We wandered down to a fine house near the ancient burial ground, which was, according to the Roman wont, outside the city gate upon the road which led to Rome. This the Prince told me, pointing it as an instance of the imperial sentiment of his ancestors. “And this dwelling,” he said, “was the Villa of no less a personage than Cicero.”
Before a small but neat house a garden was laid out, in the middle of which a pond was sunk. The empty receptacle of water was in good preservation. The stone borders of the compartments of the garden were likewise plainly discernible. The statues, however, with which the whole was decorated at the first discovery, had of course been removed to the Queen’s Museum at Portici. But there were two short spans, on opposite sides of the garden, of a covered walk which had once been carried round it. We were commencing to look about, when the Prince called out—“Come and see the wine-cellar: ’tis the best in the city!”
“No, thanks—not for me,” said Will. I do not know whether he pictured to himself long rows of amphoræ—I think that’s the name—of Falernian or Chian or whatever it was called, we used to learn about in Horace—ready to our choice and only awaiting the breaking of a seal. I myself could have endured any wine that was not rank vinegar; for October mornings in Naples are warmer than our English summer, and we had had a long dusty drive.
“Nay, I am afraid that I have nothing to offer you but the sight of a number of fine jars,” said the Prince, putting aside Will’s refusal. “I will not call them empty, for they do contain a residuary crust—the coke of a burnt resinous substance. The people of this city were for the most part Greeks, and the Greeks, as you know, still resin their wine.”
Now, I was but a boy then, and I was all for having a piece of this petrified wine lees to keep in my sea-chest as what the Italians call a curio, and I hung behind the Prince for that purpose. But he had eyes, like the Queen’s picture of Argus, in the back of his head, so I was compelled to take him into my confidence. At first he was very severe, and talked of Vandals and the Queen’s orders; but I said,—“A loose piece, a very little loose piece: surely that would not matter.” He gave a good-natured laugh, as if to say, “You are only a boy,” and stooped to bury his arm in one of the great jars, almost the shape of an egg (just such, save for the lid, as those you may see as signs of the sellers of sugars and spices in London). But as his hand was about to touch the crust there was a sudden hollow rolling resembling that of thunder. It seemed to roll round and round the curved ceiling of the dismal vault in which we stood in almost total darkness.
“Il monte! il monte!” cried poor Donna Rusidda, in a paroxysm of fright, and fled incontinently, closely followed by Will. But the Prince stopped to secure me my curio, quoting, with a gaiety that had a ring of forcedness to me, the Neapolitan proverb, Heaven has its eye upon us still, which they use when some circumstance unforeseen prevents the completion of an evil deed. But if he was scared for the second, he recovered himself forthwith, for it was the tradition of his house to fly in the face of fortune and fate and omens, and all that sort of seaman’s gospel. And I am sure I liked the prospect a good deal less than he did. For both he and his sister and his uncle were accustomed to consider the approaching extinction of their house—it was almost their religion; but I, although it was part of my profession to be killed, had only signed the contract to die for my country, and expected to die with at least plenty of sea and sky room; and that awful sound began to operate upon my nerves. I must own that the unfortunate catastrophe of the poor Pompejans presented itself in most horrid colours before my mind’s eye. I expected an instantaneous eruption of the volcano—as they call it—Pompeji overwhelmed a second time and me with it; to be excavated perhaps some thousand years hence, and by an excusable anachronism to be taken for a Roman skeleton, and hung up and handled by every curious Miss in the museum of one of our descendants. But as the Prince was determined to grope until he found me my specimen, a loose piece which he could take without the qualms of conscience, I could not as a British officer—though I was but a mid—display any desire for haste before a mere Italian. And this though a terrific rattle on the vaulted roof told me that the new eruption had begun and we were right under the deadly shower of ashes.
After what seemed an eternity, but was, likely, less than a minute, he found a fragment that satisfied him, and we made our way out, where I may swear that my spirits rose more speedily than his, for my shower of ashes was only rain of the cataract kind which comes down in the tropics, mingled with hail, to which our battle of the Nile seemed child’s play; and it was no eruption at all, but that splitting, not very loud thunder, which will accompany a storm of lightning right overhead, almost without intermission, and which is even more terrifying than the loudest disconnected claps. But he saw that which was to a Sicilian of a more disturbing nature than bullet-stones of hail—his sister under one of the spans of covered walk alone with Will. It was true that they were in full view of us; but no Sicilian woman is ever allowed to stand out of earshot with a man who is not her brother or father, and in this instance there was the aggravating circumstance of that mock wooing. But it was as much as one’s life was worth to venture out into that hail, even across so small a matter as a Pompejan garden court; and in the Queen’s circle at Naples the freer English habits had crept in much, owing to the familiarity of the Queen with the English who came there, and notably Sir William and My Lady. And therefore, with an Italian’s humour, he made a jest of necessity. He had on a fine court dress, orange and purple silk. “It is my holiday suit,” he said, “and beggars cannot be wastrels.”
The Prince needed all the comforts of philosophy, for the thunder and lightning were awful. You expected the mountain itself to have been swallowed up as well as its disgorged city of Pompeji; and each time that the storm was at its worst, Donna Rusidda would clutch hold of Will and cling to him convulsively. I looked on my neighbour’s face for a fury to which the storm would be as nothing; but he said: “’Tis her way—I would I were by her. She needs to be held; I have fears for her mind in a storm like this.”
I think most officers in our fleet would have held her in Will’s place, brother or no brother; but Will would do no more than take her hands in his and endeavour by strong pressure to inspire her with some of his own invincible composure, which presently she began to feel. Her brother, with Italian quickness of perception, grasped the significance of Will’s action.
I, looking at the two of them, imagined that the girl, with her lovely eloquent face blanched with fear, and showing a whole range of feelings from terror to gratitude, with her figure now shrinking, now clinging to that splendid image of intrepid youth, must be silently pouring out her heart to him; while all I could gather from Will’s attitude was that he was striving to do his duty under circumstances the most difficult and delicate, and that he was for changing places with either of us.