“Do not go to Rome! Do not thou or you go to Rome! Do not ye or you go to Rome!”
Thus ran the changes in the burden of admonition and thought. Especially, “Do not ye or you go to Rome!”
“Go, if you are bent upon it, me dear!” said a kind English lady. “Your husband is robust, and it may be as you and he believe, that your health requires a mild and sedative climate. But do not take your dear daughters. The air of Rome is deadly to young English and American girls. Quite a blight, I assure you!”
Said one of our Paris bankers to Caput:—“I can have no conceivable interest in trying to turn you aside from your projected route, but it is my duty in the cause of common humanity to warn you that you are running into the jaws of danger in taking your family to Rome. We have advices to-day that the corpses of thirteen Americans, most of them women and children,—all dead within the week—are now lying at Maquay and Hooker’s in Rome awaiting transportation to America.”
This was appalling. But matters waxed serious in Paris, too. Indian Summer over, it began to rain. In Scriptural phrase,—“Neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest”—of mist, sleet and showers—“lay upon us.” Deprived of what was my very life—(what little of it remained,) daily exercise in the open air, the cough, insomnia and other terrors that had driven us into exile, increased upon me rapidly and alarmingly. Weakening day by day, it was each morning more difficult to rise and look despairingly from my windows upon the watery heavens and flooded streets. Sunshine and soft airs were abroad somewhere upon the earth. Find them we must before it should be useless to seek them. The leader of the household brigade ordered a movement along the whole line. Like a brood of swallows, we fled southward. “Certainly to Florence. Probably to Rome. Should the skies there prove as ungenial as those of France,—as a last and forlorn hope—to Algiers.” Such were the terms of command.
We arrived in Florence, the Beautiful, at ten o’clock of a December night. The facchini and cocchieri at the station stared wildly when we addressed them in French, became frantic under the volley of Latin Caput hurled upon them, in the mistaken idea that they would understand their ancestral tongue. Italian was, as yet, an unknown realm to us, and our ignominious refuge was in the universal language of signs. Porters and coachmen were quick in interpretation, much of their intercourse with their fellow-countrymen being carried on in like manner. The luggage was identified, piece by piece, and fastened upon the carriages. The human freight was bestowed within, and as Prima dropped upon the seat beside me, she lifted her hand in a vow:
“I begin the study of Italian to-morrow!”
It was raining steadily, the streets were ill-lighted, the pavements wretched; and when a slow drive through tortuous ways brought us to our desired haven, the house was so full that comfortable accommodations for so large a party could not be procured. The proprietor kindly and courteously directed us to a neighboring hotel, which he could conscientiously recommend, and sent an English-speaking waiter—a handsome, quick-witted fellow—to escort us thither and “see that we were not cheated.”
“Babes in the woods—nothing more!” grumbled the high-spirited young woman at my elbow.
She was the mistress of a dozen telling Italian words before she slept. Our bed-rooms and adjoining salon were spacious, gloomy, and cheerless to a degree unknown out of Italy. The hotel had been a palace in the olden times, after the manner of three-fourths of the Italian houses of entertainment. Walls and floor were of stone, the chill of the latter striking through the carpets into our feet My chamber, the largest in the suite, contained two bier-like beds set against the far wall, bureau, dressing-table, wash-stand, six heavy chairs, and a sofa, and, between these, a desolate moor of bare carpeting before one could gain the hearth. This was a full brick in width, bounded in front by a strip of rug hardly wider—at the back by a triangular hole in the wall, in which a chambermaid proceeded, upon our entrance, to build a wood fire. First, a ball of resined shavings was laid upon the bricks; then, a handful of dried twigs; then, small round sticks; then, diminutive logs, split and seasoned, and we had a crackling, fizzing, conceited blaze that swept all the heat with it up the chimney. The Invaluable’s spirit-lamp upon the side-table had more cheer in it. If set down upon the pyramid of Cheops, and told we were to camp there overnight, this feminine Mark Tapley would, in half-an-hour, have made herself and the rest of us at home; got up “a nice tea;” put Boy to bed and sat down beside him, knitting in hand, as composedly as in our nursery over the sea.