“I try to appear as cheerful before Sir William as I can, but I am sure to cry the moment I think of you. For I feel more and more unhappy at being separated from you, and if my fatal ruin depends on seeing you, I will and must at the end of the summer. For to live without you is impossible. I love you to that degree that at this time there is not a hardship upon earth either of poverty, cold, death, or even to walk barefooted to Scotland to see you but what I would undergo. Therefore my dear, dear Greville, if you do love me, for my sake, try all you can to come here as soon as possible. You have a true friend in Sir William and he will be happy to see you. I find it is not either a fine horse or a fine coach or a pack of servants or plays or operas can make me happy. It is you that has it in your power either to make me very happy or very miserable.”
She paused here, recalled a something in Sir William’s eyes that had startled her. To him she could not say a word, not a word. She might, must be utterly mistaken, and doing him a frightful injustice. But to Greville she could open her whole heart. With desperate courage she snatched up the pen again.
“I respect Sir William. I have a great regard for him, as the uncle and friend of you, and he loves me, Greville. But he can never be anything nearer to me than your uncle and my sincere friend. He never can be my lover. You do not know how good Sir William is to me. He is doing everything he can to make me happy.”
She sealed and bound that letter with extraordinary care. Little could she think or guess that it would be returned after careful consideration from Greville for Sir William’s consideration also. Her motive in writing it was perfectly clear. Greville must know and rejoice in the thought that neither temptation, pleasures, or love could shake her perfect fidelity to him. He had come to her rescue in need, they had lived together in wifely submission and love on her side for years. She considered herself his wife in truth and hoped that the future would make her so in the world’s eyes. For that she was toiling now; that he might never have cause to blush for her bearing and accomplishments. Poor Emma! it was perhaps natural that she should put the shameful past out of sight. It had not hurt her, she thought, or Sir William could not respect her as he did. And if she could forget it, why not Greville? Only he must be certain that she was true as the needle to the North even if the incredible were to happen and Sir William to tempt her.
She pushed the sealed letter aside, then sent it to the mail and sat awhile thinking. Sir William saw her enter the room before his guests arrived, divinely lovely in the shimmering white satin and a little rope of knotted seed pearls about her round throat. With all the delight of a proud proprietor he watched the eyes of the men who entered and were ceremoniously presented. He saw the two olive-skinned Italian ladies thrown into the shade by that immaculate fairness. Her manners were the perfection of a young girl’s modesty, and her ignorance of Italian kept her in a graceful quiet of smiles and shyness. It was in the evening her triumph came when Galluci appeared with his music and Emma placed herself beside him too shy even for apologies and excuses. She sang Paisiello brilliantly. She fired off ascending rockets of silver stars that fluttered to earth again as silvery. The applause of the inflammable Italians was frantic, and her pretty bow and smile completed the picture.
Directly the two ladies rose she attended them to the door and vanished discreetly with them.
“Perfection!” said Sir William in his heart. “Thank goodness I acted as I did to-day.”
But what would Greville have said? It was Emma who asked that question in her own heart. Sir William evaded it in his.
CHAPTER XII
THE BEGINNING
That dinner party was the opening of her triumph. The guests spread her fame abroad, her beauty, modesty, fresh spontaneous charm, and above all, her exquisite singing. Not that the modesty was likely to blind the keen-sighted, laughing Neapolitans to her ambiguous position in the Ambassador’s house. Sir William’s amatory character was far too well established, but nothing could have mattered less in that land of easy pleasure, and neither she nor Sir William were thought a whit the worse in a city where every attractive woman had at least one cavaliere servente, in addition to a husband in attendance on some other lady. The Italian ladies made polite overtures. The Queen herself, as easy-moralled as any of them, expressed her curiosity and interest in the new enchantress at the Embassy, and though no definite Royal approach could possibly be made, Sir William knew that he had a successor in the Queen’s intimacy and there would be no anger, no unpleasant representations made through diplomatic channels to the English Court, where Queen Charlotte, who took an extremely Puritan view of such amusements, might very well prejudice him with his royal foster brother, King George.