On the 24th I got very uneasy about Richard. I saw him dipping his pen anywhere except into the ink. When he tried to say something, he did not find his words; when he walked, he knocked up against furniture. He would not take any medicine, because we were to leave next day to go over to Nice to inspect the ruins, from thence to Mentone ditto, and then make our way straight back to Trieste; but I took him to Dr. Frank, who was a very old friend of ours, and whose wife, Lady Agnes, had made our visit to Cannes thoroughly happy. Dr. Frank examined him, found him as sound as a bell, prescribed rest, and thought I was nervous. On the 25th the same symptoms returned, and on the 26th, though we had packed up, I absolutely refused to move; and Richard said, "Do you know, I think that that earthquake must have shaken me more than I was aware of." Now, it was not only the shocks of earthquake, but that the earth for several weeks kept palpitating in a manner very nauseating to sensitive people, and he was intensely so. He forbade me to send for Dr. Frank, saying it would pass; but I disobeyed.
Dr. Frank, thinking I had got a "fad," did not hurry, but, passing by on his rounds, thought he would look in and say good-bye. He stayed with us half an hour, assured us that Richard was all right and as sound as a bell, and was just feeling his pulse once more preparatory to saying good-bye. While his pulse was being held, poor Richard had one of the most awful fits of epileptiform convulsions (the only one he ever had in all his life), an explosion of gout. It lasted about half an hour, and I never saw anything so dreadful, though Dr. Frank assured me he did not suffer, but seemed doubtful as to whether he would recover. When Dr. Frank told me that he thought it doubtful he might not recover, I was seized with a panic lest he might not have been properly baptized, and asking Dr. Frank if I might do so, he said, "You may do anything you like." I got some water, and knelt down and saying some prayers, I baptized him. Soon the blackness disappeared, the limbs relaxed, he opened his eyes, and said, "Hallo! there's the luncheon bell; I want my luncheon." Dr. Frank said, "No, Burton, not to-day; you have been a little faint." "Have I?" he said. "How funny! I never felt anything." To make a long story short, that was the beginning of his being a real invalid. As soon as he was well enough to be spoken to about his condition, I told him what I had done, and he looked up with an amused smile, and he said, "Now that was very superfluous, if you only knew;" and after a pause he said, "The world will be very much surprised when I come to die," but he did not explain his meaning. I did not know the full significance of it; I could only guess. There were attending upon him, Dr. Frank who managed his case; Dr. Legg came once, but Dr. Brandt and Dr. Grenfell-Baker (who was there for his health) came every day and relieved guard, Dr. Brandt sleeping there at night. I had a trained nurse, Sister Aurélie of the Bon Secours, Lisa my maid, and myself always, so that he was well looked after.
Dr. Frank found that it was impossible for me to move without a travelling doctor. Richard strenuously resisted it for several days, saying "he should hate to have a stranger in the house; that we should never be by ourselves; that we should have an outsider always spying upon us, who would probably quarrel with us, or hate one or both of us, and make mischief, and confide all our little domestic affairs to the world in general; that a third was always in a nondescript position." Now, this was a risk we had to run; but I argued that if we put by £2000 of our "Arabian Nights" money and gave ourselves four years of doctor (till 1891, unless he previously got quite strong), that it would tide him over the worst crisis of his life into a strong old age, and that as soon as he was free from Government, and we settled down at home, we should be in the land of doctors, and free to live by ourselves again, and to do what he liked, which had already been arranged for 1891. He then consented. I telegraphed to England, and Dr. Ralph Leslie was sent to us. As soon as the case was handed over to him, we commenced our Via Crucis to Trieste.
It was astonishing, in spite of malady, what wonderful cool nerve Richard had in any accident or emergency.
This is his own account:—
"I was not fated to escape so easily. Just as we were packed up and on the point of starting for Nice to see the ruins, and we were in the act of saying good-bye to our old friend of twenty-four years, Dr. Frank, I was suddenly struck down by an acute attack of cerebral congestion, the result of suppressed gout. For a time I was ordered to be kept absolutely quiet, confined to bed and sofa with a diet of broth and bromide, milk and soda-water, and was carefully nursed. My wife felt that though she had successfully nursed me through seven long illnesses since our marriage, that this was a case beyond her ken. Dr. Frank also explained to me that circumstances might arise which would require an educated finger to feel the pulse, and to give instant remedies, where all the tenderness and care of my wife's nursing would be without avail. So, after strenuously opposing a course which I felt would be a grievous burthen to our lives, and be a most unpleasant change, I saw reason in it, and I allowed her to telegraph to London for a physician who was on the look-out for a travelling appointment, and was skilled in such matters, to take temporary charge of my case. In contending on this subject, she said, 'How many valuable lives are lost by friends saying, "If you are not better by to-morrow, we must send for the doctor;" or in the night, "When it is light we will send for the doctor"! Remember poor H——.' She was obstinate in her determination not to risk these things, and resolved to lose no chance of passing me through my three or four years' crisis into a sound old age. A man living in London, surrounded by the ablest doctors in the world, may dispense with this disagreeable luxury; not so, however, an exile in a foreign port town. A foreign doctor, however clever, finds it difficult to treat an Englishman, only because he has never understood or never studied a Britisher. I think, if it had not been for my wife, I should have died of inanition in my first two long attacks of gout, eight months in the winter 1883 and 1884, and three months of 1885. From the two first in Trieste I rose a perfect skeleton, which made me determine never to spend another winter there, even if I had to leave the Service. However, the Foreign Office, which has ignored me in every way else, has been merciful about 'leave,' and I hope to be a free man in March, and a Londoner in September, 1891.
"The Trieste apothecary can seldom make up English recipes, Either he has not the needful drugs, or he needs four or five days to get them, and he sells the worst quality at the highest prices. English drugs are considered strong enough to kill.
"On the eleventh day from the attack, Dr. Ralph Leslie, of Toronto, arrived. He visited all the doctors, took over the case, and stocked his medicine chest. We were able to leave Cannes on the 9th of March. We went to the Hôtel Victoria, Monte Carlo, because it was quieter than those near the gaming-tables. Here we took drives, and I became much better. We drove to Mentone to see the ruins, but we both got seedy going along—a sort of stifling—and just as we drove into the town there was another earthquake. Poor people were rushing into the streets bringing out their mattresses, carriages flying in all directions. We drove over the town and inspected everything, but did not put up for fear of a repetition of Cannes, so we drove back to Monte Carlo. Clouds gathered over Mentone. At midnight there was another shock. We were both seedy about eighteen hours, and my wife could feel the gases, I only the palpitation of the earth.
"On the 14th of March we drove over to Nice, and I was able to stand an excursion of six hours, and felt almost perfectly well. I had loads of visitors—Mr. Wickham, Mr. Myers (Professor Sayce's friend), and Father Wolfe, S.J. We only went once to the gaming-tables, and thought it very slow. My better half lost eighty-five francs in ten minutes. We determined after several days to start from Monte Carlo to Genoa. It was a big business for me, and we started by a 5.20 p.m. train. The trains had to crawl past the towns for fear of shaking down the buildings that remained, so that I was nine hours out, and as I had to be carried from the train to my carriage, which had been telegraphed for, another English family did me, and had got into it, and thereby also got our rooms and our supper; and when we arrived, they had to get us other rooms, and a bouillon for me, and we did not get to bed till two, but next day we got very good rooms.
"On the 18th of March we saw the death in the papers (as no one knew our whereabouts) of our poor uncle, Lord Gerard, and we were both very sad and agitated.
"Our next great move was to Milan, where everything was ready for us. At Milan there was still a great deal of electricity in the air, but thank God we were off the line of earthquakes.
"After staying some time at Milan, we moved on to Venice, and the air there, being of such a mild nature, immediately began to do me good. I could go out in gondolas, and took a little walk in the Piazzetta, and enjoyed it, and received visits from my friends, and on the 31st of March I passed a nice day without pain; on that day I bought a little Knight in armour. From Venice my wife telegraphed to our Vice-Consul, Mr. P. P. Cautley, to change the whole of the house, putting me in the rooms with the best climate, and reserving for ourselves a private apartment of six rooms, divided from the rest of the house and in the balmy corner.
"On the 5th of April I was able to write a little, and that day we went on to Trieste.
"The details of our melancholy journey will, I fear, scarcely interest any one but ourselves. It was a real Via Crucis, as I had to be ambulanced the whole way, and, being very weak, we were twenty-eight days accomplishing the twenty-eight hours of express train which lie between Cannes and Trieste, which was only varied by minor earthquakes till we reached Milan; at Genoa by the agitation of seeing Lord Gerard's death in the newspaper, and my wife having a large blood-cyst on her lip, which appeared soon after my fit, and which Dr. Leslie had to cut out at Milan. It was indeed a road of anguish and labour, and right thankful were we to find ourselves once more in our own home on the 5th of April, after being out ten months.
"Our climate is one sui generis; it is a perpetual alternative of the raw north-easter, called the Bora, and the muggy south-western, called Scirocco. The former often causes the quays to be roped, in order to prevent pedestrians being raised in the air and thrown into the sea, and within the last eighteen years it has upset two mail trains. Then there is the Contraste, when the two blow together, one against another, making a buffer of the human body. The Scirocco is a dry wind from the North African desert, and arrives at Trieste saturated with water, but still containing the muggy oppressing sensation so well known to travellers in Algiers, Tunis, and Marocco. Moreover, the old town is undrained, the quay is built over nine several sewers, some of large size, and it is said that the new town of Trieste is built upon ninety-two feet of old sewage, consequently the normal death-rate is at the lowest, thirty-five per thousand per annum, nearly double the amount of London, and in more than one winter it has ranged from seventy-five to eighty-five. Foreign residents here remark that a process of acclimatization must take place whenever they leave Trieste or return to it. However, on this occasion it did not maltreat me; indeed, an improvement in my case began at Venice, and continued when I reached my post."
We had some visits, and amongst other literary celebrities, Dr. MacDowall, and Madame Emily de Laszouska, née Gerard, Dr. Bohndorf, and Dr. Oscar Lenz and wife, African travellers; General Buckle, Madame Nubar, and Madame Artin Pasha. We used to sit a great deal in our garden, or in the gardens of Miramar, where he wrote on the margin of his tablets—
"F. G. HACKE'S NEW IDEA IN WORDS.
"'And is the sea alone? Even now
I hear faint mutterings.'
''Tis the waves' mysterious distant whisper,
Response of words like voice of the sea,
Communing with its kind.'
'It seems a murmur sweeping low,
And hurrying through the distant caves;
I hear again that smothered tone,
As if the sea were not alone.'"