Story of My Life Part 17

In 1852 the extravagance of my two brothers Francis and William was already causing great anxiety to their mother. Francis, who had lately obtained his commission in the Life-Guards through old Lord Combermere, had begun to borrow money upon the Gresford estate. William, who was in the Blues, with scarcely any fortune at all, had plunged desperately into the London season. When winter approached, their letters caused even more anxiety on account of their health than their fortunes: both complaining of cough and other ailments. One day, in the late autumn of 1852, my sister, coming into the diningroom of the Palazzo Parisani, found her mother stretched insensible upon the hearth-rug, with a letter open in her hand. The letter was from the new Sir John Paul, who had not in the least got over his first anger at his sister's change of religion, and who wrote in the cruellest and harshest terms. He said, "Your eldest son is dying. It is quite impossible that you can arrive in time to see him alive. Your second son is also in a rapid decline, though if you set off at once and travel to England without stopping, you may still be in time to receive his last words."

Palazzo Parisani was at once thrown into the utmost confusion, and all its inmates occupied themselves in preparing for immediate departure.

Owing to the great number of things to be stowed away, it was, however, utterly impossible that they should leave before the next morning.

Italima's state of anguish baffles description, for Francis was her idol. In the afternoon my sister, hoping to give her quiet, persuaded her to go out for an hour and walk in the gardens of the Villa Medici, where she would not be likely to meet any one she knew. In the long arcaded bay-walks of the villa she saw a familiar figure approaching. It was the "Family Spy." He came up to her, and, to her amazement, he began to address her--he, the silent follower of so many years! He said, "The time has now come at which I can serve you, therefore I speak. This morning you received a letter." Italima started. "You are surprised that I know you have the letter, and yet I am going to tell you all that was in that letter," and he repeated it word for word. He continued--"I not only know all that was in your letter and the distress in which it has placed you, but I know all the circ.u.mstances under which that letter was written, and I know all that has happened to your sons since: I know all about your sons. Your son Francis was taken ill on such a day: he saw such and such doctors: he is already much better: there is no danger: you may be quite easy about him. Your son William is not in danger, but he is really much the more ill of the two. Dr. Fergusson has seen him, and a foreign winter is prescribed. It will not do for you to go to England yourself, but yet he is not well enough to travel alone.

You have an old servant, F?lix, who came to you in such a year, and who has been with you ever since. You must send him to fetch William, and here is a paper on which I have written down all the trains and steamers they are to travel by, both in going and returning." So saying, and having given the paper to Italima and bowing very low, the Family Spy retired. Italima went home. She acted entirely on the advice she had received. She unpacked her things and remained in her palazzo at Rome.

She sent F?lix, as the Spy had directed: he travelled according to the written programme, and in a fortnight he returned to Rome bringing William back with him. The Spy never spoke to any member of the family again.

It is antic.i.p.ating, but I may mention here that when we went to Rome in 1857, I wondered if we should see the Family Spy. I spoke of it to my mother. As we pa.s.sed through the Porta del Popolo, he was the first person who met us. I saw him very often that winter, and again when I was at Paris with my sister in October 1858. That winter my sister often saw him at Rome. The next year was marked by our great family misfortunes. My sister always expected that somehow or other he would come to the rescue of the lost fortunes, but he never did. Some time after she heard that he had died very suddenly about that time.

When I returned to my mother in the summer of 1852, she was at Eastbourne with Charlotte Leycester and very ill. It was the earliest phase of the strange hysteria with which I was afterwards so familiar--sudden flushings with a deathly chill over her face, and giddiness, sometimes followed by unconsciousness, occasionally by a complete apparent suspension of life, a death-like trance without breath or pulsation, lasting for hours, or even for many days together. It is a very rare illness, but it is known to doctors, and I believe it is called "Waking coma." In this summer I first began the anxious watchings of first symptoms--the swelling of my mother's fingers around her rings, and then by a kiss searched if the alarming chill had already taken possession of her face. Happily, the heavenly state of mind in which she always lived took away from her the terror of these illnesses; the visions which beset her waking and sleeping were of all things good and beautiful: the actual trances themselves were to her a translation into heavenly places and to the companionship of the blessed, and, for those who looked upon her, a transfiguration.

When my mother was able to move, it was decided that she must try foreign air, which then and often afterwards completely restored her to health for the time. It was settled that we should go to Heidelberg, and as her cousin Charlotte Leycester was to travel with her, I was able to precede her for a few days in the old Belgian towns, which, as I was then in the first enthusiasm about foreign travel, I looked upon as absolutely entrancing.

_To_ MY MOTHER.

"_St. Omer, July 15, 1852._--I shall never feel the day is properly over till it has been shared with my own dear mother. I have only left you a few hours, and yet, at an expense of one pound, how great is the change!... We embarked at Dover at one, with a cloudless sky and rippling waves, and an Irish lady near me was most amusing, telling anecdotes first in French to her neighbour on the other side and then in English to me. But half-way across the Channel the thickest of fogs came on, we made no way, and cries and whistles were kept up without cessation. Then it grew rough, the Irish lady's jokes became less vivacious, and at last she followed almost all the other pa.s.sengers to the side of the vessel.

At five o'clock sea and fog subsided and we went on, but then the tide had gone from the harbour, and when we were a mile and a half from Calais, all the pa.s.sengers were transferred to open boats. As we were rowed in under the long pier, the beautiful fishing-nets were being drawn up out of the calm waters, and the old French faces with the high white caps and large gold earrings were looking down as last year.... The railway journey was delicious through the rich flat country, and the churches here, of the two missionary saints, Bertin and Omer, are most interesting."

"_Bruges, July 17._--The heat is so intense that I am more inclined to watch the perfectly motionless branches of the acacia under the window than to do my duty by the sights. The old town and its people all seem lulled to sleep by the oppression. Yet the Dyver Ca.n.a.l is delightful, with its strange old towers and its poplar trees, and the market on its bank filled with Dutch fishwives in bright costumes.... My straw hat attracts much attention. 'Voil? le costume anglais,' I hear the people say.... The _table d'h?te_ was very amusing, musicians playing the while on harp, guitar, and flute. To-night there is to be a procession which has had no equal for a hundred years.

"This morning I went to the B?guinage, a little village with walls of its own in the middle of the town. The sweet-faced B?guine nuns in long white veils were chanting the service in the church, ranged in the stalls of the choir. They wore long trains, which they took up when they came out of church. A priest was there, but the abbess seemed to take his part in officiating.[76] ... The streets are beautifully decorated for the procession, planted with living fir-trees, half the height of the houses, which, as they are very narrow, gives the effect of an avenue; but, behind, the houses are hung with flags and tapestry. In some streets altars are raised, surrounded with orange-trees and flowers.

"10 P.M.--The ceremonial was to celebrate 'the jubilee of the Carmelite tonsure.' ... The streets were all hung with flowers and tapestry, and garlands made a flower canopy across them, beneath which streamed crowds of peasants from every town in Belgium. Each pine-tree was a huge Christmas-tree with thousands of wax-lights blazing in the motionless air. Many hundreds of clergy formed the procession, and Capuchins and Carmelites and Franciscans, many with bare feet and flowing beards. There were also hundreds of torch-bearers and children swaying censers. Then came troops of young girls, 'brides of Christ,' in white, with garlands: then a beautiful little boy as St. John leading his lamb by a string; then Jesus, Mary, and Joseph--Mary crowned with a veil covered with golden stars, and endless winged cherubs in attendance; then abbots and canons; and lastly, under a crimson canopy, in a violet robe, the Bishop bearing the Host.

"The scene in the Grande Place was magnificent. Along the base of the _halles_ burning torches rolled up their smoke around the belfry and the brilliant banners, and the sea of faces was motionless in expectation. It was a tremendous moment when the immense ma.s.s of clergy had sung a hymn around the altar in the square, and the Bishop took off his mitre and knelt upon the rushes before the Sacrament. Then, as he lifted the Host in his hands, the music ceased, and the whole mult.i.tude of people fell almost prostrate in silent prayer."

After visiting Ghent, Malines, Antwerp, and Louvain, I joined my mother and her companions at Brussels, and we proceeded by the Rhine and Frankfort to Heidelberg, where we found a charming apartment almost at the castle gate, at the back of a baker's shop, with a little oleander-fringed garden high on the hill-top, overlooking the town and river. Two sisters and their cousin waited upon us. The castle gardens were like our own, and delicious in their shade and freshness and the scent of their roses and lilacs; and the courtyards and towers were full of inexhaustible interest. We were never weary here of studying the history of the English Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, and finding out her connection with the different parts of the castle, and her little garden with its triumphal arch was our favourite resort. We seldom went down into the town except on Sundays, when the famous Dr. Schenkel preached in St. Peter's Church at the foot of our hill. In the evenings we used to walk along the edge of the hills, through flower-fringed lanes, to the clear springs of Wolfsbrunnen, where there was a sort of nursery of trout (_florellen_). The students shared the gardens with us, with their ridiculous dress and faces scarred for life in the silly duels at the Hirsch Ga.s.se, which they looked upon as a distinction, and which generally arose from quarrels about giving way to each other in the street. They often, consequently, spent six hours a day in practising the sword-exercise, to the ruin of their studies. When we were at Heidelberg, all the clothes in the place used to be sent to be washed in the village of Spiegelhausen, because there the water was softer, and when its hills were covered with the linen of the whole town they produced the oddest effect. A large Heidelberg family considered it a great point of honour to have linen enough to last them six months, so as only to send it to be washed twice in the year, when it went in a great waggon to Spiegelhausen. A young lady always endeavoured to have this quant.i.ty at her marriage.

Lodging in the castle itself was M. Meyer,[77] afterwards a kind of secretary to the Empress Augusta of Germany, a most singular man, who was then employed upon an enormous poem, which he believed would throw Dante into the shade, though it has pa.s.sed quite unnoticed. He delighted to read us some of its endless cantos in the castle gardens, and we tried to look as if we understood and appreciated. But he was really very kind to us, and was a most amusing companion in the long walks which he took us--to the Angel's Meadow, a small green s.p.a.ce in the forests high on the mountains beyond the river, and elsewhere. I shared his admiration for Mrs. Hamilton (_n?e_ Margaret Dillon, the maid of honour), who was at that time in the zenith of her beauty and attractiveness, and was living at Heidelberg with her husband and children.

We spent a day at Schwetzingen, where at that time was living the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Stephanie, the daughter of the Comte de Beauharnais and great-niece of the Empress Josephine, who had been adopted by Napoleon, and married against her will (1806) to the Prince of Baden. My aunt, Mrs. Stanley, was very intimate with her, and had much that was interesting to tell of her many trials.

It was during the latter part of our sojourn at Heidelberg that the Stanleys (Aunt Kitty, Arthur, and Mary), with Emmie Penrhyn, came to stay with us on their way to spend the winter at Rome, a journey which at that time was looked upon as a great family event. With them I went to Spires and its beautiful cathedral, and on the anniversary of my adoption we all went over to Mannheim, and dined at the hotel where, seventeen years before, I, being fourteen months old, was given away to my aunt, who was also my G.o.dmother, to live with her for ever as if I were her own child, and never to see my own parents, as such, any more.

I dwell upon this because one of the strangest coincidences of my life--almost too strange for credence--happened that day at Mannheim.

When we returned to the station in the evening, we had a long time to wait for the train. On the platform was a poor woman, crying very bitterly, with a little child in her arms. Emmie Penrhyn, who was tender-hearted, went up to her, and said she was afraid she was in some great trouble. "Yes," she said, "it is about my little child. My little child, who is only fourteen months old, is going away from me for ever in the train which is coming. It is going away to be adopted by its aunt, who is also its G.o.dmother, and I shall never, never have anything to do with it any more."

It was of an adoption under _exactly_ the same circ.u.mstances that we had been to Mannheim to keep the seventeenth anniversary!

After parting with the Stanleys, we left Heidelberg on the 26th of August and made a little tour.

_To_ MRS. ALEXANDER.

"_Coblentz, Sept. 1._--Here we are again at Coblentz, in a room looking on the friendly Rhine, with Ehrenbreitstein all new and yellow on the other side the water, and the older houses of the town below us.

"Our little tour has been most successful. We went first to Baden, and spent the afternoon in driving up through the forest to the Alte Schloss, coming down in a splendid sunset--the golden Rhine gleaming in a red valley through the dark pines. The next morning, as I was being shown over the Neue Schloss, I asked about the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Stephanie and the Princess Wasa, when the guide rushed to a window and said, 'Come quick, for the princesses are riding out of the courtyard upon their a.s.ses, as they do every morning before breakfast;' but I saw little more than their shadows flit across the court as their donkeys clattered through the gate. I was shown the circular opening through which prisoners bound in a chain used to be let down into the _oubliettes_ and their subterranean judgment-hall, and the place where they had to give the _baiser de la Vierge_, when they fell through a trap-door upon wheels set round with knives which cut them to pieces.

"Next day we went to Strasbourg--so hot it was!--and then to Metz, where the cathedral is poor outside, but most glorious within--a vista of solid round pillars terminating in a blaze of stained gla.s.s. In one of the towers is 'Groggy,' a real dragon, dried.

"A diligence took us to Sierck on the Moselle, where we had a long time to wait, and mother sate and drew whilst I rambled about. It was evening before the churches of Treves appeared above the river-bank. We stayed at the charming Rothes Haus, with the little cross opposite commemorating the fiery vision of Constantine, which is supposed to have taken place there. Treves has a wonderful round of sights--the Roman baths, a beautiful ruin with tall brick arches, brilliant still in colour: thence up the vine-clad hill to where a gap between two ruined walls forms the entrance of the amphitheatre: back by the Porta Nigra, n.o.blest of Roman gateways, with the hermitage whither S. Simeon was brought from Syracuse by Archbishop Poppo, and where he spent the rest of his life: finally to the cathedral, and the Liebfrauenkirche with lovely cloisters filled with flowers.

"We made great friends with the old sacristan at the cathedral, who gave us an extraordinary account of the last exhibition of its great relic, the 'Heilige Rock,' or seamless coat of the Saviour, when 30,000 persons pa.s.sed through the church every day, weeping and sobbing, singing and praying as they went. The coat is only exhibited every twenty-five years, and awaits its next resurrection entombed in a treble coffin before the high altar. It has certainly done great things for Treves, as the cathedral has been restored, a capital hospital built, and all the fortunes of the citizens made by its exhibition. The sacristan was delighted to find that I also was a 'Romische Burgher,' but hoped that in a few years I should 'want some more cloth putting into my coat.'"

_To_ MY MOTHER.

"_Namur, Sept. 2._--Here I am, alone and dreary in the world once more.... It always seems as if I could have done a great deal more for you, and been more gentle and loving when I am gone, but I am sure my own darling mother will never really have thought me wanting in grat.i.tude to her."

"_Braine le Comte, Sept. 3._--I believe no one has such misfortunes as I have. I was at the Namur station at six this morning, and here by eight. Then the guard suggested my going into the waiting-room, as there was half-an-hour to wait before the train came up for Calais, for which I had a through ticket. I had no summons to the train: it came up on the opposite side of the station (concealed by another train) in five minutes, and I was left behind, and there is no train again till past seven o'clock this evening, and then only to Lille!--eleven hours to wait!"

"_Southgate, Sept. 4._--As the dreary hours at Braine le Comte waned, two English families arrived from Namur, and with two ladies, 'Alice and Sybil,' and the boys of Sybil, I sallied out to see Braine le Comte, and then into the forest to pick bilberries for the luncheon which I had no money to buy. Then I arrived in the night at Lille, and being unable to find a hotel in the dark, and indeed having no money to pay for going to one, wandered about till at length I collapsed altogether on the doorstep of one of the houses. Here I was found by some of the old market-women when they arrived for the opening of the market at dawn, and they took me into the _halles_, and made me share their early breakfast. This was a kind of black broth in a huge wooden bowl, into which we all dipped a great spoon in turns, but it was most welcome, and the old women were very kind to me."

It was a great pleasure this autumn to pay a little visit to my mother's old friend Miss Clinton, whose frequent visits to Lime had counted as some of the happiest days of my childhood. She was essentially what the French call "_bonne ? vivre_," so good-humoured and cheerful, and so indulgent to the faults of others. The crystal stream of her common-sense had always seemed to stir up the stagnant quagmire of religious inanities which the Maurice sisters had surrounded us with at Hurstmonceaux.

"_c.o.kenach, Oct. 3._--I was so glad to come here for two days. The dear old Stoke carriage with Lou Clinton[78] in it met me at Royston. She took me first to see the antiquities--Lady Rohesia's chapel and Roysie's Cave, which gave the place its name, and a house where James I. stayed when he came hunting, in which his bedroom is preserved with its old furniture: in the garden is the first mulberry-tree planted in England. We reached c.o.kenach by the field roads.

"I was taken up at once to Lady Louisa,[79] who sate, as years ago, in her large chair by the blazing firelogs, with all her baskets of papers round her, and her table covered with things."

As it was considered a settled point that I was to take Orders when I was grown up (a point on which no single member of the family allowed any discussion or difference of opinion), and that I was then to have the rich family living of Hurstmonceaux, in the gift of my brother Francis, my whole education up to this time had been with that intention. My mother, therefore, was quite enchanted when my admiration of the B?guinages which I had seen in Belgium led me, in the autumn of 1852, to devote every spare moment to a sort of missionary work in the low wretched districts of Southgate. I had read in St. Vincent de Paul: "L'action bonne et parfaite est le v?ritable caract?re de l'amour de Dieu ... c'est l'amour _effectif_ qu'il faut ? Dieu," and I determined to try to act upon it.

_To_ MY MOTHER.

"_Sept. 29, 1852._--I have now regularly entered on my parochial duties. There is a long strip of cottages in the village, yet out of Southgate parish, and which the clergyman of their own parish will have nothing to do with, as those of the inhabitants who go to church go to Southgate, so that he gets no marriage fees. The people would have been dreadfully neglected if Mrs. Bradley had not taken care of them, and as it is, they are in a very bad state, most of the men drunkards, and their wives and children starving.

As the houses look out upon an open drain, they teem with illness for which there is no remedy. The children spend their days in making mud-pies upon the road.... I have now got all these cottages as my peculiar province.

"Most of the people cannot, or fancy they cannot, go to church, so I offered to have a sort of 'cottage reading' every Tuesday in the house of one of the better people--a Mrs. Perry. I was rather alarmed, though glad, to see how many came.... I tried to make the reading as interesting and easy as I could, and afterwards ventured upon a little 'discourse.'

"It was strange to find this really heathen colony--for they know _nothing_--close by, and I am glad to have a foretaste of what my life's work will be like."

"_Southgate, October 12._--Mr. Bradley is in nothing so extraordinary as in the education of his children. All the moral lessons to his little daughter Jesse are taken from reminiscences of his 'poor dear first wife,' who never existed. I am used to it now, but was amazed when I first heard little Jesse ask something about 'your poor dear first wife, papa,' and he took out a handkerchief and covered over both their heads that no one might see them cry, which the little girl did abundantly over the touching story told her. Little Charlie's education was carried on in a similar way, only the model held up to him was a son of Mrs.

Bradley's by an imaginary first husband, who 'died and is buried in Oxfordshire.' Little Moses's mamma, 'Mrs. Jochebed Amram,' is also held up as an effective example of Christian piety and patience, but Moses himself never touches their feelings at all. I must send you one of the allegories which I have heard Bradley tell his children; it is such a characteristic specimen:--

"'Now I will tell you a story about Hare. When Hare was a little child he lived at Rome: you know what we call it?--("Oh yes, papa, Babylon.")--Well, he lived at Babylon, and he was a very good little boy then, but he used to walk about dressed in scarlet, for they all wore scarlet there. One day a man was seen in the streets, very beautiful, a stranger with silver wings. And he said, "Are you little Hare, and would you like to go with me and learn how to be good?" for he was an angel. And little Hare said, "Oh yes, that is what I always like to be and try to be, and I shall like very much to go."

"'So the angel took little Hare up and carried him away on his back: and his poor mother went up and down the streets of Babylon crying and wringing her hands, for she did not know where her dear boy was gone.

"'But the angel carried Hare to the Happy Island, where all manner of little children were living--Ada and Angelina, and numbers of others. All these little children came to Hare and asked why he came there in his scarlet dress without getting it washed, because they all wore white robes, and they told him he must get his robes washed too. But he said he liked his scarlet clothes, and did not wish to have white robes like theirs, and he was very sullen and angry.

"'So then the angel and the children left him alone and took no notice of him. But after a time he observed that all the other children had little wings while he had none, and he felt sorry when the great angel pa.s.sed by every day and took no notice of him, and at last he said, "How sorry I am to have spoken as I did, and how much I should like to have my robes washed and made white like those of the Happy Island children."