But a few days later he added that he was watching the driving rain through the windows, and that it was bad weather for the invalid. “But it will not last,” he said.
The invalid improved then, and there was a concert in Florence at which Clara Clemens sang. Clemens in his note-book says:
April 8. Clara's concert was a triumph. Livy woke up & sent for
her to tell her all about it, near midnight.
But a day or two later she was worse again—then better. The hearts in that household were as pendulums, swinging always between hope and despair.
One familiar with the Clemens history might well have been filled with forebodings. Already in January a member of the family, Mollie Clemens, Orion's wife, died, news which was kept from Mrs. Clemens, as was the death of Aldrich's son, and that of Sir Henry M. Stanley, both of which occurred that spring.
Indeed, death harvested freely that year among the Clemens friendships. Clemens wrote Twichell:
Yours has just this moment arrived-just as I was finishing a note to
poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country-house visit we paid
in England was to Stanley's. Lord! how my friends & acquaintances
fall about me now in my gray-headed days! Vereshchagin, Mommsen,
Dvorak, Lenbach, & Jokai, all so recently, & now Stanley. I have
known Stanley 37 years. Goodness, who is there I haven't known?
CCXXXI. THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE
In one of his notes near the end of April Clemens writes that once more, as at Riverdale, he has been excluded from Mrs. Clemens's room except for the briefest moment at a time. But on May 12th, to R. W. Gilder, he reported: