Almost to the last day she repeated bits of her favourite poems and psalms,—and nothing gave her so much pleasure as to plan holidays for those who still had a day’s work before them. She was infinitely mindful of those who tended her. Almost her last words were,—“Now do go and have a good rest.”
And so the end came,—suddenly but not unexpectedly. She sat down one day more tired than usual—it was the 7th January, 1912—stretched herself back, and rendered up her soul to God who gave it.
A great wave of feeling arose in the village and round about when it was known that the familiar figure of the old warrior would no more be seen in her Sussex lanes. Perplexed at first, her neighbours of all classes had come in a measure to understand her, to be proud of her,—some of them to love her. With one or two, indeed, she had formed a warm and intimate friendship. There was every token of respectful sympathy and mourning when the little procession made its way to Rotherfield Church.[[163]]
And that wave of feeling went out over the whole world. Messages and tributes of appreciation and regret poured steadily in. The most beautiful and adequate was the paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette:
“The woman as Happy Warrior has passed away with the death in her Sussex home of Sophia Jex-Blake. There is scarcely an attribute of the great figure in Wordsworth’s poem which she did not possess, with the crowning added happiness of seeing her fame as a noble and successful pioneer in a great movement finally established. She it was, more than anyone else, who compelled the gates of the medical profession to be opened to women. Through years of hostility and obloquy she never lost heart in her Cause; and, meeting violence with reason and coarseness with dignity, she won at last. Her longest and bitterest fight was with the University of Edinburgh; and, later, when Parliament had recognized the right of women to be doctors, it was in that city that she practised for twenty-one years. Since the death of Florence Nightingale no woman has died of whom more truly may it be written, Bene actæ vitæ recordatio jucundissima est.
But the reader may find a special propriety in a very simple resolution passed a few days later in an Over Seas dominion:
“That the members of the University Women’s Club of Toronto do place on record their deep sense of the great influence and noble life of Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake. Now that her distinguished career has closed, they feel that she was the helper of all University women,—and they love her for many reasons.”
The End