And in his turn Sir William had more tenderness and understanding for her than Gavin or any of his friends. He was thoroughly prepared to find her lonely and unhappy and to endure it until the emptiness was filled with the new joys. He made this very clear in the anxious letter he wrote to Greville a day or two before her arrival. He knew, he said, what must be expected:
“However, I will do as well as I can, and hobble in and out of this pleasant scrape as decently as I can. You may be assured I will comfort her for the loss of you as well as I am able, but I know that I shall have at times many tears to wipe from those charming eyes.”
It was her birthday when the long journey was finished and the imposing Palazzo, about to become her home, loomed before her. No, loomed is the wrong word for the white, light brilliance rising beside a blue sea of dipping sparkles and splendours. In England, in April, the daffodils would be blowing in cold showers, the leaves would be tiny on the hedges about Paddington Green. Here summer blazed in what seemed perennial beauty and even her wearied eyes lifted in amazement at a world as new as heaven.
Sir William resolved to meet her in his own house, and this for two reasons. He knew Emma’s sensibility, as he called it, and feared some public outburst which should attract attention very unwelcome in their position. Also, he believed that the sight of the preparations made for her would be the first step to her liking, the first assault on the memory of Greville. That could not begin too soon, and he must see it.
Accordingly the visitors, who included Gavin Hamilton, were received at the great entry by the majordomo with what appeared to her an endless train of men and women servants, eager to receive and do homage to those whom the Ambassador delighted to honour.
Her first impulse was something very like terror as she stood in the great sun-dimmed Palazzo with vast chambers stretching away in endless glimpses on either hand. The whole of the Edgware Row house might have been stowed away in the long high-ceiled hall where she stood; a hackney coach might have been driven up the wide shallow stairs. A regiment of soldiers could have been accommodated in the mysterious rooms that spread away to right, to left, above, below. Oh, for the little parlour with Greville’s dear figure in sight, and her mother calling from the kitchen and the friendly faces of baker and milkman arriving on their morning rounds, and the little smiling Molly Dring with her carefully tutored “Madam, breakfast waits.” The flashing dark eyes and quick gestures bewildered her horribly, and Mrs. Cadogan was half stupefied beside her; and Gavin Hamilton had been spirited away to some distant apartment of his own; and it was her birthday, her miserable twenty-first birthday, a lost stranger in a foreign land!
A girl called Teresa curtseys before her. Will the Eccellenza ascend to her suite? And she follows, dumb with fear, up those alarming stairs, giving her arm to her mother who stumbles up beside her—two mere English village folk in an Italian palace and as much at home there as cattle.
A door opens, a curtain is raised. Light, warm golden sunlight, softest air, rushes to meet them from wide windows framing the perfect sea, sweet islands swimming on its bosom and, pillaring the sky, a mountain with a hint of terror in the banner of smoke above it, drowsing to-day in bluest vapours.
But the rooms!—beautiful with a perfection she cannot as yet comprehend. Every detail of luxury planned for her service by one of the most cultivated tastes in Europe. Has a magician waved his wand and will it all dissolve like a dream when she wakes in the morning in that large cool bedroom with its blue hangings, great mirrors to reflect triumphant beauty, and marble, marble everywhere and whispering corridors and doors that dwarf the entrant?
She is to bathe in a Roman marble bath after the long journey, and this strangely beautiful bathroom (the first she has seen) adjoins La Signora Madre’s—for to that imposing title has poor Mrs. Cadogan attained! And His Excellency is away on business but will return before long.