III
Perhaps the "Spirits" resented being abandoned by her in summary fashion; perhaps she had overtaxed her energies addressing outdoor meetings in all weathers. At any rate, and whatever the cause, while she was travelling in the country during the winter of 1860, Lola Montez was suddenly stricken down by a mysterious illness. As it baffled the hospital doctors, she had to be taken back to New York. There, instead of getting better, she gradually got worse, developing consumption, followed by partial paralysis.
"What a study for the thoughtless; what a sermon on the inevitable result of human vanity!" was the ghoulish comment of a scribbler.
Rufus Blake, an entrepreneur, under whose banner she had once starred, has some reminiscences of her at this period. "She lived," he says, "in strict retirement, reading religious books, and steadily, calmly, hopefully preparing for death, fully convinced that consumption had snapped the pillars of her life and that she was soon to make her final exit."
After an interval, word of Lola's collapse reached England by means of a cutting in a theatrical paper. There it appears to have touched a long slumbering maternal chord. "Mrs. Craigie," says a paragraphist, "suddenly arrived in America, anxious, as next of kin, to secure her daughter's property. On discovering, however, that none existed, she hurried back again, leaving behind her a sum of three pounds for medicine and other necessities."
Cast off by her fair-weather friends, bereft of her looks, poverty-stricken, and ravaged by an insidious illness, the situation of Lola Montez was, during that winter of 1860, one to excite pity among the most severe of judges. Under duress, even her new found trust in Providence began to falter. Was prayer, she wondered forlornly, to fail her like everything else? Suddenly, however, and when things were at their darkest, a helping hand was offered. One bitter evening, as she sat brooding in the miserable lodging where she had secured temporary shelter, she was visited by a Mrs. Buchanan, claiming her as a friend of the long distant past. The years fell back; and, with an effort, Lola recognised in the visitor a girl, now a mature matron, whom she had last met in Montrose.
The sympathy of Mrs. Buchanan, shared to the full by her husband, a prosperous merchant, was of a practical description. Although familiar with the many lapses in Lola's career, they counted for nothing beside the fact that she was in sore need. Bygones were bygones. Insisting that the stricken woman should leave her wretched surroundings, Mrs. Buchanan took her into her own well-appointed house, provided doctors and nurses, and did all that was possible to smooth her path. Deeply religious herself, she soon won back her faltering faith, and summoned a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Hawks, to prepare her for the inevitable and rapidly approaching end.
A smug little booklet, The Story of a Penitent: Lola Montez, published under the auspices of the "Protestant Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge," was afterwards written by this shepherd. Since his name did not appear on the title page, he was able to make several unctuous references to himself.
"Most acceptable," he says in one characteristic passage, "were his ministrations. Refreshing, too, to his own spirit were his interviews with her."
"It was," he continues, "in the latter part of 1860 that I received a message from the unhappy woman so well known to the public under the name of Lola Montez, earnestly requesting me to visit her and minister to her spiritual wants. She had been stricken down by a paralysis of her left side. For some days she was unconscious, and her death seemed to be at hand. She had, however, rallied, and a most benevolent Christian female, who had been her schoolmate in Scotland in the days of her girlhood, and knew her well, had stepped forward and provided for the temporal comfort of the afflicted companion of her childhood. The real name of Lola Montez was Eliza G., and she was of respectable family in Ireland, where she was born."
But neither the Rev. Mr. Hawks, with his oiliness and smug piety, nor Mrs. Buchanan, with her true womanly sympathy and understanding, could bring Lola Montez back to health, any more than—for all their pills and purges—could the doctors and nurses round her bed. She lay there, day after day, aware of their presence, but unable to move or speak. Yet, able to think. Thoughts crowded upon her in a series of flashing pictures; a bewildering phantasmagoria, coming out of the shadows, and beckoning to her. Childhood's memories of India; hot suns, marching men, palanquins and elephants; Montrose and a dour Calvinism; Bath and Sir Jasper Nicolls; love's young dream; Lieutenant James and the runaway marriage in Dublin; another experience of India's coral strand; kind-hearted Captain Craigie and hard-hearted George Lennox; the Consistory Court proceedings; fiasco at Her Majesty's Theatre; Ranelagh and Lumley; wanderjahre and odyssey; Paris and Dujarier; Ludwig and the steps of a throne; passion and poetry; intrigues and liaisons; Cornet Heald and Patrick Hull; voyages from the old world to the new; mining camps and backwoods; palaces and conventicles; glittering triumphs and abject failures. And now, gasping and struggling for breath, the end.
The sands were running out. The days slipped away, and, with them, the last vitality of the woman who had once been so full of life and the joy of living.
The doctors did what they could. But it was very little, for Lola Montez was beyond their help. The end was fast at hand. It came with merciful swiftness. On January 17, 1861, she turned her face to the wall and drew a last shuddering breath.
"I am very tired," she whispered.
The funeral took place two days later. "Accompanied by some of our most respected citizens and their families," says an eye-witness, "the cortège left the house of Mrs. Buchanan for Green-Wood cemetery."
"The Rev. Dr. Hawks," adds a second account, "was constantly at the bedside of Lola Montez, and gave her the benefit of his pastoral care as freely as if she had been a member of his own flock. He conducted her obsequies in an impressive fashion; and Mr. Brown, his assistant, who had himself attended so many funerals and weddings in his day, was seen to wipe the tears from his eyes, as he heard the reverend gentleman remark to Mrs. Buchanan that he had never met with an example of more genuine penitence."
"Is not this a brand plucked from the burning?" enquired the Rev. Mr. Hawks, as he stood addressing the company assembled round the grave. He himself was assured that the description was thoroughly applicable to the woman lying there.
"I never saw," he declared, "a more humble penitent. When I prayed with her, nothing could exceed the fervour of her devotion; and never have I had a more watchful and attentive hearer when I read the Scriptures.... If ever a repentant soul loathed past sin, I believe hers did."
Possibly, since it could scarcely have been Mrs. Buchanan, it was this clerical busybody who was responsible for the inscription on Lola's headstone:
"MRS. ELIZA GILBERT
DIED
January 17, 1861.
An odd mask under which to shelter the identity of the gifted woman who, given in baptism the names Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna, had flashed across three continents as Lola Montez, Countess of Landsfeld.