Mrs. LaTouche came up alongside, and Rose’s pony quieted immediately. “Why, Rose, what is making you laugh so? I almost thought Swallow was going to toss you, for a moment.” But she was smiling at her, not cross at all.
Ah, the pang of not being able to tell the secret of the hidden letter! Rose pressed her lips together hard, to keep from telling, and smiled back. If she were truthful the letter would be taken from her before she could finish it. “Nothing, Mama,” she lied. “I’m only happy to be out.” But she was no longer happy. She knew now she could never show the letter with its broken seal to Mama: how disappointed she would be. She could not bear disappointing either of her parents.
The next week she got another letter from Ruskin in which he scolded her for sending him her “best love” from the bottom of her mother’s letter, saying that love could not be best or worst, just love. But that was her Mama’s invention, the “best love,” she wrote back, she never sent a bit of it, she didn’t like sending messages on other people’s letters, didn’t he notice––she liked to say it herself, and besides he knew he already had her love, as much of it as he pleased. And that he should have the happiest Christmas there in Switzerland, and they were finally going to London now she was well.
He spent his Christmas day alone, shattering icicles in a ravine.
In his room in Lucerne the night after Christmas Ruskin paused in his diary entry to admire the brilliance of Venus through the small diapered-paned window over his desk. Despite his parent’s entreaties that he return to Denmark Hill for the Christmas holidays he had––wilfully he knew, and at cost to himself in sorrow for their sorrow––extended his Swiss sojourn. The LaTouches had been in their Mayfair town house for two weeks now, and both Mrs. LaTouche in her frequent letters and Rose in her sporadic ones had expressed their desire to see him over Christmas.
He yearned to see Rose, to watch her come to him in her quick graceful steps, the heels of her little white shoes barely touching the floor. He yearned for the slender arms cast around his neck, and the shy sweet kiss that would follow. But he could not bear their parting. He might have an hour, an afternoon, with her and her mother or sister, and then the rest of life intruded, the carriage was called, the enchantment ended. Here in Lucerne, knowing she was growing steadily stronger, knowing she was now for the winter living at London just a few miles from his own home, he felt more ease than he could at Denmark Hill itself. He loved the thought of her.
He was trying desperately to work, to settle upon some task worthy of his efforts, and all his thoughts recurred to Rose. Carlyle was urging him on with his new political economy essay, and there was the geological study he also worked at, and the seemingly endless correspondence, hours of it each morning beyond the obligatory daily missive to his father.
He felt exactly that he was a youth of seventeen who had awakened to find himself a middle-aged man, with every desire of his youth intact but no capacity to accomplish them. As a youngster he had grieved that he had not yet the tools to spend his days immersed in metaphysical writing; in his forties he wished he could flirt, dance, and ride. Wrong at both ends of life. He wanted to see Rose, but she disturbed his work and thought.
Two days after he had sat at his window looking at Venus a letter from Rose arrived, the longest letter she had ever yet written him. It was dated 26 December. He began reading it standing in his room but sunk down upon his bed when she spoke of looking out her London window that night past the yellow glow of street gaslights to the immense and shining globe of Venus. She had been gazing West at Venus at the very hour he had. This was the perfect sympathy the child had with him––she seemed always to mirror, or even to anticipate him in act and emotion.
To her Venus was as the Christmas Star, bringing tidings of hope and joy to struggling humanity, and she hoped it would bring her St. Crumpet hope and joy too, because she knew he was not happy. She wrote at length about the Star as a sign of Peace, that inner peace which is the goal of all, and paraphrased passages from Isaiah, and wrote of Old Testament prophets, and of the love of Jesus. She said she had dreamed of him, and that she felt herself with him in his room there in Lucerne, and that she thought their rooms were not so very different. She went on for pages in serious childish fervour, and with such sweetness and concern for his well-being he felt faint by the time she reached her closing passage, in which his Posie-Rosie-Posie apologized for the blottiness of her pen.
He wished he had had some precious casket in which to store this letter, the Star Letter as he called it. It was not the call to faith he heeded––she was parroting her father there––but the utter tenderness to him he cherished.
In the morning when he wrote his father he wondered to him––Was Rose what you and her mother think––an entirely simple child? Or was she what he suspected, more subtle, more sweet and mysterious, than St. Catherine of Boulogne, that patron of artists and temptations?
He readied for his return to London. Rosie would be 14 beginning of January, and he had already chosen his gift for her, his 13th century manuscript from Liège, a Psalter and Book of Hours with an Ave to the Virgin naming her as a royal Rose. In it he inscribed:
Posie with St C’s love 3rd January 1862
Lizzie dead. Please come at once. ––William Rossetti
Ruskin sat in the jolting hansom repeating the words scrawled on the note which had reached him at Denmark Hill half hour ago. Lizzie dead. Last year Death took his dear Elizabeth Barrett Browning, greatest of female poets, and now in this cruel winter had snatched the girl whom he had hoped would become Britain’s greatest female painter.
The cab clattered over Blackfriars Bridge. The stench of the Thames, pungent even in February, forced his hand to his nose as he alighted at Chatham Place. Blast Rossetti for ever bringing that delicate girl here, with its charnel-house odours and rising damp.
He was not the first caller. The downstairs door was open and unattended and he climbed the narrow stair to their lodgings. Men’s voices told him Madox Brown was there as well as William Rossetti. He did not hear the voice of Gabriel.
He must have looked stricken, for William Rossetti crossed the floor to him and clasped him in an embrace that was as much physical support as comfort. But he waved away the offered chair.
“When did it happen,” was what he found himself saying in way of greeting.
“Early this morning.” William’s voice was raspy and he was hastily dressed, his hair barely combed. “Gabriel found her unresponsive when he returned last night, and brought a doctor at once. He and two other medical man worked hours trying to revive her, but her stupor only grew deeper. Just before dawn her pulse could be felt no more.”
Ruskin shut his eyes for a moment.
William went on. “There was a nearly-empty bottle of laudanum by her side.”
Lizzie always had difficulty sleeping, everyone knew she relied on the opiate to ease her way. The drug however demanded ever-increasing dosages to remain effective.
He could barely frame his next question. “Was it––”
William came to his aid. “It was not thought to have been, no. We hope they will rule death by misadventure.”
Ruskin looked across the room to the closed bedroom door. “Why was he not here? Why was she alone, once again alone?”
“She was not alone, not all evening, at least,” answered William. “She and Gabriel dined at a restaurant with Swinburne. Gabriel brought her back here and then went off to the Working Men’s College to teach his drawing class. When he returned he could not rouse her.”
Ruskin did not believe William’s defence of his brother. He imagined Gabriel Rossetti rushing to the arms of one of his jades after dumping off his sickly wife. He had loved Rossetti, had championed both his poetry and his art, and hoped to bring the expression of his talents to a higher plane. For years he had forgiven his protégé’s moral waywardness, his ignoring sound art-advice. He had given more out-of-pocket money to Rosse
tti than to any other artist, with no hope of such “loans” ever being repaid, and had not only repeatedly urged Rossetti to marry Lizzie and end her precarious social status, but had actually given him funds––twice––to do so. And once he finally married her his depictions of Lizzie took on a new radiance and truth; instead of exaggerating the few faults of her face and thinking them beauties, as he did with other sitters, he painted her just as she was, perfectly capturing her romantic and fragile nature.
“Where is he now,” he asked, looking at the closed door. At last Madox Brown spoke. Ruskin had never liked his paintings, despite Rossetti’s efforts to bring him round on his friend’s talent.
“He’s much too broken up to see you at present.” Ruskin registered a minor note of triumph in his voice as Brown denied him the opportunity to comfort Rossetti in person.
Ruskin turned back to William and raised his hands the slightest bit. “Let me see her,” he said.
William nodded and turned to the closed door, and opened it without entering so that Ruskin might be alone with her.
He had of course never before seen the bedroom, but it was as he might expect from such a pair. Velvet curtains, rusty with age, were imperfectly drawn against the feeble morning light falling from the single latticed window. The walls lacked any paper but were covered over in great extravagant sketches in charcoal by both Lizzie and her husband. The old bed was carved of dark wood and the hangings upon them threadbare and faded. A striped rag rug and a newer floral one by Morris lay upon the worn boards of the floor. A cupboard with a few pieces of pottery and a clothes press completed the furnishings, save for a tiny and uneven table by the bed upon which a lamp burned. It was shabby with the profligacy of ill-spent love and talent and dreams unrealised.
Ruskin approached the bed. Lizzie lay on one edge of it. Whatever horrid exertions the doctors had resorted to in attempting to revive her, there were no signs left of it on her face or in the room. She looked more than ever like the 13th century Florentine lady Ruskin had first thought she embodied, a face and form that Dante would have loved.
She was dressed in a white night-dress and the pale coverlet was pulled up almost to her shoulders. Her thick red hair had been smoothed from its centre part and softly framed her oval face. Her complexion was always very pale, and it was no paler now. Her gentle lips looked soft and barely closed. Only her eyelids told Ruskin she was dead. In life they were almost translucent, as if the luminous agate-coloured eyes beneath could still be discerned with her eyes closed. This morning they were utterly opaque, windows shut against the new day.
He raised his eyes and saw in the corner the child’s cradle he had not seen before. Last year Georgiana Burne-Jones had told him of coming to see Lizzie a few days after her baby had been born dead, and being stunned by finding the grieving mother huddled over the empty cradle by the coal fire. Her husband Ned was proceeding her on the stairs, and as they entered Lizzie had raised her head and called out, “Hush now, Ned! Don’t wake her, she’s finally asleep.”
Every effort towards love was futile. He bent forward and pressed his lips against the cool forehead.
What, he asked himself, if Rose should die, and leave him adrift? He could not voice the question to himself without staggering above a pit of desolation waiting to swallow him whole. The LaTouches had been in London several months, and now were returning to Ireland. Ruskin had not seen them as much as he could have while they were in residence in Mayfair, in hopes of making their departure less crushing when it came. His body responded in sympathy. He could not sleep, his digestion was troubling, his teeth ached, his face hurt.
Still, on the morning of their leave-taking he presented himself at their door. A horse cart laden with trunks and crates was just pulling away, and the family barouche and a hansom stood waiting outside the house.
The door opened as he mounted the steps, and the girls’ governess Miss Bunnet appeared with a small handbag. Rose and Emily were just behind her.
“St. Crumpet,” cried Rose as she spotted him. She ran to him thinking how strangely he looked at her; she didn’t know if he was going to laugh or cry. “I knew you would come. Mama said you mightn’t as you haven’t been for ever so long, but I knew you wouldn’t let me go!” She pulled herself out of his arms and they stepped aside to let Miss Bunnet go on to the carriage. He just looked at her, said nothing, just looked steadily at her, and so she threw her arms around him again just to change things.
Ruskin felt himself clutch at her shoulders, and the water coming into his eyes. Then Mrs. LaTouche, smiling in her veil and travelling dress, came out on the threshold and fetched them both inside for a proper good-bye.
At Denmark Hill that afternoon Ruskin’s old friends Dr. and Mrs. John Simon came to tea. His mother was too crippled with joint pain to come down stairs, and he sat nearly silent at the table with them and his father, all his mind following the LaTouches on their way to the coast. When the Simons left he had to bear his father’s criticism on his unsociable behaviour. In a day Rose would be back wandering the woods of Harristown picking anemones, or perhaps even plucking crayfish from the Liffey as he had taught her. If his physical heart had been wrenched from his breast he could not have felt more hollow.
As the days passed he decided to draw her. As skilful as he was as a draughtsman, as accurately as he could render architectural perspective or the sinuous curves of a convolvulus, he felt he had little gift for drawing any living being. How much less could he hope to capture Rosie’s beauty. He thought of the gold of her hair. If one were to attempt painting it he should turn to Perugino and use real gold threads to catch the effect of sunshine upon it. Still, he would try. He needed no sitter; her image was graven upon his heart. Flos florum Rosa––Rose, the flower of flowers.
In May, completely unexpectedly, came a startling invitation from Maria LaTouche. She offered him the use of a little cottage on the Harristown property, henceforth to be completely at his disposal. Ruskin remembered it well: it was just beyond the gates of the park, and had a garden, and fields, and was as well within sight of the Liffey. Rose, she had written, would walk by it each morning on her way to the village school she was now beginning to attend.
He was wild with delight. At the same time, thinking of actually living at Harristown in such close proximity to Rose seemed utterly fantastic. How could he hope to work there? How in fact could he leave his failing parents, his eighty-one year old father suffering now from the painful spasms of gravel, his mother unable to walk? But he wrote his letter of acceptance and proceeded with plans to take Georgiana and Ned Burne-Jones, too poor to travel on their own, to France and Italy.
He was in Paris when Mrs. LaTouche’s letter retracting her offer reached him. After consideration she and Mr. LaTouche had decided that their parochial Irish neighbours might misunderstand such an arrangement, & etc. He fired off a letter to Rosie, angry she had not fought harder for the scheme.
He was not to see her for more than three years.
Everywhere Ruskin looked he found destruction, war, or idiocy. Continental travel afforded a temporary respite until he happened upon the ongoing assaults of brutal restorers attacking cherished 14th and 15th century buildings, or found valleys and villages he had loved as a boy choked up with shoddy new construction and suburban sprawl. The Swiss lakes were no longer as clearly pristine as he had found them in boyhood, when he had filled his travel diaries with descriptions of their colours. Even Venice, which to the untrained eye seemed to have escaped the 19th century, filled him with despair, the accursed steam-powered passenger boats––i vaporetti––exhaling soot while depriving gondoliers of their honest living.
The entire world was unravelling. America was ripped asunder, North from South, with war resulting in appalling carnage. The French were fighting the Austrians, and Poland and Russia seemed teetering upon the brink. Prince Albert, but forty-two, was suddenly dead from typhoid fever, plunging Queen and country into mourning.
And mechanization was running amok. The double-hulled steam leviathan Great Eastern––that final fruit of the prematurely dead megalomaniac engineer Brunel––five times larger than any ship ever built, was now plying the Atlantic, belching coal smoke from the labours of 200 stokers working day and night. Ships were dropping telegraph cable from gigantic reels into deep and formerly silent ocean waters and linking Britain and America. No place was safe from the intrusion of modern engineering, and the thought made Ruskin shudder.
For the first time he felt unable to keep up with scientific innovation and thought. Chemistry was advancing so quickly that seven new elements had been detected––all, he thought wryly, ending in “ium”––and all manner of specialist laboratory equipment developed for ever-narrower purposes. The broad spectrum of his natural philosophy interests in geology, meteorology, and botany demanded an ever-deepening commitment to adopt new systems and methods. He simply could not withstand the onslaught of novel information, discoveries, and techniques.
He liked Darwin personally but despised the man’s reductionist theory applied to mankind. And Industry itself was pushing the hand of the theorists. The new railway cuttings scoring Britain revealed dramatic layers of sediment which had to have taken aeons to deposit. Deeper mines brought heretofore never-seen fossils to the surface. The earth was far older than the Old Testament reckoning of six-thousand years; the tangible scientific evidence was there for all who cared to see. With a bitter humour he realised that at least he was now spared the crisis of belief that swept the Christian world as it tried frantically to recalibrate Biblical inerrancy with scientific fact.
The full use of his talents and powers was what he required, yet in his fractured state he grasped at anything that might absorb his attention temporarily. Rising at four, he lost himself in the work at hand. He spent silent hours meticulously drawing a hummingbird’s feather in microscopic detail. He arranged and rearranged his vast collections of minerals and crystals, experimenting with original systems of classification. He composed music inspired by the Epicurean fatalism of the newly-published Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, finding solace in its imagery of fragrant roses and admonitions to seek the earthly joys that had so far escaped him. He would answer correspondence, write in his diary, walk or drive for hours, visit a picture gallery, sit in a darkened box in a music hall where some well-trained singer might win his admiration. He filled his days with ceaseless activity.
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