Every one on board had exhibited the kindliest concern during her illness. The captain and the stewards could not do enough for her; and the sorrow occasioned by her death was shared by all. Her funeral was reverently ordered. The officers attended in full uniform, and all the stewards and passengers were present. M. Renkin, the Belgian Colonial Minister, who had so recently been her guest, for whom she had set out all her pretty things, and from whom she hoped good service for Congo, walked in the procession to the main deck, immediately behind the chief mourner. The captain read the burial service, and as the day was dying her body was committed to the deep, off Cape Blanco.
When Mr. Lewis arrived in this country he received nearly a hundred letters expressing sympathy with him in his great bereavement and appreciation of his wife. The following typical quotations are taken from letters written by four friends of Mrs. Lewis whose names are mentioned in this book.
From Mrs. Edward Robinson, Bristol: “My thoughts go back to the time when she stayed with us before she was married, and I always retained such a loving regard for her, and thought her one of the finest women I knew. The loss to the Mission will be almost irreparable.”
From the Rev. William Brock, London: “I knew your dear wife when she was still Miss Thomas, and used to come over to Heath Street from the West Heath. How keenly was she then looking forward to work in Africa! Yours was an ideal union: both of you such ardent and far-seeing missionaries, and each so fitted to the other, as by the very hand of God. The new sphere, too, seemed made for you both, and you for it. Well, she must be wanted for some heavenly ministry.”
From Mrs. Jenkyn Brown, Birmingham: “It is little to say we all loved her—every one must—but we had the privilege of knowing her better than many, and I almost inherited love for her before we met, from my husband, who had known her longest.”
From Mrs. Hooper, of Kibokolo: “To me Mrs. Lewis has ever been a dear elder sister, honoured and loved unspeakably. My sorrow is too deep for words.”
CHAPTER XVIII
CHARACTERISTICS
More than once, since I began to write this book, it has been remarked to me by persons whose thoughts of Mrs. Lewis were altogether kindly, that she was an ordinary woman, and that the interest of her life is rather due to circumstance than to personality. Dissenting profoundly from this judgment, regarding her as one of the most extraordinary women I have ever met, I have wondered how such an opinion could have arisen. And I have to confess that if the lack of specific brilliant endowments makes a person ordinary, then perhaps there is excuse for speaking of Mrs. Lewis in such terms. Of genius, in the usual acceptation of the term, she had none. And no one was more perfectly aware of this than herself. She had no great learning. She was not a great speaker. Her speeches were quiet, earnest, matter-of-fact statements of the things which she had seen with her eyes, or which she most surely believed in her heart. She was not a brilliant writer. Her letters are interesting, and often fascinating, because she tells, with artless directness, stories of life and work which are remote from common experience. And withal her personal bearing was quiet and unobtrusive to a degree.
Mrs. Lewis was an extraordinary woman, not by reason of unusual mental endowments, but rather by reason of distinguished moral and spiritual qualities, which achieved such co-ordination and control and consecration of modest gifts, as resulted in the building up of exalted character and the accomplishment of splendid work. Her life affords an illustration of the truth that common gifts, conscientiously used to the utmost limits of their content, become uncommon, and that whoso does his absolute best in a good cause avails himself of the mystic forces of a divinely ordered universe, unconsciously, if unconsciously, fulfilling Emerson’s injunction: “Hitch your waggon to a star.”