Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

“ With that immense establishment of the British Embassy on her hands, no matter what the time of day, or what the function was that required to be attended, all he had to do was to take his place beside the smiling beauty, and find himself at the point where his duties began. She was the centre of life, the ear and tongue of royal favour at Naples.
A man like the Admiral, so inexhaustible in emergencies, but so prone to sink back into a low state of vitality between whiles, was more than ordinarily likely to slip into such an arrangement easily. ”

“ I suppose if a man were starved of sleep he would die, as if he were starved of food and drink. And as with a man who has felt the imperious call of sleep, so it is with a man who has felt the imperious call of love. To some men it comes late: I have lived forty years without it, but now that it has come, though I know I must be a villain, I feel as if love were as much part of my human nature as sleep, and I feel that life is a great, lovely, glorious thing, and that life with love is like winning a victory in which you do not let one ship escape. ”

“ And now, after bare leisure to cool down as I should have thought, she was sitting by my side in a most superb costume—the great lady all over—a veritable queen in condescension. In the short drive from the Embassy to the Royal Palace she was all solicitude for me, fearing a return of the fever after the drenching of the afternoon; but, praise God, I felt no ill result. It is truly wonderful what effect my spirits have upon my health. When I have the enemy within cannon-shot, or the society of those I love, nothing mortal seems able to hurt me. ”

“ As we laid ourselves alongside of the third ship—that was the Spartiate, the fourth—that was the Aquilon, raked us with double-shotted guns. The concussion was awful; the crashing of masts and yards, and the yells and death groans which arose from our bows, attested the precision of their aim. The men in the forecastle would have been fairly staggered if it had not been for Will. I could see St. Vincent’s men looking as if they had received their death-warrant; and I am sure I felt quite sick, as I was covered with human blood spouting from the quivering limbs and mangled bodies all round. ”

“ God knows I would die for Emma, as I would die for my country. I pray that I may never be the villain to her. There has been love, I know, perfectly pure between a man and woman, which has yet been most disastrous for the man, if not for his country also. But, thank Heaven, this is not so with Emma. It has been entirely for the advancement of our country, of which I have been permitted to be the instrument. Without that wonderful woman we should never have got to my battle at all: it was she who secured us our supplies at Syracuse ”

“ I am not to her a mere man, but the saviour of England, and the Sicilies, from the wicked murderous French. Nelson the man is nothing to her. He is, as you see, a little one-eyed, one-armed being, obliged to brush his hair over his forehead to hide an untidy scar. If she thought of the man at all she would think of a big fine man like Captain Troubridge; and if she is a bit motherly to me, why, so she is to my mids, and it’s all because I’m such a poor little thing playing hide-and-seek with fever. ”

“ To be at once a boy and a sailor gives one a proper appetite for such things. And I ever had as keen an appreciation of a beautiful woman as most men; and these Italian and Sicilian women, when they choose, can be so infinitely alluring, with their little laughter and their merry wit, and their open pleasure in their beauty. Donna Rusidda was in the highest spirits, and since all talked English, as being my only language, her broken English made her flashes of wit irresistible. ”

“ You are sometimes a boy with the wiseness of a man, and sometimes a man with the foolishness of a boy.”
He felt the blood rushing to his face: her criticism was rather franker than he liked, but she had addressed him with greater familiarity than she had yet allowed herself.
“You do not like her,” she said. “Well, I will tell you: your Admiral, who has a weasel’s eye for the French, may be caught napping by a woman; and she is very much in love with him—as any woman might be,” she added, with a little tragedy sigh; “for men are so scarce, though you will be one some day, Signor W-Will. ”

“ Now, no man that ever breathed was less of a coxcomb than Admiral Harry, but as the name of his ancient family was to pass out of the earth with his death, he looked to it that the son-in-law who succeeded to his honours and his great estate should be of such rank and fame that it might be no regret even for the Fleets of Eastry to be lost in their greater honours: some Duke it might be, or at least an Earl, whose belted ancestors had fought for the White or Red Rose; and Katherine Fleet, aged now eighteen, might have had any such an one as came within the magic of her moods. ”

“ But the windows of the Admiral’s chamber commanded view enough for any mortal man to desire. In the distance were the long line of mountains culminating in the snow-topped St. Angelo, twice as high as Vesuvius, which divides the Bay of Naples from the Gulf of Salerno, and, in the jaws of the Bay, Capri; while nearer in were the Castel dell’ Uovo rising up sheer from the drawbridge running out from Santa Lucia; the hill of Pausilippo, with its white villas peeping out from dark trees; and between them the royal garden with its feathery palms and ilex avenues. ”

“ I am sure that Donna Rusidda, as she came forward to welcome us to the poor house, in which she had been born, and her ancestors before her, for five hundred years, looked as fit to be a queen as any woman in Europe: she was so beautiful, her nostrils, her mouth and chin were so delicately cut. I have seen no cameo of antiquity equal in beauty of outline to that which she had executed and presented to Will the time we sailed away to the reconquest of Naples—the cameo which every day is pinned on black velvet upon Katherine’s wrist, for she is a gentler memory to Katherine than even to Will. ”

“ If I look out on to the Bay, the serried lines of lights show me ships which fought in your victory, the greatest the sea has ever seen. If I look on the land, wherever I see a flare of light, or hear a band of music, I know that they are celebrating you. The Queen, in her palace, has your heroic name hardly ever off her lips ”

“ Incidental caresses are beautiful, tender, endearing things. But to abandon yourself to a banquet of them on a Neapolitan autumn night, in the darkness and silence of a great house, hushed for a fever patient—a banquet of caresses with the loveliest woman in the world—and not a human soul to save you from falling in love! No, already I love Emma as much as an English gentleman may love a friend’s wife. She is to me the most beautiful, affectionate, loyal, respectable woman alive ”

“ She will deny me to people when they come to tell me the same tale—it is always the same tale—that the Emperor, Acton, the Russians, Sir Sidney Smith, the Bey, the Grand Signor, they are all of them doing nothing or worse than nothing, and Ball is helpless without even food from Sicily for the Maltese. Why should I have to listen to them every hour of the day? The Grand Signor is the best of them, and he is a mule ridden by those crafty Russians, who are playing the deep game. ”

“ The Queen’s army cannot move till November, which will give me time and plenty to summon Valetta.
“Between it all I may get some action to clear my atmosphere. If I stayed long in Naples, I feel as if I should not be able to leave it. I have never lived till now, but I must struggle against it, though goodness knows why. Surely the Power which sent us into the world meant us to make the best of our lives. Not the best in a shore-parson’s sense, but the best in the sense of extracting the utmost cause for thankfulness out of life—the utmost gratitude for it. ”

“ These water-mazes are very popular with the rich; and in some instances, like the present, immense sums are spent on their construction: indeed, they form the staple of amusement at an excursion to an unfamiliar palace or villa, where only one or two are in possession of the knowledge where the traps lie. You are safe nowhere: the shower may be lying in wait for lovers in a retired walk, or for a whole company on the most frequented lawn. But the water is laid on more lightly for the most part than Donna Rusidda laid it on for Will. ”

“ I have no need to marry the first lover with a title who presents himself. I am a lord’s daughter, passing rich—and passably good-looking, Will?”
“Be serious, Kitty.”
“Indeed I must, and say good-bye, Will,” she cried, as the strokes had ceased ringing out from Eastry Tower some two or three minutes, “for the minuet was for twelve o’clock, and I am engaged to Lord Dover—for that only. Good-bye, dear Will.” ”

“ And no less contrasted than kingdom with kingdom and people with people, is capital with capital. There is no light-hearted music in Palermo streets, save that which comes from Naples. And the Sicilian is too grave and dignified to chaffer or to make himself cheap or dear. And with the Sicilian Delilah the story is not one of banqueting and music, but one of wild passion and desperate to-morrows. ”

“ It is quite easy to give the numbers of an army to a man who is playing ball with you, or trying to take off a pulcinello.
Donna Rusidda turned round to Will, who was still very grim and hurt, and looked as though he would give his whole prospects to hide himself in the little Saracen building which the Queen had erected as a kind of summer-house, and which was the last piece of shelter before the Palace, that rose with the splendour and solitariness of a temple half a mile away. ”

“ It was his business to make men fit for duty again with as little rest as possible. And then he knew the Admiral. What would that eager, never-resting, planning mind have done in a darkened room, where he could see nothing, cut off from all friends who could give him any news of his fleet? He would have imagined, to say the least of it, a French fleet entering the Bay, and he not being on his ship to have the honour of beating them. ”

“ To Captain Troubridge, then, My Lady was an adventuress. He never thought that the love which ennobled her connection with Mr. Greville might also ennoble her passion for the Admiral; and he made no allowance for the rich colours of the imagination with which the Admiral painted My Lady’s companionship and love, till it seemed to him like the sunshine which makes the difference between the winters of Naples and England. ”

“ Since my arrival at Naples I have found all ranks, from the very highest to the lowest, eager for war with the French, who, all know, are preparing an army of robbers to plunder these kingdoms and destroy the Monarchy. I have seen the Minister of the insolent French pass over in silence the manifest breach of the third article of the treaty between his Sicilian Majesty and the French Republic. Ought not this extraordinary conduct to be seriously noticed? Has not the uniform conduct of the French been to lull governments into a false security, and then to destroy them? ”

“ Neither army nor mob could daunt her from fighting for a friend as a tigress will fight for her cubs; and, what is finer, she is equally dauntless of responsibility. Had Emma been a sea-captain, she would have been as daring as Foley at the Nile. Heaven meant her to be a queen, but stayed its hand and sent her to a country where there was a Queen after her own heart, and to be the ambassador of a greater country, for she is the ambassador of Great Britain. Sir William is too much taken up with the set of his eyeglass and the handling of his snuff-box. ”

“ Naples, as the Admiral said, is a city of fiddlers and light-o’-loves, utterly irresponsible; willing to begin a war with a nation like France, without counting the cost; marching to battle with the intention of turning her back the moment the enemy stopped retreating and faced her; willing to squander money that was needed for the very existence of the kingdom on pasteboard decorations and mythological fêtes; willing to accept any strong master, as Delilah accepted Samson, and from the very first thinking how she might betray him. ”

“ But, on the other hand, the prim fountain with Diana in the centre, supported by two dolphins, with their lips curled and their tails plaited, certainly did not come up to our clear pool, as deep as many a house is high, carrying on its bosom three or four great barcas, hanging with crimson and silver, and ringed all round by overhanging palmetto-like clumps of the feathery papyrus of old Egypt. Nor, I confess, do the men in Monsieur Watteau’s pictures, who are generally dancing, come up to men like Captain Troubridge and Captain Berry, in the uniform of His Majesty’s Navy. ”

“ But he was fighting with a demon rather than with a man. I never saw a human being with such a fighting fury as Will, who sprang at him like a leopard. I do not see, however, how this should have prevailed, with Will’s ignorance of fence, had not the mossy ground on which the Prince was standing proved rotten, as mossy ground will at times, the surface rubbing off and leaving a slippery mud. The Prince’s foot slipped, and Will struck his sword out of his hand. The Prince called out to him to despatch him; but Will said, with his air, “My honour is satisfied—I am not one to kill a fallen man.” ”