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.
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.”