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

contributed to its success" [a characteristic Emma exaggeration!] " and at the same time it gives me pain and grief, thinking on the Dear lamented Chief, who so bravely won the day, and if you come we will drink to his immortal memory. He cou'd never

have thought that his Child and my self shou'd pass the anniversary of that victorious day were we shall pass it, but I shall be with a few sincere and valuable friends, all Hearts of Gold, not Pincheback."

It must have been a sorry celebration of a glorious anniversary—the shabby room, the harassed, debt-ridden woman, whose beauty had coarsened and whose fortunes had sunk to zero, yet who still raised her glass, defiant on the very edge of calamity, to the memory of the dead hero.

By the summer of the following year, Alderman Smith and other of her " City friends " had obtained her discharge and collected a sum of money for her immediate needs. She was free once more, and most of her creditors were paid; but some few were still unsatisfied, and were about to issue fresh writs against her. So with the assistance and advice of Alderman Smith and one or two others, she prepared to fly from England to Calais. She was most anxious that those who had helped her should not be injured by her flight. As she told George Rose, " I then begged Mr. Smith to withdraw his bail, for I wou'd have died in prison sooner than that good man should have suffered for me."

At the end of June, 1814, she and Horatia embarked at the Tower, and, sailing down the Thames, Emma Hamilton looked her last upon

the country where she was born—the countn for which Nelson had lived and died.There i; reason to imagine from her letters that her owi susceptibilities were somewhat blunted; that hei emotions, which in earlier years had been expended upon large affairs, were now limited her own and Horatia's fortunes and comfort The sadness of her exile from her native lam seemed counterbalanced by the fact that in France people were kind, that turkeys and partridges were cheap, and Bordeaux wine, fifteenpence a bottle. Perhaps after all her unhappy experiences since Trafalgar she did not feel exile from England so bitter—she may have felt that England had treated her but ill. All her life she cherished loyalties for persons, not causes.It was Nelson she loved, not England.England was included during his lifetime because the two could not be separated, because it pleased her to play the patriot before his admiring eyes.But England without Nelson she found cold—the abstract passion of country was not in her.As the fires of life sank down, she, like many another, ceased to care for " lost causes and impossible loyalties," but craved a little comfort to end her storm-tossed days.

This at first she found in France, living for a time at Dessein's hotel, with her usual disregard of cost. Then she moved to another and cheaper hostelry, and from there to a comfort-

able farmhouse kept by two French ladies. She seems for a time to have been fairly contented, unhaunted by the thought of what she once called her " former splendours." Writing to George Rose at this time, she tells him—

"Everybody is pleased with Horatia. The General and his good old wife are very good to us; but our little world of happiness is ourselves. If, my dear Sir, Lord Sidmouth would do something for dear Horatia, so that I can be enabled to give her an education, and also for her dress, it would ease me, and make me very happy. Surely he owes this to Nelson."

To what a small petition was Emma Hamilton reduced after all her large Memorials! Her chief anxiety was now for Horatia. Within a few months of her death she wrote to Sir William Scott, " If my dear Horatia was provided for I should dye happy, and if I could only now be enabled to make her more comfortable and finish her Education, ah, God, how I would bless them that enabled me to do it!" She vows she has " seen enough of grandeur not to regret it," but she is distressed at the strait-ness of her means. She had asked Earl Nelson to let her have her Bronte pension quarterly instead of half yearly, but he had refused, " saying he was too poor." "Think what I must feel," she cries, "who was used to give God only knows, and now to ask!"

366 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

The farmhouse became too expensive for her meagre purse, and she had to betake herself and Horatia to humble lodgings in Calais, in the Rue Franchise. The winter was upon them, and though the stories told of Emma and her daughter being upon the verge of starvation in these last months are not true, yet they lacked all save the bare necessaries of life—these two stranded creatures, one of whom was the only child of Lord Nelson, and the other who had been Romney's "divine lady" and the pride of the Neapolitan Court.

" My Broken Heart does not leave me," Emma had written a little while before, and her health was now finally broken also. In the course of her life she had met and escaped from disgrace and danger and debt; but death she could not elude, and she had no further spirit left to try. The winter was severe, she caught a chill that settled on her chest; she was short of comforts, and her courage was exhausted. Worry and protracted disappointment had broken her down. By mid-January of 1815 the end came: she died shrived and consoled by a priest