AS Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson sailed for Syracuse, many thoughts kept him company in striding up and down his quarterdeck. He loved his wife with a calm affection which recognized to the full her tender claim upon him, her duty, devotion and wifely submission. To him, his Fanny appeared the ideal wife. One classified women only as good and bad. The first were those who were obedient to all household duties and created the soft and infinitely restful home atmosphere to which a wearied man returned from his labours for rest and refreshment infinitely soothing after the harsh contact with men and affairs. Here one could unburden one’s soul of likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, and be certain of a kind inevitable echo to all. What he thought, his Fanny would think. Her small pleasures and angers would follow his as certainly as little pet dogs running at his heels. She had never stood in the way of any of his duties though undoubtedly she felt the long separations. She wept a few gentle tears on parting and applied herself wholly to the care of the person he loved best in the world next to herself, his old father. Those two represented home to him and often in the mirages of the tossing spray he beheld that little room in the Norfolk parsonage, and his father’s big winged chair drawn up beside the fire, and Fanny reading the last long letter to him in her mild monotone, and the serene pride of the two in his achievements. Poor little Fanny, she had had many anxieties with her husband and son in the same danger, and yet never said a word to hinder him—no, not one. Stop!—when he had got his flag and the Cross of the Bath after the glorious battle of St. Vincent she had tenderly implored him henceforward to leave boarding to captains. Dear little Fanny!—he smiled over that bit of pride in the new Admiral’s lady: knew too how much it summed up of past suffering in the glorious escapades (for so common sense must class them) of Teneriffe and St. Vincent. He had had the glory; she the suffering.
Pious, too, after his own manner of decent Church of England piety: God and the King!—the King not so very far behind. There too he could open his inmost heart to her and be sure of her prayers commingled with his own. Naturally there were professional matters one could not tell even the most valuable wife. Not for women the anxieties and responsibilities of such a career as his. Their timidity could not support it. In that department a woman had neither help nor counsel to offer—nothing but her prayers, and her joy when all was safely accomplished. But that was much—much! It filled his soul with calm security and gratitude. For there were the bad women. He knew very well the type of captain’s wife who spent his hard-won prize money on her own flaunting vanity, and coquetted with other men while he upheld the honour of England on distant seas. No, thank God, his Fanny was none of those tawdry jilts. She was a true good woman—“All that is valuable in a wife”—so he assured her and others.
Yet nothing can be perfect. The other captains, when they went home rejoicing on leave, were surrounded by flocks of apple-cheeked youngsters, something to fight for, to leave your honours to when a hammock with round shot at head and heels was the last bed for a sailor. But he did not trouble her with that want though it was a dull empty ache when he looked at his medals, just because he knew how deeply it rankled in her own heart. There was Josiah, and to him she was a devoted mother, but Josiah meant little enough to the Admiral though he did his best for him afloat and ashore, and she felt it—she felt it, poor girl!
No casual mistress, but a wife was Fanny. It would have seemed almost indecent, even had it been possible, to surround her with worship and homage, and draw a passionate inspiration from her kind frank countenance. She could never understand romance. And yet Nelson was not without his starry lady whose glove he wore on his helmet, whose beauty he protested with sword and word in all companies, for whose least favour he would have died a thousand deaths. Such a man must kneel on his heart’s knees to some fair figure who shall crown him as he crowns her his Inspiration and All. And his was Glory, summed up in the name of England. So ride the knights of the Holy Ghost, the men whose eyes dazzle on a beauty unseen, yet most intimately known to them, each perceiving for himself that figure flitting ever on before with white feet that touch not the earth pollute, and hands that beckon to the goal that cannot be uttered: whose they are to serve eternally.
And now in his very worship came the turning point of Nelson’s life, for woe be to the man who attempts to embrace her not by raising of the womanhood into God, but sinking of the Godhead into woman.
His physical and spiritual nerves were shocked, as it were, into profound amaze by the wonder of this woman, this Emma. For, where his Fanny stood earthbound she soared glorious. Fanny had never hindered him, but this one helped him as no other had ever done. Wordless, she understood. What mattered her beauty? Had she been the sorriest wench that ever smutted her face in a kitchen, and yet had done what she did, he could have worshipped at her feet—as a true acolyte of his goddess Glory. She knew. With his own fierce energy, she flung herself into the fight: she won the troops for Toulon, the chance of victory for his fleet. That white soft hand had dealt out ruin to Napoleon, and he, Nelson himself, was but her sword.
Exaggerated? No doubt, but men of his type exaggerate gloriously, and in that is their strength. As he sailed down the Mediterranean to Syracuse, armed with her order, far beyond reach of the foolish King’s forbidding, her face fled before him encircled with rays that mingled her with England and made them one. He had not a sexual thought concerning her. So much a part of his inward aspiration had she become that sometimes he almost doubted her real, but rather a part of the dreams of moonlight nights and long calms on swaying seas.
But one thing grew in his soul to a most fiery purpose. She had not failed him. He would return her full measure pressed down and running over. To his simple and pious soul she became the Will of God—His justice upon the evil deeds of France—and possibility of failure passed as utterly from his mind as though the deed were done already, and the Frenchmen scattered with their ruined dream of power, mere wreckage of the English seas. But for all that it was a bitter and wearing chase, and though he dreamed of her the suspense left cruel marks.
For want of English frigates, the scouts of the Fleet, the French ships had slipped past and down the Mediterranean as fast as wind could carry them. Nelson’s necessities had given them the heels of him and where to find them he could not tell. Later he wrote to Hamilton: “Having gone a round of six hundred leagues at this season of the year, here am I, as ignorant of the situation of the enemy as I was twenty-seven days ago.” And again, “If I were now to die, the word frigates would be found written on my heart.” Maddening, if he had not been up-borne by the inner certitude that England and Emma gave him for an inward peace in the midst of turmoil.
He made for Syracuse for the food and water he owed to her—her only. And thence he wrote to her and to her husband, exulting. Guarded, for neither the Queen nor Emma must appear; but yet exultant.
“My dear friends, thanks to your exertions we have victualled and watered, and surely, watering at the fountain of Arethusa, we must have victory. We shall sail with the first breeze, and be assured I will return either crowned with laurel or covered with cypress.”
And now begins the great epic of the Nile.
Casting his mind over all the sea, Nelson was inclined to believe the French destination was Alexandria, yet could not be certain, and mistake was ruin. He summoned aboard his flagship the four captains in whom he placed his utmost confidence: Saumarez, Troubridge, Ball and Darby. One may picture the conference in the Admiral’s cabin of the Vanguard—the awful issues hanging upon decision, and Nelson’s worn face flame-white at the end of the table. He believed in his own heart that he might have broken down physically but for that inner certitude. “On the 18th I had near died with the swelling of the vessels of the heart.” And he held grimly on.
The little council of war had decided for Alexandria, and so with a favouring wind away goes the Fleet down the Mediterranean, not only Nelson’s own reputation at stake, but England—all—if he has erred. A terrible cast of the dice for a young admiral, not even a commander in chief. But he never feared responsibility.
And in the afternoon of the 1st August, 1798, the masthead lookout of the Zealous changed the course of the world’s history by announcing the enemy, lying in Aboukir Bay, fifteen miles east of Alexandria. The chase is ended.
Since that great battle of the Nile has been told in poetry and in the cool precision of naval historians, shall a mere romancer attempt the middle, the impossible course? Better leave it immense, vague, majestic, half hidden in the smoke of guns and drowned in their uproar. It is a battle of the Titans, the foes of centuries at death-grips for the mastery of the world: the old and new worlds tremble in the balance; the American continent, the ancient glories of the Moguls in India, are all at stake in Aboukir Bay; and while the ships lock together in a horrible bridal flash and roar in groups, in duel, and solitary terrible combat, no man yet can say which way the inevitable scale will turn. No man but one. He knows. He has read the purpose of Heaven in Naples, in Syracuse, and he cannot doubt. Wounded in the head, believing death at hand, still he clings to his certitude, giving his orders now from the cabin where the surgeons have in vain implored him to lie down and take what rest is possible in the seaquake and thunder shaking the ship.
And then Captain Berry rushes below with great, yet terrible news. The mighty Orient, the French flagship, boastfully named for her errand, is on fire, and the British Captains are directing their guns on the flames, friendly to them, that none may dare to extinguish them. Wound or no wound Nelson is on deck next moment, to see the ships, friend and foe, alike veering or slipping their cables lest the frightful catastrophe should involve them also in ruin; one English ship, the Alexander, clinging bulldog-like to her prey until all but aflame, then sullenly withdrawing. The gallant French gunners below are still firing—they do not know the hell on deck—and Nelson, white, bloody, clinging to a stay for support with his one arm, gives orders that his only boat still serviceable be launched to help the survivors in the immense catastrophe that all now see at hand and draw back to watch in a mute horror. The great flames soar up to zenith. It is hell, hell, before their eyes; and slowly, sullenly, one by one her guns cease firing. They are done, their gunners dead and dying beside them; and at last there is silence but for the crackling and singing of flame, and then with a roar that storms heaven itself, the mighty ship blows up, and a deadly quiet settles on the sea beneath the calm incurious eyes of the Egyptian stars looking down on floating and human wreckage.
“Almighty God having blessed His Majesty’s arms with victory, the Admiral intends returning public Thanksgiving for the same at two o’clock this day; and he recommends every ship doing the same as soon as convenient.
“Vanguard. Off the Mouth of the Nile. 2nd, August, 1798.”
It is done. The Mediterranean is English once more and Napoleon’s dream of French domination in Egypt broken. Non nobis Domine is the cry on Nelson’s lips—Not unto us, O Lord; not unto us.
But she was His instrument; without her, it could not have been done. He knows it. She shall have the earliest news if it be at all in his power. She, who struck with him in every blow, to whom every man in the Fleet owes his devotion; Saint Emma, as he was to call her later.
Captain Hoste should carry his news, the Admiralty despatches should go through Naples, but nothing in heaven or earth should keep himself from Naples, that he might thank, praise, bless her, who had made all things possible to him and to England. Europe lifted her head and rejoiced with exceeding great joy; India also, for he sent a messenger speeding to Bombay by Aleppo and Baghdad to announce that the menace was crushed, and Clive’s work perpetuated forever.
She was in the room of mirrors watching as she watched now daily, for news from the Fleet. Her life was almost unbearably anxious. Sir William, torn from the peaceful pursuits of years of dilettantism and converted in spite of his aversion into a serious diplomat, was gravely ill more than once from the strain.
It could not be otherwise, for he was hard upon sixty-eight, and the whole world-struggle was centring in the Mediterranean so that Naples, which had been the appointment par excellence for idle delights, became the most strenuous point of the pitched battle with the French by sword and pen. The Queen was aged and querulous with unceasing cares and the misery of a foolish husband undermining her at every turn. She made her own mistakes, too, in plenty; of cruel harshness in dealing with the incipient revolutionaries of Naples and Palermo, and foolish efforts which weakened her cause. And every day she leaned more heavily on Emma, and every day Emma responded with more feverish zeal. Mistaken also, often enough, but with the clear purpose of breaking the revolution, and aiding Nelson and England, and the Two Sicilies through them.
So she watched at her window, with Sir William, ill and a little querulous also beside her, and saw a ship coming up the bay. The Queen was at her Palace at Caserta; the city lay sweltering under the August heat. She herself was enervated and half exhausted, suffering the reaction of a fierce excitement and prolonged suspense.
Guns—the salute to the Royal flag at San Elmo, the forts replying. She hurried out breathless. A ship that had the air of a battered sea-bird, making harbour after long gales and struggles. A small ship—the Mutine. She delayed neither at Capri nor Ischia, she came steadily on and dropped anchor as near shore as possible.
Emma did not awake the sleeping old man, since the guns had failed to do it. After all, it might be nothing, a trifle, and he needed rest; but again and very quietly, she took his glass and watched proceedings with a pitying glance first at the wrinkled face and dropped jaw beside her. A boat putting off from the ship. How often now she had watched those boats and tried to guess their errands!
She arranged her hair and went quietly to the reception room. It probably would mean that Nelson had news of the French Fleet and a battle was imminent. Still—still suspense!
Time is long when one waits, however one may control oneself, and though she sat at first resolutely, presently she was pacing up and down, quicker and quicker as the pulses beat faster in her brain.
What was that! A cheer in the distance!—the screeching foreign cheer she had ridiculed with Nelson. It came nearer; it gained volume. Yes, the people were screaming like mad. Naples was yelling for joy. For what? For what?
She rushed to the windows. Two uniformed young men were walking, swiftly, steadily to the Embassy, looking neither to the right nor left. Whatever the cheers came from it was not from any words of theirs. They spoke neither to each other nor to any one else, and still the crowd ran after them, yelling, cheering.
She could bear it no longer. She flew to the entrance where many of the Embassy servants, men and women, had assembled. And as the officers neared it, she stood there, white and strained to receive them, both hands clasped upon her fluttering heart.
“What is it?” she shaped with her pale lips but could get out no word.
They knew her. Hoste and Capel had both shared her hospitalities. They waved back the crowd at the gates, and came running lightly up the approach.
“Madam, a great, a glorious victory. The French Fleet annihilated.”
And as the words left Hoste’s lips, some strain seemed to snap in her. She flung up her arms and fainted dead away, falling cruelly on the marble steps before them.
They thought they had killed her. They carried her between them into the long cool room of so many agitations and Sir William was awaked and came down; trembling, incredulous. “Thank God!” he said, when they told him, and even then could scarcely take it in. He ran and announced it from the steps of the Embassy while Emma still lay in her death-like swoon, and the populace dispersed, running also shouting to carry the news all over the city. Then and then only, he devoted himself to her, and saw her faint eyelids flutter, and the pale rose dawn again in lip and cheek.
She was badly bruised from the fall. But what of that? Joy is a great physician, and presently she was sitting up, propped on cushions with the two eager young men raining their story upon her in reply to her passionate questions. Oh, joy of joys, glory of glories! Could she write to Nelson? Yes—for they must stay three days and then rejoin him with the utmost speed. But she must take them out to Caserta—the Queen must hear. Ill? Faint? she repelled the thought with indignation. Not an hour, not a minute must be lost. “My cloak—my hat! Order the carriage!”
They could not stay her, a whirlwind would not have done that, and English flags were ordered for the carriage, and a garland for each horse’s neck, and she and Sir William with the two young men got into it and were driven through the raving streets, she bowing, smiling, pointing to them with gestures of Roman pride: a younger Volumnia, drunk with joy, scarcely herself knowing what she said and did.
She has been censured for this. Persons of superior breeding have called it “bad taste” and certainly it was exuberant and unrestrained. But there are moments in life when taste does not appear the one thing necessary to salvation. Naples must know its saviour. It must know that the slight, pale sailor of their memories had met that Apocalyptic power of Napoleon undismayed and had conquered. Rome might be in the hands of the French, but Naples was free.
So they came to Caserta and the vast Palace, Emma leading her three men, proud as an Empress, through the immense marble halls, and up the broad, lion-guarded staircase. They were English. She was English. She would speak for them. Italy might flaunt with her marble palaces, but England was her protector.
The Queen stood in the great cool salon, the dim sun-shiny air sweet with flowers. Two ladies stood behind her. Her face was worn almost to attenuation with gnawing care and bitter angers. She had not seen Emma for some days. There had been a lull since the visit of Nelson, and she had had her own sore troubles with the King over the victualling business.
Now Emma approached, walking magnificently; an almost visible light encircling her.
“Madam, I bring Your Majesty great news, glad news! Your enemies are crushed. The immortal Nelson has destroyed the French Fleet at Aboukir.” Her voice never shook. She was in complete control of herself. “And lives,” she added, “for fresh and greater victories, if they are needed.”
Marie Caroline stared at her, as if unbelieving.
“Send for the King,” she gasped, and one of the ladies ran, almost tripping over her long skirt at the door. He came hurrying, shambling in, his large mouth open foolishly, his big hands shaking.
“News? What is it?”
The Queen motioned with dry lips to Emma.
“Nelson has destroyed the French Fleet at Aboukir. Thanks be to God Almighty. Their day is done.”
The Queen broke down into wild sobbing, her ladies clustering about her. The King, with a false joy illuminating his face, sprang forward and clasped the hands of Hoste and Capel.
“And the Admiral? Is he well—the dear and great man?”
The whole room seemed to dissolve into a mere clamour of congratulation, question and answer. The Queen clasped Emma about the shoulders and kissed her cheek passionately, and Emma, radiant, laughing, rejoicing, cried aloud her English “Hip, hip, hurra!” and every soul present joined in it as best they might.
“Take me back,” she gasped to Sir William, at length, “that I may write to our immortal Nelson.”
How she wrote the world knows. It was her victory as well as his. He owned it, the Fleet owned it. What should she write, what words could ever hold her swelling pride and triumph? Even yet, a century and more away, they pulse and throb with a burning life-blood.
He had written to her too in that great hour. She held his letter in her hand.
“Emma, for God’s sake, rest,” Sir William entreated when they got home. How could she? She brushed him aside, and got her pen and wrote with a hand that stumbled at her racing thoughts. She could not. She was forced to lay it aside a day or two, by mere physical weakness.
“September 8th, 1798.
“MY DEAR, DEAR SIR,
“How shall I begin! What shall I say to you. ’Tis impossible I can write for I have a fevour caused by agitation and pleasure. God, what a victory! Never, has there been anything half so glorious, so compleat. I fainted when I heard the joyfull news and fell on my side and am hurt. I should feil it a glory to die in such a cause. No, I would not like to die until I see and embrace the Victor of the Nile. How shall I describe to you the transports of Maria Carolina. She fainted and kissed her husband, her children, walked about the room, cried, kissed, embraced every person near her, exclaiming, ‘Oh, brave Nelson. Oh, God bless and protect our brave deliverer. Oh, Nelson, Nelson, what do we not owe to you. Oh that my swolen heart coud now tell him personally what we owe to him.’ You may judge, my dear sir, of the rest. The Neapolitans are mad with joy, and if you was here now you woud be killed with kindness. Not a French dog dare show his face. How I glory in the honner of my country and my countryman. I walk and tread in air with pride, feeling I was born in the same land with Nelson and his gallant band. Little dear Captain Hoste will tell you the rest. He dines with us in the day for he will not sleep out of his ship. He is a fine good lad. If he is only half a Nelson he will be superior to all others. I send you two letters from my adorable Queen. We are preparing your apartment against you come. I wish you coud have seen our house the three nights of illumination. ’Tis, ’twas covered with your glorious name. Their were 3 thousand lamps and their shoud have been 3 millions if we had had time. For God’s sake come to Naples soon. I woud have been rather an English powder-monkey or a swab in that great victory than an Emperor out of it.
“The Queen as this moment sent a Dymond ring to Captain Hoste, six buts of wine and every man on board a guinea each.
“My dress from head to foot is alla Nelson. Ask Hoste. Even my earrings are Nelson’s anchors; in short, we are be-Nelsoned all over. I send you some sonets, but must have taken a ship on purpose to send you all written on you. My mother desires her love to you.”
Nelson read that letter; his heart throbbing as he read. Who can understand as she could—none, none, in all the wide world, for she was a part of it. Dear Fanny! She will write fondly, and with a natural pride, but this one—Emma!—why a man may see her heart is almost bursting for triumphant tumultuous joy. She alone feels as he does. Their hearts beat together. The beautiful exultant creature! Yes, Fanny will write, but it will not be like this. Oh, to see her, to hear her voice repeating his own transports. Every word of Hoste’s feeds his flame of gratitude.
“By God, sir, she’s the loveliest, most wonderful woman in all the world! She so touched off your doings that I declare I realized them afresh in her words. Capel can talk of nothing else. She dazzled him.”
Indeed, Nelson himself was dazzled. He had never drunk so sparkling, so maddening a draught, with all his triumphs. Europe poured her gratitude at his feet. Her saviour! A peerage from his own England, with a pension of £2000 a year and a gift of £10,000 from the Great East India Company whose dominions and commerce he saved, an autograph letter and diamonds from the Czar, a diamond feather from the Grand Turk with a sable pelisse also from “that good Turban soul,” as Emma called him—but why enumerate all the gifts and glories, indeed beyond enumeration? There was one he coveted more than any—the look in those eyes that saw into his own soul with perfect sympathy; the sound of that voice which for him bore the sweetness of fame, the thrill of glory.
On the 22nd September he came to Naples in his battered Vanguard and no warning breathed from blue air and bluer seas. All was gladness.
Yet there a greater danger than any from any enemy awaited him. His own heart. And hers.