I shall never forget when the time came to part, and I was to go to Liverpool to see him off, for he would not allow me to accompany him till he had seen what Fernando Po was like. It was in August, 1861, when we went down to Liverpool, and we were very sad, because he was not going to a Consulate where we could hope to remain together as a home. It was a deadly climate, and we were always going to be climate-dodging. I was to go out, not now, but later, and then, perhaps, not to land, and to return and ply up and down between Madeira and Teneriffe and London, and I, knowing he had Africa at his back, was in a constant agitation for fear of his doing more of these Explorations into unknown lands. There were about eighteen men (West African merchants), and everybody took him away from me, and he had made me promise that if I was allowed to go on board and see him off, that I would not cry and unman him. It was blowing hard and raining; there was one man who was inconsiderate enough to accompany and stick to us the whole time, so that we could not exchange a word (how I hated him!). I went down below and unpacked his things and settled his cabin, and saw to the arrangement of his luggage. My whole life and soul was in that good-bye, and I found myself on board the tug, which flew faster and faster from the steamer. I saw a white handkerchief go up to his face. I then drove to a spot where I could see the steamer till she became a dot.
"Fresh as the first beam
Glittering on a sail,
Which brings our friends up
From the under world;
Sad as the last, which reddens over one,
That sinks with all we love below the verge."
Here I give Richard's description of going out, read later—
"A heart-wrench—and all is over. Unhappily I am not one of those independents who can say, Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte.
"Then comes the first nightfall on board outward-bound, the saddest time that the veteran wanderer knows. Saadi the Persian, one of the best travellers,—he studied books for thirty years, did thirty of wanderjahre, and for thirty wrote and lived in retirement—has thus alluded to the depressing influence of what I suppose may philosophically be explained by an absence of Light-stimulus or Od-force—
'So yearns at eve's soft tide the heart,
Which the wide wolds and waters part
From all dear scenes to which the soul
Turns, as the lodestone seeks its pole.'"We cut short the day by creeping to our berths, without even a 'nightcap,' and we do our best to forget ourselves, and everything about us."
[1] "Aussitôt qu'un malheur nous arrive il se recontre toujours un ami prêt à venir nous le dire et à nous fouiller le cœur avec un poignard en nous faisant admirer le manche."—Balzac. This friend I had, but—
"There are no tricks in plain and simple Faith."—Julius Cæsar, iv. ii.
I received only four lines in the well-known hand by post from Zanzibar—no letter.
To Isabel.
"That brow which rose before my sight,
As on the palmers' holy shrine;
Those eyes—my life was in their light;
Those lips my sacramental wine;
That voice whose flow was wont to seem
The music of an exile's dream."