The die was cast. He had chosen with Faust: “Evil be thou my good.” God and Emma was his heart’s cry, against Fanny and the man-made laws that love mocks at. But here again he salved his conscience. Fanny should have all but love, every respect, every honour due from man to wife should be hers. All but the one thing she craved. Yet Nelson might have been moved had he seen the tears falling like rain over that letter. Even Emma might have pitied.
His other letters afforded him small comfort also. Troubridge, his honest true-hearted friend, his right-hand captain, had also gathered up his courage to write.
“Pardon me, my Lord. It is my sincere esteem for you that makes me mention it. I know you can have no pleasure sitting up all night at cards; why, then, sacrifice your health, comfort, purse, ease, everything, to the customs of a country where your stay cannot be long? Your Lordship is a stranger to half that happens, or the talk it occasions; if you knew what your friends feel for you, I am sure you would cut all the nocturnal parties. The gambling of the people of Palermo is openly talked of everywhere. I beseech your Lordship leave off. I wish my pen could tell you my feelings. Lady H—’s character will suffer, nothing can prevent people from talking. A gambling woman in the eye of an Englishman is lost. You will be surprised when I tell you I hear in all companies the sums won and lost on a card in Sir William’s house. It furnishes matter for a letter constantly both to Minorca, Naples, Messina, etc., and finally England. I trust your Lordship will pardon me; it is the sincere esteem I have for you that makes me risk your displeasure.”
But Nelson could not pardon in the cold searching dawn after that enchanted night. Something sickened and revolted within him—that others should watch, should guess. He flung it furiously down and would not answer it. His feeling to Troubridge was never the same again.
The Admiralty in London also was growing uneasily suspicious. They much misliked his journey in the Foudroyant with the Hamiltons to Naples to punish the Neapolitan King’s rebels and pave the way for setting him on his throne again. They could not be made to sympathize with Nelson’s execution of Caracciolo, the traitor Neapolitan Admiral; with Emma, the Queen’s emissary, in the background suspiciously all the time. They could not be made to comprehend that it was a British Admiral’s business to punish a foreign king’s traitors for him. They could not be made to comprehend the advantages of a beautiful ambassadress’s presence on board a British man-of-war in war-time, more especially as the scandal concerning her grew in volume daily.
Nor could the unsympathetic Admiralty be made to comprehend why in such stirring times it was necessary that Nelson should linger at Palermo. And furthermore, the Foreign Office began to bestir itself and ominous rumblings were heard. Their Ambassador appeared to be devoting himself far more to Neapolitan interests than to British. If Sir William Hamilton had grown so old that he was in the hands of his wife—and such a wife!—it was certainly time that inquiry should be made in that little paradise of Palermo.
Nelson sank lower and lower into depression of mind and body. The joyous wellspring of energy was dried up in him. He was ill—ill at ease. He drew up a codicil to his will that should tell all the world, if he fell, how he idealized this woman who was the world’s butt.
“I give and bequeath to my dear friend Emma Hamilton, wife of the Right Hon. Sir William Hamilton, a nearly round box set with diamonds said to have been sent me by the mother of the Grand Signior, which I request she will accept and never part from as a token of regard and respect for her very eminent virtues (for she, the said Emma Hamilton, possesses them all to such a degree that it would be doing her injustice was any particular one to be mentioned) from her faithful and affectionate friend.”
No, he would not be ashamed. He would glory in their love. And she fed every flame with the oil of her own passionate nature. He detested the French, therefore she must loathe them more. He saw her kiss a Turkish sword encrusted with valiant French blood, and did not rebuke her. She urged him on in what she believed to be the cause of God and her Queen, in that vindictive hatred of the enemy which, with herself, is the only accusation that malice itself dare hurl against Nelson.
Greville’s cold insight would have understood what Nelson’s could not; that, unrestrained, flattered, adored, the baser elements of her character were coming inevitably into play and that she would most certainly injure not only herself but all who trusted her unless rudely and violently checked as he had checked her often. But then Greville knew her past utterly; Nelson only what she chose to tell him and with her own extenuations. Greville knew the plebeian ignorance which underlay all her experience. He would have used her but never trusted her: Nelson trusted her and was used by her, blinded by the kind heart, the gallant courage, which never failed her at the worst. Greville had made her. Nelson was to unmake her and reduce her to her original elements again—the wild uneducated hoyden of Up Park, with a difference. She was like a vine, trained, pruned, fruit-bearing, in Greville’s prudent hands. She was the same plant, untrained, untended in Nelson’s, bearing bitter, unripened, wild grapes only.