One cannot read the story of her latter days, of her patience, her sweetness, and gratitude, without emotion. There is family trouble, we are not told of what nature. She falls ill. Her nieces find her in her dressing-gown, like an invalid, in an arm-chair in her bedroom; but she gets up and greets them, and, pointing to seats which had been arranged for them by the fire, says: 'There is a chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, Caroline.' But she is too weak to talk, and Cassandra takes them away.
At last they persuade her to go to Winchester, to a well-known doctor there.
'It distressed me,' she says, in one of her last, dying letters, 'to see Uncle Henry and William Knight, who kindly attended us, riding in the rain almost the whole way. We expect a visit from them to-morrow, and hope they will stay the night; and on Thursday, which is a confirmation and a holiday, we hope to get Charles out to breakfast. We have had but one visit from him, poor fellow, as he is in the sick room…. God bless you, dear E.; if ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed as I have been….'
But nursing does not cure her, nor can the doctor save her to them all, and she sinks from day to day. To the end she is full of concern for others.
'As for my dearest sister, my tender, watchful, indefatigable nurse has not been made ill by her exertions,' she writes. 'As to what I owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more.'
One can hardly read this last sentence with dry eyes. It is her parting blessing and farewell to those she had blessed all her life by her presence and her love—that love which is beyond death; and of which the benediction remains, not only spoken in words, but by the ever-present signs and the tokens of those lifetimes which do not end for us as long as we ourselves exist.
They asked her when she was near her end if there was anything she wanted.
'Nothing but death,' she said. Those were her last words. She died on the 18th of July, 1817, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral, where she lies not unremembered.