Читать книгу Patriotic Lady - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 22

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All these arrangements having been carefully made, His Britannic Majesty's Minister returned to his post at the Court of Naples, and Emma took up again her modest life at Paddington, going to and from Cavendish Square to console the moody gloom of George Romney with her bright looks, amusing Mr. Greville with her poses, her songs and her lively chatter.

By the end of 1785 there came a letter from Pliny, written within sight of Vesuvius, begging the fair Emma to come to Naples as his guest, there to perfect herself in music and painting.

As dear Charles was busily setting his affairs in order, and thought of taking a course of chemistry under Professor Black in Edinburgh, he would not be able to accompany her, but in six months' time, or sooner, he would go out to Italy and bring her home—meantime comfort and decorum would be assured by the presence of Mrs. Cadogan. Emma was a little bewildered, a little saddened; she did not want the Paddington idyll to end, she did not want to leave the lover of whom she had grown so fond—the painter who worshipped her charms.

But Mr. Greville was firm, even stern; he had a great deal of business on hand, Emma would only be in the way; it was her plain duty to go to Naples, there to learn to finish her music and painting—and also by her pretty, graceful ways to keep the wealthy, useful uncle in a good humour towards the absent Charles.

Emma consented; if she wept at the prospect of leaving Mr. Greville, there was comfort in the thought of seeing foreign lands, perhaps a foreign Court, of being admired and flattered once more by kind old Pliny.

On March 4th, 1786, Emma and Mrs. Cadogan were entrusted to the escort of Gavin Hamilton, one of Sir William's artist friends, and started for Naples, where they arrived nearly six weeks later in the full flush of the South Italian spring.

Emma, then twenty-three years old, was also in the full flush of her ripening charms. Mr. Hamilton had admitted that he "had never seen anything quite like her"—she fitted into the opulent landscape as a picture into a frame and took possession of her apartments in the Palazzo Sessa, the British Embassy in Naples, with the air of Venus returning to Paphos.