Here follows an entry in the Journal which explains an episode in the Admiral’s life which we had never been able wholly to understand until we read these lines, and which went far to convince us, in spite of ourselves, of the genuineness of these entries.
We both of us remember that morning well; indeed, it would hardly be possible for the lapse of a lifetime to efface the memory of that visit to the Favara.
The Admiral had sent the prisoner into Palermo, and with him all the officers excepting Will and myself, who were in personal attendance upon him. They were needed for their ships, and now that the whole band was captured or destroyed there was no necessity for their presence in the house of sorrow.
We had just seen them off and mounted the steps; and, as the Admiral told us that he did not require us, we went out into the garden, where Will soon led the way into the little shrine or belvedere where he had been with his beloved Donna Rusidda. It gave him a pleasure to sit there and, bidding me hold my tongue, revel in the scene of that happy time. I, who had no associations to feed on, after a little rose and went to the window, from whose lattice one could command a view of the whole terrace, at the end of which the belvedere stood. At the same end of the terrace, only a few feet below the level of the window, was a marble seat, shaped almost like a couch, of the sort common in gardens of these parts. Presently up the broad steps, which led to this terrace from the ilex grove below, came the Admiral, walking thoughtfully, and seated himself right below me. I thought it would be vastly more entertaining to watch him than Will in his present state, especially since I could see, and, very naturally, what a prey to emotion he was. He could not sit still, but walked swiftly backwards and forwards from the seat to the balustrade a few feet in front of it, over which one looked to the city and Pellegrino. While he was pacing thus, a lady came up the steps enveloped in one of the hooded black silk mantles common in so many parts of Sicily. As she came near the Admiral she let her hood fall back. It was Donna Rusidda; and I was astonished to behold on her countenance not grief but rapture. She came right up to the Admiral; and something told me that what was about to happen was of so momentous a nature as to all but justify eavesdropping—and eavesdropping it was, my continuing to stand by that lattice.
“Princess, you have saved my life,” he cried, advancing to her with his arm outstretched in a way that suggested the ghost of his lost arm stretched beside it.
“Dear Lord,” she said (and I must not at this distance of years attempt to reproduce her broken English), “there is no life to me so precious as yours.”
The Admiral was a simple man, and evidently took her declaration for the exquisite courtesy of the South, and no more.
“Princess, it is not right to speak thus.”
“Oh, why, my Lord?”
“With your murdered brother’s blood hardly yet dried upon the threshold, I cannot bear to hear you: even a compliment like that is treason to his memory.”