“Madam,” he said with solemnity, “you have saved your country. God send the Fleet may be worthy of your courage and wisdom.”
She sank into the chair behind her and covered her face with her hands, while he went to the door and gave the order to make sail instantly.
CHAPTER XX
THE NILE
As Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson sailed for Syracuse, many thoughts kept him company in striding up and down his quarterdeck. He loved his wife with a calm affection which recognized to the full her tender claim upon him, her duty, devotion and wifely submission. To him, his Fanny appeared the ideal wife. One classified women only as good and bad. The first were those who were obedient to all household duties and created the soft and infinitely restful home atmosphere to which a wearied man returned from his labours for rest and refreshment infinitely soothing after the harsh contact with men and affairs. Here one could unburden one’s soul of likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, and be certain of a kind inevitable echo to all. What he thought, his Fanny would think. Her small pleasures and angers would follow his as certainly as little pet dogs running at his heels. She had never stood in the way of any of his duties though undoubtedly she felt the long separations. She wept a few gentle tears on parting and applied herself wholly to the care of the person he loved best in the world next to herself, his old father. Those two represented home to him and often in the mirages of the tossing spray he beheld that little room in the Norfolk parsonage, and his father’s big winged chair drawn up beside the fire, and Fanny reading the last long letter to him in her mild monotone, and the serene pride of the two in his achievements. Poor little Fanny, she had had many anxieties with her husband and son in the same danger, and yet never said a word to hinder him—no, not one. Stop!—when he had got his flag and the Cross of the Bath after the glorious battle of St. Vincent she had tenderly implored him henceforward to leave boarding to captains. Dear little Fanny!—he smiled over that bit of pride in the new Admiral’s lady: knew too how much it summed up of past suffering in the glorious escapades (for so common sense must class them) of Teneriffe and St. Vincent. He had had the glory; she the suffering.
Pious, too, after his own manner of decent Church of England piety: God and the King!—the King not so very far behind. There too he could open his inmost heart to her and be sure of her prayers commingled with his own. Naturally there were professional matters one could not tell even the most valuable wife. Not for women the anxieties and responsibilities of such a career as his. Their timidity could not support it. In that department a woman had neither help nor counsel to offer—nothing but her prayers, and her joy when all was safely accomplished. But that was much—much! It filled his soul with calm security and gratitude. For there were the bad women. He knew very well the type of captain’s wife who spent his hard-won prize money on her own flaunting vanity, and coquetted with other men while he upheld the honour of England on distant seas. No, thank God, his Fanny was none of those tawdry jilts. She was a true good woman—“All that is valuable in a wife”—so he assured her and others.
Yet nothing can be perfect. The other captains, when they went home rejoicing on leave, were surrounded by flocks of apple-cheeked youngsters, something to fight for, to leave your honours to when a hammock with round shot at head and heels was the last bed for a sailor. But he did not trouble her with that want though it was a dull empty ache when he looked at his medals, just because he knew how deeply it rankled in her own heart. There was Josiah, and to him she was a devoted mother, but Josiah meant little enough to the Admiral though he did his best for him afloat and ashore, and she felt it—she felt it, poor girl!
No casual mistress, but a wife was Fanny. It would have seemed almost indecent, even had it been possible, to surround her with worship and homage, and draw a passionate inspiration from her kind frank countenance. She could never understand romance. And yet Nelson was not without his starry lady whose glove he wore on his helmet, whose beauty he protested with sword and word in all companies, for whose least favour he would have died a thousand deaths. Such a man must kneel on his heart’s knees to some fair figure who shall crown him as he crowns her his Inspiration and All. And his was Glory, summed up in the name of England. So ride the knights of the Holy Ghost, the men whose eyes dazzle on a beauty unseen, yet most intimately known to them, each perceiving for himself that figure flitting ever on before with white feet that touch not the earth pollute, and hands that beckon to the goal that cannot be uttered: whose they are to serve eternally.
And now in his very worship came the turning point of Nelson’s life, for woe be to the man who attempts to embrace her not by raising of the womanhood into God, but sinking of the Godhead into woman.
His physical and spiritual nerves were shocked, as it were, into profound amaze by the wonder of this woman, this Emma. For, where his Fanny stood earthbound she soared glorious. Fanny had never hindered him, but this one helped him as no other had ever done. Wordless, she understood. What mattered her beauty? Had she been the sorriest wench that ever smutted her face in a kitchen, and yet had done what she did, he could have worshipped at her feet—as a true acolyte of his goddess Glory. She knew. With his own fierce energy, she flung herself into the fight: she won the troops for Toulon, the chance of victory for his fleet. That white soft hand had dealt out ruin to Napoleon, and he, Nelson himself, was but her sword.
Exaggerated? No doubt, but men of his type exaggerate gloriously, and in that is their strength. As he sailed down the Mediterranean to Syracuse, armed with her order, far beyond reach of the foolish King’s forbidding, her face fled before him encircled with rays that mingled her with England and made them one. He had not a sexual thought concerning her. So much a part of his inward aspiration had she become that sometimes he almost doubted her real, but rather a part of the dreams of moonlight nights and long calms on swaying seas.