In the spring we travelled at pleasure through Switzerland and Belgium, and so to England—my husband and I now in the solitude à deux belovéd by congenial souls. Christine and her sons were left in Switzerland for a longer tour of that country.
Still wandering, lingering, and dreaming, in the long, delicious calm succeeding the darkest and stormiest period our united lives were ever to know, we revisited English villages and towns, and made acquaintance in Scotland with new and enchanting scenes, until the September day when we took passage from Glasgow for New York.
We steamed into our harbor on Sunday afternoon, just as the news of peace between the warring nations was acclaimed through the megaphone to incoming craft, and thundered from the mouths of rejoicing cannon.
XLIX
THE GOING-OUT OF A YOUNG LIFE—PRESENT ACTIVITIES—“LITERARY HEARTHSTONES”—GRATEFUL REMINISCENCES
As upon our return from foreign lands nearly twenty years before this home-coming, Sunnybank was now our pied á terre. Our daughter, Mrs. Van de Water, and her family had occupied it during our absence. It was, therefore, not merely swept and garnished for our reception, but the spirit of Home, sweet, radiant, and indescribable, was in full possession. We were settled in the nest within an hour after we drove up to the open door. A week later, the happy circle was widened by the arrival of our son and his young wife from the Adirondacks. A second attack of appendicitis had made an operation imperatively necessary. It was performed in July, and as soon as the patient was strong enough to travel, he was sent to the mountains for recuperation. The pair were our guests for four weeks. Then they returned to town to prepare for the housekeeping upon which they had planned to enter in October. Happy letters, telling of the preparations going briskly forward, and filled with domestic details, than which nothing in the wide world was more fascinating to the little wife, reminded us of the contented cooings of mating pigeons, or, as I told the prospective housewife, of the purring of the kittens she loved to fondle under the honeysuckles of the veranda, while with us.
On October 5th an unexpected telegram brought the news of the premature birth of a baby daughter, and that “mother and child were doing well.” Four days later, a second dispatch summoned us to New York. The tiny girl was but four days old when her gentle mother passed quietly out of the life, so rich in love and hope that, up to the hour when she laid herself down cheerfully upon her couch of pain, she was, to use her own words, “almost frightened at her own happiness.”
She was married on January 10, 1898. We bore her to her last home October 12th of the same year. She sleeps in the quiet “God’s Acre,” back of the old colonial church in Pompton, in the heart of the fairest of New Jersey valleys. A peaceful spot it is, cradled by the everlasting hills. There were but three graves in our family plot when we took her there. There are five, now.
We spent that winter in the city, and our boy was again one of our small household. But for the care and the blesséd comfort of the baby daughter, the light and life of hearts and house, we might have fancied the events of the last five years a dream, and that we were once more the busy trio with whom time had sped so swiftly and brightly while “Bert” was in college. We were busy now as then. Doctor Terhune preached with tolerable regularity in different churches, and he was ever a diligent student. Bert wrought faithfully in his chosen profession of journalism, and I accepted in, 1901, the charge of a Woman’s Syndicate page established by The North American, in Philadelphia. I had never been idle. Month after month, work was laid to my hands that pleased my taste, and occupied all the time I could devote to literary tasks. When I agreed to take on the new burden, it was with no forecasting of what proportions it might assume.