Part 36

He averred, in later life, that he felt an impulse of new life with the first revolution of the paddle-wheel. Certain it is that he showed signs of rallying before twenty-four hours had passed, spending all the daylight hours upon deck, and, before the voyage was half over, joining in our promenades from bow to stern. Always an excellent sailor, he drank in the sea-breeze as he might have quaffed so much nectar. The only complaint that escaped him was that, “whereas he had been promised an eleven days’ voyage, we steamed up the Clyde on the afternoon of the ninth day.”

A series of jaunts in Scotland and England was the prelude to our settling down in Florence for the winter.

Had I no other reason to urge for my deep and abiding love for that fairest and dearest of Italian cities, it would suffice me to recollect the unutterable peace and full content of that memorable half-year.

Friends, old and new, clustered about us, and lent the charm of home to the cosey apartment in Via San Giuseppe, where the gentle flow of domestic life was bright with the shining of present happiness and rekindled hope of the future. We learned to know “La Bella” at her best in those halcyon days. The boys were at a day-school; thanks to our efficient “padrona,” there were no household anxieties, and we seniors were free to enjoy to the full all that makes up the inestimable riches of the storied city.

Doctor Terhune and I claimed the privilege of convalescent and custodian, in declining to accept invitations to evening functions, thus securing opportunity for what we loved far better than the gayest of “entertainments”—long, quiet hours spent in our sitting-room “under the evening lamp,” I, busy with needle-work or knitting, while he read aloud, after the dear old fashion, works on Florentine history, art, and romance, all tending to enfold us more closely with the charméd atmosphere of the region. It would be laughable to one who has never fallen under the nameless spell of Florence to know how often, that season, we repeated aloud, as the book was laid aside for the night:

“With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise.”

Letters from home were frequent and regular. Much was happening across the water while we revelled in our dreams. The Spanish War was on. It was begun and ended during our peace-fraught exile. In January, our boy took unto himself the young wife to whom he had been troth-plight for a year, and we were the easier in mind for the knowledge that this, the last of our unwedded bairns, was no longer without a home of his own.

In the spring we travelled at pleasure through Switzerland and Belgium, and so to England—my husband and I now in the _solitude à deux_ belovéd by congenial souls. Christine and her sons were left in Switzerland for a longer tour of that country.

Still wandering, lingering, and dreaming, in the long, delicious calm succeeding the darkest and stormiest period our united lives were ever to know, we revisited English villages and towns, and made acquaintance in Scotland with new and enchanting scenes, until the September day when we took passage from Glasgow for New York.

We steamed into our harbor on Sunday afternoon, just as the news of peace between the warring nations was acclaimed through the megaphone to incoming craft, and thundered from the mouths of rejoicing cannon.

XLIX

THE GOING-OUT OF A YOUNG LIFE—PRESENT ACTIVITIES—“LITERARY HEARTHSTONES”—GRATEFUL REMINISCENCES

AS upon our return from foreign lands nearly twenty years before this home-coming, Sunnybank was now our _pied á terre_. Our daughter, Mrs. Van de Water, and her family had occupied it during our absence. It was, therefore, not merely swept and garnished for our reception, but the spirit of Home, sweet, radiant, and indescribable, was in full possession. We were settled in the nest within an hour after we drove up to the open door. A week later, the happy circle was widened by the arrival of our son and his young wife from the Adirondacks. A second attack of appendicitis had made an operation imperatively necessary. It was performed in July, and as soon as the patient was strong enough to travel, he was sent to the mountains for recuperation. The pair were our guests for four weeks. Then they returned to town to prepare for the housekeeping upon which they had planned to enter in October. Happy letters, telling of the preparations going briskly forward, and filled with domestic details, than which nothing in the wide world was more fascinating to the little wife, reminded us of the contented cooings of mating pigeons, or, as I told the prospective housewife, of the purring of the kittens she loved to fondle under the honeysuckles of the veranda, while with us.

On October 5th an unexpected telegram brought the news of the premature birth of a baby daughter, and that “mother and child were doing well.” Four days later, a second dispatch summoned us to New York. The tiny girl was but four days old when her gentle mother passed quietly out of the life, so rich in love and hope that, up to the hour when she laid herself down cheerfully upon her couch of pain, she was, to use her own words, “almost frightened at her own happiness.”

She was married on January 10, 1898. We bore her to her last home October 12th of the same year. She sleeps in the quiet “God’s Acre,” back of the old colonial church in Pompton, in the heart of the fairest of New Jersey valleys. A peaceful spot it is, cradled by the everlasting hills. There were but three graves in our family plot when we took her there. There are five, now.

We spent that winter in the city, and our boy was again one of our small household. But for the care and the blesséd comfort of the baby daughter, the light and life of hearts and house, we might have fancied the events of the last five years a dream, and that we were once more the busy trio with whom time had sped so swiftly and brightly while “Bert” was in college. We were busy now as then. Doctor Terhune preached with tolerable regularity in different churches, and he was ever a diligent student. Bert wrought faithfully in his chosen profession of journalism, and I accepted in, 1901, the charge of a Woman’s Syndicate page established by _The North American_, in Philadelphia. I had never been idle. Month after month, work was laid to my hands that pleased my taste, and occupied all the time I could devote to literary tasks. When I agreed to take on the new burden, it was with no forecasting of what proportions it might assume.

“What do these women write to you about?” asked the proprietor of the paper under the auspices of which the syndicate was carried on.

I answered, laughingly, “Everything—from Marmalade to Matrimony.”

When he put the question, I was representing the need of an assistant, since I was getting twenty letters per diem. Four years later, a secretary and a stenographer shared the labor of keeping in touch with writers who poured in upon my desk an average mail of one hundred letters a day. Two years afterward, the average was over a thousand a week.

I have been asked often why I expend energies and fill my days in what my critics are pleased to depreciate as “hack-work.” Nobody believes my assertion that I heartily enjoy being thus brought into intimate association with the women of America. The Syndicate has extended its territory into twenty-five States, and it is still growing. Women, boys, and girls, and housefathers—no less than housemothers—tell me of their lives, their successes, their failures, their trials, and their several problems. From the mighty mass of correspondence I select letters dealing with topics of general interest, or that seem to call for free and friendly discussion, and base upon them daily articles for the Syndicate public. Thousands of letters contain stamps for replies by mail. Out of this germ of “hack-work” has grown “The Helping-Hand Club,” an informal organization, with no “plant” except my desk and the postal service that transports applications for books, magazines, and such useful articles as correspondents know will be welcome to the indigent, the shut-in, the aged, charitable societies and missions in waste places. Quietly, and without parade, our volunteer agents visit the needy, and report to us. We distribute, by correspondence, thousands of volumes and periodicals annually; we bring together supply and demand, “without money and without price,” and in ways that would appear ridiculous to some, and incredible to many.

“For Love’s Sake” is our motto, and it is caught up eagerly, from Canada to California. “The Big Family,” they call themselves—these dear co-workers of mine whose faces I shall never see on earth. When, as happens daily, I read, “Dear Mother of us all,” from those I have been permitted to help in mind, body, or estate, I thank the Master and take courage.

After eight years’ active service in the field so strangely appointed to me that I cannot but recognize (and with humble gratitude) the direct leading of the Divine Hand, I say, frankly, that I have never had such fulness of satisfaction in any other sphere of labor.

“But it is not Literature!” cried a friend to me, the other day, voicing the sentiment of many.

“No,” I answered, “but it is _Influence_, and that of the best kind.”

I have, with all this, made time—or it has been made for me—to write half a dozen books in the last ten years.

_Where Ghosts Walk_ (1898) was a joy in the writing, as was the collection of material. It reproduces for me—as I turn the pages, in maternal fashion, lingering upon a scene here, and snatching a phrase there—our strayings in storied climes, rambles into enchanted nooks untrodden by the conventional tourist, but full of mystery and charm for us. In those dim paths I still walk with the ghosts that were once visible and sentient things like ourselves.

_Literary Hearthstones_ (1899-1902) was, even more emphatically, a labor of delight. I had made studies of Charlotte Brontë and Hannah More, of John Knox and William Cowper, in the homes and haunts they glorified into shrines for the reading and the religious world. Other hallowed names are yet on my memorandum-book, and in my portfolio are the notes made in other homes and haunts, and pictures collected for the illustrations of four more volumes of the series.

If I live and hold my strength and health of body and of mind, I shall, please God, complete the tale of worthies I have singled out for study. If not—they are yet mine own brain-children. None may rob me of the pleasure of having and of holding them—until death us do part.

I should be ungrateful, and do my own feelings a wrong, were I to fail, in this connection, to acknowledge my obligations to those who kindly seconded my efforts to accumulate the material for the _Hearthstones_.

Our pilgrimages to Haworth, Olney, Wrington, and Edinburgh, are starred in the reminiscence by hospitable intent and deed, by such real sympathy in my mission, and friendly aid in the prosecution of my design, that I cannot pass them over with casual mention.

For Charlotte Brontë I had, since my early girlhood, nourished admiration that ripened into reverence, as I read with avidity every page and line relating to the marvellous sisters. I had conned her books until I knew them, from cover to cover. Her _dramatis personæ_ were friends more familiar to the dreaming girl than our next-door neighbors. It was a bitter disappointment to me that the unforeseen miscarriage of our plans frustrated my longing to go to Haworth, at our first visit to the Old World. So, when my son and I set out for our Eastern trip, Haworth stood first upon our memorandum of places that _must_ be seen in England. I had letters from four men who had engaged to facilitate my attempts to enter the Parsonage. One and all, they assured me that I would find the door inhospitably closed in my face. Nevertheless, they advised me to go to Haworth, and put up at “that resort of the thirsty—the Black Bull.” Thus one of the quartette, and who had lately published a book on the Brontës:

“The present incumbent of the parish is an ogre, a veritable dragon!” he went on to say. “He savagely refused to let me set foot upon his threshhold, and he turns hundreds of pilgrims away empty every year. But go to Haworth, by all means! Put up at the ancient hostelry; walk about the old stone house and tell well its windows, and take pleasure in Emily’s moors. The dragon has restored (?) the Brontë church, and consigned the remains of the wonderful family to a genteel crypt under the renovated pavement. All the same, go to Haworth! The hills and the moors and the heather are unchanged.”

In my _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, I have related how I fared in the pilgrimage that stands out clearly in my memory as one of the sunniest spots of that memorable seven months’ tour. I have not told how simple and direct were the means by which I gained the fulfilment of my desires. Within an hour after we had registered our names in the shabby book kept for guests and transients at the Black Bull, I wrote a note to Mr. Wade, the rector of Haworth Church, asking permission to “stand, for a few minutes, within the doors of the house that had been the home of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.” I added that I should not blame him if he objected to the intrusion of strangers upon domestic privacy.

The messenger returned speedily with word that Mr. Wade had that hour returned from London, and that he could not then write a note. He would, however, be happy to see me at the Rectory on the morrow (Sunday), and would write in the morning, naming the hour for our call. His note came while we were at breakfast, to say that he would be at liberty to receive us between services. We attended morning service, but, when it was over, refrained from making ourselves known to the rector, lingering, instead, in the church to see the tablet above the Brontë vault, and the fine window, set in the restored wall by an anonymous American, “To the glory of God, and in pleasant memory of Charlotte Brontë.” Emerging from the church, with the intention of strolling up to the Parsonage, we were met by Mr. Wade, who had gone home, expecting to find us there, and was on his way to the inn to look us up. His cordial hand-clasp and genial smile were so opposed to our preconceptions of the “dragon,” that we exchanged furtive glances of relief. He took us back to the Parsonage, and showed us everything we had wished to see, with much we had not thought of, telling us, in the same hospitable way, that, although he was the only member of the family at home that day, he would be happy to have us partake of a bachelor’s luncheon. When we declined, gratefully, he accompanied us to the church, and unlocked the case in which is kept the register of Charlotte Brontë’s marriage, signed by herself—the last time she wrote her maiden name.

Several letters passed between us, in the course of the next four years, and he opened to me, on our second visit to Haworth, in 1898, unexpected avenues of information respecting her whose biography I was writing, which were of incalculable value to me. When he retired from the active duties of his profession to Hurley, in another county, he wrote to me a long, interesting letter, enclosing a copy of the resolutions passed by the Yorkshire parish he had served faithfully for forty-seven years.

Besides the precious stock of building “material” for the construction of my story of Charlotte, which I could have gained in no other way than through his kindly offices, this odd friendship taught me a lesson of faith in my kind, and of distrust of hearsay evidence and of popular disfavor, that will last me forever. I dedicated the biography to “Rev. J. Wade, for forty-seven years incumbent of Haworth, in cordial appreciation of the unfailing courtesy and kindly aid extended by him to the American stranger within his gates.”

A dedication that brought me many letters of surprised dissent from English and American tourists, and writers whose experience was less pleasant than my own. I tell the tale, in brief, as an act of simple justice to a much-abused man.

“You have been told that I am a vandal and a bear,” he said to me on that Sunday. “I found church and Parsonage almost in ruins. I was not appointed to this parish as the curator of a museum, but to do my best for the cure of souls. When I tell you that, for ten years after Mr. Brontë’s death, the average number of sight-seers who called at the Parsonage was three thousand a year, and that they still mount up to a third of that number, you may be more lenient in judgment than the touring public and the press proved themselves to be.”

From Rev. Mr. Langley—incumbent of Olney, and resident in the quaintly beautiful parsonage that was the home of Lady Austin, Cowper’s friend and disciple—we met with courtesy as fine. And in seeking details of Hannah More’s private life, I found an able and enthusiastic assistant in Rev. Mr. Wright, of Wrington, in the church-yard of which the “Queen of Barleywood” is buried.

Cherished reminiscences are these, which neither the mists of years nor the clouds of sorrow have dimmed. In dwelling upon them, as I near the close of my annals of an every-day woman’s life, I comprehend what the Psalmist meant when he said, “They have been my song in the house of my pilgrimage.”

Perhaps I erred in writing, “every-day life.” Or, it may be because so few women have recorded the lights and shadows of their lives as frankly and as fully as I am doing, that I am asking myself whether it may not be that the chequered scene I survey from the hill-top—which gives me on clear days a fine view of the Delectable Mountains—has been exceptionally eventful, as it has been affluent in God’s choicest gifts of home-joys and home-loves, and in opportunities of proving, by word and in deed, my love for fellow-travellers along the King’s Highway.

The reader who has followed me patiently, because sympathetically, from the beginning of the narrative, will comprehend, through the depth of that sympathy, why I now leave to other pens the recital of what remains to be said. The hands that guided the pen were tender of touch, the hearts were true that dictated the report of the Golden Wedding and the abstract of a noble life, now developing throughout the ages into the stature of the Perfect Man. The voluntary tributes they combined to offer are dear beyond expression, to wife and children and to a great host of friends.

APPENDIX

THE REV. EDWARD PAYSON TERHUNE, D.D.

BY REV. JOSEPH R. DURYEE, D.D.

PERMIT one who has loved Doctor Terhune for fifty years, to pay tribute to his character and outline his attainments.

He was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, November 22, 1830. It does not seem possible that this was his birth-year, he was so vigorous and his spirit was so youthful to the end. The best things in life were his rich inheritance. His father, Judge John Terhune, for fifty-four years an elder in the Presbyterian Church, was a rare man, and for generations the family had led in the moral and material development of New Jersey. He was named for Edward Payson, his father’s friend, a saintly Christian leader still remembered in the American church. Few boys have had a happier childhood. It was partly spent with his grandmother in Princeton. Her house was a centre of influence. Doctors Alexander, Hodge, Miller, and other professors were her intimate friends, and the boy was welcomed at their homes. Members of their families were life-long companions. Entering Rutgers, he was graduated in the class of 1850 with Doctors Elmendorf and Sheperd, Judges Lawrence and Ludlow, and others who became equally distinguished. His heart was set on becoming a physician, and for nearly two years he studied medicine. Then he obeyed the higher call and consecrated himself to the Christian ministry.

On graduating from the New Brunswick Seminary, several calls came. He accepted that of the Presbyterian Church of Charlotte Court-House, Virginia, and in the spring of 1855 began his pastorate. It was an ideal charge for any man. The best blood of the Old Dominion was in the congregation. No less than eighty-six of the members were college graduates. In 1856 he married Miss Mary Virginia Hawes, of Richmond. Their home became as near the ideal as any this earth has known—beautiful in its comradeship, beneficent in its influence.

In 1858, Doctor Terhune was called to the pastorate of the First Reformed Dutch Church, of Newark. To decide as he did, must have been a singular test of faith and courage. The claims of material comfort, intellectual fellowship, and family ties on one side, on the other a depleted church, in a community almost entirely dependent for support on manufacturing interests, most of which were then bankrupt. But Doctor Terhune was a soldier of the cross, and the red fighting blood ran too strong in him to resist the opportunity that called for heroic self-denial, constraint, toil and trials of faith and patience that would, for years, tax to the utmost every power of heart and mind. Few men have possessed as clear a vision of life; for him there were no illusions in the Newark outlook. He knew that, in the modern city life, then just beginning, must be fought the main battle of Christianity with the powers of evil. His commission was to lead, and he accepted the detail. For eighteen years Doctor Terhune remained at his post. Immediately his work began to tell for blessing, nor was this confined to his parish;—the entire city felt his presence. While his work in all its many parts was of the highest order, the man was always greater than his work. Men, women, and children instinctively loved him. They brought to him their problems, then felt his impression on their hearts. And it was abiding. To-day a great company scattered throughout the earth thank God for what he wrought in them.

In 1876, in consequence of the state of Mrs. Terhune’s health, Doctor Terhune resigned his Newark charge, and went abroad. His ministry did not lapse, for all the time he labored as chaplain, first in Rome and then in Paris, having entire charge of the American churches there.

Immediately on his return, in 1878, he received calls from leading churches in Newark, Plainfield, New Haven, and Springfield, Massachusetts. The last named he accepted. There he remained for five years, honored and loved throughout the city. Then came another call. The Williamsburg Reformed Church in Brooklyn had had a remarkable history. At times prosperous, then on the verge of collapse. In the centre of a great population, with a plant capable of accommodating an enormous congregation, it had never fulfilled its promise. Unless an unusual man, with rare gifts, not merely eloquence and ordinary leadership, but with almost divine tact, patience, and unselfishness, came to save it, the church would disband. Doctor Terhune loved the Old Dutch Church as loyally as any man who has ever served her, but this call must have taxed his sense of proportion. I am sure it was his Master’s higher call that decided him to go to Williamsburg. He had never cared for wealth except for its uses, was generous in every direction, and needed all the salary he could win; and the church was $80,000 in debt; its membership was scattered, and its attendants divided into antagonistic groups. More than one friend urged him to refuse such a sacrifice. What the seven years’ labor there cost him only God knew. He became twenty years older in appearance, and he lost much of the splendid vitality that had never before failed him for any length of time. But he left the church united, entirely free from debt, and with a promise for the future never before so bright. A year abroad was needed to establish his broken health.