Sir William

by David Stacton

  There was an earthquake in Calabria. Angelica Kauffmann painted Emma as the Comic Muse. Sir John Acton became the Neapolitan Prime Minister.

  “Sir John Acton,” Sir William explained, “is a man of great character, most of it bad. But though of an émigré family, he is an Englishman. He is competent, which is the next best thing to ability, and far rarer. He plans to reorganize the fleet.”

  Ferdinand assisted at the birth of a new age by founding a silk factory. There was a revolution in France, and refugees began to arrive, among them Madame Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, who painted Emma, not very well.

  Torn from her native Paris (it had seemed prudent to remove—she had no taste for painting commoners), Madame Lebrun did not care for much of anything. Indeed, even at home she had sometimes felt much the same way. She drew Emma as a bacchante. “As a bacchante,” she said tartly, “she is perfect.” The Queen, whom she also drew, did not speak quite flawless French, but was at least noble. Breeding counts. These things show, no matter what we do.

  *

  Emma decided to hurry things a little. Opposite her, Sir William was peeling a banana. She giggled reminiscently. Dressed and undressed, they are so different, which provides a key, but a key to a midnight lock only. To come and go freely by day, you need a skeleton key, and for this the best procedure is to take that wax impression called gossip, the one all-purpose key for all social occasions. The time and tide had come. It was to be taken at the flood.

  It was indeed a flood. It beached the most amazing mail—for the net was now visible—in handwriting which ranged from the flaccid to an angry scrawl knotted with rage.

  *

  His family heard the gossip first, which is to say his uncles, cousins and aunts. There were several disapproving screeds from his favorite niece Mrs. Dickenson, Mary Hamilton that was. What did this talk signify? Did he mean to disgrace them all? Let him disavow the rumor at once.

  “I am sorry,” said Sir William. “She is necessary to my happiness, and the handsomest, loveliest, cleverest and best creature in the world.”

  “I confess I doat on him,” wrote Emma to England, feeding the flames. “Nor I never can love any other person but him.” She was not lying. She believed it.

  As for the gossip, that was another thing. “I fear,” wrote Sir William, dipping his pen in cold water, to douse them, “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. Hitherto her conduct is irreproachable.”

  “It is said he has married her,” said Towneley.

  “I was most happy to hear that he was not married,” wrote Heneage Legge, a friend of Greville’s then passing through Naples, a man with a modest talent for social espionage. “However, he flung out some hints of doing justice to her good behaviour, if his public situation did not forbid him to consider himself an independent man. She gives everybody to understand that he is now going to England to solicit the King’s consent to marry her. She is much visited here by ladies of the highest rank, but wants a little refinement of manners.”

  “You need not be afraid for me in England. We come for a short time, to take our last leave,” Emma informed Greville.

  “They say they shall be in London by the latter end of May,” wrote Legge.

  The Duchess of Argyll, a relative by marriage, her first husband having been a Hamilton—the woman Emma had watched leaving George’s door—had come to Naples. She was one of the Gunning sisters, who had gone to London years before to make a good match, and besides, the Anglo-Irish are not so strict in particulars as their English cousins.

  “After all, William,” she said, “why not? She’s a likable creature, she does very well here, and we are not there.”

  Unfortunately the Duchess of Argyll died.

  “You may think of my afflictions when I heard of the Duchess of Argyll’s death. I never had such a friend as her, and that you will know, when I see you,” Emma wrote Greville.

  “Was I in a private station,” Sir William told Sir Joseph—that eminent botanist having asked, like everybody else—“I should have no objection that Emma should share with me le petit bout de vie qui me reste under the solemn convenant yon allude to. I have more fairly delivered you my confession than is usually done in this country, of which you may make any use you please. Those who ask out of mere curiosity, I would wish to remain in the dark.”

  In chains, on very thin gruel, preferably. It was the devil of a business, and how had it grown up round him so suddenly?

  “I shall allways esteem you for your relationship to Sir William, and having been the means of my knowing him,” Emma wrote Greville, with what was quite a pretty wit, though veiled.

  As a countermove, Mr. Legge persuaded Mrs. Legge to cut Emma dead, and sent the good news to Greville at once. (Now that the Duchess of Argyll was no more, the social maneuvers of Mrs. Legge might be assumed to loom large.)

  Mrs. L is not over scrupulous in her manners or sentiments beyond the usual forms established by the rules of society in her own country, but, as she was not particularly informed of any change in Mrs. H’s situation, she had no reason to think her present different from her former line of life, & therefore could not quite reconcile it to her feelings to accept those offers of friendship & service, though there was no doubt of their being kindly intended.

  Greville was gratified. “Mrs. L. has done the right thing,” he said.

  “No doubt she has, but it does not seem to have been enough to raise her from the obscurity of middle-class life,” said Towneley. “Pray, who is Mrs. L.?”

  “Mrs. Legge, of course.”

  Towneley did not ask who Mr. Legge was. To establish his credentials, he felt sure, would have meant a rummage at least three generations back, and he had not the time.

  The wife of the Spanish Ambassador paid a public call at the British Embassy, with as many contessas as she could assemble. Honor was at stake, and nobody much liked the British colony anyway, except for Sir William, of course, who was a dear.

  “I was staggered to hear them speak always in the plural, as we, us and ours,” wrote Legge.

  The Bishop of Derry, who was in Ireland for one of his rare ecclesiastical visitations, asked them to come there for a breather if they found the English air too thin. “Take her as anything but Mrs. Hart, and she is a superior being,” he said privately. “As for herself, she is always vulgar.” But he meant to back them up.

  “As I have experienced that of all women in the world, the English are the most difficult to deal with abroad,” wrote Sir William to his niece Mary, “I fear eternal tracasseries, was she to be placed above them here, and which must be the case, as a Minister’s wife in every country takes place of every rank of nobility.”

  He was thinking it over.

  As to our separating houses, we cant do it or why should we, you cant think 2 people that as lived five years in all the domestic happiness that is possible, can separate & those 2 persons that knows no other comfort but in one anothers company, which is the case I assure you with ous, tho you Bachelers don’t understand it, but you cant imagjine 2 houses must separate ous, no, it cant be, that you will be a judge of when you see us [wrote Emma to Greville, that most unhappy man].

  Like all expatriates, Sir William found it necessary to go home from time to time, in order to re-establish the validity of his reasons for staying away. And Greville was making a mash of the Welsh estates. So since they were now inseparable, they both went.

  *

  “Are you going to marry her?” demanded Sir William’s sister-in-law, point blank.

  “As a public character at Naples, I do not think it right to marry Mrs. Hart—from respect to my King.”

  His sister-in-law gave him a sensible-matron look. They had known each other too long for that sort of evasion. “Very proper. But I hope you think there is something owing to yourself.”

  “As to that, the first object is to be happy.”<
br />
  “It is,” said his sister-in-law, “not.” She had never before heard a doctrine so shocking.

  Mary Dickenson, having met Emma, felt otherwise.

  “I have always liked what you have written on a certain delicate subject, and you and I think very much alike,” said Sir William gratefully.

  *

  Emma had not much cared for the look of the cliffs at Dover. Like the English temperament, they may not be pure white, but they look white, and they have a cold and decided hauteur which does not welcome the invader. In Italy, she was what she was. Here she was only what she had come from. And besides, Italy was warmer.

  Sir William was annoyed. “Why should I not please her? She has pleased me. Besides, I do not exist solely that Charles may have his inheritance. That does not seem to have occurred to him.”

  Indeed it had not. For to Charles, everything in this world must have its reason, and in this matter he saw none.

  “She does not know,” said Mary Dickenson, who had asked Sir William and Emma to the country for the weekend, but spoke mostly to her uncle.

  “Doesn’t know what?”

  “Anything. She is innocent. But there is hope. Her left hand has been busy recently, and when it needs help, I suppose the right will have to know. So why not ask for it, when the time comes, and see?”

  “Mary!”

  “Why not? It is what you want to do, whether you know it or not. And I must confess that when I think how much it will displease Cousin Charles, I almost condone it.”

  In the young, impatience is merely anticipation; in the old, the knowledge that there is not much time left; in the world, both. But having enunciated this apothegm, Sir William found himself unwilling to be hustled along, though it was late to tarry. The first is done for us, and the second by us. Perhaps he merely wished to retain for as long as possible the illusion of choice.

  *

  “I hope,” said Mary’s husband to Emma, “that Sir William will find Emma and Lady H. the same.” For Mary’s husband was no fool either.

  *

  “I am very glad you have seen Sir W. Hamilton comfortably and had time for conversation, tho’ probably the Lady was in the way,” said Lady Frances Harper in a loud, shrill voice. “I believe it likely she may be our aunt. My mother seemed to fear it. Do you think it likely? I own I think not; for making a shew of her Graces and Person to all his acquaintance in Town does not appear a preliminary for marriage.”

  Whatever else one may say for it, this is not the tone in which one dissuades a distinguished, independent and famous relative from doing as he pleases.

  *

  Emma had gone off to see Romney, who felt less delighted than he had hoped to. She was not quite the same Emma, that was why.

  The English lack—their culture is based upon its absence—the bump of admiration. But she was the latest sensation, which is something else again. A sensation is permitted to wax warm, for it will pass. Her attitudes were unique. Her contralto was the correct oratorio rumble and left the stemware intact. The secret of her success was in request.

  “A particular friend of mine,” wrote Sir Thomas Lawrence, “promised to get me introduced to Sir. W. H.’s to see this wonderful woman you have doubtless heard of—Mrs. Hart.” He had been in London five years earlier when she was there, but apparently he had not heard of her then, or if he had, had not listened, the name then being as hard to catch as it was now impossible not to drop.

  “George, you may paint me as ‘The Ambassadress,’” said Emma, and preened.

  “I expect Sir Thomas will be doing that.” The only thing a really creative person has to teach is himself, and she had outgrown him; although it was very gratifying to have her call, and he would do the portrait, of course.

  “However did you guess? He has particularly demanded to take my likeness next week.”

  Lawrence, using an old canvas, daubed her in over an allegory of Liberality guided by Sagacity, a work by Reynolds. He was not without a sense of humor, and as he had supplanted Reynolds in other things, why not in this, as well?

  “Her acting was simple, grand, terrible and pathetic,” said Romney. But why, oh why must she act now, here in the studio, where once they had been content to play?

  Or maybe she could no longer help it.

  *

  Even Horace Walpole approved, that man who approbated only the Artificial and the Misses Berry. “I make amende honorable to Mrs. Hart,” he said. “Her Attitudes are a whole theatre of grace and various expressions.”

  “Everything she did was just and beautiful,” said the Duchess of Devonshire, “but her conversation, though perfectly good-natured and unaffected, was uninteresting, and her pronunciation very vulgar.”

  Who would think so much could come of a mere Attitude? Things were indeed coming on. And even George had cheered up, the silly old thing, and was painting her again as everything—as Joan of Arc, as Magdalen, as Constance. Only the King remained to be consulted.

  Hamilton waited upon him at Windsor. The result was a compromise. If the Queen would not receive her, the King would not object; if the King did not object, the Queen would not receive her. Thus whim and honor both were satisfied. A devoted couple, the Royal Pair were astute at compromise.

  “Sir William,” said Emma, “has proposed.”

  “To think that I should see the day,” said Mrs. Cadogan. She had not interfered. She had not hoped. She had been sure.

  “Oh the good, good man,” she added perfunctorily, and blew her nose.

  “And had I not something to do with it?” Emma was indignant.

  “Indeed you had, but that is not something a woman confesses to, if she be wise,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

  “I am glad,” said Lord Bristol, all Bishop of Derry again, and so appropriately benign, “that you have secured your own happiness.”

  “Sir William has actually married his gallery of statues. They are set out on their return to Naples,” wrote Horace Walpole, elaborating, even while he purified, his style. It was one of his celebrated letters, he had not as yet decided to whom.

  *

  And so he had, at Marylebone Church, in the presence of Lord Abercorn and the secretary to the British Minister to the Court of Savoy. Greville did not attend.

  If we do these things at all, we may just as well do them in church. But still, her sense of accomplishment, though concealed, diverted him, and since no man rushed into the church to show just cause, he went on with it and it was soon done. He had only wanted to give pleasure; therefore, the quicker out of England the better.

  With unusual prudence, Emma had signed the register with her name by birth. She wished to be sure.

  *

  She had brought it off. It felt much the same as not being married, only with something left out, but she was now secure. On the last day before they left, she posed for George once more.

  “Tell Hayley I am always reading his Triumphs of Temper. It was that that made me Lady H., for God knows I have had five years to try my temper,” she said. “I am afraid if it had not been for the good example Serena taught me, my girdle would have burst. If it had, I had been undone, for Sir W. minds temper more than beauty.”

  “Emma,” said George, painting a stranger. “The Gods have been kind to you. You have never been in love.”

  “I dote on Sir William,” said Emma indignantly, whom this one small point had perhaps been bothering.

  “Ah, that’s not loving,” said George. “That’s not the same thing at all. That only comes afterward, or without, or never.”

  He wanted to lay his brushes down. Spoiled by success? he thought. Nonsense, I was spoiled by my failure. We lose our talents when we lose heart, that’s all. It’s merely a matter of character. For most of us there comes a time, not when we wish to make little legends—we’re wiser than that—not to push away the bad things, but to soften their edges, to make an idyll out of pain, to show what it could have been, even to pretend that was the way it w
as. Or is. We enter into illusion the way a condemned man takes up residence in the death row. For who can paint against a spinning wheel?

  At least she was still loving. “George,” she said, “you shall come to Naples and paint me as often as you like. Would you enjoy that? It will be like old times.”

  “Yes, I should like that,” said George, and never saw her again.

  *

  On the last night of their stay, Sir William and she went to the theatre, where everyone ogled them and there was even a play for them to ogle. The leading actress was Jane Powell. Emma did not tell Sir William who Jane Powell was, but went backstage after the performance, by herself, to meet her; and then the congratulations were truly meaningful, or at any rate their meaning was underlined, overscored, kept private and enhanced, for they had been fellow servants at Dr. Budd’s in the old days, Jane Powell and she. Tears, joy, accomplishment, were all their conversation.

  “I always said you did not lack ability,” said Jane Powell, speaking as one woman to another, which is to say as a professional actress.

  “And I, that you were then my ideal,” said Emma, relaxed and therefore plainly lying.

  “I knew,” said Jane Powell, simply.

  “Your rise, though rapid, even to the callow eye of youth, was yet predictable,” said Emma.

  So since Jane knew and Emma had risen, they corresponded for a year or two, in the moistest of terms. It does not do to lose touch with old friends, and besides, the acting profession is uncertain.

  IV

  USUALLY DURING AN INTERREGNUM, it is the King who leaves, the people who stay behind. But in France, it was the people who had flocked out of the capital to hiss and boo and gouge each other’s eyes out; the King and Queen who had been left stranded.

  Through the streets of Paris, His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Court of the Two Sicilies clattered over the cobbles toward modern times. The King and Queen had tried to flee, but had been hauled back from Varennes to promulgate the Constitution; a symbolic scene, which is to say, the Constitution was handed to the King, the King handed the Constitution to the members of the National Assembly, and the National Assembly kept it. As for the people themselves, they were not present, but off somewhere looting houses, rioting for bread, and shouting Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité: Liberté, because it belongs in a straitjacket, or at any rate a lot of people who did were clearly at liberty; Égalité, because it does not exist, for we are not born equal—a few of us are born with brains; Fraternité, because though it is an amiable notion, no one practices it, least of all the French. Give them a fine phrase, and the people will die for it, whereas no one will fight for a good dinner, and if he has one, is too comfortable to do so.