Sir William, good easy man, needing rest, was glad enough that his restless Emma felt the need of it also, and gladly applied for leave, but was startled indeed to find when it was courteously granted that the Foreign Office had decided he should not return and had swiftly appointed his successor, one who would not be so malleable to the blandishments of the Neapolitan Queen. The world was wearied of the Palermitan celebrations, orgies, and mutual-admiration societies and a sterner régime was to be inaugurated.
The indignant Keith would not even grant a battleship to convey the party, accompanied by Her Majesty of the Two Sicilies, to England. The play was played out. Lady Hamilton had had command of the Fleet long enough, said Keith with dry sarcasm. She must be contented with the Foudroyant to take her as far as Leghorn. The rest of the journey to England must be done by land. Her reign was over.
So ended the Neapolitan chapter of Emma’s life and she must needs put it behind her and continue her journey home with a secret in her bosom not long to be hidden, and the meeting with Lady Nelson ahead like a fear made visible. She had reached her zenith in Naples. In Palermo the sun had begun to slope westward and the shadows to lengthen.
As for Nelson, he left it loaded with favours from the Neapolitan King, Duke of Bronte in Sicily, but sore, sore at heart.
CHAPTER XXIV
DESCENT
That journey home, in spite of all the splendours which his own and Emma’s renown and the Queen’s company occasioned, was a nightmare to Nelson. He was utterly besotted on her; he could neither escape from her enchantments nor will to, but as yet his conscience was not wholly silenced, nor the orientation of a lifetime completely changed. The process of deterioration, which could never touch either his genius or his patriotism, had begun in other and subtler nerves of his character but the disease had not as yet sufficiently spread to numb his recognition of what was due to his wife, and she had become an agony to him. How to meet her, what to hope, he could not tell. He who had been able some years before to say, fearless of contradiction, “There is not one action in my life but what is honourable”, could say it no longer. Glory must cover the loss of honour; a tinsel covering to a man’s own inner judgment. Others might make excuses, but he knew very well that when evil and good lay before him he had chosen evilly and must pay the price of that choice. Not indeed in losses that the world could appraise, but in things sacred, secret, on which he must be dumb for ever. What he could not know was that slowly but steadily his perception of what was noble and generous would dim and fail under this creeping paralysis of the soul and that the day was near when he was to treat his wife with such a cruelty as would have filled him with indignant shame if he had heard of it in any other case than his own.
Slowly and steadily the toils strengthened about him. From the day that Emma, pale and weeping, told him the secret that must ruin them both with their home ties and with the world if it could not be hidden, he surrendered all hope of retreat for either of them, and clung to her as one lost soul may cling to another in hell.
That mood passed, and he defied his own convictions. Love was not hell—it was Heaven. It was of God, and here was the proof. His wife had never given him a child. His home was barren of that visible blessing of Heaven. This woman whom he loved, was, in sorrow, fear and secrecy, to fill that cruel emptiness with the sound of a child’s voice, the light of its eyes. What did he not owe her for the agony endured for his sake, and what is a child but God’s blessing visible to man? Surely to such a passion as his it was the sign of approval, the recognition of a marriage sacred beyond all the laws of man. Such love made its own laws, and Heaven recognized them if man ignored them.
It was not that he ever sat down to analyze his problems. That was not Nelson’s way. He saw them in flashes of insight and took them as revelations, and shaped his life and his words in accordance with them. It followed from these that Emma should be perfect to be worthy of the Divine approval on their union. Therefore she was perfect. That his own services to his country were so great that they lifted him above the common judgments of right and wrong. Therefore he might safely despise them. Yet he was miserable—miserable.
But as he grew more and more confident of his own deserts he deteriorated, exactly in the same measure as Emma under the same strain, only he had more to lose and farther to fall than she. He became vainer, more boastful, impatient of anything that could be construed as less than fulsome admiration, suspicious of his old comrades. The word glory was sweeter to him than the word honour. It is significant of much that when he quotes Shakespeare’s noble lines that if it be a sin to covet honour “I am the most offending soul alive,” he substitutes the word glory for Shakespeare’s “honour,” apparently unconsciously. Yet glory is the world’s voice, and honour the man’s own secret and inestimable riches in the sight of the Eternal.