“ ’Tis a pitiful, wicked, brutal shame,” she cried, “that do what I will, go where I will, I can never get rid of it. And ’tisn’t as if ’twas my fault. If those misses yonder had had my upbringing, had lived as I did, slept where I did, they’d have done the same, I warrant, for all they step along so cool and genteel now.” She flung out a tragic arm toward the window. Two young ladies, full-skirted, large-hatted, with muslin fichus, crossed discreetly over chaste bosoms in the mode of 1782, were pacing sedately over the pleasant green common, past the wall of the churchyard. Lest they should need a more stringent guard than their own modesty, a well-fed footman with full-blossomed calves followed them, his gilt-headed staff and the gold lace on his livery gleaming in June sunshine, his high-fed face turned with a furtive air towards the curtains that hid the fair fury. The young ladies themselves shot a veiled glance apiece under drooping brims in that direction, for there was much healthy curiosity afloat on and about Paddington Green concerning that modest establishment.
Who could be surprised there should be? Take a placid suburb near to and yet remote from the scandals of London, place about its drowsy green the small respectable houses of Edgware Row chiefly inhabited by faded spinsters and decorous widows living out their declining days under the guidance of the church bells, and in the one vacant house of this Row set suddenly a handsome youngish man whose studied simplicity of dress cannot hide his fashion and consequence, and a young girl so beautiful that in a country where beauty itself partakes of the nature of sin, she must at once be found guilty until proved innocent—and mark what happens.
Of course it happened. Emma made a few timid advances when first she was set up as housekeeper. She spoke to the next door Mrs. Armitage across the paling of the little garden, and offered a loaf of bread when that lady was loudly regretting that the baker had forgotten his call. It was refused with a thorny precision which conveyed that bread from such hands was poison. When little Jemmy Barrett fell and grazed his knees, she stanched the wounds, filled his hands with sugar biscuits and led the howling culprit tenderly to the Barrett home among its syringa bushes across the Green. The first suspicious glance of Mrs. Barrett supposed her guilty of the howls, and explanation only produced a frosty, “Very obliging in you, I’m sure. Jemmy, if you don’t stop that noise—” and Emma, eyeing the child wistfully (for reasons), turned and walked away, followed by looks of greedy curiosity that drew heads from several windows. The clergyman’s wife called, but did not repeat the visit. “My dear, I have discovered that the servant, the cook, is her own mother,” cried the lady in the study of that divine, “and sure one knows what to think in such cases. Do pray make enquiry about Mr. Greville. ’Tis a name that bespeaks nobility, and the girl, for all her looks—”
Her looks! Here comes the difficulty, for how describe, how convey in any words, the beauty that nature bestows but once or twice in a century. There was not a great artist but later tried to give it living and glowing on his canvas, and not one of them but would own that, his best done, there was still the Unattainable laughing or sighing forever beyond his reach. Perhaps that most unbishop-like prelate, the Bishop of Derry, summed her up best when he cried, “God was in a glorious mood when he made Emma”—and yet that too needs detail if you are at all to picture her fascinations. Item: two lips indifferent red, in Shakespeare’s fashion? No, no, that may do for an Olivia but will not serve such a paragon as Emma. Let us essay the impossible and at least fall in good company, for all tried, and every man of them failed.
She was the perfect height, long-limbed, full-bosomed for a girl of her age, the hands and feet not delicate, and conveying the notion of physical strength and power as did also the fine throat and marble moulded arms. For her figure alone she was noticeable—it was to be seen slender, melting, flowing within her draperies, and every movement as full of ease as a cat’s that need never stop to consider its swiftness or slow subsidence into a luxurious coil for sleep or blinking at the fire. Coming up behind this girl, you must needs take note of her grace, the slow turn of the head on the long throat, the rhythm of curving arms and pleading hands (for she had many and uncommon gestures), the lovely length from hip to heel. Her body spoke for her and promised abundantly for her face.
Indeed, she was a wave of the ocean of beauty tossed by the breeze of youth. Should she be described? See how Romney has given her as a Bacchante, arch chin turned over her shoulder, eyes and mirthful mouth laughing deliciously to each other and to the happy fauns supposed out of sight. She will lead the dance in the woods, and sit beneath the black shade dappled with moonlight, wooing and wooed, in the clasp of strong arms with a hot cheek pressed to hers. Yet again—Circe, grave with a ruined passion, standing in noble height with down-pointing rod of enchantments, reversing her spell on her man-souled beasts; or a reading Magdalen, pensive, robed from head to knee in streaming auburn hair curling into gold at the tendrilled ends. Ah, but such hair as that, though it may be for Magdalens, is not for such as retire to caves and bury themselves in theology! Far otherwise.
Yet no picture of them all was as lovely as herself. The large limpid eyes of violet-grey might be hinted on canvas, no more, and what artist could give that signature of a freakish planet—a brown spot swimming in the liquid deeps of one. She owned that she herself considered it an absurdity, but, veiled in delicious lashes, or flashed at you in glittering laughter, it won hearts. Her mouth was divine—the sweet upward curves, the full lower lip with its twin cherries—and even that was not its charm of charms, for the changing expressiveness of it was beauty’s self, and after that point no man could any more inventorize, but was tangled hand and foot in the blue glance that netted him, the sweet smile that completed his ruin.
And hers—for what should be the fate of a girl like this born to a village blacksmith in an English village where dull days repeated dull days in everlasting sequence? Surely nature was ironic in locking such a bird in such a cage—a bird made for the wild woods and wild mating—a star dancing in the laughing dark. London beckoned the country lass along a road paved with hope and ignorance, and dropped her like ripe fruit hung on a stem too slender, into the mud, where the flies crowd and buzz over the crushed and muddied sweetness. For after a few half-hearted attempts at domestic service comes a darkness. Ugly rumours hang about it. Its implications were not perhaps quite clear to herself—but be it as it may, a girl of fifteen may plead for pity. Let us take her own account of it to Romney, who befriended as well as immortalized her: “Oh, my dear friend, for a time I own, through distress, my virtue was vanquished, but my sense of virtue was not overcome.”
Let us leave the darkness then and make no attempt to turn light upon the obscene figures that move through it about this child. She must have yearned, did yearn, for some position where the day could bring security and not violent and terrible change. Could one hope to find it in the arms of a King’s officer of the Navy, a light-hearted fool who is the first clear figure in the patchwork pictures of her life?—a man, it must be said, with no eye for the amazing woman hid in the immature girl as the conquering Aphrodite sleeps in the rough block of marble. He saw her beautiful, as many Susans and Pollys please a sailor’s fancy; snatched at the beauty and bruised it in the snatching, and passed on. So a black hoof may bruise the meadow-sweet, and tramp on knowing nothing. He found no more in this wonder than two months would exhaust, and sailed away to his destiny, leaving the way dimly open through many turns and obstacles to a mightier sailor than he who was to call the castaway “the most precious jewel that God ever sent on earth.”
But the man bruised her—broke some sincerity, some wide-eyed trust in her soul that life could never restore. And again she was flung on her pitiful resources and again comes a hiatus which there is no accurate knowledge to fill.