Naples.
Whilst Charles and Henry were one evening walking along the beautiful
beach they saw a ship nearing the land. A strong breeze was blowing
at the time, and whilst they paused to admire the noble bark, all
sails set, ploughing the crested billows, and floating over them like
an enormous sea-gull, she came nearer and nearer to the young officers.
Another minute the sails were lowered and anchor was cast. A small
boat was dispatched from the ship, and made for the beach just where
Charles and Henry were standing. They formed a thousand conjectures
of the meaning of this movement. When the boat came near the land,
a tall young man, dressed in the uniform of the Neapolitan service,
leaped on shore and advanced towards the young officers.
A few words of recognition passed. He was a lieutenant in the
Neopolitan army, sent with despatches for the commandant of the garrison
of Messina to send two or three companies of the newly-enrolled troops
to the capital.
On the way to the garrison he informed Charles and Henry that the war
was nearly at an end, but there was a great deal of disturbance and
sedition in the city of Naples, and that the garrison there had to be
doubled. The object in anchoring the ship on the coast was for fear
the garrison of Messina might have been surprised and taken by the
Carlists. Having assured himself all was safe, he entered the citadel
with the young officers, and was presented to the captain, to whom he
handed his despatches from headquarters.
The next evening found Henry and Charles, with two hundred men, on
board the ship that had anchored on the coast the day before. The
The excitement and bustle of departure had silenced for a while all
feelings of remorse, and the old passions that reigned in the soul of
Charles rose again from their dormant state. Her eye flashed with
life and her lips quivered with joy; there was still within her grasp
the chance of fame. Ambition fanned the dying embers of decaying
hope, and every pious resolve was thrown aside until the course of
events would realize or blast her new dream of greatness.
A few days brought them in sight of the beautiful capital of the
south of Italy. The modern aphorism, "See Naples and then die," was
said in other words in old times, when the Caesars and Senators of
the empire enriched its beautiful shores with superb villas. There
is not in Europe a bluer sky and, true in its refection of the azure
firmament, a bluer sea than around Naples. The coast undulates to
the sea in verdant slopes, which in autumn have a rich golden hue
from the yellow tinge of the vine-leaf. Its classic fame casts a halo
around its charms; its history in the far past, its terrible mountain
and periodical convulsions from the burning womb of the earth, render
it an object of attraction to all classes.
Charles and Henry were quite alive to the impressions felt by tourists
when, whirled along by the panting steam-horse through the luxuriant
Campo Flice, they see for the first time the column of murky smoke
that rises to the clouds over the terrible Vesuvius. The old mountain
was then, as it is now, the terror and the attraction of tourists.
The catastrophes it has caused, the cities it has swallowed up in molten
ashes, the thunder of its roar when roused from its sleep, and the
unhealthy, sulphurous vapors ever vomited from its cone, render it a
veritable giant that the human race loves to see at a distance.
Our heroines were already acquainted with the "Light-house of the
Mediterranean," and from afar the lofty and ever-blazing, active Etna;
hence Vesuvius was not so attractive as a volcano as in the halo of
classic lore that hung around it. At a distance the mountain seems
to be harmless, the blue outline of the lofty cone terminating in a
dense bank of smoke, like stormclouds gathering around the snowy peaks
of the distant Apennines; but when the adventurous tourist wishes to
approach nearer to its blazing crater, and toils up its torn and
blackened sides, he will see in the immense chasms and rents traces
of might convulsions. Deep rivers of molten lava that take twenty
and thirty years to cool; the quantity of ashes and cinders that could
change the whole face of a country and bury five cities in a few hours,
must tell of the enormous furnace raging in the bowels of the earth,
of which Vesuvius is but its chimney.
Strange, Charles longed to see Vesuvius when but a tender girl in Paris.
She little thought the extraordinary course of human events would
bring her, not only under the shadow of the terrible mountain itself,
but send her through a most thrilling scene on its barren slopes.
Let us hasten on to the course of events that rendered the extraordinary
life of this girl so romantic.