As the day waned, the confusion in the palace waxed indescribable. Tendency, no doubt, there was in the seeming chaos: I, as a stranger, could do no more than commit myself blindly to the stream, resolved in one matter alone--that I would not remain stranded and left behind. All questions of precedence but in flight--of etiquette, of privacy even--were blown to the winds. We were become a mere commonwealth of terror. Great ladies issued puffing and lumbering from their apartments, their arms loaded with goods and dresses, which they tripped over like clowns as they ran; nervous warriors got entangled in their swords, and lay gasping on their backs like dying fish. I never laughed so much or so hysterically in my life. With all but the almighty family itself it was _sauve qui peut_; and I was beginning to formulate my own desperate plans, when de’ Medici whispered quick in my ear-- “Follow me without seeming to!” It had been impossible in that frantic crowd, had not my wits already noted his every trick and mannerism. Fortunate in being utterly unencumbered, I pursued the shadow. It led me by intricate ways, out of the light into darkness, out of the tumult into silence, by a back passage through the arsenal, and so down to the waterside, where a little boat with dusk figures was waiting. Without ceremony we tumbled in, and sat panting. “Any more?” said a voice in my own good English tongue. De’ Medici answered in the negative. “Give way, men!” cried the officer sharply. In an instant we were speeding for the bay. The lights quivered and shrunk behind us; the uproar attenuated, and was drawn out to a murmur. Yard by yard there swelled up before our eyes vast ribbon-girded bulks, that rocked lazily on the tide, tracing intricate patterns with their masts among the stars. To one of these, the greatest, we galloped, and came round with a surge and hollow lap of water under its quarter. The next moment we were aboard the _Vanguard_. XXIX. I STILL KNOW HOW TO WAIT I sing Palermo, “_la felice_,” the languorous, the sunny, the lotus island to all shipwrecked mariners. O, those five days in the gulf!--a hundred hours in which to think of nothing but one’s crimes, and one’s mistake, saving the sinfulness, in not having been born a mermaid. I declare I was not ill myself, except in the illness of others; but to hear the groaning of the ship’s ribs mimicked a hundredfold by the straining ribs of my companions was an eternal bone in my throat. As a canary sings the louder the more we talk, so, as the ship talked, the more fervent rose all round the chaunt of suffering-- “O, San Gennaro, grant it passage! O, Santa Maria, I can give no more; you have it all! Father of pity, I am like a squeezed wineskin!”