What I Remember Part 25

Many of her verses she set to music, especially one little poemlet, which I remember to this day the tune of, which she called the _Song of the Blackbird_, and which was, if I remember rightly, made to consist wholly of the notes uttered by the bird.

Another instance of her "multiform faculty" was her learning landscape sketching. I have spoken of her figure drawing. And this, I take it, was the real bent of her talent in that line. But unable to compa.s.s the likeness of a haystack myself, I was desirous of possessing some record of the many journeys which I designed to take, and eventually did take with her. And wholly to please me she forthwith made the attempt, and though her landscape was never equal to her figure drawing, I possess some couple of hundred of water-colour sketches done by her from nature on the spot.

I used to say that if I wanted a Sanscrit dictionary, I had only to put her head straight at it, and let her feel the spur, and it would have been done!

We lived together seventeen happy years. During the five first, I think I may say that she lived wholly and solely in, by, and for me.

That she should live for somebody other than herself was an absolute indefeasible necessity of her nature. During the last twelve years I shared her heart with her daughter. Her intense wors.h.i.+p for her "Baby Beatrice" was equalled only by--that of all the silliest and all the wisest women, who have true womanly hearts in their bosoms, for their children. The wors.h.i.+p was, of course, all the more absorbing that the object of it was unique. I take it that, after the birth of her child, I came second in her heart. But I was not jealous of little Bice.

I do not think that she would have quite subscribed to the opinion of Garibaldi on the subject of the priesthood, which I mentioned in a former chapter--that they ought all to be forthwith put to death. But all her feelings and opinions were bitterly antagonistic to them. She was so deeply convinced of the magnitude of the evil inflicted by them and their Church on the character of the Italians, for whom she ever felt a great affection, that she was bitter on the subject. And it is the only subject on which I ever knew her to feel in any degree bitterly. Many of her verses written during her latter years are fiercely denunciatory or humorously satirical of the Italian priesthood, and especially of the Pontifical Government. I wish that my s.p.a.ce permitted me to give further specimens of them here. But I must content myself with giving one line, which haunts my memory, and appears to me excessively happy In the accurate truthfulness of its simile. She is writing of the journey which Pius the Ninth made, and describing his equipment, says that he started "with strings of cheap blessings, like gla.s.s beads for savages."

With the exception of this strong sentiment my wife was one of the most tolerant people I ever knew. What she most avoided in those with whom she a.s.sociated was, not so much ignorance, or even vulgarity of manner, as pure native stupidity. But even of that, when the need arose, she was tolerant. I never knew her in the selection of an acquaintance, or even of a friend, to be influenced to the extent of even a hair's-breadth, by station, rank, wealth, fas.h.i.+on, or any consideration whatever, save personal liking and sympathy, which was, in her case, perfectly compatible with the widest divergence of views and opinions on nearly any of the great subjects which most divide mankind, and even with divergence of rules of conduct. Her own opinions were the honest results of original thinking, and her conduct the outcome of the dictates of her own heart--of her heart rather than of her reasoning powers, or of any code of law--a condition of mind which might be dangerous to individuals with less native purity of heart than hers.

As a wife, as a daughter, as a daughter-in-law, as a mother, she was absolutely irreproachable. In the first relations.h.i.+p she was all in all to me for seventeen years. She brought sweetness and light into my life and into my dwelling. She was the angel in the house, if ever human being was.

Her father became an inmate of our house after the death of his wife at a great age at Torquay, whither they had returned after the death of my wife's half-sister, Harriet Fisher. He was a jealously affectionate, but very exacting father; and few daughters, I think, could have been more admirable in her affection for him, her attention to him, her care of him. And I may very safely say that very few mothers of sons have the fortune of finding such a daughter-in-law.

My mother had been very fond of her before our marriage, and became afterwards as devotedly attached to her as she was to me, of whom she knew her to be an indivisible part, while she was to my mother simply perfect. Her own mother she had always been in the habit of calling by that name. She always spoke to and of my mother as "mammy." What she was to her own daughter I have already said. There was somewhat of the tendency towards "spoiling," which is mostly inseparable from the adoration which a young mother, of the right sort, feels for her firstborn child, but she never made any attempt to avert or counteract my endeavours to prevent such spoiling. When little Bice had to be punished by solitary confinement for half an hour, she only watched anxiously for the expiration of the sentence.[1]

[Footnote 1: I do not remember that little Bice ever consoled herself under the disgrace of such captivity as my present wife has confessed to me that she did when suffering under the same condemnation. _Her_ method of combining the maintenance of personal dignity with revenge on the oppressor, was to say to the first person who came to take her out of prison: "No! you can't come into _my_ parlour!"]

But that her worth, her talent, her social qualities, were recognised by a wider world than that of her own family, or her own circle of friends, is testified by the recording stone, which the Munic.i.p.ality placed on my house at the corner of the Piazza dell' Independenza, where it may still be seen. Indeed the honour was not undeserved. For during the whole of her residence in Italy, which nearly synchronised with the struggle of Italy for her independence and unity, she had adopted the Italian cause heart and soul, and done what was in her to do, for its advancement. The honour was rendered the more signal, and the more acceptable, from the fact that the same had recently been rendered by the same body to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

CHAPTER XIX.

The house in the Piazza dell' Independenza, which was known in the city as "Villino Trollope," and of which I have spoken at the close of the last chapter, was my property, and I had lived in it nearly the whole of my married life. During that time four deaths had occurred among its inmates.

The first to happen was that of the old and highly valued servant of whom I had occasion to speak when upon the subject of Mr. Hume's spiritualistic experiences at my house. She had been for many years a much trusted and beloved servant in the family of Mr. Garrow at Torquay, and had accompanied them abroad. Her name was Elizabeth s.h.i.+nner. Her death was felt by all of us as that of a member of our family, and she lies in the Protestant cemetery at Florence by the side of her former master, and of the young mistress whom she had loved as a child of her own.

The next to go was Mr. Garrow. His death was a very sudden and unexpected one. He was a robust and apparently perfectly healthy man.

I was absent from home when he died. I had gone with a Cornishman, a Mr. Trewh.e.l.la, who was desirous of visiting Mr. Sloane's copper mine, in the neighbourhood of Volterra, of which I have before spoken. We had accomplished our visit, and were returning over the Apennine about six o'clock in the morning in a little _bagherino_, as the country cart-gigs are called, when we were hailed by a man in a similar carriage meeting us, whom I recognised as the foreman of a carpenter we employed. He had been sent to find me, and bring me home with all speed, in consequence of the sudden illness of Mr. Garrow. As far as I could learn from him there was little probability of finding my father-in-law alive. I made the best of my way to Florence. But he had been dead several hours when I arrived. He had waked with a paralytic attack on him, which deprived him of the power of moving on the left side, and drawing his face awry, made speech almost impossible to him.

He a.s.sured his servant--who was almost immediately with him--speaking with much difficulty, that it was nothing of any importance, and that he should soon get over it. But these were the last words he ever spoke, and in two or three hours afterwards he breathed his last.

Then in a few years more the _crescendo_ wave of trouble took my mother from me at the age of eighty-three. For the last two or three years she had entirely lost her memory, and for the last few months the use of her mental faculties. And she did not suffer much. The last words she uttered were "Poor Cecilia!"--her mind reverting in her latest moments to the child whose loss had been the most recent. She had for years entertained a great horror and dread of the possibility of being buried alive, in consequence of the very short time allowed by the law for a body to remain unburied after death; and she had exacted from me a promise that I would in any case cause a vein to be opened in her arm after death. In her case there could be no possible room for the shadow of doubt as to the certainty of death; but I was bound by my promise, and found some difficulty in the performance of it. The medical man in attendance, declaring the absolute absurdity of any doubt on the subject, refused to perform an operation which, he said, was wholly uncalled for, and argued that my promise could only be understood to apply to a case of possible doubt. I had none; but was none the less determined to be faithful to my promise. But it was not till I declared that I would myself sever a vein, in however butcher-like a manner, that I induced him to accompany me to the death-chamber and perform under my eyes the necessary operation.

My mother, the inseparable companion of so many wanderings in so many lands, the indefatigable labourer of so many years, found her rest near to the two who had gone from my house before, in the beautiful little cemetery on which the Apennine looks down.

But it was not long before this sorrow was followed by a very much sorer one--by the worst of all that could have happened to me! After what I have written in the last chapter it is needless to say anything of the blank despair that fell upon me when my wife died, on the 13th of April, 1865. She also lies near the others.

My house was indeed left unto me desolate, and I thought that life and all its sweetness was over for me!

I immediately took measures for disposing of the house in the Piazza dell' Independenza, and before long found a purchaser for it. I had bought it when the speculator, who had become the owner of the ground at the corner of the s.p.a.ce which was beginning to a.s.sume the semblance of a "square" or "piazza," had put in the foundations but had not proceeded much further with his work. I completed it, improving largely, as I thought, on his plan; adapted it for a single residence, instead of its division into sundry dwellings; obtained possession of additional ground between the house and the city wall, sufficient for a large garden; built around it, looking to the south, the largest and handsomest "stanzone"[1] for orange and lemon plants in Florence, and gathered together a collection of very fine trees, the profits from which (much smaller in my hands than would have been the case in those of a Florentine to the manner born) nevertheless abundantly sufficed to defray the expenses of the garden and gardeners. In a word, I made the place a very complete and comfortable residence. Nearly the whole of my first married life was spent in it. And much of the literary work of my life has been done in it.

[Footnote 1: "Stanzone" is the term used in Tuscany to signify the buildings destined to shelter the "Agrumi," as the orange and lemon plants are called generically, in the winter; which in Florence is too severe to permit of their being left in the open air.]

I used in those days, and for very many years afterwards, to do all my writing standing; and I strongly recommend the practice to brother quill-drivers. Pauses, often considerable intervals, occur for thought while the pen is in the hand. And if one is seated at a table, one remains sitting during these intervals. But if one is standing, it becomes natural to one, during even a small pause, to take a turn up and down the room, or even, as I often used to do, in the garden. And such change and movement I consider eminently salutary both for mind and body.

I had specially contrived a little window immediately above the desk at which I stood, fixed to the wall. The room looking on the "loggia,"

which was the scene of the little poem transcribed in the preceding chapter, was abundantly lighted, but I liked some extra light close to my desk.

In that room my Bice was born. For it was subsequently to her birth that the destination of it was changed from a bedroom to a study.

Few men have pa.s.sed years of more unchequered happiness than I did in that house. And I was very fond of it.

But, as may be readily imagined, it became all the more odious and intolerable to me when the "angel in the house" had been taken from me.

CHAPTER XX.

CONCLUSION.

a.s.suredly it seemed to me that all was over; and the future a dead blank. And for a time I was as a man stunned.

But in truth it was very far otherwise! I was fifty-five; but I was in good health, young for my years, strong and vigorous in const.i.tution, and before a year had pa.s.sed it began to seem to me that a future, and life and its prospects, might open to me afresh; that the curtain might be dropped on the drama that was pa.s.sed, and a new phase of life begun.

I had had, and vividly enjoyed an entire life, according to the measure that is meted out to many, perhaps I may say to most men.

But I felt myself ready for another! And--thanks this time also to a woman--I have _had_ another, _in no wise_ less happy, in some respects, as less chequered by sorrows--more happy than the first! I am in better health too, having outgrown apparently several of the maladies which young people are subject to!

Of this second life I am not now going to tell my readers anything.

"What I remember" of my first life may be, and I hope has been, told frankly without giving offence or annoyance to any human being. I don't know that the telling of the story of my second life would necessarily lead me to say anything which could hurt anybody. But mixed up as its incidents and interests and a.s.sociations have been with a great mult.i.tude of men and women still living and moving and talking and writing round about me, I should not feel myself so comfortably at liberty to write whatever offered itself to my memory.

Ten years hence, perhaps ("Please G.o.d, the public lives!" as a speculative showman said), I may tell the reader, if he cares to hear it, the story of my second life. For the present we will break off here.

But not without some words of parting kindness--and shall we say, wisdom!--from an old man to readers, most of whom probably might be his sons, and many doubtless his grandsons.

Especially, my young friends, don't pay overmuch attention to what the Psalmist says about "the years of man." I knew _dans le temps_ a fine old octo-and-nearly-nonogenarian, one Graberg de Hemso, a Swede (a man with a singular history, who pa.s.sed ten years of his early life in the British navy, and was, when I knew him, librarian at the Pitti Palace in Florence), who used to complain of the Florentine doctors that "Dey doosen't know what de nordern const.i.toos.h.i.+ons is!" and I take it the same may be said of the Psalmist. The years beyond three score and ten need not be all sorrow and trouble. Depend upon it kindly nature--_prudens_, as that jolly fellow, fine gentleman, and true philosopher, Horace, says in a similar connection--kindly nature knows how to make the closing decade of life every whit as delightful as any of the preceding, if only you don't baulk her purposes. Don't weigh down your souls, and pin your particles of divine essence to earth by your yesterday's vices; be sure that when you cannot jump over the chairs so featly as you can now, you will not want to do so; tell the girls with genial old Anacreon, when the time comes, that whether the hairs on your forehead be many or few, you know not, but do know well that it behoves an old man to be cheery in proportion to the propinquity of his exit, and go on your way rejoicing through this beautiful world, which not even the Radicals have quite spoilt yet.

And so _a rivederci_--_au revoir_--_auf Wiedersehn_--why have we no English equivalent better than "Here's to our next pleasant meeting!"