We called it our honeymoon—a belated one, like the gift of a portrait-bust of our boy at three years old, which Joe chaffed Miss Henrietta Montalba for presenting to us as a “wedding-present.” But none the less a honeymoon for that, though not of the conventional and luxurious type.
Many a funny experience attended Joe’s efforts to pursue in travel the economy which I had sternly sought to instil at home, and I am afraid that he never again fully resumed the good habit from which he then first broke away. Economy was not one of his virtues—was he not the son of an Irish-woman? But, then, generosity was. Burne-Jones once asked him why he took a cab to drive down the Strand, and he said it came cheaper, because if he walked he was sure to give half a crown to some former “stage-hand.” Yet when another day Burne-Jones himself was deceived by a plausible story and Joe cried in reproof: “Can’t you see that it’s only acting?” Burne-Jones replied: “Well, my dear, I’ve paid ten-and-six to see worse.”
But in the days of our first foreign trip my extravagant husband was still “trying to be good.”
I remember his taking the English prescription for a sedative to a small chemist on Lago Maggiore, whom he described as the alchymist in Romeo and Juliet; but when the dose, which at home represented about two tablespoonfuls, arrived in a straw covered quart “fiasco,” he preferred a night’s toothache to venturing on it.
As representing his sympathetic understanding of one side of the Italian character, I might cite our going into the quaintest of curiosity shops in an old town where we had to wait at a junction, and his tendering a cheque in payment of a trifling purchase. I am bound to say he confessed afterwards that he had only bought me the trinket in the faint hope of getting the change he needed and that he was as surprised as I was to see the ox-eyed little hunchback unearth a beautiful ancient casket and hand him from it the gold required.
Possibly the timid request having come from me in the man’s own dialect may have helped to confirm the impression of “good faith” given by Joe’s candid countenance; but he did naturally count on me; and on a different occasion when he was obstinately trying to drive a bargain with an unwisely grasping vetturino, his delight was great at the sudden drop of five francs in the demand of the astounded plunderer upon hearing his own vernacular from my indignant English lips.
There were many times when Joe would have none of my help. When we were staying on the Riviera he would go every day into the town in the rattling little omnibus that plied along the dusty road, succeeding by sheer kindred bonhomie in making friends with the drivers and rejoicing at the abusive epithet of “ugly microbe” suggested by some late epidemic, with which they used at the time merrily to bombard one another.
His best crony amongst the friends of my childhood was the old priest of our Apennine village who had taught me the piano when I was a little girl, in exchange—as he always averred—for my instruction in my own tongue.
I’m afraid his conversational English was little credit to me and not much better than Joe’s Italian, although the old man was a scholar and had taught himself enough, with occasional help from my father, to read Shakespeare in the original.
He pronounced the name with every vowel broad and separate, as in his Latin; this was easy in that case, but when he wanted to tell which were his “four favourite poets”—in which list he included musicians—he was sore put to it for the pronunciation of Byron, Beethoven and Bach.