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
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(_Grant Allen in "The Westminster Gazette."_)
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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.