“My poor father’s sufferings are over. He died on Wednesday evening, without the least pain or struggle, having sunk gradually into an unconscious state since Sunday morning. At all events it proved a most merciful close to his long sufferings, for he never seemed even aware of the terrible state into which the poor limbs fell, but became weaker and weaker, and as the mortification advanced, died away as if in the gentlest sleep he had known for many a day. It is all very merciful, I can feel nothing else, though it is very sad to have had no parting words of blessing, such as I am sure he would have given me. All those he loved best were near him. He had Dotie till the last day of his consciousness, and the little thing continually asked afterwards to go to his study, and enquired, ‘Grandpa ‘seep?’ When he had ceased to speak at all comprehensibly, the morning before he died he pointed to her picture, and half smiled when I brought it to him. Poor old father! He is free now from all his miseries—gone home to God after his long, long life of good and honour! Fifty years he has lived as master here. Who but God knows all the kind and generous actions he has done in that half century! To the very last he completed everything, paying his labourers and settling his books on Saturday; and we find all his arrangements made in the most perfect and thoughtful way for everybody. There was a letter left for me. It only contained a £100 note and the words, ‘The last token of the love and affection of a father to his daughter.’... ‘He is now looking so noble and happy, I might say, so handsome; his features seem so glorified by death, that it does one good to go and sit beside him. I never saw Death look so little terrible. Would that the poor form could lie there, ever! The grief will be far worse after to-day, when we shall see it for the last time. Jessie has made an outline of the face as it is now, very like. How wonderful and blessed is this glorifying power of death; taking away the lines of age and weak distension of muscles, and leaving only, as it would seem, the true face of the man as he was beneath all surface weaknesses; the ‘garment by the soul laid by’ smoothed out and folded! My cousins and Jessie and I all feel very much how blessedly this face speaks to us; how it is not him, but a token of what he is now. I grieve that I was not more to him, that I did not better win his love and do more to deserve it; but even this sorrow has its comfort. Perhaps he knows now that with all my heart I did feel the deepest tenderness for his sufferings and respect for his great virtues. At all events the wall of creed has fallen down from between our souls for ever, and I believe that was the one great obstacle which I could never overthrow entirely. Forbearing as he proved himself, it was never forgotten. Now all that divided us is over.... It seems all very dream-like just now, long as we have thought of it, and I know the waking will be a terrible pang when all is over and I have left everything round which my heart roots have twined in five and thirty years. But I don’t fear—how can I, when my utmost hopes could not have pointed to an end so happy as God has given to my poor old father? Everything is merciful about it—even to the time when we were all together here, and when I am neither young enough to need protection, or old enough to feel diminished energies....”
I carried out my long formed resolution, of course, and started on my pilgrimage just three weeks after my father’s death. Leaving Newbridge was the worst wrench of my life. The home of my childhood and youth, of which I had been mistress for nineteen years, for every corner of which I had cared, and wherein there was not a room without its tender associations,—it seemed almost impossible to drag myself away. To strip my pretty bedroom of its pictures and books and ornaments, many of them my mother’s gifts, and my mother’s work; to send off my harp to be sold; and make over to my brother my private possessions of ponies and carriage,—(luckily my dear dog was dead,)—and take leave of all the dear old servants and village people, formed a whole series of pangs. I remember feeling a distinct regret and smiling at myself for doing so, when I locked for the last time the big, old-fashioned tea-chest out of which I had made the family breakfast for twenty years. Then came the last morning and as I drove out of the gates of Newbridge I felt I was leaving behind me all and everything in the world which I had loved and cherished.
I was going also, it must be said, not only from a family circle to entire solitude, but also from comparative wealth to poverty. Considering the interests of my eldest brother as paramount, and the seriousness of his charge of keeping up the house and estate, my father left me but a very small patrimony; amounting, at the rate of interest then obtainable, to a trifle over £200 a year. For a woman who had always had every possible service rendered to her by a regiment of well-trained servants, and had had £130 a year pocket-money since she left school, it must be confessed that this was a narrow provision. My father intended me to continue to live at Newbridge with my brother and sister-in-law; but such a plan was entirely contrary to my view of what my life should thenceforth become, and I accepted my poverty cheerfully enough, with the help of a little ready money wherewith to start on my travels. I cut off half my hair, being totally unable to grapple with the whole without a maid, and faced the future with the advantage of the great calm which follows any immediate concern with Death. While that Shadow hangs over our heads we perceive but dimly the thorns and pebbles on our road.
A week after leaving Ireland I spent one night with Harriet St. Leger in lodgings which she and her friend, Miss Dorothy Wilson, occupied on the Marina at St. Leonard’s.
When I had gone to my room rather late that evening, I opened my window and looked out for the last time before my exile, on an English scene. There was the line of friendly lamps close by, but beyond it the sea, dark as pitch on that December night, was only revealed by the sound of the slow waves breaking sullenly on the beach beneath. It was like a black wall before me; the sea and sky undistinguishable. I thought: “To-morrow I shall go out into that darkness! How like to death is this!”
CHAPTER
IX.
LONG JOURNEY.
The journey which I undertook when my home duties ended at the death of my father, would be considered a very moderate excursion in these latter days, but in 1857 it was still accounted somewhat of an enterprise for a “lone woman.” When I told my friends that I was going to Egypt and Jerusalem, they said: “Ah, you will get as far as Rome and Naples, and that will be very interesting; but you will find too many difficulties in the way of going any further,” “When I say” (I replied) “that I am going to Egypt and Jerusalem, I mean that to Egypt and Jerusalem I shall go.” And so, as it proved, a wilful woman had her way; and I came back after a year with the ever-delightful privilege of observing: “I told you so.”
I shall not dream of dragging the reader again over the well-worn ground at the slow pace of a writer of “Impressions de Voyage.” The best of my reminiscences were given to the world, in Fraser’s Magazine, and reprinted in my Cities of the Past, before there was yet a prospect of a railway to Jerusalem except in Martin’s picture of the “End of the World”; or of a “Service d’omnibus” over the wild solitudes of Lebanon, where I struggled ‘mid snows and torrents which nearly whelmed me and my horse in destruction. I rejoice to think that I saw those holy and wonderful lands of Palestine and Egypt while Cook’s tourists were yet unborn, and Cairo had only one small English hotel and one solitary wheel carriage; and the solemn gaze of the Sphinx encountered no Golf-games on the desert sands.
My proceedings were very much like those of certain birds of the farmyard (associated particularly with Michaelmas), who very rarely are seen to rise on the wing but when they are once incited to do so, are wont to take a very wide circle in their flight before they come back to the barn door!
Paris, Marseilles, Rome, Naples, Messina, Malta, Alexandria, Cairo, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Dead Sea, Jordan, Beyrout, Lebanon, Baalbec, Cyprus, Rhodes, Smyrna, Athens, Constantinople, Cape Matapan, Corfu, Trieste, Adelsberg, Venice, Florence, Milan, Lucerne, Geneva, Wiesbaden, Antwerp, London—such was my “swoop,” accomplished in 11 months and at a cost of only £400. To say that I brought home a crop of new ideas would be a small way of indicating the whole harvest of them wherewith I returned laden. There were (I think I may summarise), as the results of such a journey, the following great additions to my mental stock.