At last, Lady Nelson, trembling, miserable, noting the change and briefness of his letters, unbelieving his excuse of weariness and want of time—for when had he ever failed her before?—summoned up courage to write once more with the definite proposal that she should join him in Palermo. Every day reports reached her affecting his honour, and blaming herself bitterly for long-delayed action she wrote, tenderly as a wife should write and made her proposition. For when husband and wife are apart time and distance and all the dividing influences of humanity creep in between them, and the stream, narrow at first, widens into a river and then into the boundless sea. The sweet, intoxicating spring had come in Palermo when that letter reached him and rudely recalled him to the realities of life. His coxswain brought it with a bundle of correspondence less interesting, and when he saw the well-known writing which had once been such a joy in lonely sea-watchings, his heart beat with a cruel quickness—as it had done ever since the long chase to Aboukir.
“Fanny!” he thought, and then, with a quick pang, half anger, half fear. “What does she want?”
He read it, half lying on a long chair in the Sicilian moonlight, by the light of many wax candles which streamed from the gaily lit windows of the house. Inside were green cloth card tables and about them a rabble of officers and the splendidly dressed bare-necked light women of the Neapolitan Court, women whose histories he knew very well from the not too squeamish lip of Emma. Beautiful, but none so beautiful as the queen-rose who sat facing him, with a heap of gold before her and her brilliant loveliness lit by the soft splendour of the wax lights. She wore a dress of cloth of gold falling in supple splendour about her imperial figure and diamonds in her hair and about her neck—the diamonds the lavish queen had heaped upon her to the tune of £30,000; so gossip said, and Nelson knew. She was not looking at him, nor thinking of him at the moment. Her bright eyes were shining with eagerness; she was laughing, talking loudly with the people about her as she plunged her hand into the heap of gold and pushed her stake forward.
His gold! Well, thank God he had it to give her—who could wish to restrict her little harmless excitements; she who could give herself so generously when any great cause called upon her!
He read Fanny’s letter again. Fanny in that scene of riot and laughter! Fanny, fresh from the quiet of Round Wood and her English simplicities. Fanny in her silk gown, and the lace folded across her breast, and the serene candour of her dark eyes. Impossible. Did she recur to him tenderly? Ah, no—as something far, far away, known and loved in another life, another and very different experience; a wandering ghost in this; alien, unwelcome.
He folded the letter and put it in his pocket and watched the scene through the window with absent eyes, almost feeling himself a ghost, as a man does who watches from the night the glow within that takes no heed of him.
How beautiful she was! How beautiful! So she would look if he were dead, the waves tossing over his bones, the sea-wind singing its lonely dirge. No—dear heart!—he did her an injustice, for all her heart was his—his only. He looked where Sir William sat in a corner, half asleep in his chair, the discontented lines stressed about his mouth, and a pang of pity cramped him. Old Mrs. Cadogan had gone off to bed long, long ago. It was near three in the morning. Presently she rose, in her long gold gown, girdled about the bosom in the fashion of the day.
“I’ve lost. I can’t lose any more. That makes five hundred pounds. You go on if you will. Where’s his Lordship? I shall go look for him.” She pushed her chair aside and the others closed up as eager as ever, and she came out through the long hall, in her satin shoes, and so along the warm dry grass to where he sat under the orange boughs.
Oh, the scent, the scent of the gardens, mingled with the scent of her hair. People must close their windows later in the year lest they die swooning from the overpowering fragrance of blossoms, and that night in the moonlight it was sweet as Eden and sweeter. He himself was a little dazed by it—he remembered that later.
A dead silence outside. It was like looking upon a wild picture of half-drunken riot to see the sight within—the hot eager faces, the bare-bosomed women clutching at the gold.