“She was taken too.”
“Taken! And Galiano? He is a hero and a cultivated gentleman.”
“He was,” said the Englishman sadly, “but he too is dead.”
“And the Montañes with Alcedo?”
“Killed, killed.”
My master could not control his emotion and as, at his advanced age, presence of mind is lacking at such terrible moments, he suffered the slight humiliation of shedding a few tears as he remembered his lost friends. Nor are tears unbecoming to a noble soul; on the contrary, they reveal a happy infusion of delicate feeling, when combined with a resolute temper. My master’s tears were manly tears, shed after he had done his duty as a sailor; but, hastily recovering from this paroxysm of grief, and anxious to retort on the Englishman by some pain equal to that he had caused, he said:
“You too have suffered, no doubt, and have lost some men of mark?”
“We have suffered one irreparable loss,” said the English officer in accents as deeply sad as Don Alonso’s. “We have lost our greatest man, the bravest of the brave—our noble, heroic, incomparable Nelson.”
And his fortitude holding out no better than my master’s he made no attempt to conceal his anguish of grief; he covered his face with his hands and wept with the pathetic frankness of incontrollable sorrow for his leader, his guardian, and his friend.
Nelson, mortally wounded at an early stage of the battle by a gun-shot—the ball piercing his chest and lodging in the spine—had simply said to Captain Hardy: “They have done for me at last, Hardy.” He lingered till the evening, not losing any details of the battle, and his naval and military genius only failed him with the last breath of his shattered body. Though suffering agonies of pain, he still dictated his orders and kept himself informed of the manœuvres of both fleets; and when at length he was assured that victory was on the side of the English, he exclaimed: “Thank God, I have done my duty!” A quarter of an hour later the greatest sailor of the age breathed his last. The reader will forgive me this digression.