Story of My Life Part 44

"There was a poor woman whose son was dreadfully ill, and she wanted to get him a doctor; but somehow, instead of going for the doctor, she fell asleep, and _dreamt_ that her son was ill, and that she was going for the doctor. She went first (in her dream) to the house of the first physician in the town, but, when she arrived, the door was crowded with a number of pale beings, who were congregating round it, and calling out to those within. So the woman asked them what they were, and they said, 'We are the spirits of those who have been killed by the treatment of this doctor, and we are come to make him our reproaches.' So the woman was horrified, and hurried away to the house of another doctor, but there she found even more souls than before; and at each house she went to, there were more and more souls who complained of the doctors who had killed them. At last she came to the house of a very poor little doctor who lived in a cottage in a very narrow dirty street, and there there were only two souls lamenting. 'Ah!'

she said, 'this is the doctor for me; for while the others have killed so many, this good man in all the course of his experience has only sent two souls out of the world.' So she went in and said, 'Sir, I have come to you because of your experience, because of your great and just reputation, to ask you to heal my son.' As she talked of his great reputation the doctor looked rather surprised, and at last he said, 'Well, madam, it is very flattering, but it is odd that you should have heard so much of me, for I have only been a doctor _a week_.' Ah! then you may imagine what the horror of the woman was--he had only been a doctor a week, and yet he had killed two persons!... So she awoke, and she did not go for a doctor at all, and her son got perfectly well."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROMAN THEATRE, ARLES.[227]]

In May we went to spend a week at Mentone, seeing old haunts and old friends; thence also I went for three days with Lady Grey to S. Remo, where we drew a great deal, but I did not then greatly admire S. Remo.

We stayed a few days at Arles, where M. and Madame Pinus, the landlord of the H?tel du Nord and his wife, had become quite intimate friends by dint of repeated visits. Each time we stayed at Arles we made some delightful excursion: this time we went to S. Gilles. Then by a lingering journey, after our fas.h.i.+on of the mother's well-days, loitering to see Valence and Rochemaure, we reached Geneva, where we had much kindly hospitality from the family of the Swiss pasteur Vaucher, with whose charming daughter we had become great friends at Mentone two years before. We were afterwards very happy for a fortnight in the pleasant Pension Baumgarten at Thun, and went in _einspanners_ in glorious weather to Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald. On our way north, we lingered at Troyes, and I also made a most interesting excursion from Abbeville to St. Riquier and the battlefield of Crecy, where the old tower from which Edward III. watched the battle still stood,[229] and the cross where the blind King of Bohemia fell amid the corn-lands.

[Ill.u.s.tration: H?TEL DU MAUROY, TROYES.[228]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE KING OF BOHEMIA'S CROSS, CRECY.[230]]

It was the 9th of June when we reached Holmhurst, and on the 15th I went to Arthur Stanley's house at Oxford for the Commemoration, at which the lately married Prince and Princess of Wales were present, she charming all who met her as much by her simplicity as by her grace and loveliness. "No more fascinating and lovely creature," said Arthur, "ever appeared in a fairy-story." Mrs. Gladstone was at the Canonry and made herself very pleasant to everybody. "Your Princess is so lovely, it is quite a pleasure to be in the room with her," I heard her say to the Prince of Wales. "Yes, she really is _very_ pretty," he replied.

Afterwards I went to stay with Miss Boyle, who had lately been "revived," and it was a most curious visit. Beautiful still, but very odd, she often made one think of old Lady Stuart de Rothesay's description of her--"Fille de V?nus et de Polichinelle."

_To_ MY MOTHER.

"_Portishead, June 27, 1863._--Miss Boyle is quite br.i.m.m.i.n.g with religion, and, as I expected, entirely engrossed by her works. She preaches now almost every night. She began a sort of convertive talking instantly. She asked at once, 'Are you saved?' &c. She seems to have in everything 'une grande libert? avec Dieu,' as Madame de Glapion said to Madame de Maintenon. She thinks Arthur an infidel, and said that there had been a meeting of six thousand people at Bristol to pray that his influence at Court may be counteracted. Speaking of this, on the spur of the moment she had up the servants and prayed for 'our poor Queen, who is in ignorance of all these things.' Then, at great length, for me, 'Thy child and servant who is just come into this house.' She said she had put off her meeting for the next day on my account, but I begged that she would hold it, even though the bills were not sent out.

"On Friday she did not appear till one. We dined at three, and then an 'Evangelist' came in, who also asked at once 'if I was saved?'

and then knelt down and made a long prayer, 'O G.o.d, I thank Thee that I am a saved sinner,' with a sort of litany of 'Yes, bless the Lord,' from Miss Boyle. Then I was prayed for again: it felt very odd.

"Then we went off in a fly, with one of the maids and another Evangelist called Mr. Grub, a long drive through a series of country lanes to solitary farmhouses amongst the hills. It was like the description in 'The Minister's Wooing.' At one of the houses a young woman came out and said to me that she 'hoped we were one in Christ.'

"From a turn of the road I walked down to Pill, the rude town on the Avon where Miss Boyle preaches almost every evening to the wharfingers and sailors, nearly two hundred at a time. I saw her pulpit in the open air close to the river, with the broad reaches of the Channel and s.h.i.+ps sailing in behind it. When she preaches there it must be a very striking scene. Numbers of people crowded round to ask--'Isna Lady Boyle a cooming down?'--and all the little children, 'Is Lady Boyle a cooming? Tell us, Mister, where's Lady Boyle?'

"When we returned to the other village, St. George's, Miss Boyle and her maid were sitting on a well in an old farmhouse garden, singing beautiful revival hymns to a troop of mothers and little children, who listened with delight. As the crowd gathered, she came down, and standing with her back against the fly, beneath some old trees in the little market-place, addressed the people. Then Miss Boyle prayed; then the Evangelist preached. Then came some revival hymns from d.i.c.k Weaver's hymn-book. The people joined eagerly, and the singing was lovely--wild, picturesque choruses, constantly swelled by new groups dropping in. People came up the little lanes and alleys, listening and singing. Great waggons and luggage-vans pa.s.sing on the highroad kept stopping, and the carters and drivers joined in the song. At last Miss Boyle herself preached--most strikingly, and her voice, like a clarion, must have been audible all over the village. She preached on the ten lepers, and words never seemed to fail her, but she poured out an unceasing stream of eloquence, entreating, warning, exhorting, comforting, and ill.u.s.trating by anecdotes she had heard and from the experiences of her own life. The people listened in rapt attention, but towards the end of her discourse a quant.i.ty of guns and crackers were let off close by by agents of a hostile clergyman (Vicar of Portbury), and a fiddle interrupted the soft cadences of the singing. On this she prayed aloud for 'the poor unconverted clergyman, that G.o.d would forgive him,' but when she had done, the people sang one of Weaver's hymns, 'He is hurrying--he is hurrying--he is hurrying down to h.e.l.l.' Some of the clergy uphold her, others oppose. She has had a regular fight with this one. The meeting was not over till past nine; sometimes it lasts till eleven. The people did not seem a bit tired: I was, and very cold."

I seldom after this saw my old friend, Miss Boyle. I could not press her coming to Holmhurst, because she forewarned me that, if she came, she _must_ hold meetings in the village. A sister of John Bright declared, "I always agree with my old gardener, who says 'I canna abide a crowing hen';" and latterly I have been of much the same opinion.

We left home again for Italy on the 26th of October. In those days there was no railway across the Mont Cenis, but my mother enjoyed the _vetturino_ journey along the roads fringed with barberries. Beyond this, travelling became difficult, owing to the floods. At Piacenza we were all ejected from the train, and forced to walk along the line for a great distance, and then to cross a ford, which made me most thankful that my mother was tolerably well at the time.

JOURNAL.

"_Nov. 7, 1863._--We left Bologna at 5 A.M. In the journey to Vergato the colouring was beautiful, the amber and ruby tints of autumn melting into a sapphire distance. At Vergato we engaged the coup? of the diligence, and had a pleasant pa.s.sage over the Apennines, sometimes with four, sometimes with seven horses in the ascent. The richness of the autumnal glory was beyond description--a tossing torrent, rocky moss-grown forests of old oaks and chestnuts, their leaves golden in death: here and there thickets of holly and box: an old castle on a rock: a lonely old town (La Porretta) in a misty hollow: and then a grand view from the top of the pa.s.s over purple billowy mountains. The scenery becomes suddenly Italian--perfectly Italian--in the descent, cypresses and stone-pines, villas and towers, cutting the sky and relieved upon the delicate distance: and in the depth Pistoia, lying like a map, with dome and towers like a miniature Florence."

At the station of Ficulle near Orvieto, where the railway to the south came to an end altogether at that time, the floods were out all over the country, and there were no carriages--everything being quite disorganised. We arrived at a miserable little station, scarcely better than a small open shed, in torrents of rain, at twelve o'clock in the day, and had to wait till the same hour of the day following, when carriages would arrive from Orvieto. After some time my mother was conveyed to a wretched little inn, but it was necessary for some one to remain to guard the luggage, and knowing what a fearful hards.h.i.+p it would be considered by our cross-grained man-servant, John Gidman, I remained sitting upon it, without any food except a few biscuits, in pitch darkness at night, and with the swelching rain beating upon my miserable shed, for twenty-four hours. It was a very unpleasant experience.

[Ill.u.s.tration: S. FLAVIANO, MONTEFIASCONE.[231]]

When at length we got away, we had to take the road by Montefiascone and Viterbo, which was then almost untravelled, and the postboys took advantage of the utter loneliness of the road and disturbed state of the country to be most insolent in their demands for money. Sometimes they would stop altogether in a desolate valley and refuse to let their horses go an inch farther unless we paid a sort of ransom. On such occasions we always took out our books and employed ourselves till they went on from sheer weariness. We were never conquered, but it made the journey very anxious and fatiguing.

It was with real thankfulness that we reached Rome on November 12, and engaged the upper apartment of 31 Piazza di Spagna, our landlady being the pleasant daughter of Knebel the artist, who lived in some little rooms above us, with her brother t.i.to and her nurse Samuccia.

The first days at Rome this winter were absolute Elysium--the sitting for hours in the depth of the Forum, then picturesque, flowery, and "unrestored," watching the sunlight first kiss the edge of the columns and then bathe them with gold: the wanderings with different friends over the old mysterious churches on the Aventine and C?lian, and the finding out and a.n.a.lysing all their histories from different books at home in the evenings: the very drives between the high walls, watching the different effects of light on the broken tufa stones, and the pellitory and maiden-hair growing between them.

We were also especially fortunate this winter in our friends. At first I much enjoyed very long walks with a Mr.[232] and Mrs. Kershaw, who lived beneath us. Taking little carriages to the gates, we wandered forth to the Aqueducts and Roma Vecchia, where we spent the day in drawing and picking up marbles, not returning till the cold night-dews were creeping up from the valleys, and the peasants, as we reached the crowded street near the Theatre of Marcellus, were eating their fritture and chestnuts by lamplight, amid a jargon of harsh tongues and gathering of strange costumes.

We saw much of the handsome young Marchese Annibale Paolucci di Calboli, in the Guardia n.o.bile, whose wife was an old friend of early Hurstmonceaux days, and whose children, especially the second son, Raniero, have always remained friends of mine. This is the family mentioned by Dante in "Purgatorio," xiv.--

"Questo ? il Rinier; quest' ? il pregio e l'onore Della casa da Calboli."

Old Lady Wenlock[233] came to the H?tel Europa close beside us, and was a constant pleasure. My mother drove with her frequently. She scarcely ever said anything that was not worth observing, and her reminiscences were of the most various kinds. She it was who, by telling my mother of her own strong wish and that of other people to possess some of my sketches, first suggested the idea of selling my drawings. We amused ourselves one evening by putting prices on the backs of sketches of the winter--highly imaginative prices, as it seemed to us. Some time afterwards Lady Wenlock had a party, and asked for the loan of my portfolio to show to her friends: when they came back there were orders to the amount of ?60.

Other friends of whom we saw much this winter were old Lady Selina Bridgeman, sister of my mother's dear friend Lady Frances Higginson; and Lord and Lady Hobart. Lord Hobart was afterwards Governor of Madras, but at this time he was excessively poor, and they lived in a tiny attic apartment in the Via Sistina. At many houses we met the long-haired Franz Liszt, the famous composer, and heard him play. Mr. and Mrs.

Archer Houblon also were people we liked, and we were drawn very near to them by our common interest in the news which reached us just after our arrival in Rome of the engagement of Arthur Stanley, just after his appointment to the Deanery of Westminster, to Lady Augusta Bruce (first cousin of Mrs. Houblon), the person whom his mother had mentioned as the one she would most like him to marry.

A little before Christmas--a Christmas of the old kind, with a grand Papal benediction from the altar of St. Peter's--Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury, and his family came to Rome. With them I went many delightful expeditions into the distant Campagna: to Ostia, with its then still gorgeous marbles and melancholy tower and pine; to Castel Fusano, with its palace, like that of the Sleeping Beauty, rising lovely from its green lawns, with its pine avenue and decaying vases with golden-flowered aloes, and beyond all the grand old forest with its deep green recesses and gigantic pines and bays and ilexes, its deep still pools and its abysses of wood, bounded on one side by the Campagna, and on the other by the sea; to Collatia, with its woods of violets and anemones, and its purling brook and broken tower; to Cerbara, with its colossal caves and violet banks, and laurustinus waving like angels'

wings through the great rifts; to Veii, with its long circuit of ruins, its tunnelled Ponte Sodo and its mysterious columbarium and tomb.

Another excursion also lives in my mind, which I took with Harry and Albert Bra.s.sey, when we went out very early to Frascati, and climbed in the gorgeous early morning to Tusculum, where the little crocuses were just opening upon the dew-laden turf, and then made our way across hedge and ditch to Grotta Ferrata and its frescoes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OSTIA.[234]]

I have always found--at Rome especially--that the pleasantest way is to see very little, and to enjoy that thoroughly. "Je n'avale pas les plaisirs, je sais les go?ter."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THEATRE OF TUSCULUM.[235]]

In the spring our sketchings and excursions were frequently shared by our cousins, Maria and Mary Shaw-Lefevre, who came to Rome with their maternal aunt, Miss Wright, whom I then saw for the first time, but who afterwards became the dearest of my friends--a nominal "Aunt Sophy," far kinder and far more beloved than any real aunt I have ever known.

But most of all does my remembrance linger upon the many quiet hours spent alone with the mother during this winter, of an increasing communion with her upon all subjects, in which she then, being in perfect health, was able to take an active and energetic interest.

Especially do I look back to each Sunday afternoon pa.s.sed in the Medici Gardens, where she would sit on the sheltered sunny seats backed by the great box hedges--afternoons when her gentle presence, when the very thought of her loved existence, made all things sweet and beautiful to me, recalling Cowper's lines--

"When one that holds communion with the skies Has filled her urn where these pure waters rise, And once more mingles with us meaner things, 'Tis e'en as if an angel shook his wings; Immortal fragrance fills the circuit wide, And tells us whence her treasures are supplied."

These afternoons with the mother are my real Roman memories of 1863-64--not the hot rooms, not the evening crowds, not the ceremonies at St. Peter's!

This year I greatly wished something that was not compatible with the entire devotion of my time and life to my mother. Therefore I smothered the wish, and the hope that had grown up with it. Those things do not--cannot--recur.

One day in the spring, mother and I drove to our favourite spot of the Acqua Acetosa, and walked in the sun by the muddy Tiber. When we came back, we found news that Aunt Esther was dead. She had never recovered a violent cold which she caught when lying for hours, in pouring rain, upon her husband's grave. Her death was characteristic of her life, for, with the strongest sense of duty and a determination to carry it out to the uttermost, no mental const.i.tution can possibly be imagined more happily constructed for self-torment than hers. My mother grieved for her loss, and I grieved that my darling had sorrow.... How many years of heartburnings and privation are buried for ever out of sight in that grave! _Requiescat in pace._ I believe that I have entirely forgiven all the years of bitter suffering that she caused me. "He who cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he must pa.s.s himself: for every man hath need to be forgiven," was a dictum of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. I believe that I really feel this; still "les morts se pr?tent aux r?conciliations avec une extr?me facilit?," as Anatole France says.[236]

We did not go to many of the services. The most impressive processions we saw were really those of the bare-footed monks who followed the funerals, many hundreds of them, each with his lighted candle: we used to hear their howling chant long before they turned the corner of the Piazza di Spagna.

_To_ MY SISTER.

"_31 Piazza di Spagna, Rome, Feb. 1864._--Manning is indefatigable in proselytising. I once went to hear him preach at San Carlo: anything so _dull_, so wholly unimpa.s.sioned, I never heard. There was a great function at the Minerva the other day as a protest against Renan. Michelangelo's statue of Christ was raised aloft and illuminated. A Dominican friar preached, and in the midst of his sermon shouted, 'Adesso, fratelli miei, una viva per Ges? Cristo!'

and all the congregation shouted 'Viva.' And when he finished, he cried 'Adesso tre volte viva per Ges? Cristo!' and when they were given, 'E una viva di pi?,' just as if it were a toast. The Bambino of Ara C?li has broken its toe! It was so angry at the church door being shut when it returned from its drive, that it kicked the door till one of its toes came off, and the monks are in sad disgrace.

"The old Palace of the C?sars, as we have always called it, is being superseded by immense _scavi_, opened by the French Emperor in the Orti Farnesiani: these have laid bare such quant.i.ties of old buildings and pavements, that the Orti are now like a little Pompeii."

We left Rome before Easter, and spent it quietly at Albano, where we had many delightful days, with first the Hobarts and then the Leghs of Booths in our hotel, and I made charming excursions up Monte Cavi and round the lake of Nemi with Alexander Buchanan and the Bra.s.seys. On Good Friday there was a magnificent procession, the dead and bleeding Christ carried by night through the streets upon a bier, preceded and attended by monks and mutes with flaming torches, and followed by a wailing mult.i.tude. In the princ.i.p.al square the procession stopped, the bier was raised aloft, and while the torchlight flamed upon the livid features of the dead, a monk called upon the people to bear witness and to account for his "murder."

At Sorrento we spent a fortnight at the Villa Nardi, with its quiet orange-grove and little garden edged with ancient busts overlooking the sea. At Amalfi, the Alfords joined us. We went together to Ravello. I remember how the Dean insisted on calling the little dog that went with us from the inn "Orthodog," and another dog, which chose to join our company, "Heterodog," on the principle of Dr. Johnson, who explained the distinction by saying, "Madam, orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is any other person's doxy."

[Ill.u.s.tration: AMALFI.[237]]

As we returned through Rome we stayed at the Palazzo Parisani, and much enjoyed the luxury of the large cool rooms, where we lived chiefly on riccotta and lettices. One day as we came in, the porter gave us a black-edged letter. It was the news that poor "Italima" was released from all her sorrows. For my sister, to whom Madame de Trafford had written exactly foretelling what was going to happen, one could only give thanks (though she truly mourned her mother); but it was strangely solemnising receiving the news in "Italima's" own rooms, where we had seen her in her utmost prosperity. It was a fortnight before Esmeralda could send us any details.

"_34 Bryanston Street, May 9, 1864._--Your long-expected letter came this morning. I had been waiting for it every day, every hour.