It was a hard battle,—it was bitter to fail just when we seemed winning, but I believe it was her wish to go. On Thursday I heard her murmur quietly, ‘Oh, Father, I pray Thee take me home,’—and now all is peace.
Yours sincerely,
S. J.-B.”
About the work in Edinburgh S. J.-B. had no anxiety at all. It was her way, when she trusted people, to trust them whole-heartedly, and she had absolute confidence in the assistant who had worked with her for more than a year. Well, indeed, she might, for she was extraordinarily fortunate in that gallant-hearted and faithful young helper, whose only fault seems to have been that she threw herself too completely, too conscientiously, into everything she undertook,—her chief’s work and interests, together with her own studies and laboratory experiments.[[144]] S. J.-B. never realised what a responsibility her very trust was to one wholly worthy of it.
In any case the double burden on the young shoulders proved too great, and there was a sudden and tragic breakdown ending in death.
One wonders how S. J.-B. bore the double shock. She had fancied herself “girt with the girdle of him who has nought,” when the second blow fell. She always said herself that she never could have won through but for Miss Du Pre, who simply carried her off to quiet places and tended her and brought her gradually back to the possibility of beginning again.
The practice in Edinburgh was given up for the time. There was nothing else to be done. Miss Ellaby took up the threads and finished them off as well as a stranger might; but there was no medical woman free to remain and fill the niche. It was hard on the practice.
In later years S. J.-B. met Mr. Frederick Myers, and she was induced by her impression of him to read his Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, when it appeared some time later. She was deeply interested in the book, and her mind was open on the subject always; but she “tried the spirits” severely. “No human being,” she said one day in the course of an earnest talk, “could strive to come into touch with one gone before more earnestly than I tried to come into touch with my Mother. I used to lie awake at night concentrating every faculty on the effort. But I got no response.”
Her diary became her great outlet again in those dark days, in some places almost, as of old, a very cento of beautiful or poignant thoughts from the treasure-house of her memory; but that was never the side she turned to the world, though intimate friends got glimpses of it that startled them. One guessed it too from her anxiety to spare others the pain she had suffered herself.