39. We rushed into each other's arms. 22nd May, 1860.
During Burton's absence Isabel Arundell tortured herself with apprehensions and fears. Now and again a message from him reached her, but there were huge deserts of silence. Then came the news of Speke's return and lionization in London. She thus tells the story of her re-union with Burton. "On May 22nd (1860), I chanced to call upon a friend. I was told she had gone out, but would be in to tea, and was asked to wait. In a few minutes another ring came to the door, and another visitor was also asked to wait. A voice that thrilled me through and through came up the stairs, saying, 'I want Miss Arundell's address.' The door opened, I turned round, and judge of my feelings when I beheld Richard!.... We rushed into each other's arms.... We went down-stairs and Richard called a cab, and he put me in and told the man to drive about anywhere. He put his arm round my waist, and I put my head on his shoulder." [177] Burton had come back more like a mummy than a man, with cadaverous face, brown-yellow skin hanging in bags, his eyes protruding and his lips drawn away from this teeth—the legacy of twenty-one attacks of fever.
When the question of their marriage was brought before her parents, Mr. Arundell not only offered no impediment, but remarked: "I do not know what it is about that man, I cannot get him out of my head. I dream of him every night," but Mrs. Arundell still refused consent. She reiterated her statement that whereas the Arundells were staunch old English Catholics, Burton professed no religion at all, and declared that his conversation and his books proclaimed him an Agnostic. Nor is it surprising that she remained obdurate, seeing that the popular imagination still continued to run riot over his supposed enormities. The midnight hallucinations of De Quincey seemed to be repeating themselves in a whole nation. He had committed crimes worthy of the Borgias. He had done a deed which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. Miss Arundell boldly defended him against her mother, though she admitted afterwards that, circumstances considered, Mrs. Arundell's opposition was certainly logical.
"As we cannot get your mother's consent," said Burton, "we had better marry without it."
"No," replied Miss Arundell, "that will not do," nor could any argument turn her.
"You and your mother have certainly one characteristic in common," was the comment. "You are as obstinate as mules."
Burton was not without means, for on the death of his father he inherited some £16,000, but he threw his money about with the recklessness of an Aladdin, and 16 million would have gone the same way. It was all, however, or nearly all spent in the service of the public. Every expedition he made, and every book he published left him considerably the poorer. So eager for exploration was he that before the public had the opportunity to read about one expedition, he had started on another. So swiftly did he write, that before one book had left the binders, another was on its way to the printers. Systole, diastole, never ceasing—never even pausing. Miss Arundell being inflexible, Burton resolved to let the matter remain nine months in abeyance, and, inactivity being death to him, he then shot off like a rocket to America. One day in April (1860) Miss Arundell received a brief letter the tenor of which was as follows:—"I am off to Salt Lake City, and shall be back in December. Think well over our affair, and if your mind is then made up we will marry."
Being the first intimation of his departure—for as usual there had been no good-bye—the message gave her a terrible shock. Hope fled, and a prostrating illness followed. The belief that he would be killed pressed itself upon her and returned with inexplicable insistence. She picked up a newspaper, and the first thing that met her eye was a paragraph headed "Murder of Captain Burton." The shock was terrible, but anxious enquiry revealed the murdered man to be another Captain Burton, not her Richard.