That very day his possessions were moved on shore. The grass never grew under Emma’s feet when she was determined, nor under his either, for that matter, and lapped in the security of their compact it never occurred to Nelson how the Nisbet scene would rise before the minds of his officers who knew the facts, and of many more.
It certainly occurred to Emma, but she had her securities and feared nothing. Ignorant of any public opinion but the Neapolitan, which took such arrangements as a matter of course, and confident in the Queen’s support, it never occurred to her that Royal approval might not carry the same face value all over the world as it did in Naples and Palermo. Her Queen was daughter to the greatest empress of history, Maria Theresa; her Queen’s daughter was herself Empress of Austria—no statelier lineage in all the world. What woman would not be safe who could call herself the adored friend of such a sovereign? What was a mere Queen Charlotte of England, a petty Mecklenburgher princess by birth, compared to Marie Caroline of Hapsburg? She was to learn the answer to that question very painfully later on.
In connection with it, she forgot also that there were several English ladies in Palermo, great ladies, still swayed by English public opinion, and inclined to look down upon a fugitive queen and her dissolute court, with very different feelings from the reverence with which Emma looked up to the throne. For the first time she was about to pass under the sharp criticism of women.
It was her own fault. Had she been content to remain in the shade all might have been well, but with Nelson living in her house, the Fleet at her command, the officers perpetually coming and going in her hospitalities, and Josiah Nisbet giving his verdict more cautiously but still in no uncertain terms, it was very unlikely that either the compact or the Queen would bear Emma scatheless through the scandals that arose.
And yet again it was her own fault. Where she had been modest, gentle, retiring, now that prosperity and fame had come upon her, she thrust herself forward. She vaunted Nelson’s glories and her own and made them inseparable. She sounded the loud timbrel like Miriam after the passage of the Red Sea, and it was “I” and “he” perpetually. Her songs, chiefly composed by Miss Cornelia Knight and herself, proclaimed his triumphs in clearest soprano for all the world to hear, and Nelson would sit by, his pale face fixed on her in quiet ecstasy, absorbing it all with a kind of quaint innocence which those who understood him, like his faithful Troubridge, pitied, and those who did not, ridiculed.
A pathetic, almost a horrible sight, if she could have been made to see it, but, as Greville had said long ago, Emma had so much taste and all of it so bad, that it was simply impossible to hold her in check unless one mastered the beautiful foolish creature with bit and bridle, and of that art Nelson knew nothing. He believed in her utterly and adored at the feet of his Santa Emma.
Meanwhile the fame of the escape carried her name over all Europe, conjoined with his. Indeed, it deserved renown. Energetic, courageous, she was a shining figure for the popular admiration and certainly the story lost nothing in her telling, or Nelson’s or Sir William’s.
Congratulations rained in upon them all, from the highest sources. Europe was tired of the massacre of kings and princes, and Emma Hamilton’s courageous action was set off by the dark shadows of failure in France and elsewhere. She sunned herself like a tropically splendid blossom palpitating in the ardent sun, and daily her opinion of her own perfections strengthened, fed by the Queen’s adulation and gratitude.
Yet all was not peace in the house of the Hamiltons. The strain had told upon Sir William. His talk almost night and day was of his precious treasures of vase and sculpture lost in Naples and in the wreck of the Colossus. His day was virtually done. He told Emma certain home truths which drove her still more ardently into the arms of her worshipper.
“Emma, I am very uneasy at the expense we incur daily. I would have you understand, my love, that it is beyond my means. Ready money is now my need, and the vases I would have sold in England, and on which I counted for a price to set me straight with the world again are lost in the Colossus. O God, for the peaceful days before this abominable war set all Europe by the ears! There are times when I would I were done with it all and forever.”