At Sorrento they were all “in ecstasies of adoration” when she entertained there. “I left some dying, some crying and all in despair. Mind you, this was all nobility and as proud as the devil. We humbled them! But what astonished them was that I should speak such good Italian. For I paid them, I spared none of them, though I was civil and obliging. One asked me if I left a love at Naples that I left them so soon. I pulled my lip at him, to say ‘I pray, do you take me for an Italian? Look, sir, I am English. I have one cavaliere servente and I have brought him with me.’ The house is full of painters painting me. He [Sir William] has now got nine pictures of me and two a-painting. Marchant is cutting my head in stone, that is in cameo for a ring. There is another man modeling me in wax, and another in clay. All the artists is come from Rome to study from me. Galucci played some of my solfegos and you woud have thought he woud have gone mad. He never saw or heard of such a whoman before. He says when he first came in I frightened him with a Majesty and Juno look that I received him with. Then he says that whent off on being more acquainted and I enchanted him by my politeness and the manner in which I did the honors, and then I almost made him cry with Handels, and with the comick he could not contain himself for he says he never saw the tragick and comick muse blended so happily together.”
Yes, Greville shall know, even if she gives the impression that wide Italy is emptied of artists who have poured into Naples with no other occupation than to stare at her! It is the last attempt to bring him to her feet. He shall know that, before Sir William went, she—she, the rejected—was the guest of honour on board a foreign man-of-war. No less!
“We sett down thirty to dine, me at the head of the tables, mistress of the feast, drest all in virgin white and my hair all in ringlets reaching allmost to my heals. I assure you it is so long that I realy lookd and moved amongst it. Sir William said so.”
If that does not move him, nothing will and if he thinks those silken auburn locks have grown miraculously from knee to heel during that year in Italy, then let him! Perhaps he has forgotten that little fact with so much else.
That letter despatched, she turns again to write to Hamilton. When will he come back?
“One hour’s absence is a year. My friend, my All, my earthly good, my Kind home in one, you are to me eating, drinking and cloathing, my comforter in distress. Then why shall I not love you? Endead I must and ought whilst life is left in me or reason to think on you.”
Certainly Emma can write with energy and spirit when she will; all the warmth of a graphic pen, of a warm heart, is hers when she chooses to express it. Sir William, reading the last, surprises himself by laying it against his cheek, and murmuring, “Dear child; my beloved Emma!” hoping and believing that this absence is teaching her some of the secrets of her own shy heart.
And Greville? Greville receiving his, studies it with care, makes a pencil note or two of the contents in his useful pocketbook, and—re-encloses it to Sir William with an admonitory message. “Go on circumventing Emma. She will surrender at last. It is not in the power of woman to stand so prolonged a siege.”
And now, the time come, he prepares himself to write to Emma, with the goal in sight. The message must be brief and vague, but must show her clearly once and for all that it is finished between them. Miss Middleton is half wooed, half won, he hopes. There can be no delay. He writes back tersely, that she is “to oblige Sir William.”
She read this paper in the solitude of that lovely room which had brought the sea, the blue air, indoors, to keep her company with the sunshine, and in a frantic passion, half fury, half raging love, she spat upon it, stamped her foot upon it, spurned it, a girl of the people, all the veneer gone and rage blazing uncontrolled. She could not write for a while, her hands shook so violently, every fibre of her body quivering under the shameful blow. She swallowed a glass of water, her teeth chattering against the rim. She lay long, half torpid, to compose herself and could not—a strong and righteous anger at the mean trick she had never suspected drove her like a ship before a gale. But she would, she must write if she died for it, and then at long last, as it seemed, she wrote.