I should have gone to Ford afterwards, but our Lady only died on Monday, and it was late on Wednesday night before I heard that she was to be buried on Thursday afternoon, so to arrive in time was impossible. Miss Lindsay wrote to me how her coffin was carried on the shoulders of her own labourers to the churchyard, how all the village and all her tenantry came to her funeral, with the few intimate friends within reach, and how Helmore’s music was sung. It was well the end was at Ford. Highcliffe is a rapidly changing place, and it has already passed to comparative strangers; but at Ford she will always be the Lady Waterford, “the good, the dear Lady Waterford.”
There our Lady rests, within view of her own Cheviots, surrounded by the affectionate Border people, to whom their “Border Queen” was their greatest pride and interest and joy. An aching void will remain in our hearts through life, but it is only for our poor selves. When one thinks of her, earth fades and vanishes, and if—when one is alone—one allows oneself to think, to dwell upon all the glory of what she was, an all-pervading sense of peace and holiness comes upon one, and one seems, for the moment, almost to pass into the Land of Beulah—into the higher life, without worry or vexation, where she is.
When her things were being distributed, the distributors were surprised to hear that “the odd man” most earnestly begged for something: it was for her old sealskin jacket. It was thought a most singular request at first, but he urged it very much: he should “treasure the jacket as long as ever he lived.”
He had been walking by her donkey-chair in the road, when they found a female tramp lying in the ditch, very ill indeed. Lady Waterford got out of her chair and made the man help her to lift the poor woman into it. Then she took off her own jacket, and put it upon the sick woman, and walked home by the side of the chair, tending and comforting her all the way. “But it was not my Lady’s putting her jacket on the woman that I cared about,” said the man, “but that she did not consider her jacket the least polluted by having been worn by the tramp; she wore it herself afterwards as if nothing had happened.”
XXVII
SOCIAL REMINISCENCES
“Napoleon used to say that what was most fatal to a general was the knack of combining objects into pictures. A good officer, he said, never makes pictures; he sees objects, as through a field-glass, exactly as they are.”—Macmillan, No. 306.
“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block, he will stumble on a straw.”—Swift.