In a very few minutes My Lady and the Admiral returned, My Lady leading the way straight up to the captains. She had by this become so intimate with Her Majesty that there was no need for her to observe Court etiquette on entering the presence of the Sovereign. With the captains she was so natural and unaffected that even Captain Troubridge was melted.
Hardly had she taken up her position when Donna Rusidda, having spoken with Her Majesty, upon whom she was attending, and having made her courtesy with the grace of a Neapolitan girl and a daughter of generations of courtiers, glided across the room to bring, as it seemed, a message to her Ladyship, though she lingered afterwards. I cannot say whether My Lady had an instinct against her. She was all smiles, as was her wont at such a gathering. But she did not lay her hand on the girl to detain her, or improvise any of the excuses for which she had such a happy invention; and after a few minutes of awkwardness Donna Rusidda was departing, a little crest-fallen, when her eye fell upon Will, almost in her path, just off the edge of the group. She motioned him to her.
“Ah, Signor Vill,” she said in her own language, her face lighting up with a smile even more beautiful than My Lady’s, for it was rarer: “why do not all your English officers speak Italian, as you do? They spend their lives in guarding the coasts of our country, and yet do not understand any of her children.”
Will was quite gallant in his reply: I know what he said. I think we must have discussed every incident of our life in the Two Sicilies during the long years in which we have been neighbours and brothers-in-law on the bleak coast of Kent. He said, “Because they have no charming lady to take them in hand. I had a beautiful young mother, who was brought up in Mediterranean ports, and has never ceased to pine for the sunshine.”
What a devoted woman Donna Rusidda was we were to know only too well afterwards; but she was not above a woman’s curiosity or caprice, and, the Admiral being as usual the feature of the evening, it was not long before she had manœuvred to get the weather side of Will, where, while she was talking to him, she could see the Admiral, and where the great man’s eye might occasionally light on her.
She answered his polite little speech with a charming smile, but said nothing. So he continued,—
“But you must try harder to learn my language too. You must not say Signor Vill, but Signor Will.”
“Vill.”
“No, no; not Vill, but Will.”
“Oh yes: Ou-ill—Signor Ou-ill.”