“My heart is wrung with grief. My dear, dear father is, we believe, sinking. I am going now to him, and shall stay in the house. He likes to have my hand in his, and to speak faintly from time to time of my mother. He tells me I alone can soothe him as she did. He is very peaceful, and suffering no pain, but he is too weak to help himself in the least.”
“Mar. 10.
“I am so sorry to know you are again ill. It makes me sigh. As soon as I can I will call, but I am almost breaking down from nervous prostration.
“My Liverpool journey, though likely to be useful, was trying. It is full of my dear father.
“You cannot imagine how large a blank he has left in my life. Only time can fill it up. He was the one person to whom I was necessary, and to whom my presence always carried pleasure, and I cannot get into the way of remembering that he is not.”
“Mar. 13.
“I am not well. Some old symptoms have returned, though not in a bad form. I can get through the day, but my evenings and nights are distressing. I am in a sort of anguish which does actually seem to affect my heart. Yet I would not recall my dear, dear father if I could. But nature must have some expression, and I really loved him. Besides, I was nearest to him and closest to him! Many things we understand better now.”
Knowing so well the power of a mother’s love, this daughter had grown into that mother’s power of giving herself out, a power that is universally felt as her chief characteristic. Here is a description of her as she was at the time when this portrait is drawn—
“I think, in those early days, it was her sweet and motherly way of drawing each one of us to her, and caring for each particular person’s concerns, and remembering them, which impressed me more than anything else, excepting indeed her very encouraging manner. She lost no opportunity of saying a loving word of praise, and it would be accompanied by a motherly hug, which warmed one’s heart for a long time. That comfortable, loving manner was a great power among teachers and pupils. Many a girl who had given trouble in one department or another, would go out of the parlour, after a talk with Miss Buss, thoroughly softened and helped into a right frame of mind.”
This motherly kindness won the devotion of a lifetime from the lonely girl so early called to face the world, and Caroline Fawcett well earned her great privilege of being one of the little band whose love soothed the last hours of the friend who had been so much in their lives. Her latest thought, as she writes on that sad New Year’s Eve, is the same as the first of so many years before—