"I must see Dickens before I leave England," he wrote, commenting upon the various tales he heard of him from henchmen and critics; but he never did see him, nor Thackeray either, whom he perhaps wished still more to meet. Thackeray visited America while we were abroad; and when Dickens came to Boston to read, my father was dead. Nor did he see Bulwer, an apostrophe by whom he quotes: "Oh, that somebody would invent a new sin, that I might go in for it!" Tennyson he saw, but did not speak with him. He sat at table, on one occasion, with Macaulay, and remarked upon the superiority over his portraits of his actual appearance. He made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship, in Italy, of Robert Browning and his wife, and of Coventry Patmore, the author of "The Angel in the House," a poem which he greatly liked. But, upon the whole, he came in contact with the higher class of literary men in England less than with others, whom he was less likely to find sympathetic.
One afternoon, when I had accompanied him to the consulate, there entered a tall, active man, very well dressed, with black, thick-curling hair and keen, blue eyes. He seemed under thirty years of age, but had the self-confident manner of a man of the world, and a great briskness of demeanor and speech. He sat down and began to tell of his experiences; he had been all over the world, and knew everything about the world's affairs, even the secrets of courts and the coming movements of international politics. He was a striking, handsome, indomitable figure, and aggressively American. When he went away, he left with my father a book which he had written, with an engraved portrait of the author for frontispiece. This volume, faded and shelf-worn, but apparently unread, bound in the execrable taste of a generation and a half ago, I recently found among my father's volumes. It bore on the title-page the dashing signature of George Francis Train. Train saw things in the large—in their cosmic relations; from us he was going forth to make a fortune compared with which that of Monte Cristo would be a trifle. He did make fortunes, I believe; but there seems to have been in his blood a little too much of the elixir of life—more than he could thoroughly digest. His development was arrested, or was continued on lines which carried him away from practical contact with that world which he believed he held in the hollow of his hand. My father suspected his soundness; but in 1856 there seemed to be no height to which he might not rise. The spiritual steam-engine in him, however, somehow got uncoupled from the mass of the machinery of human affairs, and has been plying in vacua, so to say, ever since. On the 9th of June came a telegram from Southampton; my mother and sisters had arrived from Madeira. My father and I left Liverpool the next day, feeling that our troubles were over. In the afternoon we alighted at the little seaport and took a cab to the Castle Hotel, close to the water. My father, with a face full of light, sprang up-stairs to the room in which my mother awaited him; I found myself with my sisters and Fannie Wrigley, the faithful nurse and companion who had accompanied them on their travels. How tall and mature Una was! What a big girl baby Rose had become! There was a little strangeness between us, but great good-will; we felt that there were a great many explanations to be made. In a few minutes I was called up-stairs to my mother. At the first glance she seemed smaller than formerly; her face appeared a little different from my memory of it; I was overcome by an odd shyness. She smiled and held out her arms; then I saw my beloved mother, and a great passion of affection poured through me and swept me to her. I was whole again, and indescribably happy.
There was never such another heavenly room as that parlor in the Castle Hotel; never another hotel so delightful, or another town to be compared with Southampton. I was united to all I loved there, and in my thoughts sunshine will always rest on it.
XII
Talked familiarly with kings and queens—Half-witted girl
who giggled all the time—It gnawed me terribly—A Scotch
terrier named Towsey—A sentiment of diplomatic etiquette—
London as a physical entity—Ladies in low-necked dresses—
An elderly man like a garden-spider—Into the bowels of the
earth—The inner luminousness of genius—Isolated and tragic
situation—"Ate ever man such a morsel before!"—The great,
wild, mysterious Borrow—Her skeleton, huddled, dry, and
awful—"Ma'am, you expose yourself!"—Plane, spokeshave,
gouge, and chisel—"I-passed-the-Lightning"—Parallel-O-
grams-A graduate of Antioch—"Continual cursing"—A
catastrophe—"Troubles are a sociable sisterhood"—"In truth
I was very sorry"—He had dreamed wide—awake of these
things—A friend of Emerson and Henry James—Embarked at
Folkestone for France.
We spent our first reunited week at the Castle Hotel, which was founded on an ancient castle wall, or part of it; traces of it were shown to guests. The harbor lapped the sea-wall in front; the Isle of Wight, white-ramparted, gleamed through the haze in the offing. I suppose, during that week, we were enough employed in telling one another our histories during our separation; and naturally that of my mother and sisters filled the larger space. They had brought home words and phrases in a foreign tongue, which made me feel very ignorant; they had talked familiarly with kings and queens; they had had exciting experiences in Madeira; they brought with them photographs and colored prints of people and places, unlike anything that I had seen. My mother, who was an unsurpassed narrator of events, gave us wonderful and vivid accounts of all they had seen and done, which I so completely assimilated that to this day I could repeat a great deal of them; my father listened with eyes like stars (as my mother would have said), and with a smile in the corners of his mouth. It was glorious weather all the time, or so it seems to have been to me. My sisters and I renewed our acquaintance, and found one another none the worse. Nobody called on us except a Mrs. Hume, with whom a stay of a fortnight was projected; she kept a girls' school, and, this being vacation, she would take us as boarders. We were starved there, as only a pinching, English, thin-bread-and-butter housekeeper can starve people; and my sisters and I had for our playmate a half-witted girl who was staying over the vacation, and who giggled all the time. Mrs. Hume had aroused my enthusiasm by telling me that there were endless sea-anemones along the coast; but Providence seemed hostile to my sea-anemone proclivities; for it turned out that what Mrs. Hume understood by sea-anemones was a small, white-flowering weed that grew on the low bluff beside the water. I never told her my disappointment, imagining that it would distress her; but it gnawed me terribly, and she did not merit such forbearance.
We would much better have stayed at the hotel, only that they charged us fourteen dollars a day, which was considered exorbitant in those days. There were seven of us, including Fanny, the nurse. What an age, when two dollars a head was exorbitant! What Mrs. Hume charged us I know not, but it is only just to admit that it must have been a good deal less than one hundred dollars a week; though, again, it must not be forgotten that translucent bread-and-butter is not expensive. We were sent there, I suppose, in order to remind us that this was still the world that we were living in, after all, and not yet Paradise. We came out from her sobered and chastened, but cheerful still; and meanwhile we visited Stonehenge and other local things of beauty or interest. Then Mr. Bennoch (who, to tell the truth, had introduced Mrs. Hume to us) invited us to spend a month at his house in Blackheath, while he and his wife were making a little tour in Germany, and we arrived at this agreeable refuge during the first half of July. My father records that he was as happy there as he had ever been since leaving his native land. It was a pleasant little house, in a semi-countrified spot, and it contained, besides the usual furniture proper to an English gentleman and his wife of moderate fortune, a little Scotch terrier named Towsey, who commanded much of the attention of us children, and one day inadvertently bit my thumb; and I carry the scar, for remembrance, to this day.
Many well-known persons passed across our stage here; and London, with all its wonders, was at our doors, the wide expanse of its smoke-piercing towers visible in our distance. All the while my father kept the official part of himself at Liverpool, where his consular duties still claimed his attention; he went and came between Mrs. Blodgett's and Black-heath. The popularity of the incomparable boarding-house in Duke Street had continued to increase, and he was obliged to bestow himself in a small room at the back of the building, which was reputed to be haunted by the spirit of one of his predecessors in office, who had not only died in it, but had often experienced there the terrors of delirium tremens; but the ghost, perhaps from a sentiment of diplomatic etiquette, never showed itself to my father. Or it may have been that the real self of him being in Blackheath, what remained was not sufficient to be conscious of a spiritual presence. He came and went, like sunlight on a partly cloudy day. I recollect taking a walk over the Heath at evening with him and the doctor who was attending my mother; Mr. Bennoch was with us; it must have been just before he and his wife went to the Continent. After walking some distance (the gentlemen chatting together, and I gambolling on ahead) we came to the summit of a low rise, from which we beheld London, flung out, all its gloomy length, before us; and in all my thoughts of London as a physical entity the impression then received of it returns to me. It lay vast, low, and obscure in front of the dull red of the sunset, with dim lights twinkling dispersedly throughout it, and the dome of St. Paul's doubtfully defining itself above the level. There is no other general view of London to be compared with this, seen under those conditions. Soon after, we came to some ridges and mounds, which, said Bennoch, marked the place where were buried the heaps of the slain of some great prehistoric battle—one, at least, which must have taken place while the Romans yet ruled Britain. It was a noble scene for such an antique conflict, when man met man, foot to foot and hand to hand, with sword and spear. My mind was full of King Arthur and his Round-Table knights of the Pendragonship, and I doubted not that their mightiest fight had been fought here.
There were many walks in London itself. One day, going west along the Strand, we found ourselves drawn into the midst of a vast crowd near Charing Cross; some royal function was in progress. Threading our way slowly through the press, we saw a troop of horsemen in steel breastplates, with nodding plumes on their helmets, and drawn swords carried upright on their thighs—the famous Horse Guards; and farther on we began to see carriages with highly ornamental coachmen and footmen passing in dilatory procession; within them were glimpses of ladies in low-necked dresses, feathers in their hair, and their necks sparkling with jewels.