“I saw Tom Tit yesterday in her carriage at the next door come to take Lady Charlotte Drummond out with her. Had I only seen her hands spreading about I should have known her.”
Yes; it was not only Emma who had so much taste and all of it so bad. With the exception of his old father most of the Nelsons might have come under that superlative Grevillian censure so far as their treatment of Frances Nelson was concerned. Yet humanity is a mixed warp and woof, and in many ways Emma kept her kind heart. Do we ever change from our birth endowments, and as life wanes is it not a progressive dissolution into the original elements? The fine lady of Naples was rapidly degenerating into the hoyden of Up Park, only coarser, more florid, more spendthrift in money as well as emotions. But Nelson could not see it. She was his Divine Lady to the last, as she was Romney’s.
Romney! She made the pilgrimage to Hampstead to see him. A sad pilgrimage. She missed the old studio in Cavendish Square. It was a villa-looking house with a neglected garden about it, a few sodden lilacs and grass-grown flower-beds, and when she entered unannounced they stared at each other for a moment in silence. He was stooped and old and dejected. A fog of melancholia clung about him, which was never to lift again. He looked at her with dull eyes as she unloosed her costly pelisse and sat down beside him and took his hands, all cordiality.
“You were once Emma,” he muttered, “once Emma! My God, how beautiful you were! I shall never paint you more. No—no. It’s all over.”
“But, my dear sir, you remember me. You don’t think me changed!” she pleaded. Indeed she knew herself she was changed. Her glass told her that if Nelson did not. Something of the young glow was gone with youth. But he only shook his head.
“You were once Emma. It’s all, all over,” he replied, and she could get no more than that. She left him, herself half bewildered with the passing of things. Her only remedy for care was gaiety, incessant noisy gaiety. Let their old acquaintance, Lord Minto, describe the life at Merton when Nelson returned:
“The whole establishment and way of life is such as to make one angry as well as melancholy. I do not think myself obliged to quarrel with him for his weakness, though nothing shall ever induce me to give the smallest countenance to Lady Hamilton. She looks eventually to the chance of marriage. She is in high looks, but more immense than ever. She goes on cramming Nelson with trowelfuls of flattery, which he goes on taking quietly as a child does pap. The love she makes to him is not only ridiculous but disgusting. Not only the rooms, but the whole house, staircase and all, are covered with pictures of her and him, and representations of his naval actions—an excess of vanity which counteracts its own subject. Braham, the celebrated Jew singer, performed with Lady H. She is horrid, but he entertained me.”
Sir William was worn out with the riot. He took an opportunity to complain to the cool Greville on meeting him in London.
“I do assure you it is wearing me to the grave,” he sighed, in reply to Greville’s look of concern. “It is really but reasonable to hope for peace, having fagged all my life, but never a chance of it do I get.”
“But surely, my dear Hamilton, you can point this out, you can insist!”