In two hours the Queen, the Prince, and Princess Alice were at Frogmore. "Just the same," was the sorrowful answer given by the ladies and gentlemen awaiting them.
The Prince Consort went up to the Duchess's room and came back with tears in his eyes; then the Queen knew what to expect. With a trembling heart she followed her husband and entered the bedroom. There "on a sofa, supported by cushions, the room much darkened," sat the Duchess, "leaning back, breathing heavily in her silk dressing- gown, with her cap on, looking quite herself"
For a second the sight of the dear familiar figure, so little changed, must have afforded a brief reprieve, and lent a sense of almost glad incredulity to the distress which had gone before. But the well-meant whisper of one of the attendants of "Ein sanftes ende" destroyed the passing illusion. "Seeing that my presence did not disturb her," the Queen wrote afterwards, "I knelt before her, kissed her dear hand and placed it next my cheek; but though she opened her eyes, she did not, I think, know me. She brushed my hand off, and the dreadful reality was before me that for the first time she did not know the child she had ever received with such tender smiles. I went out to sob…. I asked the doctors if there was no hope; they said they feared none whatever, for consciousness had left her…. It was suffusion of water on the chest which had come on."
The long night passed in sad watching by the unconscious sufferer, and in vain attempts at rest in preparation for the greater sorrow that was in store.
A few months earlier, on the death of the King of Prussia, the Prince Consort had written to his daughter that her experience exceeded his, for he had never seen any person die. The Queen had been equally unacquainted with the mournful knowledge which comes to most even before they have attained mature manhood and womanhood. Now the loving daughter knelt or stood by the mother who was leaving her without a sign, or lay painfully listening to the homely trivial sounds which broke the stillness of the night—the crowing of a cock, the dogs barking in the distance; the striking of the old repeater which had belonged to the Queen's father, that she had heard every night in her childhood, but to which she had not listened for twenty-three years— the whole of her full happy married life. She wondered with the vague piteous wonder—natural in such a case—what her mother, would have thought of her passing a night under her roof again, and she not to know it?
In the March morning the Prince took the Queen from the room in which she could not rest, yet from which she could not remain absent. When she returned windows and doors were thrown open. The Queen sat down on a footstool and held the Duchess's hand, while the paleness of death stole over the face, and the features grew longer and sharper. "I fell on my knees," her Majesty wrote afterwards, "holding the beloved hand which was still warm and soft, though heavier, in both of mine. I felt the end was fast approaching, as Clark went out to call Albert and Alice, I only left gazing on that beloved face, and feeling as if my heart would break…. It was a solemn, sacred, never-to-be-forgotten scene. Fainter and fainter grew the breathing; at last it ceased, but there was no change of countenance, nothing; the eyes closed as they had been for the last half-hour…. The clock struck half-past nine at the very moment. Convulsed with sobs I fell on the hand and covered it with kisses. Albert lifted me up and took me into the next room, himself entirely melted into tears, which is unusual for him, deep as his feelings are, and clasped me in his arms. I asked if all was over; he said, "Yes." I went into the room again after a few minutes and gave one look. My darling mother was sitting as she had done before, but was already white. Oh, God! how awful, how mysterious! But what a blessed end. Her gentle spirit at rest, her sufferings over."
By the Prince's advice the Queen went at once to the late Duchess's sitting-room, where it was hard to bear the unchanged look of everything, "Chairs, cushions … all on the tables, her very work- basket with her work; the little canary bird which she was so fond of, singing!"
In one of the recently published letters of Princess Alice to the Queen, the former recalled after an interval of eight years the words which her father had spoken to her on the death of her grandmother, when he brought the daughter to the mother and said, "Comfort mamma," a simple injunction which sounded like a solemn charge in the sad months to come.
The melancholy tidings of the loss were conveyed by the Queen's hand to the Duchess's elder daughter, the Princess of Hohenlohe; to the Duchess's brother, the King of the Belgians—the last survivor of his family—and to her eldest grand-daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia.
The moment the Princess Royal heard of the death she started for
England, and arrived there two days afterwards.