“These words are very inadequate to convey my thanks to you for this gift and all your past goodness towards me, and those which I would fain offer through you to the Committee and all the Subscribers to this splendid Testimonial; especially to the Hon. Secretary, who has undertaken the great trouble which the collection of it must have involved. I can but repeat, I thank you and them with my whole heart.
“Most sincerely, dear Lord Shaftesbury, and
“Gratefully yours,
“Frances Power Cobbe.”
This addition to my little income made up for certain losses which I had incurred, and raised it to about its original moderate level, enabling me to share the expenses of our Welsh cottage. I was, however, of course, a poor woman, and not in a position to help my friend to live (as we both earnestly desired to do) in her larger house in Hengwrt. We made an effort to arrange it so, loving the place and enjoying the beauty of the woods and gardens exceedingly. But we knew it could not be our permanent home; and a suitable tenant having come on the field, offering to take it for a term of years which would naturally reach beyond our lives, we felt that the end of our possession was drawing near. I was very sorrowful for my own sake, and still more for that of my friend who had always had peculiar attachment to the place. I reflected painfully that if I had been only a little better off, she might not have been obliged to relinquish her proper home.
All this was occupying me much. It was a Thursday morning, and the gentleman who proposed to become the tenant of Hengwrt was to come on Monday to make a definite offer which,—once accepted,—would have been held to bind my friend.
I went downstairs into the old oak hall in the morning and opened the post-bag. Among the large packet of letters which usually awaits me there was one from a solicitor in Liverpool. I knew that my kind old friend Mrs. Yates had died the week before, and I had been informed that she had left me her residuary legatee; but I imagined her to be in narrow circumstances, and that a few hundreds would be the uttermost of my possible inheritance; not sufficient, at all events, to affect appreciably my available income. I opened the Solicitor’s letter very coolly and found myself to be,—so far as all my wants and wishes extend,—a rich woman.
The story of this legacy is a very touching one. I never saw or heard of Mrs. Yates till a few years before her death, and when she was already very aged. She began by sending large and generous donations of £50, and £80, at a time to our Society. Later, she came up from Liverpool to London when I was managing affairs without a Secretary, and, finding me at the office, she gave me a still larger donation, actually in bank-notes. She was an Unitarian, or rather a Theist, like myself; and having taken very warm interest in my books, she seemed to be drawn to me by a double sympathy, both on account of religious sympathies, and those we shared on behalf of the vivisected animals. Of course I explained to her the details of my work, and she took the warmest interest in it. After I resigned my office of Honorary Secretary, she seemed to prefer to give her principal contributions personally to me to expend for the cause according to my judgment, and twice she sent me large sums, with strictest injunction to keep her name, and even the locality of the donor, secret. I called these gifts my Trust Fund, and made grants from it to working allies all over the world. I also spent a great deal of it in printing large quantities of papers. Of course I began by sending her a balance sheet of my expenditure; but this she forbade me to repeat, so I could only from time to time write her long letters (copied for me by my friend as my writing taxed her sight), telling her all we were doing. At last she came to see us here in answer to our repeated invitations, but could not be persuaded to stop more than one night. Talking to me out walking, she asked me: “Would I take charge of some money she wished to leave for protection of animals in Liverpool?” I answered that I could not engage to do this, and begged her to entrust it (as she eventually did) to some friend resident in the place. Then she said shyly: “Well, you do not object to my leaving you something for yourself—to my making you my residuary legatee?” adding to the question some words of affection. Of course I could only press her hand and say I was grateful for her kind thought. She did it all so simply, that, being prepossessed with the idea that she was in rather narrow circumstances, and that she had already given me the savings of her lifetime in the Trust Fund, it never even occurred to me that this residuary legateeship could be an important matter, after she had provided (as she was sure to do) for all legitimate claims upon her. Nothing could exceed my astonishment when I found how large was the sum bequeathed in this unpretending way. My friend thought I must be ill from the difficulty I seem to have found in commanding my voice to tell her the strange news when she came into the hall, a quarter of an hour after I had read that epoch-making letter!
Certainly never was a great gift made with such perfect delicacy. Mrs. Yates had taken care that I should have no reason, so long as she lived, to suppose myself under any personal obligation to her. Since then, it may be believed that my heart has never ceased to cherish her memory with tender gratitude, and to associate the thought of her with all the comforts of the home which her wealth has secured for me.
Mrs. Yates, at the time I knew her, had been for thirty or forty years the widow of Mr. Richard Vaughan Yates, a Liverpool Merchant. The following obituary notice of her appeared in the Zoophilist, November 2nd, 1891. I may add that beside her personal legacy to me (given simply by her will to “her friend Miss Frances Power Cobbe,” without comment of any kind) Mrs. Yates gave £1,000 to the Victoria Street Society, as well as £1,000 to the Liverpool Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; both bequests being over and above legacies to her executors, relatives and dependents:—