“Mr. Romney—oh, Mr. Romney, I’ve come back to you. Are you glad? I’m so glad I don’t know what to do. Look up, or I’ll run away again!”
He felt the loving living arms about him. In no dream had he heard her voice—that voice of heart’s music—no dream had kissed his cheek with rose-warm lips.
“Emma? Emma?”—he said at last, in a thick muffled voice that made its way through a long-heaped silence; and then the life she brought with her flowed quicker through his blood and woke him to her sunshine.
“Is it true?” he asked at last, and she, her heart almost overflowing at her eyes, assured him it was Emma—“the same, same Emma that can never change to you. No, not if she lives to be a hundred.”
She calmed him after that. She had two hours—two whole golden hours! And see! They would have their meal together, just the same as in the old dear days. Was there a loaf in the cupboard; and eggs?
No, not one. Then what did he mean? Was he going to starve? No, wait, wait! She had her plan.
She caught up her old basket in a dusty corner, itself all dusty and cobwebbed, but still preserved, and down the stair with her, and off to the nearest shop she could find; and that was near for she had not forgotten a step of the way. And presently she returned, with her little parcels, to find him at the front door staring bewildered lest she should be flown off to Naples like a witch on a broomstick; and so up the stairs, and to the little stove where he had his lonely kettle a-boil and all his rusty, dusty materials for tea; and tucked up her sleeves and made her buttered toast and fried her sausages and sat him down to eat with her while she ate also with her hearty young appetite and talked with a full mouth and a fuller heart of the Neapolitan triumphs.
That was Emma at her best and loveliest. It is arguable, nor can I refute it, that let who will possess her, Romney had the most of her after all. He drew some divine essence from her that the others could not—no, not even Nelson, though he came nearest. He saw the soul in her freed from all contradictions and flaws—pure essence, spiritual beauty. And whether he was wrong or immortally right, God only knows, who made her so beautiful.
So he listened, elbows propped on the table, and greedy eyes devouring every play of light and dark across her face—worshipping once more at the altar of the Divine Lady.
But now she must come near the central truth of her strange, eventful history—her marriage. And that would wing a dart, she knew full well, for what have poor painters to do with ambassadresses rising in apotheosis into rosy clouds of flattery and grandeur?