“Capital,” said the Admiral. “I have been looking at them, you know, on the sly, while the General was composing the proclamation which he is going to make to the cities of the Peninsula.”
“Oh, but you shall not have seen them—all.”
“Madam,” said the Admiral, pretending to be offended, “I have, as you please to notice, only one eye; but I think that the French at any rate will allow that I am a pretty good hand at taking in the whole situation.”
“Sit-oo-ation,” she repeated, laughing; “that is a good word. No, I do not think that you have—how can I say—caught—yes, caught the whole sit-oo-ation.”
“Madam, I hope I shall never contradict a lady.”
“Then you shall see a fine sit-oo-ation. First we shall go in the barca,” she cried, jumping into a light boat, which was moored to the marble steps of the artificial lake. She made Will row, while she sat in the stern with the Admiral, pointing out the exquisite little temples and marble nymphs and couches and bridges with which the lake, which was really more like a little river running between and round a number of little islands full of the rarest and most picturesque exotics, was studded. Will rowed with alacrity. The Admiral was clearly enjoying himself, and anything that gave him the least gratification was the sincerest pleasure to Will: he did not note that he was being left out of the conversation. Presently Donna Rusidda demanded to be landed in a beautiful rosetum, in which the roses were trained round a framework into a huge green crown, a model of that worn by Her Majesty’s mother, the great Empress Maria Theresa. There were quite a number of hoops to it, and the rose flowers made the gems; while the leaves changing with the autumn—the season in which it was intended to be seen—gave a golden colour to the ribs. In the centre of it, underneath the boss which contained the great gem of the real crown, was a vase of immense value—ancient Grecian of the best period—lying on the ground, which looked as if it had fallen but recently from the slender marble “stele” of a satyr with four faces, brought from the excavations at Pompeji.
“Oh, Signor W-Will, the wind has blow over Her Majesty’s favourite vase!” Naturally, Will sprang forward to replace it; and, balancing it with great care, started to rejoin them where they were standing on a beautiful tesselated pavement, adorned with the signs of the Zodiac. All of a sudden, from dozens of little jets, a great shower of water met him full in the face. He dashed back to get out at the other side, only to meet another shower, which, coming into play on him from a greater distance, was more like spray. He tried a third path, and again met the spray; but, grasping that all the paths were similarly commanded, dashed through it and the heavier shower which greeted him nearer, and flew to the pavement where they were standing, looking like a seal. Something in the pavement caught his eye, and, looking more closely, he perceived that each Zodiacal sign had for its centre mosaic a little bronze cube, raised slightly above the rest. Donna Rusidda shrieked with laughter as he put his foot on the whole twelve in succession, starting the shower on each of the corresponding twelve paths of the leafy crown of Austria; and the Admiral, though he would have been sorry for Will if he had reflected, gave the great roar of laughter in which he indulged whenever he was extravagantly tickled. He was a boy all his life, in the intervals of anxiety caused by the blindness of the Government, on whom he depended for ships and supplies to strike at the French, and irritation and depression caused by his wretched health. He had, as his whole behaviour during the sojourn in the Two Sicilies showed, a thorough appreciation of the masqueradings and buffooneries and practical jests which are to the Neapolitan part of his everyday life, and to the grave Sicilian an occasional recreation. These water-mazes are very popular with the rich; and in some instances, like the present, immense sums are spent on their construction: indeed, they form the staple of amusement at an excursion to an unfamiliar palace or villa, where only one or two are in possession of the knowledge where the traps lie. You are safe nowhere: the shower may be lying in wait for lovers in a retired walk, or for a whole company on the most frequented lawn. But the water is laid on more lightly for the most part than Donna Rusidda laid it on for Will.
Will was in high dudgeon; he had no liking for practical jests at any time, and this being put into a ridiculous and humiliating light before the woman he loved, maddened him. If it had been a man who had played the jest upon him he would have thrashed him first, and fought a duel to the death afterwards—if the thrashed person wished to carry the matter further. And though the Admiral had taken no part in the jest, his very presence, had he been any other man, would have been sufficient for hot-headed Will. But the Admiral was to him hardly a human being,—he reverenced him so, and owed him such a debt of gratitude; and so there was nothing for it but to walk behind them with his laced hat and blue coat, and the nankeen breeches whose fit had been his pride, for they could hardly have been closer if they had been carved in marble, looking like shrunk grapes.
The Admiral, by this, was woefully sorry for him; for that great man did not forget small things, and it was in his mind that only in the few days that they had been back in Naples had Will possessed a lieutenant’s uniform of his own, and that the English tailor to the Sicilian court charged as exiles will who leave their homes not to save their lives but to fill their purses. It brought to his mind a boyish figure which he had seen only six months since standing outside his state-room door getting well dripped in his new midshipman’s rig, because he would not come in under the lee of his mother till he had received the command of his officer. He remembered also that the little fair slip of a mother was none too well clad to come aboard a ship tossing at her anchors in a stiff cold gale off St. Helen’s, and that that same little mother had said to him, “You will take care of him, Sir Horatio ... I do not mean in the face of the enemy, but I have only a slender purse; his father was killed when he was a lieutenant.”
The Admiral’s money was always burning holes in his pockets, and he made up his mind instanter to present Will with a new outfit, so that what he had on might dry for his second best.