If it be permissible to say of a lady of birth that she slightly sniffed, it may be said of Mrs. St. George. Her disgust was almost visible. She certainly has left it on record.
Yet one may pity the poor woman who had all at stake. Sir William was not in the position of the ordinary husband. He knew her past, and if he should know her present what had she to expect? And Greville, the cool, sardonic Greville, was waiting their arrival in England, and certainly it could not be his interest that all should be confidence and security between her and his uncle.
When she was alone with Nelson, she dwelt on that. It haunted her.
“My own, own Nelson, I wish, I often wish, we had all never resolved to return to England,” she said one day in the hotel at Hamburg, with the English problems looming nearer and nearer. “We were safer there. ’Tis impossible I should say how I dread Greville. I have been honest with you, honest as the day, and you know ’tis his interest to make mischief between me and Sir William. And if he suspects—”
She looked up at him with trembling lips. She had been honest up to a certain point, but not entirely. There had been no mention of “the little Emma.” Nelson’s rapture of fatherhood, his belief that this marvellous experience to be was as new to her as to him, had shut her lips there, and unspeakably she dreaded Greville on that score also. She had always feared him even when she loved him. She feared him doubly now.
“My own dear angel, you shall not, must not fear,” said Nelson tenderly. “Our blessed happy secret shall be our secret always. Yet supposing the very worst—supposing Sir William divorced you—if I found you alone and deserted under a hedge it would be my pride to marry you. You should be my own Duchess of Bronte, and a fig for them all!”
“Your wife?” she reminded him, her head lying wearily back on her chair. But it was not that which made a divorce seem to her the most impossible of things. It was the terrible fear of her own past and Greville’s intimate knowledge of it. He would be a witness. She could hear his cold voice with its perfect enunciation disclosing secret after secret she trembled to think of now. There were things which in spite of Nelson’s infatuation might well give pause to his judgment. She dared not even consider such a possibility.
“Would I ruin you in the eyes of the world, my hero? Not for the sake of all the agony your poor Emma must suffer. No—I will fight it through as I have fought through many a difficulty. With your love to help me, I don’t fear. If that failed me—”
She made an expressive pause, her beautiful mouth quivering. He knelt and put his arm about her, resting his head on her bosom.
“The sun can as soon fall from the sky. Every day you are more and more to me. I glory in it. I thank God for it. My wife wrote to me desiring to meet me on landing, and I wrote to her that I judged it would be best to meet in London. I did this, for your sake, my own heart’s beloved, for I thought it would be easier for you to meet her there in some way yourself can choose. But rest assured that in that matter, as in all else, your own dear Nelson lives but to do your will. You are the best, noblest, most beautiful woman in all the world. You have no equal—you never have had—and all shall be as you will.”