“And you assure me that what you have said is the exact translation of this?”
“Put into the roundabout and compliment-paying phrases which your language demands—yes.”
“Then it is quite sufficient, Illustrissimo. Tell your terrible Admiral that he will not have to fire his guns into us; that I shall be rejoiced from the bottom of my heart to supply him with whatever he requires, water, provisions, powder even, at the most reasonable prices. With this piece of paper in my hands, I have only yielded to force. His August Majesty will not declare war upon his High and Mighty Majesty for this breach of the peace.”
But he added to himself, as we learned from the ladies of his party on the next evening, that he did not feel so certain that France would not regard it as an act of war.
This whole affair of Syracuse has not even yet been cleared up, and it must be remembered that I am writing a good many years after the event. To this day the Admiralty is in the dark as to whether the Governor did receive secret orders, overriding the Royal despatch, and supposing he did, if it formed part of those orders that he was to yield, but only to yield to a pretence of force. One thing is quite certain—that, as soon as force was mentioned, he showed the greatest good-will; and the Admiral wrote in two separate letters to Sir William and Lady Hamilton, both written the day before he left: “I have no complaint to make of private attention. Every body of persons have been on board to offer me civilities.” And in the other letter: “My dear friends, thanks to your exertions we have victualled and watered; and surely, watering at the fountain of Arethusa, we must have victory. We shall sail with the first breeze; and, be assured, I will return either crowned with laurel or covered with cypress.”
A day or two afterwards the breeze did come in the afternoon, as it always does at Syracuse. In the morning the Admiral wrote:
“The fleet is unmoored, and the moment the wind comes off the land, we shall go out of the delightful harbour, where our present wants have been most amply supplied, and where every attention had been paid to us.”
But I am anticipating. The Governor was as good as his word, and we were soon in the thick of taking in stores and water; and as there was no hope of going out in less than two days at the earliest, the inhabitants began to organise a round of hospitalities.
The very next evening, the Governor, who had recovered so far from his fright of our cannon as to have his state bed moved back from the subterranean magazine of the castle, gave a ball in our honour at his palace. The Admiral had in the afternoon paid him a state visit, accompanied by his staff.
To the English it might sound a formidable undertaking to ask the officers of a whole fleet to a ball at a few hours’ notice, but in Sicily it is very different. The palaces of the nobles were built, many of them, in the Middle Ages, when it was necessary to house the retainers, who were, in fact, the nobleman’s army, within the walls of his town palace when he happened to be there, as much as it was necessary to house them within the walls of his castle when he was in the country on his estates. When the custom of each noble maintaining a private army died out, their palaces were naturally a great deal larger than they required for their diminished establishments, and each palace could afford to have noble suites of entertaining rooms not used at ordinary times, but ready, with a little taking off of covers, for any fêtes, like a ball at carnival time. As most nobles grew their own wine, they had an unlimited supply maturing in their cellars, and fruit in Sicily is as a drug in the market. There remained nothing, therefore, but for the ladies to bring out their gala dresses from their chests, and to summon all the banquet-cooks in Syracuse to the Governor’s kitchen.