“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 unhazardous coup de grâce tickled 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 he did dose, 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.