And the last Greville saw was that fair face, dumb with sorrow, wild and white, looking at him, suffering, suffering, as the distance widened between them, and the past was past.
He waved a spotless cambric handkerchief. “Poor girl! Poor Emma!” he said compassionately, and then, “If I had guessed that Hamilton would be such a fool—” He was seriously alarmed, indeed.
CHAPTER X
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
Spring comes slowly in England; winter entrenched and relaxing his dominion inch by inch, fighting as he goes with bitter blasts of snowy winds, sharp rains, and cruel seas beating on iron coasts.
Emma had always half loved, half dreaded the spring. Her nature had the glow of ripening suns and mellow harvests, light and warmth shone from her eyes. And this was the climate she needed also for the expansion of every gift and grace. Cold winds froze her loveliness. Cold faces chilled her blood. It is certain that in Greville’s temperature, which often fell to zero and never rose above temperate, she could not have blossomed and fruited as she was to do in the South and under adoring eyes. She half loved, half feared him, and believing in her ignorance and dark experience that fear is a necessary part of love had conformed painfully to his strange inverted austerity; and knowing no life outside the small restrictions of Edgware Row dreaded to leave it with the feelings of a child lost in crowded streets. For she was one of those women in whom memory is ill developed and lost in the interests of the present. Sixteen years old when she came to Greville, the recollection of her life at Up Park, of Willett-Payne the faithless sailor, of the darker shadows of London, had long since faded away into happy forgetfulness in the atmosphere of ease and comfort which gradually came to appear the reward of unmerited sufferings. That dawning bliss vanquished all the shadows of the past until they grew dream-like and scarcely ever disturbed her and when they did could be repelled with indifference. They had been; they had ceased to be; and certainly had left no mark, she thought, except indeed little Emma, and even her origin had grown vague and inconsiderable in the child-mother’s eyes. She existed, a charming blue-eyed baby; what need was there to remember more?
And now this easy, half pagan, half material Emma was transplanted to one of the most voluptuously enervating climates of all the wide world—a place where all English standards and values seemed harsh, unreasonable, Puritanical; where Greville’s squeamish maxims of propriety were absurd and life flung its passions to the surface much as Etna and Vesuvius pour forth their lava; where the grapes so soon again ripen to vintage and the earth repairs her wrong with swift and more luxuriant blossom. What strange or evil impulses would be released in her nature?
But of all that future she guessed nothing and no up-rooted plant with wounded fibres quivering in cold air could be more drooping and fearful than Emma when she reached the Palazzo Sessa under Gavin Hamilton’s escort and with her mother almost as frightened as herself. Gavin had done his best to awaken her interest in the new sights they passed through and the deepening warmth and sunshine as they journeyed south, but in vain. She could scarcely speak. She sat, eating little, dull, heavy, with great unseeing eyes fixed on some inward sight of grief and Gavin, amazed at the small response from a temperament which he had known so vivid, was inclined to think the experiment was likely to fail.
“Master Charles will have her back on his hands in three months if it goes on,” he thought. “Hamilton will never endure it if she sits hunched up like this and makes no exertion to please him. Calypso doesn’t appear in the least inclined to console herself, and if I know anything of Hamilton he will very soon weary of the task. Besides, there is always the respectable Mrs. Dickenson.”
There was indeed!—Sir William’s niece who had acted as hostess at the Embassy since the death of Lady Hamilton. What, what would be her respectable feelings at the irruption of this surprising stranger, and which would conquer, respectability or delight? Delight had certainly the stronger backing in Naples, but yet Gavin could not in his heart do otherwise than accord the final victory to respectability. Sir William was English, all said and done, and must know the girl unworthy of any real sacrifice. He could not himself take her seriously.
But perhaps Gavin knew much less both of Emma and Hamilton than he supposed. For one thing, he under-valued her devotion to Greville. Much of the time when she sat staring dully at the passing show, she was really thinking how she could best forward his interests with his uncle that their reunion might be hastened. At her passionate entreaty he had now named October instead of November, and all her thoughts centred about the autumn. It was selfish, of course, after a fashion, for she was always in the foreground of her own picture, but it was really Greville round whom every idea revolved.