Part 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet he was not among the captured.

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

“He still baffles you, monsieur?”

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

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

A stealthy smile creased his mouth.

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

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

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

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

“Where is she?”

“In the Carmine.”

“And a hostage?”

He shivered, and hung his head.

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

I turned away with a laugh.

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

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

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

But I knew at last that the moment was near.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The king staggered back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.