“Of course not. Whoever was or will be? But Maria—she married Lord Coventry—came as near you as mortal woman could, for all she was a lovely doll with not a gleam of your good sense and talents. Elizabeth, the double Duchess, had more brains, and a great deal more dignity, and an amazing beauty. Her smile—”
“I want to see her. I want to see her!” Emma clapped her hands and sent the rays flashing from two rings of great diamonds. She might have been a graven image hung with jewels if she would, but refused extravagance of that order and commanded Sir William to save every stray penny for his Etruscan urns. What wonder she wore his heart instead of his fripperies? As a matter of fact, these rings were his dead wife’s. Even his good taste was not flawless.
“You shall see her, I promise, and she shall see you. But remember she is fifty now, and her health not strong. I like her. There’s a kind of courage in her that matches your own. If things had been different you might have been friends.”
Emma sighed, a soft little sigh, no more. But it said, and he heard it—“If things were different! Ah, and they might be. Have I not deserved it?” Much may be said in a sigh.
The Duchess came, her fame preceding her, with a little attendant court of her own, and all Naples thrilled to receive the greatest of the great English ladies. However she had begun in life she had since acquired a most majestic dignity, and the English women who had held coldly aloof from Emma were now certain of a leader who would open the way to victory and the public rout of the fair sinner.
Sir William waited upon her directly she arrived. He felt it was best to place the matter on a footing of perfect frankness at once, and was eager to find her alone; an impossibility, as it seemed, for all the gay world of Naples was perpetually in her salon.
At last he secured her, and by the merest chance, for they met in the same rose-hung gardens where Emma had repelled the King’s advances, beneath a long trellised pergola with a delicate sea-breeze wandering like a bee drunken with perfume and colour among the roses. She sat, leaning back in the chair her footman had set beneath the delicious shadow, half smiling with delight at the beauty about her.
“What a place! What a scene!” she said softly. “My dear Sir William, though you have written to Charlotte more than once, and even when you came to England last, you never expressed the half of it. ’Tis surprising to me that we endure the English climate who could be here. ’Tis to share the very youth of the world.”
“Many things conspire to make it fascinating. When on a moonlit night on the Marina I hear the soft thrum of guitars, the singing voices and subdued laughter I often wonder whether I can bear the chill of the foggy North any more,” he said. “It is home in a sense but—well, I left it a long time ago. My notions are Italian—lax, some would call them. And yet, call them what you will, they are the same all the world over, at bottom.”
“For my part the English air wearies me,” says her Grace, wielding a black fan, her large calm eyes studying him above its rim. “I was always happier in Scotland than at Court. Hamilton Palace was my heaven; and later, Inverary. I suppose ’twas the Irish blood in me, my father’s blood, that couldn’t content itself with beef and pudding and solid worth; that was better pleased with the haunted castles and purple heather of the North. Yes, even in the winter and the grey rain that falls and falls! I remember Oban in a smurr of sea fog”—she looked across the sapphire sea and sighed—“I wonder shall I ever see it more!”