“Son,” he said, “if thou quittest life with a due dependence on the Son of God, and in this temper toward thy fellow-creatures, of all this living throng thou art he who is most to be envied!  Address thy soul in prayer once more to Him who thou feelest can alone serve thee.”

Caraccioli, aided by the priest, knelt on the scaffold; for the rope hung loose enough to permit that act of humiliation, and the other bent at his side.

“I wish to God Nelson had nothing to do with this!” muttered Cuffe, as he turned away his face, inadvertently bending his eyes on the Foudroyant, nearly under the stern of which ship his gig lay.  There, in the stern-walk, stood the lady, already mentioned in this chapter, a keen spectator of the awful scene.  No one but a maid was near her, however; the men of her companionship not being of moods stern enough to be at her side.  Cuffe turned away from this sight in still stronger disgust; and just at that moment a common cry arose from the boats.  Looking round, he was just in time to see the unfortunate Caraccioli dragged from his knees by the neck, until he rose, by a steady man-of-war pull, to the end of the yard; leaving his companion alone on the scaffold, lost in prayer.  There was a horrible minute of the struggles between life and death, when the body, so late the tenement of an immortal spirit, hung, like one of the jewel-blocks of the ship, dangling passively at the end of the spar, as insensible as the wood which sustained it.

CHAPTER XV.

“Sleep, sleep, thou sad one, on the sea;
The wash of waters lulls thee now;
His arm no more will pillow thee,
Thy hand upon his brow;
He is not near, to hurt thee, or to save: 
The ground is his—­the sea must be thy grave.”

DANA.

A long summer’s evening did the body of Francesco Caraccioli hang suspended at the yard-arm of the Minerva; a revolting spectacle to his countrymen and to most of the strangers who had been the witnesses of his end.  Then was it lowered into a boat, its feet loaded with a double-headed shot, and it was carried out a league or more into the bay and cast into the sea.  The revolting manner in which it rose to the surface and confronted its destroyers a fortnight later has passed into history; and, to this day, forms one of the marvels related by the ignorant and wonder-loving of that region[6].  As for Ghita, she disappeared no one knew how; Vito Viti and his companions being too much absorbed with the scene to note the tender and considerate manner in which Raoul rowed her off from a spectacle that could but be replete with horrors to one so situated.  Cuffe himself stood but a few minutes longer; but he directed his boat’s crew to pull alongside of the Proserpine.  In half an hour after the execution took place this frigate was aweigh; and then she was seen standing out of the bay, before a light air, covered with canvas from her truck to her hammock-cloths.  Leaving her for the moment, we will return to the party in the skiff.