Lady Nelson wished it very much more eagerly herself. She scented danger—danger. She wrote and proposed it in tenderest wifely terms. They had been so long apart. She craved to see him. He answered hurriedly—impossible. She little realized the state of affairs out here, or she could never make such a proposal. The only result was to strengthen her suspicions of Emma and all her works.
The night before he sailed again, recalled by the commander in chief, he told Emma this episode, conscious himself of a half disloyalty in the very telling.
“She could not have come!” he said wistfully. “It was impossible. Yet how natural to wish it. It touched me.”
“No woman who really considered your immense anxieties should wish to hamper you for one instant. Oh, my Nelson, what is the gratification of being together compared to doing your glorious duty? It half breaks my heart to part with my soul’s friend. Yet I bid you go. I urge you. I would not keep you with me if even my life depended on it, for what is life without glory to souls like yours and mine? You have taught me this. I owe it to you, and I won’t fail. I’ll never fail.”
He put his arm about her, so that her head rested quietly on his shoulder.
“Brave Emma! Good Emma! My friend of friends. The only one in the world that understands me. My soul is too great for them. They wound and bruise it because they cannot understand. I should be given a free hand in the Mediterranean to do what I would, and here am I kept in leading strings like a sucking captain. Your Nelson has that in him that should make the world crawl before him, if it could find vent.”
“And it shall—it will!” she whispered. “And I’ll help. They should make you head of the Navy and put up a statue of pure gold to you in London if I had my way. Ignorant fools! They are not worthy of you. Who is?”
“Nor of you, nor of you!” he answered fondly.
Lovers’ bombast, but the worst thing in the world for a man of his temperament and a woman of hers.
They could not do without the atmosphere of adulation that each provided for the other. They both grew more impatient, irritable, tyrannous, to all outside that enchanted ring. The Queen’s rank protected her, but Sir William often had reason to remember Greville’s dicta concerning Emma’s “little spurts of temper,” and Nelson on board his Vanguard was more impatient of the contradictions of events, more captious than his officers had ever known him. It might be that terrible blow on the head at the battle of the Nile, they thought, but certainly it made difficulties. It was unlucky, too, that St. Vincent, who knew him through and through, was already talking of relinquishing the command and returning to England, and of Lord Keith succeeding him; a man of colder, dryer nature; a martinet; the last man, in any case, to understand Nelson’s complexities and give him rein where needful.