She dressed with burning eyes and cheeks, listening to the voice in her heart which assured her that Sir William was hers, wholly hers, let Greville do what he would. Ah, she had a weapon now! She could threaten him with undreamed of possibilities. She stood before the glass again, and poor Teresa said, timidly:
“The Eccellenza is beautiful as a divine creature. Does not God favour you more than us?”
“No, why should He?” says Emma, trying the set of an auburn curl a little more veiling the white brow.
“O God! the Eccellenza is very ungrateful! He has been so good as to make your face the same as the Blessed Virgin’s and you don’t esteem it a favour?”
“Why, did you ever see the Virgin?” Emma was mocking again.
“Oh, yes. You are like every picture there is of her, and you know the people at Ischia fell down on their knees to you and begged you to grant them favours in her name. Oh, how beautiful you are!”
Emma told this little scene, laughing, to Sir William when she went down. The volcano, the girl’s admiration, Sir William’s eyes full of meanings that his tongue dared not as yet express; all, all, intoxicated her. She looked and moved a goddess that night, a supremely beautiful woman.
What the Immortal thought he has left on record, and who will may read it in his “Italienische Reise.” Even Emma’s excitement was stilled with a kind of awe when he entered the great room of the Palazzo Sessa where Sir William stood to greet him with a deference far more real and deep than he accorded to the King of the Two Sicilies. The poet appeared in a black satin coat and knee-breeches slightly embroidered with steel—a grave and dignified dress suited to his austere beauty—and attended like a monarch by his court, the two well-known artists Tischbein and Andreas. He took his stand by one of the long windows with the Vesuvius glow lighting up the sky behind him, and Emma was immediately presented, followed by the other guests, to all of whom he bowed in silence and in stiff German fashion from the waist. Instinctively the occasion was felt to be a great one, and all were a little awed at first. Emma drew back to watch the great man on whose verdict she felt much depended for her ambitions, for well she knew Sir William’s opinion of his judgment in matters of art and beauty.
That he himself was beautiful none could doubt. That alone would have distinguished him in any company. She said afterwards to Sir William that he fulfilled completely her ideal of a king, which had perhaps suffered somewhat at the hands of Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies. Sift or separate his features she could not; they impressed and influenced her as the serene mellowing glow of a calm sunset sky irradiates all beneath it. Yet he should be described, for never in all her strange life before or after was she within the sphere of such serene intellectual magnificence, and, ignorant girl as she was, it impressed her like great organ music or the silent majesty of still gods met in the silence of the Palazzo Filangieri; or, even more, like the calm of the moonlighted sea from the Marina, where all the stars reflect themselves and are lost in unsounded deeps.
His face was nobly shaped, nobly carried on the column of a fine throat, his mouth firm, yet cut with sensuous beauty of curved lips and chin. His eyes were dominating; keen, calm, and clear. They turned meditatively on Emma herself until she shrank a little from a look which pierced deeper than she could afford to endure, and then he saw her perturbation and, smiling with distant kindness, turned to Sir William again and said something in French which she could not decipher. It reassured her, but she whispered apart to the Ambassador that she could never, never perform before so great a man.