“Take care what you say. I love you sincerely, but I cannot forget my obligations to Lady Hamilton or speak of her otherwise than with affection and admiration.”
There was a dead pause, the guest staring in embarrassment at the tablecloth, afraid to look at either.
The poor woman who had reason enough to estimate that love at its true value, tried to speak and could not—her mind was made up, and that was all. She tried to utter it and failed. She crept from the room and left the house, hoping against hope, praying that the terrible break would stir him to shame and repentance. It never did.
He went off in ghastly anxiety to Emma, afraid lest he had ruined all their plans. But she received the news with her gayest courage.
“After all, what does it matter? I can be seen about with your sisters now, and that’s really better in some ways for they don’t love your wife and they’ll be furious at her walking off like that. Trust them to talk! Besides, as my own Nelson is going afloat so soon to fight in the Baltic ’twill appear the more heartless in her. She has served our turn well with her malicious temper. Don’t you go near her, my own dear love. I know your kind heart, but she’s gone too far this time.”
“You think I was right?” he asked wistfully. He was wholly in her hands now for good or ill.
“Right? What else could you do? What can any man do dealing with a nasty evil-thinking temper like that? If a woman can’t be kind-hearted and pleasant she deserves what she gets. Many would be jealous of her, but I never was. I was as eager to make friends as if I had never a grudge against her. But she never gave you a child—how can she understand? Her love and her child were another man’s not yours!”
That went home, and then there were the fond rhapsodies without which he could not now exist. And in the dear intimate talk of all their plans and hopes there was not much room for thought of Fanny.
He hoisted his flag in the San Josef and prepared to leave England with an aching heart, for Emma’s hour was at hand. And here he shines with the lustre that nothing earthly can dim. Every thought, love, feeling of his heart was centred in that house in Piccadilly and the event to take place there, but even that could not weigh in the scale against his country’s need.
With Emma he concerted a plan of correspondence which might yet have mystified the world if she had not insanely kept his letters. There was to be a Thomson aboard his ship, a young man concerned about his wife’s confinement in which Lady Hamilton’s goodness of heart had led her to interest herself. She would send news to Nelson for Thomson. Nelson would forward Thomson’s hopes and fears to her.