Gask saluted and retired to obey; while the prisoner, covering his face with his fettered hands, appeared to be engaged in the deepest prayer. The men of the 62nd evinced considerable repugnance to become his executioners: such a duty being always reserved as a punishment for bad or disorderly soldiers; and there was not one among them who could be deemed to come under either of these denominations. A whisper circulated through the ranks, and I knew that I was imposing an unpleasant duty upon good men. The visconte divined my dilemma.
"Dundas," said he, "as Italians, let ours be the task to punish this wretch: whom I blush to acknowledge a countryman! Giacomo, take twenty of our corps, and shoot him through the back: but unbind his hands, that he may tell over his beads once more before he dies."
Giacomo selected his marksmen, and drew them up opposite a high wall, before which Navarro knelt about thirty paces from them. As the Calabrians loaded, two pioneers with a shovel and pickaxe approached; and on seeing them the prisoner seemed seized with a frenzy. Suddenly he sprang up and fled towards a parapet wall with the fleetness of a hare, and a scene of the utmost confusion ensued: shot after shot was fired at him, but missed. It was madness to hope to escape from Scylla, filled as it was with armed men, enclosed on three sides by the surging sea, on the fourth by steep cliffs, and girdled by lofty towers and bastions. Frantic with desperation and terror, the miserable Navarro rushed up the platform of one of the gun-batteries, and swung himself over the parapet; escaping a shower of balls aimed at him by the half-disciplined Calabri, who had all rushed in disorder to the walls: destruction dogged him close. Beneath, the cliff descended sheer to the sea three hundred feet below; above, the parapet bristled with weapons, and was lined with hostile faces. Chilled with a sudden horror, when the dash of the foaming sea and the hollow boom of those tremendous caverns by which the rock is pierced, rang in his ears, he became stunned; and closing his eyes, clung to a straggling vine or some creeping plants, with all the stern tenacity that love of life and fear of death inspire: never shall I forget the expression of his face when I looked over the parapet upon him. It was ghastly as that of a corpse: his short black hair bristled and quivered on his scalp; his deep dark eyes glared with terror, hatred, and ferocity, till they resembled those of a snake; and every muscle of his face was contracted and distorted. He swung in agony over the beetling cliff, on which he endeavoured in vain to obtain a footing; but its face receded from him, and he hung like a mason's plummet.
"Giacomo," said the visconte, "end his misery."
The Calabrian levelled his musket over the breast-work, and his aiming eye, as it glanced along the smooth barrel, met the fixed and agonized glance of Navarro. He fired; the ramparts round us, and the rocks and caves beneath gave back the reverberated report like thunder: the ball had passed through the brain of Navarro, who vanished from the cliff, and was seen no more.
So perished this unhappy traitor.
CHAPTER XIV.
DIANORA—THE FORFEITED HAND.
The exciting affair with Navarro was scarcely over, before we became involved in another; which, though of a different description, caused me no little anxiety: of this, my gay friend, Oliver Lascelles, was the hero.
Oliver was a handsome, good-humoured, light-hearted, curly-headed, thoughtless, young fellow; heir to one of the finest estates in Essex, with a venerable Elizabethan manor-house and deer park, a stud of horses and a kennel of hounds. He was a good shot, and a sure stroke at billiards; could push his horse wherever the hounds went, and, when hunting, was never known to crane in his life: he would spur, slapdash over everything; and he always led the field. However, these were but the least of his good qualities: he possessed others that were of a better order. Oliver was, every inch, an English gentleman and soldier; possessing a refined taste, and more solid acquirements than such as are necessary merely to enable a man to acquit himself in fashionable or military life: for, in truth, a very "shallow fellow" may pass muster, at times, in the ball room, on parade, or in the hunting-field.