RETURN TO MIDDLE STATES—THE HOLY LAND—MY FRIENDS THE MISSIONARIES—TWO
CONSULS IN JERUSALEM
IN the sketch of my husband’s life-work, written by a faithful
co-laborer in the vineyard which is the world, and appended to this
story, his reasons for returning to the Middle States are briefly
given. As I near the latter chapters of my record, I am hampered by the
necessity of treating cautiously of persons and incidents too near the
present day to be spoken of with the freedom time made justifiable in
earlier reminiscences. Those twelve years in the City of Churches were
crowded with events of more or less moment. They were busy, and not
unhappy years. Our home-group, reduced to four by the marriage of our
eldest daughter, was made still smaller by the marriage of her sister
on March 5, 1889, to Frederic Van de Water, of Brooklyn. The choice was
wise, and the union has been one of rare blessedness.
“In-laws” have no terrors in our circle. No sinister significance
attaches to the term “mother-in-law.” The adopted sons were loyal and
loving to the parents of their wives. Not a cloud darkens the memory of
our intercourse. The only obstacle to Belle’s marriage was thus stated
in whimsical vexation by her father:
“It is hard that, when there are said to be fifteen hundred proper
names in the English language, my girls must select men who have the
same. It leads to no end of confusion!”
Our boy, now grown into an athletic six-footer, was graduated from
Columbia University in 1893. We three had lived in great peace and
contentment during his college course. We talk often, and wistfully,
of those four years of church-work, social duties, literary tasks, and
academic studies, which filled hands and heads. We spent our winters in
town. Sunnybank grew to be more and more a home in the summer months.
It was like a return to the time when our own babies filled house and
verandas with merry prattle, and our hearts made music; for there were,
at the date I name, four boys to repeat the history for the proud
grandparents. But for the great sorrow that had broken up Christine’s
happy home in February, and brought her back to us with her two boys,
and the birth, a fortnight thereafter, of Belle’s second boy, the
years slipped by brightly, without other signal event until “Bert’s”
graduation at the June Commencement. There was, for me, one notable
exception to the gentle flow.
It was, I think, in mid-June, that I had a letter from the proprietor
of the _Christian Herald_, a religious paper of wide circulation,
asking me to write a serial that should run through six months’
issues of that periodical. Just at that time my mind was working
upon a projected story (published afterward in book-form under the
caption _The Royal Road_), and this seemed a promising medium for
circulating it among the classes I wished to reach. Accordingly, I
called at the _Christian Herald_ office to discuss the plan. My brief
and satisfactory interview with the managing editor over, I arose
to go when he invited me to step into the adjoining room, where the
proprietor would like to speak with me for a minute. I was courteously
received, and final arrangements for the publication of the serial
were made. I was again on the point of departure, when the proprietor
directed my attention to a new and handsome map of the city of
Jerusalem, spread out upon his desk, inquiring, in an offhand way:
“Have you ever visited the Holy Land?”
“Never,” I replied, adding involuntarily, “It has been one of my
dearest dreams that I might go some day.”
“It would be a very easy matter for you to fulfil the wish,” in the
same easy, unpremeditated tone.
“Easy?” I repeated. “Yes; in my dreams!”
“In the flesh, and in reality. Will you sit down for a moment, please?”
He proceeded then, in less time than it will take me to write it, to
unfold a plan in which I soon saw, although he did not say it, that
the serial story, my call, and the map of Jerusalem, conspicuously
displayed on his desk, were so many stages of a carefully concerted
scheme. He wanted me to go to Syria, with the express purpose of
investigating the condition of the women of that land, and getting an
insight into their domestic life, and at the same time incidentally
gleaning material for sketches of historical localities—in short, to
gather material for such “familiar talks” as I had held with American
women upon household and social topics. These were to be supplied to
his paper, week by week. His provision for travelling expenses would
include those of my husband, or any other escort I might select. The
sum he named as remuneration for the work was handsome, but this
circumstance made a slight impression upon me at the time. Our dialogue
ended in my promise to take the matter into consideration, and to let
him have my decision in a day or two. I hope he never guessed at the
whirl of emotions lying back of a sober face and calm demeanor.
I recollect walking out into the bustling streets as if I trod upon
air, my head ringing as if nerves were taut harpstrings, my heart
throbbing tumultuously. I scarcely knew where I was, or whither I was
going. Something, somewhere—it seemed in the upper ether, yet so near
that I heard words and music—was singing rapturously:
“Jerusalem the Golden!
Methinks each flower that blows,
And every bird a-singing
Of that sweet secret knows.
I know not what the flowers
May feel, or singers see,
But all these summer raptures
Are prophecies of thee!”
It was my favorite hymn, but it was nothing in me that sang it then.
“One of my dearest dreams!”—ever since, as a child, I had fed a
perfervid imagination upon Bible stories, and chanted David’s psalms
aloud in the Virginia woods, to tunes of my own making. One of them
broke into the jubilant _Jerusalem the Golden_ pealing in the ether
overhead:
“My feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!”
Was I, then, so near the fulfilment of the heavenly dream?
* * * * *
We sailed for the Holy City in September—my big boy and I. Doctor
Terhune could not go, and we had always promised that our son should
have a foreign trip when his university work was done. The opportunity
was auspicious.
Each of us told as much of the story of the memorable seven months
abroad as we were willing the public should read—I, in the letters
published first in the _Christian Herald_, subsequently in book-form
under the title, _The Home of the Bible_; Bert, in a smaller volume,
_Syria from the Saddle_, a breezy chronicle of a young man’s
impressions of what he saw and heard while in Syria. I considered it
then, and I think it now, a remarkable book, coming, as it did, from
the pen of a boy of twenty-one. He celebrated his majority in the
desert-places between Damascus and Jerusalem.
Two or three incidents, eventful forever to us, may be mentioned
briefly in this personal narrative.
I am not a believer in dreams. I do attach importance to
“coincidences,” holding some that have fallen into my life in reverence
the more sincere because I cannot explain them away.
One night in Paris, where we spent a fortnight on the way to Syria
_via_ Egypt, I had a long and distressing dream of carrying a poor
ailing baby along dark streets and over fences and fields. My arms
ached under the weight of the limp body; my heart and ears ached with
the piteous wailing of the sufferer, for whom I could do nothing.
I awoke in the morning, utterly worn out in nerve, and depressed
unreasonably in spirit. That forenoon I wrote my daughter:
“It was an ugly, gruesome dream. Your aunt Myrtle would
see in it an omen of evil. She says that a death in the
family has always followed her dream of the sick baby she
cannot put out of her arms. It is an old superstition. You
may recollect that Charlotte Brontë alludes to it in _Jane
Eyre_. I have so such dreads. Yet I find myself wishing
that I had not had that ‘visitation.’ It has left a very
unpleasant impression on my mind—a sort of bad taste in my
mental mouth. I am thankful that it came to me, and not to
Myrtle.”
My sister had been ill before we left home, but was convalescent when
we sailed, and a letter from her husband awaited us in Paris, conveying
the cheerful assurance of her confirmed improvement in health and
strength, and bidding me have no further anxiety on her account.
It was, therefore, a terrible shock when a letter, forwarded from place
to place, overtook us in Northern Syria, informing us that my dear
little “sister-daughter,” as she loved to call herself, had died on the
night of November 3, 1893—the very night through which the “gruesome”
dream had pursued me from midnight until dawn. Christine wrote in reply:
“When we read your letter of that date, Belle’s eyes met
mine in silent, awesome questioning. Merely a coincidence?
Perhaps, but strange!”