War thundered about him—“Oh, Victory, Victory, how you distract my poor brain”—and yet, through the roar of the guns, a stealing quiet can be discerned.
It was Victory in another sense also—triumph that he must carry with him for he could not live to taste it. Hardy, now in command, hurrying from the bloody deck, gave him the glad news of victory almost beyond hope, eventual ruin to Napoleon and safety to England. He heard it and rejoiced; then, gasping:
“Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton, Hardy. Take care of poor Lady Hamilton.”
And then, in the strange loneliness of death, like a child, the great Admiral said: “Kiss me, Hardy”—the last token of human love, vanishing, vanishing in the Eternal. And Hardy stooped and kissed him and once more took his station on deck, never again to meet his friend in life.
He was sinking rapidly now. To the chaplain: “I have not been a great sinner—” and after a short pause, “Remember. I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter as a legacy to my country. Never forget Horatia.”
Nearer, nearer, came the end, and at last even those beloved names faded and passed from the mirror of his mind and were gone, and only the two which were one remained, and the man, bending above him to lose nothing, heard only “God and my Country,” as he passed away into the inmost of his country’s love and remembrance, and higher—higher.
After that scene and when the threads must be gathered up, it is surely impossible to write anything condemnatory or slighting of the beautiful woman whom such a man had loved. With him her romance ended, and she became a tragic triviality. Let others follow her sinking star through all its sorrowful clouding—I cannot.
For Nelson, Trafalgar was the crowning mercy, the glorious reward of a life of self-devotion scarcely to be paralleled. Had he lived, it is said that blindness must have been his fate, and perhaps a yet more cruel clear-sightedness where he might well have prayed to be blind forever, for she had been tested by her attitude to his wife and had failed—a tragic failure that must have marred all their future. But he died with his faith unbroken.
Surely his great belief uplifts her and, washing all the stains away, leaves her fair face pure beauty in our memory, as Romney, who also loved her, has given it to us forever. To whom little is given, of them shall little be required, and she had little enough in her young days when character is unalterably moulded for life.
As for judgment on him—Heaven forbid! The cruelty to his wife is patent, but not the circumstances which led up to it. Nor her compensations. It was not all loss. If she had ever envied Emma her great husband’s love, Emma had cause to envy her also.