I could see his hand tighten round hers.
“I am a sad coward at that, dearest Emma: I have wept in the midst of victory at a comrade’s falling beside me.”
“Then, Nelson,” she said, “you have need of all your courage now, for the woman who broke her heart for you is dead.”
“Dead?” he gasped, almost falling.
“Dead,” she repeated. “Do you not remember her saying, ‘We Sicilians fear pain, but not death’?”
I do not think I ever saw such a well of silent grief, even in a woman, as there was then in the Admiral for Donna Rusidda. Certain I am that if the spirits of the late departed hover round those they love best on earth, the spirit of Donna Rusidda craved no other monument than those great tears which splashed down on the quarter-deck of the old Foudroyant.
And here I may be permitted to digress to say what I saw when, years and years later, Will and Katherine, and my wife—Will’s veritable sister, a more imperious but sweeter Will—journeyed to Sicily, a trip on I forget what excuse, the reality being that my wife had a trouble, happily passed, with her lungs, which made Will carry us all off travelling en prince, to the serene skies of Palermo. The first thing we did—it was Katherine suggested it, thinking it must be uppermost in Will’s heart, and that he, who was still so madly her lover, might hesitate to speak about the other woman—was to ask where we could find Donna Rusidda’s grave.
Can it be believed? The landlord of the Prince of Wales’s Hotel,[8] the best in Palermo, was unable to identify the Princess with herself. But on the Sunday a band was playing in the Flora, and we, who had been visiting the palace in which our beloved Admiral had spent so much of his time with the Hamiltons, were drawn to the music in a listless way, and found the crowd collected between the cupola from which the music proceeded and a fountain of white marble in the present Sicilian taste, which is not to be commended, though its parts may be beautiful. It consisted of an oval basin, perhaps a dozen feet across, with various aquatic plants growing in it; and in their midst, with only the head and part of the shoulders out of the water, a carving of a drowned woman with an exquisitely lovely face. And at one end of the fountain was a column with a broken lyre hanging to it, also of white marble, on which was carved in gold letters:—
“Rosalia di Mardolce, Princess of Favara. The last fruit of a dry tree.”
[8] Now the Hotel de France.