The thought had crossed the mind of the young man that, if they lived until they should be thrown ashore, the surviving passenger would require that he should deliver up the watch and other valuables to the family of Raffaelluccio. He may not have taken them with a design of theft. He probably saw that the dead body cumbered his companion, and committed it from a good humane motive to the sea, having removed the jewelry. But to retain possession of the property, his conscience did not bid him shrink from murder of which no eye of man would ever see the stain. An unexpected blow would silence his companion, and leave him on the boat to drift to land, a sole survivor, quietly made richer by the wreck. “I read it in his eyes,” said my informant. “The devil was in them, and I watched him well; but a heavy sea raised his side of the boat—that was his opportunity, and immediately he struck a heavy blow upon my head. If he was the younger I was the stronger, and he summoned me to struggle for my life, or for that chance of life which either of us had upon the gulf of waters. There was a horrible wrestling! I am the only survivor.
“All that day, and through a stormy, pitch-dark night, I lay tossed about, almost senseless, in the Bay of Naples. But before dawn on the second day, my boat was cast ashore at Torre dell’ Annunziata, and there locked between two rocks. I had just strength to crawl to the Coast-Guard house, in which I perceived that lights were twinkling. I was spurned. My papers were demanded.
“Faint as I was, in time I found it possible to make the good officials understand my case, and excuse the production of credentials from the fishes. They took me in, and treated me with Christian kindness. My looks had frightened them: my face was bloated, and my eyes protruded like those of a lobster.”
The mother of Raffaelluccio was living in Capri, and I was there when the news came back of her son’s fate. In the darkness of an October night, the ruined family—the bereaved mother and her daughters—mounted to their house-top, and turning toward the sea, shrieked wildly for the son and brother whom it held from them.
The voice of wo that then thrilled in my ears will never be forgotten. I never knew till then what agony could be; not expressed only, but communicated by the wail of women.
LE PETIT SAVOYARD.
(FROM THE FRENCH OF GUIRAUD.)
———
BY WILLIAM DOWE.