Part 32

His look was something to be remembered. His son was in a Berlin University, and Mrs. Ashley and her two young daughters would sail on September 15th for Liverpool, intending to go thence to Germany. They would remain there for two years.

On the morrow, we had a letter from him, notifying us that they had exchanged the date of sailing for October 15th, and the boat for the _City of Berlin_, in which we were to sail.

“A trifling delay of twenty-one years!” observed my husband, philosophically. “If all human projects came as near prompt fulfilment as that, there would be fewer grumblers.”

We took with us our three children and my maid, who had been the boy’s nurse. In _Loiterings in Pleasant Paths_, written in part while we sojourned abroad, she figures as “The Invaluable.” Never was title more justly earned. In that book the events of the next two years are recorded at greater length than they could be set down here.

I made no note there of the pain that seemed to pluck out our heartstrings, consequent upon our parting with our Newark parish and fellow-citizens. We had grown with the place, which was a mere village, eighteen years ago, by comparison with the large city we left. Her interests were ours. Doctor Terhune was identified with her public and private enterprises, and known by sight and by reputation throughout the town and its environs. His church stubbornly refused to consider his resignation as final. He might have an indefinite leave of absence—two, four, six years—provided he would engage to come to them when he could bring me back well. He wisely refused to listen to the proposal. The business quarter of the thriving city was encroaching upon the neighborhood of the church. It was likely to be abandoned as “a residential locality” within a few years. In which event, the removal of building and congregation would be a necessity. The history of such changes in the character of sections of fast-enlarging cities is familiar to all urbanites. It was essential, in the opinion of the retiring incumbent, that the church should select another pastor speedily, if it would retain its integrity and identity.

The love and loyalty that had enveloped us, like a vitalizing atmosphere, for almost a score of winters and summers, wrapped us warmly to the last. There were public receptions and private house-parties, by the dozen, and

“Partings such as press The life from out the heart,”—

and a gathering on the steamer on sailing-day that made us homesick in anticipation of the actual rending of ties that were living flesh and blood—and we were afloat.

As one of the leading men in the church shook my husband’s hand, in leaving the deck, he pressed into it an envelope. We were well down the bay when it was opened. It contained a supplementary letter of credit of three thousand dollars—the farewell gift of a few men whose names accompanied the token.

“Faithful to the end!” murmured the recipient, reading the short list through mists that thickened between his eyes and the paper. “Had ever another man such a parish?”

I answered “No!” then, emphatically.

My response would be the same to-day.

XLIV

TWO YEARS OVERSEAS—LIFE IN ROME AND GENEVA

THE main events of the two years spent abroad by our small family, including “The Invaluable,” as we soon came to call Rose O’Neill, are set down in _Loiterings in Pleasant Paths_, a chatty volume of travel and sojourn, published soon after our return to America. The private record of those two dozen months would far surpass the book in bulk. It will never be written except as it is stamped upon “the fleshly tables of the hearts” of those who lived and loved, studied, and revelled with us.

We had meant to pass the first winter in Paris, but the most beautiful city of the world was unfriendly to my sore and aching lung. After an experiment of six weeks, we broke camp and sped southward. Ten days in the fair Florence I was to learn in after years to love as a second home, repeated the doleful tale of fog, rain, and chill that pierced our bones.

An old Richmond friend, with whom I had had many a jolly frolic in my early girlhood, was now Reverend Doctor Taylor, a resident of Rome. After the exchange of several letters, we adopted his friendly advice that we should give the Eternal City a trial as the refuge we sought—so much less hopefully than at first, that I entreated my husband, on the rainy evening of our arrival in Rome, not to push inquiries further, but to let me go home, and die in comfort there.

Doctor Taylor had ordered rooms for us in a family hotel well spoken of by Americans, and was at the station to conduct us to our quarters.

I was deposited upon a sofa, when my wraps were removed, and lay there, fairly wearied out by the railway journey. The room was fireless and carpetless. I could feel the chill of the stone flooring and the bare walls through the blankets in which I was swathed by distressful Rose, who “guessed these Eyetalians hadn’t the first notion of what American comfort is!” Three long French casements afforded a full view of leaden, low-stooping skies and straight sheets of rain. When a fire of sticks, besmeared with resin, was coaxed into a spiteful flare, the smoke puffed as spitefully into the room, and drifted up to the ceiling twenty feet overhead. Invited by my ever-hospitable husband to seat himself near an apology for a cheery hearthstone—less pitiful to him after his ten years’ residence in Italy than to us, the new arrivals—our friend fell into social chat of ways and means. The carpet would be down to-morrow; the sun would shine to-morrow; I would be rested to-morrow.

He broke off with a genial laugh there, to impart a bit of information we were to prove true to the utmost during the next year:

“Everything is ‘_domano_’ with Italians. I think the babies are born with it in their mouths. One falls into the habit with mortifying ease.”

I am afraid I dozed for a few minutes, lulled by the patter of rain and the low-toned talk going on at the far (literally) side of the apartment. A lively visitor used to wonder if we “could see across it on cloudy days without an opera-glass.”

This was the next sentence that reached me:

“Thus far, we have met with discouragement. March is the most trying month to weak lungs in America. And ever since we landed in Liverpool we have had nothing but March weather. I think now we shall push on to Algiers”—glancing ruefully at the murky windows. “Upon one thing I am determined—to find a land where there is no March, as we know the month. For one year I want to secure that for my wife’s breathing apparatus.”

“I know of but one such region.” The answer was in the slight drawl natural to the George Taylor I used to know; the speaker stared sombrely into the peevish fire.

“And that?” interrogated the other, eagerly.

The drawl had now a nasal touch befitting the question:

“‘No chilling winds, no poisonous breath Can reach that healthful shore!’”

“Heavens and earth, man! _That_ is just where I don’t want her to go yet! Nor for many a long year!”

The laugh I could not suppress helped to warm and brighten us all. Do any of us suspect how much we owe to the funny side of life?

Thus began my Roman winter. With “_domano_” came the sunshine and the carpet, and the first of the hundred drives in and about the storied city, that were to bring healing and vigor, such as even my optimistic husband had scarcely dared to anticipate. That I am alive upon this wonderful, beautiful earth at this good hour, I owe, under God, to those divine four months among the Seven Hills. Doctor Terhune had received the appointment to the Chaplaincy of the American Chapel in Rome before we left Paris. He decided to accept it within a week after our arrival in the Eternal City. It was a cosey corner for pastor and flock—that little church in Piazza Poli, belonging to an Italian Protestant corporation, and occupied by them for half of each Sunday, by American tourists and transient residents of Rome for the other half. All my memories of the wonderful and bewitching winter are happy. None have a gentler charm than those which renew the scenes of quiet Sunday forenoons when visitors from the dear home-land, who had never before looked upon the faces of their fellow-worshippers, gathered by common consent in the place “where prayer was wont to be made” in their own tongue. There were no strangers in the assembly that lingered in the tiny vestibule and blocked the aisle when the service was over. The spirit of mutual helpfulness spoke in eye and speech. It should not have been considered singular that those thus convened were, almost without exception, refined and educated, and so unlike the commonly accepted type of travelling American, that we often commented upon the fact in conferences with familiar friends. We felicitated ourselves that we caught the cream of the flow of tourists, that season.

“It is a breath of the dear old home-life!” said more than one attendant upon the simple services, where the congregation was kaleidoscopic in outward seeming, the same in spirit.

I cannot pass over this period of our foreign life without a tribute to one whose friendship and able co-operation in the work laid to Doctor Terhune’s hand, did more than any other one influence to make for him a home in Rome. Dr. Leroy M. Vernon, who subsequently became Dean of the University of Syracuse, in New York State, was the rarest combination of strength and gentleness I have ever seen. He had been for some years resident in Rome; was an enthusiastic archæologist and art-student, speaking Italian with fluency and grace, and thoroughly _au fait_ to the best literature of that tongue. From the beginning of their acquaintanceship, the two men fraternized heartily. In the ripening of liking into intimacy, they walked, rode, talked, and studied together. What the association was to the younger of the two, may be imagined by one who has had the privilege of close communion with a beloved comrade who held the key to the treasure-house one has longed all his life to enter.

“The winter in Italy with Vernon was worth more to me than a course in the Academy of Fine Arts, combined with ten years of archæological lectures from experts,” was the testimony of the survivor, twenty years later, when the news of the dean’s death was brought to us.

They loved each other tenderly to the end of mortal companionship.

Who can doubt that it has been renewed in the City where eager minds are never checked by physical weakness, and aspiration is identical with fulfilment?

In mid-May, when the Pincio put on its beautiful garments in the purple flowering of the Judas-trees, and the tawny Tiber rolled between hills of living green, we turned our backs upon what those marvellous months had wrought into our own familiar dwelling-place, and took our sad, reluctant way to Florence. Five weeks there were varied by excursions to Fiesole, Bologna, and Venice. Our next move was to Lucerne. Leaving the children in care of “The Invaluable,” we ran up to Heidelberg, joining there our kinspeople, the Ashleys, and travelling with them leisurely over mountain and through pass, until we brought up in Geneva.

We were hardly settled, as we supposed for the season, in the bright little town of Calvin and Voltaire, when a summons came from the American Chapel in Paris for Doctor Terhune’s services, pending the absence of the regular incumbent in America, whither he had been summoned by the illness of his mother. We had no thought that the separation of the head from our transplanted family would be a matter of even a few weeks, whereas it lasted for four months. There was visiting back and fro; a reunion at Christmas under the massive crowns of mistletoe, such as grow nowhere else—not even in the Britain of the Druids—and a memorable New-Year’s dinner at the Hôtel Metropole, arranged under American auspices, the chief pride of the feast being mince-pies, concocted by Yankee housewives, and misspelled among the French dishes on the gorgeously illuminated menus. In February, my eldest daughter and myself went to Paris for a fortnight—a tentative trip which proved beyond a question that the air of the city on the Seine was rank poison to the healing lungs. We hurried back to jolly, friendly Geneva, where I could walk five miles _per diem_ in air that was the very elixir of life to my system, physical, mental, and moral. Even the lusty winds from Mont Blanc, and the rough gales that lashed Lake Leman into yeasty ridges for a week at a time, wrought strength, instead of harm. That bodily strength grew apace was but one element in the fulness of content in which we basked throughout the eight months we spent in the lakeside city, behind which the Alps stood in sublime calmness that was in itself tonic and inspiration. We had a pleasant _appartement_ in the _Pension Magnenat_, directly upon the quay. From our drawing-room windows we looked across the lake upon the Juras, capped with snow, and made beautiful exceedingly all day long, by changeful lights and shadows, reflected in the waters in opaline, prismatic hues we had never seen surpassed, even in Italy.

The American colony in Geneva has a stable reputation for intelligence and good-breeding. One expects to find these in university towns abroad, as at home. It may not have been unusually delightful that winter. Perhaps climate and health combined with our peaceful domestic life, to incline us to be more than satisfied with our social environment. Certain it is that the circle of congenial associates, that had widened to take us in, as a part of a harmonious corporate whole, was, to our apprehension, ideally charming. Everybody had some specific work or pursuit to explain his, or her residence in Geneva. The younger men were in the university, or in preparation for it, with “coaches”; the girls were studying French, German, and Italian, or painting from nature under such instructors as Madame Vouga, whose renown as a painter of wild flowers was international. We matrons had a reading-class, enlivened by the membership of our daughters, that met weekly at the house of some one of the party. To it we brought our easels, boards, and paint-boxes, our embroidery, or other fancy-work. One of the girls read aloud for two hours—history, biography, or essay—and at five o’clock what had been read was discussed freely over afternoon tea. A club of young people of both sexes read German, alternately with Italian and French plays, on Wednesday night, in my _salon_, I playing chaperon at my embroidery-frame at a side-table, and admitted to the merry chat that went around with coffee and cake, when the reading was concluded. Some of the members of that informal “Club” have made their mark in the large outer world since that care-free, all-satisfying sojourn in what we forgot to call an alien land, so happily did we blend with the classic influences, lapping us about so softly that we were never conscious of the acclimating process.

The tall youth, who submitted meekly (or gallantly) to correction of lingual lapses in his rendering of Molière or Wallenstein or Ariosto, from the girl at his elbow—revenging himself by a brisk fire of badinage in honest English after the books were closed—is an eminent metropolitan lawyer, whose income runs up well into the tens of thousands; another, a Berlin graduate, is the dignified dean of a law school attached to an American university; another is a college professor; another, a Genevan graduate, is rising in fame and fortune in an English city; one, beloved by all, completed a brilliant course at Harvard, and when hope and life were in their prime, laid his noble head down for his last sleep in Mount Auburn. The gay girls are staid matrons and mothers now, with sons and daughters of their own, as old as themselves were in that far-off, care-free time.

I have written “care-free” twice upon one page, and because I can conjure up no other phrase that so aptly describes what that veritable arbor on the Hill Difficulty we call “Life,” was to me. Household cares were an unknown quantity in the well-conducted pension. Our breakfast of French rolls, coffee, tea, boiled eggs, honey, and, for the younger children, creamy milk, was brought to our _salon_ every morning. A substantial luncheon (the _déjeuner à la fourchette_) was served in the pension _salle à manger_ at one, and a dinner of six or seven courses, at seven. Our fellow-guests were, for the most part, unobjectionable; a fair proportion were agreeable and desirable acquaintances. About one-third were Americans; another third were English; the rest were Italians, Germans, Russians, and French. A table at one end of the room was assigned to English-speaking boarders, and we soon made up a pleasant clique that did not, however, exclude several foreigners. Thus we persisted in calling them to ourselves. There were excursions every few days to places of interest within easy reach. Coppet, the home and burial-place of Madame de Staël; the Villa Diodati, where Byron and Shelley lived and wrote; Ferney the château from which Voltaire wrote letters to the magnates of the world, and within the walls of which he entertained all the famous wits and many of the beauties of his stirring times; Chillon, immortalized by Bonnivard and the poem founded upon his captivity—were some of the memorable haunts with which frequent visits made us familiar.

Exercise was a luxury in the ozone-fraught air, fresh every morning, and work was the natural result of the abounding vitality thus engendered. In no other quarter of the globe have I found such sustained vigor of mental and physical forces as during our residence in Switzerland. I record the fact gratefully, and as a possible helpful suggestion to other sufferers from the overstimulating climate and prevalent energy of American life. Rome was a gracious rest; Geneva was upbuilding.

It was a positive wrench to the heartstrings to leave her in May, and take our course leisurely northward.

The summer was given, and happily, to England, our headquarters being, successively, the Isle of Wight, Leamington, and Brighton.

Late in September, we sailed for New York.

XLV

SUNNYBANK—A NEW ENGLAND PARISH—“MY BOYS”—TWO “STARRED” NAMES

WITH no more idea as to our permanent abiding-place than had the Father of the Faithful, when he turned his back upon Ur of the Chaldees, and his face toward a land he knew not of, “still journeying toward the south,” in obedience to daily marching orders—we sought, upon reaching our native shores, the one _pied-à-terre_ left to us on the continent.

Sunnybank had been left in charge of the gardener, who, with his comely English wife and four children, had now occupied the lodge at the gate of our domain for ten years. He was Pompton-born and bred, and so unromantic in sentiment and undemonstrative in demeanor, that we were not prepared to behold a triumphal wreath on the gate when we drove into the grounds. No human creature was visible until, winding through the grove that hides the house from the highway, we saw the whole family collected about the door. All were in holiday garb; wreaths of goldenrod hung in the windows, and above the porch was tacked a scroll with the word “WELCOME” wrought upon it in the same flowers. Yet more amazed were we when, as Doctor Terhune stepped from the carriage, Conrad knelt suddenly and embraced the knees of his employer, with an inarticulate shout of joy, tears raining down his tanned cheeks.

“Just like a scene in an English play!” commented Christine, afterward. “But not a bit like what one would expect in Pompton, New Jersey, U. S. A.”

The unexpectedness of it all, especially the involuntary outbreak in a man who had never seen a play in his life, and despised “foolishness” of whatsoever description, moved us to answering softness, and brought the first rush of home-gladness we had felt since landing. For, to be honest, I confess that none of us were as yet reconciled to exchanging the life we had luxuriated in for the past two years—full, rich, and varied—for a toilful routine of parish duties, we knew not where. Without confiding the weakness to the others, each of us, as we owned subsequently with a twinge of shame, had been wofully dashed in spirit by the circumstances attending our arrival. Clarence Ashley had met us upon the wharf, his mother and sisters being at their country-place; the day was unseasonably warm for late September, and New York was in its least attractive out-of-season dress and mood. The docks were dirty, and littered with trunks, crates, and boxes; the custom-house officers were slow, and most of them sulky. We parted on the wharf with a dear friend from Virginia, who had travelled with us for nearly a year, and had taken return passage in the same ship. She had a home to which to go. We felt like pilgrims and strangers in a foreign land. As the carriage into which we had packed ourselves threaded its way through the grimy purlieus of the lower city, I found myself saying over mentally the unpatriotic doggerel I used to declare was unworthy of any true American:

“The streets are narrow and the buildings mean— Did I, or fancy, leave them broad and clean?”

Then, the fields and roads past which the train (yclept “an accommodation”) bumped and swung, were ragged and dusty; the hedge-rows were unkempt, the trees untrimmed. Fresh as we were from the verdure of English parks, the shaven lawns, and blossoming hedges that make a garden-spot of the tight little island we proudly recognized as our Old Home, the effect of that sultry afternoon was distinctly depressing. Our lakeside cottage, the one nook in all the broad land we could call “Home,” on this side of the water, was another disappointment. Mrs. Haycock and her girls had wrought zealously to make it comfortable, and even festive. The wee rooms (as they looked to us) were shining clean; flowers were set here and there, white curtains, white bedspreads, and bright brasses betokened loving solicitude for our welfare and contentment, and the good woman had ready a hot supper, enriched with such Pompton dainties as she knew we loved. “The Invaluable” bustled over luggage, and added finishing touches to bedrooms and nursery. I am sure she was the only one of the returned exiles who was really happy that night.

I am thus frank in relating our experiences, because I believe them to be identical with those of a majority of tourists, upon resuming home-habits in their native country. After excitement and novelty comes the ebb-tide of reaction for the bravest and the most loving. Home is home, but readjustment precedes real enjoyment of the old scenes and ways.

We were hardly settled in the nest before we paid a promised visit to Richmond. There were resident there, now, three families of the clan. My brother Horace and the noble wife with whom my intimacy continued unshadowed by a cloud of distrust until her death in 1894; my sister Myrtle, more my daughter than sister, her husband, and the boy who was my husband’s namesake; and Percy, the youngling of the brood, with a dainty little spouse and their first-born son—made up the group that welcomed us to dear old Richmond in early December.

To this was added, a week or so later, our eldest sister, who journeyed all the way from her Missouri home to join in the greetings to the whilom wanderers. We had one more Christmas-week together—the last that was to collect the unbroken band under one roof-tree. Then Mea went westward, and we took our way toward the north, leaving Christine to make her début in society under the auspices of her uncles and aunts, and where her mother had first tasted the pleasures of young-ladyhood.