CHAPTER XXIITHE MERIDIAN
Itappeared to Nelson in the anxious days coming on that Heaven itself had sent him the destined helper in his war against French domination. Two things were clear as noonday to the perception of his military genius: that Buonaparte if unchecked must rule the world, and that the theatre of Armageddon would be in the Mediterranean and lands adjacent.
And presently there was a fresh and cruel anxiety about Malta. And to all these matters, the miserable intriguing kingdom of the Two Sicilies was the key from its natural position and its harbours. Then to whom could he turn but to the marvellous woman who divined his thoughts even as he thought them, who used her unique position in the Court solely to aid his views, and who so believed in him, inspired him, that he could not say where the one blended with the other nor whether a thing was his own doing or hers?
It is easy to believe what falls in with one’s own hopes and wishes, and it became a creed with the lovers that the interests of England and the Two Sicilies were one and that together they must stand and fall. If that were so then duty, honour, alike bound him to the service of that puny court and people. For him, Europe stood or fell with Mediterranean policy, and Emma, quick as intuition and quicker, saw it with him, and undertook to imbue the Queen with the Nelsonic doctrine.
He wrote perpetually to her and to Sir William. He drew up a paper outlining his policy, which she must study. Can the imagination at all paint what it must have been to Emma—the Emma of the ghastly memories—to find herself the trusted counsellor of such a man, at such a time? It flattered her pride and ambition as they had never been flattered yet. She saw herself the very arbitress of Europe, and in those days, nothing, nothing seemed impossible to her powers. She flung all her exuberant energies into his service, for what they dreamed together he could execute, and who was to set a bound to their achievement?
And some day—here the baser elements stirred in her—some day—well, Sir William was old, ageing daily. There might be a future, splendid beyond all hopes—no, no, gratitude, everything, forbade her even to imagine such a thing. The present was enough. She had never known such a man—how could she? And he not only loved her but saw in her his guiding star, the inspiration deprived of which his own ardours must flag.
Sir William also fanned her flame. His long and hereditary experience of diplomacy had given him a remarkable insight and he saw the European problem as Nelson saw it. Every word he wrote to England played Nelson’s game and emphasized the strategic consequence of the Two Sicilies. If Revolution raised its head there, good-bye to hope for Europe. Sir William indeed so devoted himself to the single task of rousing intelligence at home that Emma may be said to have presided at the Embassy.
It was well enough known along the Mediterranean coasts. The French intelligencers wrote to their home government that unless “Hamilton’s wife” was removed, there was little hope of gaining Naples. They were right. “Le roi Caroline” was the true ruler, and she was Emma’s mouthpiece. Day in, day out, Emma’s mouth was opened to show forth Nelson’s praise, and the echo of the guns of Aboukir thundered Amen.
She wrote long diary letters to her hero setting forth all their hopes and fears and lulling him and herself with references to Lady Nelson. That was a part of the compact. Truth to their respective bonds, and outside that, perfect comradeship.
She wrote: “The Queen yesterday said to me, ‘The more I think on it, the greater I find it. My respect is such that I could fall at his honoured feet and kiss them.’ You that know us both and how alike we are in many things, that is, I as Emma Hamilton, she as Queen of Naples, imagine us both speaking of you! I told Her Majesty we only wanted Lady Nelson to be the femaletria juncta in unofor we all love you, and yet all three differently, and yet all equally, if you can make that out.”
So she protested her loyalty to herself and him. She wrote to Lady Nelson again, congratulating her on Nelson’s recovery, and his great deeds. In part, the common desire of the woman who is stealing the husband’s allegiance, to stand well with the wife, to spare her any cruelty but the one; in part, surely, a nobler aim. If Lady Nelson would but respond, would enlist Emma’s warm heart on her own behalf as well as his! That would be a safeguard—if they could be friends. But no; Fanny had heard the stories that were flying across the sea. She believed that a more dangerous than Circe herself lurked in her den strewn with men’s bones in Naples.
She replied coldly, briefly, and Emma knew that the watch-dog Suspicion was guarding that gate with wary eye. It was not wonderful. Fanny knew well there was a change in Nelson’s letters. She could set down something to work, to wounds, and the presence of anxieties. But yet—he had been in danger and anxiety many a day and oft, and there had been time for tender protestations. There were none now. She began to perceive what had never been pressed in upon her before, the grievous danger of the long separation of husband and wife. Hitherto it had made him cling more fondly to the thought of home. Now—she doubted—doubted.
She might well doubt. Every day of absence from Emma endeared her to Nelson. It was home now where she was; not only the actual walls and sweetness of daily intercourse, but heart’s home, where every word and look was understood and re-echoed. He missed her horribly at every turn. His very genius seemed to dwindle in her absence.
And in Naples things grew steadily worse. The French had been busy sowers and their grain was ripening for harvest. It became gradually clear to Emma and therefore to the Queen that the horrors of France might very well repeat themselves for the Royal Family. Always the face of her doomed sister Marie Antoinette hung before Marie Caroline, the piteous decapitated head, grey and discrowned, with deep tear-channels worn down the hollow cheeks. Neither royalty nor beauty, nor all the kings of all the world had availed to save her from that fate. And could Marie Caroline look at her own children, happy, unconscious, in the gardens of Caserta without remembering the sin crying aloud to God and man of the torture and degradation of soul and body deliberately inflicted on her nephew, the Royal child of France, the Dauphin, by the French Republicans? It is no wonder that even her courageous spirit darkened into ashes sometimes and might have been quenched but for Emma’s confident energy and the white overshadowing wings of Nelson’s Fleet.
For in November he returned to Naples. He could make the excuse that his orders were to protect the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, but though he stifled his knowledge as far as possible, he knew in his own soul what influence drew him. What was a foreign queen to an English Admiral? Yet he wrote: “I am, I fear, drawn into a promise that Naples Bay shall never be left without an English man-of-war. I never intended leaving the coast of Naples without one; but if I had, who could resist the request of such a queen?”
He was perpetually with the Hamiltons during that visit, and every impulse drew Emma to conquer his whole heart—if any of it were left unconquered. He still confused his passion for her with his passion for glory and that was her most powerful aid. It reacted in every way. It made her private interests one with the politics of the Two Sicilies. It made her indispensable to him at every turn of events.
There were the strangest moments of confidence between them in the half hours they could snatch together in the room of the mirrors when Hamilton was toiling in his office downstairs—moments of self-deception on Nelson’s part which Emma half prayed might always continue, half longed to break into reality as her life had taught it to her.
“My Emma, my own true comrade, never was such a friendship as ours in all the world. We will prove that a man and woman may be friends, with the deepest love to bind them and yet loyal as brother and sister to every obligation of honour.”
And this with her warm hand clasped in his, her violet-grey eyes glowing on him! She smiled, responsive.
“Yes, yes, it is true. We are not made of common clay, Nelson, you and me. What others cannot do, we can. See, I kiss your dear eyes with never a thought that your wife would scorn if she could know. I wish with all my soul she were here that I might serve her and show her that Emma’s heart is true as steel to her and hers. You know it is true. I would have her know it also. What does she say of me in her letters?”
“She writes calmly but kindly. It is not her way like yours, my beloved, to expend her heart in writing or speaking, but indeed she is a good, good woman, and may Heaven desert me the day I cause her a pang that could be spared.”
“Would she comprehend our friendship, do you think? Does she understand how great and commanding is your genius? Would she despise your poor Emma for her adoration of the gifts that have brought the world to your feet?”
“I have never known Fanny despise a living soul. She is all that is humble and kind,” Nelson said gravely, “and I hope beyond expression that in days to come you and she may be friends and live in harmony which will make us indeedtria juncta in uno, to use your own dear words.”
“She answered my letters coldly,” says Emma with a moisture on her flower-soft lashes. “It cut me to the heart. Oh, if she could but know my heart’s true friendship.”
“She will. She shall. I have assured her of it in letter after letter. But let us talk of the Queen.”
The subject was painful to him, until Fanny should indeed be brought to comprehend all his motives. But Nelson’s simplicity blinded him to much he had better have realized. Those who knew him best knew it and feared. A vague rumour of what was called “the flirtation” spread along the Mediterranean and reached old St. Vincent. He, knowing Nelson, dismissed it with a shrug of his shoulders and the dictum that Nelson and Emma were a couple of silly sentimental fools, no worse, but he began to be on the alert nevertheless concerning theVanguard’svisits to Naples, to be impatient of the Sicilian imbroglio and to wish that Nelson would put the matter in Troubridge’s or some other such man’s capable hands and there leave it. Nelson and Emma were born romantics, he thought. They fed each other’s flame foolishly. It was all very well for himself, old and seasoned, to write to her that he was her knight errant. It was a very different and more dangerous matter for Nelson to play the part in earnest. He wished Lady Nelson would come out and look after him.
Lady Nelson wished it very much more eagerly herself. She scented danger—danger. She wrote and proposed it in tenderest wifely terms. They had been so long apart. She craved to see him. He answered hurriedly—impossible. She little realized the state of affairs out here, or she could never make such a proposal. The only result was to strengthen her suspicions of Emma and all her works.
The night before he sailed again, recalled by the commander in chief, he told Emma this episode, conscious himself of a half disloyalty in the very telling.
“She could not have come!” he said wistfully. “It was impossible. Yet how natural to wish it. It touched me.”
“No woman who really considered your immense anxieties should wish to hamper you for one instant. Oh, my Nelson, what is the gratification of being together compared to doing your glorious duty? It half breaks my heart to part with my soul’s friend. Yet I bid you go. I urge you. I would not keep you with me if even my life depended on it, for what is life without glory to souls like yours and mine? You have taught me this. I owe it to you, and I won’t fail. I’ll never fail.”
He put his arm about her, so that her head rested quietly on his shoulder.
“Brave Emma! Good Emma! My friend of friends. The only one in the world that understands me. My soul is too great for them. They wound and bruise it because they cannot understand. I should be given a free hand in the Mediterranean to do what I would, and here am I kept in leading strings like a sucking captain. Your Nelson has that in him that should make the world crawl before him, if it could find vent.”
“And it shall—it will!” she whispered. “And I’ll help. They should make you head of the Navy and put up a statue of pure gold to you in London if I hadmyway. Ignorant fools! They are not worthy of you. Who is?”
“Nor of you, nor of you!” he answered fondly.
Lovers’ bombast, but the worst thing in the world for a man of his temperament and a woman of hers.
They could not do without the atmosphere of adulation that each provided for the other. They both grew more impatient, irritable, tyrannous, to all outside that enchanted ring. The Queen’s rank protected her, but Sir William often had reason to remember Greville’s dicta concerning Emma’s “little spurts of temper,” and Nelson on board hisVanguardwas more impatient of the contradictions of events, more captious than his officers had ever known him. It might be that terrible blow on the head at the battle of the Nile, they thought, but certainly it made difficulties. It was unlucky, too, that St. Vincent, who knew him through and through, was already talking of relinquishing the command and returning to England, and of Lord Keith succeeding him; a man of colder, dryer nature; a martinet; the last man, in any case, to understand Nelson’s complexities and give him rein where needful.
So theVanguardsailed from Naples, and Nelson felt the world cold and inhospitable without her sweet flatteries and clinging yet inspiring adoration. He wrote more and more briefly to Fanny. The wound on his head, the pressure of business, were natural excuses. He felt himself in a maze of thoughts and feelings she could never understand. Poor Fanny!
But he wrote incessantly to Emma after leaving, letters which contained a meaning between the lines which only she could read; the stain of kisses the sweeter because secret. No violent scandal had as yet arisen, for half the Fleet was in love with her courage, gaiety, and the gallant spirit enshrined in the fairest face that ever dazzled a sailor’s eyes. She was the comrade of all; at their beck for any service she could render; and from Lord St. Vincent down to the midshipmen, they swore by her. It was still easy for men to believe that Nelson thought as they did and no more.
But Emma knew better. She who, in Greville’s words, had always needed a master and must have the bit in her charming mouth and the bridle and whip to direct her, had now found a slave, and a slave who had conquered the coming master of Europe. She knew it as every woman knows her power, and her head swam with the knowledge. Good God! what should she do with him? The wrong thing—inevitably the wrong thing.
Nelson’s judgment in naval matters was infallible, but set him on shore and he was a man like another; and the more fallible because his prejudices were so strong and the self-esteem the world and Emma combined to flatter was stronger daily. How could he ever think himself in the wrong? He and Emma knew the inmost facts of the situation. Who should contradict them? They went their own way.
They flung the Two Sicilies into helpless war with France in the Roman territory, and when the Army and the miserable King fled routed, there was nothing for it but a flight for the Royal Family to Palermo.
She lived a romance in those days and throve exceedingly on the sparkle and bubble of it. One may see her at the Royal Palace, daily with the Queen, exhorting, almost commanding. Nelson had advised her of Buonaparte’s design on the Two Sicilies. In Austria was no help; no, not even though Marie Caroline’s daughter was Empress-Consort in Vienna. Palermo, Palermo and patience, had become the only hope for Neapolitan Royalty in these hard times.
“But I cannot, I cannot!” the pale Queen protested. “My dear friend, you may see for yourself that a King who flees is lost. Never again shall we regain our throne and Buonaparte has already a creature of his own to occupy it. I will die here. I will face my sister’s fate from the Jacobins.”
“If you die at your post, madam, I will remain and die with you,” cried the impassioned Emma. “But Nelson advises flight, and did you ever know the saviour of Europe wrong?”
“But how, how can it be done if I assent—which I will not do unless compelled? You know, my beloved, my only friend, that we are watched night and day. We cannot fly without our jewels, treasures, necessaries. It cannot be done.”
Emma, who knew from the Queen’s lips all the particulars of the flight of the unhappy King and Queen of France to Varennes and its miserable failure, recalled here how all was near lost by Marie Antoinette’s insistence that Royalty could not flee without little queenly furnitures which attracted suspicion. Butshewas not there to arrange it! That and all else if one were Emma. Her magnificent self-confidence carried her forward.
“Remember Varennes!” the Queen added sadly, her face sinking into utter lassitude as she looked out on the bright Palace gardens.
“Remember, madam, that Her Majesty of France had no Nelson—and may I add, no Emma.”
The Queen clasped her hand silently. There was a long pause.
“Madam, Your Majesty has not heard our plans. We hear almost daily from Nelson. Can you suppose that he cannot carry all the treasures and all the needs of Your Majesty and the Royal Family?”
“If he were at our disposal, yes!” said the Queen languidly. “But why discuss the impossible, chère Miladi? Imagine our possessions conveyed through the Jacobin mob? Imagine ourselves—no, no, we should be torn to pieces. If I could risk it for myself, how could I risk it for my children?”
Emma drew nearer, her quick eyes surveyed the room, the doors, for listeners. The Queen sat by the window, leaning her elbow on it and her chin on her hand; an attitude of utter dejection.
“We have no star. All fails with us,” she said. Emma stood, leaning slightly against the window and as if idly gathering a rosebud or two from the lavish growth outside. Her voice was so lowered that it carried to the Queen’s ear, and no farther.
“Let us suppose, madam, when we recall the history of your sainted sister the Queen, that Paris had been on the sea. That an English Fleet could have come and gone at its will. That the Admiral had been devoted to Her Majesty’s service. That he had had a friend in the Queen’s confidence and his own who could act as intelligencer between them. Does Your Majesty think the flight could have succeeded then?”
“Not even then,” said the Queen wearily. “The true difficulty lies in conveying so many people, so many possessions between the Palace and the ship. Do you suppose the Jacobin watch sleeps at night?”
“Suppose there had been a secret passage between the Palace and the sea, madam, known only to those who could be trusted. What would Your Majesty say then?”
The Queen fixed her bright haggard eyes on her.
“Is it true?”
Emma nodded, and gathered another rose or two and flung them down to the Royal children below, calling to them and laughing, until the women in attendance looked up at her bright face. Then she resumed, still leaning, so that those below could see her careless attitude. She and the Queen might be discussing the last news of the ballet at San Carlo.
“Madam, the great Nelson would never suggest a plan of which he could not foresee the end. This secret passage exists. It leads from below the Royal apartments to the Molesiglio, the small pier where boats can wait. And Nelson will have his flagship, theVanguard, in waiting, and another vessel, theAlcmenefor stores. On my knees I assure Your Majesty that there is no danger, if you will leave it fearlessly to him and to me. And from their capital of Palermo, guarded by the British Fleet, the King and Queen can dictate terms to the Jacobins in Naples.”
Another long silence. Then the Queen broke into a thunderstorm of tears and sobs.
“I am the most unfortunate of queens, mothers and women. I have nothing left in the world. All has failed.”
Emma knelt beside her and ventured to clasp the hand which lay helpless on her knee.
“Madam, you have not lost all. You have life. You have power, and Nelson—who cannot fail you. There was a queen more unfortunate by far—your beloved, unhappy sister of France. Oh, my adorable, unhappy Queen, act while there is yet time, lest your name should be added to hers—as most miserable.”
The Queen agreed faintly, exhausted with grief, and the next day retracted her promises. So it went on for days, with Nelson urging and Emma pleading—pleading with reinforcement from Acton—until at last, when Emma was almost worn out herself, the Queen consented to the gradual removal of the Royal treasures and jewels as a beginning. Possibly, she said, if they were removed out of danger she herself would face the storm in Naples.
Even that was something gained, and Nelson wrote that the logic of events would convince the Queen, for the French power in Italy was gradually drawing southward.
On the fifth of December he returned with theVanguardandAlcmeneand the great event was at hand. And at last the Queen realized that the time for decision was upon her.
Every day Emma was with her at the Palace. Every day priceless jewels, part of the old heritage of Austria, the new glories of the Neapolitan kingdom, were carefully inventoried, and carried off in her bosom, or the innocent bag she wore in the prevalent fashion secured to her wrist with a slender golden chain. She was perfectly fearless and it is probable she had never enjoyed her position so much in her life. Every day made her of more consequence. She was the pivot on which turned the whole conspiracy of flight.
It must be here owned that the English daughter of the people had the true English adoration of rank and consequence, and that her own experiences had steadily convinced her that rank and power are the indispensables of life. Who had cared for Emma Hart with all her beauty and gifts? Who did not care for my Lady Hamilton, her Excellency, the adored friend of the daughter and mother of sovereigns? The queendom of the Queen became an obsession with her.
She began to believe that the English Fleet, England itself, should pause from all other concerns to safeguard this princess whose favour meant everything to the Ambassadress. The contact vulgarized her mind daily. All was subordinated to the Queen—who in turn was to be guided entirely by her.
The work of packing proceeded in secrecy and haste, and Nelson might have been alarmed if he had seen the mountainous cargo being prepared for his ships. Valuable works of art, treasures small and great, were secured in chests and conveyed into the subterranean passage for embarkation. During the seven nights between the fourteenth and twenty-first, of December, under Emma’s own supervision, treasures of almost inestimable value in more than money were carried off. Nelson himself wrote to his commander in chief, Lord St. Vincent:
“Lady Hamilton from this time to the twenty-first, every night received the jewels of the Royal Family, etc., etc., and such clothes as might be necessary for the very large party to embark, to the amount, I am confident, of full two millions, five hundred thousand pounds sterling.” There should be no booty left for the Jacobins.
She had, on Nelson’s instructions, also warned all the British merchants in Naples that there was a refuge for them on board any of the ships of the Fleet now in the Bay of Naples.
But all was conducted in perfect security, owing to the advantages of the secret passage, and only the vaguest rumours got abroad. Day by day the King and Queen showed themselves on the balcony of the Palace, bowing to the people, calm, smiling, happy. And the mobs dispersed content, and the preparations went on steadily.
The great night came, and still Emma supported the Queen’s resolution. Surely a more extraordinary page in history scarcely exists.
It was the twenty-first of December, theAlcmeneloaded with treasure, waiting off Posilippo; theVanguardprepared for the Royal Family and their crowding attendants, Sir William half frantic at the prospect of abandoning the Palazzo Sessa and the Villa Emma to the plundering of the Jacobins, and Emma heedless of that and all else in her preoccupation with Nelson and the Queen.
She had vouchsafed a little consideration with Nelson to Sir William’s art treasures, the collection of a lifetime, and a part had been embarked on board theColossus, but that was all the thought she could spare from her more pressing duties.
It was a night of storm and rain, possibly the safer on that account, but infinitely terrifying to fair-weather travellers. Marie Caroline had written her last farewell letter from the Palace, to her daughter, the Empress of Austria. “Once on board, God help us!” she wrote, “Saved, but ruined and dishonoured.”
Yet no way out, for every hour Naples grew more dangerous. Afterwards she wrote again to the Empress:
“We descended, ten in number, with the utmost secrecy in the dark, without our ladies in waiting, or other attendants. Nelson was our guide.”
But even the Empress was not told all the particulars. Emma wrote them to Greville, and it is permissible to imagine the feeling with which the cool, the sedate Greville would read the heights to which his heroine had soared. Emma—Good God!
“On the twenty-first, at ten at night, Lord Nelson, Sir William, mother and self went out to pay a visit, sent all our servants away and ordered supper at home. When they were gone, we set off, walked to our boat, and after two hours went to theVanguard. Lord Nelson then went with armed boats to a secret passage adjoining to the palace, got up the dark staircase that goes into the Queen’s room and with a dark lantern, cutlasses, pistols, etc., brought off every soul, ten in number to theVanguardat ten o’clock. If we had remained to the next day we should all have been imprisoned.”
“On the twenty-first, at ten at night, Lord Nelson, Sir William, mother and self went out to pay a visit, sent all our servants away and ordered supper at home. When they were gone, we set off, walked to our boat, and after two hours went to theVanguard. Lord Nelson then went with armed boats to a secret passage adjoining to the palace, got up the dark staircase that goes into the Queen’s room and with a dark lantern, cutlasses, pistols, etc., brought off every soul, ten in number to theVanguardat ten o’clock. If we had remained to the next day we should all have been imprisoned.”
It was done, and as the last boat reached theVanguard, and the Royal fugitives ascended from the tossing waves, pale, terrified, rain-wet and wind-blown, Emma, leaning over the side, to watch their reception, felt her heart beat high with pride and triumph. Glory, even more glorious than her imaginations, was gained. She had saved a King and in so doing had proved her own courage and address to all the world.
The famous flight to Varennes of the unhappy Marie Antoinette and the King of France had failed for want of courage and address like her own. She had not failed. She had triumphantly rescued them and not only themselves but all their family and treasures. No half successes for her. Itcouldnot have been better accomplished. Nelson had been her instrument; without him it could not have been done; but she had been the brain, the soul of the enterprise. She triumphed, triumphed, as the Queen clasped her in her arms, seasick already, half fainting, and the terrified Royal children clung to her skirts. She led them to their cabins; she provided for every want.
She bestowed Sir William in such comfort as was possible, and had then one word with Nelson on the heaving rain-swept deck.
“Emma, my angel, my wonder; there is none like you—none. Thank God for your courage and wisdom.”
She clasped his hand, and he saw her face white and beautiful in the tossing light of a lantern. Then she sped away to her duties, and he to his. But together they had done it—a world’s wonder.
CHAPTER XXIIICIRCE
Therecomes a moment in the fully unfolded maturity of beauty when any change must be for the worse. There is a portrait of Emma about the time of the flight to Palermo which exemplifies this in perfection. It was found in the Palazzo Sessa and represents her seated in a large chair, hands clasped, one of her husband’s treasured vases on a table behind her. The beautiful hair is massed and falls in softest tendrils to her brows, there is no smile on the lips and the eyes are half-closed as though she were lost in a voluptuous dream—a dream of full summer with the languor of autumn in the air. One sees very clearly in viewing the lovely face why Greville called her his modern-antique and Sir William his Grecian, for there is something of the imperial air which reflects no soul in its beauty. So a Roman lady might sit, indolently watching the sufferings of the amphitheatre, basking in the beams of her own beauty.
This picture may be typical of much that followed the strain and stress of the flight to Palermo. It was a time of experiences which would have broken down any but Emma’s happy peasant robustness of health and muscular strength. Such weather fell on theVanguardas even Nelson declared he had never before beheld at sea—a furious and awful gale. Of the refugees, every one was ill, and helpless—the Queen in complete prostration, Royal children, attendants, all alike in miseries of fear and illness. They had no beds, but what Emma’s forethought had provided. But let her describe the scene herself to the astounded Greville, for none can do it better.
“We arrived on Christmas Day at night, after having been near lost, a tempest that Lord Nelson had never seen for thirty years he has been at sea, the like; all our sails torn to pieces, and all the men ready with their axes to cut away the masts. And poor I to attend and keep up the spirits of the Queen, the Princess Royal, three young princesses, a baby six weeks’ old, and two young princes, Leopold and Albert; the last, six years old, my favourite, taken with convulsion in the midst of the storm and at seven in the evening of Christmas Day expired in my arms, not a soul to help me, as the few women Her Majesty brought on board were incapable to helping her or the poor Royal children, all their attendants being so frightened and on their knees praying. The King says my mother is an angel. I have been for twelve nights now without closing my eyes. We have left everything at Naples but the vases and best pictures, three houses elegantly furnished, all our horses and our six or seven carriages, I think is enough for the vile French, for we could not get our things off not to betray the Royal family. Nothing can equal the manner we have been received here [Palermo] butdear, dearNaples we cannot show our love of, for this country is jellous of the other. Sir William and the King are philosophers; nothing affects them, thank God, and we are scolded even for showing proper sensibility. God bless you, my dear sir. Excuse this scrawl.”
“We arrived on Christmas Day at night, after having been near lost, a tempest that Lord Nelson had never seen for thirty years he has been at sea, the like; all our sails torn to pieces, and all the men ready with their axes to cut away the masts. And poor I to attend and keep up the spirits of the Queen, the Princess Royal, three young princesses, a baby six weeks’ old, and two young princes, Leopold and Albert; the last, six years old, my favourite, taken with convulsion in the midst of the storm and at seven in the evening of Christmas Day expired in my arms, not a soul to help me, as the few women Her Majesty brought on board were incapable to helping her or the poor Royal children, all their attendants being so frightened and on their knees praying. The King says my mother is an angel. I have been for twelve nights now without closing my eyes. We have left everything at Naples but the vases and best pictures, three houses elegantly furnished, all our horses and our six or seven carriages, I think is enough for the vile French, for we could not get our things off not to betray the Royal family. Nothing can equal the manner we have been received here [Palermo] butdear, dearNaples we cannot show our love of, for this country is jellous of the other. Sir William and the King are philosophers; nothing affects them, thank God, and we are scolded even for showing proper sensibility. God bless you, my dear sir. Excuse this scrawl.”
No doubt Greville hastened to the clubs with his exclusive information for, for many reasons, the world was agog to hear the news from Naples.
It adds a touch of humour to the above that the first of the philosophers was found by Emma during the dreadful voyage shut up in his cabin and calmly holding a loaded pistol in each hand. “Good God!” said she. “What are you doing, Sir William!”
“I am resolved, my dear, not to die with the guggle-guggle-guggle of salt water in my throat, and therefore directly I feel the ship sinking I am prepared to shoot myself,” was Sir William’s serene reply.
One may picture the astonished Emma’s countenance as she hurried off on her thousand errands.
Palermo shone like the Heavenly Land after all these tragic excitements, and the calm within the shelter of Monte Pellegrino promised in the happy promontory the rest so sorely needed after the desperate voyage across the Tyrrhenian sea. Shaded in its orange groves, with a winter so mild that year that less happy lands might well call it summer, it received the fugitives with a dreamy enervating warmth. In the garden of the house engaged for the Hamiltons was a tangle of flowers wild and cultivated such as even Naples could scarcely equal. Beds of wild mint to yield its aromatic scent when trodden, the rosy wild gladiolus, thyme and asphodel, were everywhere in glorious luxuriance, and by the tiny stream that rippled down to the Fountain of the Sea Nymph, as they called it, the wild oleanders waited with the wild anemones to give their bloom in season. There was an oriental lavishness in the air and the sub-tropical vegetation which corresponded with the Arabic form of the name “Balarmuh” or Palermo. Emma, eager for change, delighted in the strange new scene presented by the town and the lovely Conca d’Oro—the plain of the Golden Shell, with its magnificent fertility. Her mercurial spirits flew up as she stood by the gate with Nelson to watch the Palermitan hawkers with their strange merchandise and bright dark eyes fixed on the lovely Excellenza and the famous English Admiral. The water-seller with his painted table and syrups stopped to look at her; the sponge-seller, all draped in bobbing sponges, lurked near for an order. But the two were engrossed with their own affairs, and the charm of Sicily, except its flowers and balmy air, passed them by.
They turned into a secluded path, her hand on his arm. He looked inexpressibly worn and wearied. Not even her voice could light the depression that weighed him down, though none but she could understand the reasons public and private that caused it.
“I must have rest or go down,” he said in response to her anxious look. “If you did but know the troubles that crowd upon me. St. Vincent returns to England and Keith, who will be my superior, is an arrogant cold-hearted man as dry as dust who may be counted on to misunderstand every one of the reasons that moves you and me. I have written to St. Vincent entreating him to postpone his decision, but the die is cast. Keith will never realize the consequence of our King and Queen to the struggle with the French.”
“He must; he shall!” she said in the clear voice that always stirred his blood. “We have never failed yet, and we won’t. You mark me! But, Nelson, I have this to say: you are worn out and no wonder. Come and share this house. Live on shore. You can do all that is necessary from here, and then—then we shall be together always.”
He knew it was unwise, he knew that in another man he would have condemned it utterly, but the soft air, the dewy eyes mined his resolution and left him weak as water in her hands.
“But Sir William?”
She knew the battle won in his question.
“I will tell you the whole truth,” she said seriously. “All the troubles in Naples, the constant entertainments and hospitality, have given Sir William great anxiety about money. He is in debt. We cannot live here as his position obliges us without heavy expense.”
He broke in eager as a boy.
“If he would let me halve the expense of the housekeeping—why, Emma, it would be a Godsend to me. Not only the rest and the being with my own heart’s friend, but it would save me expense and give me such a home as God knows I never dreamt of. Is it possible that I could have such good fortune? Oh, to hear your voice, to see you moving about the rooms, to have your good old mother’s kindliness instead of men, men, men about me always.”
She was sure Sir William would agree, she said. He came out presently, walking a little lame with the gout and leaning on his stick, and was at once adopted into the council of three. Why, of course, a most sensible plan, but all “our dear Emma’s” suggestions were sensible. It would indeed be a desirable easement to him in money matters. Nelson could very well imagine what both his expenses and losses had been in Naples. It was agreed, and Nelson could scarcely face his own heart’s joy coupled with the physical prostration which conspired with it to deliver him into her hands. The least agitation still brought on the cruel pain in his head from the Aboukir wound, and the very sight of the large quiet rooms filled with sweet wandering garden scents was irresistible.
That very day his possessions were moved on shore. The grass never grew under Emma’s feet when she was determined, nor under his either, for that matter, and lapped in the security of their compact it never occurred to Nelson how the Nisbet scene would rise before the minds of his officers who knew the facts, and of many more.
It certainly occurred to Emma, but she had her securities and feared nothing. Ignorant of any public opinion but the Neapolitan, which took such arrangements as a matter of course, and confident in the Queen’s support, it never occurred to her that Royal approval might not carry the same face value all over the world as it did in Naples and Palermo. Her Queen was daughter to the greatest empress of history, Maria Theresa; her Queen’s daughter was herself Empress of Austria—no statelier lineage in all the world. What woman would not be safe who could call herself the adored friend of such a sovereign? What was a mere Queen Charlotte of England, a petty Mecklenburgher princess by birth, compared to Marie Caroline of Hapsburg? She was to learn the answer to that question very painfully later on.
In connection with it, she forgot also that there were several English ladies in Palermo, great ladies, still swayed by English public opinion, and inclined to look down upon a fugitive queen and her dissolute court, with very different feelings from the reverence with which Emma looked up to the throne. For the first time she was about to pass under the sharp criticism of women.
It was her own fault. Had she been content to remain in the shade all might have been well, but with Nelson living in her house, the Fleet at her command, the officers perpetually coming and going in her hospitalities, and Josiah Nisbet giving his verdict more cautiously but still in no uncertain terms, it was very unlikely that either the compact or the Queen would bear Emma scatheless through the scandals that arose.
And yet again it was her own fault. Where she had been modest, gentle, retiring, now that prosperity and fame had come upon her, she thrust herself forward. She vaunted Nelson’s glories and her own and made them inseparable. She sounded the loud timbrel like Miriam after the passage of the Red Sea, and it was “I” and “he” perpetually. Her songs, chiefly composed by Miss Cornelia Knight and herself, proclaimed his triumphs in clearest soprano for all the world to hear, and Nelson would sit by, his pale face fixed on her in quiet ecstasy, absorbing it all with a kind of quaint innocence which those who understood him, like his faithful Troubridge, pitied, and those who did not, ridiculed.
A pathetic, almost a horrible sight, if she could have been made to see it, but, as Greville had said long ago, Emma had so much taste and all of it so bad, that it was simply impossible to hold her in check unless one mastered the beautiful foolish creature with bit and bridle, and of that art Nelson knew nothing. He believed in her utterly and adored at the feet of his Santa Emma.
Meanwhile the fame of the escape carried her name over all Europe, conjoined with his. Indeed, it deserved renown. Energetic, courageous, she was a shining figure for the popular admiration and certainly the story lost nothing in her telling, or Nelson’s or Sir William’s.
Congratulations rained in upon them all, from the highest sources. Europe was tired of the massacre of kings and princes, and Emma Hamilton’s courageous action was set off by the dark shadows of failure in France and elsewhere. She sunned herself like a tropically splendid blossom palpitating in the ardent sun, and daily her opinion of her own perfections strengthened, fed by the Queen’s adulation and gratitude.
Yet all was not peace in the house of the Hamiltons. The strain had told upon Sir William. His talk almost night and day was of his precious treasures of vase and sculpture lost in Naples and in the wreck of theColossus. His day was virtually done. He told Emma certain home truths which drove her still more ardently into the arms of her worshipper.
“Emma, I am very uneasy at the expense we incur daily. I would have you understand, my love, that it is beyond my means. Ready money is now my need, and the vases I would have sold in England, and on which I counted for a price to set me straight with the world again are lost in theColossus. O God, for the peaceful days before this abominable war set all Europe by the ears! There are times when I would I were done with it all and forever.”
“But, Sir William, my good, my excellent friend,” says Nelson, intervening, “while I have you cannot and shall not be in any difficulty. What don’t I owe to you and her Ladyship that no money can repay? Name your sum and become my debtor, and be very sure you will never be pressed either for interest or principal.”
There were the usual protestations, but Nelson, infatuated as he now was, and truly owing the Hamiltons a debt beyond money, insisted, and lent Sir William several thousands, besides paying the cost of upkeep which, when it was inconvenient for Emma, fell wholly on him. This scandal got wind also, and flew over Palermo, disseminating itself throughout the Fleet to Lord Keith, and through and beyond him to England.
Sir William earned the unpleasing name ofle mari complaisant, and rumour grew more and more venomous daily. Greville was a powerful factor in restraining the worst reports and in propagating others. He had with cool placidity accepted Sir William as a fool from the day he took Emma into the Embassy, and could at least reflect with satisfaction that he had warned him. But he never thought worse of his uncle than this, and defended him in all companies on more grounds than one.
“His kind heart can entertain no suspicions, and amiable as Lady Hamilton undoubtedly is, her laxity of good nature and all her circumstances rendered her very unfit to take the lead as she is doing with my Lord Nelson’s aid,” he said coolly to all who discussed the matter with him. “She is—well, what you might expect! And I understand that Nelson is the simplest of men apart from his profession and entirely in her hands. By the way, my Lord, I hear from Palermo that very high play is indulged in there as a variation to other amusements, and that many of the chief houses are merely gambling resorts.”
“Does Her Ladyship play high?” asks the delighted listener.
“Why, I am told she has a perfect passion for faro and such games. Certainly my uncle’s fortune cannot support high play and therefore I cannot suppose high play. But fair ladies have means of supplying themselves with the sinews of war.” So Greville, most skilful to hint a fault and hesitate dislike. He dared no more.
It will easily be seen that no bed of roses was preparing in England for the Hamiltons and Nelson when the time should come for return to the north.
Meanwhile the voluptuous south lapped them in its enervating delights. Nelson loathed, yet clung to it, for her sake. He hated the laxities of the Court. They appeared to reflect their own black shadow on his love for Emma, and make all of an equal turpitude. These dissolute men and wanton women were hateful in his eyes. He would not have her near them if he could keep her away from the pollution. And the gaming—the wasteful senseless gaming; the loud empty laughter. His heart was heavy within him, though for love’s sake he followed where she led. Had he been a classical scholar he might have remembered that Sicily was the fabled land of many of the perils of Ulysses. Near here the much-enduring man had escaped from the devouring Cyclops, and in the soft azure of the sea might still be seen the rocks the monster flung after him in vain. Here the sea-nymph Galatea melted crystalline into the arms of Acis; here Dis ravished Persephone from her disconsolate mother to reign with him as Queen of Shadows and Darkness.
Many warnings were about him, but all unheeded, for Emma filled his soul, and through Emma’s bewitchments, her Queen, until the sovereignty of Naples became a clog on the honour of England and day by day he sank deeper into his dream. It narcotized him. The ships came and went: ships that formerly could never have raised anchor but he would have been on the quarterdeck alert and keen; but now they sailed away on their fateful errands and he remained in Palermo.
Napoleon slipped back through the English guard from Egypt and landed in France to pursue his meteoric mischiefs, and still Nelson lingered. Men talked of the Garden of Armida and the enchantress who held him there, but none as yet had the boldness to bring him face to face with the truth.
At last, Lady Nelson, trembling, miserable, noting the change and briefness of his letters, unbelieving his excuse of weariness and want of time—for when had he ever failed her before?—summoned up courage to write once more with the definite proposal that she should join him in Palermo. Every day reports reached her affecting his honour, and blaming herself bitterly for long-delayed action she wrote, tenderly as a wife should write and made her proposition. For when husband and wife are apart time and distance and all the dividing influences of humanity creep in between them, and the stream, narrow at first, widens into a river and then into the boundless sea. The sweet, intoxicating spring had come in Palermo when that letter reached him and rudely recalled him to the realities of life. His coxswain brought it with a bundle of correspondence less interesting, and when he saw the well-known writing which had once been such a joy in lonely sea-watchings, his heart beat with a cruel quickness—as it had done ever since the long chase to Aboukir.
“Fanny!” he thought, and then, with a quick pang, half anger, half fear. “What does she want?”
He read it, half lying on a long chair in the Sicilian moonlight, by the light of many wax candles which streamed from the gaily lit windows of the house. Inside were green cloth card tables and about them a rabble of officers and the splendidly dressed bare-necked light women of the Neapolitan Court, women whose histories he knew very well from the not too squeamish lip of Emma. Beautiful, but none so beautiful as the queen-rose who sat facing him, with a heap of gold before her and her brilliant loveliness lit by the soft splendour of the wax lights. She wore a dress of cloth of gold falling in supple splendour about her imperial figure and diamonds in her hair and about her neck—the diamonds the lavish queen had heaped upon her to the tune of £30,000; so gossip said, and Nelson knew. She was not looking at him, nor thinking of him at the moment. Her bright eyes were shining with eagerness; she was laughing, talking loudly with the people about her as she plunged her hand into the heap of gold and pushed her stake forward.
His gold! Well, thank God he had it to give her—who could wish to restrict her little harmless excitements; she who could give herself so generously when any great cause called upon her!
He read Fanny’s letter again. Fanny in that scene of riot and laughter! Fanny, fresh from the quiet of Round Wood and her English simplicities. Fanny in her silk gown, and the lace folded across her breast, and the serene candour of her dark eyes. Impossible. Did she recur to him tenderly? Ah, no—as something far, far away, known and loved in another life, another and very different experience; a wandering ghost in this; alien, unwelcome.
He folded the letter and put it in his pocket and watched the scene through the window with absent eyes, almost feeling himself a ghost, as a man does who watches from the night the glow within that takes no heed of him.
How beautiful she was! How beautiful! So she would look if he were dead, the waves tossing over his bones, the sea-wind singing its lonely dirge. No—dear heart!—he did her an injustice, for all her heart was his—his only. He looked where Sir William sat in a corner, half asleep in his chair, the discontented lines stressed about his mouth, and a pang of pity cramped him. Old Mrs. Cadogan had gone off to bed long, long ago. It was near three in the morning. Presently she rose, in her long gold gown, girdled about the bosom in the fashion of the day.
“I’ve lost. I can’t lose any more. That makes five hundred pounds. You go on if you will. Where’s his Lordship? I shall go look for him.” She pushed her chair aside and the others closed up as eager as ever, and she came out through the long hall, in her satin shoes, and so along the warm dry grass to where he sat under the orange boughs.
Oh, the scent, the scent of the gardens, mingled with the scent of her hair. People must close their windows later in the year lest they die swooning from the overpowering fragrance of blossoms, and that night in the moonlight it was sweet as Eden and sweeter. He himself was a little dazed by it—he remembered that later.
A dead silence outside. It was like looking upon a wild picture of half-drunken riot to see the sight within—the hot eager faces, the bare-bosomed women clutching at the gold.
“Did we look like that?” she said in a kind of astonishment. “It’s better out here. It was hot, hot, in there. I wanted to come out and get cool. It smelt of wine. This smells of flowers. Nelson—how pale you are! What is it? Come out of this glare!”
She gave him her hand, and drew him up, and they wandered from the lurid patch of light flung by the windows out under the cool green boughs, moonlight-silvered, with gulfs of dark and light beneath them along the garden paths, and the first faint rustle of a bird disturbed in the boughs by their passage. Quiet, cool quiet and a great peace, and sweetness like the breath of a goddess about them in dark night. Before very long it would be dawn and the wan edge of light surrender the secret of Mongibello, dreaming in the warm darkness.
“You’re disturbed and I know it,” she said very softly at last. “There’s nothing passes in your mind but I read it like a book. What is it? A letter from Keith?”
“No, not Keith. At least I have only read one letter. It’s from her, Emma.”
“Her?” He could hear the quick-taken breath, the apprehension in her voice. Surely that should have revealed their own danger to them. There was no longer talk of the femininetria juncta in uno—three joined in one—where Lady Nelson was concerned. Emma had grown to hate her very name. She was a malignant presence lurking in the dark ready to strike. And who was she after all? There was nothing in Emma’s past to imbue her with any respect for a mere church ceremony, except in her own case and Sir William’s, which naturally did not affect any other.
“What does she want?” she asked at length, as a low hanging bough shook a little spray of scented dew into her fair bosom. Nelson gathered the offending blossom and laid it there all fresh and cool, against the glowing warmth.
“She wants to join me here or at Naples.”
“Do you want her?” The voice was cold and distant—with suppressed pain, he thought.
“You know,” he said, and that was all. She turned upon him passionately in the scented dark.
“Nelson, if she came I should die—I should die. She would never understand. How could she? She would come between us. You would never love me any more.”
“I shall love you until I die. You are my breath, my life, my soul to me. My own heart’s angel.”
“But you love her best.”
“Don’t ask me—I don’t know what I do,” he said hoarsely. “There are things best left unsaid. I love you. I never knew what love was until I saw you—until this minute, I think.”
They had drawn near the fountain of the sea nymph, half buried in maidenhair and violets. Its soft warble was like the voice of quiet. A few crystal moonlight drops fell from the jar she held in her cold marble hand. How many lovers had her down-dropped eyes seen by her waters in the warm Sicilian nights? But never a pair like these—never before and never again. It was too much for him. Everything in nature conspired to help her, and fought against his resolution. The world faded before him, and only her face remained star-sweet against the dark.
Perhaps he would never get home, never again see his offended Fanny? Had he not done enough, toiled enough by land and sea to earn his reward? Peace and love. He asked no more; and both, both were passionately within reach at the moment. Better forget it all and dream away their lives in some such paradise as this forgotten and forgetting. He put his arm about her, and hid his face on the warm whiteness of her breast. Her own face, lovely and indistinct in moonlight and shadow, blotted out Heaven and earth for him and left only its own intolerable sweetness. He ached for her. The cruel, the unslaked thirst was upon him.
The marble nymph was silent in her green gloom, only the water dripping, dripping eternally from her jar, and a white cloud veiling the moon.
He that is without sin among you—
They were together until the faint gold rim showed beyond the sea and the mountain rose coldly white against the dawn. The revellers were still pushing the money frantically about when they returned, but Sir William had vanished, exhausted, and the air of the great room was foul and close.
Next day Nelson wrote to Fanny: