CHAPTER XXVII.--Of the Death of Donna Rusidda, the Resurrection of

Caracciolo, and the Happy Ending.

The 12th of July, 1799, is a day I can never forget, for on it happened two events, one shocking and one surprising, to the last degree.

The Admiral had gone to bed the night before more dejected than I ever knew him; for though he had had the honour to receive His Majesty on board, and the executive officers of the Government, to take up their official residence there, until such time as St. Elmo should have fallen and Naples be safe again for the Royal presence, he was terribly cast down by a piece of news which came by the same frigate that had brought His Majesty, and which I found the means to send on to Will. The Queen had not been suffered to accompany the King. That great Sovereign was left to eat her heart out in disgrace, nominally for the misfortunes into which her headlong recourse to arms in the November before had plunged her kingdom, really because General Acton, who accompanied His Majesty, found that by using the King as a tool against her he himself had the ruling of the kingdom instead of taking his orders from her.

It was thought very strange that one of the Queen's ladies--the Princess of Favara, Donna Rusidda--should make urgent and repeated applications to accompany the Court to Naples, though Her Majesty was not suffered to go. Her applications were consequently refused, and the convoy, guarded by His Majesty's frigate the _Sea-Horse_, Captain Foote; and His Sicilian Majesty's frigate the _Sirena_, which had the King on board, started without her. But since convoys sail very slowly, they were overtaken by a light vessel, with some despatches for His Majesty; and with the despatches came the melancholy news that the Princess had been found dead in the Mardolce lake. The business of receiving the Court on board was over, and I was standing in attendance on the Admiral, when up comes My Lady, evidently with something grave on her mind. I was about to take my leave when the Admiral motioned me to stay. Indeed, privacy on the flagship there was none to be had, except by turning the King out of the Admiral's state-room. What with the Court and its hangers-on, and officers from the squadron with various business, the ship had about double her complement on board, though at bedtime they grew a little less from the sheer want of room to lie down. It was evening, but we were close to a lantern, whose light fell on the faces of My Lady and the Admiral, though so little on mine that perhaps they forgot me.

"Nelson," began My Lady, with blunt words but the gentlest and most engaging manner, "were you in love with little Rusidda, that I came upon with you that day at the Favara?"

"Dearest Emma, I never loved any but you--not even, as I know now, Lady Nelson. I never knew what perfect friendship and sympathy was until I met your noble heart, which has filled up all my heart, leaving no space for anything unless it were a child of yours--flesh of your flesh--if you had one."

"I believe it," cried My Lady, with generous quickness, "though I saw your lips upon her forehead, and though she poured her whole heart out to me, poor little thing, when she was begging to be brought."

"I can swear it," he said, "by all that is most holy to me: by my hopes for my country--by anything."

"I am not jealous," she said; "you can be a better lover than I saw then?"

"I do not love her," he said; "though I think she is a sweet, beautiful, gracious, noble woman."

"But I know how she loved you," said My Lady, "for she confessed, and that is why I entreated her to be brought."

I could see that she was in a way jealous, for every look as it were, every little gesture while she was questioning him, had been in the nature of a caress.

"I think it was the purest kind of hero-worship, though she besought me to receive her love--that is to say if I am a hero, and I am sure I doubt it now."

Oblivious of my very existence, My Lady flung her arms round him, and wooed him with those lovely lips, crying "My king of heroes!"

Then she murmured again--"Poor little Rusidda! what a brave, true woman, and the best I think in Sicily!" Then she added aloud, "You are not afraid of death?"

He looked at her inquiringly.

"I am not afraid of my own death," he said, and truly.

"You have seen it in a hundred forms; you have seen your most faithful friends and servants--a handful at a time, perhaps...?"

I could see his hand tighten round hers.

"I am a sad coward at that, dearest Emma: I have wept in the midst of victory at a comrade's falling beside me."

"Then, Nelson," she said, "you have need of all your courage now, for the woman who broke her heart for you is dead."

"Dead?" he gasped, almost falling.

"Dead," she repeated. "Do you not remember her saying, 'We Sicilians fear pain, but not death'?"

I do not think I ever saw such a well of silent grief, even in a woman, as there was then in the Admiral for Donna Rusidda. Certain I am that if the spirits of the late departed hover round those they love best on earth, the spirit of Donna Rusidda craved no other monument than those great tears which splashed down on the quarter-deck of the old _Foudroyant_.

* * * * *

And here I may be permitted to digress to say what I saw when, years and years later, Will and Katherine, and my wife--Will's veritable sister, a more imperious but sweeter Will--journeyed to Sicily, a trip on I forget what excuse, the reality being that my wife had a trouble, happily passed, with her lungs, which made Will carry us all off travelling _en prince_, to the serene skies of Palermo. The first thing we did--it was Katherine suggested it, thinking it must be uppermost in Will's heart, and that he, who was still so madly her lover, might hesitate to speak about the other woman--was to ask where we could find Donna Rusidda's grave.

Can it be believed? The landlord of the Prince of Wales's Hotel,[8] the best in Palermo, was unable to identify the Princess with herself. But on the Sunday a band was playing in the Flora, and we, who had been visiting the palace in which our beloved Admiral had spent so much of his time with the Hamiltons, were drawn to the music in a listless way, and found the crowd collected between the cupola from which the music proceeded and a fountain of white marble in the present Sicilian taste, which is not to be commended, though its parts may be beautiful. It consisted of an oval basin, perhaps a dozen feet across, with various aquatic plants growing in it; and in their midst, with only the head and part of the shoulders out of the water, a carving of a drowned woman with an exquisitely lovely face. And at one end of the fountain was a column with a broken lyre hanging to it, also of white marble, on which was carved in gold letters:--

"_Rosalia di Mardolce, Princess of Favara. The last fruit of a dry tree._"

[8] Now the Hotel de France.

Will questioned the people who were about the fountain, such of them as understood Italian. None of them knew much of her, and one and all were under the belief that she was called Rosalia of the Mardolce because she was found drowned in it, and not because it was her name. The Favara, he learned, had fallen hopelessly into decay, and was now merely a storehouse of the farmer who rented the land. And though every woman and child in Palermo knew that the beautiful lady had drowned herself for love, not one of them remembered the name of the lover who had gone away and left her.

* * * * *

My Lady's most solicitous attendance was unable to cheer the Admiral. He retired to bed in the most absolute dejection. He seemed to be almost haunted by an idea that his luck must have died with the death of the loving Rusidda, and with him bodily infirmities always crept in after ailings of the spirit. I was therefore almost terrified by a most untoward event which happened in the morning.

His Majesty had risen very early, and as I noted that he was gazing with intense anxiety at some distant object, I hurried up to the chart-house and procured a glass for him. The moment he put the spy-glass to his eye he turned ghastly pale, and with an exclamation of horror let it fall, clattering on the deck. It was fortunately not injured, and I hastily picked it up and looked in the same direction; and lo! away on our starboard quarter, with his face full upon us, much swollen and discoloured by the water, and his eyes started from their sockets by strangulation, floated the ill-fated Caracciolo! All the superstition of the Italians was called into play by this extraordinary and fearful apparition. His hair--which, though it was dark when we saw him that day at Pompeji, was turned quite grey with the apprehensions of his last few days--streamed in the light breeze that rippled the placid waters. I could see how alarmed the King was: no one but an Italian or Portuguese could have turned so deathly pale.

We had many priests on board; they had swarmed round the King like flies round a pot of honey. I hunted them up now, one after another; but none was of the smallest consolation, till one, more adroit than his brothers, told the King that the spirit of his unfortunate Admiral could not rest without his forgiveness, which he had risen to implore.

This the King was graciously pleased to accord, but without a corresponding effect on the corpse, which was head and shoulders above the water and was swimming (or drifting before the wind) to Naples.

The occasion was a serious one. It would probably have been small loss to his kingdom if Ferdinand the First of the Two Sicilies had in a fit of horror plunged overboard to seek relief in a watery grave; but he was much more like to lose his kingdom over it than his kingdom was to lose him, for if ever Caracciolo reached Naples in that terrible position, which gave one the idea of a swimming man, all our eighteen ships of the line might not have been able to restrain the feelings of the populace.

There was therefore nothing for it but for me to waken the Admiral, whom I had seen to bed in such sickness and dejection, from his uneasy slumbers. In supreme moments any man in the world who was near him must have turned to that commanding spirit for strength.

But now I was more alarmed for the Admiral than for the King. What would, I wondered, be the effect on his mind, already overwrought by the terrible news of the preceding evening, of this apparition of one upon whom he had pronounced the death sentence found by the Sicilian court-martial. However, there was nothing for it but to fetch him.

He was so ill that he could hardly walk, and I was in a cold sweat as to what would happen. I handed him my glass to look at that upon which all eyes were riveted, and to my joy I saw the blood and animation rush back to his face, and that curious smile spread over it that was there as we rode into the Nile.

"What, he--that scoundrel?" he cried. "Mr. Trinder, ask the Captain to have her unmoored and to hoist sail, and head the ship for him. We'll soon put him right."

I think every Italian in the ship expected him to be struck dead, or a thunderbolt to fall from the clear sky, and not a few of our chaps felt a bit queer over it; but up went the anchors and aloft went the men, and we shook out our sails and bent them, and very soon we were bounding along towards the apparition.

How great a man I felt the Admiral to be at that moment! as great as I felt him when we were running into the Nile and Trafalgar, with the French blazing away at us, and us reserving our guns double-shotted until we were near enough for them to tear the whole length of the ships we raked. To head the ship for it, our great _Foudroyant_, of which we were so proud, made every man feel his courage; while if the Admiral had ordered a boat to be lowered it would have taken some stiff-backed men to go in her--though he would, I have not the least doubt, have gone himself. When we did get up to it, and backed our topsails, no Englishman in the ship need have been put out by it, for it was plain to every one that the body had risen because it was so distended with gases, bred by some horrible internal disease. And then we read the Sicilians a lesson of British courage and discipline. For when the Admiral gave his orders, without the smallest unusual bustle or excitement a boat was lowered, and the men took the evil-looking and horrible-smelling thing on board--still, as it proved, with those double-headed thirty-two pound shot fastened to the feet--and rowed it a couple of miles, it might have been, to a point on the shore, where they buried it at their leisure.

And I do think that this should have laid the ghost of Caracciolo as effectively among the Admiral's enemies in England as it did among the superstitious Neapolitans, who were veritably more impressed with this than by any of his victories over the French.

Hardly had the _Foudroyant_ returned to her moorings, when we beheld the standards of England and the Sicilies run up on the lofty Citadel of St. Elmo, and had it saluted by one-and-twenty guns repeated from every vessel in the fleet, as they noted the proud signal. And as soon as might be after that, a barge dashed out from the Arsenal with Captain Troubridge on board, to announce the surrender of the Citadel, the last point in Naples to hold out against the Sovereign, at a loss to us of only two killed and five wounded, though the Swiss and Russians and Albanians and Calabrians suffered somewhat more severely, owing to a sortie which they had successfully countered.

So interested was every one in the new hero of the hour--the splendid British seaman who had no equal, but the Admiral, where tough fighting was to be done--that nobody noticed a second barge which pulled alongside shortly after the other, starting from the Castel dell' Uovo, and which, as it proved, contained, besides Will and its crew, a lady and a lame old gentleman. But that was the first time that Katherine saw the Admiral, to whom her gracious presence was to be the one bright star during the wearisome weeks that he had to be at Deal, to watch some new move of the flotilla which Napoleon had assembled at Boulogne for the invasion of England; and the first time that my Lord Eastry, the greatest of all the frigate captains before Cochrane, and the great Lord Nelson were face to face.

* * * * *

This brings me back to the Admiral--the Admiral about whom I sat down to write this chronicle, but whom I had almost forgotten for the moment, for Will is so much the nearer to me.

Well, the Admiral lived for more than six years after this. And though his friends made moan over his ill-health and ill-spirits, and that great love of his for which alone he had the wish and the spirit to live, whatever the sin or the shame of it might have been; and, though his enemies at home found him neglectful, and insubordinate, and whatnot, he went from strength to strength, and as the necessity became the greater, he put forth fresh powers of his genius. It was his very name which preserved England from invasion during the long months that Napoleon lay at Boulogne. He had the Danish Navy at Copenhagen, and would have had the Russian into the bargain if his blockheads of superiors had let him. And, as all the world knows, at the sad and glorious day of Trafalgar he swept the seas.

And so to rest, in the heart of the Cathedral, which is the heart of the City, which is the heart of the Empire, which was the creation of him, who made all the seas the highways of the King of England.

Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.

"MORE OR LESS MARRIED.

"Mr. Douglas Sladen's first novel is a distinct success. He has been exceptionally fortunate in his _mise en scène_. He wanted to write a Deceased Wife's Sister novel. In itself, one can hardly imagine a more unpromising subject; and I confess I took up the book with the gravest misgivings. But they were soon dissipated. For what does Mr. Sladen do but transplant that familiar British grievance to Japan, of all places in the world, and introduce us to European Yokohama society, which has never yet been exhausted from the novelist's standpoint! On this virgin soil he has planted two heroines--sisters--both delightful, and both sympathetic. Most writers would have made their hero marry the wrong sister first; but Mr. Sladen, more wisely, makes him marry the right one--the one he loves, the one who loves him--while yet keeping the reader's interest mainly engaged on the one he doesn't marry. This is excellently managed. Again, the novelty of the local colour and the brightness of the story make us forget the familiarity of the annual and perennial grievance on which it hinges. In due time the first wife dies at an excellent juncture, and Phil Sandys, the hero, does not marry her sister Bryn, the delicious heroine. On the contrary, to prevent scandal, he sends her home to the England she has never seen, consigned to the care of a most unpleasant rector cousin. All the circumstances conspire to produce a _dénouement_. You foresee but one end--and it doesn't happen. A steamer to Melbourne, where such marriages are legal, and a short way out of the trouble? Nothing of the sort: Mr. Sladen takes a bolder and more dangerous course. Bryn's objection to a marriage with Phil is a strictly ecclesiastical one--the Church forbids: but the objection goes down before a sufficient cause like a Japanese house before a gentle earthquake. How Phil and Bryn substituted a union blessed by the American Minister to Japan and the whole resident Christian population for a strictly legal ceremony must be read in the novel itself. Certainly, the story as a whole succeeds in interesting and amusing the most jaded reader; it is wholesome, healthful, breezy, and airy. Its Japanesquery is delightful; and its ethics will only disturb the peace of the Anglican clergy, while deepening in the minds of not a few among the laity the sense of opposition to a bishop-made restriction, which prevents the legal union of two people so obviously designed for one another as its hero and heroine.--G. A."

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Transcriber's Note

Archaic and variant spelling is preserved as printed. Further, as noted at the beginning, all misspelling in quoted matter is likewise preserved as printed.

The following notes apply only to the other (i.e. non-quoted) material in the book.

Punctuation errors have been repaired.

Hyphenation and accent usage has been made consistent.

The following amendments have been made:

Page 26--repeated 'and' deleted--... as he scanned him, face and figure, ...

Page 46--Frederic amended to Frederick--... which was the great Emperor Frederick II.'s favourite ...

Page 293--conversasation amended to conversation--... many of whom could hold sufficient conversation with Italians.