Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (9 page)

junctures of affairs and men first witnessed by her, will find place in the next chapter. It was not many months before she was to exclaim to Greville, " You do not know what power I have hear "; before Acton, the Premier, was to rally Sir William on " a worthy and charming young lady." But now and here the climax of her emotions, when she first fully realised Greville's breach of faith and his real purpose in exiling her, must be reached without interruption. Even on the first of May, when his uncle told her in reply to her solicitude for Greville's welfare, that she might command anything from one who loved them both so dearly, " I have had a conversation this morning," she wrote, " with Sir William that has made me mad. He speaks—no, I do not know what to make of it."

Three months went by, and still no letter came, except one to tell her how grateful was the nephew for the uncle's care; and still Sir William looked and languished. The truth began to dawn upon her, but even now she dare not face, and would not believe it. At the close of July, when Naples drowses and melts in dreamy haze, she made her last and piteous, though spirited, appeal. " I am now onely writing to beg of you for God's sake to send me one letter, if it is onely a farewell. Sure I have deserved this for the sake of the love you once had for me. . . . Don't despise me. I have not used you ill in any one thing. I have been from you going of six months, and you have wrote one letter to me, enstead of which I have sent fourteen to you. So pray let me beg of you, my much loved Greville, only one line from your dear, dear hands. You don't know how thankful I shall be for it. For if you knew the misery I feel, oh! your heart wou'd not be intirely shut up against me; for I love you with the truest affection. Don't let any body sett you against me. Some of your friends—your foes per-

haps, I don't know what to stile them—have long wisht me ill. But, Greville, you never will meet with anyr body that has a truer affection for you than I have, and I onely wish it was in my power to shew you what I cou'd do for you. As soon as I know your determination, I shall take my own measures. If I don't hear from you, and that you are coming according to promise, I shall be in England at Cristmass at farthest. Don't be unhappy at that, I will see you once more for the last time. I find life is insupportable without you. Oh! my heart is intirely broke. Then for God's sake, my ever dear Greville, do write to me some comfort. I don't know what to do. I am now in that state, I am incapable of anything. I have a language-master, •a singing-master, musick, etc., but what is it for? If it was to amuse you, I shou'd be happy. But, Greville, what will it avail me? I am poor, helpless, and forlorn. I have lived with you 5 years, and you have sent me to a strange place, and no one prospect but thinking you was coming to me. Instead of which I was told. . . . No, I respect him, but no, never. . . . What is to become of me ? But excuse me, my heart is ful. I tel you give me one guiney a week for everything, and live with me, and I will be contented. But no more. I will trust to Providence, and wherever you go, God bless you, and preserve you, and may you allways be happy! But write to Sir William. What [h]as he done to affront you? " 1

She awaited Greville's orders. Sir William had commissioned still another portrait of her from Rom-ney; " Angelaca " was about to paint her; she was " so remarkably fair " that " everybody " said she " put on red and white "; Lord Hervey was her slave; a foreign prince was in her train each evening; the king was " sighing " for her. It was Greville's orders 1 Morrison MS. 152, July 22, 1786.

for which she waited. She had just visited Pompeii and viewed the wrecks of love and bloom and life unearthed by alien hands. Was here no moral for this distraught and heaving bosom? And there that awful mountain lowered and threatened ruin every day. The Maltese Minister's house hard by had been struck by lightning. Like lurid Nature, Emma too was roused to fury, though, a microcosm of it also, she smiled between the outbursts. What could she do but wait ?

Twelve days more; the order comes— "Oblige Sir William/' Her passion blazes up, indignant: ". . . Nothing can express my rage. Greville, to advise me! — you that used to envy my smiles! Now with cool indifference to advise me! ... Oh! that is the worst of all. But I will not, no, I will not rage. If I was with you I wou'd murder you and myself boath. I will leave of [f] and try to get more strength, for I am now very ill with a cold. ... I won't look back to what I wrote . . . Nothing shall ever do for me but going home to you. If that is not to be, I will except of nothing. I will go to London, their go into every excess of vice till I dye, a miserable, brokenhearted wretch, and leave my fate as a warning to young whomen never to be two good; for now you have made me love you, you made me good, you have abbandoned me; and some violent end shall finish our connexion, if it is to finish. But oh! Greville, you cannot, you must not give me up. You have not the heart to do it. You love me I am sure; and I am willing to do everything in my power, and what will you have more? And I only say this is the last time I will either beg or pray, do as you like."—" I always knew, I had a foreboding since first I began to love you, that I was not destined to be happy; for their is not a King or Prince on hearth that cou'd make me

happy without you."—" Little Lord Brooke is dead. Poor little boy, how I envy him his happiness."

She had been degraded in her own eyes, and by the lover whom she had heroised. Was this, then, the reward of modesty regained; of love returned, of strenuous effort, of hopes for her child, and a home purified? Her idol lay prone, dashed from its pedestal, with feet of clay. And yet this did not harden her. Though she could not trust, she still believed in him as in some higher power who chastens those he loves. Her paroxysms passed to return again:—". . . It is enough, I have paper that Greville wrote on. He [h]as folded it up. He wet the wafer. How I envy thee the place of Emma's lips, that would give worlds, had she them, to kiss those lips! ... I onely wish that a wafer was my onely rival. But I submit to what God and Greville pleases." Even now she held him to his word. " I have such a headache with my cold, I don't know what to do. ... I can't lett a week go without telling you how happy I am at hearing from you. Pray, write as often as you can. // you come, we shall all go home together. . . . Pray write to me, and don't write in the stile of a freind, but a lover. For I won't hear a word of freind. Sir William is ever freind. But we are lovers. I am glad you have sent me a blue hat and gloves. . . ."

For many years she cherished Greville's friendship. She wrote to him perpetually after the autumn of this year saw Sir William win her heart as well as will by his tenderness, and by her thought of advancing the ingrate nephew himself. Never did she lose sight of Greville's interests during those fourteen future years at Naples. She lived to thank Greville for having made Sir William known to her, to be proud of her achievements as his eleve.

But at the same time in these few months a larger

horizon was already opening. She had looked on a bigger world, and ambition was awakening within her. She had seen royalty and statesmen, and she began to feel that she might play a larger part. Under Greville's yoke she had been ready to pinch and slave; with Sir William she would rule. " Pray write," she concludes one of her Greville letters, " for nothing will make me so angry, and it is not to your intrest to disoblidge me, for you don't know," she adds with point, " the power I have hear. ... If you affront me, / will make him marry me. God bless you for ever." *

And amid all her tumult of disillusionment, of uncertainty, of bewilderment in the new influence she was visibly wielding over new surroundings, she remained the more mindful of those oldest friends who had believed her good, and enabled her to feel good herself. Sir William, wishful to retain for her the outside comforts of virtue, hastened to gratify her by inviting Romney and Hayley to Naples. The disappointment caused by Romney's inability to comply with a request dear to him - threw her back on herself and made her feel lonelier than ever; her mother was her great consolation.

And what was Greville's attitude? These Emma-letters would have been tumbled into his waste-paper basket with the fourteen others that remain, had he not returned them to Hamilton with the subjoined and private comment:— "L'onbli de I'lnclus est volant, ftxez-le: si on admet le ton de la vertu sans la verite,

1 Morrison MS. 153, August i, 1786. Some of the sentences are quoted in the order of feeling and not of sequence. Emma seldom wrote long letters in a single day.

2 Romney had been very ill. In his answer (August, 1786) he hopes "in a weke or to, to be upon my pins (I cannot well call them legs), as you know at best they are very poor ones."—Cf. Ward and Roberts's Romney, vol. i. p. 67.

on est la dupe, et je place naturellemcnt tout sur Ic pied vrai, comme j'ai toujours fait, et je constate I'etat actuel sans me reporter a vous." One must not be duped by the tone without the truth of virtue! The " self-respect," then, instilled by him, was never designed to raise her straying soul; it was a makeshift contrived to steady her erring steps—a mere bridge between goodness and its opposite, which he would not let her cross; though neither would he let her throw herself over it into the troubled and muddy depths below: it was a bridge built for his own retreat. Grev-ille recked of no " truth " but hard " facts," which he looked unblushingly in the face, nor did his essence, harbour one flash or spark of idealism. And still he purposed her welfare, as he understood it; he had sought to kill three birds with one stone. Hamilton, for all his faults, was never a sophist of such compromise. For Emma he purposed a state of life above its semblance, and a strength beyond its frail supports; already he desired that she would consent to be, in all but name, his wife. Greville, certain of her good nature, had dreaded permanence; Hamilton, if all went smoothly, meant it. Yet Greville exacted friendship without affection. His French postscript was designed to escape Emma's comprehension, though a month or so later it could not have succeeded in doing so. But the letter itself contained some paragraphs which he probably intended her to study:—

"... I shall hope to manage to all our satisfaction, for I so long foresaw that a moment of separation must arrive, that I never kept the connexion, but on the 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. For after all, consider what a charming creature she would have been if she had been blessed with the advantages of an early education, and had not been spoilt by the indulgence of every caprice. I never was irritated by her momentary passions, for it is a good heart which will not part with a friend in anger; and yet it is true that when her pride is hurt by neglect or anxiety for the future, the frequent repition of her passion bal-lances the beauty of the smiles. If a person knew her and could live for life with her, by an economy of attention, that is by constantly renewing very little attentions, she would be happy and good temper'd, for she has not a grain of avarice or self-interest. ... 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. I had proposed to make her accept and manage your kind provision, 1 and she would easily have adopted that plan; it was acting the part of good woman, and to offer to put her regard to any test, and to show that she contributed to MY happiness, by accepting the provision ... it would not have hurt her pride, and would have been a line of heroicks more natural, because it arose out of the real situation, than any which by conversation she might persuade herself suited her to act. Do not understand the word " act" other than I mean it. We all [act] well when we suit our actions to the real situation, and conduct them by truth and good intention. We act capriciously and incon-

1 Sir William offered to settle £100 annually, and Greville a like sum, on her. Romney was to have been a trustee.

veniently to others when our actions are founded on an imaginary plan which does not place the persons involved in the scene in their real situations. ... If Mrs. Wells had quarrell'd with Admiral Keppell, she would nevef have been respected as she now is. ... If she will put me on the footing of a friend . . . she will write to me fairly on her plans, she will tell me her thoughts, and her future shall be my serious concern. . . . She has conduct and discernment, and I have always said that such a woman, if she controul her passions, might rule the roost, and chuse her station."

Thus y£neas-Greville, of Dido-Emma, to his trusty Achates. Surely a self-revealing document of sense and blindness, of truth and falsehood, one, moreover, did space allow, well worth longer excerpts. He excused his action in his own eyes even more elaborately, over and over again. He would conscientiously fulfil his duty to her and hers, if only she would accept his view of her own duty towards him: his tone admitted of few obligations beyond mutual interest. He never reproached either her or himself: he thought himself firm, not cruel; he remained her good friend and well-wisher, her former rescuer, a father to her child. " Heroicks " were out of place and out of taste. He again held up to her proud imitation the prime pattern' of " Mrs. Wells." He was even willing that she should return home, if so she chose; but his terms were irrevocably fixed, and it was useless for her to hystericise against adamant.

But he did not reckon with the latent possibilities of her being. The sequel was to prove not " what Greville," but what " God pleases."