Part 21 (2/2)

So for ten days she lay in the little London bedroom, looking out over London trees, her heart pining for the day--the spring day which would surely come--when she and he would return to Stocks together and their ills would be forgotten. ”Ah,” she wrote to him in his nursing home on March 18, ”it is too trying this imprisonment--but it ought only to be a few days more!”

And indeed, her release was nearer than she knew. Did she not know it?

In mortal illness there are secrets of the inner consciousness which those who tend, however lovingly, can never wholly penetrate, but as her mind advanced ever nearer to the verge, one felt that it was swept, ever and anon, by far-off gusts of poetry, finding expression in words and fragments long possessed and intimately loved. Such were the ”Last Lines” of Emily Bronte, of which, two days before the end, she repeated the great second verse to Dorothy, saying with the old pa.s.sionate gesture of the hands, ”_That's_ what I am thinking of!”

O G.o.d within my breast, Almighty, ever-present Deity!

Life--that in me has rest, As I--undying Life--have power in thee!

Then, early on the morning of the 24th, there came an hour of crisis, when life fought with death for victory; but, before the end, ”she opened her dear eyes wide, her dear brown eyes, like the eyes of a young woman, and looked out into the unknown with a most wonderful look on her face. I think that at that moment her soul crossed the bar.” So wrote Dorothy, the only witness of that look; she will carry the memory of it in her heart to the end.

We buried her in the quiet churchyard at Aldbury, within sight of the long sweep of hill and the beechwoods that she had loved so well. Her old friend the Rector, Canon Wood, laid her to rest, while another friend for whom she had had a deep regard, Dean Inge, spoke of her in simple and moving words, naming her before us all as ”perhaps the greatest Englishwoman of our time.”

There were not wanting, indeed, signs that many in England so regarded her. It was as though she had lived through the period, some ten years before, when the public had tired somewhat of her books and younger writers had to a large extent supplanted her, until, towards the end, she found herself taken to the heart of her countrymen in a manner that had hardly been her lot in the years of her greatest literary fame. They loved her not only for all that she had done, but for what she was, divining in her, besides her intellectual gifts, besides even the tenderness and sympathy of her character, that indomitable courage that carried her through to the end, over difficulties and obstacles at which they only dimly guessed. They loved her for wearing herself out, at sixty-seven, in visits to the battle-fields of France, that she might bear her witness to her country's deeds; they loved her for all the joy that she had given to little children. Two months before her death the Lord Chancellor, making himself the mouthpiece of this feeling, had asked her to act as one of the first seven women magistrates of England, and later still, when she was already nearing the end, the University of Edinburgh invited her to receive the Honorary Degree of LL.D. These acts of recognition gave her a pa.s.sing pleasure, and when she herself was beyond the reach of pleasure, or of pain, it stirred the hearts of those who went with her, for the last time, to the little village graveyard to see awaiting her, at the drive gate, a file of stalwart police, claiming their right to escort the coffin of a Justice of the Peace.

Many indeed were the tributes paid to her memory, whether in the letters received after her death or in the words uttered by Lord Milner and other old friends at the unveiling of her medallion in the Hall of the Pa.s.smore Edwards Settlement[41] (July 1922). Of these one only shall be quoted here, from a letter written to Mr. Ward by her dear and intimate friend of so many years' standing, Andre Chevrillon:

...”I had no friend in England whom I loved and respected more, none to whom I owed so much. I have often thought that if I love your country as I do--and indeed I have sometimes been accused of being bia.s.sed in my views of England--it was partly due to the personal grat.i.tude which I always felt for the kindness of her greeting and hospitality when I came to England as a young man. The same generous welcome was extended to other young Frenchmen who have since written on England, and there is no doubt that it has helped to create long before the War a bond between our two countries.

”We all felt the spell of her n.o.ble and generous spirit. She struck one as the most perfect example of the English lady of the old admirable governing cla.s.s, with her ever-active and efficient public spirit--of the highest English moral and intellectual culture. Though I had come to England several times before I met her--some thirty years ago--I had not yet formed a true idea of what that culture would be--though I had read of it in my uncle Taine's _Notes on England_. It was a revelation, though I must say I have never met one since with quite so complete a mental equipment, and that showed quite to the same degree those wonderful and, to others, beneficent qualities of radiant vitality, spirit and generosity. (It seems that these words must recur again and again when one speaks of her). She was one of those of whom a nation may well be proud.

”I remember our impression when her first great book came to us in Paris. Here was the true successor of George Eliot; she continued the great English tradition of insight into the spiritual world.

The events in her novels were those of the soul--how remote from those which can be adapted from other writers' novels for the cinema!--The main forces that drove the characters like Fate were Ideas. She could _dramatise_ ideas. I do not know of any novelist that gives one to the same degree the feeling that Ideas are living forces, more enduring than men, and in a sense more real than men--forces that move through them, taking hold of them and driving them like an unseen, higher Power.”

On her tombstone we inscribed the lines of Clough, which she herself had written on the last page of _Robert Elsmere_:

Others, I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see, And, they forgotten and unknown, Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead had sown.

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