But she was still struggling to reach me.
“Diana! Not this end to all our love! Not this end to the high hopes with which we came. It is not ourselves, but Liberty, sister. See, he will be good; he will not hurt you” (she was groping eagerly for the knife, which he ended by letting her secure). “I did not know,” she cried, “I did not guess—until this moment I did not. I will never see him again, if you wish. I will be no man’s wife to your hurt. Diana! It is the truth!”
I let her rave. I never took my eyes from his devil’s face.
“So,” I said, deeper now, and with my hands upon my storming bosom, “you would make your sacrifice to Reason, monsieur, in me—me!Mymission was to be the Pucelle’s, and her glorious fate, with which, I suppose, you were to assure your little after-paradise of loves. O, a grateful use for this poor heart, to be a stepping-stone to the respectable amours of Monsieur and Madame Pissani! Only I renounce the honour, as I renounce the cause of the paragon of taste who could prefer that for this.”
I tore at my dress.
“You have made your choice,” I cried; “it is all said. Only think, monsieur, think sometimes of what you have lost, before you talk of the battle being won!”
I hurried from the room, even as my false friend called to me again in agony, “Diana! Believe me! Listen to me! O, what shall I do?” But, even in my frenzy, I had the wit to pause the other side of the door, listening for his response.
“Thou shalt go back to Rome, my dearest, my heart,” he said. “Hearken to me, my Pattia.”
But she only sobbed dreadfully, “Not like this—not in this disgrace. I must follow her, even if she kills me.”
“By my soul, no,” he said; “for your life is mine.”
I could hear them wrestling together; till, in a moment, he prevailed, even before I had guessed he would.
“Hush, my bird,” he panted softly; “there is one other way—if it must be so indeed.”
There followed a pause. I could have laughed in the mad joy of my revenge. He was an upstart, this patriot; a son of the people. He would commit her to his own—wive her, I most fervently prayed—and deposit his jewel, this little pet of luxury, in the squalid cabin at Camaldoli where he was born. He had often told me of it; of his early experiences of the joys of life in a place where the peasant could not fasten his coat against cold, or take refuge from the sun under a tree, or borrow a stone from the hill for his paths, or renew his starved patch with manure of leaves, or set a water-butt to catch the showers, or be buried decently when he dropped at the plough-tail and died, because buttons, and the shade of trees, and stones, and dead leaves, and rain-water, and a dead peasant were all taxed alike—items in a hundred other feudal impositions which left existence hardly its own shadow to prevail by. And now these joys would be hers; for I knew that she had not the strength to oppose him, though enough to damn her own fool fortune by insisting on the Church’s sanction to her possession of an estate of mud and wattles. I listened eagerly for the next.
“If thou wilt be my mother’s daughter?” he said.
I could have clapped my hands. I hurried down the passage and out into the night, fierce, burning, but with an exultation in my rage. The sight of men risen, scared and listening, as I passed through the wineshop, served to recall me to myself and to my danger. I was outcast from these conspirators—if only they had known!
With an effort I composed myself, and turned to them with a smile—
“Messieurs, but the door is between me and the street!”
One of them at that stepped forward, opened it, and gravely bowed me forth. As gravely I stepped into the rain, and made without hurry for the beach.
So this was the end to all my exaltation, to my dreams of love and sacrifice! I stamped in the puddles. “Vive la tyrannie! vive les Bourbons!” I cried to myself as I sped on. So shamed, so wronged, so spurned! was not the worst justified to me? I saw the shadow of my loved monster standing solemn sentinel over the single trunk we had brought with us. Our heavy baggage we had left in Rome. O,mon fidèle! how at that moment I could have stormed my wounded heart out on thy breast!
“Canst thou lift it and follow me?” I said only.
He answered, the dear Caliban, by obeying.
“Whither?” he growled.
I looked desperately about me. Near at hand it was all a tangle of spars and sheds, and the rain driving between. But inland, the night went up in glistening terraces, scattered constellations all shaken in the thunder of a great city. Far south, what looked like the red light of a forge alternately glared, and faded, and grew again, battling, it seemed, with drowning flaws of tempest. It was the glimmering bonfires of Vesuvius, those hot ashes of a consumed empire, from which, according to Pissani, the phœnix Liberty was to arise. I laughed: “Not yet, my poet, my friend; since thou choosest another than Pucelle to breed thee thy patriots!”
I turned to the north. There, upon a huddle of tall buildings, looming near and enormous in the dark, the stars of the hills seemed to have drifted down, clinging thickly over all, like primroses under a bank.
“It is the royal palace,” said Gogo.
“It isourway, then,” I panted, on fire. “Follow me, and quickly; we are not safe here.”
Along wharfs and causeways, plashing over the filthy stones, by squalid alley and reeking wall, I fled and he pursued. I had no lodestar save my hate; but it served. The growing scream and thunder of the town drove towards us as we advanced; but few people in that bitter night; until, skirting the massed buildings of the arsenal and palace, we emerged suddenly through a little lane into the Strada di St. Lucia, and paused a moment undecided and amazed.
It was as if the devil had taken his glowing pencil and ruled off this quarter of the city for his own. A noisome ravine of houses it was, with life like a fiery torrent brawling along its bed. Song and tumult and mad licence; fingers quick to stab, or to snap like castanets to a dancing child; doorways that were the mouths of tributary sewers vomiting filth and tatters into the main; fishermen, at their flaring stalls, bawling crabs and oysters,frutti di mare—my God! what fruit, and from what a sea that drained a shambles; women out in the rain and the open, making their shameless toilettes, and screaming the while such damnation by the calendar on their sister doxies for a word, a retort, a mere flea-bite (the commonest experience, after all) as to leave themselves, one would have thought, no vocabulary for the more strenuous encounters of fists and claws; children swarming everywhere in the double sense, and scattering shrill oaths like vermin; rags and nakedness and insolence—a loafing melodrama—an epitome of the worst squalor and viciousness in all Naples—such was the district upon which we had alighted, the mid-ward of the Lazzaroni.
As we stood, a ruffian, swaggering past, swerved, and approached a handsome, impudent face. Gogo, without a word, heaved his shoulder between. But I had no fear. These Lazzari were the king’s friends—and mine. I pushed aside my henchman.
“Pour le roi!” I cried, and pointed towards the palace.
He understood, and whipped off his greasy hat.
“Viva il re!” he answered enthusiastically, showing his white teeth, and motioned us to a street going eastwards up the hill. I saw and recognised the same fellow once or twice afterwards. He was a Michele di Laudo—Mad Michael, they called him—who, as chief of his vagabonds, was to take a prominent part in the defence of the suburbs against the French.
We crossed the street under his protection, and on its farther side, before waving us on, he bent and snatched a kiss. The rank sweet touch of his lips was like aviséon my passport into hell. It seemed to bring the blaze, the colour, the stench of the reeling streets clashing to a focus in my brain, and it sent me speeding on half drunk and half sick, loathing and hugging myself. I was an angel in Sodom, running blindly for the refuge of God’s wing in a dazzle of roaring lights, and confused by the glare, knowing not whether I turned to the self I had left or to the self that was awaiting me. Gogo, straining in my wake, panted as I hurried before him—
“For every dog but the watch-dog, a bone.”
I turned on him, with a stamp.
“A bone! I am meat for your masters, I tell you.”
“I serve no Pissani,” he said sullenly.
I shook him in my anger.
“Never breathe his name to me again, or we part.”
“Very well,” he said. “I thought as much. He has got his deserts.”
“Hashe?”
I glared at him one moment, then turned and sped on—up the street of the Giant, passing the north flank of the palace, where sentries stood on guard, and so into an open piazza, the Largho S. Ferdinando, into which the palace itself stuck a shoulder, and where were churches and the flaring portico of a theatre, and other buildings strangely fine in their contiguity to the slums we had left.
And here, amidst the wild drift and gabble of a throng less foul but as aimless, we plunged and were absorbed, and stood together again to breathe.
All Naples, it seemed, was bent on shouting down its brother.
“What next?” bawled Gogo in my ear.
A handsome inn, the “Orient,” stood comparatively quiet and isolated in an odd corner of thePlace.
“Rooms—there!” I answered.
“Its exclusiveness makes it prominent,” boomed Gogo, with as much dryness as he could put into a roar.
I beckoned him on imperiously.
On n’a jamais bon marché de mauvaise marchandise.
In a little we were installed in comfortable rooms.
“Now order wine,” I said, “and we will drink.”
I sipped, while he sat on a stool at my feet, soothing the weariness from them with a touch that was only my monster’s. The Chianti and the sorcery of his hand began to drug me.
“Drink you too,” I murmured.
He reached for his glass.
“To whom?” he said. “What are we now? It makes no difference; only I must know.”
“Death to all republics,” I cried, “and long life to the King of Naples!”
“Ah!” he said, between a groan and a sigh. “Well—the poor child—you have cast her off, I suppose,” and he drained his glass.
I stared at him a moment, then fell sobbing upon his shoulder.
“You pity everyone but me,” I cried, “and my heart is broken.”
“What, in the old place?” said he.
But I was too miserable to retort; and half the night afterwards he held me, fallen fast asleep, in his arms.
Forthree days I remained shut into my rooms at the “Orient,” not daring to go out, a prey to the utmost nervousness and agitation. Do not suppose that on that account I was the less determined in my plans for vengeance. But revenge that lays itself open to retribution misses the better half of itself. I remembered my old friend Mr. Roper’s dictum, and beat my brains only for the means to strike with impunity. I was not from the first without a design. The difficulty was to give it practical effect; because for the moment I could not use Gogo. For myself, under my assumed name, I might lie secure in this hiding. To makehimmy carrier to the English Embassy would be to mark a sure track to my retreat with every punch of his wooden legs. I dared not let him out; I dared not even temporarily part with him in my peril; I dared not come to a decision, while knowing that my life depended on a wise one. For I was a renegade revolutionary—I could not blink the fact. Though I had never hitherto actually set foot in Naples itself, there must be many to know me by report for that apostle of the new creed of equality who, but a few years before, had stumped their country, winning converts. And now! the safety of many men—and women too—was in my hands; and not Pissani, nor those others when they came to learn, would have forgotten the nature of my secession, or the significance of the threats which had accompanied it. If passion had given me away, caution must redeem me. I had no faith in Patty’s power to protect me. The occasion was too desperate; the interests involved were too many. Pissani was a reformer before he was a lover. Imustbe sacrificed, if possible, to the cause I had the means to betray.
All day, peeping from behind the curtains of our windows, we saw the piazza below like a seething cauldron of unrest. As significant of that as anything were the out-at-elbows letter-writers under the arcades of the old theatre of San Carlo, who, at a time when every man feared to commit his simplest thoughts to paper, did less than enough business to keep themselves in macaroni. They served to exhibit the popular bankruptcy as well as the briefless advocates, who, from thriving on the countless abuses of the law, found themselves abandoned to the lawlessness they had created; as well as the journalists, who, having been brought under a strict moral censorship, starved as vampires might on a diet of milk; as well as the professors andsavants, who were hampered, it must be confessed, by a thousand childish restrictions in their efforts to make life beautiful by turning it inside out, and to teach men to follow in themselves, while eating an omelet, the whole process of absorption and digestion; as well as the bolder demagogues, who, mounted on steps or tubs, screamed denunciations of their misgoverning sovereigns, under the transparent veil of Claudius and Messalina, and called upon their hearers, by many classical examples, to strike for liberty and political cleanliness. At which the Lazzari laughed, understanding just so much that, if they were to be no longer flea-bitten, they would be deprived of the traditional luxury of scratching; and shaking their heads over that new idea of equality, which was in fact so old an idea as to be embodied in a popular proverb: “Tu rubbi a me, io rubbo a te,” which one might expound: “‘If Taffy robs me, I rob Taffy’—so what the devil’s all this fuss about?” Naples was rich in charitable institutions for the encouragement of indolent beggary; and what sort of a reform was it that sought to deprive an honest loafer of his soup? And so to a mantheyheld out for dirt, moral and material, and for the king who assured them a continuance in both—a condition of things which made revolution a very different affair from what it had been in starving Paris.
Since the date of my first visit in ’94 this ferment had been rising, in spite of all efforts of the authorities to check it. As well try to stop the decomposition of a dead body—for such was the national credit. The foolish, vile queen, panic-sick that she was destined to the fate of her better-meaning but as foolish sister in Paris, persuaded her weak, common husband into a counter-blast to the Terror—with as much effect as King James the First’s against smoking. It is bad policy to try to suppress an evil by advertising it. Self-martyrdom is the most popular of all notorieties. They inaugurated a system of espionage, which in itself was an education to conspirators; they read Jacobinism across the forehead of all learning, and so alienated the intelligence which might have saved the land; they crammed the filthy prisons with suspects, and broke the hearts and fortunes of those who were the best leaven to corruption; they made it criminal to wear scarlet waistcoats and long trousers; finally, for some such dereliction, or one less momentous, they hung up two or three respectable boys in a public square, varying the entertainment by shooting down some scores of spectators who had fallen into a panic at the noise of a distant musket-shot. And then, having thrown their sacrifice on the flames of discontent, and so lowered them, they settled down with an affectation of the strong arm, and a blindness to the embers smouldering underneath.
These had not ceased to smoulder, nevertheless, feeding on their new fuel; and by and by the blaze was to come.
Eh bien! la voix du peuple est la voix de Dieu!So they say; only, unfortunately, here the Lazzari were the crack in it. It was a pretty Naples I had come to.
One afternoon, while looking out of the window, I saw a magnificent equipage cross the square, and, turning the corner towards the palace, disappear. I had been waiting during these long days for some such vision, the nature of which now, if, indeed, the plaudits of the loafers had not confirmed it in my mind, was established in the glimpse of a bold, beautiful face which I obtained in its passing. On the instant my resolution was made, and I ran to the table and hastily scribbled off a note:—
“One whom you formerly befriended seeks your help and protection. She is in possession of important secrets, which you cannot afford to discard. Ask for her, under the name of Madame Lavasse, at the‘Orient.’”
“One whom you formerly befriended seeks your help and protection. She is in possession of important secrets, which you cannot afford to discard. Ask for her, under the name of Madame Lavasse, at the‘Orient.’”
I called Gogo, and hurriedly instructed him—
“Lady Hamilton has just passed, driving to the palace. Her coach is gilt, with four dapple-greys. Go secretly out by the back; make your way there circumspectly, wait for her reappearance, and throw this in at the window of her carriage. Then return here, but by a roundabout way, and not till after dark. Be swift and sure. Everything—our safety, our lives—depends on this opportunity.”
He groaned out a little sigh: “And our honour, Diana? Think of the time when we shall be damned together, before you betray the child.”
I walked up and down in terrible agitation when he was gone. Betray! Who had been the traitor, of us two? Not a drop of water for her, though I were to lie in Abraham’s bosom!
Night came, but no Gogo. Tortured with doubts and apprehensions, I could neither eat nor rest. Had he too repented at last of his loyalty, and abandoned me in my need? They all fell from me, those I had succoured and most trusted. Sometimes, in my agony of mind, I upbraided his selfishness, cursed my own irreclaimable fondness in putting faith in man. I believed he had sold himself—whether to cupidity or an emotion, what did it matter. At length, quite exhausted by my passions, I fell asleep on my bed, dressed as I was.
I slept far into the morning, and awoke to a consciousness of a presence in the next room. Was it he, returned at last? Dazed, and sick with excitement, I rose and ran to meet him. A lady only was there, cloaked and mysterious. She lifted her veil, and showed me the face I had desired.
It had not, indeed, so much altered in these years as her person’s amplitude. Conceive, my dear friend, the head of a Circe on the body of a hippopotamus! Now I perceived Nature’s forethought in the gift of those immense feet. They were disproportionate no longer. She had grown colossal. The mountain had come to Mahomet. It was wonderful how, in spite of all, she could have retained the general fine contour of her features. One would have thought she could hardly have kept her countenance, seeing the changes below. I certainly found it difficult to keep mine, as I fell on my knees before her, and, catching at her hands, hung my head.
She stepped back from me, shaking the room. I understood then in a moment that the old glamour was only to be recovered, if at all, with discretion.
“Now, madam,” she said, “being come at your request, I must ask you for your reason, and as short as you’ll please to make it.”
“My messenger”—I began.
“Your messenger,” she interrupted me promptly, “is put under lock and key till we know more about him and you. He got a cut on the cheek before he was took by the guards; but that wasn’t my fault.”
I buried my face in my hands.
“I thank you, madam,” I said, with emotion. “He lies at least in better security than I.”
“Well, I won’t answer for that,” she replied, “till I come to hear what you’re after.”
I looked up.
“O, madam, my benefactress!” I cried. “It is much to expect, perhaps; but do you not know me?”
“O, perfectly, madam!” she said, with a curtsey that made her balloon. “We make it our pains to know all about our visitors. Believe me, you was under surveillance from the moment you stepped ashore at the Mole. It was not very likely, was it, that we should overlook the arrival of her as seemed wishin’ to reap the discord she had sowed among us a while back? Be sure we know you, madam, well enough, and the reputation you built for yourself in Paris too!”
Startled as I was, I had a difficulty to refrain from retorting that my reputation would bear comparison with hers. But I bit my lip on the temptation, and for the moment took refuge from everything in tears, to which, however, she listened silent.
“I did not refer to that,” I cried, looking up with clasped hands and swimming eyes, “but to the goodness of a great and beautiful lady, who once succoured a poor girl in distress.”
“And I include that too in my knowledge,” said she; “and much gratitude you’ve shown to the class as befriended you.”
“Gratitude!” I cried. “O, believe me, that, until I reached here, I never even guessed that, in conspiring against royalty, I was conspiring against you, my saviour.”
She sat down on a chair, near breaking it.
“Didn’t you?” she said, gathering the folds of her cloak about her. “Well, supposing you didn’t, what then? You ain’t goin’ to forego your principles for a sentiment like that—don’t tell me.”
“If you won’t believe me”—I murmured despairingly.
“Why look here, Madame Lavasse, or Please, or whatever your damned name is,” she said, shaking a hectoring finger at me, “one may help a girl, but a woman helps herself, which I make no bones of guessing you’ve managed to do pretty free. The question with you is whether Jacobinism or royalty is going to pay best; and if you’re proposin’ to change about and turn informer, no better moral than profit is at the bottom of your little game, I’ll vow. Well, I don’t say but in that case we’re open to treat; only I’ll ask you to drop the artless girl, which don’t sit well on you at your age, and talk with me like one woman of the world to another.”
I rose to my feet with a burning face.
“Go!” I said, with an imperious gesture; “insult me no more. Have I not suffered wrong and outrage enough, but my heart must be made the sport of every common”—
“Highty-tighty, miss!”
She rose in astonishment. For a moment she stood conning me, my quivering lips and heaving bosom. Then of a sudden she smiled.
“Well, perhaps”—she said. “There, I’ve a way of letting my tongue run away with me; but it’s no example for you to follow. I should have remembered the glass houses in the sayin’ before I twitted you with your past. Only for sure, Diana Please, it can never be said against me that I betrayed my love that betrayed me.”
My rage was all gone. I dropped my head, with a sad little cry. The sound of it brought her to my side.
“Was he not your love,” she whispered—“him that came with you?”
And I answered, “He was my love.”
“Was—was,” she repeated. “Well—I see. They take other fancies.”
“You was sold yourself—is it not true?” I muttered.
“Ay,” she answered, and sighed. “But it was for gold.”
“Youcan forgive, then, and forget,” I said; “but not I—no, never.”
“You would ruin him?”
“Yes, and her.”
“Bring him to the gallows?”
“That is why I sent for you. You can trust me.”
“And in the meantime you fear for yourself?”
“I struck her. He tried to stab me. I cried,Vive le Roi!You know what that means.”
“CryVive la Reinefor the future. ’Tis the sweet saint who suffers most. Well, it seems the truth at last; and you have your provocation—by God, you have! Only for me, having one different, to help myself by you?—it goes against my stomach somehow. I wish it was your principles instead of your jealousy.”
“Help me in nothing but to some place of safety, where I can inform and direct the court.Itwill not be troubled with your ladyship’s scruples.”
“How do you know? ’Tis so you have been taught to regard my sweet queen, I suppose?”
“O, madam!” I cried, “you know what made me an ardent pupil.”
She stood musing upon me long and earnestly.
“Yes, perhaps,” she said at length, and sighed; “what a fool preacher is Love, not to be able to keep his own faith! To drive woman for refuge on woman—’tis like banishing your physician to the enemy’s camp. Well”—she took my hands; I thought she was going to kiss me, but she made no offer—“for myself, I don’t want to hear none of your inculpations; but I’ll put you in train to satisfy your passions on others that may. Will that suit you?”
She turned before I could answer, and was going.
“It must be soon,” I urged hoarsely, following her; “O, madam! don’t you understand that it must be soon?”
“Within an hour or two,” she said, over her shoulder. “Have no fear. You are already protected—and watched.”
I set myself, with what self-control I could, to await her return; for, after our emotional confidences, I expected nothing less than that she would come for me presently in person. But in that I was mistaken, as was made evident in the ushering up to me by and by of a very courtly young gentleman, of a shrewd, sallow visage, who informed me, with a bow, that he was Love’s emissary.
“His Majesty, sir,” I said, with a faint smile, and some intentional ambiguity, “is well represented. Do we go to the palace?”
“We go,” he said, “tothe palace. Will madam be pleased to accept my escort?”
I took the arm he offered me. In view of some such contingency, I had spent the interval in making my toilette agreeably to it.
He conducted me out by the back way to the stables, where, in a little court, we found an ordinary post-chaise, with two horses, awaiting us.
“Faire comme on le juge à propos,” murmured my companion; and, seeing my trunk (pregnant with damning evidence) well secured in front, he handed me in, followed himself, pulled down the blinds, and gave the word. In an instant we were rolling over the stones.
It was a very roundabout way, it seemed to me, that we took to the palace; yet for long—so potent was my trust in myself as an emissary of vengeance, and so engaging the chatter of my comrade—I suspected no treachery. But at length, losing conscious sense, through the thunder of the wheels, of a roar and racket which had once accompanied it, I started as it were awake, and, in an immediate panic, peeped from behind the blind nearest me. And then I saw that we had already left the town, and were tearing along country roads.
I half rose, with a cry: “The palace! This is not the way to it!”
My companion seized my wrist in a grip of steel, forcing me to reseat myself.
“The very nearest, I can assure you, madam.”
“You are taking me to prison?”
“My faith! a prison that some would like,” he said, showing his teeth.
I struggled with him. “Let me out! I will raise the country else!”
He released me at once.
“As madam wills. Madam will claim protection of her friends the Jacobins? For me, I consult only her safety.”
“What!” I panted at him, sinking back. “Tell me who are you?”
“Luigi de’ Medici, at madam’s service,” he said, with a bow; “a name, at least, that should be a guarantee of some worth.”
“No doubt, sir; but, as a stranger, at your mercy”—
“I have the honour to be, madam, the chief of the police.”
The word awoke new frenzy in me.
“My God! I am betrayed. For pity’s sake, sir, tell me where we go.”
“I answered, madam, to the palace. I am a man of my word.”
“What palace?”
“Ah! At length madam talks reason. To the Palace of Caserta, ten leagues away.”
I stared at him aghast.
“To be immured there?”
“Truly,” he said, “to be immured in a paradise, amongst fountains and flowers! It is not like the inside of a wall.”
“You are pleased to mock me, sir. But why am I brought so far?”
“Madam shall ask of her mirror,” he said, with a charming grin. “Shall I so abuse my office as to admit that His Majesty is susceptible; and that Madame the English Ambassadress—who, nevertheless, is of a perfect honour—is jealous for her friend the queen, and, perhaps, for her own pre-eminence in beauty? Certainly not. It is quite enough to say that Madame Lavasse, being in some danger of assassination in Naples, is removed to a distance for her own security; to a place, in short, whence she can direct the lightning, without exciting suspicion of collusion with Jupiter.”
He bent and looked into my face.
“I vow, madam,” he said, “that the last frost of discretion must melt in the fire of such beauty. Take my word for it, that the Queen of Olympus never of her will would have admitted Venus to be of her court.”
This was very disarming, to be sure; and already, before we reached Caserta, Signor de’ Medici was in possession of some preliminary information that proved useful to him.
CasertaPalace was a sort of Versailles to the Palazzo Reale. It was a fine, long, rectangular building, lofty and imposing in the eighteenth century style of grand architecture, with marble colonnades and innumerable windows. The town it dominated, being a royal townpar excellence, was comparatively clean and reposeful; and the palace gardens were as extensive and as beautiful as any in the world.
It was not, however, to a corner of this stately pile that I found myself committed, but to rooms in the Casino of St. Lucius, which stood in the park some two miles north of the main building, and commanded a noble view, not only of the surrounding country, but of the dark pruned alleys beset with white statues, and the terraces and fountains and cascades of the gardens themselves—a lovely spot. And here, for the moment secure and at peace, I resolved upon a life of placid enchantment, treated like a queen’s hostage, and biding the development of events.
I had my little sleepy, soft-footed household—an old groom, a pretty maid or two, and a quite delectable cook. No restrictions were placed upon me; I was free to wander as I listed, and, indeed, had no inducement to venture without the cordon of sentries who were my best protection. The month was April, the most lovely in all Naples; and, save when Capri, showing near and blue, gave indications of the scirocco, I spent all my days out of doors. So tranquil was it, so remote from the centres of ferment, I could have thought myself in Avalon, though all the while and around the clouds of a coming tempest were gathering to burst. As I loitered by those empty corridors of green, smiling back the smiles of the unruffled statues, listening to the drowsy thunder of the waters, seeing only for all tokens of human life the little marionnettes of place swarming, quite distant and minute, about the steps of the palace, France was preparing to launch her legions on Naples both by land and sea; scared refugee cardinals were trotting by the dozen into the city; Nelson, off Toulon, was shaping his course, by way of Aboukir, to the arms of Mrs. Hart; Ferdinand was tremblingly fastening his warlike greaves on his fat shins; and, finally, Maria Carolina was making her bloody tally for the hangman. And only of the last was I actively cognisant, seeing that it was there alone lay my concern with the outer world.
From time to time M. de’ Medici would visit me in this connection, coming ingratiatory and quite lover-like to refresh his portfolio with new names from my list, or to examine my correspondence, which was entirely at his service. I had taken no half-measures. The spared assassin comes to strike again, was my motto.
“Have I not proved myself a sincere convert?” I said to him once.
“Assuredly, most beautiful,” he answered; and fell to counting on his fingers. “You have given us already certain proof of the guilty complicity of—One: Signor Domenico Cirillo, professor of botany, arborist, edenist, pupil of Jean Jacques, too delicate a flower for this climate; two: Francesco Conforti, court theologian, a priest and ambitious—nothing singular, but he will be beaten in the race for power by a neck; three: Carlo Muscari; four: his excellency the Marquis of Polvica, a lamentable case; five: Pasquale Baffi, professor of dead languages, for which he will soon be literally qualified; six: Gennaro Serra di Cassano, a very pretty young gentleman, late released from confinement—but it is sometimes policy to spare the cub, if one would learn the way to the dam; seven:—but, ’tis enough, madam: those six will vindicate you.”
“You are welcome to them, monsieur,” I said, “if only you would exchange against them all my dear, indispensable Gogo.”
At which, as usual, he shook his head, tightening his lips.
“A bond of sentiment. You are better apart.”
“At least you might acquaint me where he is?”
“As to that, he is very safe and well cared for.”
“In prison?”
“Nominally—nominally,ma belle. But, observe—so are you, you know. What then? There are prisons and prisons.”
“Well, if he is as well off as I?” I sighed. And, indeed, the assurance was a wonderful comfort to me.
As a matter of course he kept me constantly informed—though I never questioned him—as to the career of the Pissanis, the head and front of all offending.
“Signor Nicola is our bell-wether,” he would say. “We have hung a little invisible cymbal about his neck, which has the strange quality of sounding only to us. O, we police are the latter-day fairies, believe me! All unconsciously to himself, he calls the flock about him; and we—we have nothing to do but keep count of them, till the season of the butcher arrives. Then we shall see. I shall want, perhaps, all the fingers of my own hands, and of yours too—my God, a dainty tally! And madam, you ask—though your lips do not move? It is very laughable, take my word. At once, since her marriage, the dear little frog emulates the bull. O, fie, fie! Madam misreads me. Such a scandal! I would say only that it has inoculated her with her husband’s ambition; that she is become an enthusiast in the cause, attending meetings, distributing tracts, haranguing multitudes in her sweet round voice, that is like pelting giants with sugar-plums. Yes, as madam implies, it is marvellous. What will not love do? But for me, I am susceptible: I adore all beauty. I could wish the poor child another embrace than the hangman’s.”
“Well, sir,” I answered, “you will have occasion, perhaps, to offer her the alternative.”
“O, fie!” he said. “Is not my heart engaged immutably? Otherwise—who knows? It is a sad world.”
It was a very dark and bitter one to me from the moment of his revelations. So, she could be independent of me, and happy in her independence! What a world of hypocrisy and double-dealing was exposed in this her easy repudiation of my claims upon her! During all these years that I had counted her my slave, she had been nursing her schemes of treachery—been manœuvring, probably, to make me the instrument of her conveyance to her lover’s arms. And now, no doubt, they were laughing over their outwitting of me. Well, who laughs last laughs best.
One day I had a notable visit. Two ladies, walking through the grounds, came upon me where I was seated in a grove of myrtle. One was Lady Hamilton, very great and gorgeous in a shell-shaped hatde sparterie, trimmed with butterflies and a violet ribbon knotted under one ear; while the other, whom I did not know, a dowdy, ignoble old figure with watery eyes, wore a plainfichu-chemise, and an immense bonnet with a veil thrown back over it. They both stopped upon seeing me, and Lady Hamilton beckoned. I rose, advanced, and curtsied.
“Here, your Majesty,” said my friend, “is the very person herself.”
Her Majesty! I paled and trembled; then ventured a glance from under my lashes. Sure I was not to blame for my remissness. I vow I could have thought my lady had brought her monthly nurse with her for an airing in the country. The poor woman looked steeped in caudle, flocky with child-beds, and no wonder. In some two dozen years out of her forty-five or so she had borne near as many children. She had prayed for an heir, and Heaven had sent her a tempest. The eternal lyings-in had soured her temper, which was not further improved by neuralgia and opium. Nursing, as she did, outside her litter, a perpetual ambition to wear the breeches of government, it had been characteristically mean of her husband to adopt this method to correct it. Yet, in spite of all she had borne both from and to her lord, her vigour remained unquenchable. Indeed, in a kingdom which annually abandoned some twenty-five thousand babies to the foundlings, a child was the cheapest present one could make to one’s favourite of the moment. Yet, as I saw her now, she was the farthest from imposing or attractive. Her legs were short, and her upper lip so long that her nose stood nearer her forehead than her chin, on the former of which she wore a single fat curl like a clock-spring. She put a hand to it two or three times, before she addressed me, very quick and hoarse, in French.
“Maria! Mais elle fait une bonne mine à mauvais jeu!Come hither, child. So this is our redoubtable littlemoucharde? We have need of her in these days of the devil’s advocacy.”
Her eyes looked injected; her flabby face puckered at the temples like yellow milk skin. As I approached, she turned away in evident pain. Lady Hamilton was all effusive attentions at once. She waved me to stop, and supported her friend to the seat I had just occupied, commiserating, explaining, and fondling in one.
“O, my darling queen! It is the neuralgia that worries my sweet like a dog. Lean on your Emma. Have you nothing, child—no salts, no drops?”
I fetched a certain vinaigrette from my pocket, and bending before the royal knees, snapped the stopper once or twice under the royal nose. The effect was instantaneous. An expression of maudlin relief succeeded to the strain. She lay breathing peacefully, with a smile on her lips, until, after some minutes, she aroused herself with a sigh.
“What was it, then? It is a Circe, with her witch’s face and her potions!”
But this was to trespass on the other’s domain.
“Give it to me, if you please,” said Mrs. Hart coldly. “Her Majesty would prefer to take it from my hand.”
I returned it quietly to my pocket.
“Nay, madam,” I said; “it is a remedy that must not be repeated.”
She looked at me astounded; then broke into a forced laugh. “Hey-day! We are pretty absolute, are we not?” But the queen, grown suddenly very affable and communicative, put her aside with a hand which she laid upon my arm—
“We will not quarrel with our physician. She knows what she knows. Moreover, for all her long exile and the little errors which she has redeemed, she is of the great nation which we love. Is it not so, child? and hast thou heard what are the best and latest news? None other than that thy glorious captain, the supreme Nelson, has within the last few days annihilated the French fleet at Aboukir! Ah! that rose is from thy heart. It speaks the proud blood, the red rose of England, mantling above all foolish sophistries. Thou canst not but rejoice with us in the destruction of the enemies of thy race—of all the world!”
And then she and the other began a little litany of excommunication:—
“Dogs and assassins!”
“Despoilers of churches and women!”
“Hordes of anti-Christ vomited from hell!”
“Scum and rabble of an infamous democracy!”
“Monsters of sacrilege!”
“Cowards curst of God!”
“Whom to slay is righteousness!”
“To whom to give quarter is deadly sin!”
“Subverters of all order and decency!”
“The devil hang the lot!” said Lady Hamilton.
The queen rose, quite refreshed and reinvigorated. Suddenly she was holding me with a piercing look. Craft and villainy peeped out of her little inflamed eyes.
“I come to put a question to you, madam,” she said. “There is a lady of our retinue—the Signora de Fonseca Pimentel. Your correspondence contains no proof of her disloyalty to us?”
“No, madam, or I should have informed M. de’ Medici,” I answered, in a faint terror; but rallied immediately. “I know only that she is in communication with the Signor Carafa since his escape.”
“Ha!”
The red eyes of the ferret closed a moment, then reopened to an ineffable smile. She held out her hand to me to kiss.
“We find you an invaluable physician, Madame Lavasse. To have eased a poor queen—it is something; but to cure this land of its headache”—
“Ah, madam!” I said, “there I yield to the hangman.”
Both ladies burst out laughing as they moved away. The queen turned and waved her hand.
“You shall not be forgotten,” she cried; and I curtsied.
A few days later M. de’ Medici called upon me. He read out a little indictment he had prepared for my behoof—
“Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, wife to Pasquale Tria de Solis, Neapolitan officer, noble, now deceased: emotional; authoress of some panegyrical sonnets to royalty and the age of gold; since suspect of schemes for the education of the populace; shows a partiality for red; advocates an appropriation of the Punch and Judy shows to the lessons of national virtue; claims the liberty of the press to print her halting rhapsodies;” (Monstrous!) “imputed sympathiser with Ettore Carafa (son to the Duke of Andria, the king’s major-domo, and to the duchess, Her Majesty’s mistress of the robes) in said Ettore’s late conspiracy to print and distribute an Italian version of the ‘Rights of Man,’ which conspiracy resulted in the execution of some companion malignants, and the escape from Naples of said Ettore; finally, convicted of corresponding with said fugitive, to the end of His Majesty’s overthrow and the subversion of his government!”
“Not convicted, M. de’ Medici.”
“That is all one, most beautiful,” said the chief of police, folding his paper. “Madame Lavasse’s word is as good as her bond.”
Within a week the Pimentel was lodged in the prison of the Vicaria.
That was in October; and thenceforward things moved fast, though scarce quick enough for me, who was beginning to beat my wings against the gilded bars of my cage. For what was all the national excitement to me but a means to my personal vengeance? And I feared, feared that while I lay aside for others’ use, my prey would find a means to escape me.
On the 22nd of September I had heard the guns of the citadels down below in the bay welcoming Nelson’s arrival. The sound shook every nerve in my restless heart, so that I could hardly eat or sleep that night; and I laughed myself into hysterics over my little maid Martita’s description of how Madame l’Ambassadrice d’Angleterre had flown up the side of theVanguard, and cast herself upon the breast of her hero, who was a very little man, and quite unable to support so much emotion.
Still, thereafter, as day by day drums beat, and recruits were gathered, and men hanged themselves to avoid serving, and the English admiral was urging upon the poor fat, wind-blown king one of three alternatives: To advance upon the French, and conquer; to die sword in hand; or to remain and be kicked out—while all Naples was seething and roaring in a vortex about my garden, the garden itself remained silent and empty, an island in the midst of a whirlpool.
But at last His Majestydidset out, and reaching actually as far as Rome, while the republican general Championnet was falling back for a spring, blustered naughtily for a little, killing a few Jews, threatening the wounded enemy in the hospitals, committing to sack and pillage the very sacred city he had come to relieve, and finally, upon the approach of the concentrated French, deserting his demoralised army, and pelting back, with all the might of his perspiring legs, to where?—why, to Caserta.
It was evening of the 19th of December, and a thunderstorm, to terrify one to death in that desolate park, had broken over the town. All the imprisoned electricity of months past seemed to me, as I stood fascinated at an upper window of the Casino, to have torn itself free, and to be hunting in and out of the trees for fugitives from its fury. Far away and below the thousand eyes of the palace shut sickly to each blaze, and blinked and were staring frightened again in the crash that followed. The hand of an incensed God bent the proud necks of the trees, and His wrath drove a roar of leaves and twigs criss-cross about the alleys. It was the anarchy beginning.
In the midst I saw two figures, cloaked and dusk, butt their way to the door below; and a moment later Martita summoned me to receive messengers from the palace. I went down, and found two officers, pale and glaring, awaiting me in the parlour. The rain dripped from their unbonneted locks; their hands were restless with their hats and sword-hilts. I curtsied in wonder; and the elder, with a shaky, conciliatory smile, addressed me.
“You will pardon this intrusion, madam. The occasion is our excuse. You have in your possession some charm, some restorative, by which Her Majesty the queen has already greatly benefited?”
“Assuredly, monsieur. It is in my pocket now.”
“It is much needed at the moment. You will vouchsafe us the loan?”
“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 ownchassé, 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.”
Whata 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!”
“Heis 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 unhazardouscoup de grâcetickled 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 hediddose, 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 doyoudo 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. Allislost, 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 serveyoualone!”
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:ifwe go, it will be but as a fowler withdraws from his nets, that the foolish birds may fly more confident into the lure.”
Ifwe 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 wassauve qui peut; and I was beginning to formulate my own desperate plans, when de’ Medici whispered quick in my ear—