Since the appearance of my first volume,[192] “the Empress’s Church”—St. Michael’s, Farnborough—has received an addition. While the Empress was on her unwontedly long cruise in the Thistle during part of May and the whole of June and July, 1910, a striking scene was being enacted within the walls of St. Michael’s. For some months the quiet which ordinarily reigns in the Mausoleum was disturbed. Sculptors and masons—French and English—appeared, masses of stone were hauled into the church, and the sound of mallets and chisels reverberated through the great crypt, which extends beneath the choir and transepts. Entering the crypt, I gazed at the transformation which had been effected. I saw a third tomb! It is a graceful arch, rising from the back of and surmounting the high altar. All who have visited the Catacombs at Rome will recall the “table” tomb and the “arched” tomb, and will not need to be told that the latter, from its shape, is the arcosolium. These tombs differ only in the form of the surmounting recess. In the “table” tomb the recess above, essential for the reception of the entombed body, is square. In the arcosolium, a form of later date, the recess for the tomb is semicircular, as at Farnborough. These modes of interment were adopted by the early Christians. I leave it to the archæologists to tell us whether or no the Empress Eugénie’s arcosolium is unique in this country. I cannot recall anything resembling it. A space behind the altar is occupied by a massive block of masonry, with a flat surface, flush with the side walls from which the arch springs, and upon this the Empress’s sarcophagus (assuming it should take that form, and so harmonize with the granite tombs of the Emperor and the Prince Imperial) will rest.
Here, then,
“In God’s own time, but not before,”
Eugénie de Montijo, Empress, will sleep her last long sleep with her beloved Dead—Exiles all.
The historian who comes after us will find in this place of Napoleonic sepulture ample materials for a moving chapter. He will have to re-narrate, with the assistance of my modest records, the amazing rise and the more astounding downfall of an Emperor and the deplorable end of a Prince. But he will “use his best ink” in the endeavour to limn a faithful portrait of her who held the world in thrall by her beauty, who has endured her martyrdom with a resignation and fortitude so admirable as to have compelled the affectionate solicitude of the nation whose honoured guest she has been for forty-one sorrowful, yet not wholly gloomy, years.
As I write these closing lines the air is full of processional melody, the Town gay with colour. I think, not of the Empress, when she, like our own beloved Albert Edward and Alexandra, was the centre of adulation, but of the Woman, in the not unkindly winter of her life, kneeling before a tomb—her own. It is All Saints’ Day—the Jour des Morts[193]—and in the crypt she mingles her prayers with the Benedictines’ “pour tous les fidèles défunts.” So I had seen her aforetime, and some words I heard then will not be kept back when the sluices of memory are opened:
... And now, as in a strain of music, the theme comes back again, and we end with the first notes with which we began, so, if our thoughts have for a while run in another channel, they fall back into the great deep of sweet sorrow, and, I will say, of thanksgiving, for that noble, princely youth who has passed before our eyes with the brightness of a ray of light, and from this world has disappeared for ever.... What a morning in life it was when that beautiful youth entered into this world! What a mother’s joy! If ever son was worthy of a mother’s love, it was he. And if ever mother loved a son as an only son can be loved, it was she. What a desolation now! The solitary home. All alone. Yet not alone; for they who believe are never lonely. They have come unto “Mount Sion, and to the City of the Living God; to the company of many thousands of angels; to the Church of the first-born, who are written in the heavens; to God, the Judge of all; to the spirits of the just made perfect”; to the great cloud of witnesses ever about them. And as the Mother, who, when her Divine Son was in the grave, looked on with certain confidence to the glory of the Resurrection, to the future recognition in personal identity, and in the restored bonds of Mother and of Son in all the perfection of maternal and filial love glorified in eternity, so is it now. And this will be her consolation.... And what is the longest life of waiting but a little while at last?[194]
The light beats down, the gates of pearl are wide:
And she is passing to the floor of peace.
And Mary of the seven times wounded heart
Has kissed her lips ... the Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
The time will come when we shall be able to unveil the whole truth to the world.
I shall continue to hope for a future of truth and of justice.