Читать книгу Patriotic Lady - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 29

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The British Embassy was housed in two floors of the Palazzo Sessa, which Sir William Hamilton rented in Naples; these magnificent and sumptuously handsome apartments looked out upon the glitter of the bay.

A suite of four fine rooms was given to Emma and her mother; the rooms had been newly decorated by the British Minister for his dazzling treasure; he had exhausted his taste, if not his purse, in preparing a background worthy of so beautiful an occupant; couches of Pompeian shape with gilt claw-legs and curved backs had their classic rigidity broken by tasselled' cushions of brocade. The walls, exquisitely painted with light arabesques, were kept to those melting hues of cream, amber and ivory which best set off the vivid hues of Emma's carnation and the glint of her opulent tresses. Here and there was a sculptured vase that would in time come to be priceless, here and there a picture which represented the climax of some master's art. Sir William searched through the garnered hoard of a lifetime to find out the choicest pieces for the adornment of Emma's sun-bathed chambers.

She had little appreciation of all this, but she could delight in the soft canopied bed with the pale silk curtains, the carved wardrobe full of handsome clothes, the toilet-tables lavishly plenished, the rich draperies which kept off the heat, the dainty food, and the obsequious service.

She had done her best to please Charles Greville by being economical and prudent, when she had lived in Edgeware Row, but it was a relief no longer to have to count the pence, to content herself with one glass of beer, and to sigh for frocks which she could not afford. Compared to the maids at a few pounds a year who had been her sole servants at Paddington, the troop of Neapolitan attendants were as amiable and skilful as a host of genii.

Emma, like the princess in an Eastern tale, could have her every wish anticipated; she might have fine wines to drink, rich food to eat. Sir William never scolded, nor lectured, nor asked her to consider the cost. Every kind of pleasure that it was possible for her to imagine was offered her with humble delight in her acceptance. It was not possible for Emma to do otherwise than bloom with an even brighter lustre than she had worn at Paddington or in Romney's studio, to glow and smile and give out a delicious radiancy of youth and joy.

The peasant girl who had passed her childhood on the misty moors of Flintshire seemed to belong easily, as if by right, to this gorgeous background; Sir William became every day more and more infatuated, more and more excited over his good luck.

"Who was she?" Naples asked, between a smile and a shrug; and he, a man of easy tact, had his answer ready—a young protigie who had come to Italy to learn music and was resting awhile under his roof with her good mother.

Meanwhile, with that bad taste which infatuation will produce, even in people of high breeding, he presented Emma with some of his wife's clothes and toilet articles, a satin gown with Indian paintings on it, for which he had given twenty-five guineas, and for the hot weather loose muslin dresses something like those she had worn when sitting for Romney, with sleeves tied back with ribbons and plain knotted sashes. He told Emma that she might command anything, and she was grateful and wrote again to Charles Greville in the last week of July: why should not the fairy prince come to add the last touch of enchantment to this fairyland?

Why must she, when everything else was perfect, be content with an old lover? When she took up her pen she began to write in a facile, sentimental, emotional style, which was not wholly hypocritical:

"For God's sake send me one letter, if it be only a farewell. Think, Greville, of our former connection, and don't despise me."

If he did not come to her, she must go to him; she would be in London at Christmas at the latest, life was insupportable without him and her heart was entirely broken. What were the language masters, the singing masters, the music masters, without Greville? Why, nothing. She would return to live with him if he would allow her but one guinea a week for everything. Then she went on with an account of all that was happening to her, full of pride and pleasure in her triumph, informing her beloved Greville that she had no more eruptions on elbows or knees, and was become so fair that the Italians declared she must use rouge and white. She had been to Pompeii and the islands and there had been a dreadful storm of thunder and lightning; she ran on with this and all the other chatter that came into her mind. She was progressing with her Italian—she would write to him in that language soon. "But Grevell, of fleas and lice, there is millions." Then at the end a flourish of good-humoured tenderness: "Pray, write to yours ever. With the truest and dearest affection. God bless you. Write me, my dear, dear Greville. Emma."

Swift and dreadful storms, alternating with hot tempests marred that resplendent summer. The heat was suffocating, and streams of lava began to pour slowly from the fearful cone of Vesuvius, while plumes of smoke hung stagnant in the heavy sky; there were rumblings of earthquake and showers of ashes. All this to Emma was but an added excitement. It was scarcely possible for her to grasp anything beside the fact of the great success of her beauty.

When she went abroad, the cheerful, insolent lazzaroni and the idle, jolly, picturesque crew of beggars, fishermen, small tradespeople, and loungers, who formed such a large part of the population of Naples, followed her with cries of pleasure, delighting in her noble beauty, which to them was of so uncommon a type; they praised the mass of rich chestnut hair, her simple white gowns in the English or Turkish fashion, the plain straw or the famous blue hat which Greville had sent from London, and which cast such exquisite shadows over the entrancing face.

The Neapolitan aristocracy viewed, perhaps with a touch of irony, the old man's darling who had so suddenly and so dramatically appeared to take his dead wife's place in the Palazzo Sessa, but neither Sir William nor Emma perceived the hint of subtle mockery in the homage the easy Southerners paid to this fresh and uncommon charmer. The Queen was no prude; she has been described by one who knew her, as a woman "whose manners were so loose that it was possible to suspect her of every excess," and it was commonly believed that she had countered the incessant infidelity of the King with more than a few amours of her own, and that the handsome and elegant John Acton had been for years more to her than a friend. Whether the Queen was maligned or not, at least she showed herself generous towards the girl who appeared in such an equivocal position in the British Minister's house. Her Majesty did not herself receive Emma, but she made no objection to her courtiers' doing so.

The Italian gentlemen, in their tinsel and pomade, their pearls and their diamonds, sauntered laughing after Emma, when Sir William proudly paraded her in the trim walks of the gardens of the Villa Reale. A sparkling Viennese Prince was there; Emma could not spell his name, but he could speak her language and they got on very well together. He entitled himself her "cavaliere servente"; though the expression was new to her she soon grew to understand what it meant. The elegant admirer often dined at the Palazzo Sessa, and demanded a picture of the exquisite Emma while he smiled at her over the wine-glass; she was delighted to hear that he was a friend of the Queen:

"And he does nothing but entertain her with my beauty, accounts of it, etc."

Emma also discovered that the King had a heart and that she had made an impression on it. When, in the delicious summer evenings, after the storms had passed over, Sir William took Emma out in his boat on the waters off Posilippo, where he had a little casino or summer pleasure-house, His Majesty made a point of being there also, and put out in his own barge, which was filled with Court musicians.

Sailing close to the British Minister's party, Ferdinand gazed his fill of the English Miss, la Signora Hart, and ordered his musicians to play her a serenade on the French horns, sitting the while with his hat in his hand. When the concert was over His Majesty made a remark, which was translated to Emma as meaning that he regretted he could not speak English; after that he took occasion to be as often as possible in her train of admirers, when she walked in the grounds of the royal villa or when she took her seat with Sir William in the box at the Opera House, where her radiance was displayed to the lorgnettes of the boxes and the stares of the pit.

It was a curious experience for Emma. She had never seen a king before. When she had been in London, King George had been as far away from her sphere of life as an Archbishop from the village church in Cheshire where she had been baptized. The Spanish Bourbon monarch was by no means inaccessible nor fastidious; almost totally uneducated and delighting in the company of his inferiors, he was as much beloved by the lowest population of Naples as he was despised by the professional classes and the aristocracy.

When Emma caught his easily pleased eye, His Majesty was about thirty-five years old, heavily made with a rolling profile and an enormous nose, which earned him the nickname of Il Re Nasone; an athletic figure, he was careless in his dress, wearing for choice a Neapolitan fisherman's cap on his blond hair and delighting in the rough jacket, striped shirt and loose trousers of the Neapolitans who lounged on the sea-front or sauntered round the quays. For preference, he spoke the Neapolitan dialect, and indeed expressed himself with difficulty in any other language. He was good-humoured, if not thwarted, and cared nothing for what happened to anyone else as long as he was left undisturbed to those enjoyments of his appetites and that indulgence in his pleasures which were to him the beginning and end of his existence.

Ferdinand IV liked to catch fish in the bay and sell it in the marketplace of Naples, haggling shrewdly over the price with the amused fishermen; he enjoyed the native dishes and especially macaroni, which he liked to eat with his fingers, and which he had been known to throw by the handful from his box in the Opera on to the crowd below.

The big, brutal man was afraid of his Queen, who could on occasions prove a screaming fury, and in order to escape from her passionate hysterics and her scathing tongue he had handed over to her every department of State, and was not in the least galled that Acton was virtually King of Naples and that everyone knew it.

Such as he was, Ferdinand Bourbon was the King, and Emma had him in her train. She had, for the first time in her life, a carriage and horses, and servants in livery, not the livery of Sir William—discretion forbade that—but still livery, and the outfit had the air of a great lady's equipage.

She threw herself with zeal into her lessons; she improved vastly in her singing; her teachers agreed that she had a superb voice. How could they do otherwise when the pupil was so beautiful and the paymaster so rich? She improved, too, with her sketching, which she found as "easy as A.B.C." In the light of Sir William's approving smile, she jotted down on paper the outline of the great mountain, which was expected to erupt at any moment. Vesuvius, dark in the brilliant light, sending forth gusts of black smoke, rising gaunt and bare from fields of lava and opulent harvests of grain and vines, was an odd subject for the fair amateur's uncertain pencil; but everything she did pleased.

Every available artist painted her portrait; a favourite pose was that of a Bacchante, and Italian admirers declared that she was exactly like those classic nymphs, attendant on the god of Wine, whose laughing faces, after the oblivion of hundreds of years, had been discovered beneath the roots of vines in the fields around the city; she was also compared to the famous Ariadne, with the firm outline, with the perfect features so voluptuously curved; a different Ariadne from that painted by George Romney.

Every Sunday Sir William took his charmer to Caserta, where among the fragrancies of orange and melon, of rose and lily, amid the sounds of mandolines and guitars, Emma was ogled and quizzed, flattered and praised; there she listened to the elegancies of the Austrian Prince who assured her that she was "a diamond of the first water and the finest creature on earth," and who, in the correct manner of a cicisbeo attended her to her concerts, to her bath, to her promenade.

All this excitement she wrote about in her letter of August 1st to Charles Greville. But with the cries of triumph were mingled cries of heartbreak. He had written to her at last, and not kindly, but rather with the impatience of a man bored with sentimentality and romance. He had told her bluntly that never could she be his again and that she must "oblige Sir William" and think herself fortunate for the opportunity of doing so. Emma replied in the tone of a Clarissa Harlowe.

Nothing could express her rage; she was all madness; he, who used to envy her smile, to advise her with cool indifference, to give herself to another man! It was too much; she suggested dreadful alternatives—if she were with him, she would murder him and slay herself; she would not have a farthing from either of the gentlemen, she would return to London and kill herself with excess of vice; her fate was a warning to young women who tried to be "good."

Greville had taught her the ways of virtue, and then cast her off again on to the path of vice. A girl that a King was sighing for to be so lightly dismissed! But she would not complain—it was enough she had the paper he had written on, the wafer that he had licked: "How I envy thee! To take the place of Emma's lips"—she would give worlds if she had had that kiss. But she could not rage long; she had a cold which made her feel very ill; besides, there was her brilliant success to write about, there was a charming present to acknowledge: "I am glad you have sent me a blue hat and gloves. My hat is universally admired through Naples."

Then a sigh of good-humoured resignation. The young love was gone—why, she must sell herself to the old man, but perhaps on her own terms. She ended her letter with the sentence: "If you affront me, I will make him marry me. God bless you for ever."