Now Will, being the officer on duty, had no time to waste in talking on what I have just writ down, though he must perforce attend to the Sicilian Prince who was come on board about a matter so serious. All he said to me was—“Tell them I am going to fight this Italian at eight o’clock, and ask if any of them will act for me. There is not one of them upon whom I have any personal claim.”
It was with some trepidation that I knocked at the door of the ward-room. I knew that most of them were not on terms with him, and had a sinking feeling at my heart that I should have to go back and confess that he had not a friend to serve him in this pinch, in which case the matter would have to remain until the Captain came on board and told off two officers to do it. But when I went in and told my errand, every officer in the room got up and laid his sword on the table. So it fell, of course, to the two seniors present, one of whom was the First Lieutenant, Mr. Galwey; and they spoke in the highest terms of Will; and all present then went on deck.
When the two chosen to act as Will’s seconds went forward to meet the Prince’s seconds, a most curious thing happened, for, the chaplain being ashore with the Admiral, there was not a man on board save Will who could speak their lingo. So here we had the strange spectacle of the principal in a duel acting as the interpreter between his own and his adversary’s seconds.
And, the matter being settled in this fashion, the Prince and his seconds went presently ashore. As soon as he was off watch, Will and his seconds followed, and Will wrote in the boat a line to his mother in the very probable event of his death, though I had no fear but that he would give a good account of himself. Will’s seconds had asked that I should be allowed to accompany him as being his nearest friend; and it was granted willingly.
We did not go through the town when we landed, but skirted along the sea front to where the road from the drawbridge conducts to the ruins of ancient Syracuse; and no sooner were we on the mainland, than we turned up to the right and drove for about a mile till we came to the Capuchin nunnery which stands on the brink of one of the most remarkable monuments in the world, the vast Latomia or quarry in which the unfortunate Athenians, captured at the siege of Syracuse, were confined. The singularity of the Latomia is that the quarries cut into enormous natural caverns, which had existed, probably unknown, beneath a thin shell of stone and earth. They went on quarrying until all the roof of the cavern had been cut away and its sides were as perpendicular as cliffs down to a few feet from the bottom, where fresh caverns, and shallower in depth, begin and stretch away into the bowels of the earth. This Latomia, so vividly described by Thucydides, as Mr. Comyn afterwards told us, seemed about a mile in length, varying in breadth from a few yards to a hundred yards, and was, in depth, of perhaps a hundred feet. It was largely covered with undergrowth, though there were some fine orange and lemon groves, valued, I was told, because, being somewhat sheltered from the sun, they came on when other crops were over. In the centre of one of these lemon groves, near the antique well, was an open glade and a lawn, used I do not know for what purpose. And here the duel was to take place.
No sooner had the fight begun than my worst fears were realised, for I saw by the Prince’s pose and the first few passes, that he was a practised swordsman. But he was fighting with a demon rather than with a man. I never saw a human being with such a fighting fury as Will, who sprang at him like a leopard. I do not see, however, how this should have prevailed, with Will’s ignorance of fence, had not the mossy ground on which the Prince was standing proved rotten, as mossy ground will at times, the surface rubbing off and leaving a slippery mud. The Prince’s foot slipped, and Will struck his sword out of his hand. The Prince called out to him to despatch him; but Will said, with his air, “My honour is satisfied—I am not one to kill a fallen man.”
The Prince protested that he should send fresh seconds the next morning, when the seconds on both sides decided that the duel could not proceed. And so the matter was left.
You can imagine what shakings of the hand we gave Will as we took him back to the landing-place for having defended in such a way the honour of the ship; and I believe that our two lieutenants were settled in their own minds that there should be no second duel, considering the handsome way in which Will had given the Prince his life, though, with one of Will’s temper, it was not easy to see how the duel was to be prevented, if the Prince sent fresh seconds, save by the authority of the Captain, who could confine him to the ship, or the Admiral.
Considering that Will was one of the Admiral’s staff, the First Lieutenant, his senior second, concluded to lay the whole matter before the Admiral when he came on board. And he came on board very soon afterwards in the highest of spirits, for he always loved a good day ashore as well as any A.B. in his fleet.
“God bless my soul!” cried the Admiral, when he had heard the First Lieutenant’s story, which, of course, was told in whispers that I did not overhear, “I’ll go and see the young man—His Highness, I suppose I ought to call him—myself. I can’t afford to delay the fleet if a breeze springs up to let us get at the French, and I hope that none of my officers will ever shirk a situation.”