IV.

1894.

On the 27th of January 1864 my dear little Maggie died of gastric fever. I have written about it all elsewhere. I had escaped, I thought, from the valley of the shadow of death, and had been happy, in sheer force of youth and health and the children: now I was plunged again under the salt and bitter waves. I laid her by her father, and it seemed to me that all light and hope were gone from me for ever. Up to five years ago I could not say her dear name without the old pang coming back; since then, when there came to be another to bury in my heart, my little girl seemed all at once to become a tranquil sweet recollection; and now that all are gone she is but a dear shadow, far in the background, while my boys take up in death as in life the whole of the darkened scene. All three gone, and only I left behind! I must try not to dwell on that here. There is enough of distracted thoughts and fancies elsewhere. I have never ventured to go back to Rome. I dared not while I had still the boys to think of. Twice fatal to us, I did not venture to face it a third time. I used to say that if I knew I had a fatal disease, or was sure that they needed me no longer, I would go by myself, and would be happy to die there, but never that they should go. I feel as if I should like to go now, but not to die there, for I must, if it is possible, lie beside my Cyril and Cecco at Eton. But this belongs to a later time.

We left Rome in May, the party still together, the Tullochs and I. I felt that if I left them then I could never bear to see them again; and thus it was that Sara and Fanny Tulloch were left with me for a year, their parents returning home. I remember very little in Rome. The people I met there, the things I saw, seemed all wiped out of my mind, except some strange broken scenes. The first week after that calamity Geddie took me out to Frascati, to their house there, for a little change; and I never can forget the aspect of that summer place, where we had once lived through the hot July and August, in the desolation of the winter and of my misery. We were on the upper storey of a great cold Italian house, the cold penetrating to the heart, cold such as never was seen or felt surely in the North, — no servants, no comforts, sitting crying over the fire through a dismal day or two in a great, gaunt, half-empty room, my heart breaking for the children. It did not last long, but I have never forgotten these dismal days. There is another day in my memory like a dream. It was then March, and we had gone to Albano and were living there. The Macphersons came out to visit us, and, as they could never be without company, asked some of their friends out from Rome on the Sunday to go to Nemi. Then, finding how I shrank from the strangers, Robert took me through the woods, — a wonderful, wild, beautiful way, — leading my donkey to the place where we were to dine. I recollect a kind of soothing in the sensation of the spring, the wild freshness of the wood; a party of charcoal-burners, whose encampment we passed, appear to me like a picture, — wild men, not safe to meet, but my kind old Robert knew them all and their dialect and their ways. Nemi, the wonderful blue lake, bound within the circle of its deep banks, and an old Palazzo with frescoed rooms looking sheer down into the wonderful metallic water, which looked something like molten sapphires, but of a warmer colour. I had half a mind. I remember, to take an appartamento in that house, and throw myself into the rut of artist life, though my instincts were not of that kind, — a life not exactly disorderly, but a little wild and wandering and gregarious. I wonder, if I had stayed at Nemi, and brought the boys up so — how bewildering the thought is of things one might have done.

After that we went to Naples and Capri, where we stayed a long time and got to know all the guides and people, riding about every day over all the lower island and up to Anacapri — all like a dream. And Sentella, the good hunchback maid whose face the Principal said was so full of moral beauty, and Feliciello, who was not by any means so good, but whom we liked and petted. I wrote, I think, a little sketch of it afterwards, called “Life on an Island,” or some such name, in ‘Blackwood.’10

In May we left Rome finally and moved northward to the Lake of Como, where we stayed at Bellaggio; then into Switzerland, where we spent the summer, chiefly on the Lake of Geneva; then to Paris, where we passed the winter. The Principal and the padrona had gone home long before, and my party in Paris consisted of my two little boys, the two girls, Sara and Fanny, Jane, and a Swiss-French governess. Mademoiselle Pricam, whom we had picked up at Montreux. In Paris we got a cheerful apartment on the Champs Elysées, the sunny side. It was at the height of the gaiety and prosperity of the Empire, and I used to say that the sight of all the gay stream of life from the windows, all the fine people coming and going, the brightness and the movement, were a kind of salvation to me in that dark and clouded time. I remember going off to St Germain to spend the first anniversary of my Maggie’s death, taking my delightful boy with me; and the dark gloomy evening after I had put him to bed in the inn, once more sitting desolate and crying over the fire; but next morning the terrace in the wintry sunshine, and all the thoughts that came to one then, and still more the going back to the cheerful rooms in Paris, which were a kind of home, and my other dear little fellow rushing with his shout of welcome to mamma, brought a little sunshine back; though it was not till the 4th of April after that, when I found the rooms crowded with flowers which they had all gone out to get for me on my birthday before I was up, that I began to feel as if I had passed again from death into life. I took them all out to St Cloud in reward for their flowers, and they were all so gay, and the morning and the drive so bright.

In Paris I saw a good deal of the Montalemberts. I have described how I translated the Count’s book when I first went to Scotland after my widowhood. He had been pleased with it, I don’t know why, for it was badly done; and by John Blackwood’s desire and introduction came to see me in Paris, and I dined there once or twice, though under protest, for I had never gone anywhere or cared to see anybody. There was one party I remember which was interesting, where were Prévost-Paradol and some other literary people. I was too shy and out of my element to make much of them, and have never been proud of my French; so I did not get the good I ought out of this glimpse of society. On one occasion Miss Blackwood, who came to Paris and paid me a long visit, was with me, — a little alarming in her large bare shoulders in the small party with the other ladies all decorously covered. There was, I remember, a pretty graceful Madame L’Abbadie, whose husband came up to me, a man with a dreadful brogue, and said, “I speak English better than Montalembert; the reason is I am born in Dublin, and he is born in London.” Montalembert’s English was delightful, perfect in accent and idiom; I don’t remember any mistake of his except the amusing and flattering one with which he expressed his surprise when we first met to find me “not so respectable” as he had supposed. I daresay it was a mistake made on purpose; for to be sure I was still young, and perhaps, in the still lingering exaltation of my sorrow and the tears that were never far off from my eyes, looked younger than I was. It was then 1865, and I must have been thirty-seven, and had grey hair. Montalembert himself was, I think, one of the most interesting men I ever met. He had that curious mixture of the — shall I say? — supernaturalist and man of the world (not mystic, he was no mystic, but yet miraculous, if there is any meaning in that) which has always had so great an attraction for me, — keen and sharp as a sword, and yet open to every belief and to every superstition, far more than I ever could have been, who looked at him and up to him with a sort of admiring wonder and yet sympathy, not without a smile in it. He was a little like Laurence Oliphant in this, but Laurence was not a highly educated man like Montalembert. M. de Montalembert struck me as the most delightful, benign, and genial of men when I saw him first; but afterwards I used to say that he was one of the few men I was afraid of, and that he had a fine way of picking one up as on some polished pair of tongs, and holding one up to the admiration of the world around, in all the bloom of one’s foolishness. I remember on one occasion, when there was great talk of vacant fauteuils in the Academic, and of the candidates, two of whom in particular were being discussed, I asked him, rather sillily, whether there were two vacancies or two candidates for one vacancy — something of that sort, — when he turned to the company and called their attention to the orderly, temperate, English mind, in which there was no rush at a prize, but a well-balanced competition of two, as I had suggested. There was a great deal of laughter, in which, of course, any shy explanation of mine was completely drowned. I doubt whether an Englishman of equally fine manners would have held up a French stranger to the gentle ridicule of the company in this way. And yet I always liked him in the midst of my alarm, and he was very kind. I gave him the ‘Life of Irving,’ with a little protest, which was quite true, that it was not because I had written it, but because of the man Irving that I wished him to read it, which protest he received with a little banter and look of seeing through me; but afterwards avowed that he was touched by the character of Irving and its truth, mightily apart as it was from all his own prepossessions, which were so strong, however, that he could not bear Scotland, — could not even persuade himself to permit the glamour of Sir Walter to excuse the black anti-Catholic desolation of that dreadful country, all but lona. Happening to speak of Carlyle, he expressed great dislike for him. I had mentioned that unfortunately Carlyle had no children. “Why unfortunately?” said Montalembert; “happily, rather, for he was not a man to have the bringing up of children.” I made some sort of indignant reply, but added, “I don’t believe in education.” He paused a moment, laughed, and said, “Neither do I.” Carlyle had an equal dislike of him, and shot forth a thunderbolt at him on one occasion when I mentioned him; but spoke of Lamennais in a half tender tone,— “There is no hairm in him, no hairm in him,” he said. Lamennais was tragic from the Montalembert point of view, — a name to be spoken of with bated breath.

It was Count de Montalembert who gave me tickets for one of the side chapels in Notre Dame, where Pere Felix was preaching to men during Lent, — a scene I have described somewhere, and which I read a description of lately in the life of Mrs. Craven. The nave was packed closely with men, a dark mass, their immovable faces whitening the whole surface of that great area under the not abundant lights, and the spare figure of the monk in the pulpit, his face whiter still, like ivory. It was very dark in the side chapels, and we did not hear very well; but the sight was very impressive, and specially so on, I think, the Thursday of Holy Week, when this immense crowd of men sang the Stabat Mater in unison, — the most wonderful volume of sound, which was quite overwhelming in the depth and strength of it, rolling like a kind of regulated and tempered thunder, or like the sound of many waters, — a perfectly new and extraordinary effect. (I remember finding out afterwards, to my great confusion, that these tickets had been given to me only for one night, and that I had kept other people out of them — the sort of horrible ridiculous want of sense which makes one hot all over when one discovers it.)

On the Easter morning we went very early to Notre Dame to see the communion of these men, which was also a very touching sight. There was an old lady in the gallery where we were who looked down all the time, crying and talking to herself, “Dix soldats — et un petit bon homme en blouse.” I, more profane, smiled a little, and was a little ashamed of myself for doing so, at the air of conscious solemnity with which most of the men came up to the altar, very devout, but yet with a certain sense of forming part of a very great and ennobling spectacle.

I made little of the ladies of the Montalembert household on this occasion, my attention being chiefly attracted to him. The girls were quite young, and I did not see enough of them to make friends as afterwards with Madame de Montalembert, a person to whom it is difficult to do justice in words, the fine, ample, noble Flamande, grande dame au bout des ongles, ready and capable to do anything in the world of which there might be need, to defend a castle, or light a fire, or nurse the sick, but helplessly unable to “do” her own hair, — a characteristic failure which amused me much when I found it out, which was not, however, till much later. As usual I did not make half the use of my opportunities which I ought to have done, was shy of going to see them, and held back generally after my fashion, which I always regret afterwards. I am not sure that I ever saw Montalembert again.

At the other end of the social scale we picked up a curious pair in Paris, — a man who was an Oxford man, far from a refined specimen, indeed, who advertised in ‘Galignani’ for pupils, and whom I engaged to begin my boy with Latin. He came, I think, every morning, and Cyril, aged eight, began his serious education under him. He was of a species of which I saw various specimens later, — the half rustic, half vulgar son of a country clergyman, gone all wrong at the University, but not a bad scholar, and, above all, not a bad man — coarse, red-faced, perhaps a little vicious, certainly addicted to drink. He had a wife, a kind of falsely pretty creature, or with a false air of being pretty, very pink and white, with one leg a little shorter than the other in consequence of some illness, who had come to Paris to be under Nelotan, the great doctor. There was a baby and an English, or rather Welsh, nurse, who stood by them through thick and thin, strongly disapproving of both, but faithful all the same. It was she, I think, probably through Jane, from whom we heard how the man had been engaged to his wife before her illness, and had helped to nurse her through it and made light of the defect it left, which he would not permit to interfere with their marriage. This prepossessed me much in his favour. Then came the report that she had a dreadful temper, and threw plates and cups at him in her fury, which made his good-humour and apparent devotion to her more touching still. Afterwards it appeared that she had a tolerable income and he not a penny, besides being in innumerable scrapes, which discouraged us a little. They used to come and spend one evening in the week with us, and I think did his preliminary teaching very well. Fanny was his pupil too, as well as Cyril; they were both, it is true, exceptional scholars.

We had another regular evening visitor once a-week — a man whom, though I never saw more of him than those regular weekly visits, I got to think of as a dear friend, and I think he had the same sort of feeling for me — Giovanni (or, as he wrote himself, John) Ruffini, the author of ‘Dr. Antonio,’ an Italian refugee of the 1848 times, and for years a resident in London, where he had written that delightful book in English, His written English was beautiful, but he spoke it badly and with difficulty. He was a large mild man, with blue eyes, heavy-lidded and large — large externally, and specially remarkable when they were cast down, which sounds odd but was true. He lived with an English family, with whom he had been for years — partly brother, partly lover, partly guest, I did not know them, and I don’t know the rights of the story. The father had died some time before, but he still kept his place among them, and went about with the mother of the house, both of them growing old with what seemed to me a delightful innocence and naturalness. They made their villeggiatura, these two together, sometimes in a couple of chalets on a Swiss mountain, as if there had not been such a thing as an evil tongue in the world, which interested me exceedingly: and indeed his weekly visit, his pensive Italian mildness, the look of the traditional exile, though in so perfectly natural a man, was very interesting: that exile look with the faint air of fiction in it, and its absolute sincerity all the same, has gone out of mortal ken nowadays.

Another queer pair that I used to see were old Father Prout (Mahony, or O’Mahony, as he called himself) and the old lady about whom he circled, and who was a very quaint old lady indeed, with the air of having been somebody, — a very dauntless, plain-spoken old person in old shiny black satin and lace, and looking as if everything was put on as well as the satin — hair, teeth, and everything else. Peace to their ancient ashes! — they were a strange pair. She — I have forgotten her name — came to see me, and I went to her house once in the evening, somewhere in the heart of Paris, up a great many stairs, where she had an apartment exactly like herself, with much dingy decoration and a great many curious things, and the air somehow of being dressed like its mistress, and scented and done up with an artificialness which, as in the lady’s case, by dint of long continuance had grown to be perfectly sincere. She bade her old gentleman sing me his great song, “The Bells of Shandon,” which he did, standing up against the mantelpiece, with his pale head, like carved ivory, relieved against the regular garniture de cheminee, the big clock and candelabra. He had a fine face with delicate features, almost an ascetic face. He had been a priest, but had years before abandoned that calling and adopted literature in its place. He was for a time one of the Fraser group, which was, more or less, an imitation of the Blackwood group, with much real or pretended rivalry, and had knocked about a great deal in his life, and was poor. I think I heard that the old lady died, and that he became poorer still.11 There were thus two elderly romances, in old fidelity and friendship, under my eyes, made innocent, almost infantile, especially in the latter case, as of old babies, independent of sex and superior to it, amid all the obliterations of old age. I had several curious visitors of this kind, chiefly sent to me, I think, by Robert Macpherson, — one of them Miss Cushman, the actress, whom I had met in London and had not liked, but who touched my heart with her evident deep knowledge of trouble and sorrow. I think I have described her and others in some other places, though I can’t tell where, I had visitors too from home, — Mrs. Fitzgerald, Miss Blackwood, and Principal Tulloch, who came to take the girls home, and in his turn brought some odd Scotch-cosmopolitan people. Not cosmopolitan, however, was the Scotch minister, who held his little conventicle in the Oratoire, and who said sturdily, and with the courage of his opinion, that he had not learned French, and did not mean to do so, as he disapproved of it altogether.

We were about six months in Paris, in the little bright apartment which I remember cost over a thousand francs for wood and coal during that time, and was as warm as a nest. The party consisted of the two girls, my two dear little boys, — Cyril so full of wit and fun, Cecco always so original even in his babyhood, learning to read in Mademoiselle’s wonderful way in a fortnight without a tear, — Mademoiselle herself, Jane, and a servant and a half — the bonne a tout faire and her child. The Champs Elysées, full of sun and brightness and fine carriages, and all the fine people passing in a stream every afternoon, did me much good, and it all bears a radiant aspect now as I look back, heavy though my heart often was. I heard then for the first time of our afterwards familiar and beloved cousin Annie, in reality a second cousin, whom I had never seen, but who wrote introducing herself to me, with some literary aspirations, taking at that time the shape of poetry, against which I remember I advised her, suggesting a novel instead. I cannot remember what I was then doing, nor how I was in the matter of money, but I presume I must have been going on with a flowing sail, working a great deal and not requiring to take much thought of my expenses, which, alas! was my way. I ought to have been saving, of course, but I didn’t, with a miraculous ease of mind which some people have thought criminal, I sometimes think, too, that it was so, and also have sometimes lately (1895) pondered upon a sadder12 theory still, as if that had something to do with the great sorrows that have clouded the end of my life. I never had any expensive tastes, but loved the easy swing of life, without taking much thought for the morrow, with a faith in my own power to go on working, which up to this time has been wonderfully justified, but which has been a great temptation and danger to me all through in the way of economies. I had always a conviction that I could make up by a little exertion for any extra expense. Sickness, incapacity, want of health or ability to work, never occurred to me, I suppose. At the same time, I never was very highly paid for my work, and perhaps this had its effect too on my carelessness in pecuniary matters. I made enough to carry me on easily, almost luxuriously, but not enough to save, never a large sum which could be partly put away at once and give one a taste of the sweetness of possessing something. I could not do this, and I fear it was not in me to practise that honourable pinching and sparing by which some women do so much. I had not the time for it, nor, indeed, I am ashamed to say, the wish. I am ashamed too to make the confession that I do not in the least remember what I was working at at this time. It is not that I have ever been indifferent to my work. I have always been most grateful to God that it was work I liked and that interested me in the doing of it, and it has often carried me away from myself and quenched, or at least calmed, the troubles of life. But perhaps my life has been too full of personal interests to leave me at leisure to talk of the creatures of my imagination, as some people do, or to make believe that they were more to me in writing than they might have been in reading — that is, my own stories in the making of them were very much what other people’s stories (but these the best) were in the reading. I am no more interested in my own characters than I am in Jeanie Deans, and do not remember them half so well, nor do they come back to me with the same steady interest and friendship. Perhaps people will say this is why they never laid any special hold upon the minds of others, though they might be agreeable reading enough. But this does not mean that I was indifferent to the work as work, or did not beat it out with interest and pleasure. It pleases me at this present moment, I may confess, that I seem to have found unawares an image that quite expresses what I mean — i.e., that I wrote as I read, with much the same sort of feeling. It seems to me that this is rather an original way of putting it (to disclose the privatest thought in my mind), and this gives me an absurd little sense of pleasure.

We left Paris in the summer — my little boys, the governess, Jane, and I. I did not want to go back to England till the end of the year, and we strayed about a little. The tutor aforesaid and his wife had taken a house in Normandy with the intention of having boarders, and there it occurred to me to go for a short time — especially while Jane went home for her holiday. The house called itself the Chateau de Montilly, which sounded well. It was, however, a new square house in a garden, without any attractions whatever; and the unfortunate pair were rather insufferable at such close quarters, and I was very thankful to get away in about a fortnight — staying that time merely for decency’s sake. Mr. Story, who was in Paris, came down to visit me, I remember; and we went to see Bayeux and the tapestry, jogging along in a country shandrydan with a huge red umbrella. That fact and a wonderful thunderstorm there was — which he and I sat at an open window to watch, much to the annoyance and terror of our hosts, who would have liked to shut it out with bolted shutters — are about all I recollect, except the discomfort of the forced stay with people totally out of my way and kind, and the little meannesses of the household, and the annoyed interest we began to take in what there would be for dinner as soon as we discovered that the fare was sure to be scanty and bad. We escaped as soon as we could, having taken in a few views of French village life, and made the discovery that to take out an ill-tempered Mrs. — for a little diversion — even if it were no more exciting than a Norman fair, and the drive thereto in a carriole — was good for her soul’s health, poor thing, and cleared the skies. I am a little hazy about what followed. We went to Avranches, to the little country town hotel, where the good people of the place came in to dine, and tied their dinner napkins round their half-finished bottles of wine; and we went to Mont St Michel, which delighted me, and where I had half a mind to take one of the many empty houses left by the prison officials when it ceased to be a prison. One imposing white house dominating the village I was told I could have for a hundred francs a-year! There would have been economy, and a certain amount of interest and picturesque surroundings, but the sea and the vast sands were very grey. We bivouacked in an almost empty house, containing little but what are called box-beds in Scotland, and a table and chair or two, which belonged to an old priest, very snuffy and shabby, who was called M. L’Aumonier, and had, I suppose, filled that office in the economy of the great prison, though I don’t quite know what office it is. He took me to window after window to show me little shelves of garden which he had on the slopes of the rock — one here and another there, but each provided with certain conveniences, on which the good man insisted much. The first night there I was seized by a sudden panic to find that I had lodged myself and my helpless little party in the midst of a strange, unknown, and rather rough community — in a house which had not a key even to its outer door, — and sat up till daylight to watch over them. The light reassured me, and the thought of my big and dauntless Jane, who was worth two men, and who would have faced an army for her two little boys. Oh, my little boys! and the happiness of watching over them and all their ways and sayings, though I was sad enough then, thinking there was no sadder mother, longing for my Maggie wherever I went.

We spent a long time at St Adresse, near Havre, in a house which belonged to Queen Christina of Spain, where there was capital sea-bathing; and the children, or at least Cyril, began to learn to swim, and enjoyed themselves in all the amusements of the sea-side. One half tragic experience we had. Setting out to row, I and my little man, only eight, with a recklessness which I shiver now to think of, we were caught by the current, and had not our plight been seen from the shore and a man sent after us, I don’t know what might have happened. The current was well known, only not to me, newly arrived and, as it appeared, very imprudent. We had rowed a great deal on the Gairloch, and we were close inshore, and the shining sunlit water looked like burnished glass or gold, or both. Mademoiselle was with us, and as bold as a little stout Swiss lion. I had luck in that way at least. How much would have been spared if that boat had drifted out to sea! many years’ toil coming to so little, many years’ misery and sorrow, though many happy too — and this long tragedy at the end! To have ended all together under that rippled sheet of gold, what an escape from all that came after! But it would have been hard on Mademoiselle and her old mother at Lausanne. It makes one’s head go round, however, to think how little difference it would have made had such a little catastrophe taken place, and made a paragraph in the papers, — an innocent, not undesirable, not unlovely catastrophe, all over sweetly and suddenly that has taken so many years to get over, and yet is over or soon will be: how little important to any one else! probably so much better for ourselves! I feel a kind of envy now of the situation and of the possibility — but this is all so vain.

I suppose it must have been after St Adresse that we went to St Malo, where the delightful bay, crowded with rocky islets and downy white sails, delighted me. We found a small cabin of a house on the very edge of the cliff at Dinard, which was then a little village, very primitive and quiet, whence we crossed to St Malo in a small boat with a big sail, — always somewhat alarming to me, notwithstanding my rash boating. It was called the bateau de poissage, I remember, in the Norman-French that always sounded to me like Scotch. We had a noble Marie for our bonne, a woman with the finest thoughtful face, whom I had photographed in her beautiful cap, in spite of her protestations that it would have been much better to take her niece, a commonplace, pretty little girl. Probably they do not wear those caps now, in which they looked like medieval princesses, wandering after the procession of the Fete Dieu, which took place while we were there. But these are all very trivial recollections. I remember being extremely touched by the playing of the local band in the Dinard church, I suppose on this occasion. They played where the anthem would come in in the English service, and what they played was Ah che la morte, and other airs from the “Trovatore,” which shocked me at first into the usual English sense of superiority, and then affected me greatly with the thought that it was absolutely the best thing they could do which they were offering to God, whether very worthy or not, and what could the finest genius do more? My other best recollection is of the country doctor, whom I called to see my dear little Cecco in some illness, just enough to make an anxious woman more anxious, and who laughed and prescribed the galette of the place, a kind of cracknel, and confiture and cider, the drink of the place, I could have hugged him for his laugh, which proved how little was the matter, and administered the cracknel and the jam, but not the cider, which was sour. So little a thing dwells on one’s mind, but it was not little at that moment, when these infantile vicissitudes were the most important matters in life.

We had rather a wild, rather a wearisome, but in some ways an amusing, journey from St Malo to Boulogne. There was a boat direct from St Malo, which, if I had been a wise woman, I should have taken, and so got home quite cheaply. But I had a great dislike to the sea; and with some compunction for the expense and more pleasure in the adventure, — though adventure there was really none, except that the manner of the journey was by that time a little out of the way, — we set off by land. So far as I remember, we went sixty miles the first day, if that is possible, but I don’t recollect where we halted or how many days we took to the journey altogether. We started with that perfect ignorance of where we were going, and perfect confidence that everything would go well, which, I suppose, is peculiar to women (when they are not nervous and timorous). The carriage was packed with toys and books and all kinds of things for the children, and the progress through the air, the little exhilaration of the start, the glimpse of village interiors as we rattled past, the arrivals and departures, were quite enough amusement for me. I suppose Mademoiselle must have liked it too, for she threw herself completely into the frolic. And as for Jane, it was all in the day’s work to her. I think we passed one night at Granville. I remember distinctly that we all lunched in the middle of the day at an unknown and nameless village, upon potatoes en robe de chambre, which Mademoiselle sagely advised as a thing we could be quite sure of, whereas other dishes might be doubtful, and the fragrant tray of fresh sponge biscuits, taken warm and sweet out of the oven while we were there and added to our meal as desert, which made me feel that the capabilities of the place were greater than we thought. The rush across a broad level of country without many features was monotonous in the end; but the quiet and fresh air, and long silences and sense of progress, were all soothing and pleasant. I have a kind of shadowy recollection of the journey, like a dream, that is refreshing still. We spent a day or two in Dieppe, intending at first to take the boat there, but having got into the habit of driving, with the old delightful connections of the vetturino coming back, we finally decided to continue our drive along the coast to Boulogne, and, though we did not deserve it, were rewarded at last by the smoothest of passages across the Channel — a thing which in those days I always dreaded. We found rooms in London in the Bayswater Road, opposite Kensington Gardens — a place I have always liked; and then I set to work to find a home for us, where there should be means of education for the boys. My mind was at first inclined for Harrow, but something, I forget what, induced me to come to Windsor, which captivated me at once. Either then or later I wrote a letter to Mr. Warre, now the Head Master, then young and “rising,” whom I found very agreeable, and who decided, but with some reluctance, that it might be possible to educate my sons at Eton in all respects like the other boys there, but sleeping at home; which possibility, combined with the beauty of the river and the castle, and the air of cheerful life about, decided me very quickly to settle here. And a house was found very quickly; not this in which I now sit, and where almost all the events of my later life have taken place, but one in the same Crescent, within two doors of me, smaller than this. We came into it in November, I think, 1865. I have been here ever since. The house was very bright, the sun on it almost from its rising to its setting, a pleasant little garden behind, and the Crescent garden — a piece of ground of considerable extent, which we called, I don’t know why, the plantation, beautifully planted, and, considering its position, a wonderful little piece of landscape gardening, — of which we took possession by acclamation. Very few people used it in these days: the day of lawn-tennis was not yet, and I suppose most of the people were elderly, for we had it almost altogether to ourselves. I never knew till a long time after of how much importance it was in the first chapter of my boys’ life, this bit of town garden with its fine trees and wild nooks and corners. Lately my Cecco has told me of so many things that were done there, “when we were small,” as he always said. It lies under my windows now, but I can’t trust myself to go into it.

Here we got to know gradually various people about. The Hawtreys, a family of old brothers and sisters, relatives of the old Provost Hawtrey of Eton, were in themselves a very characteristic household. They lived in a large red-brick house near the church, the centre of an enormous connection, married brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces innumerable. The Windsor portion of the family were known universally by their Christian names, Stephen and Anna, Henry and Florence. They have all lived in my ken to be very old people, — the two first having both died over eighty, while the younger pair still survive, still ascending towards the snows. It was a house full of entertainment, of family gatherings, Christmas festivities, in which the overwhelming atmosphere of Hawtreyism pervaded everything. They were all kind naturally, but anything so bland as John Hawtrey, who was an Eton master, or so effusively benignant as old Stephen, I never saw. The last was full of schemes, almost always benevolent, always more or less as people thought, profitable, as exemplified in certain transactions which are not worth telling, which were mere gossip, though if I had time or was sure to give pain to nobody, they were not without amusing points. A wicked wag at Eton declared that Stephen got up in the morning to build the walls of his new mathematical school out of the materials which were lying ready for more slothful workmen to build Mr. Somebody’s house hard by, — a story everybody laughed at as ben trovato, though I cannot say I ever knew these good people to do anything to the disadvantage of their neighbours. They were good people, whether or no. They had all kinds of parties continually going on, — dinner-parties, garden-parties, musical-parties. In one of the last a family quartette played what was rather new and terrible to me, long sonatas and concerted pieces, which filled my soul with dismay. It is a dreadful confession to make, and proceeds from want of education and instruction, but I fear any appreciation of music I have is purely literary. I love a song and a “tune”; the humblest fiddler has sometimes given me the greatest pleasure, and sometimes gone to my heart; but music properly so called, the only music that many of my friends would listen to, is to me a wonder and a mystery. My mind wanders through andantes and adagios, gaping, longing to understand. Will no one tell me what it means? I want to find the old unhappy far-off things or battles long ago, which Wordsworth imagined in the Gaelic song. I feel out of it, uneasy, thinking all the time what a poor creature I must be. I remember the mother of the sonata players approaching me with beaming countenance on the occasion of one of those performances, expecting the compliment which I faltered forth, doing my best not to look insincere. “And I have that every evening of my life!” cried the triumphant woman. ‘‘Good heavens! and you have survived it all this time,” was my internal comment. I can see the kind glow on her face and the mother’s pride, and thought myself, I am glad to say, a very poor creature to be left so helplessly behind, though not without a rueful amusement too.

I had a little neighbour in one of the smaller Crescent houses, whom the children soon got to call Aunt Nelly, and I “Little Nelly,” — I hardly know why, unless for the too perfect reason that she was Nelly and very little, which of course was much too simple to be the true meaning of the name. She it was who, dying in her sleep without so much as the movement of a finger — little happy woman, always of the angel kind — put the story, if story it can be called, of “The Little Pilgrim” into my mind. Many simple people here had a sort of grotesque notion that there was something of her in it more than the suggestion, as if, alas! it were possible to follow and describe the ways of those who are gone. She was far from being wise or clever, generally reputed rather a silly little woman; but with a heart of gold, and a straightforward, simple, right judgment, which was always to me like the clear shining of a tiny light. She was, perhaps, a silly little woman, in fact, in some ways. There are kinds of foolishness I like for my own part, as there is also a kind of benignant gentle dulness which always soothes me, and which I constantly recommend as so good a relief from the intellectualism some of my friends love; but then they do love the intellectual, and I don’t — much. My little Nelly had been trained to be unselfish, which, being far better than unselfish without training, was the only little fictitious trait in her — but so superficial and innocent. I often point the moral to the girls of that kind of technical unselfishness, by telling how little Nelly on a muddy road exhausted herself in finding a dry part for me, while she hobbled through the mud, as if I was to be outdone in that cheap generosity! But the woman was of the angel kind, and breathed goodness round her. She was the guardian, when I first knew her, of an old, old mother, whose head and memory were gone, and of a brother with a nervous disease — a poor man cast out of life in the middle of his days, and feeling himself to the bottom of his heart a cumberer of the soil. Her life was spent in amusing and caring for these two invalids, playing cards for hours with them. My little Cecco used to go in the evening, rather proud of being wanted, seven or eight years old, in his little velvet suit, to make the fourth at whist, and when he was a man would speak of the long whist “which was Aunt Nelly’s way.” The invalid brother was rarely visible, but sometimes I found a bouquet of flowers laid on my balcony, which was low enough to be reached from outside, which he laid there, stealing unnoticed into the garden.

Both these poor people died after long years, and left my little Nelly free — to take other burdens on her shoulders, and save other wounded creatures of God. Once when I was in great straits, and very anxious and unhappy, I asked her to help me in praying for the great boon I desired. I am not of the kind who do that usually, and perhaps when the trouble had been softened away I forgot even that I had done it; but thinking of it all years after, in the great and deep joy of knowing that the change I desired had come to pass, though without knowing what had led to it, I suddenly remembered how in my trouble I had sought her help, and it seemed to me like a flash of light upon the road by which we had come, not knowing. I have never asked any one else to do that for me.

Notwithstanding, she was the object of perpetual banter in the house. There was almost always some current joke about what little Nelly had done or said, at which she herself was the first to laugh. How many of those foolish, dear, affectionate mockeries I remember! Not mockeries — the word is too harsh: the ring of the laughter, the shining of the young eyes, and the light in her own, as beautiful as the youngest eyes among them, worn and faded as she was, are as fresh as ever. I wonder sometimes if what has been ever dies! Should not I find them all round the old whist-table, and my Cecco, with his bright face and the great blue vein that showed on his temple, proud to be helping to amuse the old people, if I were but bold enough to push into the deserted house and look for them now? I have so often felt, with a bewildered dizziness, as if that might be.

Then there was another near neighbour, one whom I have seen to-day, who lives on as I do, lonely and forlorn, with all the elements in her then of a brilliant life, — clever, witty, pretty, a woman not to be passed over, and who, had her lot fallen otherwise, might have filled any position almost, and perhaps been a leader of society, had life been more auspicious to her. When I knew her first she lived in one of the most important houses in the place, with a delightful old mother, in a delightful house and much apparent comfort. She had a handsome son in London, a beautiful daughter who had made a distinguished marriage abroad. She herself had read a great deal, was an accomplished musician, spoke the purest French, knew foreign society tolerably well, and had been one of the “county” people more or less, but when I knew her first was very lonely, not in perfect intelligence either with son or daughter, and either negligent or frettingly, insufferably kind and anxious over her mother. I don’t know, and have never desired to know, notwithstanding the eagerness of many people to inform me, what her past had been. It was not the least a past such as is now meant when a woman with a past is spoken of, but there had been some foolish rash attempt to secure a very brilliant marriage at home for the beautiful daughter, which had prejudiced the little society about against her, and she was very solitary, her mother old and an invalid, one of the prettiest and most charming old ladies possible, with a delightful endowment of Irish wit; but there was to her mind certainly nobody who was in the least her equal in her way. There are some people who never get any credit for what is good in them, and some who get too much credit. My friend was one of those who are never done justice to, and indeed, if one may say it, did not deserve to be done justice to, if such a contradiction were ever true. She thought or said that she had been more than done justice to in the former part of her life, — that she had been admired, followed, and adored with more than her share of devotion; and indeed this might have been quite true, for she must have been beautiful when she was young, and full of a sparkle of wit and cleverness and accomplishments. But certainly there was very little of this in the latter part of her life, though she was still a pretty woman at forty-five, and infinitely superior to many of those who had no good word for her. It might be because she was abandoned by her fine friends, or it might be that she found something sympathetic in me, who have always been a very good listener, and apt to admire and be interested in attractive people, but she fell into a great intimacy with me, and used to spend at least half of her time in my house. I believed at first, of course, all she told me of the unkindness of others: some of it was true; some of it, it became apparent in the course of years, was not true, or at least not all true, though probably she was not aware of this, and took her own part always with a zeal and vehemence which made her feel everybody else more completely in the wrong than it is safe to believe everybody who is against one can be. She had not the merry heart which goes all the way, the happy blood that Mrs. Craven speaks of; and yet she had a certain version of the merry heart, and threw herself into all the little entertainments and pleasures which I gradually began to be drawn into, by reason of the household of girls I soon had. Cousin Annie, whom I did not know before, drifted towards me almost as soon as I came to Windsor, and as she was an orphan without a home, stayed with me for a number of years; and Sara and Fanny Tulloch paid me long visits; and my boys began to spring up and carried me along on the stream of their rising life. My neighbour threw herself into all we did, and we soon began to do a great deal. It makes me wonder, looking back, how, after the despair of my grief, which found so much utterance, I should have risen again into absolute gaiety thus, twice over. But so it was. I thought it was for the young people round me, and no doubt it was so, but equally without doubt my own life burst forth again with an obstinate elasticity which I could not keep down. The merry heart goes all the way. I worked very hard all the time, but could always spare a day or any amount of evenings to please the girls, still more to please the boys. For the children, after my Cyril went to Eton, we began to have theatricals, which grew into more and more importance, till we used to play Shakespeare and Moliere in my little drawing-room, alternating with innocent versions of “Barbe Bleue,” &c., but that in the earlier days. I never attempted any performance myself but once, that of Mrs. Hardcastle in “She Stoops to Conquer.” Of course the great inspiration of these performances was Mr. Frank Tarver, an Eton master, an excellent amateur actor, who, as he very soon fell in love with Sara, made himself prime minister, or, at least, master of the revels, with great energy, and helped to keep up the circle of amusement. There were others, too, full of character, and as interesting in their way as if they had been great lights in the literary or any other world, whom I might describe, and who made up a very intelligent and light-hearted society; but as not one of them turned out remarkable in any way, I need not insist upon them. One, who was one of the first to break the circle, my young friend Captain Gun, an engineer officer stationed here, I may mention. He was the Tony to my Mrs. Hardcastle, — a large plain young man, full of ability and force. Had he lived he would, no doubt, have come to something. He had the readiness and resource of a soldier, seeing in a moment in a way that seemed magic to me where there was any kind of danger. I remember in Romney lock, in the dusk of a summer night, a sudden incomprehensible movement of his which filled me with alarm for a moment, as he suddenly made a step out of our boat, which shivered with the motion, into another close by and dimly seen. He had perceived that it was in unskilful hands, and that the bow had caught in the side of the lock, — a dangerous position, which his sudden additional weight at once remedied. This to my ignorance was wonderful, though, of course, it was the simplest thing in the world; but the quick sight and the quick action were delightful to witness, as soon as one understood them. Captain Gun married a few years later a lady wonderfully like Fanny, who died soon, and he died shortly after, on which last occasion there were some very curious incidents took place with the table-rapping, to which we had given ourselves, with much levity, for the moment, — the only serious experience we ever had.

Into the midst of this half-childish gaiety there came a very sudden and alarming interruption. My brother Frank had married at the same time as I myself did, and had lived a very humdrum but happyish life with a wife who suited him, and had now four children — a boy and three girls. He had been in rather delicate health for a year or two, and had fallen into rather a nervous condition, his hand shaking very much so that it was difficult for him to write, though he still could do his work. For this reason I heard from them rarely, as Jeanie, his wife, was a bad correspondent too. One morning very suddenly, and in the most painful and disagreeable way, I heard that he had got into great trouble about money, and was, in fact, a ruined man. It was the thunderbolt out of the clear sky, which is always so tremendous. I spent a day of misery, expecting him to come to me, not knowing what to expect, and fearing all sorts of things. A day or two after I went to look for him, and found him absent and his wife in great trouble. His health, from what I now heard, was altogether shattered; and it was that as much as anything else which had brought his affairs into the most hopeless muddle, from which there seemed no escape. They had not very much money at any time, but what they had had somehow slipped through his fingers. His wife and I did everything we could, but that was very little. He was a man without an expensive taste, the most innocent, the most domestic of men, but what he had had always slipped through his fingers, as I well knew. Poor dear Frank! how well I remembered the use he made of one of my mother’s Scotch proverbs to justify some new small expense following a bigger one which he would allow to be imprudent. “Well,” he would say, half-coaxing, half-apologetic, “what’s the use of eating the coo and worrying [choking] on her tail?” Alas! he had choked on the tail this time without remedy, and the only thing to be done was to wind up the affairs as well as was possible, and to further the little family, whom he could not live without, after him, which was what we did accordingly, with a prompt action which was some relief to our heavy hearts. We neither of us had a word of blame on our lips or a thought of anger in our hearts. Frank and Nelly, the two elder children, came to me, and Jeanie with her two little girls (my two girls this many a year, and now the only comfort of my life) joined her husband in France. It was a terrible break in life, and affected me in many ways permanently; but after the shock of seeing that chasm opening at our feet, and all their life shattered to pieces, everything quieted down again. The children were well. Oh, magic of life that made everything go smooth! they had taken no harm. They had their lives before them, and unbounded possibilities of making everything right. I am not sure that I had not a sort of secret satisfaction in getting Frank, my nephew, into my hands, thinking, with that complacency with which we always look at our own doings, that I could now train him for something better than they had thought of. This was in 1868. My Cyril was twelve and at Eton, having his room at his tutor’s, and living precisely like other Eton boys, though coming home to sleep, which was one of the greatest happinesses in my life. Frank was fourteen, a big strong boy. I planned to send him to Eton too, but coming home for his meals, which was much less expensive, as I could not afford the other for him, and it answered very well. He was always the best of boys, manful, and a steady worker. Cyril had begun to be by this time noted as one of the cleverest boys, far on for his age, and promising everything, besides the brightest, wittiest, most sparkling little fellow, as he always was. I used to make it my boast that both my boys received Frank as a true brother, and never would have allowed me, had I wished it, to give them any pleasure or advantage which he did not share. Nelly after a while went to her mother’s sister, Mrs. Sime, and so we all settled down. But it is not likely that such family details would be of interest to the public.

And yet, as a matter of fact, it is exactly those family details that are interesting, — the human story in all its chapters. I have often said, however, that none of us with any of the strong sense of family credit which used to be so general, but is not so, I think, now, could ever really tell what were perhaps the best and most creditable things in our own life, since by the strange fate which attends us human creatures, what is most creditable to one is often least creditable to another. These things steal out; they are divined in most cases, and then forgotten. Therefore all can never be told of any family story, except at the cost of family honour, and that pride which is the most pardonable of all pride, the determination to keep unsullied a family name. This catastrophe was tremendous in appearance, and yet was more or less a good thing for the children, whose prospects seemed to be utterly ruined, — not for the parents. Poor Jeanie — not strong enough, I suppose, to bear what fell upon her, as she had not been strong enough to do anything to prevent it — died most unexpectedly in her sleep, in a mild attack of fever which excited no alarm. My brother had been glad to get an appointment among the employees of a railway that was being made, of all places in the world, in Hungary, and went there with his wife and the little girls. I forget how long they were there, — only a very short time. The shock of their downfall was over, they were more or less happy to be together, and Frank and Nelly were happy enough here. We had returned to all our little gaieties again, our theatricals, — our boating, and the rest, — without much thought on my part, I fear, of the additional responsibility I had upon me of another boy to educate and set out in the world. We were all assembled, a merry party enough, one summer evening, after an afternoon on the river, at a late meal, — a sort of supper, — when a telegram was put into my hand. I remember the look of the long table and all the bright faces round it, the pretty summer dishes, salad, and pink salmon, and ornamented sweet things, and many flowers, the men and boys in their flannels, the girls in their light summer dresses, — everything light and bright. I have often said that it was the only telegram I ever received without a certain tremor of anxiety. Captain Gun, who was there, had been uncertain of his coming on this particular day, and a good many telegrams on that subject had been passing between us. I held the thing in my hand and looked across at him, and said, “This time it cannot be from you.” Then I opened it with the laugh in my mouth, and this is what I read: “Jeanie is dead, and I am in despair.” It was like a scene in a tragedy. They all saw the change in my face, but I dreaded to say anything, for there was her son sitting by, my good Frank, as gay as possible. He was only about fifteen, or perhaps sixteen. We managed to keep it from him till next morning, not to give him that shock in the midst of his pleasure; and somehow the supper got completed without any one knowing what had happened.

A very short time after my poor brother came home with the two little white-faced, forlorn children, with their big eyes. I never thought but that it must kill him, but it did not; though, when I met them at Victoria, I thought I never should have got him safely back, even to Windsor. He was completely shattered, like a man in a palsy, for a time scarcely able to stand or to speak, but not so overwhelmed with grief as I expected. Grief is the strangest thing, or rather it is very wonderful in how many different ways people take those blows, which from outside seem as if they must be final. Especially is it so in the closest of human connections, that between man and wife. People who have seemed to be all the world to each other are parted so, and the survivor, who is for the moment as my poor brother said “in despair,” shows the most robust power of bearing it, and is so soon himself or herself again, that one, confounded and half-ashamed, feels that one is half-ridiculous to have expected anything different. Frank, poor fellow, had got over his sorrow on the long journey. He came to me like a child glad to get home, not much disturbed about anything that could happen. He lived for about six years after, for a great part of the time in tolerable comfort, but, so far as work was concerned, was capable of no more. The shaking of his hand was never cured, nor even sufficiently improved to make writing of any kind possible. He settled down to a kind of quiet life, read his newspaper, took his walk, sat in his easy-chair in the dining-room or in his own room for the rest of the day, was pleased with Frank’s progress and with Nelly’s love for reading, and with his little girls, and so got through his life, I think, not unhappily. But he and I, who had been so much to each other once, were nothing to each other now. I sometimes thought he looked at me as a kind of stepmother to his children, and we no longer thought alike on almost any subject; he had drifted one way and I another. He did not even take very much interest in me, and I fear he often irritated me. Poor Frank! it was sometimes a great trial, and I often wonder how the life went on, on the whole, so well as it did. He entertained delusive hopes for a time of going back and of being able to do something; but they were evidently from the first delusions and nothing more, and it did not hurt him so much as might have been thought when they vanished, — he had too little strength to feel it, I suppose.

Of course I had to face a prospect considerably changed by this great addition to my family. I had been obliged to work pretty hard before to meet all the too great expenses of the house. Now four people were added to it, very small two of them, but the others not inexpensive members of the house. I remember making a kind of pretence to myself that I had to think it over, to make a great decision, to give up what hopes I might have had of doing now my very best, and to set myself steadily to make as much money as I could, and do the best I could for the three boys. I think that in some pages of my old book I have put this down with a little half-sincere attempt at a heroical attitude, I don’t think, however, that there was any reality in it. I never did nor could, of course, hesitate for a moment as to what had to be done. It had to be done, and that was enough, and there is no doubt that it was much more congenial to me to drive on and keep everything going, with a certain scorn of the increased work, and metaphorical toss of my bead, as if it mattered! than it ever would have been to labour with an artist’s fervour and concentration to produce a masterpiece. One can’t be two things or serve two masters. Which was God and which was mammon in that individual case it would be hard to say, perhaps; for once in a way mammon, meaning the money which fed my flock, was in a kind of a poor way God, so far as the necessities of that crisis went. And the wonder was that we did it, I can’t tell how, economising, I fear, very little, never knowing quite at the beginning of the year how the ends would come together at Christmas, always with troublesome debts and forestalling of money earned, so that I had generally eaten up the price of a book before it was printed, but always — thank God for it! — so far successfully that, though always owing somebody, I never owed anybody to any unreasonable amount or for any unreasonable extent of time, but managed to pay everything and do everything, to stint nothing, to give them all that was happy and pleasant and of good report through all those dear and blessed boyish years. I confess that it was not done in the noblest way, with those strong efforts of self-control and economy which some people can exercise. I could not do that, or at least did not, but I could work. And I did work, joyfully, with pleasure in it and in my life, sometimes with awful moments when I did not know how I should ever pass some dreadful corner, where the way seemed to end and the rocks to close in: but the corner was always rounded, the road opened up again.

I recollect one of these moments especially, I forget the date: I always do forget dates, but the circumstances were these. We were a family of eight, children included, two boys at Eton, almost always guests in the house, — every kind of thing (in our modest way) going on, small dinner-parties, and a number of mild amusements, when it so happened that I came to a pause and found that every channel was closed and no place for any important work. I had always a lightly flowing stream of magazine articles, &c., and refused no work that was offered to me; but the course of life could not have been carried on on these, and a large sum was wanted at brief intervals to clear the way. I had, I think, a novel written, but did not know where I should find a place for it. Literary business arrangements were not organised then as now — there was no such thing as a literary agent. Serials in magazines were published in much less number, magazines themselves being not half so many (and a good thing too!). The consequence was that I seemed to be at a dead standstill. It was like nothing but what I have already said, — a mountainous road making a sharp turn round a corner, when it seems to disappear altogether, as if it ended there in the closing in of the cliffs. I was miserably anxious, not knowing where to turn or what to do, hoping every morning would bring me some proposal, waiting upon God, if I may use the word (I did the thing with the most complete faith, — what could I else?), for the opening up of that closed way. One evening I got a letter from a man whose name I did not know, asking if he could come to see me about a business matter. I forget whether he mentioned the name of the ‘Graphic,’ then just established, — I think not; at all events there was nothing in the letter to make me think it of any importance. I replied, however (I didn’t always reply so quickly), appointing the second day after to receive him. I had decided to go to London next day to see if I could persuade some one to take my novel and give a good price for it. I think it was to Mr. George Smith I went, who was very kind and gracious, as was his wont, but would have nothing to say to me. I fancy I went somewhere else, but I had no success. I recollect coming home in a kind of despair, and being met at the door when it was opened to me by the murmur of the merry house, the cheerful voices, the overflowing home, — every corner full and warm as if it had a steady income and secure revenue at its back. My brother, I remember, who I suppose had seen some cloud on my face before I left, came forward to meet me with some trivial question, hoping I had not felt cold or taken cold or something, which in the state of despair in which I was had a sort of exasperating effect upon me; but they were all dispersing over the house to get ready for dinner, and I escaped further notice. No one thought anything more than that I was dull or cross for the rest of the evening. I used to work very late then, always till two in the morning (it is past three at this moment, 18th, nay, 19th April 1895, but this is no longer usual with me). I can’t remember whether I worked that night, but I think it was one of the darkest nights (oh, no, no, that I should say so! they were all safe and well), at least a very dreadful moment, and I could not think what I should do.

Next morning came my visitor. He came from the ‘Graphic’: he wanted a story, I think the first they had had. He wanted it very soon, the first instalments within a week or two; and after a little talk and negotiation, he came to the conclusion that they would give me £1300. The road did run round that corner after all. Our Father in heaven had settled it all the time for the children; there had never been any doubt. I was absolutely without hope or help. I did not know where to turn, and here, in a moment, all was clear again — the road free in the sunshine, the cloud in a moment rolled away.

It was not, however, the story which I had finished at the time which I gave them (which did not seem suitable). I began another instantly, and went on with it in instalments, I think. It was the novel called ‘Innocent,’ and was not very good, so far as I can remember, though the idea was one that had pleased me, — the development by successive shocks of feeling of a girl of dormant intelligence. I believe the trial scene in it was very badly managed — not unnatural, for I never was present at a trial, though that, of course, was no excuse. It was seldom that an incident so dramatic as this little episode I have described took place in my life; but it was checkered with similar, if lesser, crises. It was always a struggle to get safely through every year and make my ends meet. Indeed I fear they never did quite meet; there was always a tugging together, which cost me a great deal of work and much anxiety. The wonder was that the much was never too much. I always managed it somehow, thank God! very happy (and presuming a little on my privilege) when I saw the way tolerably clear before me, and knew at the beginning of the year where the year’s income was to come from, but driving, ploughing on, when I was not at all sure of that all the same, and in some miraculous way getting through. If I had not had unbroken health, and a spirit almost criminally elastic, I could not have done it. I ought to have been worn out by work, and crushed by care, half a hundred times by all rules, but I never was so. Good day and ill day, they balanced each other, and I got on through year after year. This, I am afraid, sounds very much like a boast. (I was going to add, “but I don’t mean it as such.”) I am not very sure, however, that I don’t mean it, or that my head might not be a little turned sometimes by a sense of the rashness and dare-devilness, if I may use such a word, of my own proceedings; and it was in its way an immoral, or at least an un-moral, mode of life, dashing forward in the face of all obstacles and taking up all burdens with a kind of levity, as if my strength and resource could never fail. If they had failed, I should have been left in the direst bankruptcy; and I had no right to reckon upon being always delivered at the critical moment. I should think any one who did so blamable now. I persuaded myself then that I could not help it, that no better way was practicable, and indeed did live by faith, whether it was or was not exercised in a legitimate way. I might say now that another woman doing the same thing was tempting Providence. To tempt Providence or to trust God, which was it? In my own case, naturally, I said the latter, and did not in the least deserve, in my temerity, to be led and constantly rescued as I was. I must add that I never had any help from outside, I never received so much as a legacy in my life. My publishers were good and kind in the way of making me advances, without which I could not have got on; but they were never — probably because of these advances, and of my constant need and inability, both by circumstances and nature, to struggle over prices — very lavish in payment. Still, I made on the whole a large income — and spent it, taking no thought of the morrow. Yes, taking a great deal of thought of the morrow in the way of constant work and constant undertaking of whatever kind of work came to my hand. But, indeed, I do not defend myself. It would have been better if I could have added the grace of thrift, which is said to be the inheritance of the Scot, to the faculty of work. I feel that I leave a very bad lesson behind me; but I am afraid that the immense relief of getting over a crisis gave a kind of reflected enjoyment to the trouble between, and that these alternations of anxiety and deliverance were more congenial than the steady monotony of self-denial, not to say that the still better kind of self-denial which should have made a truer artist than myself pursue the higher objects of art, instead of the mere necessities of living, was wanting too. I pay the penalty in that I shall not leave anything behind me that will live. What does it matter? Nothing at all now — never anything to speak of. At my most ambitious of times I would rather my children had remembered me as their mother than in any other way, and my friends as their friend. I never cared for anything else. And now that there are no children to whom to leave any memory, and the friends drop day by day, what is the reputation of a circulating library to me? Nothing, and less than nothing — a thing the thought of which now makes me angry, that any one should for a moment imagine I cared for that, or that it made up for any loss. I am perhaps angry, less reasonably, when well-intentioned people tell me I have done good, or pious ones console me for being left behind by thoughts of the good I must yet be intended to do. God help us all! what is the good done by any such work as mine, or even better than mine? “If any man build upon this foundation...wood, hay, stubble;... if the work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” An infinitude of pains and labour, and all to disappear like the stubble and the hay. Yet who knows? The little faculty may grow a bigger one in the more genial land to come, where one will have no need to think of the boiling of the daily pot. In the meantime it was good to have kept the pot boiling and maintained the cheerful household fire so long, though it is smouldering out in darkness now.

There is one thing, however, I have always whimsically resented, and that is the contemptuous compliments that for many years were the right thing to address to me and to say of me, as to my “industry.” Now that I am old the world is a little more respectful, and I have not heard so much about my industry for some time. The delightful superiority of it in the mouth of people who had neither industry nor anything else to boast of used to make me very wroth, I avow, — wroth with a laugh and rueful half sense of the justice of it in the abstract, though not from those who spoke. The same kind of feeling made me angry the other day even, comically, not seriously angry, at a bit of a young person who complimented me on my ‘Beleaguered City.’ Now, I am quite willing that people like Mr. Hutton should speak of the ‘Beleaguered City’ as of the one little thing among my productions that is worth remembering (no, Mr. Hutton does nothing of the kind — he is not that kind of person), but I felt inclined to say to the other, “‘The ‘ Beleaguered City,’ indeed, my young woman! I should think something a good deal less than that might be good enough for you.” By which it may perhaps be suspected that I don’t always think such small beer of myself as I say, but this is a pure matter of comparison.

I need scarcely say that there was not much of what one might call a literary life in all this. I was very seldom in town, Windsor being near enough to permit of almost all that one wanted to do in town, except society, being done in a day, between two trains so to speak, which was the most convenient thing in the world, and the most impossible for any sort of social intercourse. Even a dinner-party, which could only be done at the cost of a visit, thus became much more out of the question than if I had lived at a greater distance, and thus been compelled to pass a week or two occasionally in London. Now and then I went to a luncheon-party or an afternoon gathering, both of which things I detested. Curiously enough, being fond on the whole of my fellow-creatures, I always disliked paying visits, and felt myself a fish out of water when I was not in my own house, — not to say that I was constantly wanted at home, and proud to feel that I was so. The work answered very well for a pretence to get me off engagements, but I could always have managed the work if I had liked the pleasure, or supposed pleasure. I need not speak, however, as if I had been a person in much request, which would be giving an entirely false view of myself. I never was so in the least. From the days when my Jewish friend complained that I did not do myself justice, with the aggrieved tone of a woman to whom I had thus done a great injustice by not doing anything to make myself agreeable or remarkable, being asked to her house for that purpose, I have always been a disappointment to my friends. I have no gift of talk, not much to say; and though I have always been an excellent listener, that only succeeds under auspicious circumstances.

I think I never met so many people as in the days of Mrs. Duncan Stewart, that dear and bright old lady who used to fill her little rooms in Sloane Street with the most curious jumble of entertaining people and people who came to be entertained, the smartest (odious word!) of society, and all the luminaries of the moment, many writers, artists, &c., and a few mountebanks to make up. She herself was very worthy of a place in any picture-gallery. There is a very droll sketch of her by Mr. Augustus Hare, which does no justice to the subject. She was an English and nineteenth-century shadow of the French ladies who take up so much space in the records of the eighteenth, and who were, indeed, I suppose, of no more personal consequence than she, were it not for the mention they have secured in so many records of a memoir-writing time, and the numbers of great people who circled round them. Mrs. Stewart had known almost everybody in her day, which of itself is a wonderful attraction. She had at one time seen much of Disraeli — almost at one time run the risk of having her head turned by him. The loves (but this never came to be a love — on her side at least; “For, my dear,” she used to say, “I had the great preservation of being in love with my husband”) of a lady of eighty are always amusing and pathetic. Age takes all the doubtfulness out of them, and gives them a piquancy as of the loves of children. She had ancient suitors, worshippers of her old age, always about her. I believe she refused a proposal of marriage after she was seventy. She was at the time I knew her of the most picturesque appearance, with a delicate small face of the colour of ivory, fine features, except that always troublesome mouth, which is imperfect in almost every face that is good for anything, and those dim blue eyes which have a charm of their own — half veiled and mystic. She was one of those people who do not grow grey, and she wore a peculiar head-dress — a kerchief of fine muslin and lace falling upon her shoulders, and softly veiling her small erect head. In the middle of the flutter of general company about her, she had always (as indeed every one has) a constant circle of intimates always the same, and sometimes not quite worthy of the idol they surrounded. It seems a law of nature that this should be so, and that every remarkable person should have a little ring of commonplace satellites, who are apt to make the object of their adoration a little absurd, out of pure love and desire to do her or him honour, with perhaps the leaven of a little hope to do themselves honour too, by being known as her or his friends. This delightful old lady was very fond of seeing and knowing everything. She went to every entertainment, grave or gay, and was all agog to go to the Greek play at Eton, where it came to entrance us from Oxford, with a chorus pour rire of a dozen dreadfully recognisable young Dons and scholars affubles in inconvenient robes and beards; as well as to see Sarah Bernhardt, or any and every novelty that turned up. “La pièce m’interesse,” she said, looking out upon her parties with her dim eyes that saw everything, and never so pleased as when the crowd fluttered about her, and a little special court gathered round her sofa. Some vile young journalist, I remember, made a cruel sketch of her, which was published in a cruel and wicked series then giving great piquancy to the ‘Saturday Review’ (I think it was in the Girl of the Period and Mature Siren time, which are all so forgotten nowadays), for which I hope he has had his deserts somewhere. Of course, nothing could be easier than to travesty this sweet and bright old lady into a spectre of society, clinging on to the last to social dissipations, and incapable of being alone — and nothing more absolutely untrue. Her grandchild said of her after she was dead, in the hush of that pause in which the longing to know what they are doing, what they are thinking who have left us, is overwhelming, “Oh, she will have no time to think of us, she will be so much interested in seeing everything.” Even in the shock of loss it was impossible not to be consoled by the thought of that vivid curiosity and interest and enjoyment with which she would find a new sphere before her, with everything to be found out.

Whom did I meet at Mrs. Stewart’s? I forget; nobody, I suppose, of any great consequence. She had little boxes of rooms over a tailor’s shop in Sloane Street, and there gave the most elaborate luncheons, all sorts of delicacies, to which a number of very fine people would crowd in, sitting at all the uneasy angles of a table with adjuncts to it, which completely filled the room. Her income, I believe, was as small as her rooms; and her pleasant way was to tell her daughter or some intimate friend she had so many people coming to lunch, and then to prepare her pretty head-dress and her careful little mise en scène to receive them, with no further thought of more substantial preparations. But the table groaned all the same, and there was every costly and delicate viand on it that was to be had, and heaps of flowers, thanks always to her daughter or her loving admirers. There used to be Lady Martin often, in a large Rubens hat and long sweeping feather, though long past the age of such vanities, seventy or thereabouts, with all the old world graces, and the consciousness of having been more admired than any woman of her day, which gives an ineffable air to an old beauty. Her husband, the excellent Sir Theodore, was so evidently and so constantly the first of all her admirers, leading the band, that the group was always interesting and touching in its bygoneness yet perfect sincerity and good faith. She wrote her book after this about the Shakespeare parts she had played, — that strange, elegant, antiquated expression of the graceful feminine enthusiast accustomed to applause which, at least in the case of a good woman, at her age is so touching as to make one ashamed of the smile which fades away almost into sentiment while we look on and are ashamed of ourselves. There was the twinkle of Bon Gaultier in Sir Theodore’s eye on other matters, but never where his wife was concerned. And a very frequent visitor was the kind, the gentle, the sympathetic Censor of Plays, dead only this year, Mr. Pigott, a man to whom everybody’s heart went out, I don’t know exactly why or how, except from an intuition of friendship, a sort of instinct. He was always interested, always kind, — a sort of atmosphere of humanity and warm feeling and sympathy about him, his little round form and round head radiating warmth and kindliness. He is the only man I have ever met, I think, from whom I never heard an unkind word of any one. This, to tell the sad truth, is apt to make conversation a little insipid; but he had the most extensive acquaintance both with people and things, and had many a happy turn of expression and mot of social wisdom which preserved him from that worst of faults: he was never dull, though always kind, which is almost a paradox. I have my own way of dividing people, as I suppose most of us have. There are those whom I can talk to, and those whom I can’t. With the first no subject is needed, the conversation goes on of itself; with the other all the finest subjects in the world produce no result. (I remember as I write one story of Mr. Pigott which slightly, but very slightly, contradicts this statement that he never said an unkind word. We were talking once of the son-in-law of a friend of ours, who had most gratuitously and unnecessarily appeared against her in a trial in which she was unhappily involved, to prove (as if any one could prove such a thing) that certain anonymous letters were written by her. We were discussing his conduct with indignation, when Mr. Pigott looked up with a smile,— “Look in his face and you’ll forgive him all,” he said. It was true that the man was a fool, and bore it on his face.)

It was with Mrs. Stewart that I first saw Tennyson. She had, I suppose, asked leave to take me there with her to luncheon, and I was of course glad to go, though a little unwilling, as my manner was. I forget where it was — an ordinary London house, where they were living for the season. Mrs. Tennyson lay upon her sofa, as she did always — though able to be taken to the luncheon-table by her excellent son Hallam, whom I knew a little, and who was always kind and pleasant. I have always thought that Tennyson’s appearance was too emphatically that of a poet, especially in his photographs: the fine frenzy, the careless picturesqueness, were almost too much. He looked the part too well; but in reality there was a roughness and acrid gloom about the man which saved him from his over romantic appearance. He paid no attention to me, as was very natural. The conversation turned somehow upon his little play of “The Falcon” — now more forgotten, I think, than any of his others, though it seemed to me much the most effective of them. I said something about its beauty, and that I thought it just the kind of entertainment which a gracious prince might offer to his guests; and he replied, with a sort of indignant sense of grievance, “And they tell me people won’t go to see it.” I am afraid, however, that I did not attract the poet in any way, to Mrs. Stewart’s great disappointment and annoyance. She was eager to point out to me that he was much occupied by a very old lady — a fair, little, white-haired woman, nearly eighty, the mother of Mr. Tom Hughes (Tom Brown), who was just then going out to America to the settlement in the backwoods which was called Rugby, in Tennessee, where the young Hughes were, and which was going to be the most perfect colony on the face of the earth, filled with nothing but the cardinal virtues. I think the old lady died there, and I know the settlement went sadly to pieces and ruined many hopes. However, feeling I had not been entirely a success, — a feeling very habitual to me, — I was glad of Mrs. Stewart’s sign of departure, and went up to Mrs. Tennyson on the sofa, to which she had returned, to take my leave. I am never good at parting politenesses, and I daresay was very gauche in saying that it was so kind of her to ask me; while she graciously responded that she was delighted to have seen me, &c., according to the established ritual in such cases. Tennyson was standing by, lowering over us with his ragged beard and his saturnine look. He eyed us, while these pretty speeches were being made, with cynical eyes. “What liars you women are!” he said. There could not have been anything more true; but, to be sure, it was not so civil as it was true. I never saw him again till that recent occasion when my Cecco and I went to Farringford when he was Lord Tennyson, and very old and infirm, and his wife was a shrunken old, old lady, laid upon a sofa from which she never moved, the flood of life flowing past her but never touching her, — a pathetic sight. It was after Lionel’s death, and after my Cyril’s death, and I sat by her and cried; but she seemed in her old age as if she could weep no more. That time Lord Tennyson was delightful — kind and friendly and full of stories, talking a great deal, and in the best of humours. He read the “Funeral Ode” to us afterwards, and one or two shorter poems (“Blow, bugles, blow”); and I was so glad and thankful that Cecco should see him so, and have such a bright recollection of him to carry through his life. Alas! alas! It had always been a regret that he had never seen Carlyle — so little as it matters now!

It is rather a fictitious sort of thing recalling those semi-professional recollections. It is by way of a kind of apology for knowing so few notable people. I met Mr. Fawcett once, the blind politician, a huge mild man, cheerful in talk and amiable in countenance, whom somebody (not me, I am afraid) overheard saying to his wife when she came back to him from another room, to take — the small smiling woman she was — his colossal person in charge, “Oh, Milly, your step is like music.” He spoke to me very kindly, magnifying my work, though I don’t remember how, except the pleasant impression. At the same party was Sir Charles Dilke, who, on being introduced to me, began at once to speak of his books and of his publishers, as if he and not I were the literary person. The same thing happened with a great lady I afterwards met in the same house, — a Roman Catholic lady, and a very great personage. There had been several invitations given to her at one time and another by the mistress of the house, but they all failed somehow, and at last the one she could accept fell on a Friday. The great lady took the trouble to write the day before to remind my friend that it was Friday, and consequently to her a fast day. This put C. R. on her mettle, as any one who knows her will understand, and we were served with the most exquisite and luxurious meal, I don’t know how many maigre dishes — fish, eggs, and vegetables, all beautifully cooked and seductive to the last degree, about as little like fasting as the imagination could conceive. I like fish and vegetables better than any other kind of food, and, beguiled by the variety, followed Lady’s example and kept up with her as long as I could. But it was a vain attempt, and I had to sit and look on for some time while she travelled valiantly through every dish. She, too, chose as the theme of her conversation her own books, their success or rather their relative successes, and the troubles she had with her publishers, and all the rest, while I sat with rueful amusement listening, feeling my little role taken from me. The worst was, I had never heard she had written anything, and was in mortal terror of betraying my ignorance! What with her literature, and her beautiful appetite, and our beautiful meal, the occasion was delightful. There were some actor-gentlemen of the party, — I know not if the great lady had a liking for actors, but there they were, furtively regaled with beef after the lighter quips and fancies of the feast, and rather ignored in consequence by us finer people who had fasted on about twenty of the daintiest dishes in the world.

The year 1875 was an era in my life — a great many things happened in that year. Frank, my good Frank, my nephew, who had grown the most trustworthy and satisfactory boy in the world, loving home, fond of amusement and diversion, but only in the right ways, — such a one as is a stand-by and tower of strength in a family, — completed his work at Cooper’s Hill very well, taking a high place, and so having the right to choose what part of India he would go to. Things had so developed in the family that this event seemed an occasion for various other changes, especially as at the same time Cyril was to go to Oxford. My brother had been getting feeble and less easy to take care of, and I was anxious that he should live in a doctor’s house and be watched and cared for, as his state seemed to demand; and he was himself desirous of making a change, although his plan for himself was quite different, and he preferred the freedom of going off by himself somewhere as my father had done, and living in his own way, for which he was evidently not strong enough, though he did not perceive it himself. We settled, however, that when the elder boys, as we called them, went away, Frank to India and Cyril to Balliol, this further move should be decided on; and that the little girls, whose education ought to be seriously thought of, should go to Germany at the same time. I think the pressure of my poor brother’s illness, though he was not ill then but only ailing, and of his different way of looking at things and perhaps unconscious criticism and often disapproval of my ways, had become a little too much for me, and he wanted to be free himself, and when his children were gone would no longer have had anything to bind him to my house. But all this was made unnecessary, these plans and arrangements, as often happens in such a breaking up. Death is often opportune, as Mr. Pigott said. I was trying to make Frank’s last summer at home pleasant, and wanted him within the limitations of our small ways to see and do everything possible. There is an incident in one of my own books, in ‘Kirsteen,’ which is a sort of illustration of my feeling about him. It was not my own invention, but told me as the family custom in the large, poor, proud family which formed the model of the family in that book, — the bottle of champagne solemnly produced and drunk by the whole party on the night before the boy went away. I wanted Frank to have his bottle of champagne. I had settled to take them all to Switzerland for one thing, and I took them up to an opera for another, and to stay a night or two in London, and to see everything they could see in the small amount of time. There was a match going on at Lord’s, I think, which filled the morning, and then we were to dine at Miss Blackwood’s, and stay in the same house in Half Moon Street where she was. All was very lively and pleasant for the boys, who went up in the morning all so bright and gay, with their little bows of blue ribbon, and button-holes with a bit of forget-me-not, to serve the same purpose. How often have I come out with them to the door, seeing them off, so spruce, in the bright morning (surely the days were always bright when they went up for that Eton and Harrow match), so full of pleasure. I found one of these little blue bows in my Cyril’s room after — God bless him! — and it lies with other treasures. I can see them now setting out, the little hall full of the little bustle, and I half scolding, telling them they were sure to be late, and so proud — the three of them — all well, not a cloud, the most hopeful youths, Frank tall and strong, my Cyril with his beautiful face, my Cecco only a boy and little, straining to keep up with them, all dressed in their best, with that keen regard to the fashion which I laughed at and loved, — but what did I not love in them? They were my all in this world. I was always anxious; but there was not a cloud upon the skies, and what had I to fear?

Next morning we were called back by a telegram. My brother had been taken ill, and the little scheme of pleasure was broken up. I found him very ill, scarcely conscious, when I got home, and in that state he remained, with a few lightenings, till he died. It lasted only a few days. He was not quite sixty, but worn out, and his life withered away to the barest skeleton of living. Often, often have I been vexed with thoughts that I might have been more tender to him. I did all I could for him, grudging nothing, but we had veered far away from each other, and I do not know that I was always kind. But it was not in unkindness, but with a full heart, that I thanked God for his release then. He was taken away from the partings which would have been hard to bear, from the evil to come: he had not to give up his son or to part with his little girls; and I was glad for him. He was delivered just in time, and slept and dreamed away, without any trouble in going so far as any one knew. He had not taken very much part in our life; the children, who were much with him, were too young to mourn except for the moment.

There was one thing that it was a balm to me to think of. At first it was supposed that he might rally and go on for some time, for two years perhaps, the doctor said. I took my own boys into council, and they both said warmly, with all their hearts, that there must be no thought now of any change, — that we could let him go into no stranger’s hands now that he was ill. It cost my Cecco something to make such resolutions as that, I knew after, but only long after. To Cyril it cost nothing, but they both agreed cordially, both the boys, as to a thing that could not be gainsaid. But they were not put to the proof — and he was saved seeing them all go away.

Cyril left Eton at the end of that half, a little while after. When he went down to see if the lists were out before we left home, the man at Drakes told him, smiling, that he could not tell him the names, but he could tell him this, that in the first three, two were Oppidans. This was very rare, and there was little doubt that he was one of them. He and Frank came rushing up with this exciting news to tell me. I have had great trouble, but also I have had many joys. I forget who the Colleger was who was first, — I think it was Ryle, or perhaps Harmer, now Bishop; then Farrar, Oliphant. These two went to Balliol, both with scholarships from Eton, Farrar also with a Balliol scholarship, which Cyril ought to have got too, but did not. Both of them now are, I hope and believe, fulfilling their lives in a better place than this, Farrar very young. He was more regular, more dutiful; he had not the wayward touch in him, the careless heart. He did far better after. At that time there was no better possible, — it was all triumph and anticipation of every good. Eton is very dear, very bright to me in all its recollections. No brighter being than my Cyril came from it, a boy unharmed in every way, handsome, winning, clever, gay, the most light-hearted, the most generous in feeling, full of understanding and of tenderness, nothing about him commonplace or dull, looking as if he would not subdue but win the whole world. I used to think that if one could desire to have another personality than one’s own, his would have been the thing to dream of at that bright moment. And I used to apply to him the description of the young squire in Chaucer, —

“Singing he was, or flyting, all the day,

He was as fresh as is the month of May.”

There was no prouder woman in the world than I was with the three. Frank was twenty-two, Cyril nineteen, Cecco sixteen — he doing so well too, with his strange little ways and shyness and close clinging always to his mother, it is just twenty years ago. I think often if all had gone well, as might then have been so confidently expected, — had Frank been a prosperous man in India, perhaps sending home his children to be educated, and Cyril been a rising lawyer as was hoped, and Cecco, if delicate, still able with care to keep on, — it would all have been so natural, not anything wonderful, just the commonplace of life for which other fathers and mothers would scarcely pause to give special thanks, it being all so usual, exactly what might have been expected. And ah, the difference to me! But, thank God! we did not know what was coming in these days.

We went to Interlaken, Cecco and I and our dear “little Nelly.” The older boys took the little girls to their German school at Arolsen, and joined us after, coming round by the Lake of Constance. We found Annie Thackeray, attended by Miss Huth, a gentle little soul, very much like my little Nelly, and making great friends with her at Interlaken; and here it was that Annie and I became fast friends. There never was any one more fascinating or a more delightful companion, so pleased to please, so ready to see the best of you — a little, perhaps, too ready to perceive a best that might not be in you, yet with a keen observation underneath that was — though if the report was unfavourable would scarcely permit itself to be — critical. She was always more effusive than myself, delightfully flattering, appreciating. I used to say that if you wanted the moon very much, she would eagerly, and for a moment quite seriously, think how she could help to get it for you, scorning the bounds of the possible. We went to Grindelwald together and were in the same hotel — the old Bear in its homely days — for about a fortnight, and grew intimate. She was joined there by the Leslie Stephens, meaning her sister Minnie and Minnie’s husband. It was Mrs. Stephen’s last summer in this world, but we did not know that either. She was not strong, but there were reasons for that, and no sort of alarm about her. Little Minnie, her one little girl, was the baby of the party — a little, fragile, quaint thing, whom I remember standing by the great St Bernard, Sultan, with her hands in his deep fur, a curious little picture. She was full of quaint sayings and wondering looks, looking on at the boys and asking solemnly, “What are they thinking about?” with the gravest observation, and defending her little basket of cakes from Cyril’s pretended attacks with a serious discrimination of him as the greedy boy, which became one of our little jokes. It takes but a small matter to make a joke when all is well and one’s heart inclined that way. I made acquaintance with Mr. Leslie Stephen at that time, — a man with whom I had had a slight passage of arms by letters about some literary work, he being the editor of the ‘Cornhill,’ a prosperous magazine in those days. I fell into a chance talking with him one evening in front of the Bear, when the sky was growing dim over the Wetterhorn, and the shadows of the mountains drawing down as they do when night is coming on. I recollect we walked up and down and talked, I have not the smallest remembrance what about. But the end of it was that when I went in we had become friends, or so it was at least on my side.

Leslie Stephen was kind to the boys, taking them for walks with him up among the mountains; and, egged on by the ladies, he was so far kind to me that he took two of my stories for the ‘Cornhill,’ which meant in each case the bulk of a year’s income.

This expedition was altogether very successful and delightful, the last time the three boys were to spend together, for many years, we thought, — for ever in this world, as it turned out. One thing happened in it on which I look back with a mixture of feeling and amusement. It was the coming to life of the two who were then called the little girls. They had been very unresponsive children, not “forthcoming” as Mrs. Freshfield says; little shy mice, half-shy, half-defiant, as I think children often are whose childhood has been broken up by transplantation to another house. They had not had perhaps so much as they should have had of the petting of the nursery. The household when they came into it was preoccupied by the boys, who were so much older; and though everybody was kind, they missed, no doubt unconsciously, poor little souls, the something more than kindness, the indulgence, the mother. At all events they were very chilly, scared, distrustful little things. They left home with no apparent feeling at all, and much comment among us (most of the bystanders were always rather against these two little impedimenta) at the absence of feeling. Of course they were excited by the prospect of the journey in the care of the two big brothers, and all the novelty. But when they were left in Germany among strange-speaking people, among new ways, in such a strange place, the two little hearts gushed out all at once. They wrote to me the most pathetic, imploring letters. “Oh, come and take us home; oh come, come and take us home. We will be as good as angels,” said Madge, “if you will only come and take us home.” It was rather hard work refusing. We were in Interlaken, I think, when these letters came, and we made up a basket of all the toys and pictures and cakes that would carry, to console them. And they soon got over their first home-sickness. And they never relapsed into those chills and mists of their childhood, but have always been since my true children, the unquestioned daughters of the house, and with no further cloud upon the completeness of their adoption — they of me, as well as I of them. The first is often the more difficult of the two.

With that year began a new life, one of which I cannot speak much. That was the burden and heat of the day: my anxieties were sometimes almost more than I could bear. I had gone through many trials, as I thought, and God knows many of them had been hard enough, but then I knew to the depths of my heart what the yoke was and how heavy. Many times I have woke in the morning feeling in myself that image of Shelley’s “Prometheus,” which in my youth I had vexed my husband by not appreciating, except in what seemed to me the picture rather than the poem, the man chained to the rock, with the vultures swooping down upon him. Their cruel beaks I seemed to feel in my heart the moment I awoke. Ah me, alas! pain ever, for ever, God alone knows what was the anguish of these years. And yet now I think of ces beaux jours quand j’etais si malheureuse, the moments of relief were so great and so sweet that they seemed compensation for the pain, — I remembered no more the anguish. Lately in my many sad musings it has been brought very clearly before my mind how often all the horrible tension, the dread, the anxiety which there are no words strong enough to describe, — which devoured me, but which I had to conceal often behind a smiling face, — would yield in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of a voice, at the first look, into an ineffable ease and the overwhelming happiness of relief from pain, which is, I think, our highest human sensation, higher and more exquisite than any positive enjoyment in this world. It used to sweep over me like a wave, sometimes when I opened a door, sometimes in a letter, — in all simple ways. I cannot explain, but if this should ever come to the eye of any woman in the passion and agony of motherhood, she will more or less understand. I was thinking lately, or rather, as sometimes happens, there was suddenly presented to my mind, like a suggestion from some one else, the recollection of these ineffable happinesses, and it seemed to me that it meant that which would be when one pushed through that last door and was met — oh, by what, by whom? — by instant relief. The wave of sudden ease and warmth and peace and joy, I felt, to tell the truth, that it was one of them who brought that to my mind, and I said to myself, “I will not want any explanation, I will not ask any question, — the first touch, the first look, will be enough, as of old, yet better than of old.”

I do injustice to those whom I love above all things by speaking thus, and yet what can I say? My dearest, bright, delightful boy missed somehow his fooling, how can I tell how? I often think that I had to do with it, as well as what people call inherited tendencies, and, alas! the perversity of youth, which he never outgrew. He had done everything too easily in the beginning of his boyish career, by natural impulse and that kind of genius which is so often deceptive in youth, and when he came to that stage in which hard work was necessary against the competition of the hard working, he could not believe how much more effort was necessary. Notwithstanding all distractions he took a second-class at Oxford, — a great disappointment, yet not disgraceful after all. And I will not say that, except at the first keen moment of pain, I was in any way bitterly disappointed. Tout peut se reparer. I always felt so to the end, and perhaps he thought I took it lightly, and that it did not so much matter. Then it was one of my foolish ways to take my own work very lightly, and not to let them know how hard pressed I was sometimes, so that he never, I am sure, was convinced how serious it was in that way, and certainly never was convinced that he could not, when the moment came, right himself and recover lost way. But only the moment, God bless him! did not come till God took it in His own hands. Another theory I have thought of with many tears lately. I had another foolish way of laughing at the superior people, the people who took themselves too seriously, — the boys of pretension, and all the strong intellectualisms. This gave him, perhaps, or helped him to form, a prejudice against the good and reading men, who have so many affectations, poor boys, and led him towards those so often inferior, all inferior to himself, who had the naturalness along with the folly of youth. Why should I try to explain? He went out of the world, leaving a love-song or two behind him and the little volume of “De Musset,” of which much was so well done, and yet some so badly done, and nothing more to show for his life. And I to watch it all going on day by day and year by year!

My Cecco took the first steps in the same way; but, thanks be to God, righted himself and overcame — not in time enough to save his career at Oxford, but so as to be all that I had hoped, — always my very own, my dearest companion, choosing me before all others. What a companion he was, everybody who knew us knows: full of knowledge, full of humour — a most accomplished man, though to me always a boy. He did not make friends easily, and he had few; but those whom he had were very fond of him, and all our immediate surroundings looked up to him with an affectionate admiration which I cannot describe. “I don’t know, but I will ask Cecco,” was what we all said. He had not much more than emerged from the desert of temptation and trial, bringing balm and healing to me, when he fell ill. When his illness first was declared, it seemed to me that my misery was more than I could bear. I remember that we all went to the Holy Communion together the Sunday before we left for Pau, and that as I went up to kneel at the altar I was so nearly overcome, that Cyril put his hand on my arm and gripped it almost roughly to recall me to myself. And then the whole world seemed to come back again into the sun after a time; he got so much better, and the warm summer of the Queen’s Jubilee year seemed to complete what Pau had begun. And he passed his examination for the British Museum, coming out first, and his life seemed now to be ordered in a safe place — in the work he loved. Alas! Then Sir Andrew Clark would not pass him, but other doctors gave the best of hopes. And he did a great deal of good work, and finally went to the Royal Library here; and we had many blinks of happiness, both in the winter on the Riviera and at home. I cannot tell what he was to me — consulting me about everything, desiring to have me with him, to walk with me and talk to me, only put out of humour when I was drawn away or occupied by other things. When he was absent he wrote to me every day, I never went out but he was there to give me his arm, I seem to feel it now — the dear, thin, but firm arm. In the last four years after Cyril was taken from us, we were nearer and nearer. I can hear myself saying “Cecco and I.” It was the constant phrase. But all through he was getting weaker; and I knew it, and tried not to know.

And now here I am all alone.

I cannot write any more.