The Dodd Family Abroad Volume Ii Part 18

Tuesday Evening.

The telegraph has just brought word that she _will_ come. James is gone down to the office to get a copy of the despatch.

James is come back to say that she is at Novi. If she arrive here to-night, there will be an illumination of the town! Is not this too bad, Molly? Doesn't your blood run cold at the thought of it all?

They 're shouting like mad under my window now, and Lord George thinks she must be come already. James has come in with his hat in tatters and his coat in rags. The excitement is dreadful. The people suspect that the Government are betraying them to Russia, and are going to destroy a palace that belongs to a tallow merchant.

All is right, Molly. She is come! and they are serenading her now under the windows of the "Croce di Matta!"

Wednesday Night.

If my trembling hand can subscribe legibly a few lines, it is perhaps the last you will ever receive from your attached Jemima. I was never intended to go through such trials as these; and they 're now rending a heart that was only made for tenderness and affection.

We were there, Molly! After such a scene of crushing and squeezing as never was equalled, we got inside the circus, and with the loss of my new turban and one of my "plats," we reached our box, within two of the stage, and nearly opposite the King. For an hour or so, it was only fainting was going on all around us, with the heat and the violent struggle to get in. n.o.body minded the stage at all, where they were doing the same kind of thing we used to see long ago. Ten men in pinkish buff, vaulting over an old white horse, and the clown tumbling over the last of them with a screech; the little infant of three years, with a strap round its waist, standing and tottering on the horse's back; the man with the bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s and the basin, and the other one that stood on the bottles,--all pa.s.sed off tiresome enough, till a grand flourish of trumpets announced Signor Annibale, the great Modern Hercules. In he rode, Molly, full gallop, all dressed in a light, flesh-colored, web, and looking so like naked that I screeched out when I saw him. His hair was divided on his forehead, and cut short all round the head; and, indeed, I must confess he was a fine-looking man. After a turn or two, brandishing a big club, he galloped in again, but quickly reappeared with a woman lying over one of his arms, and her hair streaming down half-way to the ground. This was Sofia; and you may guess the enthusiasm of the audience at her coming! There she lay, like in a trance, as he dashed along at full speed, the very tip of one foot only touching the saddle, and her other leg dangling down like dead. It was shocking to hear the way they talked of her symmetry and her shape,--not but they saw enough to judge of it, Molly!--till at last the giant stopped to breathe a little just under our box. K. I. and the young men, of course, leaned over to have a good look at her with their gla.s.ses, when suddenly James screamed, "By the ------ --I won't say what--it is herself!" Mary Anne and I both rose together. The sight left my eyes, Molly, for she looked up at me, and who was it--but the Countess that James was going to marry! There she was, lying languidly on the giant, smiling up at us as cool as may be. I gave a screech, Molly, that made the house ring, and went off in Mary Anne's arms.

If this is n't disgrace enough to bring me to the grave, Nature must have given stronger feelings than she knows to your ever afflicted and heart-broken

Jemima Dodd.

LETTER XXIII. MISS CAROLINE DODD TO MISS c.o.x, AT MISS MINCING'S ACADEMY, BLACK ROCK, IRELAND

Sestri, Gulf of Genoa.

My dear Miss c.o.x,--I had long looked forward to our visit to Genoa in order to write to you. I had fancied a thousand things of the "Superb City" which would have been matters of interest, and hoped that many others might have presented themselves to actual observation. But with that same fatality by which the future forever evades us, we have come and gone again, and really seen nothing.

Instead of a week or fortnight pa.s.sed in loitering about these mysterious, narrow streets, each one of which is a picture, poking into crypts, and groping along the aisles of those dim churches, and then issuing forth into the blaze of sunshine to see the blue sea heaving in mighty ma.s.ses on the rocky sh.o.r.e, we came here to see some vulgar spectacle of a circus or a tournament. By ill-luck, too, even this pleasure has proved abortive; a very mortifying, I might say humiliating, discovery awaited us, and we have, for shame's sake, taken our refuge in flight from one of the most interesting cities in the whole peninsula.

I am ashamed to confess to you how ill I have borne the disappointment.

The pa.s.sing glimpses I caught here and there of steep old alleys, barely wide enough for three to go abreast; the little squares, containing some quaint monument or some fantastic fountain; the ma.s.sive iron gateways, showing through the bars the groves of orange-trees within; the wide portals, opening on great stairs of snow-white marble,--all set me a-dreaming of that proud Genoa, with its merchant-princes, who combined all the haughty characteristics of a feudal state with the dashing spirit of a life of enterprise.

The population, too, seemed as varied in type as the buildings around them. The bronzed, deep-browed Ligurian--the "Faquino"--by right of birth, stood side by side with the scarcely less athletic Dalmatian. The Arab from Tiflis, the Suliote, the Armenian, the dull-eyed Moslem, and the treacherous-looking Moor were all grouped about the Mole, with a host of those less picturesque figures that represent Northern Europe.

There, was heard every language and every dialect. There, too, seen the lineaments of every nation, and the traits of every pa.s.sion that distinguish a people. Just as on the deep blue water that broke beside them were ships of every build, from the proud three-decker to the swift "lateen," and from the tall, taper spare of the graceful clipper to the heavily rounded, low-masted galliot of the Netherlands.

I own to you that however the actual life of commerce may include commonplace events and commonplace people, there is something about the sea and those that live on the great waters that always has struck me as eminently poetical.

The scene, the adventurous existence, the strange faraway lands they have visited, the Spice Islands of the South, the cold sh.o.r.es of the Arctic Seas, the wondrous people with whom they have mingled, the dangers they have confronted,--all invest the sailor with a deep interest to me, and I regard him ever as one who has himself been an actor in the great drama of which I have only read the outline.

I was, indeed, very sorry to leave Genoa, and to leave it, too, unseen.

An event, however, too painful to allude to, compelled us to start at once; and we came on here to the little village from whence I write. A lovely spot it is,--sheltered from the open sea by a tall promontory, wooded with waving pines, whose feathery foliage is reflected in the calm sea beneath. A gentle curve of the strand leads to Chiavari, another town about six miles off; and behind us, landward, rise the great Apennines, several thousand feet in height,--grand, barren, volcanic-looking ma.s.ses of wildest outline, and tinted with the colors of every mineral ore. On the very highest pinnacles of these are villages perched, and the tall tower of a church is seen to rise against the blue sky, at an elevation, one would fancy, untrodden by man.

There is a beautiful distinctness in Italian landscape,--every detail is "picked out" sharply. The outline of every rock and cliff, of every tree, of every shrub, is clean and well defined. Light and shadow fall boldly, and even abruptly, on the eye; but--shall I own it?--I long for the mysterious distances, the cloud-shadows, the vague atmospheric tints of our Northern lands. I want those pa.s.sing effects that seem to give a vitality to the picture, and make up something like a story of the scene. It is in these the mind revels as in a dreamland of its own. It is from these we conjure up so many mingled thoughts of the past, the present, and the coming time,--investing the real with the imaginary, and blending the ideal with the actual world.

How naturally do all these thoughts lead us to that of Home! Happily for us, there is that in the religion of our hearts towards home that takes no account of the greater beauty of other lands. The loyalty we owe our own hearth defies seduction. Admire, glory in how you will the grandest scene the sun ever set upon, there is still a holy spot in your heart of hearts for some little humble locality,--a lonely glen,--a Highland tarn,--a rocky path beside some winding river, rich in its childish memories, redolent of the bright hours of sunny infancy,--and this you would not give for the most gorgeous landscapes that ever basked beneath Italian sky.

Do not fancy that I repine at being here because I turn with fond affection to the scene of my earliest days. I delight in Italy; I glory in its splendor of sky and land and water. I never weary of its beauteous vegetation, and my ear drinks in with equal pleasure the soft accents of its language; but I always feel that these things are to be treasured for memory to be enjoyed hereafter, just as the emigrant labors for the gold he is to spend in his own country. In this wise, it may be, when wandering along some mountain "boreen" at home, sauntering of a summer's eve through some waving meadow, that Italy in all its brightness will rise before me, and I will exalt in my heart to have seen the towers of the Eternal City, and watched the waves that sleep in "still Sorrento."

We leave this to-morrow for Spezia, there to pa.s.s a few days; our object being to loiter slowly along till papa can finally decide whether to go back or forward: for so is it, my dearest friend, all our long-planned tour and its pleasures have resolved themselves into a hundred complications of finance and fashionable acquaintances.

One might have supposed, from our failures in these attempts, that we should have learned at least our own unfitness for success. The very mortifications we have suffered might have taught us that all the enjoyment we could ever hope to reap could not repay the price of a single defeat. Yet here we are, just as eager, just as short-sighted, just as infatuated as ever, after a world that will have "none of us," and steadily bent on storming a position in society that, if won to-morrow, we could not retain.

I suppose that our reverses in this wise must have attained some notoriety, and I am even prepared to hear that the Dodd family have made themselves unhappily conspicuous by their unfortunate attempt at greatness; but I own, dearest friend, that I am not able to contemplate with the same philosophical submission the loss of good men's esteem and respect, to which these failures must expose US--an instance of which, I tremble to think, has already occurred to us.

You have often heard me speak of Mrs. Morris, and of the kindness with which she treated me during a visit at her house. She was at that time in what many would have called very narrow circ.u.mstances, but which by consummate care and good management sufficed to maintain a condition in every way suitable to a gentlewoman. She has since--or rather her son has--succeeded to a very large fortune and a t.i.tle. They were at Genoa when we arrived there,--at the same hotel,--and yet never either called on or noticed us! It is perfectly needless for me to say that I know, and know thoroughly, that no change in _their_ position could have produced any alteration in their manner towards us. If ever there were people totally removed from such vulgarity,--utterly incapable of even conceiving it,--it is the Morrises. They were proud in their humble fortune,--that is, they possessed a dignified self-esteem, that would have rejected the patronage of wealthy pretension, but willingly accepted the friendship of very lowly worth; and I can well believe that prosperity will only serve to widen the sphere of their sympathies, and make them as generous in action as they were once so in thought. That their behavior to _us_ depends on anything in themselves, I therefore completely reject,--this I know and feel to be an impossibility. What a sad alternative is then left me, when I own that they have more than sufficient cause to shun our acquaintance and avoid our intimacy!

The loss of such a friend as Captain Morris might have been to James is almost irreparable; and from the interest he once took in him, it is clear he felt well disposed for such a part; and I am thoroughly convinced that even papa himself, with all his anti-English prejudices, has only to come into close contact with the really n.o.ble traits of the English character, to acknowledge their excellence and their worth. I am very far from undervaluing the great charm of manner which comes under the category of what is called "aimable." I recognize all its fascination, and I even own to an exaggerated enjoyment of its display; but shall I confess that I believe that it is this very habit of simulation that detracts from the truthful character of a people, and that English bluntness is--so to say--the complement of English honesty.

That they push the characteristic too far, and that they frequently throw a chill over social intercourse, which under more genial influences had been everything that was agreeable, I am free to admit; but, with all these deficiencies, the national character is incomparably above that of any other country I have any knowledge of. It will be scarcely complimentary if I add, after all this, that we Irish are certainly more popular abroad than our Saxon relatives. We are more compliant with foreign usages, less rigid in maintaining our own habits, more conciliating in a thousand ways; and both our tongues and our temperaments more easily catch a new language and a new tone of society.

Is it not fortunate for you that I am interrupted in these gossipings by the order to march? Mary Anne has come to tell me that we are to start in half an hour; and so, adieu till we meet at Spezia.

Spezia, Croce di Malta.

The little sketch that I send with this will give you some very faint notion of this beautiful gulf, with which I have as yet seen nothing to compare. This is indeed Italy. Sea, sky, foliage, balmy air, the soft influences of an atmosphere perfumed with a thousand odors,--all breathe of the glorious land.

The Garden--a little promenade for the townspeople, that stretches along the beach--is one blaze of deep crimson flowers,--the blossom of the San Giuseppe,--I know not the botanical name. The blue sea--and such a blue!--mirrors every cliff and crag and castellated height with the most minute distinctness. Tall lateen-sailed boats glide swiftly to and fro; and lazy oxen of gigantic size drag rustling wagons of loaded vines along, the ruddy juice staining the rich earth as they pa.s.s.

Como was beautiful; but there was--so to say--a kind of trim coquetry in its beauty that did not please me. The villas, the gardens, the terraced walks, the pillared temples, seemed all the creations of a landscape-gardening spirit that eagerly profited by every accidental advantage of ground, and every casual excellence of situation. Now, here there is none of this. All that man has done here had been even better left undone. It is in the jutting promontories of rock-crowned olives,--the landlocked, silent bays, darkened by woody sh.o.r.es,--the wild, profuse vegetation, where the myrtle, the cactus, and the arbutus blend with the vine, the orange, and the fig,--the sea itself, heaving as if oppressed with perfumed languor,--and the tall Apennines, snow-capped, in the distance, but whiter still in the cliffs of pure Carrara marble,--it is in these that Spezia maintains its glorious superiority, and in these it is indeed unequalled.

It will sound, doubtless, like a very ungenerous speech, when I say that I rejoice that this spot is so little visited--so little frequented--by those hordes of stray and straggling English who lounge about the Continent. I do not say this in any invidious spirit, but simply in the pleasure that I feel in the quiet and seclusion of a place which, should it become by any fatality "the fashion" will inevitably degenerate by all the vulgarities of the change. At present the Riviera--as the coast-line from Genoa to Pisa is called--is little travelled. The steamers pa.s.sing to Leghorn by the cord of the arch, take away nearly all the tourists, so that Spezia, even as a bathing-place, is little resorted to by strangers. There are none, not one, of the ordinary signs of the watering-place about it. Neither donkeys to hire, nor subscription concerts; not a pony phaeton, a pianist, nor any species of human phenomenon to torment you; and the music of the town band is, I rejoice to say, so execrably bad that even a crowd of twenty cannot be mustered for an audience.

Spezia is, therefore, _au naturel_,--and long may it be so! Distant be the day when frescoed buildings shall rise around, to seduce from its tranquil scenery the peaceful lover of nature, and make of him the hot-cheeked gambler or the broken debauchee. I sincerely, hopefully trust this is not to be, at least in our time.

We made an excursion this morning by boat to Lerici, to see poor Sh.e.l.ley's house, the same that Byron lived in when here. It stands in the bight of a little bay of its own, and close to the sea; so close, indeed, that the waves were plashing and frothing beneath the arched colonnade on which it is built. It is now in an almost ruinous condition, and the damp, discolored walls and crumbling plaster bespeak neglect and decay.

The view from the terrace is glorious; the gulf in its entire extent is before you, and the island of Palmaria stands out boldly, with the tall headlands of Porto Venere, forming the breakwater against the sea. It was here Sh.e.l.ley loved to sit; here, of a summer's night, he often sat till morning, watching the tracts of hill and mountain wax fainter and fainter, till they grew into brightness again with coming day; and it was not far from this, on the low beach of Via Reggio, that he was lost!

The old fisherman who showed us the house had known him well, and spoke of his habits as one might have described those of some wayward child.

The large and l.u.s.trous eyes, the long waving hair, the uncertain step, the look half timid, half daring, had made an impression so strong, that even after long years he could recall and tell of them.

It came on to blow a "Levanter" as we returned, and the sea got up with a rapidity almost miraculous. From a state of calm and tranquil repose, it suddenly became storm-lashed and tempestuous; nor was it without difficulty we accomplished a landing at Spezia. To-morrow we are to visit Porto Venere,--the scene which it is supposed suggested to Virgil his description of the Cave in which neas meets with Dido; and the following day we go to Carrara to see the marble quarries and the artists' studios. In fact, we are "handbooking" this part of our tour in the most orthodox fashion; and from the tame, half-effaced impressions objects suggest, of which you come primed with previous description, I can almost fancy that reading "John Murray" at your fireside at home might compensate for the fatigue and cost of a journey. It would be worse than ungrateful to deny the aid one derives from guide-books; but there is unquestionably this disadvantage in them, that they limit your faculty of admiration or disapproval. They set down rules for your liking and disliking, and far from contributing to form and educate your taste, they cramp its development by subst.i.tuting criticism for instinct.

As I hope to write to you again from Florence, I 'll not prolong this too tiresome epistle, but, with my most affectionate greetings to all my old schoolfellows, ask my dear Miss c.o.x to believe me her ever attached and devoted

Caroline Dodd.

The Morrises arrived here last night and went on this morning, without any notice of us. They must have seen our names in the book when writing their own. Is not this more than strange? Mamma and Mary Anne seemed provoked when I spoke of it, so that I have not again alluded to the subject. I wish from my heart I could ask how _you_ interpret their coldness.

LETTER XXIV. MARY ANNE DODD TO MISS DOOLAN, OF BALLYDOOLAN.

Lucca, Pagnini's Hotel.

Dearest Kitty,--This must be the very shortest of letters, for we are on the wing, and shall be for some days to come. Very few words, however, will suffice to tell you that we have at length persuaded papa to come on to Florence,--for the winter, of course. Rome will follow,--then Naples,--_e poi?_--who knows! I think he must have received some very agreeable tidings from your uncle Purcell, for he has been in better spirits than I have seen him latterly, and shows something like a return to his old vein of pleasantry. Not but I must own that it is what the French would call, very often, a _mauvaise plaisanterie_ in its exercise, his great amus.e.m.e.nt being to decry and disparage the people of the Continent. He seems quite to forget that in every country the traveller is, and must be, a mark for knavery and cheating. His newness to the land, his ignorance, in almost all cases, of the language, his occasional mistakes, all point him out as a proper subject for imposition; and if the English come to compare notes with any Continental country, I'm not so sure we should have much to plume ourselves upon, as regards our treatment of strangers.

For our social misadventures abroad, it must be confessed that we are mainly most to blame ourselves. All the counterfeits of rank, station, and position are so much better done by foreigners than by our people, that we naturally are more easily imposed on. Now in England, for instance, it would be easier to be a d.u.c.h.ess than to imitate one successfully. All the attributes that go to make up such a station abroad, might be a.s.sumed by any adventurer of little means and less capacity. We forget--or, more properly speaking, we do not know--this, when we come first on the Continent; hence the mistakes we fall into, and the disasters that a.s.sail us.