Five months before her death, Lady Webster was very full of the terrible deaths which had lately occurred from railway accidents, and, on leaving home, she said to Madame Bergeret, "Here is this paper, and if I should be killed by an accident or not live to come home, you may read it; but at any rate keep it for me, and perhaps, if I come back, some day I may want it again." Lady Webster came back well and did not ask for the paper, and when she died, it was so sudden, a few minutes after talking quite cheerfully to Madame Bergeret, that in the shock she remembered nothing about it, and it was only long afterwards, when they were making a great fuss about there being no will, that she suddenly thought of the paper entrusted to her, and, when it was read, found Lady Webster had left her all she possessed.
Madame Bergeret dying herself about a year afterwards, left everything back to the Webster family. She was a quiet primitive old woman, who used to sit in the background at work in Lady Webster's sitting-room.
After my return home in the autumn of 1867, my mother was terribly ill, so that our journey abroad was a very anxious one to look forward to. I tried, however, to face it quite cheerily. I have read in an American novel somewhere, "It is no use to pack up any worries to take with you; you can always pick up plenty on the way;" and I have always found it true.
To MISS WRIGHT and JOURNAL.
"Nice, Nov. 17, 1867.—My dear Aunt Sophy will be delighted to see this date. So far all our troubles and anxieties are past, and the sweet Mother certainly not the worse, perhaps rather better for all her fatigues. It is an extraordinary case, to be one day lying in a sort of vision on the portals of another world, the next up and travelling.
"When we reached Paris she was terribly exhausted, then slept for thirty-six hours like a child, almost without waking. At the Embassy we were urged to go on to Rome, all quiet and likely to subside into a dead calm; but so much snow had fallen on Mont Cenis, that in Mother's weak state we could not risk that passage, and were obliged to decide upon coming round by the coast. On Monday we reached Dijon, where twenty-four hours' sleep again revived the Mother. It was fiercely cold, but Tuesday brightened into a glorious winter's day, and I had a most enchanting walk through sunshine and bracing air to Fontaines. It is picturesque French country, a winding road with golden vines and old stone crosses, and a distance of oddly-shaped purple hills. Fontaines itself is a large village, full of mouldering mediæval fragments, stretching up a hillside, which becomes steeper towards the top, and is crowned by a fine old church, a lawn with groups of old walnut-trees, and the remains of the château where St. Bernard was born. Over the entrance is a statue of him, and within, the room of his birth is preserved as a chapel. The view from the churchyard is lovely, and the graves are marked by ancient stone crosses and bordered with flowers. Within are old tombs and inscriptions—'Ce git la très haute et très puissante dame,' &c.
"We came on to Arles by the quick night-train, and stayed there as usual two days and a half—days of glaring white sirocco and no colour, and at Arles we found ourselves at once in Southern heat, panting, without fires and with windows wide open."
