Dared and Done Read online

  “ ‘Our friend & follower, that was to be’—is that, then, your opinion of my poor darling Flush’s destiny,” she teased him that same evening. “There is a dreadful tradition in this neighbourhood,” of a lady who did not pay and in holding out had “her dog’s head sent to her in a parcel.” So “Get Flush back, whatever you do,” she told her brother Henry. Where did Henry find the captain of the dog bandits? Why, “smoking a cigar in a room with pictures!—They make some three or four thousand a year by their honorable employment.” And forget Flush’s submitting without a fight; why he was caught and gagged, Browning could depend on that. “If he could have bitten, he would have bitten—if he could have yelled, he would have yelled.”

  And on another issue: She wanted him to tell her when and how they’d leave England. She would do as he said. “Have I refused one proposition of yours when there were not strong obstacles?… For instance, I agreed … to your plan about the marrying—and I agreed to go with you to Italy in the latter part of September—did I not?” Her only suggestion was that there should be as little excitement as possible because of her nervous temperament. “But I shall not fail, I believe—I should despise myself too much for failing.”

  On September 3, mistakenly thinking Flush had been found, Robert told Elizabeth he would not have given in to the kidnappers, arguing the morality of “religion, right and justice” in resisting wickedness, and sounding much as he did when he had advocated the honor of dueling. He was so sick with a headache that his sister had to mail the morning letter for him.

  FLUSH, 1843. EBB’s drawing of her golden-haired spaniel given to her by Mary Russell Mitford after the tragic death of EBB’s favorite brother. In “To Flush, My Dog,” published in the Athenaeum, July 22, 1843, EBB wrote:

  This dog watched beside a bed

  Day and night unweary,

  Watched within a curtained room

  Where no sunbeam broke the gloom

  Round the sick and dreary.

  Elizabeth replied the same evening, first intent on his health, then on to the saga of the “archfiend Taylor” and to domestic politics. Taylor had come the previous night and told Henry that the bandits would accept six pounds with an extra half guinea for his own trouble in the negotiations. Papa interposed exactly as he had three years before: Henry should not pay that amount, and he should not tell a word of it to Elizabeth. But Henry told his sister that he hadn’t paid what Taylor asked. She was annoyed, since she had expected the ransom to be higher. She told Henry that he must go at once and finish the business.

  The next day still no Flush, but a very long and very earnest letter from Browning on good and evil and social responsibility. What would he do if she, not Flush, were kidnapped? The inner knight in Browning came galloping forth. “I would pay every farthing I had in the world, and shoot with my own hand the receiver of it after a chase of fifty years—esteeming that to be a very worthy recompense for the trouble.” Not that he meant to be domineering in approach. “My own Ba, if I thought you could fear me, I think I should have the courage to give you up to-morrow!” His headache was chronic that week.

  By September 5, Flush was still not home. Henry had been far too lukewarm. If he didn’t get Flush back, she would go to the bandits tomorrow despite her brother’s telling her she’d be robbed and murdered. Three years ago after Flush was dognapped, the accursed Taylor had told her brother Daisy that they had been watching for Flush for two years and “that they had hoped to get hold of him the other day when he was out with the lady in the chair, as he had been several times lately.” “Conceive the audacity!” she wrote to Mary Mitford, “and the hardheartedness!! They must have guessed at my state of health by the very movement of the chair,—drawn for a few steps & then resting!—and to calculate coolly on such an opportunity of taking away the little dog of which I was obviously so fond!—I said so to my brothers; & they laughed. ‘Hardheartedness! Why they wd. have cut your own throat for five pounds’!—And that is true.”

  No longer “the lady in the chair,” she took Wilson and the two of them went by cab, asking at a public house where Taylor could be found. Everyone there knew who she was looking for before she mentioned Taylor’s name. “An unsolicited philanthropist ran before us to the house & out again to tell me that the great man ‘wasn’t at home!—but wouldn’t I get out?’ ” By then a group of men and boys had gathered around, and Wilson was in terror. Elizabeth decided not to get out of the cab, declining to go in to meet Mrs. Taylor. The philanthropist ran back with this message and then brought out to them “An immense feminine bandit . . fat enough to have had an easy conscience all her life,” who asked if she’d care to leave the cab and wait for Taylor to get home. She left a message instead: “That Mr. Taylor should keep his promise about the restoration of a dog which he had agreed to restore—& I begged her to induce him to go to Wimpole Street in the course of the day, & not defer it any longer.”

  Taylor actually did come to Wimpole Street. Elizabeth sent down the money even though he hadn’t brought the dog, as she knew it was the only way. But Alfred (Daisy) arrived and swore at Taylor calling him a thief, and the art-collecting, cigar-chomping bandit rushed out swearing they’d never see Flush again. “Angry I was with Alfred, & terrified for Flush,—seeing at a glance the probability of his head being cut off as the proper vengeance!” Now she came downstairs and was ready to go to Taylor wherever he was and save Flush at any price. “Everybody was crying out against me for being ‘quite mad’ & obstinate, & willful—I was called as many names as Mr. Taylor.” Finally Sette (brother number seven) said he’d go, and he took the money and was civil with Taylor and at eight o’clock Flush returned—dirty, thinner, and frightened. Counting in the six guineas for this ransom, she had by then paid twenty to the dog-stealers in all.

  On September 6, Elizabeth wrote to tell Browning that “Flush is found, & lying on the sofa.” Browning was so ill, the dizziness in his head was so bad, that not only would he miss a visit the next day, but when he received a letter about her trip to the banditti and the return of Flush, he had only one sentence of happiness for Flush’s return and only one to remark on her extraordinary trip into the underworld of the dog-snatchers.

  Three days later came the final crumbling of their old order. On September 9, on the spur of the moment, asking no one’s opinion and after the heat of summer which would have made it pleasurable, Moulton Barrett informed his family that they would leave the house on Wimpole Street for a month so that it could be properly aired and cleaned. Browning had predicted the possibility. “This night, an edict has gone out, and George is tomorrow to be on his way to take a house for a month either at Dover, Reigate, Tunbridge.” It happened “too soon & too sudden for us to set out on our Italian adventure now.” However, “you must think for both of us.”

  Browning did. “We must be married directly and go to Italy—I will go for a licence today and we can be married on Saturday. I will call tomorrow at 3 and arrange everything with you.” Browning accepted the authority she asked him to take. More firmness and insistence on his part would have been welcomed earlier. But it was obvious that the last thing he wanted to be, or to have her imagine him to be, was a dominating and threatening figure. Besides finding her father’s act “quite characteristic,” Browning felt “the departure with its bustle is not unfavourable.”

  They met in her room at Wimpole Street for the last time on September 11, and on September 12 in St. Marylebone Church they married. His signature was strong, hers looked as if it were written with a fish bone. The witnesses were his cousin James Silverthorne and her maid, Elizabeth Wilson.

  On the next day, a Sunday afternoon, he wrote to her that her proof of love to him had been made and that his whole life would be spent in attempting to furnish proof of his affection for her. “Do you feel what I mean, dearest? How you have dared and done all this, under my very eyes, for my only sake? I believed you would be capable of it—What then? What is a belief? My own eyes have s
een—my heart will remember!”

  On the morning after their marriage, Robert Browning “woke … quite well—quite free from the sensation in the head—I have not woken so, for two years perhaps—what have you been doing to me?”

  “Dearest, I am so glad!—I had feared that excitement’s telling on you quite in another way.” The excitement had told on her in quite another way. She had woken up that Sunday after the marriage with all her brothers in the house and coming into the room “laughing & talking & discussing this matter of leaving town” and also at the same time “two or three female friends of ours, from Herefordshire—and I did not dare to cry out against the noise, though my head seemed splitting in two (one half for each shoulder), I had such a morbid fear of exciting a suspicion.” Not only that, Mary Trepsack, with whom she was to dine the next day, came in. All this commotion—“It was like having a sort of fever.” In the middle of it, the church bells rang. “ ‘What bells are those?’ asked one of the provincials. ‘Marylebone Church bells’ said Henrietta, standing behind my chair.” And as she wrote this to Browning, having escaped the din of her household, who walked in, “Who do you think?—Mr. Kenyon.” And in his repaired specs, “looking as if his eyes reached to their rim all the way round; & one of the first words was ‘When did you see Browning?’ ”

  Among all the “emotion and confusion” of their wedding day, only one thought had come that was not a feeling. Of all the many women who had stood where she had stood marrying at Marylebone Church, perhaps not one of them “has had reasons strong as mine, for an absolute trust & devotion towards the man she married,—not one!” But perhaps they had less need of such a husband as Robert Browning. They “have that affectionate sympathy & support & presence of their nearest relations.” That “which failed to me.”

  50 WIMPOLE STREET. The London home of the widowed Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and his adult children. It has since been torn down.

  Elizabeth had to spend six more days at Wimpole Street after her marriage and without seeing her husband. The thought of visiting together under Moulton Barrett’s roof as man and wife was out of the question. The anxious week echoed the months she was forced to stay at Torquay after the death of Bro. Where Browning’s headache ended, Elizabeth’s began. His choice was made against no obstacle. His parents were informed, and whatever disappointment they might have felt about not being able to meet their daughter-in-law, not being able to have a public wedding for their gifted son, it was their son’s welfare that was most important to them, and his decision was theirs. Still, it was no wonder that his mother’s headaches increased as her son’s disappeared. The worry the family had at the time they seemed to have spared their son, or perhaps he spared his wife. Robert was taking responsibility for the life of a famous British poet and the great-granddaughter of Edward of Cinnamon Hill. What would happen to him in the eyes of the world if this former invalid were to die on their wedding voyage?

  Elizabeth’s anxieties centered on the consequences of the choice she had made on September 12, 1846. She began to experience them fully the next day. By September 14 she wrote that no one, not even John Kenyon, must be given an intimation of their marriage till after they were gone. “Remember that I shall be killed—it will be so infinitely worse than you can have an idea.” Was she exaggerating? Or did she know her father? She certainly knew John Kenyon, the blind Boyd, the painter Haydon, Anna Jameson.… Was her repeated image about being thrown out of windows should knowledge come to light excessive, or was it a metaphor for the physical violence that disobedience to her father could produce on Wimpole Street? “I told you once,” she had written to Robert eight months before, “that we held hands faster in this house for the weight over our heads.”

  As much as she feared her father’s finding out while she was still within reach, she felt the guilt of what her leaving was going to mean to him. On Monday evening, for the first time in a long while, her father walked into her room and spoke kindly to her, asked how she felt. Gone were the days in which he would emerge from his adjoining room every night and, holding her hand, lead her in spontaneous evening prayers. How did she feel?

  “Once I heard of his saying of me that I was ‘the purest woman he ever knew.’ ” Her response to this news had been to smile, or, she believed, she actually laughed out loud. “Because I understood perfectly what he meant by that—viz—that I had not troubled him with the iniquity of love-affairs, or any impropriety of seeming to think about being married. But now the whole sex will go down with me to the perdition of faith in any of us. See the effect of my wickedness!—‘Those women!’ ”

  What preoccupied her was the letter she was going to write to him. She had many letters to write, but to him, what was she going to say? Papa, I am married—I hope you will not be too displeased? She composed part of the letter to Browning: “With the exception of this act, I have submitted to the least of your wishes all my life long—Set the life against the act, & forgive me, for the sake of the daughter you once loved.” Surely she can say that and “then remind him of the long suffering I have suffered.—and entreat him to pardon the happiness which has come at last—.”

  She knew his reaction. “He will wish in return, that I had died years ago!—For the storm will come & endure—And at last, perhaps, he will forgive us—it is my hope.”

  She had also to compose a wedding advertisement to be published after they left, and she wanted to do it without a date. Should it include the fact that Browning was the author of Paracelsus, the fact that she was the eldest daughter of Moulton Barrett of Jamaica or Cinnamon Hill, Jamaica, as well as Wimpole Street? Should Wimpole Street include the number 50?

  This announcement was very important to the couple. For finally there is a myth to debunk. Elizabeth Barrett, forty-year-old spinster, and Robert Browning, thirty-four-year-old bachelor, both of age and certifiably in their right minds, did not elope!

  On August 22, Mrs. Jameson had made a joke. Well, if no one could convince her to go to the continent with a companion, why then “there is only an elopement for you.”

  “I was obliged to laugh,” Elizabeth wrote to Robert. But surely no one was going to use the word elopement to describe the event. “We shall be in such an obvious exercise of Right by Daylight.”

  Browning’s response the next day: “ ‘Elopement’! Let them call it ‘felony’ or ‘burglary’—so long as they don’t go to church with us, and propose my health after breakfast!”

  But they weren’t running away in order to marry. They were exercising their Christian rights as adults. They married secretly. Henrietta, having once had her knees brought to the floor, carried on a love affair under her father’s nose. But if he found out, she had the ability and the nerve to run. It had taken the courtship for Elizabeth to develop the strength to walk. She was a consenting adult. “When I hear people say that circumstances are against them, I always retort, . . you mean that your will is not with you! I believe in the will—I have faith in it.”

  On Wednesday she reported that the family was to leave for the house at Little Bookham, which was six miles from the railway, on Monday. She seemed to consider going on to Bookham with them as she hadn’t written half her letters. She “began to write a letter to Papa this morning, & could do nothing but cry, & looked so pale thereupon, that everybody wondered what could be the matter.” She assured Robert she was better now, but should she go with the family or was it possible she could write her letters from the road? She and Wilson had packed lightly. But the bags that had to be sent later, to what post office should they go? His mother was ill; would it be better to wait on her account?

  “The way will be to leave at once,” Browning wrote back. His mother would feel worse if they stayed and got into trouble. “Take no desk . . I will take a large one.”

  On Thursday, Elizabeth’s handwriting showed her fatigue and weakness. She told Robert that she was “so tired” that the earliest she could go would be Saturday. On Friday, her handwriting was
again strained as she wrote a few sentences, asking for the time of the express train. For she realized his hour was wrong, even in the midst of what she called her confusion.

  Friday night, September 18, was the last night Elizabeth would spend at Wimpole Street. The letters she could write were written, including the one to her father. Tomorrow she and Wilson and Flush would leave. It would have to be at an hour late enough not to compromise Arabel, who slept on the couch in her room. There could be no goodbyes, not even to her sisters. “Your letters to me I take with me, let the ‘ounces’ cry out aloud, ever so. I tried to leave them, & I could not. That is, they would not be left: it was not my fault—I will not be scolded.”

  And she ended this extraordinary correspondence, “Is this my last letter to you, ever dearest?—Oh,—if I loved you less . . a little, little less.”

  In the postscript she added how perfect Wilson had been to her through this hectic time, Wilson, whom she had once called timid. “I begin to think that none are so bold as the timid, when they are fairly roused.”

  Something crucial had happened to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the week since her marriage, and her time at Wimpole Street as a married woman had allowed her to dwell on it. She became fully aware of the repercussions of her choice. The ultimate knowledge of the last letter was that, in taking responsibility for her life, she took responsibility as well for the pain she was going to cause. “It is dreadful . . dreadful . . to have to give pain here by a voluntary act—for the first time in my life.” Before she left her father’s house to live her own life, to see the mountains and rivers for herself—and before her marriage was consummated—she had already entered the world.

  RIDING AN ENCHANTED HORSE