XLVIII The Clouds Return After the Rain — Abroad Again — Healing and Health — Idyllic Winter in Florence
What one of Doctor Terhune’s biographers has alluded to as his “splendid vitality,” had been cruelly taxed by his professional labors in his first charge in Brooklyn. With a strong man’s aversion to the acknowledgment of physical weakness, he had fought, with heroic courage and reserve, the inroads of a disease that was steadily sapping his constitution and vigor. None except his physician and myself dreamed of the gnawing pain that was never quiet during his waking hours, and robbed the nights of rest. The services of Sunday left him as weak as a child, and stretched him upon the rack all of that night. When, the work he had assigned to himself soon after accepting the pastorate of the Bedford Avenue Church having been accomplished, he resigned the position, and quoted his physician’s advice that he should take a few months of rest and change of scene—the information was couched in terms so light that, with the exception of two or three of his chosen and most faithful friends, his parishioners had no suspicion of his real condition. The public press hazarded the wildest and most absurd guesses at the causes that had stirred the nest he had builded wisely and well during the last seven years.
Perhaps the theory that amused us most, and flew most widely from the mark, was “that his wife—known to the public as ‘Marion Harland’—took no interest in church-work—in fact, never attended church at all.” My class of forty-four splendid “boys”—the youngest being twenty-one years of age—begged to be allowed to look up the imaginative reporter and, as the Springfield member of the Church Militant had proposed, “fire him out.” Calmer counter-statements from older heads, and hearts as loyal, met the assertion in print and in private. To me, it weighed less than a grain of dust in the greater solicitude that engrossed my thoughts. For, in a week after the formal resignation of his office, the patient sufferer was under the surgeon’s knife.
They called it “a minor operation,” and enjoined complete rest, for a month or so, that ought to bring recuperation of energies so sadly depleted that those who knew him best were urgent in the entreaty that the mandate should be obeyed. He “rested” in the blessed quiet of Sunnybank for a couple of months; then set out for a leisurely jaunt westward. He had been invited to preach in Omaha, and thought that he would “take a look at the country” which he had never visited. He got no further than Chicago, falling in love with the warm-hearted people of a church which he agreed to supply for “a few weeks.” The weeks grew into seven months of active and satisfying work among his new parishioners. Our eldest daughter was with him part of the time, and I went to him for a visit of considerable length, returning home with the sad conviction, deep down in my soul, that to accept the offered “call” to a permanent pastorate would be suicidal. He could never do half-way work, and he loved the duties of his profession with a love that never abated. By the beginning of the next summer, he was forced to admit to himself that his physical powers were inadequate to the task laid to his hand. Yet, on the way home, he was lured into agreeing to supply the pulpit of a friend, a St. Louis clergyman, during the vacation of the latter, preaching zealously and eloquently for five weeks, and this in the heat of a Missourian summer.
It was but a wreck of his old, buoyant self that he brought back to us. Confident in his ability to rise above “temporary weakness,” he insisted that “Sunnybank and home-rest were all he needed to set him up again as good as new.”
I had said once, jestingly, in his hearing, after his quick recovery from a short and sharp attack of illness:
“It is hard to kill a Terhune. Nothing is really effectual except a stroke of lightning, and that will paralyze but one side. None of them die under ninety!”
He reminded me of the foolish speech, many and many a time, in the weeks that dragged themselves by us who watched the steady ebb of vital forces and the pitiable failure of all remedial agencies. He was the finest horseman I have ever known, and, as I have already said, sat his saddle as if he were a part of the spirited animal he bestrode. “Let me once get into the saddle again, and all will be right,” had been his hopeful prognostication in every illness prior to this mysterious disorder. He mounted his horse a few times after he got home, and rode for a mile or two, but listlessly and with pain. Then he ceased to ask for the old-time tonic that had acted like a magic potion upon the exhausted body, in answer to the indomitable spirit. The spring of desire and courage was not broken, but it bent more and more visibly daily, until it was a gray wraith of the former man that lay, hour after hour, upon the library sofa, uncomplaining and patient, utterly indifferent to things that once brought light to the eyes and ring to the voice. Even his voice—a marvel up to seventy-five, for sweetness, resonance, and strength—quavered and broke when he forced himself to speak.
In this, our sore and unprecedented extremity, we who watched him took counsel together and urged him to go to the city and consult Doctor McBurney, the ablest specialist and surgeon in New York, and with no superior in America. The patient offered feeble opposition. It was easier to do as we wished, than to argue the point. Our eldest daughter was living in New York, and not far from the surgeon. We lost no time in securing an appointment, and the surgeon was prompt in decision. “The minor operation,” in which he had had no hand, was well enough as far as scalpel and probe had gone, but the seat of the malady was left untouched. There was a malignant internal growth which had already poisoned the blood. To delay a “major operation” a fortnight, would be to forfeit the one and only chance of life. It might already be too late.
In three days the almost dying man was in the Presbyterian Hospital, and under the knife.
I hasten past the month that followed. With clean blood, a temperate life, and a superb constitution as his backers, my brave husband stood once more upon his feet, and was apparently upon the highroad to recovery. When he was restored to our home-circle in season for the Christmas festivities, we rejoiced without a prevision of possible further ill from the hateful cause, now forever removed, as we fondly believed. Early in January, I had a sudden and violent hemorrhage from the lungs, superinduced, we were told by the eminent specialist summoned immediately, by the long-continued nervous strain and general weakening of the entire system.
Doctor Terhune took me to the train when I set out upon the southern trip prescribed strenuously by consulting practitioners. My dearest and faithful brother was to meet me on the last stage of my easy journey. When the late invalid waved his hat to me from the platform as the train began to move, I noted with pride and devout gratitude, how clear were his blue eyes, how healthful his complexion, and, looking back as far as I could catch sight of him, that his step had the elasticity of a boy of twenty.
He wrote daily to me, and in the old, lively fashion, for three weeks. Then a letter dictated by him to Christine told of a boil upon his wrist that hindered pen-work. I “was not to be uneasy. It was probably a wholesome working out of the virus of original sin. He would be all the better when the system was freed from it.”
I wrote at once, begging that nothing might be concealed from me, and setting a day for my return.
A telegram from my husband forbade me to stir until the time originally named as the limit of my visit. And the daily letters continued to arrive. One, I recollect, began:
“A second rising, farther up the arm, is ‘carrying on the work of purification.’ So says the poor Pater, with a rueful glance at his bandaged hand and arm. If it were only the left, and not the right hand, he would not have to put up with this unworthy amanuensis.”
Those six weeks in Richmond stand out in memory like sunlighted peaks seen between clouds that gathered below and all around it. My brother’s wife, the cherished girl-friend of our Newark life, was so far from well that we enacted the rôles of semi-invalids in company. Sometimes we breakfasted in her room, sometimes in mine, as the humor seized us. I lounged in one easy-chair, and she in another, all the forenoon, making no pretence of occupation. Had we not been straitly commanded to do nothing but get well? We drove out in company, every moderately fine day. When we tired of talking (which was seldom), we had our books. I sent to a book-store for a copy of Barrie’s Margaret Ogilvie—the matchless tribute of the brilliant son to the peasant woman from whom he drew all that was noblest and highest in himself—and gave it to my fellow-invalid to read. Then we talked it over—we two mothers—tenderly and happily, as befitted the parents of grown children who were fulfilling our best hopes for them. I repeated to her once, in the twilight of a winter afternoon, as we sat before the blazing fire of soft coal that tinted the far corners of the library a soft, dusky red—a stanza of Elizabeth Akers Allen’s Rock Me to Sleep, Mother:
“Over my heart in the days that have flown,
No love like mother-love ever has shone;
No other worship abides and endures,
Faithful unselfish, and patient like yours.”
“That is one of my husband’s favorite songs,” I said. “I often sing it to him and to Bert in the twilights at home.” And with a little laugh, I added: “My boy asked me once to emphasize ‘patient.’ He says that is the strongest characteristic of the mother’s love.”
“They repay us for it all!” was the fervent reply.
And I returned as feelingly, “Yes, a thousandfold.”
She was ever the true, unselfish woman, generous in impulse and in action, sweet and sound to the very core of her great heart. We had loved each other without a shadow of changing for over thirty years. In all our intercourse there is nothing upon which I dwell with such fondness as on the days that slipped by brightly and smoothly, that late January and early February. If I observed with regret that I rallied from my sudden seizure more rapidly than she threw off the languor and loss of appetite which, she assured us, over and over, “meant next to nothing”—I was not seriously uneasy at what I saw. She had not been strong for the last year. Time would restore her, surely. She had just arisen on the morning of my departure, when I went into her room to say, “Good-bye.” She smiled brightly as I put my arms about her and bade her, “Hurry up and return my visit.”
“You will see me before long,” she said, confidently. “As soon as I can bear the journey I shall go to Newark. My native air always brings healing on its wings.”
My beloved friend Mrs. Waite had passed from earth, six months before. The visit I paid at her house, on the way back to New York, was the first I had made there since the beauty of her presence was withdrawn.
On the morning after my arrival I had a long letter from Christine. It began ominously:
“I have a confession to make. Father has been far more indisposed than I would let you think. Do not blame me. I have acted under orders from him and from the doctor. Neither would hear of your recall. Not that this relapse is a dangerous matter. The ‘boils’ were a return of the old trouble. He has not left his bed for a fortnight. I thought it best to prepare you for seeing him there.”
An hour later I had a telegram from my brother:
“M. is decidedly worse. We apprehend heart-failure.”
Again I say, I would shorten the recital of how the clouds returned after the rain which we had believed would clear the atmosphere.
I was seated at the bedside of my husband, who aroused himself with difficulty to speak to me, as one shakes off a stupor, relapsing into slumber with the murmured welcome on his fevered lips, when a dispatch was brought to me from Richmond.
My sister-in-love had died that afternoon.
Five months to a day, from the beginning of my husband’s serious illness, he was brought down-stairs in the arms of a stalwart attendant, and lifted into a carriage for his first ride. We drove to the neighboring Central Park, and were threading the leafy avenues before the convalescent offered to speak. Then the tone was of one dazed into disbelief of what was before his eyes:
“The last time I was out of doors, the ground was covered with snow. I am like those that dream. I never knew until now what a beautiful place the world is!”
It was glorious in July verdure when we got him back to Sunnybank. There was no talk now of the saddle, and the briefest of drives fatigued him to faintness. Whatever the doctors might say as to the ultimate elimination of the hidden poison they had found so difficult to drive out, watchers, who had more at stake in the issue of his protracted illness, failed to see the proof that skill had effected what they claimed. After the glow of pleasure at getting home again subsided, he relapsed into the old lassitude and sad indifference to what was going on about him; his eyes were dull; his tone was lifeless; he seemed to have forgotten that he had ever had appetite for food.
At last, one day, as I sat fanning him, while he lay on the wicker sofa on the vine-clad veranda, regarding neither lake nor mountain, and smiling wanly at my chatter of the seven birds’-nests in the honeysuckle, from which the last fledgling had been coaxed away by their parents that morning—an inspiration came to me. I laid my hand on his to make sure that he would be aroused to listen, and stooped to the ear that shared in the deadening of the rest of the body.
“What do you say to going abroad again—and very soon?”
He opened his eyes wide, lifting his head to look directly at me.
“What did you say?”
I repeated the query.
He lay back with closed lids for so long I thought he was asleep. Then an echo of his own voice, as it was in the olden time, said:
“I think, if I could once more hear the rush of the waves against the keel of the steamer, and feel the salt air on my face, it would bring me back to life. But—where’s the use of dreaming of it? I shall never be strong enough to go on board.”
“You will, and you shall! You saved my life by taking me abroad. We will try the efficacy of your own prescription.”
I think that not one of the crowd of friends who came down to the steamer to see us off, had any hope of seeing again his living face. I heard, afterward, that they said as much among themselves, when the resolutely cheerful farewells had been spoken, and they stood watching the vessel’s slow motion out of the dock, the eyes of all fixed upon one figure recumbent in a deck-chair, a thin hand responding to the fluttering handkerchiefs above the throng on the end of the pier.
Our son was there with his betrothed, who wrote to me afterward that he was “depressed to despondency.” Belle, with her husband and boys, would occupy Sunnybank while we were away. Christine had insisted that it was not kind or safe to leave to me the sole care of the invalid. In the three weeks that elapsed between the “inspiration” and our embarkation, the brave girl had wound up all affairs that would detain her in America, and made herself and two sons ready to accompany us. The party was completed by the faithful maid who had nursed her children from infancy, and who was quite competent to aid me in nursely offices to the patient for whose sake the desperate expedition was undertaken.
He averred, in later life, that he felt an impulse of new life with the first revolution of the paddle-wheel. Certain it is that he showed signs of rallying before twenty-four hours had passed, spending all the daylight hours upon deck, and, before the voyage was half over, joining in our promenades from bow to stern. Always an excellent sailor, he drank in the sea-breeze as he might have quaffed so much nectar. The only complaint that escaped him was that, “whereas he had been promised an eleven days’ voyage, we steamed up the Clyde on the afternoon of the ninth day.”
A series of jaunts in Scotland and England was the prelude to our settling down in Florence for the winter.
Had I no other reason to urge for my deep and abiding love for that fairest and dearest of Italian cities, it would suffice me to recollect the unutterable peace and full content of that memorable half-year.
Friends, old and new, clustered about us, and lent the charm of home to the cosey apartment in Via San Giuseppe, where the gentle flow of domestic life was bright with the shining of present happiness and rekindled hope of the future. We learned to know “La Bella” at her best in those halcyon days. The boys were at a day-school; thanks to our efficient “padrona,” there were no household anxieties, and we seniors were free to enjoy to the full all that makes up the inestimable riches of the storied city.
Doctor Terhune and I claimed the privilege of convalescent and custodian, in declining to accept invitations to evening functions, thus securing opportunity for what we loved far better than the gayest of “entertainments”—long, quiet hours spent in our sitting-room “under the evening lamp,” I, busy with needle-work or knitting, while he read aloud, after the dear old fashion, works on Florentine history, art, and romance, all tending to enfold us more closely with the charméd atmosphere of the region. It would be laughable to one who has never fallen under the nameless spell of Florence to know how often, that season, we repeated aloud, as the book was laid aside for the night:
“With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.”
Letters from home were frequent and regular. Much was happening across the water while we revelled in our dreams. The Spanish War was on. It was begun and ended during our peace-fraught exile. In January, our boy took unto himself the young wife to whom he had been troth-plight for a year, and we were the easier in mind for the knowledge that this, the last of our unwedded bairns, was no longer without a home of his own.
In the spring we travelled at pleasure through Switzerland and Belgium, and so to England—my husband and I now in the solitude à deux belovéd by congenial souls. Christine and her sons were left in Switzerland for a longer tour of that country.
Still wandering, lingering, and dreaming, in the long, delicious calm succeeding the darkest and stormiest period our united lives were ever to know, we revisited English villages and towns, and made acquaintance in Scotland with new and enchanting scenes, until the September day when we took passage from Glasgow for New York.
We steamed into our harbor on Sunday afternoon, just as the news of peace between the warring nations was acclaimed through the megaphone to incoming craft, and thundered from the mouths of rejoicing cannon.