XVIII

In Othello's predicament--Gaetano--Crystals and snail-

shells--Broad, flagstone pavements--Fishing-rods and blow-

pipes--Ghostly yarns--Conservative effects of genius--An

ideal bust and a living one--The enigma of spiritualism--A

difficult combination to overthrow--The dream-child and the

Philistine--Dashing and plunging this way and that--Teresa

screamed for mercy--Grapes and figs and ghostly voices--My

father would have settled there--Kirkup the necromancer--A

miraculous birth--A four-year-old medium--The mysterious

touch--An indescribable horror--Not even a bone of her was

left--Providence takes very long views.

The railroad which now unites Rome with Florence defrauds travellers

of some of the most agreeable scenery in Italy, and one of the most

time-honored experiences; and as for the beggars who infested the route,

they must long since have perished of inanition--not that they needed

what travellers gave them in the way of alms, but that, like Othello,

their occupation being gone, they must cease to exist. Never again could

they look forward to pestering a tourist; never exhibit a withered arm

or an artistic ulcer; never mutter anathemas against the obdurate, or

call down blessings upon the profuse. What was left them in life? And

what has become of the wayside inns, and what of the vetturinos? A

man like Gaetano, by himself, was enough to modify radically one's

conception of the possibilities of the Italian character. In appearance

he was a strong-bodied Yankee farmer, with the sun-burned, homely,

kindly, shrewd visage, the blue jumper, the slow, canny ways, the silent

perception and enjoyment of humorous things, the infrequent but timely

speech. It was astonishing to hear him speaking Italian out of a mouth

which seemed formed only to emit a Down-East drawl and to chew tobacco.

In disposition and character this son of old Rome was, so far as we,

during our week of constant and intimate association with him, could

judge, absolutely without fault; he was mild, incorruptible, and placid,

as careful of us as a father of his children, and he grew as fond of

us as we were of him, so that the final parting, after the journey was

done, was really a moving scene. I have found the tribe of cabbies, in

all countries, to be, as a rule, somewhat cantankerous and sinister;

but Gaetano compensated for all his horse-driving brethren. To be sure,

_vettura_ driving is not like cabbing, and Gaetano was in the habit of

getting out often and walking up the hills, thus exercising his liver.

But he must have been born with a strong predisposition to goodness,

which he never outgrew.

Save for a few showers, it was fine weather all the way, and a good part

of the way was covered on foot by my father and me; for the hills were

many, and the winding ascents long, and we would alight and leave

the slow-moving vehicle, with its ponderous freight, behind us, to be

overtaken perhaps an hour or two later on the levels or declivities.

Gaetano was a consummate whip, and he carried his team down the descents

and round the exciting turns at a thrilling pace, while the yards of

whiplash cracked and detonated overhead like a liliputian thunder-storm.

On the mountain-tops were romantic villages, surrounding rock-built

castles which had been robber strongholds centuries before, and we

traversed peaceful plains which had been the scenes of famous Roman

battles, and whose brooks had run red with blood before England's

history began. We paused a day in Perugia, and received the Bronze

Pontiff's benediction; the silent voices of history were everywhere

speaking to the spiritual ear. Meanwhile I regarded the trip as being,

primarily, an opportunity to collect unusual snail-shells; and we passed

through a region full of natural crystals, some of them of such size as

to prompt my father to forbid their being added to our luggage. I could

not understand his insensibility. Could I have had my way, I would have

loaded a wain with them. I liked the villages and castles, too, and

the good dinners at the inns, and the sound sleeps in mediaeval beds

at night; but the crystals and the snail-shells were the true aim and

sustenance of my life. My mother and sister sketched continually, and

Miss Shepard was always ready to tell us the story of the historical

features which we encountered; it astounded me to note how much she knew

about things which she had never before seen. One afternoon we drove

down from surrounding heights to Florence, which lay in a golden haze

characteristic of Italian Junes in this latitude. Powers, the sculptor,

had promised to engage lodgings for us, but he had not expected us

so soon, and meanwhile we put up at a hotel near by, and walked out a

little in the long evening, admiring the broad, flagstone pavements and

all the minor features which made Florence so unlike Rome. The next day

began our acquaintance with the Powers family, who, with the Brownings,

constituted most of the social element of our sojourn. Powers had an

agreeable wife, two lovely daughters, and a tall son, a few years older

than I, and a pleasant companion, though he could not take the place of

Eddy Thompson in my heart. He was clever with his hands, and soon began

to make fishing-rods for me, having learned of my predilection for the

sport. There were no opportunities to fish in Florence; but the rods

which Bob Powers produced were works of art, straight and tapering, and

made in lengths, which fitted into one another--a refinement which was

new to me, who had hitherto imagined nothing better than a bamboo pole.

Bob finally confided to me that he straightened his rods by softening

the wood in steam; but I found that they did not long retain their

straightness; and, there being no use for them, except the delight of

the eye, I presently lost interest in them. Then Bob showed me how to

make blow-pipes by pushing out the pith from the stems of some species

of bushy shrub that grew outside the walls. He made pellets of clay from

his father's studio; and I was deeply affected by the long range and

accuracy of these weapons. We used to ensconce ourselves behind the

blinds of the front windows of Powers's house, and practise through the

slats at the passers-by in the street. They would feel a smart hit and

look here and there, indignant; but, after a while, seeing nothing

but the innocent fronts of sleepy houses, would resume their way. Bob

inherited his handiness from his father, who seemed a master of all

crafts, a true Yankee genius. He might have made his fortune as an

inventor had he not happened to turn the main stream of his energy in

the direction of sculpture. I believe that the literary art was the only

one in which he did not claim proficiency, and that was a pity, because

Powers's autobiography would have been a book of books. He was a

Swedenborgian by faith, but he also dabbled somewhat in spiritualism,

which was having a vogue at that time, owing partly to the exploits of

the American medium Home. Marvellous, indeed, were the ghostly yarns

Powers used to spin, and they lost nothing by the physical appearance of

the narrator, with his tall figure, square brow, great, black eyes, and

impressive gestures; his voice, too, was deep and flexible, and could

sink into the most blood-curdling tones. My recollection is that Powers

was always clad in a long, linen pinafore, reaching from his chin to his

feet, and daubed with clay, and on his head a cap made either of paper,

like a baker's, or, for dress occasions, of black velvet. His homely

ways and speech, which smacked of the Vermont farm as strongly as if he

had just come thence, whereas in truth he had lived in Florence, at this

time, about twenty years, and had won high fame as a sculptor, tempted

one to suspect him of affectation--of a pose; and there is no doubt that

Powers was aware of the contrast between his physical presentment and

his artistic reputation, and felt a sort of dramatic pleasure in it.

Nevertheless, it would be unjust to call him affected; he was a big man,

in all senses of the term, and his instinct of independence led him to

repudiate all external polish and ear-marks of social culture, and to

say, as it were, "You see, a plain Vermont countryman can live half a

lifetime in the centre of artificial refinement and rival by the works

of his native genius the foremost living artists, and yet remain the

same simple, honest old sixpence that he was at home!" It was certainly

a more manly and wholesome attitude than that of the ordinary American

foreign resident, who makes a point of forgetting his native ways and

point of view, and aping the habits and traits of his alien associates.

And, besides, Powers had such an immense temperament and individuality

that very likely he could not have modified them successfully even had

he been disposed to do so.

[IMAGE: HIRAM POWERS]

His daughters, as I have said, were lovely creatures. Powers was at this

time modelling an ideal bust of a woman, and one day I went into his

studio expecting to find Bob there, but the studio was empty but for the

bust, which I now had an opportunity to contemplate at my ease for the

first time. I thought it very beautiful, and there was something about

the face which reminded me of somebody, I could not decide who. Just

then a portiere in the doorway parted, and in came a living bust, a

reality in warm flesh and blood, compared with which the ideal seemed

second-rate. It belonged to one of Powers's daughters, who had come

for a sitting; she was serving as her father's model. Upon seeing the

unexpected boy, fixed there in speechless admiration, the young lady

uttered a scream and vanished. I now knew whom the face of the clay

effigy reminded me of, and afterwards when I saw beautiful statues I

thought of her, and shook my head.

My father and Powers took a strong fancy to each other, and met and

talked a great deal. As I just said now, spiritualism was a fad at that

time, and Powers was pregnant with marvels which he had either seen

or heard of, and which he was always ready to attempt to explain on

philosophical grounds. My father would listen to it all, and both

believe it and not believe it. He felt, I suppose, that Powers was

telling the truth, but he was not persuaded that all the truth was in

Powers's possession, or in any one else's. Powers also had a great deal

to say concerning the exoteric and esoteric truths of sculpture; his

racy individuality marked it all. He would not admit that there was any

limit to what might be done with marble; and when my father asked him

one day whether he could model a blush on a woman's cheek, he said,

stoutly, that the thing was possible. My father, as his manner was

with people, went with the sculptor as far as he chose to carry him,

accepting all his opinions and judgments, and becoming Powers, so far as

he might, for the time being, in order the better to get to the root of

his position. And then, afterwards, he would return to his own self, and

quietly examine Powers's assertions and theories in the dry light. My

father was two men, one sympathetic and intuitional, the other critical

and logical; together they formed a combination which could not be

thrown off its feet.

We had already met the Brownings in London; but at this period they

belonged in Italy more than anywhere else, and Florence formed the best

setting for the authors both of Aurora Leigh and of Sordello. They lived

in a villa called Casa Guidi, and with them was their son, a boy

younger than myself, whom they called Pennini, though his real name

was something much less fastidious. Penni, I believe, used to be an

assistant of Raphael early in the sixteenth century, and Pennini may

have been nicknamed after him. His mother, who was an extravagant woman

on the emotional and spiritual plane, made the poor little boy wear

his hair curled in long ringlets down his back, and clad him in a fancy

costume of black velvet, with knickerbockers and black silk stockings;

he was homely of face, and looked "soft," as normal boys would say. But

his parents were determined to make an ideal dream-child of him, and, of

course, he had to submit. I had the contempt for him which a philistine

boy feels for a creature whom he knows he can lick with one hand tied

behind his back, and I had nothing whatever to say to him. But Pennini

was not such a mollycoddle and ass as he looked, and when he grew up he

gave evidence enough of having a mind and a way of his own. My mother

took him at his mother's valuation, and both she and my father have

expressed admiration of the whole Browning tribe in their published

journals. Mrs. Browning seemed to me a sort of miniature monstrosity;

there was no body to her, only a mass of dark curls and queer, dark

eyes, and an enormous mouth with thick lips; no portrait of her has

dared to show the half of it. Her hand was like a bird's claw. Browning

was a lusty, active, energetic person, dashing and plunging this way and

that with wonderful impetus and suddenness; he was never still a moment,

and he talked with extraordinary velocity and zeal. There was a mass

of wild hair on his head, and he wore bushy whiskers. He appeared very

different twenty years later, when I met him in London, after his wife's

death; he was quiet and sedate, with close-cut silvery hair and pointed

beard, and the rather stout, well-dressed figure of a British gentleman

of the sober middle class. It is difficult to harmonize either of these

outsides with the poet within--that remarkable imagination, intellect,

and analytical faculty which have made him one of the men of the

century. There was a genial charm in Browning, emphasized, in this

earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of courtesy.

In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable when he chose

to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and repellent, and

assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him, in 1879, why he

made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied, frankly, that he did

so because he couldn't help it; the inability to put his thoughts in

clear phrases had always been a grief to him. This statement was, to me,

unexpected, and it has a certain importance.

After a few weeks in Casa Bella, opposite Powers's house, Florence grew

so hot that we were glad of an opportunity to rent the Villa Montauto,

up on the hill of Bellosguardo, less than a mile beyond the city gate.

The villa, with two stories and an attic, must have been nearly two

hundred feet long, and was two or three rooms deep; at the hither end

rose a tower evidently much older than the house attached to it. Near

the foot of the tower grew an ancient tree, on a projecting branch of

which we soon had a swing suspended, and all of us children did some

very tall swinging. There was a little girl of ten belonging to the

estate, named Teresa, an amiable, brown-haired, homely little personage.

We admitted her to our intimacy, and swung her in the swing till she

screamed for mercy. The road from Florence, after passing our big iron

gate on the east, continued on westward, beneath the tower and the

parapet of the grounds; beyond extended the wide valley of the Arno,

with mountains hemming it in, and to the left of the mountains, every

evening, Donati's comet shone, with a golden sweep of tail subtending

twenty degrees along the horizon. The peasant folk regarded it with

foreboding; and I remember seeing in the book-shops of Rome, before we

left, pamphlets in both Italian and English, with such titles as "Will

the great comet, now rapidly approaching, strike the earth?" It did not

strike the earth, but it afforded us a magnificent spectacle during

our stay in Montauto, and the next year it was followed by war between

Austria and France and the evacuation of Venice.

The elevation of Bellosguardo sloped from the villa north and east, and

this declivity was occupied by a podere of some dozen acres, on which

grew grape-vines, olive and fig trees. Every morning, about ten o'clock,

the peasants on the estate would come in loaded with grapes, which they

piled up on a large table in the reception-hall on the ground floor. We

ate them by handfuls, but were never able to finish them. Between times

we would go out among the fruit trees and devour fresh figs, luscious

with purple pulp. I had three or four rooms to myself at the western

extremity of the house; they were always cool on the hottest days. There

I was wont to retire to pursue my literary labors; I was still writing

works on conchology. My sister Una had rooms on the ground floor,

adjoining the chapel. They were haunted by the ghost of a nun, and

several times the candle which she took in there at night was moved by

invisible hands from its place and set down elsewhere. Ghostly voices

called to us, and various unaccountable noises were heard now and then,

both within and without the house; but we children did not mind them,

not having been bred in the fear of spirits. Indeed, at the instance

of Mrs. Browning, who was often with us, we held spirit seances,

Miss Shepard being the medium, though she mildly protested. Long

communications were written down, but the sceptics were not converted,

nor were the believers discouraged. "I discern in the alleged

communications from my wife's mother," wrote my father, "much of her own

beautiful fancy and many of her preconceived ideas, although thinner

and weaker than at first hand. They are the echoes of her own voice,

returning out of the lovely chambers of her heart, and mistaken by her

for the tones of her mother."

Almost every day some of us made an incursion into Florence. The town

itself seemed to me more agreeable than Rome; but the Boboli Gardens

could not rival the Borghese, and the Pitti and Uffizi galleries were

not so captivating as the Vatican and the Capitol. However, the Cascine

and the Lung' Arno were delightful, and the Arno, shallow and placid,

flowing through the midst of the city, was a fairer object than the

muddy and turbulent Tiber. Men and boys bathed along the banks in the

afternoons and evenings; and the Ponte Vecchio, crowded with grotesque

little houses, was a favorite promenade of mine. There was also a large

marketplace, where the peasant women sold the produce of their farms. My

insatiable appetite for such things prompted me often to go thither

and eat everything I had money to buy. One day I consumed so many fresh

tomatoes that I had a giddiness in the back of my head, and ate no more

tomatoes for some years. But the place I best liked was the great open

square of the Palazzo Vecchio, with the statues of David and of Perseus

under the Loggia dei Lanzi, a retreat from sun and rain; and the Duomo

and Giotto's Campanile, hard by. The pavements of Florence, smooth as

the surface of stone canals, were most soothing and comfortable after

the relentless, sharp cobble-stones of Rome; the low houses that

bordered them seemed to slumber in the hot, still sunshine. What a

sunshine was that! Not fierce and feverish, as in the tropics, but soft

and intense and white. Who would not live in Florence if he could? I

think my father would have settled there but for his children, to whom

he wished to give an American education. The thought was often in his

mind; and he perhaps cherished some hope of returning thither later

in life, and letting old age steal gently upon him and his wife in

the delicious city. But the Celestial City was nearer to him than he

suspected.

There was a magical old man in Florence named Kirkup, an Englishman,

though he had dwelt abroad so many years that he seemed more Florentine

than the Florentines themselves. He had known, in his youth, Byron,

Shelley, Hunt, and Edward Trelawney. After that famous group was

disparted, Kirkup, having an income sufficient for his needs, came to

Florence and settled there. He took to antiquarianism, which is a sort

of philtre, driving its votaries mildly insane, and filling them

with emotions which, on the whole, are probably more often happy than

grievous. But Kirkup, in the course of his researches into the past,

came upon the books of the necromancers, and bought and studied them,

and began to practise their spells and conjurations; and by-and-by,

being a great admirer and student of Dante, that poet manifested himself

to him in his lonely vigils and told him many unknown facts about his

career on earth, and incidentally revealed to him the whereabouts of the

now-familiar fresco of Dante on the wall of the Bargello Chapel, where

it had been hidden for ages beneath a coat of whitewash. In these occult

researches, Kirkup, of course, had need of a medium, and he found among

the Florentine peasants a young girl, radiantly beautiful, who possessed

an extraordinary susceptibility to spiritual influences. Through her

means he conversed with the renowned dead men of the past times. But one

day Regina (such was the girl's name), much to the old man's surprise,

gave birth to a child. She herself died, in Kirkup's house, soon after,

and on her death-bed she swore a solemn oath on the crucifix that the

baby's father was none other than Kirkup himself. The poor old gentleman

had grown so accustomed to believing in miracles that he made little ado

about accepting this one also; he received the child as his daughter,

and made provision for her in his will. No one had the heart or thought

it worth while to enlighten him as to certain facts which might have

altered his attitude; but it was well known that Regina had a lover, a

handsome young Italian peasant, much more capable of begetting children

than of taking care of them afterwards.

These interesting circumstances I did not learn until long after

Florence had receded into the distance in my memory. But one afternoon,

with my father and mother, I entered the door of a queer old house close

to the Ponte Vecchio; I was told that it had formerly been a palace of

the Knights Templars. We ascended a very darksome flight of stairs, and

a door was opened by a strange little man. He may have been, at that

time, some seventy years my senior, but he was little above my height;

he had long, soft, white hair and a flowing white beard; his features

bore a resemblance to those of Bulwer Lytton, only Bulwer never lived to

anything like Mr. Kirkup's age. Old as he was, our host was very brisk

and polite, and did the honors of his suite of large rooms with much

grace and fantastic hospitality. Dancing about him, and making friends

freely with us all meanwhile, was the little girl, Imogen by name, who

was accredited as the octogenarian's offspring. She was some four or

five years of age, but intellectually precocious, though a complete

child, too. Mr. Kirkup said that she, like her beautiful mother, was a

powerful medium, and that he often used to communicate through her with

her mother, who would seem to have kept her secret even after death. The

house was stuffed full of curiosities, but was very dirty and cobwebby;

the pictures and the books looked much in need of a caretaker. The

little child frolicked and flitted about the dusky apartments, or seated

herself like a butterfly on the great tomes of magic that were piled in

corners. Nothing could be stronger or stranger than the contrast between

her and this environment. My father wrote it all down in his journal,

and it evidently impressed his imagination; and she and Kirkup

himself--_mutatis mutandis_--appear in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and

again, in a somewhat different form, in The Dolliver Romance. There

was even a Persian kitten, too, to bear little Imogen company. But no

fiction could surpass the singularity of this withered old magician

living with the pale, tiny sprite of a child of mysterious birth in the

ghost-haunted rooms of the ancient palace.

It seemed as if the world of the occult were making a determined attack

upon us during this Florentine sojourn; whichever way we turned we came

in contact with something mysterious. In one of my father's unpublished

diaries he writes, in reference to the stories with which he was being

regaled by Powers, the Brownings, and others, that he was reminded "of

an incident that took place at the old manse, in the first summer of our

marriage. One night, about eleven o'clock, before either my wife or

I had fallen asleep (we had been talking together just before), she

suddenly asked me why I had touched her shoulder? The next instant she

had a sense that the touch was not mine, but that of some third presence

in the chamber. She clung to me in great affright, but I got out of

bed and searched the chamber and adjacent entry, and, finding nothing,

concluded that the touch was a fancied one. My wife, however, has never

varied in her belief that the incident was supernatural and connected

with the apparition of old Dr. Harris, who used to show himself to

me daily in the reading-room of the Boston Athenaeum. I am still

incredulous both as to the doctor's identity and as to the reality of

the mysterious touch. That same summer of our honeymoon, too, George

Hillard and his wife were sitting with us in our parlor, when a rustling

as of a silken robe passed from corner to corner of the room, right

among my wife and the two guests, and was heard, I think, by all three.

Mrs. Hillard, I remember, was greatly startled. As for myself, I was

reclining on the sofa at a little distance, and neither heard the rustle

nor believed it."

Nevertheless, such things affect one in a degree. Here is a straw to

show which way the wind of doctrine was blowing with my father: We were

in Siena immediately after the date of our Florentine residence, and

he and I, leaving the rest of the family at our hotel, sallied forth in

quest of adventures. "We went to the cathedral," he writes, "and while

standing near the entrance, or about midway in the nave, we saw a female

figure approaching through the dimness and distance, far away in the

region of the high altar; as it drew nearer its air reminded me of Una,

whom we had left at home. Finally, it came close to us, and proved to

be Una herself; she had come, immediately after we left the hotel, with

Miss Shepard, and was looking for objects to sketch. It is an empty

thing to write down, but the surprise made the incident stand out very

vividly." Una was to pass near the gates of the next world a little

while later, and doubtless my father often during that dark period

pictured her to himself as a spirit. To make an end of this subject, I

will quote here my father's account of a story told him by Mrs. Story

when we were living in Rome for the second time. The incident of the

woman's face at the carriage window reappears in The Marble Faun.

"She told it," he says, "on the authority of Mrs. Gaskell, to whom the

personages were known. A lady, recently married, was observed to be in a

melancholy frame of mind, and fell into a bad state of health. She told

her husband that she was haunted with the constant vision of a certain

face, which affected her with an indescribable horror, and was the cause

of her melancholy and illness. The physician prescribed travel, and they

went first to Paris, where the lady's spirits grew somewhat better, and

the vision haunted her less constantly. They purposed going to Italy,

and before their departure from Paris a letter of introduction was given

them by a friend, directed to a person in Rome. On their arrival in Rome

the letter was delivered; the person called, and in his face the lady

recognized the precise reality of her vision. By-the-bye, I think the

lady saw this face in the streets of Rome before the introduction took

place. The end of the story is that the husband was almost immediately

recalled to England by an urgent summons; the wife disappeared that very

night, and was recognized driving out of Rome, in a carriage, in tears,

and accompanied by the visionary unknown. It is a very foolish story,

but told as truth. Mrs. Story also said that in an Etruscan tomb, on the

Barberini estate, the form and impression, in dust, of a female figure

were discovered. Not even a bone of her was left; but where her neck had

been there lay a magnificent necklace, all of gold and of the richest

workmanship. The necklace, just as it was found (except, I suppose,

for a little furbishing), is now worn by the Princess Barberini as her

richest adornment. Mrs. Story herself had on a bracelet composed, I

think, of seven ancient Etruscan scorabei in carnelian, every one of

which has been taken from a separate tomb, and on one side of each was

engraved the signet of the person to whom it had belonged and who

had carried it to the grave with him. This bracelet would make a good

connecting link for a series of Etruscan tales, the more fantastic the

better!"

On the first day of October, 1859, we left Florence by railway for Siena

on our way back to Rome. There had been no drawbacks to our enjoyment of

the city and of our villa and of the people we had met. We departed with

regret; had we stayed on there, instead, and not again attempted the

fatal air of the Seven Hills, our after chronicles might have been

very different. But we walk over precipices with our eyes open, or pass

safely along their verge in the dark, and only the Power who made us

knows why. Providence takes very long views.