Whilst Richard had been on the West Coast of Africa, Speke and Grant had been on their Expedition, and returned and had a grand ovation. The labours of the first Expedition had rendered the road easy for the second. "The line had been opened," Richard wrote, "by me to Englishmen; they had only to tread in my steps." In the closing days of December, 1863, Speke made a speech at Taunton, which for vain-gloriousness and bad taste was unequalled. He referred to Richard as "Bigg," asserted "that in 1857 he (Speke) had hit the Nile on the head, but that now (1863) he had driven it into the Mediterranean." It is not much to be wondered at if the following epigram on one of Richard's visiting cards was left on the table of the Royal Geographical Society—
"Two loves the Row of Savile haunt,
Who both by nature big be;
The fool is Colonel (Barren) Grant,
The rogue is General Rigby."
The first great event was the British Association Meeting at Bath, September, 1864. Laurence Oliphant conveyed to Richard that Speke had said that "if Burton appeared on the platform at Bath" (which was, as it were, Speke's native town) "he would kick him." I remember Richard's answer—"Well, that settles it! By God, he shall kick me;" and so to Bath we went. There was to be no speaking on Africa the first day, but the next day was fixed for the "great discussion between Burton and Speke." The first day we went on the platform close to Speke. He looked at Richard, and at me, and we at him. I shall never forget his face. It was full of sorrow, of yearning, and perplexity. Then he seemed to turn to stone. After a while he began to fidget a great deal, and exclaimed half aloud, "Oh, I cannot stand this any longer." He got up to go out. The man nearest him said, "Shall you want your chair again, Sir? May I have it? Shall you come back?" and he answered, "I hope not," and left the Hall. The next day a large crowd was assembled for this famous discussion. All the distinguished people were with the Council; Richard alone was excluded, and stood on the platform, we two alone, he with his notes in his hand. There was a delay of about twenty-five minutes, and then the Council and speakers filed in and announced the terrible accident out shooting that had befallen poor Speke shortly after his leaving the Hall the day before. Richard sank into a chair, and I saw by the workings of his face the terrible emotion he was controlling, and the shock he had received. When called upon to speak, in a voice that trembled, he spoke of other things and as briefly as he could. When we got home he wept long and bitterly, and I was for many a day trying to comfort him.
I reprint a few lines that rushed to my mind in winter, 1864:—
Reprinted from Fraser's Magazine, February, 1869.
"'WHO LAST WINS.'
Some Lines I wrote on Richard and Speke.
"The following lines were suggested to me in the studio of the late Edgar George Papworth, Esq., of 36, Milton Street, Dorset Square, in the winter of 1864.
"Captain Burton had recently returned from Africa. The annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science had just taken place at Bath, and poor Captain Speke's sudden death was still fresh in our memories. We had been invited by the artist to look at Captain Speke's bust, upon which he was then employed. Mr. Papworth said to Captain Burton, 'I only took the cast after death, and never knew him alive; but you who lived with him so long can surely give me some hints.' Captain Burton, who had learnt something of sculpturing when a boy in Italy, took the sculptor's pencil from Mr. Papworth's hand, and with a few touches here and there made a perfect likeness and expression. As I stood by, I was very much impressed by this singular coincidence.
"A moulded mask at my feet I found,
With the drawn-down mouth and deepen'd eye,
More lifeless still than the marbles round—
Very death amid dead life's mimicry;
I raised it, and Thought fled afar from me
To the African land by the Zingian Sea.
"'Twas a face, a shell that had nought of brain,
And th' imbedding chalk showed a yellow thread
Which struck my glance with a sudden pain,
For this seemed alive when the rest was dead;
And poor bygone raillery came to mind
Of the tragic masque and no brain behind.
"But behind there lay in the humblest shrine
A gem of the brightest purest ray:
The gem was the human will divine;
The shrine was the homeliest human clay,
Self-glory—but hush! be the tale untold
To the pale ear thinned by yon plaster mould.
"Shall the diamond gem lose her queenly worth,
Though pent in the dungeon of sandy stone?
Say, is gold less gold, though in vilest earth
For long years it has lurked unprized, unknown?
And the rose which blooms o'er the buried dead,
Hath its pinkness paled, hath its fragrance fled?
"Thus the poet sang, 'Is the basil vile,
Though the beetle's foot o'er the basil crawl?
And though Arachne hath webbed her toil,
Shall disgrace attach to the princely hall?
And the pearl's clear drop from the oyster shell,
Comes it not on the royal brow to dwell?'
"On the guarded tablet was writ by Fate,
A double self for each man ere born,
Who shall love his love and shall hate his hate,
Who shall praise his praise and shall scorn his scorn,
Enduring aye to the bitter end,
And man's other man shall be called a friend.
"When the spirits with radiance nude arrayed
In the presence stood of the one Supreme,
Soul looked unto soul, and the glance conveyed,
A pledge of love which each must redeem;
Nor may spirit enfleshed in the dust, forget
That high trysting-place, ere time was not yet.
"When the first great Sire, so the Legends say,
The four-rivered garden in Asia trod,
And 'neath perfumed shade, in the drouth of day,
Walked and talked with the Hebrew God,
Such friendship was when it first began;
And the first of friends were the God, the man.
"But we twain were not bound by such highborn ties;
Our souls, our minds, and our thoughts were strange,
Our ways were not one, nor our sympathies,
We had severed aims, we had diverse range;
In the stern drear Present his lot was cast,
Whilst I hoped for the Future and loved the Past.
"'Twixt man and woman use oft hath bred
The habits that feebly affection feign,
While the common board and genial bed
And Time's welding force links a length of chain;
Till, when Love was not, it has sometimes proved
This has loved and lived, that has lived and loved.
"But 'twixt man and man it may not so hap
Each man in his own and his proper sphere;
At some point, perchance, may the lines o'erlap;
The far rest is far as the near is near—
Save when the orbs are of friend and friend
And the circles' limits perforce must blend.
"But the one sole point at which he and I
Could touch, was the contact of vulgar minds.
'Twas interest's forcible feeble tie
Which binds, but with lasting bonds ne'er binds;
And our objects fated to disagree,
What way went I, and what way went he?
"And yet we were comrades for many years,
And endured in its troth our companionship
Through a life of chances, of hopes and fears;
Nor a word of harshness e'er passed the lip,
Nor a thought unkind dwelt in either heart,
Till we chanced—by what chance did it hap?—to part.
"Where Fever yellow-skinned, bony, gaunt,
With the long blue nails and lip livid white;
With the blood-stained orbs that could ever haunt
Our brains by day and our eyes by night;
In her grave-clothes mouldy with graveyard taint
Came around our sleeping mats—came and went:
"Where the crocodile glared with malignant stare,
And the horse of the river, with watery mane
That flashed in the sun, from his oozy lair
Rose to gaze on the white and wondrous men;
And the lion, with muzzle bent low to earth,
Mocked the thunder-cloud with his cruel mirth:
"Where the speckled fowls the Mimosa decked
Like blue-bells studded with opal dew;
And giraffes pard-spotted, deer-eyed, swan-necked,
Browsed down the base whence the tree dome grew,
And the sentinel-antelope, aëried high,
With his frightened bound taught his friends to fly:
"Where the lovely Coast is all rank with death,
That basks in the sun of the Zingian shore;
Where the mountains, dank with the ocean's breath,
Bear the incense-tree and the sycamore;
Where the grim fierce desert and stony hill
Breed the fiercest beasts, and men fiercer still:
"Where the Land of the Moon with all blessings blest
Save one—save man; and with name that sped
To the farthest edge of the misty West
Since the Tyrian sailor his sail-sheet spread,
Loves to gaze on her planet whose loving ray
Fills her dells and fells with a rival day:
"Where the Lake unnamed in the Afric wold
Its breast to the stranger eye lay bare;
Where Isis, forced her veil to unfold—
To forget the boast of the days that were—
Stood in dusky charms with the crisp tire crowned
On the hallowed bourne, on the Nile's last bound:—
"We toiled side by side, for the hope was sweet
To engrave our names on the Rock of Time:
On the Holy Hill to implant our feet
Where enfaned sits Fame o'er the earth sublime;
And now rose the temple before our eyes—
We had paid the price, we had plucked the prize;
"When up stood the Shadow betwixt us twain—
Had the dusky goddess bequeathed her ban?
And the ice of death through every vein
Of comradeship spread in briefest span;
The guerdon our toils and our pains had won
Was too great for two, was enough for one;
"And deeper and deeper grew the gloom
When the serpent tongue had power to sting,
While o'er one of us hung the untimely doom—
A winter's night to a day of spring,
And heart from heart parting fell away
At the fiat of Fate by her iron sway.
"It seems as though from a foamy[1] dream
I awake, and this pallid mask behold,
And I ask—Can this be the end supreme
Of the countless things of the days of old?
This clay, is it all of what used to be
In the Afric land by the Zingian Sea?"
——Isabel Burton.
Richard at this time wrote, secretly, a little "squib" of one hundred and twenty-one pages, called "Stone Talk," being some of the marvellous sayings of a petral portion of Fleet Street, London, to one Dr. Polyglot, Ph.D., by Frank Baker, D.O.N., 1865. He kept it quite secret from me, and one day brought it out of his pocket on a railway journey, as if he had bought it from a stall, and gave it to me to read. I was delighted with it, kept reading him out passages from it, with peals of laughter. Fortunately we were alone, and I kept saying to him, "Jemmy, I wish you would not go about talking as you do; I am sure this man has been associating with you at the club, picked up all your ideas and written this book, and won't he just catch it!" At last, after going on like that for a considerable time, the amused expression of his face flashed an idea into my brain, and I said, "You wrote it yourself, Jemmy, and nobody else;" and he said, "I did." When I showed it to Lord Houghton, he told me that he was afraid that it would do Richard a great deal of harm with the "powers that were," and advised me to buy them up, which I did. He took the nom de plume of "Frank Baker" from his second name Francis and his mother's name Baker.
It has been thrown in my teeth, since his death, that he would have married twice before he married me, and as he was between thirty-nine and forty at the time of our marriage, it is very natural that it should be so. I sometimes take comfort in reading passages from "Stone Talk" anent former loves—I do not know who they are:—
"So, standing 'mid the vulgar crowd,
I watched the fair, the great, the proud
That hustled in, when glad surprise
Awaited these my languid eyes.
The pink silk hood her head was on
Did make a sweet comparison
With brow as pure, as clear, as bright,
As Boreal dawn or Polar night,
With lips whose crimson strove to hide
Gems all unknown to Oman's tide,
With eyes as myosotis blue,
With cheeks of peachy down and hue,
And locks whose semi-liquid gold
Over the ivory shoulders rolled.
Not 'low' her dress, yet cunning eye
'Neath gauzy texture could descry
Two silvery orbs, that rose and fell,
With Midland Sea's voluptuous swell,
Intoxicating to the brain
As flowers that breathe from Persian plain
Whereon to rest one moment brief
Were worth a life of pain and grief;
And, though fast closed in iron cage—
Venetian padlock of the age—
The poetry of motion told
Of all by envious flounce and fold
Concealed; each step of nameless grace
Taught glowing Fancy's glance to trace
A falling waist, on whose soft round
No lacing wrinkle might be found
(Nor waspish elegance affright
Thorwaldsen's, Canova's sight),
And rising hips and migniard feet—
Ankle for Dian's buskin meet—
Gastrocunemius——
Cease, Muse! to tell
The things my mem'ry holds too well.
I bowed before the 'Thing Divine'
As pilgrim sighting holy shrine,
And straight my 'chanted spirit soared
To dizzy regions late explored
By Mister Hume—A. B.—C. D.—all
The rout yclept spiritual.
A church of emeralds I see,
An altar-tower lit brilliantly;
A steeple, too, the pave inlaid
With richest tint of light and shade;
A 'deal of purple,' archèd pews;
And all the 'blacks' methinks are 'blues.'
Now throngs the murex-robèd crowd,
A-chanting anthems long and loud,
And children, garbed in purest white,
Kneel with wreathed heads before the light.
I, too, am there, with 'Thing Divine,'
Bending before the marble shrine,
While spirit-parson's sleepy drone
Maketh me hers and her my own.
When sudden on my raptured sight
Falls deadly and discharming blight,
Such blight as Eurus loves to fling
O'er gladsome crop in genial spring.
Fast by the side of 'Thing Divine,'
By spirit-parson fresh made mine,
In apparition grim—I saw
The middle-aged British mother-in-law!!
* * * * *
The pink silk hood her head was on
Did make a triste comparison
With blossomed brow and green-grey eyes,
And cheeks bespread with vinous dyes,
And mouth and nose—all, all, in fine,
Caricature of 'Thing Divine.'
Full low the Doppelgänger's dress
Of moire and tulle, in last distress
To decorate the massive charms
Displayed to manhood's shrinking arms;
Large loom'd her waist 'spite pinching stays,
As man-o'-war in bygone days;
And, ah! her feet were broader far
Than beauty's heel in Mullingar.
Circular all from toe to head,
Pond'rous of framework, as if bred
On streaky loin and juicy steak;
And, when she walked, she seemed to shake
With elephantine tread the ground.
Sternly, grimly, she gazed around,
Terribly calm, in much flesh strong,
Upon the junior, lighter throng,
And loudly whispered, 'Who's that feller?
Come! none of this, Louise, I tell yer!'
And 'Thing Divine' averted head,
And I, heart-broken, turned and fled."
DIRGE.
"I also swore to love a face
And form where beauty strove with grace,
And raven hair, black varnished blue,
A brow that robbed the cygnet's hue,
Orbs that beshamed the fawnlet's eyne,
And lips like rosebuds damp with rain.
Ah! where is she? ah! where are they—
The charms that stole my heart away?
"She's fatten'd like a feather bed,
Her cheeks with beefy hue are red,
Her eyes are tarnished, and her nose
Affection for high diet shows;
The voice like music wont to flow,
Is now a kind of vaccine low.
Cupid, and all ye gods above,
Is this the thing I used to love?"