THE autumn of 1868 was indeed filled for me with utter misery and "weariness of spirit." If it were not that my dear Mother had gone hand and hand with me through the terrible time of the trial and the weeks which followed, I could scarcely have survived them. To please her, I went away for a time, at the end of August, to our old friend Mrs. Francis Dawkins near Havant, and to Ripley Castle and Flaxton in Yorkshire; but I had no spirits to enjoy, scarcely to endure these visits.
It added to the complication of troubles that the poor Aunt Eleanor, for whose sake alone I had brought all the trouble upon myself, now began to take some perverted view,—what I have never ascertained. She went to live with her brother George Paul, who had lately returned from America, and for ten years I never saw her to speak to.
I was most thankful when we left England for Italy on the 12th of October, and seemed to breathe freely when we were once more in our old travelling life, sleeping in the primitive inns at Joigny and Nuits, and making excursions to Citeaux and Annecy. Carlyle says, "My father had one virtue which I should try to imitate: he never spoke of what was disagreeable and past," and my Mother was the same; she turned her back at once upon the last months, which she put away for ever like a sealed volume. We spent several weeks at Florence in the Via della Scala, whence, the Mother being well, I went constantly to draw in the gallery of sketches by Old Masters at the Uffizi. But, in the middle of November, I felt already so ill, that I began to dread a possibility of dying where my Mother would not have any one to look after her, and on the 16th we hurried to Rome, where I had just time to look out lodgings for my Mother, and establish her and Lea in the Piazza Mignanelli, when I succumbed to a violent nervous fever. Most terrible are the sufferings which I recollect at this time, the agonising pains by day, and the nights of delirium, which were truly full of Coleridge's "pains of sleep," in which I was frequently haunted by the sardonic smile of the horrible Mrs. Dunlop, and otherwise by dreams which were, as Carlyle would say, "a constant plunging and careering through chaos and cosmos." In the second week of December I rallied slightly, and could sit with Mother in the sun on the terrace of Villa Negroni. By the 14th I was able to walk a little, and went, supported on each side, to the quiet sunny path by the Tiber which then existed opposite Claude's villa. Just in front of us a carter was walking by the side of his cart, heavily laden with stones. Suddenly the wheel of the cart went too near the steeply sloping bank of the Tiber and tipped over; the horse tried in vain to recover itself, but the weight of the stones was so great that it was dragged down, and slowly, slowly, screaming as only animals do scream, disappeared with the cart under the swollen yellow waters; while the driver stood helplessly upon the bank shrieking and wringing his hands.
Weak as I was, this terrible scene naturally brought back all my fever, which now turned to typhoid, and I soon became delirious. By the following Sunday my life was despaired of. But in the small hotel where we had stayed at Florence, we had met an American, Dr. Winslow, with his wife and daughters, to whom my Mother had shown kindness, and who had been struck with our entire union and devotion to each other. Dr. Winslow arrived in Rome when I was at the worst, and the first news he heard was that I was dying. He at once gave up his Roman sight-seeing and everything else, and devoted himself to me, coming many times a day and nursing me with such wonderful care, that I eventually recovered, though it was February before I was at all myself again. It was an unspeakable blessing that my Mother continued well during my long illness, and was so kindly looked after by Mrs. Woodward and Miss Wright that I had no anxiety about her; though in the spring, when we had moved to the Via Babuino, she had one of her strange illnesses, ending in a tranquil unbroken sleep which lasted two days and nights. It was about this time that she was called to bear a loss which in earlier years would have been utterly crushing, that of her sister-friend Lucy, who expired peacefully in her quiet home at Abbots-Kerswell, with only her faithful maid watching over her. In her hermit-life, my Aunt Lucy had become farther removed from us each year, but two years before my Mother had found great happiness in visiting her, and her beautiful letters were a constant enjoyment. Still it is a merciful dispensation that to those who are themselves on the border-land of heaven, bereavements fall less bitterly, separations seem so short; and, to my Mother, the loss of the dearest friend of her early life was only a quiet grief: she had "only gone from one room into the next." My Aunt Lucy Hare had never liked me, but I had none of the bitter feeling towards her which I had towards my Aunt Esther: she truly loved my Mother, and I could admire, though I could not enter into, the various graces of her character, which were none the less real because they were those of a Carmelite nun in Protestant form.
To Roman antiquaries this spring was rendered important from the discovery of the site of the Porta Capena,—the site of which was long a vexed question,—by Mr. J. H. Parker, the Oxford publisher, who devoted much of his fortune to archæological pursuits. Pius IX. granted him permission to excavate without in the least believing anything would come of it. But when he came to inspect the discoveries he exclaimed, "Why, the heretic's right," and complained bitterly that his own archæologists, whom he paid highly, should have failed to find what had been discovered by a foreigner. Mr. Parker carefully marked all the pieces then found of the Servian Wall, and numbered them in red; but the guardia, seeing the red marks, thought they meant something revolutionary, and destroyed them. When he found them gone, Parker was furious. "Is it," he said, "due to the absurdities of an effete religion, or is it perhaps the insolence of some rival archæologist?" (meaning Rosa).
As we returned through France in the spring of 1869, we diverged to Autun and Nevers, the last of the pleasant expeditions the dear Mother and I made together in summer weather. The greater part of our summer was spent quietly at home, and was chiefly marked for me by the marriage of my dear friend Charlie Wood to Lady Agnes Courtenay.
To MISS WRIGHT.
"Holmhurst, July 10, 1869.—Your description made me see a pleasant mental picture of the cousinhood assembled at your party. For myself, I cannot but feel that all social pleasures will henceforward become more and more difficult for me, as the Mother, though not ill, becomes daily more dependent upon me for all her little interests and amusements, so that I scarcely ever leave her even for an hour. It is an odd hermit-like life in the small circuit of our little Holmhurst, with one or two guests constantly changing in its chambers, but no other intercourse with the outside world. At last summer has burst upon us, and looks all the brighter for the long waiting, and our oak-studded pastures are filled with gay groups of haymakers, gathering in the immense crop. The garden is lovely, and my own home-sunflower is expanding in the warmth and stronger and better than she has been for months past."
