Emma goes back to the room of the mirrors, almost collapsed with evaporated excitement. She has strung herself high these days and pays for it now in a kind of nervous exhaustion.
But she and the Queen agree that Captain Nelson is a fit representative of England’s sea honour. They hope if need be that he may be the messenger again, Sir William nodding assent, as he goes quietly back to his vases.
And Nelson writes to his calm sweet wife in the Norfolk parsonage that in her is all his joy, none separated from her. And she, his other self, must hear of the Neapolitan glories. And the astonishing ambassadress is not forgotten.
“Lady Hamilton has been wonderfully good and kind to Josiah. She is a young woman of amiable manners and who does honour to the station to which she is raised.”
He paused as he wrote it, reflecting how little that cool sentence conveyed all the emotions through which she had drawn him. But what matter? They might never meet again.
A true courageous Englishwoman. That was his last thought. But Fanny represented better the passive sweetness of ideal wifehood.
The ship ploughed through moonlit seas, with a faint star or two over sleeping Naples.
CHAPTER XIX
DIPLOMACY
A troublous year, but it brought a new part to Emma. Nelson had carried back to Lord Hood an account of the excellent dispositions of the Ambassadress toward the Fleet; the junior officers were full of her praises also. They had a friend at court in the truest sense of the word, and that grim Fleet, tossing about the Mediterranean in storm and sunshine, harassing the French in their every plan, seldom seeing land save as a danger, had need of many things; the officers were certain now that what she could do in their favour she would.
Nelson, who wrote often and warmly to the Hamiltons, though never nearer to them than Leghorn, had passed the knowledge of her warm heart and indefatigable spirit on to Sir John Jervis, now his commander in chief, and urged him to write to the English Embassy for all he needed for his bluejackets.