dare scarcely leave it without having made an examination of these ruins.

"Pompeji first, Nelson!" cried her Ladyship, coming upon us while Will and I were taking our orders about some matter. She had a most easy way of addressing men on the shortest acquaintance. "And we must go in _calesses_, for our coaches would never get back alive from such a road. I know not which are worst, the lava rocks you rise over, or the lava sands you sink in."

The Admiral was much gratified, and My Lady rattled on merrily. "We must have the Queen. The King does not signify; he would make some reason to get off a-hunting, if we had him with us. But the Queen we must have; for they always dig up a new house or temple, or at least a skeleton or two in a mould of lava, for royalty. We will send for an army of workmen, and the Director. I suppose we must have the Director, though we get to work much the faster if we have not him to say 'Gently, gently,' all the while, and 'Use the sounding rod before the spade.' Yes, we must have the Queen, and she will bring so many of her gentlemen and ladies; and we shall take how many? You, Nelson, of course, and these boys, and----"

"Mr. Comyn, your Ladyship, my chaplain." He had not yet commenced Emma, or dearest Emma, as he afterwards used, in public. "Mr. Comyn is my library," he added in his gracious way, "upon such matters."

"Yes; Comyn must come," said her Ladyship, "but I don't think we'll have Troubridge: he turns so glum sometimes. I'll go off and see the Queen for her to fix a day, and whom she will have with her; and I must see who are to be with me, and count how many _calesses_: we can only put two into each if we drive ourselves or put the driver out on the shaft; but they are fine, they give you a tossing like a boat, with their high loose springs, but they will weather any rock, and I assure you we shall have plenty."

"I fear I shall cut a very sorry figure," said the Admiral; "sea-sick on land is shameful, and I am a very poor sailor, your Ladyship."

"_A fico_ Nelson; you shall drive me."

"Then I shall be wrecked at last, and I came near enough in the _Vanguard_ when we were reconnoitring off Toulon before the race for the Nile. But I'll drive your Ladyship; I never stayed in port for fear of shipwreck, and never will."

It was fixed for the next day. The heat signified but little, for these _calesses_ have large hoods, and the streets of Pompeji are so narrow as to give some shade. I do not know how many _calesses_ there were--more than we could easily count, as they met outside the palace over against the church of S. Ferdinando. As the Admiral was fulfilling his promise of driving her Ladyship, Will and I had a _caless_ to ourselves, and you may be sure that we enjoyed it. Coming last, as being the least present, we had all the fun of the fair; and every one was making much splutter, because, though some were well used to driving, they were mostly new to the handling of these see-sawing _calesses_. I never in my whole life had the driving of anything but an old pony and a shay: no more up to this time had Will, though he afterwards prided himself on his horseflesh. But the mere whipping up of a horse was fun enough for boys like us; and if we had not had to keep our place in the rear of the line, I think that we should have needed a deal of picking up on that road.

I shall not describe how we made our royal progress--we had the Queen with us, mind--out of the Capuan Gate and past Portici, where their Majesties have a palace and keep all the best of the things that are found in Pompeji, even shaving the frescoes off the walls with a fine kind of saw. Indeed, I was not able to observe much, for Will, contrary to his usual wont, cried, "You drive, Tubby!"--which I was at a loss to understand, until I espied that in the _caless_ in front of us, of which the hood would not stay up, were seated the Prince of Favara and his sister.

Once or twice, when we halted perforce, for this or the other reason of My Lady, ever a creature of impulses, I was able to take my eye off my horse, which in the general order, being the whip, I could not afford to do. When I did so look up, I was not surprised that Will bade me drive, for in all my life I never saw a woman with her head so beautifully poised on her shoulders as Donna Rusidda, and the heat brought the red into the clear cheeks of that delicate face. Her hair, too, which was brushed up after the fashion of the day into something very like the mode used on the Greek coins, had the most enchanting little curls at the top of her slender neck.

When we arrived at our destination, we all drove into a spacious courtyard, on a level with and a few yards distant from the high road, from which it is separated by a large lattice gate, adjoining to the abode of the only real inhabitant of the once magnificent and populous town of Pompeji--the invalid soldier who acted as guardian and guide to its remains, and who looked scared at the wholesale invasion of his peaceful realm.

Her Ladyship had been true to her word in getting a royal order for excavators, who turned up to an innumerable extent, and their director. And there was, of course, our escort: we had rendezvoused at the Palace because of the necessity of taking a patrol of cavalry to protect us from annoyance by the sympathisers of the French party.

No sooner were we dismounted, than Mr. Comyn felt it his duty to improve the occasion. He began on the vicissitudes of earthly grandeur: this very dwelling of the Neapolitan veteran was once tenanted by a maniple of those legionaries whose irresistible valour had subdued all our hemisphere from the Tyne to the swampy banks of the Nile, from the pillars of Hercules to the shores of India.

"Bravo, Comyn!" roared the Admiral, whom the Queen encouraged to treat her as a friend rather than a sovereign: "what a rare _auspex_, is it you call it? No, _augur_, you make. Why, since the fortunate event of the 1st of August every one of these four points at this moment acknowledges British sway; and not only the sea between them, but every accessible corner, and the liquid part of the whole globe, from Nootka Sound to Bass's Straits, is directed from half a dozen valves in Charing Cross. But a truce to national bragging, which I detest as much as individual self-praise! It will only do by way of a claptrap at the end of a dry stage-speech, well and significantly bawled up to the forum or the galleries. No more of it in this place: let us begin the sober narrative of facts."

"Oh Lud!" said her Ladyship, "is it so bad as that? Your Majesty, may the excavators cast about and find a good place to begin, that we may have something to see while our ears are being tickled? A golden statue let it be; not the same gold as the statue of Minerva, whose head the peasant split open with a hoe."

In the face of her Ladyship's protests the excavators were marched off to a place out of sight; the plain reason being that the part all round where we were was already excavated down to its original level.

The quadrangular court which we first entered into might be as large as the railed part of Leicester Square. It was surrounded on all sides by a colonnade supporting the roof of a gallery, and from the gallery you entered a number of small apartments not unlike the cells of a prison, or, to use an affirmative comparison, greatly resembling the galleries round some of our old inns, with the rooms adjoining. Only in the present instance the corridor was on the ground floor, there being no upper storey.

"This building, sir," said Mr. Comyn, after a lame parley with the one-armed soldier, "was first taken for a gymnasium, afterwards for a prison, and by some for a school of gladiators; at present it is declared to have been a barrack for soldiers, because various pieces of armour were found in some of the cells. The little apartments are highly interesting. Many have their walls covered with inscriptions and curious drawings."

"Very curious," said the Admiral dryly, pointing to a pencil sketch such as one notices on the dead walls in the London streets which happen to have a national school near them--the master or beadle or other obnoxious person being represented by an outlined figure with straight lines for the legs and arms, and some sort of an irregular circle for head and body. This one had a nose added as well as an eye, and his feet were represented by pothooks, and his hands by toasting-forks, one of which held a straight weapon, looking, it must be confessed, more like a rod than any sort of sword. The letters of the inscription were all capitals, and although not absolutely like our present Roman alphabet, might easily be read, particularly by one who from Herculanean MSS. had become a little familiar with antique penmanship.

This was Mr. Comyn's dictum, not mine, and the name of the figure was Nonius Maximus.

The Queen bade Miss Cornelia Knight, who was one of the party, and had a pretty talent for making poor sketches, to do a drawing of the figure for Her Majesty; which produced much merriment, for the one-armed guardian was such a recluse in his charge out here that he did not know his company. He at once rebuked Her Majesty, informing her that he had strict orders from the Queen not to allow the use of pencil, paper, or any writing or drawing materials within the town of Forum Pompeji. My Lady, after first exchanging confidential glances with the faithful servant, slyly winked at the Queen with her left eye, while a repeated gliding motion of her right thumb across the finger nearest it made a certain telegraphic signal, and the Queen made one who desired to serve her honestly a rogue, by giving him some _carlins_, to be allowed to break the rules, which she had made herself.

I could see that the Admiral was gravely shocked: the idea of professional duty never left him in the most incongruous situations.

On a sight-seeing expedition like this, it was in the habit of my Lady, and, I was told, of the Queen, to do that which might be least expected of them. If there were but little to see, they would fly through it and back again, in so short a space of time that all the elaborate preparations should seem wasted; and if there was more to be seen than a strong man could walk through on a long summer's day, they would trifle by the hour at the very outset, as they seemed like to do now. But the Admiral was of a different mind. He had come to see the ruins so wondrously preserved for nigh twenty centuries by the mummifying ashes,--how these mighty Romans lived whose ensample he was never weary of studying. His acquaintance with their history was not indeed profound, and in the studies of their antiquities he was even less versed. But he had in his chaplain, Mr. Comyn, a ripe scholar, with whom it was ever his wont to make all possible inquiry about a place before he should visit it.

And My Lady, ever quick to feel the pulse of his desires, and having the Queen accustomed to follow her impulses, with a laugh, in one minute directed a forward movement.

The Admiral was much amazed at the smallness, nay, meanness of the houses; and made inquiry if only the dwellings of the shop-keepers and other baser sort of persons had been in the town, the rich resorting to villas in the outskirts.

"By no means," said the Director: "this is a Roman senator's house you have before you, and that which you have but now examined belonged to one of the most famous proconsuls--a class which of all others had the best opportunity of enriching themselves."

The Admiral was profoundly impressed.

"What a people!" he said. "A man who had ruled half Asia came to end his days in a house which had no windows and no door, but such as we give our servants at the kitchen-back; which covered no more ground than a cottage, and had, like a cottage, only the one floor, and had in the whole of it but one room large enough for company. How the great Romans, for whom the world was too little, could bear to be cooped up in those little cells, no larger than a cabin, in a climate like this passes my comprehension."

All present agreed with him--as like as not their code of manners demanded that they should appear to--all, except the Prince Caracciolo, who was of the Neapolitan Navy, and of the party. He was a man cut on the cross-grain, and said, with a licence very unusual among Italians, except when they are looking for a quarrel: "If I could persuade myself that these pig-styes were actually the work of Roman architecture I should feel no difficulty in solving the doubts of my credulous English friend. It was these very confined cells which made them so eager to get abroad, and enlarge by conquest their elbow-room. And the same reason induces us modern Italians who live in comfortable, lofty, and spacious dwellings to remain where we are, convinced, as we feel, that any change of abode would only be for the worse."

The Prince, it must be known, had a good estate in Naples, at the corner of the Chiaja, where the road goes off to Pausilippo, and bounding on that side the fine new gardens of the Thuilleries, which the King had made with pleached walks and a fair open space in the midst, to display that wonder of antiquity, the Farnese Bull, which came to him by inheritance a little since. Mr. Comyn did not render his speech, knowing the Admiral's temper, and the avoidance of quarrels commending itself to him as a clerk in holy orders. It was a happy chance that he, not Will, was interpreting for the Admiral at the moment. Not that Will would have rendered his impertinence to the Admiral, but that he would have felt it incumbent upon himself to force the stout, ill-conditioned Prince to swallow an insult direct, or fight.

But Master Will was more profitably engaged. The Prince of Favara, as is so honourably often the case with Sicilian nobles, was a great amateur in the antiquities of his country, and the ruins lately laid bare at Forum Pompeji and Herculaneum were of special interest to him, for he had, among the beggarly remnants of a patrimony which had come down to him, a hill some ten miles from Palermo and two from the court suburb of Bagheria, a bluff barren hill which had been the site of the ancient city of Soluntum founded by the Phœnicians, where the men who tended the vines and olives were for ever turning up some fragment of ancient-world temples or dwellings. He was too poor to have the hill excavated as he desired; indeed, the very vineyards and olive-gardens were leased to a creditor, strictly bound down to do no digging above what was necessary for trenching the trees. The Prince had dreams of laying bare a Sicilian Pompeji when he should have made his fortune, which he was not like to do except by marriage with an heiress, a commodity not too plentiful at the Neapolitan Court. But he was not a Royal favourite, though attached to the Court; and further, any money which Ferdinand I. of the Two Sicilies bestowed upon his favourites was expected to be duly wasted in riotous living.

Well, the Prince of Favara was for showing the city as it should be shown to his late enemy, Will; and his sister--who had come under his protection--was as attached to their buried city on the hill, and therefore to buried cities generally, as himself; and I was, as ever, with Will. And looking up to Will as I did, it seemed his plain right that he should walk with the beautiful Donna Rusidda and I with the Prince, lagging bravely. I had, moreover, I think I may say without vanity, more book-brains than Will, who was a man of action and perhaps a little narrow--which the Prince was not long in learning. For Will was not of the kind who can simulate by a fire of small questions interest in a matter which does not come into his thoughts. So the Prince had perforce to address all his information to me. He had, since we were away fighting at the Nile, picked up a very little English from My Lady, who had been interested in him on account of the story of his _duello_. But it was so little that his entire attention was necessary for explaining the smallest point to me. But the exercise gave him much pleasure. Unlike the Englishman, the Italian loves to adventure in a foreign language.

We wandered down to a fine house near the ancient burial ground, which was, according to the Roman wont, outside the city gate upon the road which led to Rome. This the Prince told me, pointing it as an instance of the imperial sentiment of his ancestors. "And this dwelling," he said, "was the Villa of no less a personage than Cicero."

Before a small but neat house a garden was laid out, in the middle of which a pond was sunk. The empty receptacle of water was in good preservation. The stone borders of the compartments of the garden were likewise plainly discernible. The statues, however, with which the whole was decorated at the first discovery, had of course been removed to the Queen's Museum at Portici. But there were two short spans, on opposite sides of the garden, of a covered walk which had once been carried round it. We were commencing to look about, when the Prince called out--"Come and see the wine-cellar: 'tis the best in the city!"

"No, thanks--not for me," said Will. I do not know whether he pictured to himself long rows of _amphoræ_--I think that's the name--of Falernian or Chian or whatever it was called, we used to learn about in Horace--ready to our choice and only awaiting the breaking of a seal. I myself could have endured any wine that was not rank vinegar; for October mornings in Naples are warmer than our English summer, and we had had a long dusty drive.

"Nay, I am afraid that I have nothing to offer you but the sight of a number of fine jars," said the Prince, putting aside Will's refusal. "I will not call them empty, for they do contain a residuary crust--the coke of a burnt resinous substance. The people of this city were for the most part Greeks, and the Greeks, as you know, still resin their wine."

Now, I was but a boy then, and I was all for having a piece of this petrified wine lees to keep in my sea-chest as what the Italians call a _curio_, and I hung behind the Prince for that purpose. But he had eyes, like the Queen's picture of Argus, in the back of his head, so I was compelled to take him into my confidence. At first he was very severe, and talked of Vandals and the Queen's orders; but I said,--"A loose piece, a very little loose piece: surely that would not matter." He gave a good-natured laugh, as if to say, "You are only a boy," and stooped to bury his arm in one of the great jars, almost the shape of an egg (just such, save for the lid, as those you may see as signs of the sellers of sugars and spices in London). But as his hand was about to touch the crust there was a sudden hollow rolling resembling that of thunder. It seemed to roll round and round the curved ceiling of the dismal vault in which we stood in almost total darkness.

"_Il monte! il monte!_" cried poor Donna Rusidda, in a paroxysm of fright, and fled incontinently, closely followed by Will. But the Prince stopped to secure me my _curio_, quoting, with a gaiety that had a ring of forcedness to me, the Neapolitan proverb, _Heaven has its eye upon us still_, which they use when some circumstance unforeseen prevents the completion of an evil deed. But if he was scared for the second, he recovered himself forthwith, for it was the tradition of his house to fly in the face of fortune and fate and omens, and all that sort of seaman's gospel. And I am sure I liked the prospect a good deal less than he did. For both he and his sister and his uncle were accustomed to consider the approaching extinction of their house--it was almost their religion; but I, although it was part of my profession to be killed, had only signed the contract to die for my country, and expected to die with at least plenty of sea and sky room; and that awful sound began to operate upon my nerves. I must own that the unfortunate catastrophe of the poor Pompejans presented itself in most horrid colours before my mind's eye. I expected an instantaneous eruption of the _volcano_--as they call it--Pompeji overwhelmed a second time and me with it; to be excavated perhaps some thousand years hence, and by an excusable anachronism to be taken for a Roman skeleton, and hung up and handled by every curious Miss in the museum of one of our descendants. But as the Prince was determined to grope until he found me my _specimen_, a loose piece which he could take without the qualms of conscience, I could not as a British officer--though I was but a mid--display any desire for haste before a mere Italian. And this though a terrific rattle on the vaulted roof told me that the new eruption had begun and we were right under the deadly shower of ashes.

After what seemed an eternity, but was, likely, less than a minute, he found a fragment that satisfied him, and we made our way out, where I may swear that my spirits rose more speedily than his, for my shower of ashes was only rain of the cataract kind which comes down in the tropics, mingled with hail, to which our battle of the Nile seemed child's play; and it was no eruption at all, but that splitting, not very loud thunder, which will accompany a storm of lightning right overhead, almost without intermission, and which is even more terrifying than the loudest disconnected claps. But he saw that which was to a Sicilian of a more disturbing nature than bullet-stones of hail--his sister under one of the spans of covered walk alone with Will. It was true that they were in full view of us; but no Sicilian woman is ever allowed to stand out of earshot with a man who is not her brother or father, and in this instance there was the aggravating circumstance of that mock wooing. But it was as much as one's life was worth to venture out into that hail, even across so small a matter as a Pompejan garden court; and in the Queen's circle at Naples the freer English habits had crept in much, owing to the familiarity of the Queen with the English who came there, and notably Sir William and My Lady. And therefore, with an Italian's humour, he made a jest of necessity. He had on a fine court dress, orange and purple silk. "It is my holiday suit," he said, "and beggars cannot be wastrels."

The Prince needed all the comforts of philosophy, for the thunder and lightning were awful. You expected the mountain itself to have been swallowed up as well as its disgorged city of Pompeji; and each time that the storm was at its worst, Donna Rusidda would clutch hold of Will and cling to him convulsively. I looked on my neighbour's face for a fury to which the storm would be as nothing; but he said: "'Tis her way--I would I were by her. She needs to be held; I have fears for her mind in a storm like this."

I think most officers in our fleet would have held her in Will's place, brother or no brother; but Will would do no more than take her hands in his and endeavour by strong pressure to inspire her with some of his own invincible composure, which presently she began to feel. Her brother, with Italian quickness of perception, grasped the significance of Will's action.

I, looking at the two of them, imagined that the girl, with her lovely eloquent face blanched with fear, and showing a whole range of feelings from terror to gratitude, with her figure now shrinking, now clinging to that splendid image of intrepid youth, must be silently pouring out her heart to him; while all I could gather from Will's attitude was that he was striving to do his duty under circumstances the most difficult and delicate, and that he was for changing places with either of us.

The storm lasted long--I cannot say how long; but it had not been over more than a very few minutes when the tension on our minds was broken in an unexpected way; and, mind you, there was tension, for during that storm his late adversary had conceived for Will a warmth of friendship to which for the time even mine could offer no parallel. Will seemed to the Prince the most splendid gentleman he had ever seen, and wild thoughts were surging through the Italian's brain at the idea of the old tree of the Favara, which had seemed to have borne its last fruit, being brought back to its ancient strength by having this superb Northern stock grafted on to it. The Prince was registering a vow that Will should marry his sister--not by compulsion at the sword's point, as he had once thought, but as the crown of friendship; not in fulfilment of the ancient prophecy which predicted the end of their house, but in final justification of the courage with which they had always defied Fate.

Only some such dream could account for the extraordinary behaviour of the Prince when the thunder and lightning and hail had ceased, and were succeeded by a cataract of rain; unless it were that the Sicilians, with those strange marriage customs of theirs, considered that a man and a woman who had once been plighted to each other, even in a one-sided troth, of whose existence one of the parties was ignorant, were absolved from the almost monastic restrictions placed between unmarried people of opposite sexes.

What passed between them I have had more than once from Will over our Madeira in his mansion-house at Eastry, when he had for years been married to Katherine. It may have gained a little in the telling, but Will was not like most men--he was too proud to embellish, to himself or others--and I must confess that what he told me afterwards tallied with what I gathered from their mien.

For when physical fear departed with the thunder it is certain--as certain as I could make through rain so heavy--that Donna Rusidda began to regard Will more after the manner of the daughters of Eve.

"Signor Hardres," she began, "it is strange that I should be prisoned here with you, who have offered me the gravest insult which any man can offer a Sicilian woman."

"'Tis."

"I took your word as a gentleman, by the code of your own country, that you were ignorant how you were insulting me."

"No man shall ever make me break my word."

"I believe that," she replied, with a charming expression on her face which he did not then understand, but which in reality marked the struggle between a pure high soul and an impulse inherited from generations of ancestresses for whom intrigue was the one interest open to a woman. Men had their wars, their politics, their painting, many things--and woman nothing; though there was once upon a time a Sicilian poetess. But then what is poetry but the breath of intrigue?

She had something on her mind which she could best gain through Will, and being only a woman, and a woman of the South at that, she was well content to make him burn his fingers for the slight he had put upon her, no matter how unwitting he had been.

"Tell me," she said, "why did you come under my window?"

"I was a young fool."

"Perhaps. But that does not explain everything."

"I wanted an escapade. I am no better than other sailors. But their usual escapades of horseplay are not to my taste--I prefer fighting to that. Indeed, I did fight a few times as the alternative, till they grew tired of such serious jests."

"Granted; but why was I honoured with supplying the victim?"

"You were the only unmarried lady with whom I had had the honour of conversation."

"Yes. But if you meant nothing by your serenading, any window would have done--some window in one of the palaces over the Marina, for instance. You were not, I think, staying at an inn, but on your ship?"

"Yes."

"And the Mont' alti Palace is far from the landing steps and not above-easy to find for a stranger."

"Where there's a will there's a way."

He was of course speaking in Italian to her, so that the appropriate play on his own name did not appear, nor had she sufficient English to understand it if he had given the proverb in English; but the truth of it struck home to me when he put it into English for me.

"Assuredly, signor," she replied; "but why should there have been the will?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"You don't know? Can young English officers leave their ship at all times without question?"

He shook his head.

"You had leave?"

"No."

"You would then have had serious trouble had you been discovered by your captain?"

"I suppose so."

"You were not rowed ashore, I suppose, in that fine barge with the guard of honour assigned to you, as when you came to threaten our poor old Governor in the name of His Britannic Majesty?"

"No, I was not."

"Nor even in the very smallest of the ship's boats--officially?"

"No."

"And a watch is kept on English ships."

"Certainly."

"So that you could not take a speaking horn and halloa for a _barca_?"

"No."

"You took, then, the trouble to prearrange that a _barca_ should come alongside of your ship at such a time; it is not necessary that the watch should know this, for a _barca_ man can move in silence when directed, and on such an occasion would not use lights. The spot where he should lie under the ship therefore would have been indicated with some care, and most secret signals concerted. Also there was a guard at the landing stage even at Syracuse, when your great fleet seemed like to blow us out of memory; also there was the sentry to be bribed at the town gates, or a rope ladder to be at a certain place for scaling the walls; also without a trusty guide you would have searched all night for the Mont' alti Palace, which you had never seen; also the lute which you played was native Sicilian, and like to be especially procured for the purpose. If your Admiral had meant to take the city by a night surprise, he could not have laid his plans more carefully; and you did all this without any definite object?"

"Madam, if you must have it, I thought you very pretty and proud."

"More desirable than some ladies in Syracuse?"

"More desirable than any lady in Syracuse."

"At the same time, a woman upon whom you could play a scurvy jest?"

"A pure jest, without any _arrière pensee_."

"And you thought a high-born lady was the proper food for such a jest?"

"Madam, I do not think so. I behaved like a young blackguard, and I am utterly ashamed of myself."

"Well, you fought like a young lion to atone for it." Then, as if she had said too much, or used too soft a tone, she added quickly: "But how is a woman going to forgive you, when you thought it a mere jest to woo her, and were so deadly serious about not marrying her that you were ready to die for it?"

"I don't know," gasped the bewildered Will. "Perhaps--perhaps--you can tell me?"

"Oh, I.... Well, a woman is always flattered by a man being willing to die for her, even if he is only dying to be rid of her."

"I deserve your sarcasm; but I had your good will the night the Admiral came to the Mont' alti Palace, or I might not be here now."

"A woman can forgive anything to a brave--boy!"

"Say cub, madam."

"No, I will not," she said, with a pretty toss of her head, which I noted. "You began like a Neapolitan, but you ended like a hero. And it would have been a very sorry affair to have had blood, or death, or anything unforgetable marring so fair a performance; and there was more besides, which I would fain not tell you."

"I pray you." (This was the time at which I, Thomas Trinder, noted what seemed a struggle between hesitancy and archness.) "I _pray_ you," reiterated Will.

"Must I tell you?" she asked, in the prettiest confusion.

A look of mastery passed over Will's face. There was no smile of triumph, as there might have been on most young officers' faces at such a moment; but he showed sufficient to the quick eye of a fencing woman.

"Because I knew, just ere it was too late, that I did not love you, and nothing would have induced me to marry you, and nothing would induce me now," she added, looking maddeningly lovely, and with a certain softness on her face which might or might not be taken to modify her words.

Will gathered a little hope from this look; for, strange to say, this cartel of defiance and renunciation obliterated the image of Katherine, and made him determine, with all the calm resolution and fierce temper in his nature, that marry her he would.

"But though I cannot, and never would, and could not bring myself to marry you, I desire you to be my dearest friend, as Englishmen can be the friends of women. True, in Sicily there can be no friendship between men and women, because our men are what they are. Therefore a man is never suffered to be alone with a woman until he is irrevocably pledged to marry her--a pledge that can only be revoked by death."

"And yet you marry such men?"

"Such is our fate. Besides, what is marriage but a licence between a man and a woman?"

"But after marriage it is like England: you have no restrictions between the friendships of men and women."

"We have no restrictions as to friendship; but it is not like England, if what the English, who are at the Court--and there are many--say is true."

Delicacy prompted Will not to question her, and there was a little silence, during which she tried to lift the mosaics out of the broken pattern under their feet with the point of her dainty shoe. Then she looked up and said, "Those friendships are not friendships--they are love affairs. But I wish our friendship to be like your English friendships."

Will bit his lip, and there was another silence, during which the white horse in the chariot underneath them lost the little black cube which had been his eye for twenty centuries. Seemingly satisfied with her success in this direction, she reiterated, "You will give me your friendship, Signor Vill?"

He gave her his hand.

At that moment we heard My Lady's voice--"There they are, Cesare: give them their donkeys."

It had, it appeared, occurred to her fertile mind that the Court of Naples should ride round the excavations on the fine asses which they breed in this part of Italy. The Admiral wished to see everything--no light task in the heat of a Neapolitan October day; and driving was an impossibility in the narrow streets, even if the chariot ruts, a couple of inches deep in the lava paving of the roads, had been the proper space apart for the wheels of the _calesses_ in which we had come from Naples. What then but ride on asses? The Court would take it as a jest, and the Admiral should see all he desired.

The idea, like so many of My Lady's ideas, proved to be an inspiration. The managing--the difficulty of managing--the strange asses hastily impressed, entertained the empty heads to whom the very antiquities were interesting seen in this lazy manner, and afforded pleasant food for jest. To those who were minded to see, everything Pompejan presented itself now with an added interest. For once the impluvia--the shallow marble ponds set in the centre of the sloping courts--had their complement of water, and all the ingenious devices for conveying the coveted moisture from every surface of the house to the pond in the centre, were at work.

We clattered a little along a street, when we heard My Lady's clear full voice call out to stop, and those who would to dismount. The Admiral, for all his one arm, was off his ass before any one else, and helping My Lady to dismount, and enter a house of a better kind, which by the traces of mould still left could not have been so long unearthed.

The statues of little Amoretti were still on a little marble island in the centre of the pool, and there were a pair of marble shafts with the heads and shoulders of satyrs standing in the court. My Lady hurried us into a sequence of small chambers, no larger than the chambers made in the thickness of the walls of ancient English castles, which were painted in bright colours with borders of flowers, and had groups of animals masking as human beings for their centres. A grasshopper driving a kind of buggy with a parrot for his steed was very quaint: I had not thought that the Romans knew of parrots.

When My Lady had called Pepino to throw a bucket of water over the designs and freshen them up, their brilliance was startling. Nor were they true frescoes, as we now know the art in England, for I rubbed my finger against them whilst they were wet, but could get no stain.

"You will soon be able to see them better," said the Queen--who went round the excavations with the eye of a purchaser, who had had a residue thrown in--"for I am going to have those pictures of the ancients sawn off the walls and carried to my palace."

"They were better here," said the Admiral boldly, when My Lady interpreted.

She repeated his remark to Her Majesty, who said,--

"Tut! tut! A few storms such as we have had to-day, and a summer or two of the sandy breath of the sirocco, and where would they be?"

Then occurred a lively little dialogue, interpreted, with improvements, no doubt, by her Ladyship.

"If it were in England I make bold to think that we should roof them in with glass."

"You English are made of money."

"A nation need not be made of money to have this whole city roofed in with glass, as it is given back to the daylight; and these would be the finest museums in the world. The Romans were the chief race worth considering in the ancient world, and here we have the actual houses in which they lived, with the ashes still in the braziers and the bread in the bins."

"I think we must give you Pompeji as your dowry when the King has that patent of nobility drawn out which he wishes to have the honour of conferring upon you; and then you can put it all under one hall roof, Admiral."

"You are too good, Your Majesty, but I should feel like a fish out of water with an estate on a continent. I am an islander, and islands are in the keeping of fleets."

"You are running away, Admiral, for the first time," said the Queen, laughing good-naturedly; "but if you won't take the city, the city must come to Portici. One cannot make these expeditions out here every day--why, it has been at the peril of our lives," she added, suddenly remembering the hail--"but in the palace one can be surrounded all day long with these oldest paintings in the world. And sawing them off does not hurt them: why, the ancients did it themselves! When Herculaneum was dug out we found in one chamber the pictures ready sawn off for a removal. It was put off by the eruption for a couple of thousand years, but we carried out the wishes of the former owners."

"Oh, Your Majesty!" said the Admiral.

And this is how we cavalcaded round Pompeji. Nor did we confine ourselves to the streets: we rode into the temples, up to the very altars; and in one of them--the temple, I think, of some Egyptian god--speaking through the interpretation of My Lady, the Director called the Admiral's attention to a secret passage perforated in two places, observing that it was in that passage, and through its openings, that the concealed priests of the goddess were wont to pronounce the oracles to be delivered to a credulous multitude. He was going to add to this valuable piece of information other particulars, perhaps equally interesting, when the Prince Caracciolo stopped his progress sourly by telling him he need be at no further trouble, since he was sure that the milord Inglese would not believe one word of the story: the gentleman was too great an admirer of antiquity to be persuaded that his friends, the ancients, would be capable of upholding fraud in their worship. "I, for my part," he added, "am convinced that all the oracles we read of in history were contrived by similar tricks of imposition." And then this strange man, who in his own religion was profoundly superstitious, changed of a sudden, and would have us believe that these oracles were by direct inspiration of Satan, the arch-fiend of mankind, who, before the establishment of the Catholic faith, was absolute lord and master of the human race.

Once again the Prince's conversation had to be left uninterpreted to the Admiral. This was a warning to My Lady, who, with the adroitness for which she was famous, immediately contrived to fill the Queen with a fresh desire, which was that the Court should sup at a well-known wayside house, a mere _trattoria_, which there was at Resina, on the way back to Naples. So back the donkeys clattered along the rutted lava street to the courtyard outside which we had left our _calesses_.

On the road to Resina they were not all blessings which the party in their hearts showered upon My Lady. The courtiers were tired of their _al fresco_ day, and wishful to be back and banqueting in Naples in the least possible time; for they had had their breakfast, which corresponds to our midday meal in England, portentously early, and though they eat but two regular meals a day, the Neapolitans, who were accustomed to being in attendance on the Queen and My Lady, were for the most part _gourmands_, who looked to making up at their dinner for what they had scamped at their breakfast. But a little before Resina their opinions underwent a change, for it came on a smart shower, and a _caless_ gives but little shelter. There had, moreover, been not the slightest sign of rain when we left Naples. The ladies were for the most part provided with cloaks. The Italian lady is both precious of her clothes and fond of wrapping, though indifferent to the most icy draughts. But some of the men were ill provided, notably the Prince Caracciolo, who was just two in front of us, and in spite of his reputed wealth, of a frugal turn.

Hastily stopping his _caless_, and handing the reins to the lady he was driving, the wife of a friend to whom he paid much attention, he requested her to stand up, and in an incredibly brief space of time had whipped his cocked beaver into the seat, and with the utmost sangfroid replaced it with a bandeau formed of his handkerchief, which unequivocally betrayed his attachment to the narcotic comfort of Virginia dust. With a wonderful celerity for him, his upper garment, which was of pale blue silk, and buttoned with unbecoming tightness over his unwieldy figure, was turned inside out, and a pleasing contrast formed between the milky hue of the sleeves and the purple bombazine lining of the rest of his habit.

You can hardly imagine what a figure of fun he made to us boys, who had already taken a violent dislike to the man, with his spleen and his shifting, inscrutable eyes. But he came out in a rather more welcome light shortly; for when we reached the inn at Resina, and had stampeded from the _calesses_ for shelter into the huge sort of kitchen, lighted only by the great coach doorway, which served for the eating house as well as for the cooking place, there was such a confusion that we had doubts of getting even a _cena_, which, as every one knows, is a much inferior thing to a _pranzo_. But then the dour Prince, unmindful of his ridiculous attire, put on an air of smiling self-sufficiency, and saying, "_Lascia far a me_," went out, and presently reappeared with the Padrone, who, with the help of his women, had been pushing the abandoned _calesses_ out of the rain under a kind of pent-house. The Padrone, with whom the Prince seemed to be strangely familiar, made his appearance in the _negligé_ of a nightcap and a calico short jacket, and having understood our present wants, though he had no idea of the Italians of our company being anything more than well-to-do gentry, disappeared with the truly Neapolitan promise, "_Avrà un buon pranzo in un momento_."

"That's a very short time," said the Queen.

"Indeed, you will get it in a very few minutes," said Caracciolo.

The Queen turned on him with the haughtiness that came so naturally to the daughter of Maria Theresa: "The Prince seems to know Resina better than I should have expected."

"Yes, your Majesty. The fact is, that there is an estate in the neighbourhood to which I go for hunting."[4]

[4] More what we should call shooting in England.

"Indeed!" said the Queen; "and do you get good sport?"

"Oh, excellent, your Majesty--excellent."

"The King will be glad to hear of it. He is always glad of fresh country to hunt so near Naples."

"I should be most honoured," said the Prince, turning round to scowl at the innkeeper, who had returned. We caught the scowl, and wondered if it conveyed more than that the Prince's temper was ruffled. Our patience had been put to no great trial. The innkeeper had come to announce the _buon pranzo_, which consisted of a tolerable vermicelli soup, a pork fry, and a dish of delicate little fish unfortunately fried in oil. The Italian ladies turned up their noses at the fish: to cook in oil was the sign of a very poor eating-house. To us boys, however, all was manna in the desert, and Prince Caracciolo fell to with such energy and rapacity that before I had despatched four or five of the little transparent fish, which almost fell to pieces, he had emptied the dish in front of him altogether. The little creatures glided down his fauces unmasticated, much more quickly than they move in their native element.

Noticing the dismay on the faces of the men in the company, he mentioned that the supply was unlimited, and that more would be brought in hot from the pan as required. The Queen called for _lachrime Christi_, saying, "To dine at the foot of Vesuvio and not drink _lachrime Christi_, would be worse than being at Rome and not seeing St. Peter's."

"_Vulite roba buona?_"[5] asked mine host, not in the least knowing who she was, but gathering from her appearance that she was rich enough to like his best.

[5] "Would you like good stuff?"

"_Si, signor_," she replied, with a little smile at the fellow's naïve ignorance. Never before had a royal party dined more economically: including the "capital stuff," the bill did not come up to seven carlins a head--half a crown perhaps of our money. And when the bill was brought, or rather the amount named--for in these humble _trattorie_ they save the expense of bill-paper--she ordered an equal amount to be added to it, with the good wishes of their Majesties of the Two Sicilies.

The man was aghast, until he had a nudge from Caracciolo: "Don't you see that it is Her Majesty, _Pasquale_?" And then we had the civility and obeisances which would have spoiled the whole fun of the feast if our incognito had been betrayed earlier. And My Lady, in particular, had enjoyed herself mightily: she loved new dishes, and vowed that she would have pork fry and those little sand-fish done in oil at her next supper at the Embassy.

We did well in stopping. A heavenly evening had succeeded the storm and shower; the latter had precipitated every azotic impurity in the atmosphere, and imparted to it a fresh supply of oxygen; a luxuriant vernal vegetation exhaled its perfumes more freely--it was a treat to breathe! A brilliant moon assisted to conduct us safely and pleasantly through Portici to the Castel del Carmine; and, skirting the shore past the Immacolata, we rounded the Castel Nuovo to the Royal Palace, where we drew up in a kind of salute while the Queen entered, and then dispersed to our several destinations.