The Queen motioned with dry lips to Emma.
“Nelson has destroyed the French Fleet at Aboukir. Thanks be to God Almighty. Their day is done.”
The Queen broke down into wild sobbing, her ladies clustering about her. The King, with a false joy illuminating his face, sprang forward and clasped the hands of Hoste and Capel.
“And the Admiral? Is he well—the dear and great man?”
The whole room seemed to dissolve into a mere clamour of congratulation, question and answer. The Queen clasped Emma about the shoulders and kissed her cheek passionately, and Emma, radiant, laughing, rejoicing, cried aloud her English “Hip, hip, hurra!” and every soul present joined in it as best they might.
“Take me back,” she gasped to Sir William, at length, “that I may write to our immortal Nelson.”
How she wrote the world knows. It was her victory as well as his. He owned it, the Fleet owned it. What should she write, what words could ever hold her swelling pride and triumph? Even yet, a century and more away, they pulse and throb with a burning life-blood.
He had written to her too in that great hour. She held his letter in her hand.
“Emma, for God’s sake, rest,” Sir William entreated when they got home. How could she? She brushed him aside, and got her pen and wrote with a hand that stumbled at her racing thoughts. She could not. She was forced to lay it aside a day or two, by mere physical weakness.
“September 8th, 1798.