TO MRS. HARRY Coghill.
Windsor,
12th February.
I meant to have written to you at once on getting your letter, or indeed sooner, on getting your flowers, to thank you for them; but everything has been put out of my head by Cecco’s illness, which makes me incapable of any other thought. He has had a cough for some time which was said to come from the throat; and though it gave me some uneasiness from time to time, yet, as I was assured the lungs were quite well, and that it was only irritation of the throat, I suffered myself to be quieted. Since Christmas, however, he has been getting very thin, and about a fortnight ago he was persuaded, or almost forced, to put himself under active treatment by a Dr. M., whom he happened to have taken a fancy to — a young man supposed to be very clever — who came and told me on Tuesday last quite calmly that it was laryngitis with a tendency to tubercle, and all that follows. I know you will feel for me. You will imagine that every moment since has been spent in watching him, in thinking of him, alternation from hope to despair. He is going to town to see Dr. Maclagan on Monday, and if he is ordered to go away to the Riviera or anywhere else, I of course will go with him and at once. How I am to give up my work and do this I don’t know, but I must and will, unless Providence absolutely forbids. My mind jumps at everything that is worst and most dreadful, as you will readily understand.
I don’t know how things will shape themselves in face of this sudden and unthought-of misery. If we have to go, I will try to let my house in April when the Guards come. But nothing is clear, — the means even of so far slackening work as to make my entire attention to him practicable is as dark as the rest; but it will be made possible somehow by God’s grace, I hope. This is too miserable a letter to send to an invalid. I am very sorry you are ill, and hope that it may not be long before you mend. You will not mind my selfishness in writing all this to you. The comfort is that you will understand.
Windsor,
19th February.
I have arranged all my little affairs, and we start on Tuesday. We think of going to Pau, where there is a golf club, which I think will be a good thing for Cecco. He is a little better, I think, eating better, and his cough variable, sometimes not troublesome at all. God grant that the move may do him good. You know how anxiety of this kind acts upon me. I am in a suppressed fever, and can think of nothing else day and night. I watch every morsel he eats, every varying look and change of colour. How strange it is! All my troubles, and God knows they have been neither few nor small, have been repetitions — always one phase or another coming back, and that makes it all the worse, for I know how far my anguish can go.
I will write to you when I have anything good to tell you. The girls, I am afraid, will be dreadfully dreary left at home. Should you be in town on your way to Italy, I hope you will come and see them....
The following are addressed to Mrs. Oliphant’s adopted daughters: —
Hôtel de Francs, Pau,
March 1.
My dearest Children, — It is your turn to have the bulletin, and I am writing in the morning before breakfast, Cecco having not yet appeared. We had a tolerable day yesterday. We were out in the morning, and in the afternoon he went down alone to the golf-ground, a long walk, and found Mr. M. at once, and was put down for the Club....I thought yesterday that through the whole course of the day he looked a little better; probably I shall be down into the depths again to-day. I don’t think there is any torture in the world like anxiety: it rends my heart to pieces — I feel it sore in my breast....
It was very east-windy here yesterday, and cold round the comers, though the sun is quite hot, and always blazing: now and then the mountains disappear altogether, and then there is nothing in front of us but a line of low hills, which will be green a month hence, but at present are, I should think, less advanced than the trees in the Crescent. This has a very curious effect in the blazing sunshine, which feels like summer, while the vegetation is still all dormant like winter. The “links” on Sunday looked like St. Andrews Links (I mean the actual ground, the turf) on a hot summer day, but still there is not a bud on the trees. We noticed the same thing at Nervi, but there were more evergreens there.
Pau,
23rd March.
...We went up-stairs to Mdlle. de Castelbajar’s last night. There were about half-a-dozen ladies — Madame la Marquise That and Madame la Comtesse This — and one gentleman. The room very much crowded with furniture, nicknacks, and pictures, and two card-tables where everybody except me played whist; one of the games was honest bumble-puppy like our own, and great fun; the other serious play, Mdlle.’s own partie, to which Cecco had the honour to be promoted. I know that he is considered très-bien élevé, and that I too am approved of, but less warmly-this through the maids. Cecco lost 6 francs, but was amused and will go again, for which I am too thankful. If Heaven would only send a young man! not too good at golf.
After Mrs. Tulloch’s death: —
Pau,
30th March.
I have just been writing to Cyril about this terrible blow, but in the idea that he may possibly have gone to St. Andrews before he receives it, I write to you too, and send you Mr. Baynes’s letter, which is very hard to read, but which contains a great deal you will like to see. It was very kind of him to write so fully....
I have been trying to say to Cyril that I am glad, — and so, in a sense, I am. It seems the right thing and the best thing, but I don’t think I shall ever want to go to St. Andrews again. To think one will never see her sweet worn face again is what I cannot realise. It makes it more like a dream that I should be so far away. I got a letter from her dated the 11th March, after which she had written to some people to ask them to call on me here, for Cecco’s sake. She wrote so tenderly and anxiously about Cecco....
I think I told you, however, that when she bade me good-bye last in St. Andrews I was very much struck with the emotion she showed. She had never before showed so much feeling in parting with me, and that was why I said I would go and pay her a visit in February, which was stopped by Cecco’s illness. She had no heart to live any longer — and why should she? — her work was done. God bless her wherever she is now — if we could only know a little where it is. The two will be together, wherever it may be. Of course you will see about a wreath. I did the best I could here. I made a little cross as big as the biggest flower-box I could get, and covered it with the pale Parma violets, which are so sweet, and I sent a box of anemones besides....
Pau,
30th April.
...We are now just beginning to get into the discomfort of a move again, after being so long settled here, and by this time next week I suppose Lina will be on her way home, our avant coureur. I hope Cecco will stand the travelling, and I hope that I myself may stand it. I daresay I shall be dreadfully tired of it before it is over. However, there will be no fatigue for the next week, as the journey to Biarritz is nothing to speak of. It will cost — that is, the three weeks will cost — a horrible deal of money, at which I shiver, but some of it at least will pay, or so I hope at least. I am working very hard at an article for the June ‘Blackwood’ to get it off my mind before I go away....
Mdlle. de Castelbajar has asked us to dine there on Monday, as it is our last night. She is very anxious we should come back next year, and thinks it will be very ungrateful to Pau, which has done so much for Cecco, if we don’t. I gave her Denny’s love, and she was quite pleased. Nobody could be more kind, and I feel quite sorry to say good-bye to her. I am to have her photograph. Oh dear! one of my lamps has just gone out, and the smell will be insupportable presently. So I must stop and fly to bed. God bless you, my dearest children. How glad I shall be to get home.
To Mrs. Harry Coghill.
Windsor,
26th May.
Here we are back again with, thank God, the completest reason to be satisfied with the hurried and anxious step I took with trembling three months ago. Cecco is to all appearance quite well; his cough has almost disappeared, and his general health is quite satisfactory. He has gained in weight, is in perfectly good spirits, and altogether is quite a different creature, thank God. The doctor at Pau said that he ought to spend next winter again abroad, but it is a long time before that question need be discussed, and in the meantime I am full of thankfulness. We got home on Monday night. Our Spanish trip was too hurried, yet we saw Burgos, Toledo, and Saragossa, all most interesting places, fairly well, besides Madrid and Barcelona, which are great flourishing modern towns, more or less like other places; and the sight of the country itself, even in the mere course of the journeys, was very curious and interesting. However, I need not say the best thing we saw was home, looking very bright and full of flowers, for a great part of which I have to thank you: they gave us the most fragrant welcome. Cyril and the girls were, I am sure, most unfeignedly glad to see us. It must have been a very dark time, especially for Madge and Denny; but they have been very busy, which is the best way of making the time pass....Now, I want you to come to me for the great week here, the Jubilee. It begins, I believe, on Tuesday the 21st, and lasts the rest of the week. I don’t know whether you will be able to get admission to Westminster, or if you will want to see the procession in town; but at all events I hope you will come in time for the Queen’s entrance into Windsor, which I should think would be a pretty sight, and stay as long as you can spare the time, till the end of the week at least. There are to be all kinds of fetes, I believe.
In the cheerful and hopeful mood induced by the success of the Spanish journey, Mrs. Oliphant was able to enjoy the festivities of the Queen’s Jubilee and the company of the friends who filled her house. Of course she worked hard all the time, but work never seemed to exhaust her. “As long as the children were well,” as she so often said herself, all was well. But Cecco, though he had greatly mended for the moment, was weak, and her fears were only lulled, not ended.
F. R. Oliphant to Mr. Blackwood.
Windsor,
August 1.
...May I ask what you are going to do about the Borgia papers? My reason for asking is that we are just leaving Windsor to spend a month in the Lake district, and I should like to know whether I ought to take the manuscript with me and finish the translation now. I am happy to say that I have as much work as I can manage just now, and in addition to all else, I have just got my nomination for the British Museum, and must rub up a great deal of faded knowledge for the examination, which will be in the beginning of October. I am going to the Lakes to try and get stronger by that time, so the whole family makes a mass movement in that direction on Wednesday,
Mrs. Oliphant to Mrs. Harry Coghill.
Royal Oak Hotel, Rosthwaite, Keswick.
...We have been here about ten days in the very heart of the hills — in a very homely inn, where everything is a little frowsy, as old carpets, old furniture, &c., of the lodging-house kind are apt to get, but the food more or less good. Cecco had rather a roseate recollection of it, I suppose, and I was dreadfully taken aback when we arrived; but most things ameliorate by the great art of putting up with them, and we are not uncomfortable. The boys walk almost all day, though the weather has rather conspired against them, and they have had to postpone their big mountain climbing from day to day. This is our first absolutely and hopelessly wet day, and even now there are glimmers as if it might clear. Cecco, on the whole, is very well. I can’t remember whether I gave you the doctor’s last report of him or not. I suppose I must have done so, that he thinks him to have made great progress during the summer, but that, privately between ourselves, he will not let him live in London “for several years,” though Cecco has not been informed of this definitely, the B. M. business not coming on till October. Nothing could be more entirely mountain air than we have here, and I don’t think I was ever conscious of air so sweet: a sort of mingled balm of cow’s breath and hay is in the whole atmosphere, the former predominant; and it is the most entire and perfect rural scene that could be imagined, hills, and very fine ones, rising up on all sides. The colour is cold, there is very little heather and too much green, but that is the only drawback.
This was the time of the British Museum examination about which Cecco had been very anxious. During the short visit which his mother paid to her cousin, Mrs. Coghill, in Staffordshire, he passed this test brilliantly, earning a large number of marks in excess of what was required. He was naturally delighted with this success, and his mother shared in his pleasure, though she knew better than he did how much difficulty his delicate health might cause in the matter of an appointment.
F. R. Oliphant to Mr. Blackwood.
39 Dover Street, Piccadilly,
October 30.
...My mother has gone to stay for a day or two with the Coghills, where I hope she will have better weather than we have here now. A regular spell of rain seems to have set in. We leave London at the end of the week. London amusements are at present diversified by the pleasant uncertainty whether the next turning one takes will not land one in the middle of a demonstrative mob of young roughs, soi-disant the unemployed. These being usually personally conducted by a considerable force of police, things are not so bad as they were in February last year; but still there are dangers to be dreaded by a man with a new hat, the thing of all others which seems to excite the greatest fury among them, and mine is not yet a month old. I saw their procession going up Bond Street to-day, apparently very quiet and orderly. Many people think that the unemployed are not bad fellows on the whole, as long as you don’t ask them to work, but they are certainly an abominable nuisance.
In spite of Cecco’s success in his examination, he was destined to disappointment, the medical authorities deciding that his state of health was unsatisfactory. Against this decision he appealed, and gained permission to be re-examined. But the appeal turned out to be from Sir A. Clark to Sir A. Clark, and the decision was reaffirmed, to his bitter disappointment.
Mrs. Oliphant to Mrs. Harry Coghill.
Windsor,
December 6.
I was just about to write to you when I got your note. I should have done so before if I had been sure that you were at home to tell you my tale of troubles. As you are so near, I shall run up to-morrow by the 1 o’clock train. It will be a relief to talk it all over with you, for all my hopes have come to nothing. Cecco has been rejected by the C. S. Commissioners on the score of health. Sir Andrew Clark has decided against him, and his work is made all of no avail. It has been a most bitter disappointment, though he has taken it very bravely. Sir A. C. allowed that he was quite able for the work now, but could not certify that he would be so uninterruptedly, as if that could be said for the most robust. I will tell you all about it to-morrow. The Blackwoods are in your hotel, and my visit will be half to them.
Windsor,
30th December.
I have received no parcel, but will send at once to make inquiries. I hope it may still turn up. I have felt so guilty myself in not having written nor sent you the Venice book, which was to be your Christmas present, that I had not felt I had any right to a letter from you. Now I write from bed, where I am staying in the mornings partly for work, partly with the hope of staving off one of my colds, which I fear, however, has got its fangs upon me. I send you with this the ‘Makers of Venice,’ which I hope you will like; the pictures, at all events, are nice. It has been out only a few days. The first opinion I have heard of it is Mr. Gladstone’s, to whom Mr. Macmillan sent it, and who sent back to him at once a letter of four pages saying, first, that he was not going to Venice, as had been reported; and next, that he must contradict himself, and say that he had been in Venice, the book having quite given him that feeling; after which he enters into a question of Venetian political history about Bajamonte, whose very name, I should think, was unknown to most readers, but with whom this amazing old man seems intimately acquainted.