I treasured the tribute gratefully, and I never failed to quote it when I heard—as was frequent during Mr. McKinley’s administration—contemptuous criticism of the helpless, sickly woman—the poor shade of the First Lady of the Land—whose demands upon his time and care were unremittent and heavy. He was held up to the world by his eulogists as a Model Husband, a Knight of To-day, whose devotion never wavered. As my now sainted mentor said, few of the admiring multitude guessed at his debt of gratitude and at his chivalrous remembrance of the same.
XLVIII
THE CLOUDS RETURN AFTER THE RAIN—ABROAD AGAIN—HEALING AND HEALTH—IDYLLIC WINTER IN FLORENCE
What one of Doctor Terhune’s biographers has alluded to as his “splendid vitality,” had been cruelly taxed by his professional labors in his first charge in Brooklyn. With a strong man’s aversion to the acknowledgment of physical weakness, he had fought, with heroic courage and reserve, the inroads of a disease that was steadily sapping his constitution and vigor. None except his physician and myself dreamed of the gnawing pain that was never quiet during his waking hours, and robbed the nights of rest. The services of Sunday left him as weak as a child, and stretched him upon the rack all of that night. When, the work he had assigned to himself soon after accepting the pastorate of the Bedford Avenue Church having been accomplished, he resigned the position, and quoted his physician’s advice that he should take a few months of rest and change of scene—the information was couched in terms so light that, with the exception of two or three of his chosen and most faithful friends, his parishioners had no suspicion of his real condition. The public press hazarded the wildest and most absurd guesses at the causes that had stirred the nest he had builded wisely and well during the last seven years.
Perhaps the theory that amused us most, and flew most widely from the mark, was “that his wife—known to the public as ‘Marion Harland’—took no interest in church-work—in fact, never attended church at all.” My class of forty-four splendid “boys”—the youngest being twenty-one years of age—begged to be allowed to look up the imaginative reporter and, as the Springfield member of the Church Militant had proposed, “fire him out.” Calmer counter-statements from older heads, and hearts as loyal, met the assertion in print and in private. To me, it weighed less than a grain of dust in the greater solicitude that engrossed my thoughts. For, in a week after the formal resignation of his office, the patient sufferer was under the surgeon’s knife.
They called it “a minor operation,” and enjoined complete rest, for a month or so, that ought to bring recuperation of energies so sadly depleted that those who knew him best were urgent in the entreaty that the mandate should be obeyed. He “rested” in the blessed quiet of Sunnybank for a couple of months; then set out for a leisurely jaunt westward. He had been invited to preach in Omaha, and thought that he would “take a look at the country” which he had never visited. He got no further than Chicago, falling in love with the warm-hearted people of a church which he agreed to supply for “a few weeks.” The weeks grew into seven months of active and satisfying work among his new parishioners. Our eldest daughter was with him part of the time, and I went to him for a visit of considerable length, returning home with the sad conviction, deep down in my soul, that to accept the offered “call” to a permanent pastorate would be suicidal. He could never do half-way work, and he loved the duties of his profession with a love that never abated. By the beginning of the next summer, he was forced to admit to himself that his physical powers were inadequate to the task laid to his hand. Yet, on the way home, he was lured into agreeing to supply the pulpit of a friend, a St. Louis clergyman, during the vacation of the latter, preaching zealously and eloquently for five weeks, and this in the heat of a Missourian summer.
It was but a wreck of his old, buoyant self that he brought back to us. Confident in his ability to rise above “temporary weakness,” he insisted that “Sunnybank and home-rest were all he needed to set him up again as good as new.”
I had said once, jestingly, in his hearing, after his quick recovery from a short and sharp attack of illness:
“It is hard to kill a Terhune. Nothing is really effectual except a stroke of lightning, and that will paralyze but one side. None of them die under ninety!”