When my wife and I left the Island, late in 1918, Lady Ritchie was one of the last friends we saw. She came to our gate to say good-bye. She was then over eighty-one. How many of my friends are more than eighty! The most active youth is ninety-three! He also is an Isle of Wighter. Lady Ritchie was an Isle of Wighter half of every year. She had first visited Freshwater with her father when she was a child, and her association with it had never ceased since then. For many years past she had a little house there. "The Porch" it was called. The colder half of the year she lived in London, in St. Leonard's Terrace, Chelsea; the warmer half at "The Porch." In 1918, when Chelsea Hospital, the home of the red-coated Old Pensioners, was bombed by German aircraft, she had a narrow escape. Her house faces the hospital grounds, and every window pane in the front was shattered. She was sitting in her drawing-room at the time, but was unhurt by the flying glass and unruffled by the flashing and crashing all about her. She was then approaching her eighty-first birthday. But ladies of eighty-one, however unconquerable, do not go through such an experience without nerve strain. When I saw her again, a few weeks later, she, for the first time, seemed conscious that age was advancing upon her. The pleasant little gatherings became fewer; she was much fatigued after them. But her spirits were as high as ever, and her thought as kindly.
When the United States entered the war, she came to me with a jubilant letter from an old friend of hers in New York. Her friend had written, "I rejoice that you and I are now fighting together, side by side."
"Yes, yes," said Lady Ritchie, reading the letter to me, "think of it! Two old ladies of eighty fighting shoulder to shoulder!" And straightway she made a little American flag which she hung at "The Porch" door, alongside a Union Jack.
She was, I think, the last of that once considerable group whose members always addressed, and alluded to, the first Lord Tennyson as "Alfred." And she was as full of stories of him as an egg is of meat. The last time we passed Farringford together, she said:
"I like to think of the expression on Alfred's face when he was told that a new boy-in-buttons, a country lad whom he had just taken into service, answered the doorbell one day, and saw a tall, sedate gentleman standing there.
"'Tell your master that the Prince Consort has called,' he said to the boy.
"'Oh, crickey!' exclaimed the youngster, who fled to the innermost parts of the house.
"Somehow, I forget how, the message was conveyed to Alfred, who found the Prince waiting at the door, still laughing at the boy's consternation. The Island life was fairly simple in those days."
And what is left of that old life is gracious, kindly, hospitable. In no place in any part of the earth have I met with greater kindliness than in Freshwater. That is why I am fond of the West Wight and have been there so often. I wonder if ever I shall go there again. Once I crossed the Atlantic to go there and only there. And now, to-day that gracious lady of the old time has gone, never to return. How kindly she was, and gentle! What sweet dignity and thoughtfulness, a manner that was not put on and off like a gown. It was innate. There are few left in the world like that dear lady. The present generation calls them old-fashioned. Theirs was indeed an old fashion, and the world is poorer because it does not know how to match it. Their spirit was not the spirit of the age as we see it at the dawn of the third decade of the Twentieth Century. Farewell, dear lady, you were Thackeray's finest work!