Chapter I.—Of the finding of Lord Nelson’s Journal.
I WAS sitting with Will in the morning-room of his mansion of Eastry, which he had with Katherine, when one of his footmen came in to announce that a lady wished to speak to him very particularly. She refused to give her name, but she came on a matter of great importance connected with Lord Nelson, whose confidence Captain Hardres had enjoyed. It was, she told the footman, a very intimate personal matter in connection with his late Lordship.
Now, Will was not ordinarily what is called an approachable person; but she had hit upon the password to which he never could turn a deaf ear, and he directed that she should be shown in.
No sooner had she entered the door, carrying a bundle, which, to the footman’s evident distress, she had refused to trust out of her own hands, than, seeing me, she stopped. But Will said, in cold tones that would have frightened any one not sure of her mission, “This gentleman also had the honour of serving under the Admiral.” To all who had served under that immortal man he was always “the Admiral.”
She looked at us both, and I am vain enough to think that she felt my presence would make what she had come to say easier, rather than more difficult, though Will’s face had softened when he saw that she was a gentlewoman of reduced circumstances.
The bundle she had brought with her, tied up in a piece of faded green silk, contained something hard and square. When she unknotted it and produced three leather-bound volumes of the kind used for journals, and opened one at random, Will might have seen a ghost.
This was in the year 1819, you must remember,—long years after the Admiral had seen his work finished, and had passed away like Moses in sight of the fulfilled promise. And Will, who had been in constant personal attendance nearer and more confidential than a secretary, saw before him, as plainly as his eyes could show him, three volumes of the identical kind always employed by the Admiral for his private affairs, and written, as it seemed to Will, by the Admiral’s very own hand. And Will, though he was not wise in book-learning, nor had given much attention to such matters, had had the very best opportunities for observing the Admiral’s writing. He knew every turn in the clear but shaky characters, written with the left hand by one accustomed till he was more than thirty-five years old to penning with his right. The binding, the paper, and the ink, as well as the handwriting, were the counterparts of what Will had seen so often before the Admiral on his desk.
The old lady did not offer a word of explanation until we had examined them for some minutes, and, looking up, had laid them down, and then she told us a likely story enough.
It came out that she was Mrs. Hunter, and the good soul who had taken my Lady Hamilton, then like to die, and in great destitution, into her house at Boulogne, and had sheltered her and maintained and nursed her free of charge until her death.
“These three volumes,” she said, “were her Ladyship’s last and greatest treasure, which she never would have far away from her, and which, when she was alone, she read to her great comfort.”