“And London will beat it!” she said, triumphant, as they entered the coach for the journey. “We are safe, safe in England. It will be Naples, Palermo, only more, because it’s our own dear country.”
But Nelson was silent. His fears were greater than his hopes. Yet Emma was always right and surely her charms would conquer England as they had done Italy. On her he relied. But that welcome was unfortunate for it made her more self-confident, less inclined to be conciliatory than ever before. She was certain they could have it all their own way.
CHAPTER XXV
FANNY
It was a still Sunday afternoon with a November mist clinging like a cold breath to London, daylight still but the lights showing little starry points in the streets below when Fanny and his old father waited for Nelson at Nerot’s Hotel in St. James’s.
She was a young woman of thirty-six, “not beautiful but eminently pleasing,” as a friend described her, with clear hazel eyes matching abundant hair arranged low over her forehead, almost hiding the brown, finely-marked eyebrows. The charm of her face was the mouth, set in with the pressure of a hinted dimple at each corner and very ready to break into a smile to match the latent smile in her eyes. Her figure was slight and well-formed, under a plain dress of brown satin a little staid in its design for her years, especially with the broad falling collar of Maltese lace and sleeves to match, which Nelson had sent her from the Mediterranean, and which certainly would be more suitable ten years hence. The sleeves half hid really beautiful little hands with a quick nervous gesture about them when she was eager, which the Nelson daughters considered foreign and affected.
But Frances Nelson cared very little about things of that order. She had never gone much into society, was rather alarmed than otherwise by the daring, low-bosomed fashions of the day, imported from the license of France, and was better pleased to escape notice than to attract it. Besides, except for Nelson’s visits to England, her life had been mostly passed in the village of Burnham Thorpe, as the companion of Nelson’s old father: a dull life for a young woman, and one which his daughters, Mrs. Matcham and Mrs. Bolton, were very well pleased to commit to the daughter-in-law.
She really had very little in common with the Nelsons. She had been married extremely young to her first husband, Dr. Nisbet, and was left a widow next year with a child—Josiah. But her life in the Leeward Islands and her few travels with Nelson had given her at least a glimpse of the world outside England, and she was apt to think the family narrow and ignorant. She thought them also excitable and exaggerated in their emotions, which was true enough in its way, and they returned the compliment by styling her cold, reserved, uninteresting. They could not imagine what Horatio had seen in a widow, who had only £4000 “to her fortune” when all was said and done.
Still, it was owned that Fanny was sensible and useful. She had not the sensibility they could admire, was not liable like themselves to interesting heart spasms on the slightest excitement, took things quietly and composedly, and might even be suspected of airs of superiority to those who had sensitive feelings and displayed them. Yet their father would have been a problem without her and certainly none of the sons or their wives coveted his company. Perhaps it was on the whole better she was so staid and quiet. A livelier young woman might have been urgent for more amusement, and old Mr. Nelson was attached to her.
She was certainly reserved. It was extraordinarily difficult for her to express what she felt, and in that respect she was a contrast indeed to her husband, whose emotions, like his family’s, were always more or less in the extreme. For the rest, she seemed to have little initiative, agreed with his opinions gently, and was compliant almost to a fault. His father was exceedingly fond of her and thought her the ideal wife for Horatio, who had agreed in that opinion formerly. In short, a woman of whom it would be difficult to predict her action in really disturbing circumstances.
It was characteristic of her reserve that while all the family were whispering together with clustered heads of the stories which had come in from Naples and Palermo she never uttered a word on the subject. Mrs. Bolton, Mrs. Matcham, both sailed as near the wind as they dared when they visited their father, but Fanny was silent. Not meaningly and bodingly silent, but calmly. It was as if she had heard nothing. For the life of them the two bustling women could not make her out, and went away, discussing the “hussy” at Naples, and lamenting Fanny’s stupidity, who, if she had written “strongly” to Horatio would only have been doing her duty as a wife and might have made some impression. In reality, the quiet woman whose hazel eyes were so reticent had heard more than any of them and lived in an agony of fear and jealous pain. A Nelson would have stormed about the room, stormed in speech and on paper and decreased the pressure somehow by this kind of exhalation. She could not. She endured. She made little tentatives, small hints, in her letters to him which she prayed he might take advantage of for explanation and, when he never did, was helpless and could say no more. She crimsoned even when alone at the mere thought of upbraiding her husband with any liking for another woman.