Мэтью Перл: The Dante Chamber

That wouldn’t do. It went into the flame of the candle and was replaced by:

She did not rush to answer most of her correspondence, a contrast to her usual habits. Instead, she spent her time reviewing her stacks of compositions. She set aside more time to write new poetry and found verses of a variety of sorts — devotional, narrative, elegies — came to her quite easily. She soon surprised her publisher, Alexander Macmillan, at his offices.

“I have a volume of poetry I am ready to publish, if you happen to have interest.”

“If! Of course we do, Miss Rossetti,” said Macmillan.

“Thank you. It is a volume of nursery rhymes for today. I shall leave you them to see if they suit your needs.”

Macmillan called the next morning enthusiastically raving about her poems and began to make plans to put them into print as soon as possible.

“It matters not to you that I am not a parent, and may never be?” Christina asked.

“Why, Miss Rossetti, your children are the very kind who bring the greatest pride — your verse. Keep in mind, as great a poetess as Jean Ingelow herself has never married!”

Early in May, Oliver Wendell Holmes called on her to bid farewell before sailing out of Liverpool. He had arranged his passage to meet his daughter in Belgium on the first vessel that could take him there. He was so full of talk and conversation about museums and libraries he had lately seen, about the Tower of London and Stratford-on-Avon, Christina had a strong feeling that the doctor wanted to discuss anything and everything except what had happened.

“I suppose the wise traveler should never think time away will change him. It will interrupt his routine for a while, but then he will settle down into his former self, and be just what he was before. How small a matter literature is, Miss Rossetti, to the great seething, toiling, struggling, love-making, bread-winning, child-rearing, death-awaiting men and women who fill this huge, palpitating world of ours!”

To her surprise, before they took leave from each other, Holmes did make what seemed a brief reference to the events.

“At night before I sleep, I have been contemplating how liberty is often a heavy burden on a man, Miss Rossetti. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men always dreaded. In common life, I suppose, we shirk it by forming habits that take the place of self-determination. But if a man has a genuine, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is bent upon becoming a slave to another’s doctrine, nothing can stop him.”

He added: “Such a time as we had irons ten years’ creases out of one’s forehead.” Then he paused. “Thank heavens it’s over.” But when he said that, the hand with which he held his teacup shook slightly, and he said the words in a tone of a man who did not believe his assertion.

Despite all Sibbie had done, it still seemed cruel to have to describe for Holmes how the burning building collapsed and exploded around an unmoving ( unmovable was the better word) Sibbie. Holmes had wanted Sibbie to redeem him for what he thought were his shortcomings. Christina was glad he would soon be reunited with his daughter. At any age, a father’s presence brought comfort to a daughter, and Christina was hopeful Amelia’s company would be restorative for Holmes.

Browning, always impressing Christina anew with his warmth in his friendships, wrapped Holmes’s hand in both of his. “Goodbye, Holmes,” he said, “and mind it isn’t so long before you come again! There’s always a one o’clock meal at my house waiting for you.”

Not everyone in their recent coterie seemed in a hurry to pay a call on the Rossettis after Gabriel had settled in again. Tennyson returned to his Farringford estate to heal from the injuries he sustained in the carriage accident in Walsden. Those injuries remained painful for a few weeks although they ultimately proved minor. Still, no trips to London followed. Nor were any invitations extended to the Londoners to come to the Isle of Wight. The laureate walled himself into his burrow, and there wasn’t any sign of him at two successive Cosmopolitan Club meetings.

Browning, who called on Tudor House regularly, remained indignant about Tennyson’s informing Inspector Williamson of their activities during the search for Gabriel, and the laureate staying away from London and Tudor House in the wake of all that had come to pass only compounded Browning’s resentment. He would not speak of Tennyson other than to repeat his position and then gloss it with the comment, “I’m not afraid of him, and he hates me for it. But let him make amends, and I won’t mind.” On a different occasion he exclaimed: “Tennysonite!”

“Pardon?” Christina asked.

“Tennysonites, Browningites... never mind. Thinking back over all that happened, Miss Rossetti, I see that we have been all the time walking over a torrent on a straw. Perhaps life must now be begun anew — all the old cast off and the new one put on.”

Christina was content to slip back into her usual seclusion, but before she did she made her own unannounced visit to the Isle of Wight, largely an attempt to encourage Tennyson to mend his friendship with Browning. She hated to think that she, by driving their collective inquiries, caused a rift between friends. She herself easily forgave Tennyson for his breach of their trust. How could you forgive him, how could you not be full of vinegar and gall for a man who blatantly betrayed you? Browning had demanded of her.

Farringford had the look of a charmed castle, its windows glowing a soft crimson. As she crossed through the wicket gate, she saw that beneath the sign marked Private were words written in chalk by some local who resented the declaration: Old Tennyson is a fool . She hoped the desecration would be removed before he saw it. It only occurred to her when Tennyson greeted her and asked if she had seen the chalk message, that he could have scrubbed it off whenever he’d wanted. Tennyson couldn’t stop talking about it. “Whoever wrote it was right. We are all of us fools, if we only knew it! I am the greatest example. We are but the beginning of some better, fuller wisdom.”

Speeches like that one, she wished she could tell Browning, was why she had little trouble forgiving Tennyson, who brought her up to his sanctum at the top of the house. They began the way all writers do when visiting each other — by looking at the books the other was reading.

“Poetry, histories, but you’ll still not find many novels in my stack, Miss Rossetti. I like novels, I do. What I dislike is ending one and beginning a new one. I should like to have one novel to read in a million volumes, to last me my life.”

“I have wondered something, Mr. Tennyson.”

“Out with it! You can ask anything at all.”

“You say you are the second most shortsighted man in the country. Who is the first most shortsighted man in England?”

“Someone was bound to ask, sooner or later. I have to admit it was Charles Napier,” Tennyson said with a frown. “He died some years ago, which I suppose means I am the most shortsighted. Ugh. But that did not bring you all the way from the city.”

“No. It’s Browning.”

She should have guessed that Tennyson would prove just as intransigent as Browning, shielding himself from her entreaties in his capacious pipe smoke. It was not that Tennyson wouldn’t talk about the recent events. Though when he spoke of them, he did so somewhat circuitously, as though reflected by a wall of mirrors. Tennyson revealed that he had kept some of the pages written by Simon Camp that Holmes had recovered at the Golden Lion Inn in Walsden; Holmes still had some of the others, he believed. He removed these documents folded inside a book, handling them as if they were the Holy Grail, as he told Christina a story.