During this July at Osborne, Lady Lyttelton wrote her second vivid description, quoted in the "Life of the Prince Consort," of Prince Albert's organ-playing. "Last evening such a sunset! I was sitting, gazing at it, and thinking of Lady Charlotte Proby's verses, when from an open window below this floor began suddenly to sound the Prince's organ, expressively played by his masterly hand. Such a modulation! Minor and solemn, and ever changing and never ceasing. From a piano like Jenny Lind's holding note up to the fullest swell, and still the same fine vein of melancholy. And it came on so exactly as an accompaniment to the sunset. How strange he is! He must have been playing just while the Queen was finishing her toilette, and then he went to cut jokes and eat dinner, and nobody but the organ knows what is in him, except, indeed, by the look of his eyes sometimes."
Lady Lyttelton refers to the Prince's cutting jokes, and the Queen has written of his abiding cheerfulness. People are apt to forget in their very admiration of his noble thoughtfulness, earnestness, and tenderness of heart that he was also full of fun, keenly relishing a good story, the life of the great royal household.
The Queen had been grieved this summer by hearing of the serious illness of her greatest friend, the Queen of the Belgians, who was suffering from the same dangerous disease of which her sister, Princess Marie, had died. Probably it was with the hope of cheering King Leopold, and of perhaps getting a glimpse of the much-loved invalid, that the Queen, after proroguing Parliament in person, sailed on the 21st of August with the Prince and their four elder children in the royal yacht on a short trip to Ostend, where the party spent a day. King Leopold met the visitors—the younger of whom were much interested by their first experience of a foreign town. The Queen had the satisfaction of finding her uncle well and pleased to see her, so that she could call the meeting afterwards a "delightful, happy dream;" but there was a sorrowful element in the happiness, occasioned by the absence of Queen Louise, whose strength was not sufficient for the journey to Ostend, and of whose case Sir James Clark, sent by the Queen to Laeken, thought badly.
The poor Orleans family had another blow in store for them. On Prince
Albert's thirty-first birthday, the 26th of August, which he passed at
Osborne, news arrived of the death that morning, at Claremont, of
Louis Philippe, late King of the French, in his seventy-seventh year.
The Queen and the Prince had been prepared to start with their elder children for Scotland the day after they heard of the death, and by setting out at six o'clock in the morning they were enabled to pay a passing visit to the house of mourning.
We may be permitted to remark here, by what quiet, unconscious touches in letters and journals we have brought home to us the dual life, full of duty and kindliness, led by the highest couple in the land. Whether it is in going with a family of cousins to take the last look at a departed kinsman, or in getting up at daybreak to express personal sympathy with another family in sorrow, we cannot fail to see, while it is all so simply said and done, that no painful ordeal is shirked, no excuse is made of weighty tasks and engrossing occupations, to free either Queen or Prince from the gentle courtesies and tender charities of everyday humanity; we recognise that the noblest and busiest are also the bravest, the most faithful, the most full of pity.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE QUEEN'S FIRST STAY AT HOLYROOD—LIFE IN THE HIGHLANDS—THE DEATH OF THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS.
This year the Queen went north by Castle Howard, the fine seat of the Earl of Carlisle, the Duchess of Sutherland's brother, where her Majesty made her first halt. After stopping to open the railway bridges, triumphs of engineering, over the Tyne and the Tweed, the travellers reached Edinburgh, where, to the gratification of an immense gathering of her Scotch subjects, her Majesty spent her first night in Holyrood, the palace of her Stewart ancestors. The place was full of interest and charm for her, and though it was late in the afternoon before she arrived, she hardly waited to rest, before setting out incognito, so far as the old housekeeper was concerned, to inspect the historical relics of the building. She wandered out with her "two girls and their governess" to the ruins of the chapel or old abbey, and stood by the altar at which Mary Stewart, the fair young French widow, wedded "the long lad Darnley," and read the inscriptions on the tombs of various members of noble Scotch houses, coming to a familiar name on the slab which marked the grave of the mother of one of her own maids of honour, a daughter of Clanranald's.
The Queen then visited Queen Mary's rooms, being shown, like other strangers, the closet where her ancestress had sat at supper on a memorable night, and the stair from the chapel up which Ruthven, risen from a sick-bed, led the conspirators who seized Davie Rizzio, dragged him from his mistress's knees, to which he clung, and slew him pitilessly on the boards which, according to old tradition, still bear the stain of his blood. After that ghastly token, authentic or non- authentic, which would thrill the hearts of the young princesses as it has stirred many a youthful imagination, Darnley's armour and Mary's work-table, with its embroidery worked by her own hand, must have fallen comparatively flat.