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

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

On a sight-seeing expedition like this, it was in the habit of my Lady, and, I was told, of the Queen, to do that which might be least expected of them. If there were but little to see, they would fly through it and back again, in so short a space of time that all the elaborate preparations should seem wasted; and if there was more to be seen than a strong man could walk through on a long summer’s day, they would trifle by the hour at the very outset, as they seemed like to do now. But the Admiral was of a different mind. He had come to see the ruins so wondrously preserved for nigh twenty centuries by the mummifying ashes,—how these mighty Romans lived whose ensample he was never weary of studying. His acquaintance with their history was not indeed profound, and in the studies of their antiquities he was even less versed. But he had in his chaplain, Mr. Comyn, a ripe scholar, with whom it was ever his wont to make all possible inquiry about a place before he should visit it.

And My Lady, ever quick to feel the pulse of his desires, and having the Queen accustomed to follow her impulses, with a laugh, in one minute directed a forward movement.

The Admiral was much amazed at the smallness, nay, meanness of the houses; and made inquiry if only the dwellings of the shop-keepers and other baser sort of persons had been in the town, the rich resorting to villas in the outskirts.

“By no means,” said the Director: “this is a Roman senator’s house you have before you, and that which you have but now examined belonged to one of the most famous proconsuls—a class which of all others had the best opportunity of enriching themselves.”

The Admiral was profoundly impressed.

“What a people!” he said. “A man who had ruled half Asia came to end his days in a house which had no windows and no door, but such as we give our servants at the kitchen-back; which covered no more ground than a cottage, and had, like a cottage, only the one floor, and had in the whole of it but one room large enough for company. How the great Romans, for whom the world was too little, could bear to be cooped up in those little cells, no larger than a cabin, in a climate like this passes my comprehension.”

All present agreed with him—as like as not their code of manners demanded that they should appear to—all, except the Prince Caracciolo, who was of the Neapolitan Navy, and of the party. He was a man cut on the cross-grain, and said, with a licence very unusual among Italians, except when they are looking for a quarrel: “If I could persuade myself that these pig-styes were actually the work of Roman architecture I should feel no difficulty in solving the doubts of my credulous English friend. It was these very confined cells which made them so eager to get abroad, and enlarge by conquest their elbow-room. And the same reason induces us modern Italians who live in comfortable, lofty, and spacious dwellings to remain where we are, convinced, as we feel, that any change of abode would only be for the worse.”

The Prince, it must be known, had a good estate in Naples, at the corner of the Chiaja, where the road goes off to Pausilippo, and bounding on that side the fine new gardens of the Thuilleries, which the King had made with pleached walks and a fair open space in the midst, to display that wonder of antiquity, the Farnese Bull, which came to him by inheritance a little since. Mr. Comyn did not render his speech, knowing the Admiral’s temper, and the avoidance of quarrels commending itself to him as a clerk in holy orders. It was a happy chance that he, not Will, was interpreting for the Admiral at the moment. Not that Will would have rendered his impertinence to the Admiral, but that he would have felt it incumbent upon himself to force the stout, ill-conditioned Prince to swallow an insult direct, or fight.

But Master Will was more profitably engaged. The Prince of Favara, as is so honourably often the case with Sicilian nobles, was a great amateur in the antiquities of his country, and the ruins lately laid bare at Forum Pompeji and Herculaneum were of special interest to him, for he had, among the beggarly remnants of a patrimony which had come down to him, a hill some ten miles from Palermo and two from the court suburb of Bagheria, a bluff barren hill which had been the site of the ancient city of Soluntum founded by the Phœnicians, where the men who tended the vines and olives were for ever turning up some fragment of ancient-world temples or dwellings. He was too poor to have the hill excavated as he desired; indeed, the very vineyards and olive-gardens were leased to a creditor, strictly bound down to do no digging above what was necessary for trenching the trees. The Prince had dreams of laying bare a Sicilian Pompeji when he should have made his fortune, which he was not like to do except by marriage with an heiress, a commodity not too plentiful at the Neapolitan Court. But he was not a Royal favourite, though attached to the Court; and further, any money which Ferdinand I. of the Two Sicilies bestowed upon his favourites was expected to be duly wasted in riotous living.

Well, the Prince of Favara was for showing the city as it should be shown to his late enemy, Will; and his sister—who had come under his protection—was as attached to their buried city on the hill, and therefore to buried cities generally, as himself; and I was, as ever, with Will. And looking up to Will as I did, it seemed his plain right that he should walk with the beautiful Donna Rusidda and I with the Prince, lagging bravely. I had, moreover, I think I may say without vanity, more book-brains than Will, who was a man of action and perhaps a little narrow—which the Prince was not long in learning. For Will was not of the kind who can simulate by a fire of small questions interest in a matter which does not come into his thoughts. So the Prince had perforce to address all his information to me. He had, since we were away fighting at the Nile, picked up a very little English from My Lady, who had been interested in him on account of the story of his duello. But it was so little that his entire attention was necessary for explaining the smallest point to me. But the exercise gave him much pleasure. Unlike the Englishman, the Italian loves to adventure in a foreign language.