Last Meeting With The Queen
what was supposed to be a peculiar form of catarrh. He went to stay with Mr. Armitstead at Butterstone in Perthshire. I saw him on several occasions afterwards, but this was the last time when I found him with all the freedom, full self-possession, and kind geniality of old days. He was keenly interested at my telling him that I had seen James Martineau a few days before, in his cottage further north in Inverness-shire; that Martineau, though he had now passed his ninety-second milestone on life's road, was able to walk five or six hundred feet up his hillside every day, was at his desk at eight each morning, and read theology a good many hours before he went to bed at night. Mr. Gladstone's conversation was varied, glowing, full of reminiscence. He had written me in the previous May, hoping among other kind things that “we may live more and more in sympathy and communion.” I never saw him more attractive than in the short pleasant talks of these three or four days. He discussed some of the sixty or seventy men with whom he had been associated in cabinet life,[313] freely but charitably, though he named two whom he thought to have behaved worse to him than others. He repeated his expression of enormous admiration for Graham. Talked about his own voice. After he had made his long budget speech in 1860, a certain member, supposed to be an operatic expert, came to him and said, “You must take great care, or else you will destroy the colour in your voice.” He had kept a watch on general affairs. The speech of a foreign ruler upon divine right much incensed him. He thought that Lord Salisbury had managed to set the Turk up higher than he had reached since the Crimean war; and his policy had weakened Greece, the most liberal of the eastern communities. We fought over again some old battles of 1886 and 1892-4. Mr. Armitstead had said to him—“Oh, sir, you'll live ten years to come.” “I do trust,” he answered as he told me this, “that God in his mercy will spare me that.”
II
Then came months of distress. The facial annoyance grew into acute and continued pain, and to pain he proved [pg 526] to be exceedingly sensitive. It did not master him, but there were moments that seemed almost of collapse and defeat. At last the night was gathering
About the burning crest
Of the old, feeble, and day-wearied sun.[314]
They took him at the end of November (1897) to Cannes, to the house of Lord Rendel.
Sometimes at dinner he talked with his host, with Lord Welby, or Lord Acton, with his usual force, but most of the time he lay in extreme suffering and weariness, only glad when they soothed him with music. It was decided that he had better return, and in hope that change of air might even yet be some palliative, he went to Bournemouth, which he reached on February 22. For weeks past he had not written nor read, save one letter that he wrote in his journey home to Lady Salisbury upon a rather narrow escape of her husband's in a carriage accident. On March 18 his malady was pronounced incurable, and he learned that it was likely to end in a few weeks. He received the verdict with perfect serenity and with a sense of unutterable relief, for his sufferings had been cruel. Four days later he started home to die. On leaving Bournemouth before stepping into the train, he turned round, and to those who were waiting on the platform to see him off, he said with quiet gravity, “God bless you and this place, and the land you love.” At Hawarden he bore the dreadful burden of his pain with fortitude, supported by the ritual ordinances of his church and faith. Music soothed him, the old composers being those he liked best to hear. Messages of sympathy were read to him, and he listened silently or with a word of thanks.
“The retinue of the whole world's good wishes” flowed to the “large upper chamber looking to the sunrising, where the aged pilgrim lay.” Men and women of every communion offered up earnest prayers for him. Those who were of no communion thought with pity, sympathy, and sorrow of
A Power passing from the earth