"It was then," said her doctor, "that her expression lost all its anxiety. Death had no terror for her. She was almost radiant." The serenity of her countenance remained unchanged, and to her last moment she was as one preparing for a festival.
After a pause she said, "Tell me how long you think it possible that I should live." Dr. Squires said, "You might live two days, but it is quite impossible that you should live longer than that." She at once asked for writing materials, and with a firm hand, as if she were well, she wrote a telegraphic despatch bidding Madame de Trafford to come to her at once. (The office was then closed, and when it was opened, it was already too late to send the despatch.) Then Dr. Squires kindly and wisely said, "I fear you have little time to lose, and if you wish to make any changes in your will, you had better make them at once." My sister answered, "Oh, I must alter everything. I never thought it possible that I should die before my aunt, and I wish to leave things so that my death will make no difference to her." The doctor, seeing a great change coming on, was afraid to leave the room even to get a sheet of paper, and he wrote upon a scrap of paper which he picked up from the floor. My sister then made a very simple will, leaving everything to her (Protestant) aunt, Miss Paul, except her interest in Park Lodge and a chest of plate which she left to Francis, and her claims to a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds,[379] which she left to me.
When Esmeralda had dictated the page containing these bequests, her doctor wisely made her sign it in the presence of her servants before she proceeded to dictate anything else. Thus the first portion of her will is valid, but before she had come to the end of another page containing small legacies to the Servites, to the Nuns of the Precious Blood, &c., the power of signature had failed, and it was therefore valueless.
Esmeralda then said almost playfully, "You had better send for the Nuns of the Precious Blood, for they would never forgive me, even after all is over, if they had not been sent for," and a maid went off in a cab to fetch the Abbess Pierina. It was then that a priest arrived from Farm Street to administer extreme unction, and Dr. Squires, seeing that he could do nothing more, and that my sister was already past observing who was present, went away.
The Abbess Pierina says that she arrived at the house about nine o'clock, and saw at once that Esmeralda was dying. A priest was praying by the bedside. She remained standing at the foot of the bed for about ten minutes, then she went up to Esmeralda, who said, "I am dying." A few minutes afterwards, in a loud and clear voice, she called "Auntie," and instantly fell back and died.
Thus the day which she looked for as her Sabbath and high day came to her, and she passed to the rest beyond the storm—beyond the bounds of doubt or controversy—to the company of those she justly honoured, and of some whom she never learnt to honour here, in the many mansions of an all-reconciling world. Let us not look for the living amongst the dead. She exchanged her imperfect communion with God here for its full fruition in the peace of that Sabbath which knows no evening.
During the whole of the last terrible hours our poor deaf aunt was in the room, but she had sunk down in her terror and anguish upon the chair which was nearest the door as she came in, and thence she never moved. She never had strength or courage to approach the bed: she saw all that passed, but she heard nothing.
Soon after all was over, the Abbess Pierina came down to my aunt, and revealed—what none of her family had known before—that Esmeralda had long been an Oblate Sister of the Precious Blood, and she begged leave to dress her in the habit of the Order. All the furniture of the room was cleared away or draped with white, and the bed was left standing alone, surrounded night and day by tall candles burning in silver sconces, with a statue of "Our Lady of Sorrows" at the head, and at the foot the great crucifix from the oratory. Esmeralda was clothed in a long black dress, which she had ordered for her journey to Jerusalem, but had never worn, and round her waist was the scarlet girdle of the Precious Blood. On her head was a white crape cap and a white wreath, as for a novice nun.
As soon as Aunt Eleanor was able to think, she sent for her sister, Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, who arrived at 11 A.M. She, as a strong Protestant, said that she could never describe how terrible the next three days were to her. All day long a string of carriages was ceaselessly pouring up the street, and a concourse of people through the house, nuns of the Precious Blood being posted on the different landings to show them where to go. Each post brought letters from all kinds of people they had never heard of before, asking to have anything as a memorial, even a piece of old newspaper which Esmeralda had touched.
On the day after we arrived at Holmhurst from Germany (Sunday 31st), I went up to try to comfort my broken-hearted aunt at the house in Grosvenor Street. The rooms in which I had last seen Esmeralda looked all the more intensely desolate from being just finished, new carpets and chintzes everywhere, only the last pane of the fernery in the back drawing-room not yet put in. My aunt came in trembling all over. It was long before she was able to speak: then she wrung her hands. "Oh, it was so sudden—it was so sudden," she said; and then she became more collected, and talked for hours of all that had passed. Those present said that for the whole of the first day she sat in a stupor, with her eyes fixed on vacancy, and never spoke or moved, or seemed to notice any one who went in or out.