THERE is a most absolute and splendid justice in the remorseless sequence of cause and effect, and those who play at dice with angry gods cannot win.
Nelson had cause to know that truth in the days that followed. He was losing, losing steadily. There were moments of frantic joy buried like jewels in a rubble of fears, anxieties and disappointments. It would always be right next day, but never was. Emma and he would always find perfect bliss—to-morrow. But that to-morrow was the rainbow in the field beyond and to-day he was face to face with Emma’s troubles and Fanny’s tragedy.
He knew it was a tragedy and denied it fiercely to himself and to Emma. She was cold, dull, heartless. She did not care a rap. What comfort could a man find in a pale, silent creature like that? He wanted warmth and colour; he wanted tender flattery. Was it his fault if she had changed in his last absence? He wanted to be friends provided she would fall in joyfully with all his views regarding Emma, and she would not. She obeyed his wishes like a slave. They were seldom alone; he contrived that; but when they were, little was said and less answered.
But—there is justice. Though Lady Nelson made no plea for herself, the world made it for her. There was deep indignation against the treatment she was receiving. Queen Charlotte entirely refused to recognize Emma, and this although Sir William made his best interest with the King, his foster brother. The third George could be a veritable farmer George for bluffness when he so pleased, and he told Sir William to his face that he might very well remember how much he had disapproved the marriage, how he had assured him at the time that whatever the Neapolitan Court might do, the English Court would hold to its rules; though he himself would be always welcome. And to Emma’s rage and Nelson’s infinite disgust, Sir William serenely attended the next Court.
“It would make a talk if I did not, and at my age I cannot be troubled,” he said, with a smile which had a family resemblance to Greville’s.
“It would trouble me to attend without my wife,” Nelson said, a little too bluntly.
“Yet I have not seen you take her,” Sir William rejoined with the same fine smile, and the conversation dropped.
And the more public opinion set against him, the more defiant Nelson grew. In his own words, he was fixed as Fate, and daily more bound to the woman whose ordeal was drawing nearer.
“It is not,” said Sir William Hotham, a typical man about town discoursing at his club, “that London has turned suddenly moral or that any sensible person cares a damn about Nelson’s chastity. It’s his confounded vanity that leads him to brandish himself and the woman in the face of society and think every one is to swallow it because he is the great Lord Nelson. And such a woman! As for that poor wife of his—the least a man can do is to hide that sort of weakness. It’s damned unjustifiable to wound her feelings publicly as he does, when there isn’t a man or woman alive but knows she’s one of the best good women that ever stepped. Look at him now, going off to Fonthill with the Hamiltons for Christmas and leaving her alone here in town, and he only lately home from sea! I declare I can barely stand it, though God knows it’s no concern of mine.”
“The mischief is,” said another man, in the little group at the club, “that Nelson is no rake. If he were, he would manage his affairs with much better breeding and a deal more consideration for that poor wife of his. He’s as infatuated as a fool about the Hamilton woman as if he were a boy of sixteen in love for the first time—which is exactly the case. It’s his damned innocence that’s more than half the trouble.”
But pity or no pity, the climax was nearly upon Fanny now. Nothing could stave it off. She spent her solitary Christmas sitting at the window of their lodgings in Arlington Street and wondering whether in all broad London there was any heart so heavy as hers. Not in London perhaps, but certainly in the midst of all the gaiety at Beckford’s palace of Fonthill. Nelson was sick in spirit—and the more mortally offended with his wife because he knew that in ways he could not explain to himself she was the cause of his unrest—even in Emma’s company and the noisy gaieties of Beckford’s meretricious Fonthill; all of which suited her Ladyship exceedingly well.
They returned to London, and Fanny had her orders to attend the Hamiltons to the opera and show herself in the box with them. Emma made a point of that, for the time was not now far distant when Lady Nelson’s countenance might be vital to her in Sir William’s and the world’s eyes. Fanny pleaded fatigue, but soon saw there was no alternative. She put on her quiet black satin and sat in the box a little behind the beautiful glittering Emma in her purple spangled satin with the cachemire draping her fair shoulders. There were very few eyes in the house which were not turned upon that box, with their owners speculating on the drama it held. Nelson sat in front, brilliant in stars and orders as Emma in jewels. Sir William went placidly to sleep.
Half-way through the performance, in the very midst of the great soprano aria, “Non dirmi addio,” where the prima donna swoons into the arms of the distracted tenor, Emma followed her example and fainted quietly away. Nelson and her husband sprang together to her assistance. Fanny sat death-still, not moving a finger. It was as if something had snapped in her brain with the result of an extraordinary lucidity in all her perceptions. She saw, she understood, and her own hitherto obtuseness filled her with shame and self-disgust. No wonder that Nelson, that every one despised her. She had carried obedience into caricature and made a show of herself for all London. She rose and walked out of the box without a look in Emma’s direction.
Presently the two men followed, supporting Emma between them. She was recovering but still pale as death, her eyes showing but as a blue line under heavy lids. They had dragged some cushions out of the box and made a kind of couch for her in the passage, which was quite empty.
“Have you no smelling salts?” Nelson said imperiously. He was stooping over the sufferer with Sir William. There was no direct answer.
“I am going home,” Fanny said. She pulled her cloak about her and turned her back on the group without another word. She walked swiftly along the passage.
“My dear Nelson, pray attend to your wife. I will see to Emma. See, she is recovering quickly. Lady Nelson cannot return alone.” So said Sir William, realizing the potentialities of the situation and anxious to avoid them. An attendant came hurrying up with salts, and Nelson strode away after his wife with a heart full of anger which was but pain reversed.
He overtook her half-way down the stairs, and calling a carriage, put her in in dead silence, and followed her. Not a word was said on the way to Arlington Street, the wheels jolting over the cobbles, and the dim lamps shining and darkening as they passed. Fanny opened her own door at the end, and got out and went upstairs. She knew she must face it now, and a kind of desperate resolution came to her. Things could not last like this. A change there must be and who could tell it might not be for the better? Certainly nothing could be worse.
Nelson followed her and shut the door of the sitting-room. He looked ill and pale in his fine coat with its stars; even less fit to face the ordeal than she. But he moved straight up to the attack and laid his ship alongside the enemy, as he always did at sea. She sat down, quite unable to stand.
“I wish to know why you publicly insulted Lady Hamilton? Why, when she fainted, did you not show her the common humanity of help as one woman to another? Why did you turn your back on her and walk out of the box?”
Her teeth were chattering with terror. She could hardly control her voice. There could be only one thing more dreadful than this scene—to endure as she had been enduring. But she got some words out at last.
“If you ask me that question I must answer. But you had better not.”
His tone was like tempered steel: “I ask it.”
She raised herself in her chair, supporting her two hands on the arms, and looked into his eyes.
“It is terrible to me to say it, but I cannot screen your mistress and the mother to be of your child.”
There was an awful silence. His face was livid. Every particle of colour had fallen away even from his lips. So they faced each other, the ruins of their life between them. For a minute or more neither spoke—nor could. Then he rallied.
“How you dare make that base and foul attack on a woman better than yourself, God only knows. I can only suppose your mind is poisoned through and through by the Jacobin lies. Never while I live will I forgive you. And this to the husband to whom you owe everything!”
A sudden courage fired her at this most unjust speech.
“When my husband withdraws his love and gives it to another, what else he has given me is worthless in my eyes. And as to stories—I go by your own conduct. Have I had a kind word from you since you returned? Have we lived as husband and wife? Have I not been dragged about with a woman whose shameful past made her an unfit companion for me in any case?”
“Be silent,” he said, with low concentrated fury.
“I cannot be silent. I have always obeyed you and my one prayer is to do so again and forever. Oh, my husband, my dear, dear husband; we were happy once. I implore and entreat you let us be happy again. Put her away and come back to me. She is ruining you in the eyes of men. On all sides are stories of her worthlessness and your misplaced belief in her. That is the cause of all the coldness that wounds you. I love you. Come back to me and forget this most miserable thing and let us be happy again.”
She spread her hands out in the quick gesture he knew so well. The tears were thick in her eyes but did not overflow. Even then her reserve stood in her way. Even to herself she seemed strained and cold. She wanted to kneel before him and cling about him and tell him all her love, but could not. Oh, for a word, a sign of love from him and then the frost would break up and dissolve in a rain of passionate tears and kisses.
He turned to the window for a minute and stood looking out on the dim lights as if taking a moment to think, and then turned back again.
“I won’t insult the woman you speak of by defending her from your vile attacks. She is utterly beyond your malice; the truest, bravest heart in the world. If you wanted love from me you should have met my friend as your friend and taken her to your heart as I have. She was willing to love you, as she wrote you more than once, but you would have nothing but your own poor jealousy. Well, have it! Keep it! I tell you here and now that you have so acted that one hair of her head is more to me than all you have and are, and that though most unfortunately I must live with you for her sake, it shall never again be as husband and wife. And if you injure her in word or deed it shall be at your peril.”
She got up from her chair steadied by these dreadful words and stood holding by it for a moment. Then she spoke in a choking whisper.
“What must the passion be that can make a man like you speak so to the wife he has loved and trusted? I have no more to say. God judge between us.”
She went quietly to the door that led to her bedroom and passed through and he heard the key turn. If even then she had faltered and shown some sign of weakness he might have—no, not relented, for Emma possessed him too strongly for that!—but have thought of her more tenderly. But her reserve stood her in ill stead, and moreover he knew he was in the wrong, and he who has done the wrong never pardons. He would have left the house forever then but for the injury to Emma’s reputation at that crisis.
He sat down by the table and buried his face in his arm and thought of Emma and yearned for her and for the comfort she only could give him. Indeed, his love for her, misplaced, guilty, is none the less one of the rememberable passions of the world, incalculable to himself and in its results.
When he had a little recovered, he went out into the street and to Piccadilly that he might judge by the light in her window whether she had returned and was still suffering or could sleep. Up and down in the cold rain he walked, his eyes fixed on that square of light, and at last was rewarded more than once by seeing her figure flit across it with long dishevelled hair, and Mrs. Cadogan evidently in attendance. That was the best he could hope, and then he went back and crept into his small bedroom and never closed his eyes any more than did his wife; and so those two miserable hearts were side by side, united yet apart in a very different suffering, for the few last nights left them.
They were not to be many. In his tactlessness and cruel persistence, hardened by the slights shown almost everywhere to Emma, he scarcely opened his mouth at home but to praise her. He had a faint hope of convincing Fanny that all was innocent between them, and that therefore the subject was not one he need avoid, but still greater was the desire to insist on the virtues and greatness of soul which all the world must realize. His brother Maurice came up to London and, shocked at the state of affairs and the talk which greeted him on every side, implored Nelson to be reconciled with his wife, even if it were only for the sake of Lady Hamilton’s reputation, which he himself privately considered past praying for. Nelson’s answer was an ultimatum.
“I am willing to live on friendly terms with Fanny but will never desert a woman to whom I owe so much and insult her by what my desertion would imply. Fanny must accept her as an honoured friend.”
And Fanny could only reply that there might be some hope if she could be allowed to ignore the woman. That surely was not too much to ask. It was much too much, as it proved. There was a deadlock.
It added to her agony that Nelson’s sisters, Mrs. Bolton and Mrs. Matcham, had struck up the most cordial friendship with the woman whose hand, as they well perceived, could dispense all the favours they could hope from their famous brother, and the elder brother William, the needy clergyman, was not long in imitating them. His letters to Emma, sickening with adulation, often contained such gentle reminders as the following:
“I am told there are two or three very old lives, prebends of Canterbury, in the Minister’s gift, near £600 a year, and good houses.” And then she would set Nelson, much against his taste, to beg the authorities for favours which he hated to ask.
She was flattered in the extreme by this family recognition and too free and easy to care to trace its wellspring very closely—all was confidence and sympathy on that side.
The situation was impossible and the end came quickly. They were breakfasting in Arlington Street, a friend, Nelson’s solicitor Hazlewood, with them, and Nelson, as usual, was showing forth the praises of “dear Lady Hamilton.” The breaking-point of Fanny’s long suffering was reached, as often happens, by a thing she had silently borne hundreds of times before. She rose at last and said passionately:
“I am sick, sick, of hearing of dear Lady Hamilton. Indeed you must choose between us. I can endure no more.”
Nelson was shocked from the family vehemence into calm, for there was finality in her face.
“Take care what you say. I love you sincerely, but I cannot forget my obligations to Lady Hamilton or speak of her otherwise than with affection and admiration.”
There was a dead pause, the guest staring in embarrassment at the tablecloth, afraid to look at either.
The poor woman who had reason enough to estimate that love at its true value, tried to speak and could not—her mind was made up, and that was all. She tried to utter it and failed. She crept from the room and left the house, hoping against hope, praying that the terrible break would stir him to shame and repentance. It never did.
He went off in ghastly anxiety to Emma, afraid lest he had ruined all their plans. But she received the news with her gayest courage.
“After all, what does it matter? I can be seen about with your sisters now, and that’s really better in some ways for they don’t love your wife and they’ll be furious at her walking off like that. Trust them to talk! Besides, as my own Nelson is going afloat so soon to fight in the Baltic ’twill appear the more heartless in her. She has served our turn well with her malicious temper. Don’t you go near her, my own dear love. I know your kind heart, but she’s gone too far this time.”
“You think I was right?” he asked wistfully. He was wholly in her hands now for good or ill.
“Right? What else could you do? What can any man do dealing with a nasty evil-thinking temper like that? If a woman can’t be kind-hearted and pleasant she deserves what she gets. Many would be jealous of her, but I never was. I was as eager to make friends as if I had never a grudge against her. But she never gave you a child—how can she understand? Her love and her child were another man’s not yours!”
That went home, and then there were the fond rhapsodies without which he could not now exist. And in the dear intimate talk of all their plans and hopes there was not much room for thought of Fanny.
He hoisted his flag in the San Josef and prepared to leave England with an aching heart, for Emma’s hour was at hand. And here he shines with the lustre that nothing earthly can dim. Every thought, love, feeling of his heart was centred in that house in Piccadilly and the event to take place there, but even that could not weigh in the scale against his country’s need.
With Emma he concerted a plan of correspondence which might yet have mystified the world if she had not insanely kept his letters. There was to be a Thomson aboard his ship, a young man concerned about his wife’s confinement in which Lady Hamilton’s goodness of heart had led her to interest herself. She would send news to Nelson for Thomson. Nelson would forward Thomson’s hopes and fears to her.
So, with this great fear at his heart, he sailed to fresh triumphs—the great victory of Copenhagen—and to what might very likely be death. He made a generous provision for Fanny and cut the bond between them, writing with cold precision:
“I have done all in my power for you, and if I died, you will find I have done the same. Therefore my only wish is to be left to myself and wishing you every happiness, believe that I am your affectionate Nelson and Bronte.”
She endorsed it:
“This is my Lord Nelson’s letter of dismissal which so astonished me that I immediately sent it to Mr. Maurice Nelson, who was sincerely attached to me, for his advice. He desired me not to take the least notice of it, as his brother seemed to have forgotten himself.”
Yet she still waited on in hope never to be fulfilled. To Emma he wrote passionately, in almost frenzied anxiety for her health, but in their secret code.
“Pray tell Mrs. Thomson her kind friend is very uneasy about her and prays most fervently for her safety, and he says he can only depend on your goodness. May the Heavens bless and protect my dearest friend and give her every comfort this world can afford is the sincerest prayer of your faithful and affectionate Nelson and Bronte.”
On the twenty-ninth of January his daughter Horatia was born, incredibly under the roof of Sir William in Piccadilly. With Mrs. Cadogan’s connivance all was kept secret, though it would be difficult to guess how far Sir William himself was blinded or preferred to be. Within a week the child was at nurse in a somewhat obscure London street and in another fortnight, Emma, “recovered from one of her old Neapolitan attacks,” was shining in society again—such society as accepted her.
As for Nelson; the family excitability combined with his own feelings drove him almost insane. “I believe,” he wrote to Emma, “that dear Mrs. Thomson’s friend will go mad with joy. He cries, prays, and performs all sorts of tricks, yet dare not show all or any of his feelings, but he has only me to consult with. He swears he will drink your health this day in a bumper, and damn me if I don’t join him. I cannot write, I am so agitated by this young man at my elbow. I believe he is foolish. He does nothing but rave about you and her. I own I participate in his joy and cannot write anything.”
Ah, what chance had Fanny against that new passion of fatherhood! None. If he could ever have forgotten Emma there was now this living bond between them, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. She must be christened Horatia. She must be provided for, loved, guarded. Nothing was too much for this treasure, and the greater treasure to whom he owed her. It is incredible—the passion of this man for such a woman. Not sensual passion only, though that had its share, but an idealization which almost makes one doubt between the woman as he saw her and the woman she really was. And yet—only the Power to whom the secrets of all hearts are known can say which is the right estimate, the lover’s or the world’s.
Not even the famous letters of his great antagonist—Napoleon’s to Josephine—can equal the outpourings of Nelson, held at sea by his equal devotion to England, but tortured by Emma’s beauty and the fear (which it is instructive to note) of her least infidelity.
The dissolute Prince of Wales invited himself to Sir William’s house to hear the enchanting Emma sing with the famous Banti, and Sir William, with an eye on the governorship of Malta, was most anxious to oblige him. Nelson was driven almost mad at the bare thought of it. A shrieking self-torture runs through every word he wrote:
“Do not sit long at table. Good God! He will be next you and telling you soft things. If he does, tell it out at table and turn him out of the house. O God, that I was dead. I am gone almost mad, but you cannot help it. His words are so charming that I am told no person can withstand them. If I had been worth ten millions I would have betted every farthing that you would not have gone into the house knowing he was there, and if you did, which I would not have believed, that you would have sent him a proper message by Sir William and sent him to hell. Hush, hush, my poor heart, keep in my breast. Emma is true. They say he sings well. I have eat nothing but a little rice and drank water. But forgive me. I know my Emma, and don’t forget you had once a Nelson, a friend, a dear friend, but alas! he has his misfortunes. He has lost the best, his only friend, his only love. Don’t forget him, poor fellow. He is honest. Oh, I could thunder and strike dead with my lightning. I dreamt it last night, my Emma.”
And so on through many pages—a cruel heart-piercing mixture of Lear and Ophelia and as mad as either.
“Do not let him come downstairs with you, or hand you up! Perhaps my head was a little affected. No wonder, it was such an unexpected, such a knock-down blow, such a death.”
Was this happiness? Was it ever happiness? That question may well be asked but hardly answered. He trembled always on the edge of terrors of one sort or another. His own child he could but see by stealth, his “wife in the eyes of God” was the wife of another—a man bound to him by closest, most trusting ties of friendship. He was reduced to counting on that man’s death and hoping for it—“When your uncle [Sir William] dies”—then all would be well. And yet not even then. There was his wife, and she in her dumb suffering must be vilified as a hard self-seeking woman that the beloved Emma might be justified, and his passion for her. And when all this failed to convince his own unhappy soul, then God must be called to justify him—God in whose eyes love is all. He must pity and understand what to human eyes must appear hideous. He threw himself on the Divine sympathy, knowing there could be none on earth for a fall so complicated.
But amid all these griefs there stood out starry clear one joy unmixed and perfect—England. He had served her as none other, and the time was not past. He could serve her again—his frail breast her bulwark in the terrible days he foresaw—and before God and man that duty should be flawlessly done. There was his reparation, if such were needed. That should uplift his name to the snowy heights of honour and Emma’s shine with it as his inspiration. He fought for her and for himself in every blow he struck for the country he loved as well as he loved her—or better.
So he sailed sorrowful, but with a great hope before him, to the north. And Frances Nelson made once more a simple dignified appeal for reconciliation; but Emma was omnipotent. It was not even answered. At all events, all hope was over when he returned from Copenhagen, for Emma, with his commission, had bought the charming house of Merton Place in Surrey which he was henceforth to share by a most extraordinary arrangement with the Hamiltons.
Emma’s way was growing clear before her, and in her own mind there was now no doubt as to the future. Sir William’s life could not be long. He had told her so himself and the doctors confirmed it, and the duty, fast growing irksome, of pretending to place his interests before Nelson could not trouble her much longer. She would do her utmost for him while he lasted. Her natural good-nature prompted her there and was backed by the motive of self-interest, if it needed backing, for on his will much might depend. Nelson was far from rich and the allowance he felt compelled to make his wife, sorely and openly grudged by Emma, made her the more anxious about her own resources. With two incomes at her disposal and her own bent that way, she had grown terribly extravagant. Though Merton might please Nelson and Sir William, London pleased her, and not for a moment would she hear of surrendering the house in Piccadilly and its gaieties. Both there and at Merton she was surrounded by the Bohemian and masculine society which was nearly all that her reputation left her with the exception of Nelson’s sisters and their families; and in such an environment all that Greville had checked in her character reappeared now and with the added force of long repression. Her easy manner was now familiarity, her outbursts of temper were almost unbearable, her very kindness affronted. She prejudiced Nelson at every turn against his wife—“Tom Tit,” as she nicknamed her—and she tossed over the poor woman’s wardrobe which Nelson had commissioned her (of all people!) to pack and return. She never wearied of cruel jokes about her with his sisters, who flattered her by joining in her humour. She wrote to one of them:
“Tom Tit is at Brighton. She did not come nor did he go. Jove [Nelson], for he is quite a Jove, knows better than that! It is such a pain to part with dear friends and you and I liked each other from the moment we met; our souls were congenial. Not so with Tom Tit, for there was an antipathy not to be described! Tom Tit does not come to town. She offered to go down but was refused, she only wanted to go to do mischief to all the great Jove’s relations. ’Tis now shown, all her ill treatment and bad heart. Jove has found it out.”
And the cara amica wrote back:
“I saw Tom Tit yesterday in her carriage at the next door come to take Lady Charlotte Drummond out with her. Had I only seen her hands spreading about I should have known her.”
Yes; it was not only Emma who had so much taste and all of it so bad. With the exception of his old father most of the Nelsons might have come under that superlative Grevillian censure so far as their treatment of Frances Nelson was concerned. Yet humanity is a mixed warp and woof, and in many ways Emma kept her kind heart. Do we ever change from our birth endowments, and as life wanes is it not a progressive dissolution into the original elements? The fine lady of Naples was rapidly degenerating into the hoyden of Up Park, only coarser, more florid, more spendthrift in money as well as emotions. But Nelson could not see it. She was his Divine Lady to the last, as she was Romney’s.
Romney! She made the pilgrimage to Hampstead to see him. A sad pilgrimage. She missed the old studio in Cavendish Square. It was a villa-looking house with a neglected garden about it, a few sodden lilacs and grass-grown flower-beds, and when she entered unannounced they stared at each other for a moment in silence. He was stooped and old and dejected. A fog of melancholia clung about him, which was never to lift again. He looked at her with dull eyes as she unloosed her costly pelisse and sat down beside him and took his hands, all cordiality.
“You were once Emma,” he muttered, “once Emma! My God, how beautiful you were! I shall never paint you more. No—no. It’s all over.”
“But, my dear sir, you remember me. You don’t think me changed!” she pleaded. Indeed she knew herself she was changed. Her glass told her that if Nelson did not. Something of the young glow was gone with youth. But he only shook his head.
“You were once Emma. It’s all, all over,” he replied, and she could get no more than that. She left him, herself half bewildered with the passing of things. Her only remedy for care was gaiety, incessant noisy gaiety. Let their old acquaintance, Lord Minto, describe the life at Merton when Nelson returned:
“The whole establishment and way of life is such as to make one angry as well as melancholy. I do not think myself obliged to quarrel with him for his weakness, though nothing shall ever induce me to give the smallest countenance to Lady Hamilton. She looks eventually to the chance of marriage. She is in high looks, but more immense than ever. She goes on cramming Nelson with trowelfuls of flattery, which he goes on taking quietly as a child does pap. The love she makes to him is not only ridiculous but disgusting. Not only the rooms, but the whole house, staircase and all, are covered with pictures of her and him, and representations of his naval actions—an excess of vanity which counteracts its own subject. Braham, the celebrated Jew singer, performed with Lady H. She is horrid, but he entertained me.”
Sir William was worn out with the riot. He took an opportunity to complain to the cool Greville on meeting him in London.
“I do assure you it is wearing me to the grave,” he sighed, in reply to Greville’s look of concern. “It is really but reasonable to hope for peace, having fagged all my life, but never a chance of it do I get.”
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