One would have imagined that the gruesome proof would have satisfied him, and having seen it he would have been content to bury it decently. But the report goes on to say that nothing would induce him to part with it afterwards, and that he kept it in a specially constructed case, under lock and key, by the side of his bed. Here, whenever his crazy panics seized him, he could open the box and finger the head and reassure himself again.
And all this happened, not in the time of Caligula or Tiberius, but three years before the birth of Queen Victoria.
CHAPTER XVII ITALIAN SEAS
Let us return to happier themes!
Many and enchanting books have been written about Italian cities and Italian country, but none about our Italian seas. People who look at the map may think this a limited subject; there is the Mediterranean, and there is the Adriatic—what more can be said? Amici miei, to a sea-lover there are as many seas as ports; the dear salt water and the sunrise and the sunset know it, and have a separate caress for each. They make—or fit into—the thousand moods of mind that colour a pilgrim’s life, and the pictures of them in my gallery of remembrance are clearer than any of my landscapes and more helpful—because they never hurt.
The landscapes, all except the loveliest ones where the spirit poised for one longing instant—like a bird on the topmast of a ship, and, like the bird, was given no more than time to take breath and wing away again—are mostly inhabited. Here your friend quarrelled with you; there your true love kissed you and betrayed; farther on your child was sick and every aspect of the most beautiful scenery in the world brings back only the poignant watches when a flush of colour in the little face sent you crazy with joy, and something wrong again with the little pulse froze your heart with fear. On land we cannot get away from ourselves and others; earth is greedily dominant, monstrously exacting. But the sea repudiates all individual ties. You must be empty of yourself, or it will not speak to you at all. Its laws are not our laws, and the first thing it does, if you are docile to its magic, is to wash out your personality, and oh, how glad some of us are—or would be—if we only could utterly forget that irritant, insistent factor of existence!
In our long wanderings most paths, as we look back on them, show the little red stains where we cut our feet; we have left shreds of our soul’s garments on many a thorn by the way; but for me, and I fancy for some of you others, the breath and the sound and the touch of the sea have been nothing but coolness and healing, a sunbath for life’s chillinesses, a fountain of strength in its languors. I think I should know now the right point to make for, according to the distemper that might be assailing me; and though twenty years ago I sought and loved the onslaught of the Atlantic and the Valhalla of the March tides in the Channel, to-day I would fare no farther than my home seas, those that lap and sing on the Italian shores.
I was sailing up into the Bay of Naples once just as the morning had conquered the last star; the sky was a faint milky blue and the mountains were cowled outlines, very dark and still. Not a breath stirred the sea, not a sound came from the land. Suddenly from the shadows that were neither land nor sea, I saw coming towards me a tall, glorious form, floating on the water, pointing to the sky, clothed in long, straight robes of white, making for open sea with the steady rush of a seabird on rested pinions. It took all the growing daylight to itself—it was the daylight, for a few breathless seconds—a vision of the Immaculate Conception, it seemed to me; then the music of ripple on prow whispered across the water, the sun leapt up behind Sant’ Angelo; I rubbed my eyes, and lo, a slender vessel with snowy sails, tall and narrow, from some strange port, such sails as our seamen never unfurled. She brought the wind as she had taken the daylight, and a moment later she swept past in her immaculate pride and was gone.
I always rather resented the advent of battleships and royal yachts and gaudy truck of that kind in our southern waters, but the private yachts inspired us with a pleasant mysterious interest that was not unwelcome. Once, when we were watching anxiously for my brother, during his venturesome sail from New York to Naples, and the children were cruising round the Bay not far from Naples, a large, beautiful yacht was seen to come in and cast anchor off Santa Lucia, and at once the greatest excitement prevailed on the Crawford felucca. Was that the Alda? Oh, surely it must be! At once the Margherita headed for the port, and the nearer she came to the new arrival, the surer was everybody that the Alda—which none of them had seen, as Marion had just bought her—had reached port at last. How well she had stood the voyage! No sign of the heavy weather mentioned in the wire from Gibraltar! No sign of the Padrone either, but, of course, he would have had to go on shore to report himself and get his harbour papers from the Consul. What was this? Dark-faced sailors in fezes? How like Marion to pick up a Lascar crew in New York! Let us row round her and hail somebody. Good heavens! The first shout brought a dozen lovely Turkish ladies to the cabin windows, smiling, interested, only too ready to ask the pretty boatful on board. The children stared open-mouthed! Then a burst of uncontrollable laughter shook the Margherita from stem to stern. Papa had certainly not brought a harem from New York! “A casa,” came the order to the grinning sailors, and the Margherita turned tail and ran for home.
There is a busy, unromantic seaport called Livorno, a long way up the coast from Naples, a Tuscan town of white streets and shadeless squares, all alive with commerce, and, until I came to years of reason, represented to me by the huge flapping straw hats, fine as silk and pale gold in colour, which we children regarded as signals of summer, when, on the first hot day, the ribbons that held them were tied under our chins, and we were admonished, on pain of sunstrokes and spankings, not to take them off. I had among my possessions a toy Swiss cottage all made of the same pretty straw, and I imagined that “Leghorn” was a straw city with bunches of red poppies and blue ribbons on the house-tops for ornament. It was rather a blow to discover, on being taken there when I was seven years old, that the only traces of my toy city were the thin golden strings which most of the women were plaiting with lightning quickness as they walked in the streets or sat in the doorways.