The Admiral: A Romance of Nelson in the Year of the Nile

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

Will did not say whether the cause of his dudgeon was that he conceived the landlord to have confused him with a common sailor, or because the landlord did not perceive at a glance that he was one of those to whom it is an instinct not to make a social mistake.

We found the confection, which was new to Englishmen, very good; and I should be ashamed to say how many I ate, for as the Admiral was enjoying the music and the fluttering in of gay people to whom he had no need of being presented, My Lady plied us with the iced cream, as a kind of sop to our good-nature, for keeping us there without consulting us. She had, as I suppose, some private reason of her own.

Will had not the like appetite, but he kept an “ice” in front of him and trifled with it; expecting momentarily, though I know not why, to see the graceful form of Donna Rusidda enter, with her brother the Prince. But she did not come; and last of all our carriages were called, and we drove up to the ten o’clock service in the Palace chapel. Since the death of the poor little prince in the passage from Naples, Her Majesty had had services every morning and evening at ten, and I know not how much oftener, celebrated in her chapel, most of which she at first attended. But she had too masterful a mind to continue thus for long, when the air was so full of events; and consequently, though the services were celebrated, the attendance grew slender.

The Queen’s mourning had also prevented us from becoming familiar with the Palace, as we were at Naples. Indeed, we had hardly been into it, except with messages from the Admiral, which were generally received in a large shabby chamber, hung with poor portraits of former Viceroys, near the head of the red marble staircase which wound round and round, three stories up, I think.

The Palace chapel is on the story below; and as it possesses no exterior, but is merely as it were a hall in the present Palace, whatever it may have been in the time of that Norman Prince who built it; and as young naval officers do not speak much of such matters, I was altogether unprepared for the glory which burst upon us when we pushed the leather-covered folding doors open and stepped into a little basilica, I think they call it, full of the smell of the sweetest incense, and very softly but perfectly lit with huge silver lamps hung from the Arabic ceiling, and fed with aromatic oil, which displayed to me what looked like a scene from the “Arabian Nights.” The chapel had tall Moorish-looking arches and walls covered with golden mosaics, and a wondrously carved white marble candlestick as tall as two or three men, and its floors and altar-parapet and lower walls were made up of huge panels and pieces of rich crimson porphyry divided with white marble, and the inlaid mosaic borders they call the Cosmato. The quaint shapes, the rich scents and colours almost stunned my senses; and gorgeously robed priests, who seemed all white and jewels, passed to and fro performing some solemn and beautiful service, of which I could make nothing, but of which even I, an irreverent young Protestant sailor, felt the holiness. The music, too, was sweet and rich and pervading. I could imagine any one who was stricken to the heart, as the poor Queen had been in those first days, coming here for comfort. It was so above the ordinary human, as to suggest ideas of the presence of the Divine.

As soon as I could get over my astonishment, I noted that there was nothing corresponding to our pews,—there were but a few loose chairs, which those of the Palace, high or low, who came in to worship, picked up and carried where they would.

The Admiral motioned us to place some of these in the shadow near the door, that, not being of the religion, we might sit as unobtrusive as possible. The service which had just begun was to last some half-hour, and My Lady had told him that he should wait through it for the music.

When I got over my feeling of awe, I was a little disturbed by what seemed to me the antics of the service: the small boys dressed, as it seemed to my ignorant mind, like so many small priests, who were for ever bringing some book or robe or other article from the opposite point of the chapel to where the priest was performing; the tinkling of the little silver bells, which directed sometimes the movements of the boys, sometimes of the worshippers (they seemed to know which without being told); the swinging of censers; the changing of the robes of the performing priest; and the breaking out of a sweet clear intonation from some unsuspected corner.

But Will, as I have said, was not imaginative; and I think in his soul, having been very well brought up by his mother, he hated the whole thing as Popish. He would not even be amused as I was at a confession that was going on at the other side of the door from us, where a lady, evidently of high rank, dressed in the hooded kind of mantle of black silk not unlike a domino, common in Sicily, was pouring out her heart, as we could tell by the sobs which shook her slender figure, through the perforated panel of the confessional, to a comfortable old priest, who was paying the very slightest heed to her, and most of the time carrying on with another priest a conversation which produced more than one smile.

The lady, as she knelt on the broad steps of the confessional, with her arms flung upwards, like the Magdalene embracing the Cross, and the graceful line of her straight young back carried along the fall of the rich mantle to the floor at the foot of the steps, made a most charming picture. I heard the Admiral tell My Lady that he had quite lost his heart to the pretty sinner—a term by which I feel sure he meant no irreverence, for it was not in the nature of the Admiral to be irreverent to a woman; and, least of all, to a woman in distress.