I held my breath, staring fascinated, while the others echoed his cry: “Caracciolo! è Caracciolo! O me miserábile, Caracciolo!” in a dozen accents of terror.
I had heard of the poor scapegoat admiral,[2] whom Nelson—always bearing a grudge against him for his better seamanship—had caused ten days before to be hanged with every refinement of savagery, and afterwards flung into the water. Now risen, it seemed, from its first sleep on the floor of the bay, the sopt and dreary spectre was come riding to sear the eyeballs of the master, whom it had failed to serve only through being deeper pledged to humanity. Fouling our hawser, the body swung upright, bobbing and reeling as if it were treading water. Its hair and long beard swayed on its cheeks; its dead stiff eyes stared unwinking in the spray; its arms were flung wide, as if inviting its destroyer to a mocking embrace. Turning a moment, it drifted loose, and went dancing towards the shore, where the poor fishermen of Santa Lucia, who had loved the man, were to find and give it Christian burial.
The king staggered back.
“Mother of saints!” he sobbed, “what does the creature want?”
“Sire,” whispered a voice, “he asks for a consecrated grave.”
“Give it him, give it him!” gasped His Majesty, and signed to me to follow him below, where, however, I was not long in laying his “horrors.”
“Enfin, mon père,” I said, “the man, by his appearance, was only asking your forgiveness.”
“Magnificent,” he answered, with a shaky laugh. “He was certainly in need of it”—and he turned to me gratefully, but with a rather scared look.
“Little agent of Providence, if thou hast ever a poor friend thou wouldst save in the dark time coming, ask of my Majesty’s mercy, and it will listen. There may be some who err through the mind’s nobility. Of that I know nothing; only—only, I would have something to balance my possible mistakes.”
It was true enough, though the blood-lust was not long in mastering him, when once, without risk to himself, he could taste the spice of vengeance. Even while he spoke the depleting of the gaols and prison-ships was begun, and the hurried trials, and the false testimony, and the hangings. And the wail of the thousand doomed was already mingling itself in the streets with the roar of a grand State lottery, when at last we could venture ashore and to safe quarters in the reconsecrated palace.