She would write to Sir William—yes, but letters that should neither lament nor weary him. She would write to Greville—yes, but it should be a song of triumph. Not a minute would she lose! Sir William first. He should find the letter waiting his arrival. What could she tell him he did not know? The convent—that would amuse him. She would prattle on paper as she talked when she drew up her stool beside his chair and told him the day’s adventures. And first, she began with his health and happiness and comfort, leaning on them, but not too strongly—no sentiment—and then passed on.
“I had hardly time to thank you for your kind letter of this morning as I was busy preparing for to go on my visit to the convent of Santa Romita and endead I am glad I went but to-morrow I dine with them in full assembly. I am quite charmed with Beatrice Acquaviva. Such is the name of the charming whoman I saw to-day. O Sir William, she is a pretty whoman! She is 29 years old. She took the veil at 20 and does not repent to this day, though if I am a judge of physiognomy her eyes does not look like the eyes of a nun. They are always laughing and something in them vastly alluring, and I wonder the men of Naples woud suffer the onely pretty whoman who is realy pretty to be shut in a convent. But it is like the mean-spirited ill taste of the Neapolitans. I told her I wondered how she woud be lett to hide herself from the world, and I daresay thousands of tears was shed the day she deprived Naples of one of its greatest ornaments. She answered with a sigh, that endead numbers of tears was shed and once or twice her resolution was allmost shook. And since that time one of her sisters had followed her example. But I think Beatrice is charming and I realy feil for her an affection. Her eyes, Sir William, is I don’t know how to describe them. I stopt one hour with them and I had all the good things to eat and I promise you they don’t starve themselves, but their dress is very becoming, and she told me she was allowed to wear rings and mufs and any little thing she liked and endead she displayed to-day a great deal of finery, for she had four or five dimond rings on her fingers and seemed fond of her muff. She has excellent teeth and shows them for she is always laughing. She kissed my lips, cheeks and forehead and every moment exclaimed ‘Charming fine creature,’ admired my dress, said I looked like an angel, for I was in clear white dimity and a blue sash. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘it would be worth while to live for such a one as you. Your good heart would melt at any trouble that befel me and partake of one’s greef or be equaly happy at one’s good fortune.’ In short I sat and listened to her and the tears stood in my eyes and I loved her at that moment. Did she not speak very pretty? But not one word of religion. There is sixty whomen and all well-looking but not like the fair Beatrice. ‘O Emma,’ she says to me, ‘they brought here the Viene minister’s wife but I did not like the looks of her at first. She was little, short, pinched face and I received her cooly. How different from you. We may read your heart in your countenance, your complexion, in short your figure and your features is rare, for you are like the marble statues I saw when I was in the world.’ I think she flattered me up but I was pleased.”
So was Sir William. He laughed to his heart’s content over this effusion—Emma among the nuns! Certainly she would be a disintegrating influence. He wrote back, encouraging her to go there as often as she could, to go everywhere and send him these naïve descriptions—a calm, friendly letter. Indeed, it ended, “Kindest regards to my dear friend Emma, from,” etc. She wrote back that in his absence convent society was the gayest she could endure—nothing where he could have been and was not was pleasant without him. And then, “Do you call me your dear friend? Oh, if I could express myself! If I had words to thank you that I may not be choaked with meanings for which I can find no utterance.”
She found utterance, however, for many gay little descriptions, many memories of the quiet happy evenings they had had, winged with music and pleasant talk—evenings when her education was being carried on delightfully, insensibly, by one of the most cultivated minds in Europe. That, she knew, was his favourite pursuit now; the pleasure he would choose in preference to any other. She remembered what he had told her with such pride as the saying of his intimate friend, the great and scientific Sir Joseph Banks: “I rejoice to hear she proceeds with success in her improvement. Her beauty will, I hope, last as long as she can wish; but her mind, once stored with instruction, will certainly last as long as she stays this side of heaven.” Could it be wondered that her head was a little giddy with such notices from such men? After all, as she herself said: “I am a pretty woman and one cannot be everything at once.”
Perhaps in any case the forcing process had been a little too rapid for slow-footed common sense to keep up with it. The environment, too, carried its own dangers. Not for nothing did Goethe note before quitting those enchanted shores that “Naples is a paradise. Every one lives, after his kind, intoxicated with self-forgetfulness. It is the same with me. I scarcely recognize myself. Yesterday I thought ‘Either you were or are mad.’ ”
Emma, after a very different fashion, was in the same case. The general adoration had, as Greville foresaw, gone to her brain; indeed, it was a heady draught. She had tasted pleasures she could never now forego. Greville—of course she loved him—but whereas the alternative had been Greville or despair, it was now becoming clear to her that the chance which gave her not only Greville but Hamilton was unique. It could never recur. If she lost them both her life would run the ordinary course of such lives as hers; another, other protectors; waning beauty; desertion. She might, of course, make a marriage, even a wealthy one, but there again Greville and Hamilton—her twin stars—had spoiled her for the company of the average man of pleasure, the only type which would consider her either as a mistress or wife. It is the truth of this strangely mixed Emma that she loved to learn many things worth learning, and with very little delicacy of her own she loved to be with those who naturally owned it and to reflect it until she could half deceive herself as well as them into the belief that she shared it.
Every day in Sir William’s absence she would order the boat at her disposal and float about the cuvette bleue of the bay, thinking, dreaming in a sort of languor that threatened to overwhelm her now. It was a respite, a lull before she was compelled to make that alarming definite choice which must sever her from Greville and the past for ever, for the alternative now was not Greville or despair; it was Greville or Sir William.
A slow seductive enervation was in the very air. She wandered in the famous gardens with only a staid old woman as attendant, who followed decorously a little behind, and scarcely saw how many eyes sought the lovely Englishwoman; and there one day the King himself met her, and, overjoyed at the chance of her cavaliere servente’s absence, ventured to join her among the flowers. A warm languid day, the sun drowsing among the blossoms and the swaying palms, what could be a more charming occupation than to see how her Italian had improved since their last meeting? Emma was all discretion, the monarch all ardour, and old women—in Italy only, let us believe—not inaccessible to Royal bribes which ensure their absence at needed moments.
The pair sat among the rosy oleanders, with the melting sapphire of the sea in glimpses through divinest blossomed boughs where all the ancient gods of Italy might have dreamed away the long warm hours. And Ferdinand urged his love for the exquisite foreigner, and she parried and fenced, and dared neither wholly discourage the Royal advances nor wholly smile upon them, and so sat for an hour, basking in the miraculous truth that she, the once forlorn and forsaken, had it in her power to captivate a king. He followed her when she arose, beseeching, entreating, she looking over her shoulder with the look we know so well in the “Bacchante,” where for Romney’s inspiration she had assumed the arch repelling-inviting smile that was to catch the King in its golden net. But when she left the gardens she knew he did not interest her. It would be useful for writing to Greville. It would convince Hamilton of her pure fidelity when he returned. That was all the use of it. She dismissed the Royal wooer with the final wave of her hand, and fell into heavy thought again.
But she wrote of it to Greville; no tearful plaintive letter this time, but rather a sinister triumph meant to warn him that longer delay and hovering about a cold English bride would mean a loss that possibly nothing could ever replace. Kings would not dispute Miss Middleton with him. Royal dukes, like His Highness of Gloucester, would not creep to her feet for an introduction. He would have a commonplace dowdy wife, no more; and even as regards fortune: If one can sing like an angel, dance, pose, draw not only men’s but women’s frantic admiration, be a European celebrity, may not money also fall in golden showers? She believed it might. Consequently, we boast! We tell Greville sufficient to let him imagine even greater splendours than as yet have transpired!