Part 20

“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.