THERE comes 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 the Vanguard as 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] but dear, dear Naples 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 the Colossus. 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 the Colossus. 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 of le 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 feminine tria 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:
“You would by February have seen how unpleasant it would have been had you followed any advice which carried you from England to a wandering sailor. I could, if you had come, only have struck my flag and carried you back again, for it would have been impossible to set up an establishment at either Naples or Palermo.”
The die was cast. He had chosen with Faust: “Evil be thou my good.” God and Emma was his heart’s cry, against Fanny and the man-made laws that love mocks at. But here again he salved his conscience. Fanny should have all but love, every respect, every honour due from man to wife should be hers. All but the one thing she craved. Yet Nelson might have been moved had he seen the tears falling like rain over that letter. Even Emma might have pitied.
His other letters afforded him small comfort also. Troubridge, his honest true-hearted friend, his right-hand captain, had also gathered up his courage to write.
“Pardon me, my Lord. It is my sincere esteem for you that makes me mention it. I know you can have no pleasure sitting up all night at cards; why, then, sacrifice your health, comfort, purse, ease, everything, to the customs of a country where your stay cannot be long? Your Lordship is a stranger to half that happens, or the talk it occasions; if you knew what your friends feel for you, I am sure you would cut all the nocturnal parties. The gambling of the people of Palermo is openly talked of everywhere. I beseech your Lordship leave off. I wish my pen could tell you my feelings. Lady H—’s character will suffer, nothing can prevent people from talking. A gambling woman in the eye of an Englishman is lost. You will be surprised when I tell you I hear in all companies the sums won and lost on a card in Sir William’s house. It furnishes matter for a letter constantly both to Minorca, Naples, Messina, etc., and finally England. I trust your Lordship will pardon me; it is the sincere esteem I have for you that makes me risk your displeasure.”
But Nelson could not pardon in the cold searching dawn after that enchanted night. Something sickened and revolted within him—that others should watch, should guess. He flung it furiously down and would not answer it. His feeling to Troubridge was never the same again.
The Admiralty in London also was growing uneasily suspicious. They much misliked his journey in the Foudroyant with the Hamiltons to Naples to punish the Neapolitan King’s rebels and pave the way for setting him on his throne again. They could not be made to sympathize with Nelson’s execution of Caracciolo, the traitor Neapolitan Admiral; with Emma, the Queen’s emissary, in the background suspiciously all the time. They could not be made to comprehend that it was a British Admiral’s business to punish a foreign king’s traitors for him. They could not be made to comprehend the advantages of a beautiful ambassadress’s presence on board a British man-of-war in war-time, more especially as the scandal concerning her grew in volume daily.
Nor could the unsympathetic Admiralty be made to comprehend why in such stirring times it was necessary that Nelson should linger at Palermo. And furthermore, the Foreign Office began to bestir itself and ominous rumblings were heard. Their Ambassador appeared to be devoting himself far more to Neapolitan interests than to British. If Sir William Hamilton had grown so old that he was in the hands of his wife—and such a wife!—it was certainly time that inquiry should be made in that little paradise of Palermo.
Nelson sank lower and lower into depression of mind and body. The joyous wellspring of energy was dried up in him. He was ill—ill at ease. He drew up a codicil to his will that should tell all the world, if he fell, how he idealized this woman who was the world’s butt.
“I give and bequeath to my dear friend Emma Hamilton, wife of the Right Hon. Sir William Hamilton, a nearly round box set with diamonds said to have been sent me by the mother of the Grand Signior, which I request she will accept and never part from as a token of regard and respect for her very eminent virtues (for she, the said Emma Hamilton, possesses them all to such a degree that it would be doing her injustice was any particular one to be mentioned) from her faithful and affectionate friend.”
No, he would not be ashamed. He would glory in their love. And she fed every flame with the oil of her own passionate nature. He detested the French, therefore she must loathe them more. He saw her kiss a Turkish sword encrusted with valiant French blood, and did not rebuke her. She urged him on in what she believed to be the cause of God and her Queen, in that vindictive hatred of the enemy which, with herself, is the only accusation that malice itself dare hurl against Nelson.
Greville’s cold insight would have understood what Nelson’s could not; that, unrestrained, flattered, adored, the baser elements of her character were coming inevitably into play and that she would most certainly injure not only herself but all who trusted her unless rudely and violently checked as he had checked her often. But then Greville knew her past utterly; Nelson only what she chose to tell him and with her own e