He lay back with closed lids for so long I thought he was asleep. Then
an echo of his own voice, as it was in the olden time, said:
“I _think_, if I could once more hear the rush of the waves against the
keel of the steamer, and feel the salt air on my face, it would bring
me back to life. But—where’s the use of dreaming of it? I shall never
be strong enough to go on board.”
“You will, and you shall! You saved my life by taking me abroad. We
will try the efficacy of your own prescription.”
I think that not one of the crowd of friends who came down to the
steamer to see us off, had any hope of seeing again his living face.
I heard, afterward, that they said as much among themselves, when the
resolutely cheerful farewells had been spoken, and they stood watching
the vessel’s slow motion out of the dock, the eyes of all fixed upon
one figure recumbent in a deck-chair, a thin hand responding to the
fluttering handkerchiefs above the throng on the end of the pier.
Our son was there with his betrothed, who wrote to me afterward that he
was “depressed to despondency.” Belle, with her husband and boys, would
occupy Sunnybank while we were away. Christine had insisted that it was
not kind or safe to leave to me the sole care of the invalid. In the
three weeks that elapsed between the “inspiration” and our embarkation,
the brave girl had wound up all affairs that would detain her in
America, and made herself and two sons ready to accompany us. The party
was completed by the faithful maid who had nursed her children from
infancy, and who was quite competent to aid me in nursely offices to
the patient for whose sake the desperate expedition was undertaken.
He averred, in later life, that he felt an impulse of new life with
the first revolution of the paddle-wheel. Certain it is that he showed
signs of rallying before twenty-four hours had passed, spending all
the daylight hours upon deck, and, before the voyage was half over,
joining in our promenades from bow to stern. Always an excellent
sailor, he drank in the sea-breeze as he might have quaffed so much
nectar. The only complaint that escaped him was that, “whereas he had
been promised an eleven days’ voyage, we steamed up the Clyde on the
afternoon of the ninth day.”
A series of jaunts in Scotland and England was the prelude to our
settling down in Florence for the winter.
Had I no other reason to urge for my deep and abiding love for that
fairest and dearest of Italian cities, it would suffice me to recollect
the unutterable peace and full content of that memorable half-year.
Friends, old and new, clustered about us, and lent the charm of home
to the cosey apartment in Via San Giuseppe, where the gentle flow of
domestic life was bright with the shining of present happiness and
rekindled hope of the future. We learned to know “La Bella” at her best
in those halcyon days. The boys were at a day-school; thanks to our
efficient “padrona,” there were no household anxieties, and we seniors
were free to enjoy to the full all that makes up the inestimable riches
of the storied city.
Doctor Terhune and I claimed the privilege of convalescent and
custodian, in declining to accept invitations to evening functions,
thus securing opportunity for what we loved far better than the gayest
of “entertainments”—long, quiet hours spent in our sitting-room “under
the evening lamp,” I, busy with needle-work or knitting, while he read
aloud, after the dear old fashion, works on Florentine history, art,
and romance, all tending to enfold us more closely with the charméd
atmosphere of the region. It would be laughable to one who has never
fallen under the nameless spell of Florence to know how often, that
season, we repeated aloud, as the book was laid aside for the night:
“With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.”
Letters from home were frequent and regular. Much was happening across
the water while we revelled in our dreams. The Spanish War was on. It
was begun and ended during our peace-fraught exile. In January, our boy
took unto himself the young wife to whom he had been troth-plight for a
year, and we were the easier in mind for the knowledge that this, the
last of our unwedded bairns, was no longer without a home of his own.
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.