The Letters of Charles Dickens Volume I Part 36

G.o.d be with us all!

Ever your affectionate.

[Sidenote: Mr. H. A. Layard.]

OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND,"

_Sat.u.r.day, 13th March, 1869._

MY DEAR LAYARD,

Coming to town for a couple of days, from York, I find your beautiful present.[100] With my heartiest congratulations on your marriage, accept my most cordial thanks for a possession that I shall always prize foremost among my worldly goods; firstly, for your sake; secondly, for its own.

Not one of these gla.s.ses shall be set on table until Mrs. Layard is there, to touch with her lips the first champagne that any of them shall ever hold! This vow has been registered in solemn triumvirate at Gad's Hill.

The first week in June will about see me through my present work, I hope. I came to town hurriedly to attend poor dear Emerson Tennent's funeral. You will know how my mind went back, in the York up-train at midnight, to Mount Vesuvius and our Neapolitan supper.

I have given Mr. Hills, of Oxford Street, the letter of introduction to you that you kindly permitted. He has immense local influence, and could carry his neighbours in favour of any good design.

My dear Layard, ever cordially yours.

[Sidenote: Miss Florence Olliffe.]

26, WELLINGTON STREET, _Tuesday, 16th March, 1869._

MY DEAR FLORENCE,[101]

I have received your kind note this morning, and I hasten to thank you for it, and to a.s.sure your dear mother of our most cordial sympathy with her in her great affliction, and in loving remembrance of the good man and excellent friend we have lost. The tidings of his being very ill indeed had, of course, been reported to me. For some days past I had taken up the newspaper with sad misgivings; and this morning, before I got your letter, they were realised.

I loved him truly. His wonderful gentleness and kindness, years ago, when we had sickness in our household in Paris, has never been out of my grateful remembrance. And, socially, his image is inseparable from some of the most genial and delightful friendly hours of my life. I am almost ashamed to set such recollections by the side of your mother's great bereavement and grief, but they spring out of the fulness of my heart.

May G.o.d be with her and with you all!

Ever yours affectionately.

[Sidenote: Mr. James T. Fields.]

ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Friday, April 9th, 1869._

MY DEAR FIELDS,

The faithful _Russia_ will bring this out to you, as a sort of warrant to take you into loving custody and bring you back on her return trip.

I rather think that when the 12th of June shall have shaken off these shackles,[102] there _will_ be borage on the lawn at Gad's. Your heart's desire in that matter, and in the minor particulars of Cobham Park, Rochester Castle, and Canterbury, shall be fulfilled, please G.o.d! The red jackets shall turn out again upon the turnpike-road, and picnics among the cherry-orchards and hop-gardens shall be heard of in Kent.

Then, too, shall the Uncommercial resuscitate (being at present nightly murdered by Mr. W. Sikes) and uplift his voice again.

The chief officer of the _Russia_ (a capital fellow) was at the Reading last night, and Dolby specially charged him with the care of you and yours. We shall be on the borders of Wales, and probably about Hereford, when you arrive. Dolby has insane projects of getting over here to meet you; so amiably hopeful and obviously impracticable, that I encourage him to the utmost. The regular little captain of the _Russia_, Cook, is just now changed into the _Cuba_, whence arise disputes of seniority, etc. I wish he had been with you, for I liked him very much when I was his pa.s.senger. I like to think of your being in _my_ ship!

---- and ---- have been taking it by turns to be "on the point of death," and have been complimenting one another greatly on the fineness of the point attained. My people got a very good impression of ----, and thought her a sincere and earnest little woman.

The _Russia_ hauls out into the stream to-day, and I fear her people may be too busy to come to us to-night. But if any of them do, they shall have the warmest of welcomes for your sake. (By-the-bye, a very good party of seamen from the Queen's ship _Donegal_, lying in the Mersey, have been told off to decorate St. George's Hall with the ship's bunting. They were all hanging on aloft upside down, holding to the gigantically high roof by nothing, this morning, in the most wonderfully cheerful manner.)

My son Charley has come for the dinner, and Chappell (my Proprietor, as--isn't it Wemmick?--says) is coming to-day, and Lord Dufferin (Mrs.

Norton's nephew) is to come and make _the_ speech. I don't envy the feelings of my n.o.ble friend when he sees the hall. Seriously, it is less adapted to speaking than Westminster Abbey, and is as large. . . .

I hope you will see Fechter in a really clever piece by Wilkie.[103] Also you will see the Academy Exhibition, which will be a very good one; and also we will, please G.o.d, see everything and more, and everything else after that. I begin to doubt and fear on the subject of your having a horror of me after seeing the murder. I don't think a hand moved while I was doing it last night, or an eye looked away. And there was a fixed expression of horror of me, all over the theatre, which could not have been surpa.s.sed if I had been going to be hanged to that red velvet table. It is quite a new sensation to be execrated with that unanimity; and I hope it will remain so!

[Is it lawful--would that woman in the black gaiters, green veil, and spectacles, hold it so--to send my love to the pretty M----?]

Pack up, my dear Fields, and be quick.

Ever your most affectionate.

[Sidenote: Mr. Rusden.]

PRESTON, _Thursday, 22nd April, 1869._

MY DEAR SIR,

I am finishing my Farewell Readings--to-night is the seventy-fourth out of one hundred--and have barely time to send you a line to thank you most heartily for yours of the 30th January, and for your great kindness to Alfred and Edward. The latter wrote by the same mail, on behalf of both, expressing the warmest grat.i.tude to you, and reporting himself in the stoutest heart and hope. I never can thank you sufficiently.

You will see that the new Ministry has made a decided hit with its Budget, and that in the matter of the Irish Church it has the country at its back. You will also see that the "Reform League" has dissolved itself, indisputably because it became aware that the people did not want it.

I think the general feeling in England is a desire to get the Irish Church out of the way of many social reforms, and to have it done _with_ as already done _for_. I do not in the least believe myself that agrarian Ireland is to be pacified by any such means, or can have it got out of its mistaken head that the land is of right the peasantry's, and that every man who owns land has stolen it and is therefore to be shot.

But that is not the question.

The clock strikes post-time as I write, and I fear to write more, lest, at this distance from London, I should imperil the next mail.

Cordially yours.

[Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Chappell.]

OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND,"

_Monday, 3rd May, 1869._

MY DEAR MR. CHAPPELL,

I am really touched by your letter. I can most truthfully a.s.sure you that your part in the inconvenience of this mishap has given me much more concern than my own; and that if I did not hope to have our London Farewells yet, I should be in a very gloomy condition on your account.

Pray do not suppose that _you_ are to blame for my having done a little too much--a wild fancy indeed! The simple fact is, that the rapid railway travelling was stretched a hair's breadth too far, and that _I_ ought to have foreseen it. For, on the night before the last night of our reading in America, when Dolby was cheering me with a review of the success, and the immediate prospect of the voyage home, I told him, to his astonishment: "I am too far gone, and too worn out to realise anything but my own exhaustion. Believe me, if I had to read but twice more, instead of once, I couldn't do it." We were then just beyond our recent number. And it was the travelling that I had felt throughout.

The sharp precautionary remedy of stopping instantly, was almost as instantly successful the other day. I told Dr. Watson that he had never seen me knocked out of time, and that he had no idea of the rapidity with which I should come up again.

Just as three days' repose on the Atlantic steamer made me, in my altered appearance, the amazement of the captain, so this last week has set me up, thank G.o.d, in the most wonderful manner. The sense of exhaustion seems a dream already. Of course I shall train myself carefully, nevertheless, all through the summer and autumn.