She clasped his hand, and he saw her face white and beautiful in the tossing light of a lantern. Then she sped away to her duties, and he to his. But together they had done it—a world’s wonder.
CHAPTER XXIII
CIRCE
There comes a moment in the fully unfolded maturity of beauty when any change must be for the worse. There is a portrait of Emma about the time of the flight to Palermo which exemplifies this in perfection. It was found in the Palazzo Sessa and represents her seated in a large chair, hands clasped, one of her husband’s treasured vases on a table behind her. The beautiful hair is massed and falls in softest tendrils to her brows, there is no smile on the lips and the eyes are half-closed as though she were lost in a voluptuous dream—a dream of full summer with the languor of autumn in the air. One sees very clearly in viewing the lovely face why Greville called her his modern-antique and Sir William his Grecian, for there is something of the imperial air which reflects no soul in its beauty. So a Roman lady might sit, indolently watching the sufferings of the amphitheatre, basking in the beams of her own beauty.
This picture may be typical of much that followed the strain and stress of the flight to Palermo. It was a time of experiences which would have broken down any but Emma’s happy peasant robustness of health and muscular strength. Such weather fell on the Vanguard as even Nelson declared he had never before beheld at sea—a furious and awful gale. Of the refugees, every one was ill, and helpless—the Queen in complete prostration, Royal children, attendants, all alike in miseries of fear and illness. They had no beds, but what Emma’s forethought had provided. But let her describe the scene herself to the astounded Greville, for none can do it better.
“We arrived on Christmas Day at night, after having been near lost, a tempest that Lord Nelson had never seen for thirty years he has been at sea, the like; all our sails torn to pieces, and all the men ready with their axes to cut away the masts. And poor I to attend and keep up the spirits of the Queen, the Princess Royal, three young princesses, a baby six weeks’ old, and two young princes, Leopold and Albert; the last, six years old, my favourite, taken with convulsion in the midst of the storm and at seven in the evening of Christmas Day expired in my arms, not a soul to help me, as the few women Her Majesty brought on board were incapable to helping her or the poor Royal children, all their attendants being so frightened and on their knees praying. The King says my mother is an angel. I have been for twelve nights now without closing my eyes. We have left everything at Naples but the vases and best pictures, three houses elegantly furnished, all our horses and our six or seven carriages, I think is enough for the vile French, for we could not get our things off not to betray the Royal family. Nothing can equal the manner we have been received here [Palermo] but dear, dear Naples we cannot show our love of, for this country is jellous of the other. Sir William and the King are philosophers; nothing affects them, thank God, and we are scolded even for showing proper sensibility. God bless you, my dear sir. Excuse this scrawl.”
No doubt Greville hastened to the clubs with his exclusive information for, for many reasons, the world was agog to hear the news from Naples.
It adds a touch of humour to the above that the first of the philosophers was found by Emma during the dreadful voyage shut up in his cabin and calmly holding a loaded pistol in each hand. “Good God!” said she. “What are you doing, Sir William!”
“I am resolved, my dear, not to die with the guggle-guggle-guggle of salt water in my throat, and therefore directly I feel the ship sinking I am prepared to shoot myself,” was Sir William’s serene reply.
One may picture the astonished Emma’s countenance as she hurried off on her thousand errands.
Palermo shone like the Heavenly Land after all these tragic excitements, and the calm within the shelter of Monte Pellegrino promised in the happy promontory the rest so sorely needed after the desperate voyage across the Tyrrhenian sea. Shaded in its orange groves, with a winter so mild that year that less happy lands might well call it summer, it received the fugitives with a dreamy enervating warmth. In the garden of the house engaged for the Hamiltons was a tangle of flowers wild and cultivated such as even Naples could scarcely equal. Beds of wild mint to yield its aromatic scent when trodden, the rosy wild gladiolus, thyme and asphodel, were everywhere in glorious luxuriance, and by the tiny stream that rippled down to the Fountain of the Sea Nymph, as they called it, the wild oleanders waited with the wild anemones to give their bloom in season. There was an oriental lavishness in the air and the sub-tropical vegetation which corresponded with the Arabic form of the name “Balarmuh” or Palermo. Emma, eager for change, delighted in the strange new scene presented by the town and the lovely Conca d’Oro—the plain of the Golden Shell, with its magnificent fertility. Her mercurial spirits flew up as she stood by the gate with Nelson to watch the Palermitan hawkers with their strange merchandise and bright dark eyes fixed on the lovely Excellenza and the famous English Admiral. The water-seller with his painted table and syrups stopped to look at her; the sponge-seller, all draped in bobbing sponges, lurked near for an order. But the two were engrossed with their own affairs, and the charm of Sicily, except its flowers and balmy air, passed them by.