CHAPTER XIIITHE PROCESS

Butwhile those letters were speeding to Greville, Sir William, not unobservant that absence appeared to make the heart grow fonder, resolved to try the same prescription on his own account.

A visit to Rome was desirable and necessary in diplomatic interests, and a little diplomatic reflection might not be amiss for Emma. He had come to be so necessary a part of her daily life that it would be as well she should realize how much she owed to his presence—an experiment he would not have ventured earlier but felt might be well essayed now. He had proved on that celebrated evening that chaste indignation might be surmounted by the wish to shine, and it emboldened him.

They met a day or two later in the beautiful boudoir he had lately fitted for her with great mirrors entirely covering the wall opposite the Chinese-fashion semi-circular window to reflect and repeat the glorious sea and sky beyond. It might indeed have been a palace beneath the sea for light and shimmer, and she delighted to watch the lovely progress of the day from dawn to sunsetting and twilight and moonlight. She had caught the moon and every star in her own chamber, she would say, laughing.

“See; here is Venus!” pointing to her mirrors, “and I can swim along that moon-path to heaven.”

It was a room sacred to their meetings. The written sheets of the first part of his book on Etruscan urns lay on the table and Emma—Emma!—was reading them with him and learning every day to be more and more his companion.

Now he came in quietly, with a certain gravity, very different from his usual delight in that morning entry.

“I have a piece of news for you, Emma. I am going away for some weeks.”

The pencil slipped from her fingers. She looked up startled.

“Away!”

“Yes. It is necessary, but even if it had not been necessary I should have gone. I think you understand the reason very well.”

“You are angry with me?” The quick breath caught on the words.

“No. It is rather you who are angry with me.”

It faced her with a dilemma. She looked down, and her cheeks crimsoned.

“I read your silence very well,” he went on calmly. “Your heart is not ungrateful but your modesty was alarmed. You consider yourself Greville’s wife in all but name. Am I wrong?”

She moved her head slightly, but said nothing.

“Well, that matter is for you and Greville to settle, and since we both have written, for I wrote and conclude you have done the same, we shall soon know his mind. Meanwhile I wish to assure you that you have no occasion for alarm. I shall not offend in that respect again. You are perfectly safe.”

Terror seized her. What was there in Greville to count on? What would be her fate if Sir William were offended beyond hope? How could she convey to him that her prayer had really been, “O Lord, protect me, but do not protect me too much!” How could she make him understand her doubts and fears? Impossible! Therefore she took refuge in a quiet grief which must touch and plead for her.

“You are angry with me,” she repeated sorrowfully, “and what can I say? Oh, if you could but see the warm true affection in my heart you would not be so cruel to your unhappy Emma. Once you said I was your friend—”

“You are my dear friend. I shall never call you otherwise.”

She turned with eyes swimming in sudden tears.

“Do you call me your dear friend? Ah, what a happy creature is your Emma—me that had no friend, no protector, nobody that I could trust, and now to be the friend, the Emma of Sir William Hamilton!”

He was literally obliged to look away from her. How otherwise could he persist in his purpose of leaving her to the cruel reflection that she had wounded him. And yet it was necessary that he should go. He knew it. Still, he trifled with temptation.

“And yet, though you feel this, you were shocked at the thought of being wholly mine, Emma; bound to me by the tenderest ties?”

She looked down and muttered the one word, “Greville.”

“Yes, you are right. That brings us back to where we started. We have written to Greville. I shall go away and leave you to reflection which will deeply affect us both. There is no more to be said at present.”

“Oh, don’t go!” It came like an involuntary cry. “Won’t you miss me? Won’t you miss accompanying my songs with your viola; and how can I sing if you are gone? And the book”—she laid her hand on the sheets—“and the garden? If you go I will go nowhere until you come back. It’s all nothing to me unless you’re here.”

He wanted to improve on that admission but held himself strongly back.

“My dear Emma, I have called you my friend. I wish this matter settled with reason and good sense, and to that end we must separate a while that we may both reflect. I have my thinking to do as well as you yours. This pleasant delightful life has drifted us into a situation which may hold its difficulties for me as well as for you if I am not careful. It will really be best we should meet no more until you have heard from Greville. Let us postpone any discussion until then.”

It terrified her, but what could she say? Her mind was a tossing sea. She wished to keep them both—the one as a lover, the other as an indulgent friend—and it looked most alarmingly as if neither could be trained into the position she wished him to fill.

“May I write to you?” she faltered.

“Certainly. And pray write fully to Greville. Your mind and his will be the easier for it. The position cannot be made too clear. Now, we will not meet except in public until I return.”

He got himself out of the room somehow, out of range of those imploring eyes. And yet what they implored she knew no more than he. And though he took her to Sorrento where she was the hostess at an informal entertainment, the centre of all thoughts and admiration, she could not catch a single responsive look from his eyes. His private band was there and accompanied her in her latest, most brilliant song. The applause was deafening, but he was talking to my Lady Diana Beauclerck before it ceased and she could not see a single motion of his hands to swell the uproar. She sang again some of the Piedigrotta songs—redolent of the country and the people—this time in costume and with her tambourine, and yet could extract nothing but the placid smile of general benevolence with which he regarded all the company. Her fears grew steadily, and by the time he departed before she was up, she was on tenter-hooks.

She went and shut herself that evening into the room of the mirrors and did the serious thinking he recommended, with a little note of farewell from him in her hand. He was hurt and she had hurt him. How far had she hurt herself in doing it? Could it be possible that she had been foolishly, madly mistaken in her course throughout; that if she had written to Greville rather on her triumphs than her sorrows, he might have valued her more highly? Men did not like perpetual moaning and whining, and Greville of all men would not bear it. Could that be the reason why he had not troubled to answer her letters? If so—oh, if she could but recall the last two she had written! And as to Sir William—had she not deafened and besieged him with her Greville lamentations and was not that madness also? What could have possessed her to weary them both with such folly? Surely the merest beginner should have known better; and she—the beauty, the genius whom all her world applauded, who could not only delight but fascinate every man who looked into her eyes—sheto behave like a love-sick country girl!

She would write to Sir William—yes, but letters that should neither lament nor weary him. She would write to Greville—yes, but it should be a song of triumph. Not a minute would she lose! Sir William first. He should find the letter waiting his arrival. What could she tell him he did not know? The convent—that would amuse him. She would prattle on paper as she talked when she drew up her stool beside his chair and told him the day’s adventures. And first, she began with his health and happiness and comfort, leaning on them, but not too strongly—no sentiment—and then passed on.

“I had hardly time to thank you for your kind letter of this morning as I was busy preparing for to go on my visit to the convent of Santa Romita and endead I am glad I went but to-morrow I dine with them in full assembly. I am quite charmed with Beatrice Acquaviva. Such is the name of the charming whoman I saw to-day. O Sir William, she is a pretty whoman! She is 29 years old. She took the veil at 20 and does not repent to this day, though if I am a judge of physiognomy her eyes does not look like the eyes of a nun. They are always laughing and something in them vastly alluring, and I wonder the men of Naples woud suffer the onely pretty whoman who is realy pretty to be shut in a convent. But it is like the mean-spirited ill taste of the Neapolitans. I told her I wondered how she woud be lett to hide herself from the world, and I daresay thousands of tears was shed the day she deprived Naples of one of its greatest ornaments. She answered with a sigh, that endead numbers of tears was shed and once or twice her resolution was allmost shook. And since that time one of her sisters had followed her example. But I think Beatrice is charming and I realy feil for her an affection. Her eyes, Sir William, is I don’t know how to describe them. I stopt one hour with them and I had all the good things to eat and I promise you they don’t starve themselves, but their dress is very becoming, and she told me she was allowed to wear rings and mufs and any little thing she liked and endead she displayed to-day a great deal of finery, for she had four or five dimond rings on her fingers and seemed fond of her muff. She has excellent teeth and shows them for she is always laughing. She kissed my lips, cheeks and forehead and every moment exclaimed ‘Charming fine creature,’ admired my dress, said I looked like an angel, for I was in clear white dimity and a blue sash. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘it would be worth while to live for such a one as you. Your good heart would melt at any trouble that befel me and partake of one’s greef or be equaly happy at one’s good fortune.’ In short I sat and listened to her and the tears stood in my eyes and I loved her at that moment. Did she not speak very pretty? But not one word of religion. There is sixty whomen and all well-looking but not like the fair Beatrice. ‘O Emma,’ she says to me, ‘they brought here the Viene minister’s wife but I did not like the looks of her at first. She was little, short, pinched face and I received her cooly. How different from you. We may read your heart in your countenance, your complexion, in short your figure and your features is rare, for you are like the marble statues I saw when I was in the world.’ I think she flattered me up but I was pleased.”

So was Sir William. He laughed to his heart’s content over this effusion—Emma among the nuns! Certainly she would be a disintegrating influence. He wrote back, encouraging her to go there as often as she could, to go everywhere and send him these naïve descriptions—a calm, friendly letter. Indeed, it ended, “Kindest regards to my dear friend Emma, from,” etc. She wrote back that in his absence convent society was the gayest she could endure—nothing where he could have been and was not was pleasant without him. And then, “Do you call me your dear friend? Oh, if I could express myself! If I had words to thank you that I may not be choaked with meanings for which I can find no utterance.”

She found utterance, however, for many gay little descriptions, many memories of the quiet happy evenings they had had, winged with music and pleasant talk—evenings when her education was being carried on delightfully, insensibly, by one of the most cultivated minds in Europe. That, she knew, was his favourite pursuit now; the pleasure he would choose in preference to any other. She remembered what he had told her with such pride as the saying of his intimate friend, the great and scientific Sir Joseph Banks: “I rejoice to hear she proceeds with success in her improvement. Her beauty will, I hope, last as long as she can wish; but her mind, once stored with instruction, will certainly last as long as she stays this side of heaven.” Could it be wondered that her head was a little giddy with such notices from such men? After all, as she herself said: “I am a pretty woman and one cannot be everything at once.”

Perhaps in any case the forcing process had been a little too rapid for slow-footed common sense to keep up with it. The environment, too, carried its own dangers. Not for nothing did Goethe note before quitting those enchanted shores that “Naples is a paradise. Every one lives, after his kind, intoxicated with self-forgetfulness. It is the same with me. I scarcely recognize myself. Yesterday I thought ‘Either you were oraremad.’ ”

Emma, after a very different fashion, was in the same case. The general adoration had, as Greville foresaw, gone to her brain; indeed, it was a heady draught. She had tasted pleasures she could never now forego. Greville—of course she loved him—but whereas the alternative had been Greville or despair, it was now becoming clear to her that the chance which gave her not only Greville but Hamilton was unique. It could never recur. If she lost them both her life would run the ordinary course of such lives as hers; another, other protectors; waning beauty; desertion. She might, of course, make a marriage, even a wealthy one, but there again Greville and Hamilton—her twin stars—had spoiled her for the company of the average man of pleasure, the only type which would consider her either as a mistress or wife. It is the truth of this strangely mixed Emma that she loved to learn many things worth learning, and with very little delicacy of her own she loved to be with those who naturally owned it and to reflect it until she could half deceive herself as well as them into the belief that she shared it.

Every day in Sir William’s absence she would order the boat at her disposal and float about thecuvette bleueof the bay, thinking, dreaming in a sort of languor that threatened to overwhelm her now. It was a respite, a lull before she was compelled to make that alarming definite choice which must sever her from Greville and the past for ever, for the alternative now was not Greville or despair; it was Greville or Sir William.

A slow seductive enervation was in the very air. She wandered in the famous gardens with only a staid old woman as attendant, who followed decorously a little behind, and scarcely saw how many eyes sought the lovely Englishwoman; and there one day the King himself met her, and, overjoyed at the chance of hercavaliere servente’sabsence, ventured to join her among the flowers. A warm languid day, the sun drowsing among the blossoms and the swaying palms, what could be a more charming occupation than to see how her Italian had improved since their last meeting? Emma was all discretion, the monarch all ardour, and old women—in Italy only, let us believe—not inaccessible to Royal bribes which ensure their absence at needed moments.

The pair sat among the rosy oleanders, with the melting sapphire of the sea in glimpses through divinest blossomed boughs where all the ancient gods of Italy might have dreamed away the long warm hours. And Ferdinand urged his love for the exquisite foreigner, and she parried and fenced, and dared neither wholly discourage the Royal advances nor wholly smile upon them, and so sat for an hour, basking in the miraculous truth that she, the once forlorn and forsaken, had it in her power to captivate a king. He followed her when she arose, beseeching, entreating, she looking over her shoulder with the look we know so well in the “Bacchante,” where for Romney’s inspiration she had assumed the arch repelling-inviting smile that was to catch the King in its golden net. But when she left the gardens she knew he did not interest her. It would be useful for writing to Greville. It would convince Hamilton of her pure fidelity when he returned. That was all the use of it. She dismissed the Royal wooer with the final wave of her hand, and fell into heavy thought again.

But she wrote of it to Greville; no tearful plaintive letter this time, but rather a sinister triumph meant to warn him that longer delay and hovering about a cold English bride would mean a loss that possibly nothing could ever replace. Kings would not dispute Miss Middleton with him. Royal dukes, like His Highness of Gloucester, would not creep toherfeet for an introduction. He would have a commonplace dowdy wife, no more; and even as regards fortune: If one can sing like an angel, dance, pose, draw not only men’s but women’s frantic admiration, be a European celebrity, may not money also fall in golden showers? She believed it might. Consequently, we boast! We tell Greville sufficient to let him imagine even greater splendours than as yet have transpired!

At Sorrento they were all “in ecstasies of adoration” when she entertained there. “I left some dying, some crying and all in despair. Mind you, this was all nobility and as proud as the devil.Wehumbled them! But what astonished them was that I should speak such good Italian. For I paid them, I spared none of them, though I was civil and obliging. One asked me if I left a love at Naples that I left them so soon. I pulled my lip at him, to say ‘I pray, do you take me for an Italian? Look, sir, I am English. I have onecavaliere serventeand I have brought him with me.’ The house is full of painters painting me. He [Sir William] has now got nine pictures of me and two a-painting. Marchant is cutting my head in stone, that is in cameo for a ring. There is another man modeling me in wax, and another in clay. All the artists is come from Rome to study from me. Galucci played some of my solfegos and you woud have thought he woud have gone mad. He never saw or heard of such a whoman before. He says when he first came in I frightened him with a Majesty and Juno look that I received him with. Then he says that whent off on being more acquainted and I enchanted him by my politeness and the manner in which I did the honors, and then I almost made him cry with Handels, and with the comick he could not contain himself for he says he never saw the tragick and comick muse blended so happily together.”

Yes, Greville shall know, even if she gives the impression that wide Italy is emptied of artists who have poured into Naples with no other occupation than to stare at her! It is the last attempt to bring him to her feet. He shall know that, before Sir William went, she—she, the rejected—was the guest of honour on board a foreign man-of-war. No less!

“We sett down thirty to dine, me at the head of the tables, mistress of the feast, drest all in virgin white and my hair all in ringlets reaching allmost to my heals. I assure you it is so long that I realy lookd and moved amongst it. Sir William said so.”

If that does not move him, nothing will and if he thinks those silken auburn locks have grown miraculously from knee to heel during that year in Italy, then let him! Perhaps he has forgotten that little fact with so much else.

That letter despatched, she turns again to write to Hamilton. When will he come back?

“One hour’s absence is a year. My friend, my All, my earthly good, my Kind home in one, you are to me eating, drinking and cloathing, my comforter in distress. Then why shall I not love you? Endead I must and ought whilst life is left in me or reason to think on you.”

Certainly Emma can write with energy and spirit when she will; all the warmth of a graphic pen, of a warm heart, is hers when she chooses to express it. Sir William, reading the last, surprises himself by laying it against his cheek, and murmuring, “Dear child; my beloved Emma!” hoping and believing that this absence is teaching her some of the secrets of her own shy heart.

And Greville? Greville receiving his, studies it with care, makes a pencil note or two of the contents in his useful pocketbook, and—re-encloses it to Sir William with an admonitory message. “Go on circumventing Emma. She will surrender at last. It is not in the power of woman to stand so prolonged a siege.”

And now, the time come, he prepares himself to write to Emma, with the goal in sight. The message must be brief and vague, but must show her clearly once and for all that it is finished between them. Miss Middleton is half wooed, half won, he hopes. There can be no delay. He writes back tersely, that she is “to oblige Sir William.”

She read this paper in the solitude of that lovely room which had brought the sea, the blue air, indoors, to keep her company with the sunshine, and in a frantic passion, half fury, half raging love, she spat upon it, stamped her foot upon it, spurned it, a girl of the people, all the veneer gone and rage blazing uncontrolled. She could not write for a while, her hands shook so violently, every fibre of her body quivering under the shameful blow. She swallowed a glass of water, her teeth chattering against the rim. She lay long, half torpid, to compose herself and could not—a strong and righteous anger at the mean trick she had never suspected drove her like a ship before a gale. But she would, she must write if she died for it, and then at long last, as it seemed, she wrote.

“Nothing can express my rage. Greville, to advise me! You that used to envy my smiles. How with cool indifference to advise me! Oh, that is the worst of all. But I will not, no, I will not rage. If I was with you I would murder you and myself boath. I will go to London, go into every excess of vice till I dye, a miserable broken-hearted wretch, and leave my fate as a warning to young whomen never to be too good, for now you have made me good you have abandoned me, and some violent end shall finish our connexion if it is to finish.”

A long pause, and tenderer thoughts stole over her. Her hand delayed. Must the last words be all cruel poisoned darts? Ah, no. She wrote again slower, the tears this time falling in large drops like blood upon the letter.

“It is enough. I have paper that Greville wrote on. He has folded it up. He wet the wafer. How I envy thee the place of Emma’s lips that woud give worlds, had she them, to kiss those lips. I onely wish a wafer was my onely rival. But I submit to what God and Greville pleases.”

God and Greville! She laid down the pen.

It is not too much to say that with that letter died the last remnant of virginity in Emma’s heart. It had survived much, but that mean treachery slaughtered it. It is another and a worse, though never a wholly bad woman, who survives—a woman dangerously scorned who will dangerously repay it to Greville and others. She wrote once more before Sir William returned.

“Pray write, for nothing will make me so angry, and it is not to yourinterestto disoblige me, for you don’t know the power I have here. If you affront me I will make him marry me. God bless you forever.”

A different woman, as may well be seen, but Greville did not realize it. It must be owned he played his cards from this time clumsily both with the girl and Sir William. He sent that wild threat to his uncle because it would set him on his guard. He wrote with a cool superior friendship to Emma, and quick as lightning she caught his tone, seeing all lost, and replied in kind. Every nerve, every sense, was on guard now. She would not injure herself by trying to make trouble between Sir William and his favourite friend. No, though her girdle should burst, to use her own graphic phrase, she would keep her temper, play her game and win—and win. And Greville should see it and suffer! He had more cause for annoyance than she knew. Miss Middleton refused him, an expected post slipped through his fingers, and it was all in all to him to be well with Sir William.

She helped him in her own way and for her own ends. Not a word of complaint—a summer calm, kindly references to Greville, awaited the uneasy Sir William when he returned to the Palazzo Sessa. And when they were alone she pulled her little stool beside him, and looking up with a smile half sad, half arch, said softly:

“I have my wisdom teeth at last, Sir William. You have seen the last of the silly impatient Emma. She spread her wings and flew away far beyond Capri while you were gone. It is a happy grateful girl now who will love you forever and ever, who did not even know until your dear beloved face was out of sight how little she could do without you.”

He stooped forward and looked into her face, scarcely believing:

“Emma, dearest and sweetest, do you mean it?”

“And more,” she said, “much more! My eyes are opened.”

He put his arms about her, dazzled, overcome, now that the moment of surrender was upon him. Her glowing beauty bathed him, the loveliest lips on earth were pressed to his, the curtain of silken hair fell about them.

Let a man beware of the hour which fulfils all his wishes.

CHAPTER XIVTHE WAY TO TRIUMPH

Emma, laughing, singing, not a care in her sea-blue eyes four years later. Emma, the sunlight of the Palazzo Sessa, sweet as a summer dawn to Hamilton and to all the world. Greville, forgotten as a lover, preserved as a friend—after a fashion! We write to him, we enter sympathetically into his concerns. He is still unmarried. We do not tell him we rejoice in Miss Middleton’s refusal, for that would be unkind, injudicious. We say she is a foolish girl who will have cause to regret her folly. Naturally we dwell on the domestic peace and happiness of the Palazzo Sessa, and the charm of days that drift like flower petals on a breeze. We threaten no more—that was but a wild outburst of passion at a very irritating moment, and much better forgotten. Greville has no cause for uneasiness. Emma is pleasantly provided for. Sir William is furnished with a mistress so charming that no anxiety about marriage can possibly arise, and he may rise up and call himself blessed, for his plan has been a success from beginning to end. He certainly had not the smallest fear that his uncle would make himself ridiculous, and what could be more ridiculous than to marry a woman whom all Europe knew as hisbelle amie. Besides he himself had already given the elderly lover his views as to the proper provision to be made for Emma when this last bond should wear thin. That suggestion would probably bring forth an enlightening answer. It brought forth a very comfortable one; the more so because so evidently sincere.

“I fear,” Sir William wrote, “that her views are beyond what I can bring myself to execute, and that when her hopes on this point are over she will make herself and me unhappy.”

So all was well to the last point. Sir William duly on his guard and Emma’s impetuosity, as usual, hurrying her into mistakes. Greville laid that letter beside a friendly one from Emma, with a contented sigh and pursued his irreproachable way in peace.

So also did Emma, though not by any means in inward quiet. The more dazzling, the more delightful her triumphs, the more she felt the insecurity of the foundation. Sir William was her slave, but not her legalized slave, and though she had no fears for the present it must be her certain doom to be dismissed with a slender “provision” when he grew older and his family reclaimed him as it does all old and wealthy men. Day by day she made herself dearer and more necessary to him but never a day seemed to bring that goal nearer. She would hint, sigh, glance gently near the target, but never an arrow found the bull’s eye. He would do anything, everything for her—excepting the one thing that mattered more than all the wealth of the world, and yet she could not teach herself to think it impossible. Sometimes, the inward storm broke in nervous irritations in which he must have guessed the truth, and then she would be terrified and redouble her wifely submissions. Suppose he should think, as Greville had thought, that she had an ungoverned temper; then all hope would be over. He certainly was keenly on the watch—and why, why, if he thought the thing impossible?

Her circumspection was almost perfect. She solved the nearly impossible problem of being passionately admired, the dancing star of gaiety, the sighed for of all the distinguished and attractive men who came and went in their society, and yet of preserving a reputation of unsullied fidelity to her Ambassador. No other man had so much as a look to boast of. They called her the lovely ice-image. Sir William knew better and was radiant. But never a word of the only reward she craved, and she could see only a future in which Greville and the family would consult coldly on an adequate pension in return for her services.

And yet, the Queen had seen her immaculate propriety of behaviour with admiration, and had even pointed her out as an example to the giddy ladies who formed the Royal circle. “If a young woman inherposition can so conduct herself, what ought,” etc. The rest of the little sermon may be imagined, and might have been more effective but for the Royal preacher’s own intimacy with the cool, handsome Irishman Acton who was the Neapolitan Minister of Marine, whom the wits of Naples coupled with King and Queen in the assertion that the three werehic, haec, hoc, and the King the last of them. But what did Emma care? Royalty is royalty, amuse itself how it will, and every word that fell from Marie Caroline’s lips was treasured and laid before Hamilton. She had chilled the King off effectually and the lovers laughed together over that thwarted gallantry. He was lost in admiration of the tender affection which nothing could swerve. Emma, who desired the Queen’s attentions very much more eagerly than the King’s, knew well of Her Majesty’s highly unreasonable jealousy of her consort’s diversions, and trimmed her sails accordingly. Not that they were any temptation to her. She was firmly if temperately attached to Hamilton, was less physically than intellectually sensuous, and had, moreover, a clear end before her and a tangled way to it which absorbed all her deeper interests. And as yet no prospect of success. He was wary beyond all her skill. A plotter, an adventuress she may be called by the too righteous, but would not any woman have done the same? And her heart was sincere if her brain was tortuous. She cared for her man; was grateful for benefits received although she hoped for more.

Sir William came in one day a little disquieted.

“News, my dearest child, news from England. A relation of mine, a very important relation coming out. I would have had her here in the house but—no, no, my Emma, my dear, don’t look sad. Don’t hide your face. What is she or any one compared to my beauty? You never thought I meant that. Come here!”

He drew her to his knee and she drooped her head on his shoulder.

“But, Sir William, the foreign ladies here don’t mind me. Indeed they don’t! See how they come to our evenings! And when we entertain at the Villa Emma, or anywhere, they don’t hold away. They have no objections.”

“My angel, yes.” He smoothed her hair tenderly. Never once did he fail in the gentlest kindness and even respect. “But English women, particularly English women about Queen Charlotte, have to be careful. Absurd, ridiculous, when every one knows what goes on, and when some of the women they pass by are a million times better and more beautiful than themselves! But this is a very great lady and was in attendance on the Queen for a considerable time. It is the Duchess of Argyll, my cousin by marriage. Her first husband was Duke of Hamilton. You can imagine I would give anything that she should know my jewel and see it sparkle, but ’tis impossible. She will hear your praises all over Naples—that’s my consolation—your kind heart not the least. But I wanted to prepare you for this, for I would not have it hurt you when she comes.”

“It won’t, it shan’t hurt me!” she said, smiling courageously into his eyes. “No one can have everything and I’d like to know where is the woman that has so much as me! Duchess as she is I daresay she hasn’t the quarter! No, my own Sir William, you shall go see her and then come back to our home, and I believe you’ll own there’s no place so happy for us both. What do I want with duchesses? Is she very proud?”

“As proud as a gorgeous peacock. Didn’t Bozzy, old Dr. Johnson’s Boswell, say she chilled him nearly into marble with her majesty? But, for all that, he ended by allowing there was something pleasant too—‘better be strangled by a silk rope than a hempen,’—I forget the exact words. But she’s all the prouder because she began life so poor that she and her beautiful sister, Maria, had to borrow dresses from a saucy actress before they could make any appearance in the world. Well born, all the same, granddaughters of Lord Mayo’s. Gunning was their name.”

“Oh, tell me more!” cried Emma, sparkling with interest. “I’ve heard Greville speak of the beautiful Gunnings. Were they as beautiful—as me?”

She pouted those incomparable lips into a kiss that ensured his denial.

“Of course not. Whoever was or will be? But Maria—she married Lord Coventry—came as near you as mortal woman could, for all she was a lovely doll with not a gleam of your good sense and talents. Elizabeth, the double Duchess, had more brains, and a great deal more dignity, and an amazing beauty. Her smile—”

“I want to see her. I want to see her!” Emma clapped her hands and sent the rays flashing from two rings of great diamonds. She might have been a graven image hung with jewels if she would, but refused extravagance of that order and commanded Sir William to save every stray penny for his Etruscan urns. What wonder she wore his heart instead of his fripperies? As a matter of fact, these rings were his dead wife’s. Even his good taste was not flawless.

“Youshallsee her, I promise, and she shall see you. But remember she is fifty now, and her health not strong. I like her. There’s a kind of courage in her that matches your own. If things had been different you might have been friends.”

Emma sighed, a soft little sigh, no more. But it said, and he heard it—“If things were different! Ah, and they might be. Have I not deserved it?” Much may be said in a sigh.

The Duchess came, her fame preceding her, with a little attendant court of her own, and all Naples thrilled to receive the greatest of the great English ladies. However she had begun in life she had since acquired a most majestic dignity, and the English women who had held coldly aloof from Emma were now certain of a leader who would open the way to victory and the public rout of the fair sinner.

Sir William waited upon her directly she arrived. He felt it was best to place the matter on a footing of perfect frankness at once, and was eager to find her alone; an impossibility, as it seemed, for all the gay world of Naples was perpetually in her salon.

At last he secured her, and by the merest chance, for they met in the same rose-hung gardens where Emma had repelled the King’s advances, beneath a long trellised pergola with a delicate sea-breeze wandering like a bee drunken with perfume and colour among the roses. She sat, leaning back in the chair her footman had set beneath the delicious shadow, half smiling with delight at the beauty about her.

“What a place! What a scene!” she said softly. “My dear Sir William, though you have written to Charlotte more than once, and even when you came to England last, you never expressed the half of it. ’Tis surprising to me that we endure the English climate who could be here. ’Tis to share the very youth of the world.”

“Many things conspire to make it fascinating. When on a moonlit night on the Marina I hear the soft thrum of guitars, the singing voices and subdued laughter I often wonder whether I can bear the chill of the foggy North any more,” he said. “It is home in a sense but—well, I left it a long time ago. My notions are Italian—lax, some would call them. And yet, call them what you will, they are the same all the world over, at bottom.”

“For my part the English air wearies me,” says her Grace, wielding a black fan, her large calm eyes studying him above its rim. “I was always happier in Scotland than at Court. Hamilton Palace was my heaven; and later, Inverary. I suppose ’twas the Irish blood in me, my father’s blood, that couldn’t content itself with beef and pudding and solid worth; that was better pleased with the haunted castles and purple heather of the North. Yes, even in the winter and the grey rain that falls and falls! I remember Oban in a smurr of sea fog”—she looked across the sapphire sea and sighed—“I wonder shall I ever see it more!”

“Why, madam, yes! Your Grace will reign queen of the Highland hearts for many a long day yet.”

“No, no, my good Sir William, when beauty goes, hearts follow her like her own doves. I was a queen once. I am an elderly duchess now.”

She turned her sweet face upon him smiling, sweet like a half-faded rose that hangs a little wearily on its stem, but perfumed and lovely still with a pathetic loveliness. Her voice was soft as the breeze. That had been always a part of the Gunning charm. To him who could remember when she and her dead sister had set London in a ferment, twin stars rising with mutual rays, the very sight of her must always recall the time when he too was young and a worshipper at the little feet which earned their shoemaker half a fortune when he exhibited the beauties’ shoes at so much a head to the crowd. Only Sir William had never been certain which of the two possessed his heart. Was it Elizabeth, was it Maria? How could any poor devil tell? Dear dead frivolities, how they warmed him! He laughed a little at the memory and they talked together over places and people well known to both; the perfect free masonry of caste. A pleasant hour.

“I saw Greville before I left London. He does not improve on me in spite of his cleverness and excellent fine manners. A selfish young man, as I think, and cold. I was not surprised Miss Middleton refused him. A warm-hearted girl.”

“A better, more well-conducted, sensible man does not exist, your Grace!” Sir William was eager in the defence. “I know no one whose advice I would sooner take.”

“Yes, on a Greek urn or a question of worldly wisdom or good taste,” says her Grace with her soft, imperial air. “But not on a matter of the heart or of kindness or—what shall I say?—heart’s honour. No, Sir William; indeed, believe me, women are the best judges of such matters, andthereI pronounce Greville outside the pale.”

“Madam, I protest!”

“No, you agree! you always agreed with me. You remember when Hamilton laughed at my Irish brogue you would say it was the music of the spheres.”

“And it was and always will be!”

“No—I am always contradicting my kind cousin—I have forgotten my Irish days and Irish ways, I am only a dull old duchess now. But I love beauty though I don’t see any to match—”

“Your own!” he interrupted.

“No, my poor sister’s. Heavens, how lovely she was! Do you remember—but who’s that?”

She pointed covertly with her fan at a girl pacing absently down the pergola with an elderly woman handsomely dressed leaning on her arm. She herself was dressed in white, with a large straw hat trimmed with blue ribbons shading her face, and carried a basket of roses in the other hand. A little black and white silken spaniel trotted after her.

She was looking gravely down on the path as she walked, lost in thought, and evidently knew nothing of who sat among the roses. The pair stopped a little way off and there she stood in perfect quiet, looking far away to the sea. A lovely tranquillity was on her face and the gently relaxed figure. It was as though some vaguely pleasant thought possessed her, all sunshine and roses.

“That girl,” said the Duchess softly, lest she should be overheard, “is the greatest beauty I have seen since my sister died. I should say a perfect beauty if I did not remember Maria. I can think no one else equalsher. What is your judgment?”

“You must not ask my judgment here!” he whispered, and as Emma and her mother moved towards them again in passing, he rose and bowed with the most punctilious courtesy, Emma flushing brightly as they curtseyed in answer and passed on. She could guess very well who the noble-looking woman must be who sat so much at ease with Sir William. She could not hurry her mother, however, and so they went slowly out of sight.

“Who is she?” the Duchess demanded.

He looked her straight in the face.

“As I remember you, madam, your Grace was bound by no conventions. You were not held by other people’s approvals and disapprovals. You judged for yourself and imposed your own will on others. If so great a lady cannot, who can? That was your attitude. Is it so still?”

“Certainly, so far as I know. Who is she? An unmentionable?”

“No, an extremely mentionable, mentioned indeed by all here who can admire beauty, genius, and the warmest heart in the world.”

“There spoke a lover!” says the Duchess, fixing him with her clear eyes. “I know who she is now. She is the lady of the Embassy. Oh, I have heard all about her. Well, cousin, I like you for bowing to her while you sat with me. Youcouldhave made as though you did not see her. It was like you. I think all the Hamiltons are gentlemen.”

“Madam, not even for your Grace’s good opinion would I slight the woman I love best in the world. Yet I am thankful it approves mine.”

“Tell me about her. I have heard so many scandals since I came that the truth would be of interest. Is she of the common sort—or what?”

Let Sir William’s speech be imagined rather than related. He painted her for the Duchess as no other voice, not even Romney’s nor yet his brush, could have painted her. Her heart, her purity, her intellect, her extraordinary accomplishments (indeed the Duchess had heard much of the latter), all were passed in review with a lover’s fondness.

She listened without a frown. In that perfumed languid air it was perhaps more irksome to sit in judgment than in the grey chills of England, but in any case she considered her station too high to be bound by any other opinion than her own. Her Grace was accustomed to say that the working class and the aristocratic are a law unto themselves in matters of morals and that it is but the middle class who skulk and hypocritize. It may be observed that she coined her words as well as her views and was more likely to be friendly with the farmer’s wife than the lawyer’s lady.

Therefore she brought an unprejudiced mind to hear on Sir William’s story, which included neither Up Park nor Edgware Row nor the appurtenances thereof. The picture presented to her mind was that of a young and pure-minded woman submerged by cruel fate and gifted with beauty and genius worthy of the highest, the widest opportunity. Let the reader judge how far she was deceived.

When Sir William had finished, she, noting meanwhile with some compassion how the clear sunlight emphasized the lines of sixty years in his face, answered kindly enough.

“I see how your interest is engaged, and indeed the story is a very singular one. I see also that you would willingly engage my sympathy for the young person, and ’tis so easily engaged where courage and beauty are concerned that I must needs say I prefer to give my judgment a little play also. What is her position in the society of Naples?”

“Why, madam, the Queen is much interested and has said often to me that she would willingly make her acquaintance, but you are aware ’tis impossible she should be received at Court. The King used to call at the Palazzo Sessa to sing duos with her—ill enough for a King!—but, as you know his reputation with women, Emma in her discretion judged it best to stop that diversion of His Majesty’s, which much gratified the Queen, and made her favour secure in that quarter. The Neapolitan ladies treat her with every courtesy, and God knows ’twere ridiculous otherwise, as not one is without her lover. As for the English ladies, some visiting here, of high birth, like my Lady Diana Beauclerck and the artist Mrs. Darner, have not disdained her, but they are more or less ladies errant in the eyes of the English resident here, and I must own the residents defy the Embassy and all its works. They will not see that such genius as Emma’s makes its own laws—”

“But they can be scarcely expected to see it should make theirs!” interrupted the Duchess with a hidden smile in her eyes. It was somewhat absurd to hear a man who knew the world present his case in this way.

“True, madam. Well, I will trouble your Grace no more. Mrs. Hart has a large society—if it could content her—and the admiration of every man of judgment who ever beheld her.”

“She appears then like the man in the fairy tale who having got the moon wanted the sun also.”

“Are not your sex ever so, madam?”

“May be, may be not. Well, my good Sir William, I desire to see your paragon at closer quarters. Would she consent, do you think, to come quietly to my salon one evening and sing for an old lady who finds San Carlo somewhat fatiguing? May I see those poses of which all the world talks? Whatever the lady be she won’t hurt either my morals or my manners!” She laughed softly, and Sir William grew hot in his reply.

“She will hurt no one’s, your Grace. Rather others may learn from her. But, indeed, if it gives you pleasure she will do her best to please you from her good heart, which shows equal kindness to the beggars on the quay as to the greatest duchess in England.”

“And very commendable!” says her Grace, slowly furling her fan. “Then do me the favour to bring her on the evening of Thursday and then, if you would have a candid opinion, it is yours.”

They talked a little longer of other matters; indeed, the Duchess lingered until the sun was low and the shadows long. A man dark-browed and swarthily beautiful, lying against the pedestal of the marble faun near at hand, took up his guitar, and sang low and sweet in a mellow tenor while she beat time gently with a jewelled hand on her knee.

Back to Index Next