Читать книгу The Admiral - Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen - Страница 12

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COMING to where the road into the city and the road to the ruins divided, at a spot where a few almost-buried columns marked the site of the ancient market-place—the Agora is the Greek term, I believe—the Prince of Favara and his sister made their excuses and bade their servants drive home to the Mont’ alti palace; and here they waited till sunset, within their palace, in the best poor state that the Marchese’s reduced circumstances permitted.

Not having received the expected communication—either while Will was in his company on the Anapo, nor in the hours which elapsed in the interval—at sunset, the Prince, with two gentlemen of his acquaintance, rowed out in a private barca to the Vanguard, there to demand to see Will. Now Will, as it chanced, was the officer on watch, so they found their man easily.

“You will understand why I have come,” said the Prince, adding a great many roundabout and studiedly ceremonious phrases.

“Not I,” said Will, with equally studied carelessness, having noticed something in the Prince’s manner.

I was present, and had some inkling that a storm was brewing; though otherwise I knew nothing of what it was about, until I had it from Will afterwards.

“Last night you did my sister, the Princess of Favara, the honour of paying her your addresses in the recognised Sicilian fashion of appealing to the lady herself in the first instance, to know if your attentions would be acceptable. I may tell you that the ladies of a house like ours, if our possessions are diminished, do not make their decision in so brief a period—though this is nothing unusual for people of no family. But though courtships in Sicily are not of long duration, as far as the lady’s decision to accept or reject the addresses is concerned, the accepted suitor goes immediately to the father or guardian, states that he has the lady’s consent, gives an account of his position and property, and, if everything is satisfactory, arrangements are then made. You have not done this. As you did my sister the honour of offering her your attentions, and as she did you the honour of accepting them, I have come here to know why you have not called upon me.”

As Will maintained an air of indifference and silence, the Prince went on to say: “I should have mentioned that there are two circumstances which made my sister accept the suit of a stranger upon so brief an acquaintance. She was aware that your ship will sail as soon as the wind springs up, and it was in defiance of the prophecy that the last of our house will come to an evil end by reason of love for a fair-haired stranger from the north. It is the motto of our family that we fear neither man nor fate, and it has been our pride to live up to our motto. It seemed to both my sister and myself that you were the man indicated by the prophecy, and it was our duty to defy it. When you came below her window last night, she consulted me as to whether you were the man indicated, and as it seemed to us both that you were, she accepted you.”

“But, my good sir,” said Will, speaking very rapidly in his excellent Italian, “I am already engaged to another lady in England. I only understood that serenading was the custom of the country. I was not in the least aware that it constituted an offer of marriage, which I was not in a position to make. However, though I cannot marry your sister, I am perfectly willing to offer you the satisfaction which a gentleman expects; and at four bells—that is, at eight o’clock—till when it is my watch, I shall be at your service. I must trust to you to find a place where we shall not be disturbed.”

“The Latomia dei Cappucini beside the ancient wheel-well will do excellently, and a carriage shall be waiting at the landing-stage to convey yourself and your seconds at eight o’clock. Will you give me the names of two of your brother officers who may confer with my seconds after you have decided your choice of weapons. It is your choice. I am the challenger, although you anticipated me in expressing your readiness to give me satisfaction.”

“The sword is the only weapon for gentlemen,” says Will, as fine as you please; though he was but eighteen years old and young in the art of fence, while his adversary, being a Sicilian gentleman and nearer thirty, was like to be an expert swordsman. And then, though they had been so mighty civil to each other as to who was the challenger, I heard the Prince whisper to Will as I went down to the ward-room to see who would act for Will—for, mind you, there was not one of them that liked him—I heard him whisper, “A l’outrance,” and Will replied, with the most contemptuous indifference, “If you wish it.”

Now Will, being the officer on duty, had no time to waste in talking on what I have just writ down, though he must perforce attend to the Sicilian Prince who was come on board about a matter so serious. All he said to me was—“Tell them I am going to fight this Italian at eight o’clock, and ask if any of them will act for me. There is not one of them upon whom I have any personal claim.”

It was with some trepidation that I knocked at the door of the ward-room. I knew that most of them were not on terms with him, and had a sinking feeling at my heart that I should have to go back and confess that he had not a friend to serve him in this pinch, in which case the matter would have to remain until the Captain came on board and told off two officers to do it. But when I went in and told my errand, every officer in the room got up and laid his sword on the table. So it fell, of course, to the two seniors present, one of whom was the First Lieutenant, Mr. Galwey; and they spoke in the highest terms of Will; and all present then went on deck.

When the two chosen to act as Will’s seconds went forward to meet the Prince’s seconds, a most curious thing happened, for, the chaplain being ashore with the Admiral, there was not a man on board save Will who could speak their lingo. So here we had the strange spectacle of the principal in a duel acting as the interpreter between his own and his adversary’s seconds.

And, the matter being settled in this fashion, the Prince and his seconds went presently ashore. As soon as he was off watch, Will and his seconds followed, and Will wrote in the boat a line to his mother in the very probable event of his death, though I had no fear but that he would give a good account of himself. Will’s seconds had asked that I should be allowed to accompany him as being his nearest friend; and it was granted willingly.

We did not go through the town when we landed, but skirted along the sea front to where the road from the drawbridge conducts to the ruins of ancient Syracuse; and no sooner were we on the mainland, than we turned up to the right and drove for about a mile till we came to the Capuchin nunnery which stands on the brink of one of the most remarkable monuments in the world, the vast Latomia or quarry in which the unfortunate Athenians, captured at the siege of Syracuse, were confined. The singularity of the Latomia is that the quarries cut into enormous natural caverns, which had existed, probably unknown, beneath a thin shell of stone and earth. They went on quarrying until all the roof of the cavern had been cut away and its sides were as perpendicular as cliffs down to a few feet from the bottom, where fresh caverns, and shallower in depth, begin and stretch away into the bowels of the earth. This Latomia, so vividly described by Thucydides, as Mr. Comyn afterwards told us, seemed about a mile in length, varying in breadth from a few yards to a hundred yards, and was, in depth, of perhaps a hundred feet. It was largely covered with undergrowth, though there were some fine orange and lemon groves, valued, I was told, because, being somewhat sheltered from the sun, they came on when other crops were over. In the centre of one of these lemon groves, near the antique well, was an open glade and a lawn, used I do not know for what purpose. And here the duel was to take place.

No sooner had the fight begun than my worst fears were realised, for I saw by the Prince’s pose and the first few passes, that he was a practised swordsman. 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.”

The Prince protested that he should send fresh seconds the next morning, when the seconds on both sides decided that the duel could not proceed. And so the matter was left.

You can imagine what shakings of the hand we gave Will as we took him back to the landing-place for having defended in such a way the honour of the ship; and I believe that our two lieutenants were settled in their own minds that there should be no second duel, considering the handsome way in which Will had given the Prince his life, though, with one of Will’s temper, it was not easy to see how the duel was to be prevented, if the Prince sent fresh seconds, save by the authority of the Captain, who could confine him to the ship, or the Admiral.

Considering that Will was one of the Admiral’s staff, the First Lieutenant, his senior second, concluded to lay the whole matter before the Admiral when he came on board. And he came on board very soon afterwards in the highest of spirits, for he always loved a good day ashore as well as any A.B. in his fleet.

“God bless my soul!” cried the Admiral, when he had heard the First Lieutenant’s story, which, of course, was told in whispers that I did not overhear, “I’ll go and see the young man—His Highness, I suppose I ought to call him—myself. I can’t afford to delay the fleet if a breeze springs up to let us get at the French, and I hope that none of my officers will ever shirk a situation.”

The barge was still at the gangway, the Lieutenant had hailed them to await orders, and the Admiral prepared to descend.

“Have you supped, sir?” asked the Lieutenant; and the Admiral without pausing replied, “I shall have a better appetite if I wait till this matter is finished.”

When he landed a few minutes afterwards, he hired a coach—there are always two or three hackneys at the landing-place with such a large fleet in port—and bade the man drive to the Prince of Favara’s. The Prince was well known in Syracuse, though he had no palace of his own there, but was visiting with his uncle; and the man drove the Admiral without delay to the Palazzo Mont’ alti.

The Admiral, who had taken the chaplain with him as interpreter, in the enforced absence of Will, asked if the Prince were in; and the porter replied in the affirmative, not knowing that the Prince, who had entered the palace with his seconds immediately after the duel, had left by the garden door and gone to sup in a favourite tavern near the Marina. Three or four servants passed the English officers from the great gate across the courtyard, up the staircase which wound round it, terminating in an arcade, and through a succession of fine chambers into the principal salon, which had a large mirror at each end with a kind of sofa arranged under it, facing about a dozen chairs arranged in a horseshoe. Along the sides of the room were more couches interrupted by mirrors with wide marble shelves in front of them, supported by gilded lions’ legs. Lustres hung on each side of the mirrors, and they supported tall Chinese vases on French stands of gilded bronze. The floor was tiled and covered with patterns, a good many tiles going to form each pattern, and there was a small carpet at each end of the room where the chairs were arranged. The Admiral commented on all these to his chaplain, for there was a goodish delay. In fact, they were so busy taking in the details in order to pass the time, that it was only when they heard the light tapping of a woman’s heels on the tiles close beside them, that they perceived that some one had entered the room.

The Admiral, as his wont was even over trifles, had been full of animation when he was speaking, which changed to an air of grave respectfulness when he perceived that it was Donna Rusidda herself who had entered. She was alone, out of compliment to the Admiral, or because she did not wish the ancient lady, whom she maintained as a kind of duenna, to hear what passed between them. The Admiral had brought me with him, saying, “You keep the conscience of our young scapegrace, Trinder: you had best come along and answer for him.”

Donna Rusidda naturally did not know the whole of the affair, though she had had it from her maid already that a duel had been fought on her account, which had been terminated by the disarmament of her brother, who had announced his intention of finding fresh seconds to renew it on the following day, as his late seconds would not consent to its being proceeded with. It was, indeed, for this purpose that he had gone to the albergo by the Marina, where, that being a resort of the young bloods, he was likely to meet with friends to accommodate him.

I thought I had never seen any one look more lovely than this girl, whose clear dusky cheeks were flushed till the blood showed rosily through them with the treble excitement. For she had come alone into the presence of strangers, and the strangers were so famous, and come upon a mission which concerned her so closely. And though the Admiral had not then won the victory with which he was shortly to astonish the world, the connection between the noble families of the Two Sicilies and Spain was very strong, their kings being of the same family; and his achievements of taking the two Spanish three-deckers one after the other, with a handful of boarders from his seventy-four, was fresh in their memories. It was this little one-armed man, with the sensitive mouth, who had led the boarders in that heroic fight at St. Vincent.

She was glad she had come in without his noticing her and seen his animation as he was discussing the unfamiliar aspects of the Mont’ alti salon with his chaplain. She had seen his natural energy instead of the quiet air of dignity and respect which he put on for her. She had come, she explained, to tell them that her brother was out; she had despatched a messenger for him, and begged that they would remain and give her the honour of receiving them until her brother arrived. “Meanwhile, might she offer them some slight refreshment?” Servants were entering with fruit and wine and cakes. The Admiral begged her to excuse them. He had come like the Roman Senator of old, who went to Carthage with peace and war in his robe, and he would not break bread in the house of the Mont’ alti until he knew whether he should leave them as a friend or an enemy. In fact, now that one of the squadron that he was engaging, to use his metaphor, was in range, he was nothing but a commander. The Admiral, as is well known, was never held to be indifferent to the charm of women; and the slender girl, with her dark beauty thrown up by the white and pearls of her evening attire, was remarkable even among Italian women in their heyday for her exquisite grace. She had, too, the kind of face which might be called, with equal truth, haunting and haunted,—it haunts my memory still,—and she had in her eyes, or perhaps it was in her expression, the look of one born to be the victim of a great misfortune.

The Admiral received her with dignity as well as profound respect, and as the interview proceeded without either side caring to commit itself until the Prince of Favara arrived, this dignity settled into an air of dignified resolution. He looked as I have seen him look when he was going into action, before he had quite settled some detail in the attack. When all was plain fighting, he smiled. As the small, slender figure, braced with the air of a commander’s expectancy, stood before her, she had some opportunity of knowing what manner of man this Nelson was, when he was about to hurl a fleet of England on a fleet of France.

I can see it all before me, as distinctly as on the night of that 21st of July, ’98: the world’s great Admiral, that was to be, in his attitude of “prepare for action,” and the enemy represented by that gentle, half-terrified, half-mystified Southern beauty, with the background of the high, vaulted, half-furnished chamber in the mediæval Sicilian palace. It was now quite dusk, and the candles in the sconces on each side of the mirrors gave only a half light. There were no candles in the vast crystal chandelier which hung from the ceiling.

Presently we heard footsteps through the suite of reception-rooms leading to the salon, and the Prince of Favara entered with his uncle the Marchese, and two other Sicilian gentlemen. The Marchese had, it appeared, gone out with him to assist him in finding seconds. They did not seem so astonished as might have been expected at the presence of Donna Rusidda, for they had spoken with her duenna in the chamber leading immediately into ours. But they had the look of men who had come in full of some excitement, suddenly checked by an important piece of news, and greeted the Admiral with marked civility.

It was clearly for him to speak, and he began with his usual courage and directness. “I have come, your Highness, to express my regret that an officer of my fleet should have been guilty of a practical jest upon a lady; but I understand that he has already given you the satisfaction of a gentleman.”

“Your Excellency is mistaken,” said the Prince: “I am not satisfied. I have just arranged with these gentlemen, the Conte di Noto and the Conte di Spaccaforno, to seek his seconds and arrange for the completion of the duel à l’outrance.”

“I understand that he has given you your life, your Highness, which is sufficient satisfaction for any gentleman that I have met in a profession which exists for the purpose of fighting.”

“It may be sufficient by the English code, your Excellency,” said the Prince firmly, but quite courteously; “but according to the code of our country such an insult can only be wiped out by the death of one of the combatants. I shall insist on the meeting being resumed, or brand Signor——”

“Hardres,” said the Admiral.

“——as a coward who insulted a lady and then ran away in the great fleet of England.”

“It seems to me a strange kind of cowardice for a boy of eighteen, just studying the art of fence, to meet a man of thirty, and an accomplished swordsman, and when he has—partly by accident, I will allow—disarmed his adversary, to suffer him to depart untouched, especially when he knows that that adversary had it in his heart to kill him without mercy, and indeed protested that a new duel must be fought.”

But the Prince only replied, “I shall brand him as a coward.”

“I think, your Highness,” said the Admiral, with a wicked look upon his face, such as I think I never saw again in all the years that I had the honour of serving under him, “that you will need all the courage you have to-morrow morning, when the duello is resumed. You will take it up exactly where it ceased. You were lying on your back, I believe, with your sword a dozen yards away in a garlic bed or something of the kind, and Lieutenant Hardres was standing over you, sword in hand. No interference will be tolerated by the guard, which I shall land to see fair play, and the guns of the ships will be trained on Syracuse.”

The Prince’s face did blench as the chaplain translated the words delivered by the Admiral in a voice that was like a volley of grape shot; and after a few minutes’ conference with the Marchese, he replied courteously, but with a quiet ring of sarcasm:—

“If you will allow me, your Excellency, I will go with you when you return to your ship, and have my throat cut by Signor Hardres at once. The solution you pronounce is, I see, the correct one. Unfortunately I had no precedent to go upon. A Sicilian, in Signor Hardres’s place, would have killed me, as I would have killed him. I am at your service whenever you are ready to go.”

The Admiral’s face cleared of wrath like the sky after a thunderstorm: he was ever the most generous of men, but he had a look of mystification when Donna Rusidda, who had been present all the while, but had taken no part in the proceedings till this moment, said:

“Uncle Marchese, you have lived many years, and are referred to by every one on matters of manners and breeding.” He bowed. “What happens when a lady, having begun by accepting the suit of a cavalier, sees something to make her change her mind and desire to be relieved of the suit?”

“Such a thing was never done in my time, Donna niece, by a lady of a family like ours, but tradition is clear upon the point: the quarrel then belongs to the rejected suitor, who would have the right to ask a gentleman’s satisfaction from the kinsman to whom it fell to represent her. But he would also have the right to be indifferent.”

“If, then, I say, and I swear by my patron, Santa Rosalia, that it is true, that I am no longer willing to receive the suit of Signor Hardres, the quarrel is, as you say, his, and it will be for him to demand the fresh duello, not for the Prince, my brother.”

“It is so,” said the Marchese.

“Then, Signor Admiral,” said the girl, with a most beautiful expression on her face—which I, not knowing the Sicilians so well as I did afterwards, imagined to express a woman’s holy joy in peace-making—“will you have it conveyed to Signor Hardres that I wish to withdraw my acceptance of his suit, and that the quarrel is now his own.”

“I can answer for it that your brother will hear no more from him, madam,” replied the Admiral, stooping very low to kiss her hand—for he, too, used the same interpretation as I. “And then, your Excellency,” he said, bowing to the Marchese, “and your Highness,” bowing to the Prince, “as I have full power to represent Lieutenant Hardres, we may regard this incident as at an end. And now, madam,” he added, looking at Donna Rusidda straight in the face with his most gracious smile, “I shall, if you invite me again, partake of this excellent entertainment, for I have not yet supped.”

The invitation was, of course, graciously repeated; and I was glad to see that the Prince had some of his sister’s graciousness, for he took one of the trays—the servants had been sent from the room—and brought it, saying, “Hungry work, your Excellency!” And the smile with which he said this, and the smile with which the Admiral received it, laid the foundation of the friendship which, until its tragical termination, played so conspicuous a part in the Admiral’s life.