“Emma, dearest and sweetest, do you mean it?”
“And more,” she said, “much more! My eyes are opened.”
He put his arms about her, dazzled, overcome, now that the moment of surrender was upon him. Her glowing beauty bathed him, the loveliest lips on earth were pressed to his, the curtain of silken hair fell about them.
Let a man beware of the hour which fulfils all his wishes.
CHAPTER XIV
THE WAY TO TRIUMPH
Emma, laughing, singing, not a care in her sea-blue eyes four years later. Emma, the sunlight of the Palazzo Sessa, sweet as a summer dawn to Hamilton and to all the world. Greville, forgotten as a lover, preserved as a friend—after a fashion! We write to him, we enter sympathetically into his concerns. He is still unmarried. We do not tell him we rejoice in Miss Middleton’s refusal, for that would be unkind, injudicious. We say she is a foolish girl who will have cause to regret her folly. Naturally we dwell on the domestic peace and happiness of the Palazzo Sessa, and the charm of days that drift like flower petals on a breeze. We threaten no more—that was but a wild outburst of passion at a very irritating moment, and much better forgotten. Greville has no cause for uneasiness. Emma is pleasantly provided for. Sir William is furnished with a mistress so charming that no anxiety about marriage can possibly arise, and he may rise up and call himself blessed, for his plan has been a success from beginning to end. He certainly had not the smallest fear that his uncle would make himself ridiculous, and what could be more ridiculous than to marry a woman whom all Europe knew as his belle amie. Besides he himself had already given the elderly lover his views as to the proper provision to be made for Emma when this last bond should wear thin. That suggestion would probably bring forth an enlightening answer. It brought forth a very comfortable one; the more so because so evidently sincere.
“I fear,” Sir William wrote, “that her views are beyond what I can bring myself to execute, and that when her hopes on this point are over she will make herself and me unhappy.”
So all was well to the last point. Sir William duly on his guard and Emma’s impetuosity, as usual, hurrying her into mistakes. Greville laid that letter beside a friendly one from Emma, with a contented sigh and pursued his irreproachable way in peace.
So also did Emma, though not by any means in inward quiet. The more dazzling, the more delightful her triumphs, the more she felt the insecurity of the foundation. Sir William was her slave, but not her legalized slave, and though she had no fears for the present it must be her certain doom to be dismissed with a slender “provision” when he grew older and his family reclaimed him as it does all old and wealthy men. Day by day she made herself dearer and more necessary to him but never a day seemed to bring that goal nearer. She would hint, sigh, glance gently near the target, but never an arrow found the bull’s eye. He would do anything, everything for her—excepting the one thing that mattered more than all the wealth of the world, and yet she could not teach herself to think it impossible. Sometimes, the inward storm broke in nervous irritations in which he must have guessed the truth, and then she would be terrified and redouble her wifely submissions. Suppose he should think, as Greville had thought, that she had an ungoverned temper; then all hope would be over. He certainly was keenly on the watch—and why, why, if he thought the thing impossible?
Her circumspection was almost perfect. She solved the nearly impossible problem of being passionately admired, the dancing star of gaiety, the sighed for of all the distinguished and attractive men who came and went in their society, and yet of preserving a reputation of unsullied fidelity to her Ambassador. No other man had so much as a look to boast of. They called her the lovely ice-image. Sir William knew better and was radiant. But never a word of the only reward she craved, and she could see only a future in which Greville and the family would consult coldly on an adequate pension in return for her services.