That sense of duty carried her to the bedside of the Prince of Wales when, at the end of 1871, he was struck down at Sandringham by the fell disease under which his father had sunk. There she fulfilled the same priceless offices which she had ten years before discharged at Windsor Castle. It pleased Heaven to spare her a renewal of the great affliction of 1861; and in the very days of December in which we are now living, the life of the much-loved brother, which had been wellnigh despaired of, came slowly back to requite her affection, and in answer to her prayers.
The trials of that time came, before the exhaustion had passed away both of body and mind which the Princess had undergone during the Franco-German war. Separated—and for the second time—by war from the Prince of Hesse, who was away in the thickest of the perils of that campaign, she was not a woman to give herself up to morbid brooding on the pangs and apprehensions under which, devoted wife as she was, she yet could not fail to suffer most acutely, for her feelings were warm, and her imagination active beyond that of most women. In the hospital at Darmstadt, crowded with the soldiers, French as well as German, who had come from the battlefields maimed and racked with pain, she was foremost with her bright intelligence, her helpful sympathy, and her tender hand, in soothing pain, and inspiring that sense of manly gratitude which is the best of panaceas to a soldier’s sick-bed. What she was and what she did at that time have embalmed her image in many a heart, and will make the tears flow thick and fast in many manly eyes at the thought of the death of one so young, so good, so gifted, and so fair. To her it was merely duty—duty to be done at every cost; but how much it had cost to that finely touched spirit and to that delicate womanly frame might be read, by all who could look below the surface, in the deep earnestness of her eyes and the deeper earnestness of her thoughts. The pain of that terrible period would not let itself be forgotten even in the gratitude which she felt for the providence which restored her beloved husband to her side, and for the realization of her father’s cherished dream of an United Germany, which had been purchased by the valor and the sufferings of its sons.
The Princess’ fortitude had already been severely tried in the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866. Hesse-Darmstadt was engaged upon the side of Austria, and her husband, Prince Louis, took the field with the troops of the Principality. At the very time that his third daughter, the Princess Irène, was born, he was with the army; and the Princess Alice knew he was under fire but was unable to get any tidings from him. The victorious Prussians marched into Darmstadt, while the Princess, newly made a mother, was still confined to her room.
Of the sad aspects of life it had been her destiny to see much—as daughter, as sister, and as mother. In June, 1873, a terrible calamity fell upon her as a mother. A child—one especially beloved—climbing to an open window in a room adjoining that in which she was, lost its balance, and was killed almost before her eyes, as she rushed in terror to call him back. This, too, had to be borne. It was borne nobly, and with Christian resignation. But such shocks tell upon the vital powers, and some trace of what had been “undergone and overcome” seemed to be visible long afterward in a perceptible bodily languor, and in a more spiritual beauty which had passed into her expressive face.
The thought of this sent an anxious thrill through the hearts of many, when it became known that the Princess was herself seized by the terrible malady which had prostrated her husband and five of her children, and taken from her the youngest of them all—the youngest, the brightest, the idol of her other children.[138] She had nursed them all through their time of danger, and now, spent with watching and anxiety as she was, the malady had laid its fatal clutch upon herself. She that had cared and thought for all was soon past all human care to save. Thus she died as she had lived, devoted, self-sacrificing, purified by great pain and great love—a model daughter—wife—mother.
Of the loss of such a woman to the husband to whom she was the all-in-all, to the children to whose love she will respond no more, to the mother in whose thoughts she is interwoven with the sweetest, the saddest, the most sacred memories, to the brothers and sisters whom she loved and who loved her so truly, so tenderly, who dare trust himself to speak? It must be long before the grief can be assuaged, under which all these must now be suffering—before the “Idea of her life can sweetly creep,” as something hallowed, “into their study of imagination”; but the day will come when they will bless God, that theirs was a wife, a daughter, a sister, a mother, so good, so noble, and that, having fought her fight on earth valiantly, yet meekly, she has gone where there is no more sorrow, nor crying, and where the great mysteries of life alone find their solution.
Theodore Martin.
Of the many beautiful tributes in verse to the worth of the Princess, which appeared in England immediately after her death, none spoke the prevailing feeling more truly than the following:—