The Billow and the Rock - Harriet Martineau

“I most heartily thank you, my dear friend, for the notice you have given me of the death of that person. It would be a ridiculous untruth to pretend grief for it; but as it brings to my mind a train of various things for many years back, it gives me concern. Her retaining wit and facetiousness to the last surprises me. These qualities none found in her, no more than common sense or good nature, before she went to those parts; and of the reverse of all which if she had not been irrecoverably possessed, in an extraordinary and insufferable degree, after many years’ fruitless endeavours to reclaim her, she had never seen those parts. I long for the particulars of her death, which, you are pleased to tell me, I am to have by next post.”

“Hers was a singular death, at last,” observed Lord Carse, when he put the President’s second letter into the hands of his sister. “I almost wonder that they did not slip the body overboard, rather than expose themselves to danger for the sake of giving Christian burial to such a person.”

“Dust to dust,” said Lady Rachel, thoughtfully. “Those were the words said over her. I am glad it was so, rather than that one more was added to the tossing billows. For what was she but a billow, driven by the winds and tossed?”

When, some few years after, the steward approached the island on an autumn night, in honour of Rollo’s invitation to attend the funeral of the Widow Fleming, his eye unconsciously sought the guiding light on the hill-side.

“Ah!” said he, recollecting himself, “it is gone, and we shall see it no more. Rollo will live on the main, and this side of the island will be deserted. Her light gone! We should almost as soon thought of losing a star. And she herself gone! We shall miss her, as if one of our lofty old rocks had crumbled down into the sea. She was truly, though one would not have dared to tell her so, an anchorage to people feebler than herself. She had a faith which made her spirit, tender as it was, as firm as any rock.”

The End.