Nelson's Lady Hamilton by Meynell, Esther (cheapest way to read ebooks .txt) 📗

of writing to Sir William Hamilton a few months after his cruel break with the girl who loved him, yet with quite sincere conviction—

" I so long foresaw that a moment of separation must arrive, that I never kept the connexion, but on a footing of perfect liberty to her. Its commencement was not of my seeking, and hitherto it has contributed to her happiness. She knows and reflects often on the circumstances which she cannot forget, and in her heart she cannot reproach me of having acted otherwise than a kind and attentive friend. But you have now rendered it possible for her to be respected and comfortable, and if she has not talked herself out of the true view of her situation she will retain the protection and affection of us both. . . . Knowing all this, infinite have been my pains to make her respect herself, and act fairly, and I had always proposed to continue her friend, altho' the connexion ceased."

So far the virtuous and upright Greville.

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lie was incapable of seeing his conduct in the light in which it appeared to more generous souls. He told himself that he had done well for Emma, as for himself. Her worldly circumstances were improved, her material prosperity was assured, so long as she continued to please Sir William Hamilton. Hard and unspiritual in his own nature, in spite of his culture and refinement, he recked little of the blow he had dealt Emma by shattering her faith and trust in him. By his treatment he did more than any other man who came into her life to destroy the child in her—the simple uncritical belief in goodness which she had strongly, in spite of her own stray ings from the path of virtue. Flung back upon herself as she had been by his abandonment of her, it was no wonder, it was only human, that she at last turned to bay and wrote to him: " It is not to your intrest to disoblidge me, for you don't know the power I have hear. ... If you affront me, I will make him marry me."

By writing that threat Emma showed herself a subtly changed creature. She had learned her lesson: in future she would be less the victim of men's passions and more the moulder of her own fortunes. "Love, in its unselfishness," says Captain Mahan, "passed out of her life with Greville. Other men might find her pliant, pleasing, seductive; he alone knew her

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as disinterested." This judgment is somewhat sweeping, but substantially just. Ambition and the love of power were dawning upon the horizon of the country girl, who hitherto had been content to give everything and receive little.

CHAPTER V

NAPLES

IT would have been impossible to find a place or a society more entirely fitted to expand Emma's characteristic gifts and graces than Naples from the year 1786 to the year of the Battle of the Nile. She had naturally a southern temperament: joyous, responsive, thinking little of the morrow, fully alive to all visible beauty— to all beauty, that is, which could be touched and seen, but insensitive to the austere and spiritual charm of things unseen—" the visionary gleam, the glory and the dream/ 1 Her native tendency towards the theatrical side of life was enhanced by the atmosphere of Naples, where the priests, the Lazzaroni, the royalties, gave to everything she saw the air of a gorgeous opera, played in a sunshine so brilliant as to have some of the dazzling qualities of limelight, and backed by the unsurpassable stage-setting of the Bay of Naples and the smoking crater of Vesuvius.

For the first few years of her life there it was all gaiety and flowers, balls, receptions,

" Attitudes," compliments, a king in the train of her admirers. Such was the opening scene. Then the stage darkened, and the Muse of History came stalking across the boards, arrayed in all the pomp and panoply of war. It was—

" A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene !"

Storms, revolutions, bloodshed followed, while warships — the battered victors of the Nile — rode at anchor on the blue waters of the Bay of Naples, and the fortresses of Uovo and Nuovo, on which Emma had looked out many years, became the centres of anarchy and rebellion. Emma's spirit rose to these great events. Her courage, her resource, her readiness were undoubted ; she played her part well when the time came, and there can be little question that she saw herself and the Queen of Naples as the twin heroines of a drama which was being acted before the eyes of Europe.

But in the late summer of 1786 wars and revolutions were yet dim upon the horizon, the only disturbances were thunder, lightning, an eruption of Vesuvius. In one of her letters, Emma writes: "We have dreadful thunder and lightning. It fell at the Maltese minister's just by our house and burnt [h]is beds and wires, etc. I have now persuaded Sir William to put up a conductor to his house. The lava runs a

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little, but the mountain is very full and we expect an irruption every day."

By the end of the year Emma and her mother had left their own apartment, and moved into the Palazzo Sessa, the British Embassy at that time. Nothing which money, imagination, and taste could suggest for her comfort and pleasure had been left undone by Sir William Hamilton, Goethe, during his Italian journey, saw and admired her boudoir, which, " furnished in the English taste," he considered "most delightful," while the