Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (775 page)

The Storys were also in Rome during these last months of our stay, and Miss Mitchell, I think, still lingered in her little lodgings in the Via Bocca di Leone. Miss Cushman likewise reappeared for a time, with all her former greatness and fascination, and many other friends, new and old, made that spring season memorable. As the moment for our departure drew near, the magical allurement of Rome laid upon us a grasp more than ever potent; it was impossible to realize that we were leaving it forever. On the last evening we walked in the moonlight to the fountain of Trevi, near our lodgings, and drank of the water — a ceremony which, according to tradition, insures the return of the drinker. It was the 25th of May, forty-four years ago. None of us has gone back since then, and, of the five who drank, three have passed to the country whence no traveller returns. For my own part, as a patriotic American nearly thirteen years old, I had no wish ever again to see Rome, and declared myself glad to turn my back upon it, not that I had any fault to find with it — I had always had a good time there — but my imagination was full of my native land, with which nothing else could be comparable. I did not learn of the fabled spell of Trevi until afterwards; then I scoffed at and defied it, and possibly Rome may have decided that it could do without me.

The railway to Civita Vecchia had just been completed, and we passed swiftly over the route which had been so full of dangers and discomforts eighteen months before. Embarking on the steamer for Marseilles, we kept on thence to Avignon, where we spent about a week. This venerable town had few attractions for me; I did not much care for the fourteenth-century popes, nor for the eighteenth-century silks, nor even for Petrarch and Laura; and the architecture of the palace, after I had tried to sketch it, ceased to exhilarate me. My father was in no mood for sight-seeing, either, but he went through it all conscientiously. My mother, of course, enjoyed herself, but she met with an accident. While sketching some figures of saints and monsters that adorned the arch of the northern portal of the palace, she made an incautious movement and sprained her ankle. The pain was excessive for the moment, but it soon passed off, so as to enable her to limp back to our hotel. But the next day the pain was worse; my father had a headache, a rare affliction with him; I had caught a bad cold from swimming in the arrowy Rhone, and Una and Miss Shepard were both in a state of exhaustion from sight-seeing; and in this condition the journey to Geneva had to be made. We had intended to remain there but a day, but we stayed longer, breathing the pure air from the Alps, and feeling better as we breathed. I stood on a bridge and looked down at that wonderful azure water rushing into the lovely lake; I looked up and beheld those glorious mountains soaring into the sky, and I forgot Rome and Florence, and almost America, in my joy. Everything that life needs for life seemed present there.

We got into a little steamer and made the trip up the lake, the mountains all about us. Up to this time I had imagined that the acclivities in the north of England and in Scotland were mountains. We sat on deck, in the stern of the steamer, my father gazing out and up from beneath the rim of his soft felt hat, with his dark cloak over his shoulders. He looked revived and vigorous again. Shortly before we left Rome he had ceased to shave his upper lip, for what reason I know not; I think it was simply indisposition to take that trouble any longer. My mother had at first gently protested; she did not want his upper lip and mouth to be hidden. But as the brown mustache, thick and soldier-like, appeared, she became reconciled, and he wore it to the end of his life. “Field-Marshal Hawthorne” James T. Fields used to call him after we got home. Owing to the preponderance of expression of the upper part of his head, the addition did not change his look as much as might have been expected; we soon got used to it, and, inasmuch as all his photographs were taken after the mustache was established, the world does not know him otherwise.

The view became more and more enchanting as we penetrated farther into the depths of the embrace of the mountains, and at last, at its most ravishing point, the lake ceased, and the lonely little pile of dingy white masonry, which is Chillon, appeared. Few works of man have a more romantic interest than this castle; but, seen from the lake, its environment was too much for it. Had it plunged downward into the smooth waters and vanished, its absence would not have been marked in that stupendous landscape. But it improved greatly upon closer acquaintance; and when we stood in its vaults, and saw the pillar to which the prisoner was chained, and the hole in the floor, with its three steps of stone, and the fourth of death, we felt that Chillon was not unequal to its reputation.

After leaving Chillon and Geneva our faces were turned homeward, and we hastened our steps. My father wrote to England to engage our passage for the first of August. We were now at midsummer. We returned to Paris, and after a few days there proceeded to Havre, in order to see Ada Shepard safe on board her steamer for home; her Wanderjahre was over, and she was now to be married to Henry Clay Badger. We were sorry to say good-bye to her; she had been a faithful and valuable element in our household, and she had become a dear friend and comrade. She stood waving her handkerchief to us as her steamer slipped away down the harbor. She, too, was sorry for the parting. She once had said to me: “I think your father is the wisest man I ever knew; he does not seem ever to say much, but what he does say is always the truest and best thing that could be said.”

From Havre we crossed the Channel to Southampton, and were soon in London. Boston and Concord were only six weeks distant. Such, at any rate, had been the original design. But after we reached London the subject of the English copyright of The Marble Faun came up for discussion. Henry Bright introduced Mr. Smith, of the firm of Smith, Elder & Company, who made such proposals for the English publication of the book as were not to be disregarded; but, in order to make them available, it was necessary that the manuscript should be completed in England. Nothing but the short sketch of it was as yet in existence; it could not be written in much less than a year; either the English offer must be rejected, or we must stay out that year in her Majesty's dominions. My father decided, not altogether unwillingly, perhaps, to stay. He had written in his journal a few weeks before: “Bennoch and Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much grieved to say farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at some indefinite time, rather foolishly, perhaps, for it will tend to take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect, is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long.”

But my father could not write in London, and, casting about for a fitting spot, he finally fixed upon the remote hamlet of Redcar, far up on the bleak coast of Redcar, in Yorkshire. It was not far from Whitby, where we had been two or three years before. The gray German Ocean tumbled in there upon the desolate sands, and the contrast of the scene with those which we had been of late familiar with made the latter, no doubt, start forward intensely in the romancer's imagination. So there he wrote and wrote; and he walked far along the sands, with his boy dogging his steps and stopping for shells and crabs; and at a certain point of the beach, where the waves ran over a bar and formed a lake a few feet in depth, he would seat himself on a tussock of sand-grass, and I would undress and run into the cold water and continue my swimming-lessons, which had been begun in Stockbridge Bowl, continued in Lake Leman, and were now brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Both my feet were finally off the bottom, and I felt the wonderful sensation of the first cousin to flying. While I floundered there my father looked off towards the gray horizon, and saw the visions of Hilda, Miriam, Kenyon, and Donatello which the world of readers was presently to behold through his eyes. As we walked home in the twilight, the dull-red glow of the sunset would throw the outlines of the town into dark shadows, and shed a faint light on the surf roaming in from the east. I found, in my old album, the black silhouette of the scene which I made one day. The arms of an old mill are flung appealingly upward, the highest object of the landscape, above the irregular sky-line of the clustering houses. There is also, on the next page, a water-color drawing of a sailor in a blue jersey and a sou'wester, standing, with his hands in his pockets, on the beach beside one of the boats of the region — a slender, clipper-built craft, painted yellow below and black above, good for oars or sail. Her bow rests on a shaft connecting two wheels, for convenience of running her down into the water. There was a dozen or more of these boats always ready on the beach in front of our lodgings. These lodgings were just back of the esplanade, which, during our sojourn, was treated to a coat of tar from end to end — a delightful entertainment for us children — and I have loved the smell of tar ever since. There is little else that I remember about Redcar, except that, in the winter, there was skating on a part of the beach; but it was “salt ice,” and not to be compared with the skating I was to enjoy a year or two later in Concord, which I shall describe if ever I come to that epoch in my narrative.

From Redcar, with the romance more than half done, we went south to our old Leamington, which seemed half like home; and there the loveliness of an English spring at its best came to greet us, and there the book was finished, and sent to the printer. We spent a month or two at Bath, and found it very pleasant; my father rested from his labors, except the proof-reading; and I was instructed in the use of the broadsword by an old Peninsular officer, Major Johnstone, who had fought at Waterloo, and had the bearing of such majors as Thackeray puts into Vanity Fair. I once asked him whether he had ever killed a man; it was on the day when he first allowed me to use a real broadsword in our lesson. “Well,” replied the major, hesitatingly, “I was riding in a charge, and there came a fellow at me, with his sword up, and made a swing for my head. I dodged, and his blade just grazed me; but I let him have it, downright, at the same moment, and I caught him where the neck joins the shoulder, and he went down, and I went on, and what became of him I don't know; I hope nothing serious!” The major sighed and looked serious himself. “And was this the sword?” I demanded, balancing the heavy weapon in my hand. “No — no — it wasn't that one,” said the major, hastily. “I've never used the other since! Now, then, sir, if you please, on guard!”

We went to London, and there were our old friends Bright and Bennoch, and the Motleys appeared from Italy, and a book called (by the publishers) Transformation came out in three volumes, being the latest romance by the author of The Scarlet Letter. The title was not bestowed with my father's consent. He had, at the publishers' request, sent them a list of several titles, beginning with The Marble Faun, and among others on the list was “The Faun's Transformation.” The publishers took the “Transformation,” and left out “The Faun.” My father laughed, but let it go. The book was to come out under its proper title in America, and he was indifferent as to what they called it in England.

The end of our tarrying in the Old World was now at hand. Seven years had we lived there, and we were eager and yet loath to go. My father's friends gathered about him, men who had hardly so much as heard his name a little while ago, but who now loved him as a brother. For a few days Mrs. Blodgett's hospitable face glowed upon us once more, and pale Miss Williams, and trig little Miss Maria, and many of the old captains whom we had known. It was the middle of June, and the sun shone even in Liverpool. Our red-funnelled steamer lay at her moorings in the yellow Mersey, with her steam up. It was not The Niagara, but on her bridge stood our handsome little Captain Leitch, with his black whiskers, smiling at us in friendly greeting. How much had passed since we had seen him last! How much were we changed! What experiences lay behind us! What memories would abide with us always! My father leaned on the rail and looked across the river at the dingy, brick building, near the wharves, where he had spent four wearisome but pregnant years. The big, black steamer, with her little, puffing tug, slipped her moorings, and slid slowly down the stream. After a few miles the hue of the water became less turbid, the engines worked more rapidly and regularly. Liverpool was now a smoky mass off our starboard quarter. It sank and dwindled, till the smoke alone was left; the blue channel spread around us; we were at sea, and home lay yonder, across three thousand miles of tumbling waves. But my father still leaned on the rail, and looked backward towards the old home that he loved and would never see again. It was the hour for good-bye; there would come another hour for the other home and for welcome.

THE END

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1851–1926) was an American Roman Catholic religious sister and social worker, and the daughter of the great novelist.
 
After her father's death in 1864, she tried to become an author, publishing a book of poems in 1888. She later decided to rededicate her life to restoring her family's reputation after her brother's illegal activities and prostitution scandals.
 
In 1897 she published this affectionate account of life with her father.