Sir William

by David Stacton

Pardon me, my Lord [wrote Troubridge]. It is my sincere esteem for you that makes me mention it. I know you can have no pleasure sitting up all night at cards; why, then, sacrifice your health, comfort, purse, ease, everything, to the customs of a country where your stay cannot be long? Your Lordship is stranger to half that happens, or the talk it occasions; if you knew what your friends feel for you, I am sure you would cut all the nocturnal parties. Lady H’s character will suffer, nothing can prevent people from talking. A gambling lady, in the eye of an Englishman, is lost.

  Nelson was a little man neither to his followers nor his friends. It was only his superiors who diminished him, as best they were able. He forgave the admonition, for gambling did not bore him.

  “Why do you interest yourself in such things?” he asked.

  “I don’t. They interest me,” said Emma, and shoved another pile of ducats down. “Besides, it is the fashion,” she explained, lost, and paid up—with his money.

  She paid up with a good deal of it, and there were other drains upon his pocket, which in optimum case was not so deep as a well but more like a cistern, being replenished from above when he rained money into it, rather from below by the cool crystal springs of a private income. Graffer, having no English garden to play with any more, Nelson sent him off to Bronte to organize an English farm as an example to the Sicilians of the singular excellence of nonvinous agriculture.

  “I hope the news of the Dukedom,” wrote Fanny, “is true, if you have money given to support the rank.” Since he had not, he planted seven hundred acres to corn and watched Emma gamble.

  “They have everything in common,” said Damas, a damned Frenchman, “money, faults, vanities, wrongdoing of every kind.”

  “Her rage is play, and Sir William says when he dies she will be a beggar,” reported Lady Minto.

  *

  For New Year’s there were fetes, but it was New Year’s of 1800, and a century is more solemn than a year, for it is a kind of swivel which allows us to whirl either way, forward or back. A number of attitudes were permissible, so long as they were neither shown nor voiced and so long as they were not Emma’s.

  A little solemnly, like guests at a ball, waiting for the doors to the supper room to be folded back, perspiring from the crush of their exertions, they watched to see what would be given them as room and reward. For they expected empty rooms, prepared for them to enter. They would saunter in at the proper time:

  —and, a little solemnly, having defended themselves stubbornly thus far, they prepared to fall back upon the ultimate room, the chamber in which they would die;

  —or, securely, from boxes of rank and station, they waited, like grandparents, to see the new child, who might or might not be worth a christening mug;

  —or, anyhow, the guns in the harbor fired a salute, the churches, despite the snows, were warm inside—the glass in their windows steamy—and there were midnight masses as well as singing in the streets.

  A yellow rocket arched, sprang into bloom, and with the century it died. A cold wind blew through the gardens, like change, and roused thereby a whirl of snow and dead leaves, a sort of fetch.

  Clocks chimed. There was a pause. The doors to the supper room were folded back. But there was no change, and, a little stiff, Miss Knight, who had been asked to the party, shook out her skirt and let out her breath and said “Well!”

  It was over with. The world was still there. The millennialist must change his plans. And yet his defeat did not make them that more the festive. The night was cloudy and dark, the rockets now seemed to explode anticlimactically, and the Hamiltons and Nelson went home early.

  At the rear of the Palazzo Palagonia, a terrace overlooked the sea, which was black but empty except for the flare of a single fishing boat rocking up and down not far out.

  “Well, what will it bring?” asked Nelson as they stood there peering toward the horizon, each looking ahead from a different age, a different altitude; each having climbed a different height in time.

  “Oh all sorts of good things, I expect,” said Emma. “Doesn’t it always?” She was thirty-five and now faced life head on, for now neither profile was the better one; they had both aged, so she favored neither side.

  “I meant what will it be like?” said Nelson, taking her hand. He was forty-two, little had been granted him in the human way as yet, and New Year’s is a lonely time. He felt cold.

  Emma, who had an impulse to turn back, and who was besides both compassionate and sorry, took one of Sir William’s hands in her free one and squeezed it confidingly.

  But Sir William, who was seventy and could see farther than either of them and had taken Nelson’s question seriously, looked out over the sea and said, “Whatever else it will be, it will be vulgar.” New children are always vulgar, for if they are not vulgar, they are not children—and an old man will put up with much for the pleasure of congenial company—and besides, it would not be for long.

  Emma, who had felt the sudden chill, asked to withdraw indoors.

  “Take her,” said Sir William. “I would like to remain outdoors a while.” For though the society of others enhances our knowledge of them, if we would know ourselves, we must isolate the beast and contemplate him, enlarged, at our leisure.

  He stood respectfully before the view, his hands folded, his legs apart, at rest, and realized—as soon as his thoughts had roiled up into some temporary identity before scattering again—that he had been remembering that in Apollonius of Tyana, and other authors, we may read that sometime in the late spring, the beginning of the old Pagan year, a voice had been heard across these waters, crying, “Great Pan is dead,” and that the sound of that lament had lingered over the sea for a long time. Indeed, he could hear it now; and that when Anthony was at last put down by Octavian’s favorite, there was heard in the streets of Alexandria the ghostly music, the sistrums and the tambours and syrinxes of the old gods, deserting him.

  Yes, it would be a vulgar century.

  Nelson, who had been gone for no little time, came out to join him. Sir William had thought he would. Poor man, no doubt he was puzzled, for he needed them both, a quite natural thing but not to the morality of a clergyman’s son, for to the clergy, nothing is natural.

  Since Nelson did not speak, it occurred to Sir William to wonder what he saw out there. Not Great Pan or the gods of Alexandria leaving, certainly. But he might very well be catching a glimpse of the glitter of the fairies moving off down the trod, for he was a Norfolk man, and Norfolk folk were often fey.

  Sir William did not know whether it was the irreality or the reality of the world which pleased him more, but since the two alternate so rapidly as to form what seems a continuous image, perhaps it did not matter. He was by no means dissatisfied. We admire the whole, accept both, and pick our own way to our own death, though it is possible to wave to each other through the trees. It is an autumn ramble. The leaves are marvelous colors. The air is bracing. So why hurry?

  But a glass of brandy at three in the morning would, on this occasion, do no harm.

  *

  New Year’s, it is worse than a birthday, thought Emma. One does not always wish to sleep alone.

  “Would you ever,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “and I thought it was to be only a sketch.” She was pleased as punch and just as jocular. She had attained to the quality; she had had her portrait done, proper, in a miniature.

  It was Sir William’s New Year’s gift. He had had all four of them done: Nelson in profile, plump, hideous, in the Sicilian taste; Emma all Sir Peter Lely—for it was a provincial place, Palermo, and the old styles die hard—with blue skin, breasts like honeydews, pretty in the face, and fashionably tousled hair; himself, well—“Ah yes,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “that’s himself”—a face which in Reynolds’ day had been thrifty but dreaming and sad, was now sad but certain. It was odd. Mrs. Cadogan and he, they were dissimilar, but they both had the same look. They had both been watchers.

  “Ma, you do look a perfect badger,” said
Emma.

  The badger is a neat and tidy animal, and what is past is past. “It was my best dress,” said Mrs. Cadogan. It had been her best mobcap, too.

  The thing they had in common, Emma saw, was that they could both outstare you. She became evasive. “Nelson looks shocking, and I look a fright,” she said. “Would packed ice help, do you suppose?”

  “Silly girl, where would you get ice here?” Mrs. Cadogan took her own miniature and said good night, put the miniature away, took it out, went to bed, blew the candle out and went to sleep assuaged. Sir William, when he thought of it, always did the right thing, which was more than she could say for some she knew, even if sometimes it did take him twenty years.

  *

  Unfortunately the future is soon enough that imaginary time, the present, which is neither here nor there, but painted on the fore edge, and so, unless you know the trick, invisible. The present is only a riptide between two seas, a consequence of the past, dangerous, given to froth, or else invisible. The present looks placid, but has the strength to drag us down.

  Sir William was in a jitter about finances. No sense could be made of Greville, and since teeth cannot be extracted at a distance, it was necessary to return to England to procure cash. But that was a voluntary excursion. This was worse.

  “I have been recalled,” said Sir William bleakly; he could face ingratitude, but not impertinence. “How can they? I have been here for thirty-six years.”

  He had not only become Italianized, but italicized. And now, to be dismissed with bad spelling, without so much as a nota bene.

  “I shall protest to the dear Queen,” said Emma, who felt herself suddenly cast out again, a feeling she had forgotten for years.

  “My dear, I am still a British subject. I can be subjected to any indignity my government pleases. That is all the term means.”

  “But we could stay on here.”

  “We are people of position. What sort of people do you suppose we would become, if position we had none? We should not exist. We should be nonentities.”

  Emma went to the Queen. “She is half dead with grief,” she said, when she came back.

  “How unlike her. She so seldom does anything by halves.”

  “She says she will try to persuade the King to write to England on our behalf. Who are they sending out?”

  “A young man named Paget. He is the son of Lord Uxbridge.”

  “It is Lock, depend upon it,” said Emma. “He has been our undoing. I should never have caught him with all that furniture, and he should never have grown side whiskers.”

  The King, however, would do anything to thwart his wife, and so did nothing to help. Sir William did not come to hunt often enough these days, and when he did he was such a shambles there was no fun in him any more.

  “Yesterday, on your departure,” wrote the Queen, “I endured a scene of frenzy, shouts, and shrieks, threats to kill you, throw you out the window, call your husband to complain you had turned your back. I am extremely unhappy, and with so many troubles I have only two alternatives, either to go away or die of sorrow. The accursed Paget is in Vienna.”

  It was where Lord Elgin had paused earlier; it seemed to be where the devil stopped to change horses. Maria Carolina had even tried the kid gloves, but to no avail. Sir William was old. He did not shoot with a steady arm. He must go. And besides, Lady Hamilton had turned her back on His Majesty as recently as the last time he had pinched her, which was eight years ago.

  “Furthermore,” said Ferdinand, “I am no longer moved by white kid gloves,” and flung them in her face.

  “Den Dank, Dame, begehr’ ich nicht!” For of course he knew the literature of his fetish and had been saving this for years. At last he had spoken German to her. He was not deceived. Sir William was used up, that woman now ran everything, and what was worse, was a friend of the Queen. So let her leave. It was one of those periods when Ferdinand’s affections for his wife were in their waning phase.

  “Und verläβt sie zur selben Stunde,” said the Queen, her worst fears realized.

  Sir William was not surprised. The last three battu had been held without him.

  “But what are we to do?” wailed Emma.

  “Why, make the best of things,” said Sir William. “We were going home for a visit anyway; and perhaps when the fishing season comes around again, so will he, for I can still fish.”

  He had no desire to show his chagrin, which was scarcely in a fit state to be shown. It is so with all our emotions: when we feel them is not the time to show them, for they are not then at their best. They are then as useless as a shriveled balloon. It is only inflation makes them presentable.

  “We will return,” he said, with absolute certainty, since he did not believe they would. “Do not fret. And as for that, we are not yet gone. But I wish Nelson were not at Malta.”

  So did Nelson. He applied for leave to return to Palermo. His health demanded it, he said. Troubridge called him a fool direct. Ball wrote to Emma. But go he must. If it was not his health, it was the Goddess Hygeia, demanded him back.

  “All I shall say is to express my extreme regret that your health should be such as to oblige you to quit your station off Malta,” said Keith, his superior, who knew all about the Goddess Hygeia and did not like her. Health, to a well-bred Englishman, is always an unwholesome thing.

  “She sits at the councils and rules everybody and everything,” reported Lady Minto.

  Lord Spencer, the Admiralty Lord, was plainer. “Having observed that you have been under the necessity of quitting your station off Malta on account of your health—which I am persuaded you could not have thought of doing without such necessity—it appeared to me much more advisable for you to come home at once than to be obliged to remain inactive at Palermo. I am joined in the opinion by all your friends here that you will be more likely to recover your health and strength in England than in an inactive situation at a foreign court, however pleasing the respect and gratitude shown to you for your services may be.”

  “It does not seem clear whether he will go home,” said Lord Minto. “He does not seem at all conscious of the sort of discredit he has fallen into, or the cause of it, for he still writes, not wisely, about Lady H. and all that. But it is hard to condemn and use ill a hero, as he is in his own element, for being foolish about a woman who has art enough to make fools of many wiser than an admiral.”

  “Gossip makes the same ripples, no matter what the stone,” wrote Fanny to her son Josiah, who had written to her about Nelson.

  Josiah should be beaten with his own broomstick, on his own behind. Could none of them understand friendship?

  Apparently not.

  “Our private characters are to be stabbed in the dark,” said Emma, denying everything, and besides, nothing had happened yet. She had been given the Cross of Malta and was now a Chanoiness of that order. Nelson had arranged it, and the Queen was having the order itself set in diamonds for her.

  “Mr. Paget is to come by land,” wrote Fanny. “I have seen some of his plate, which is fine, but there is not much of it.”

  “Give my love to Lady Minto and kiss the children for your sincere and attached Emma,” wrote Emma, to Lord Minto.

  “Indeed you shall not,” said Lady Minto, who had a horror of disease. “She is a hussy. It would not be safe. Who knows whose lips those lips have touched? It would be better to burn the infected thing.”

  Minto smiled and filed the letter away.

  *

  “Is it a letter from your wife?” asked Emma. “What does she say?”

  “That everyone is ill,” Nelson told her, with a grimace. “It is what she always says. She is a born nurse. She haunts the wards. Lord St. Vincent has the stone; Susannah has fever in the bowels. My father is not well. Captain Pearson has died on his way home from Honduras, of yellow fever; and she has even been to Admiral Bligh, who says that yellow fever is indeed dreadful. He is the breadfruit tree man. She writes these notes to cheer me.”
<
br />   “One would expect her to dwell upon the cheerful side of things.”

  Nelson should not have spoken so of his wife, but he felt bitter. “Oh, she dwells there, all right, but her visits are paid to the other side of the house. It is about her visits she writes principally.”

  “I believe Mrs. Walpole will give me up for being too humdrum,” wrote Fanny. It was damnable. To love another man’s wife is, in the proper circles, customary; to love one’s best friend’s wife reduces her to Bathsheba at once. Why did Emma have to look at him that way?

  *

  She was only idly wondering. She could not be called scheming, ever. It was merely that, a starfish, she had been born with an instinct as to which rock to cling to and in which storm, so as not to be overwhelmed. A spume of indignation might flare forty feet into the air, but still, there she was, clinging, snug and safe. In calmer seas she swam pleasantly, involuntarily, with the tide, which drew her on.

  She dropped her eyes. She had been worrying about whether or not Sir William could survive an English winter. If he could not, what then?

  “Do you realize,” she said, “that Acton has married his thirteen-year-old niece, during Carnival. Why on earth would he do that? He is sixty-four.”

  “Why, to save appearances, I expect,” said Sir William luxuriously. “He had been a bachelor too long, a phenomenon imperfectly understood in this country, but finally tumbled to. No doubt people were beginning to talk.” To be twice Emma’s age was bad enough; to be five times as old as one’s wife could scarcely admit of comment.

  “He says he wishes to retire with her to England.”

  “Now whyever would he do that?” asked Sir William, genuinely surprised, “when he can quite easily go into hiding here until the girl is of age and the whole thing looks respectable?”

  “It will make the Queen feel her age.”

  “No doubt it makes Sir John feel his,” said Sir William, speaking from certainty. “Paget has arrived in Naples and wants my house here. I told him he could not have it, as I meant to return next winter.”