“Did we look like that?” she said in a kind of astonishment. “It’s better out here. It was hot, hot, in there. I wanted to come out and get cool. It smelt of wine. This smells of flowers. Nelson—how pale you are! What is it? Come out of this glare!”
She gave him her hand, and drew him up, and they wandered from the lurid patch of light flung by the windows out under the cool green boughs, moonlight-silvered, with gulfs of dark and light beneath them along the garden paths, and the first faint rustle of a bird disturbed in the boughs by their passage. Quiet, cool quiet and a great peace, and sweetness like the breath of a goddess about them in dark night. Before very long it would be dawn and the wan edge of light surrender the secret of Mongibello, dreaming in the warm darkness.
“You’re disturbed and I know it,” she said very softly at last. “There’s nothing passes in your mind but I read it like a book. What is it? A letter from Keith?”
“No, not Keith. At least I have only read one letter. It’s from her, Emma.”
“Her?” He could hear the quick-taken breath, the apprehension in her voice. Surely that should have revealed their own danger to them. There was no longer talk of the feminine tria juncta in uno—three joined in one—where Lady Nelson was concerned. Emma had grown to hate her very name. She was a malignant presence lurking in the dark ready to strike. And who was she after all? There was nothing in Emma’s past to imbue her with any respect for a mere church ceremony, except in her own case and Sir William’s, which naturally did not affect any other.
“What does she want?” she asked at length, as a low hanging bough shook a little spray of scented dew into her fair bosom. Nelson gathered the offending blossom and laid it there all fresh and cool, against the glowing warmth.
“She wants to join me here or at Naples.”
“Do you want her?” The voice was cold and distant—with suppressed pain, he thought.
“You know,” he said, and that was all. She turned upon him passionately in the scented dark.
“Nelson, if she came I should die—I should die. She would never understand. How could she? She would come between us. You would never love me any more.”