CHAPTER XIV
THE 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 his belle 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 in her position 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 were hic, 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.
“You shall see 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, and there I 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 equals her. 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. You could have 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.
Mare si lucido,
Lido si caro,
Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!
The famous song of Naples.
“This is heaven,” says she, when the voice was silent, “and you and your Emma trouble yourselves about the weary world! Oh, fools, fools! Forgive me, my good cousin!”
Indeed, it was with a beating heart that Emma prepared for that introduction. Not even to Sir William would she admit how much it signified to her. He viewed it but as the caprice of a lady too great to be crossed. She, as the golden key which might possibly unlock another of the endless gates which stayed her progress. Yet she betrayed no eagerness, no agitation, though it awakened every intelligence to its work. “What would I not do for any relative of my own Sir William’s,” was all she said when it was laid before her.
But her preparations! She had resolved that she would wear the dress in which the Attitudes should be performed, and indeed it served her well. Had she known her business completely she would never have been seen in anything else.
Behold, then, the Duchess of Argyll’s salon in the Villa Columbaia, high, cool and beautiful with the grace of Italian and the comfort of English furnishings. A naked girl in marble, carved by a famous Italian, poised life-size by the windows, running; caught in the flush of her speed with a butterfly perched on her finger.
The Duchess herself sat in a noble chair carved long ago by English workmen, and above her head was a picture of her sister, the dead Lady Coventry, seductive, entrancing, with her long languid eyes. She herself, in an Italian evening gown of purple lustring trimmed with silver gauze, harmonized the incongruities with an odd but delightful unity. There was beside her a great stand of tall and shaded wax candles which shed the most flattering light known to the imagination on her beautiful worn face, and the great bowl of luscious roses at her elbow.
There was only a small party in attendance (for all present had the air of attending her Grace): three or four men, the Lady Diana Beauclerck, the Duke and Duchess de St. Maître and a few more; Lady Diana, sketchbook in hand, for she would never lose the chance of some new and surprising pose of Emma’s.
To these, talking and laughing, the lacquey makes his unashamed announcement.
“His Excellency the Ambassador and Mrs. Hart.” And the Duchess beholds framed in the tall dim doorway—what? A statue from the Museo come to pay her respects? No, a somewhat tall young woman robed in pure white of some subtly soft material which drapes like Greek marble, and falls in long slender folds to chastely hidden but sandalled feet. Chastely hidden the beautiful bosom also, rounding softly through the veil, but the noble throat, a pillar of ivory, rears itself proudly from the uncovered chest as strongly and finely modelled as that of Diana’s swiftest nymph, with room and to spare for ample lungs and untroubled breath. The sleeve is looped to the shoulder on one side, and falls in long drapery on the other. Her face, a little pale with controlled agitation, is serenely sweet and modest. A magnificent young animal in rejoicing health, if no more, thinks the Duchess as Sir William leads the beauty forward and she makes her reverence before the thronelike chair. Her Grace may then remark the masses of gold-touched bronze hair pressed and calmed down upon the small head that its luxuriance may be controlled into reason, and the rose-red lips above the perfect chin. The eyes are not on show. Mrs. Hart veils them chastely with long lashes. She showed like a lovely survival of the lost glory of Greece among these fashionably dressed ladies—and knew it. The Duchess received her graciously and motioned that a chair be set beside her. Sir William should have nothing to complain of and, indeed, she was curious herself.
“I take it very kind, madam, that you visit me this evening,” says she with gentle dignity. “But Sir William has no doubt made my excuses and told you that my physicians forbid any fatigue. Therefore I am compelled to ask my friends to be charitable and favour me with their company when they will be so good.”
“Oh, madam, what could I think it but an honour to visit your Grace,” says the sweet statue, carefully tutored in her forms of address by the best tutor of the polite world, and then relapses into a graceful silence with bows and smiles to such of the company as she knows; Lady Diana especially warm in her greeting, for there was never an artist heart could hold away from its spiritual kin in Emma.
“And did he tell you that I entreated as a special favour that I might hear what I am told is one of the finest voices of our day?” the Duchess continues.
“Indeed, madam, yes. He told me your Grace would find San Carlo too fatiguing.”
“And those famous poses of which I understand the great Goethe has written in terms of such delight?”
“All is at your service, madam. I have come dressed in the antique taste for the purpose. I only beg one favour; that if you find them ennuyante you will stop me.”
“I promise!” says the Duchess, with a smile which disarms her words.
There was more talk, and refreshments were served, however, before she would put the statue in motion. Mrs. Hart was not to feel she was bidden merely as a raree-show for fashionable folks. Indeed, Lady Diana exhibited first her portfolio of new drawings done for the decoration of one of Mr. Horace Walpole’s rooms at his gimcrack castle of Strawberry Hill, and one of the gentlemen, the Duke de San Maître, favoured them with a song, “Napoli bella” and so forth, which Emma applauded with more smiling warmth than any of the party, the Duchess watching her well pleased.
It was her turn next—the poses which gained her the nickname of The Gallery of Statues from the said Mr. Horace Walpole. I will not, I must not particularize, though on such beauty one would linger if possible, but as she melted from one loveliness to another, the Duchess’s eyes followed and could not be satisfied. She laughed with the laughing comedy, held her breath while the ruined Cassandra, pointing to the violating Sun, seemed to hurl forth the dreadful prophecies that none regarded, smiled for pure pleasure at the nymph with a tambourine, and so forth through every act of the lovely show—so lovely that even the girl’s enemies could not withhold their reluctant praises.
When it was over, she clapped her hands.
“Wonderful, marvellous—I could see it forever and ever! It is a new art. It is painting and poetry and sculpture and the theatre all expressed in one,” cried she. “My dear, you have genius. I never saw anything remotely like it. And now—can it be possible that with all these perfections you also have a voice worth hearing? If so, I declare it unjust, preposterous. The most of us have no gifts at all. The few have one, but you—”
“I have called her Pandora, for indeed she has them all,” says Sir William, and the gentlemen who understood the classical allusion applauded. And Emma sang. She put her heart into it. She gave them her famous “Luce bella” with ornaments of diamond and crystal clearness that the Banti herself could not have excelled. Her voice sparkled and glittered; nothing more brilliant could be imagined. And then when she had driven them all into the realms of soulless admiration—for what is such art but an exquisite gymnastic?—she led them back into the forests of true romance with a simple ballad from Scotland, in homage to the Duchess whose soft eyes filled with tears in listening.
They have slain the Earl o’ Moray
And laid him on the green.—
The cry of it! The tears in her soft voice!
Oh, the bonny Earl o’ Moray
He was the Queen’s love.
And lang, lang may his lady
Look o’er the Castle doun,
Ere she see the Earl o’ Moray
Come sounding through the toun.
So she ended in a dying sweetness with notes as deep as doom, and would sing no more, and the silence that followed was better than all words. The Duchess drew her near and kissed her cheek without any.
Indeed, Emma spoke little that night. She was conscious herself, to a certain extent, that she was on her promotion. Conscious, too, that there were faults of speech which great ladies might view with scorn unsoftened by the bright beauty which made even these a naïve enchantment to men. She was therefore at her best, nothing breaking out of control; pliable, gentle, unassuming; in all things obedient and attentive to Sir William.
He drew near the Duchess while Emma at Lady Diana’s request poised her tambourine for a rapid sketch in Mr. Walpole’s interest. The others had gathered about the pretty sight.
“Your opinion, madam?”
“I am charmed, dazzled. She is a revelation of the mo