“It seemed most strange thus to go to the Deanery again—that the doors closed for six years were opened wide by death, by the death of one who had always remained my friend, and whom no efforts of others could alienate. Red cloth showed that royalty was coming, and I went at once to the library, where an immense crowd of cousins were assembled. As I went down the little staircase with Kate Vaughan, four ladies in deep mourning passed to the dining-room, carrying immense wreaths of lovely white flowers: they were the Queen and three of her daughters. The Queen seemed in a perfect anguish of grief. She remained for a short time alone with the coffin, I believe knelt by it, and was then taken to the gallery overhanging the Abbey.
“Soon the immense procession set out by the cloisters, and on entering the church, turned so as to pass beneath the Queen and then up the nave from the west end. The church was full of people: I felt as if I only saw the wind lifting the long garlands of white flowers as the coffin moved slowly on, and Arthur’s pathetic face of childlike bewilderment. The music was lovely, but in that vast choir one longed for a village service. It was not so in the second part, when we moved through one long sob from the poor of Westminster who lined the way, to the little chapel behind the tomb of Henry VII., where the service was indescribably simple and touching.
“The procession of mourners went round the Abbey from the choir by a longer way to the chapel on account of the people. As it passed the corner of the transept, the strange little figure of Mr. Carlyle slipped out. He had been very fond of Augusta, was full of feeling for Arthur, and seemed quite unconscious of who and where he was. He ran along, before the chief mourners, by the side of the coffin, and in the chapel itself he stood at the head of the grave, making the strangest ejaculations at intervals through the service.”
Arthur stood at the head of the grave with his hands on the heads of Thomas Bruce’s two children. When the last flowers fell into the grave, a single voice sang gloriously, “Write, saith the Spirit.” Then we moved back again to the nave, and, standing at the end, in a voice of most majestic pathos, quivering, yet audible through all that vast space, Arthur himself gave the blessing. “The Queen was waiting for him upon the threshold as he went into the house, and led him herself into his desolate home.”
I insert some poor lines which I wrote “In Memoriam.”
“Lately together in a common grief
Our Royal mistress with her people wept,
And reverently were fairest garlands laid
Where our beloved one from her sufferings slept.
Seeing the sunshine through a mist of tears
Fall on the bier of her we loved so well,
Each, in the memory sweet of happy years,
Some kindly word or kindlier thought could tell.
And tenderly, with sorrow-trembling voice,
All sought their comfort in a meed of love,
Unworthy echoes from each saddened heart
Seeking their share in the great loss to prove.
For she so lately gathered into rest
Was one who smoothed this stony path of ours,
And beating down the thorns along the way,
Aye left it strewn and sweet with summer flowers.
In the true candour of a noble heart,
She never sought another’s fault to show,
But rather thought there must be in herself
Some secret failure which she did not know.