University of Virginia Library

62. LXII.

REUBEN went with a light heart upon his voyage.
The tender memories of Ashfield were mostly
lived down. (Had the letter of Adèle ever reached
him, it might have been far different.) Rose, Phil,
the Tourtelots, the Tew partners (still worrying
through a green old age), the meeting-house, even the
Doctor himself and Adèle, seemed to belong to a
sphere whose interests were widely separate from his
own, and in which he should appear henceforth only
as a casual spectator. The fascinations of his brilliant
business successes had a firm grip upon him. He indulges
himself, indeed, from time to time, with the
fancy that some day, far off now, he will return to the
scenes of his boyhood, and astonish some of the old
landholders by buying them out at a fabulous price,
and by erecting a “castle” of his own, to be enlivened
by the fairy graces of some sylph not yet fairly determined
upon. Surely not Rose, who would hardly be
equal to the grandeur of his proposed establishment,
if she were not already engrossed by that “noodle”
(his thought expressing itself thus wrathfully) of an

assistant minister. Adèle, — and the name has something
in it that electrifies, in spite of himself, — Adèle,
if she ever overcomes her qualms of conscience, will
yield to the tender persuasions of Phil. “Good luck
to him!” — and he says this, too, with a kind of
wrathful glee.

Still, he builds his cloud castles; some one must
needs inhabit them. Some paragon of refinement and
of beauty will one day appear, for whose tripping feet
his wealth will lay down a path of pearls and gold.
The lonely, star-lit nights at sea encourage such phantasms;
and the break of the waves upon the bow, with
their myriad of phosphorescent sparkles, cheats and
illumines the fancy. We will not follow him throughout
his voyage. On a balmy morning of July he wakes
with the great cliff of Gibraltar frowning on him.
After this come light, baffling winds, and for a week he
looks southward upon the mysterious, violet lift of the
Barbary shores, and pushes slowly eastward into the
blue expanse of the Mediterranean. In the Sicilian
ports he is abundantly successful. He has ample time
to cross over to Naples, to ascend Vesuvius, and to
explore Herculaneum and Pompeii. But he does not
forget the other side of the beautiful bay, Baiæ and
Pozzuoli. He takes, indeed, a healthful pleasure in
writing to the Doctor a description of this latter, and
of his walk in the vicinity of the great seaport where

St. Paul must have landed from his ship of the Castor
and Pollux, on his way from Syracuse. But he does
not tell the Doctor that, on the same evening, he attended
an opera at the San Carlo in Naples, of which
the ballet, if nothing else, would have called down the
good man's anathema.

An American of twenty-five, placed for the first time
upon the sunny pavements of Naples, takes a new lease
of life, — at least of its imaginative part. The beautiful
blue stretch of sea, the lava streets, the buried towns
and cities, the baths and ruins of Baiæ, the burning
mountain, piling its smoke and fire into the serene sky,
the memories of Tiberius, of Cicero, of Virgil, — all
these enchant him. And beside these are the things
of to-day, — the luscious melons, the oranges, the figs,
the war-ships lying on the bay, the bloody miracle of St.
Januarius, the Lazzaroni upon the church steps, the
processions of friars, and always the window of his
chamber, looking one way upon blue Capri, and the
other upon smouldering Vesuvius.

At Naples Reuben hears from the captain of the
Meteor — in which good ship he has made his voyage,
and counts upon making his return — that the vessel
can take up half her cargo at a better freight by touching
at Marseilles. Whereupon Reuben orders him to
go thither, promising to join him at that port in a fortnight.
A fortnight only for Rome, for Florence, for

Pisa, for the City of Palaces, and then the marvelous
Cornice road along the shores of the sea. Terracina
brought back to him the story of Mr. Alderman Popkins
and the Principessa, and the bandits; after this
came the heights of Albano and Soracte, and there, at
last, the Tiber, the pyramid tomb, the great church
dome, the stone pines of the Janiculan hill, — Rome itself.
Reuben was not strong or curious in his classics;
the galleries and the churches took a deeper hold upon
him than the Forum and the ruins. He wandered for
hours together under the arches of St. Peter's. He
wished he might have led the Doctor along its pavement
into the very presence of the mysteries of the
Scarlet Woman of Babylon. He wished Miss Almira,
with her saffron ribbons, might be there, sniffing at her
little phial of salts, and may be singing treble. The
very meeting-house upon the green, that was so held
in reverence, with its belfry and spire atop, would
hardly make a scaffolding from which to brush the cobwebs
from the frieze below the vaulting of this grandest
of temples. Oddly enough, he fancies Deacon
Tourtelot, in his snuff-colored surtout, pacing down the
nave with him, and saying, — as he would be like to
say, — “Must ha' been a smart man that built it; but I
guess they don't have better preachin', as a gineral
thing, than the old Doctor gives us on Fast-Days or
in `protracted' meetin's.”

Such queer humors and droll comparisons flash into
the mind of Reuben, even under all his sense of awe,
— a swift, disorderly mingling of the themes and offices
which kindled his first sense of religious awe under a
home atmosphere with the wondrous forms and splendor
which kindle a new awe now. The great dome
enwalling with glittering mosaics a heaven of its own,
and blazing with figured saints, and the golden distich,
“Thou art Peter, — to thee will I give the keys of the
kingdom of heaven,” — all this seems too grand to be
untrue. Are not the keys verily here? Can falsehood
build up so august a lie? A couple of friars shuffle
past him, and go to their prayers at some near altar;
he does not even smile at their shaven pates and their
dowdy, coarse gowns of serge. Low music from some
far-away chapel comes floating under the paneled vaultings,
and loses itself under the great dome, with a
sound so gentle, so full of entreaty, that it seems to him
the dove on the high altar might have made it with a
cooing and a flutter of her white wings. A mother
and two daughters, in black, glide past him, and drop
upon their knees before some saintly shrine, and murmur
their thanksgivings, or their entreaty. And he,
with no aim of worship, yet somehow shocked out of
his unbelief by the very material influences around
him.

Reuben's old wranglings and struggles with doubt

had ended — where so many are apt to end, when the
world is sunny and success weaves its silken meshes
for the disport of self — in a quiet disbelief that angered
him no longer, because he had given over all
fight with it. But the great dome, flaming with its letters,
Ædificabo meam Ecclesiam, shining there for ages,
kindled the fight anew. And strange as it may seem,
and perplexing as it was to the Doctor (when he received
Reuben's story of it), he came out from his first
visit to the great Romish temple with his religious nature
more deeply stirred than it had been for years.

Ædificabo meam Ecclesiam. He had uttered it.
There was then something to build, — something that
had been built, at whose shrine millions worshiped
trustingly.

Under the somber vaultings of the great Florentine
Cathedral, the impression was not weakened. The
austere gloom of it chimed more nearly with his state
of unrest. Then there are the galleries, the painted
ceilings, — angels, saints, martyrs, holy families, — can
art have been leashed through so many ages with a
pleasant fiction? Is there not somewhere at bottom an
earnest, vital truth, which men must needs cling by if
they be healthful and earnest themselves? Even the
meretricious adornments of the churches of Genoa afford
new evidence of the way in which the heart of a
people has lavished itself upon belief; and if belief,
why, then, hope.

Upon the Cornice road, with Italy behind him and
home before (such home as he knows), he thinks once
more of those he has left. Not that he has forgotten
them altogether; he has purchased a rich coral necklace
in Naples, which will be the very thing for his
old friend Rose; and, in Rome, the richest cameos
to be found in the Via Condotti he has secured for
Adèle; even for Aunt Eliza he has brought away from
Florence a bit of the pietra dura, a few olive-leaves
upon a black ground. Nor has he forgotten a rich
piece of the Genoese velvet for Mrs. Brindlock; and,
for his father, an old missal, which, he trusts, dates
back far enough to save it from the odium he attaches
to the present Church, and to give it an early Christian
sanctity. He has counted upon seeing Mr. Maverick
at Marseilles, but learns, with surprise, upon his
arrival there, that this gentleman had sailed for America
some months previously. The ship is making a
capital freight, and the captain informs him that application
has been made for the only vacant state-room in
their little cabin by a lady attended by her maid. Reuben
assents cheerfully to this accession of companionship;
and, running off for a sight of the ruins at
Nismes and Arles, returns only in time to catch the
ship upon the day of its departure. As they pass out
of harbor, the lady passenger, in deep black, (the face
seems half familiar to him,) watches wistfully the receding

shores, and, as they run abreast the chapel of
Nôtre Dame de la Garde, she devoutly crosses herself
and tells her beads.

Reuben is to make the voyage with the mother of
Adèle. Both bound to the same quiet township of
New England; he, to reach Ashfield once more, there
to undergo swiftly a new experience, — an experience
that can come to no man but once; she, to be clasped
in the arms of Adèle, — a cold embrace and the last!