Poor little wife! Poor husband, too, when after her death he has so often to say, "Ah me! too late, too late". Yet they loved each other well, and when Thomas Carlyle wrote on her tombstone, "For forty years she was the true and ever-loving helpmate of her husband," and added that she was "suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out," no one doubts that the words came from the deepest depths of his heart.
In the china closet a glass case contains some pathetic mementoes—a yellowed old lace cap worn by Mrs. Carlyle, a brooch with the portrait of her dog Nero, given by the mistress to "little Charlotte," a sock of Carlyle's with his initials neatly marked in red thread, and two small cardboard boxes, each containing locks of the hair of Thomas Carlyle and his wife. Trivial things, which yet in their haunting intimacy are too sacred, it seems, to be stared at by the curious sightseers.
In a corner hangs an etching that deserves a more prominent place, the desolate picture of a funereal cortège wending its slow way against a bleak background of snow and leaden sky.... Thomas Carlyle is being carried to his last rest, and surely the Great Scene Shifter had well chosen the setting. The simple dignity of the procession approaching over the white countryside, the little group of humble folk awaiting its arrival at the gate of the churchyard, the frozen silence of the dead day—what could be more touching or impressive!
As we mounted the stairs on our way to the upper rooms, Mrs. D., who had said nothing for quite five minutes, remarked that, for her part, she couldn't see why people weren't allowed to rest in their graves. Even Mrs. D.'s scepticism and want of imagination was not proof against those little mementoes in the glass case, and I think she resented her inability on this occasion to take refuge behind the usual, "'Ow d'yer know it's all true?" The old lady was visibly depressed, and, to cheer her up, I asked her if she had ever worn a "bustle," quoting a letter of Jane Welsh's, in which she wrote, "The diameter of the fashionable ladies at present is about three yards; their bustles (false bottoms) are the size of an ordinary sheep's fleece. Eliza Miles told me a maid of theirs went out one Sunday with three kitchen dusters pinned-on as a substitute."
Whereupon Mrs. D., between laughter and breathlessness, had to pause on the top stair whilst she adjusted her hat at a still more rakish angle, and ejaculated, "Oh, saucy!"
It is well nigh impossible, in the later portraits of Mrs. Carlyle, to recognise the girl in the miniature. The dark brooding face is almost forbidding, and one is forced to the conclusion that the portraits have little real likeness to the original. Jane, with a vitality that upheld her through years of bodily and mental suffering, with a gaiety and wit which won her the admiration and homage of those celebrated men who went to see her husband, and stayed to make friends with her, Jane could never have looked like that! No doubt the coal-scuttle bonnet and severe style of hair dressing had a great deal to do with it. The fashions in those days were not kind to the middle-aged woman. All the same, when I looked at a portrait of Lady Ashburton, Carlyle's friend and patron, I found there a woman whose beauty could triumph over such handicaps. Jane thought Lady Ashburton a "cat," and the insolent eyes and disdainful curve of "Harriet's" mouth incline me to think Jane was right. Comparisons are unkind, but one is forced to the conclusion that whilst Lady Ashburton's face might well be her fortune, Jane Welsh would have to draw on her wit and intellect.
The cold wind outside roared round the cold house, and a piano-organ in the street ground out a hymn. Down below the bell tinkled. More visitors were arriving, and wishing to keep in advance of them, we left the drawing-room for Mrs. Carlyle's bedroom.
"Red bed," says Carlyle in a letter to his wife, "will stand behind the drawing-room"—and here it is! A four-poster with bare laths hung with faded red curtains and flounce. There is nothing more intimate than a bed, but this bed, standing so many years unwarmed by human contact, has outlived all such associations. It was not always a kind bed, either, judging from the tragic account in her letters of Jane's sleepless nights. "Oh!" she writes, "if there was any sleep to be got in that bed wherever it stands!" (alluding to a change in the position of her bed at Chelsea). "But it looks to my excited imagination, that bed I was born in, like a sort of instrument of red-hot torture; after all those nights I lay meditating on self-destruction as my only escape from insanity." A woman who could express her sufferings in such vivid language would be spared no iota of misery. Pin-pricks, which a stupid person might ignore, would to Jane be sword-thrusts.
As one thinks of her one remembers those words written by her husband: "Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?" and there, on the wall close at hand, hangs the photograph of her grave in Haddington Church.
But, dear me, Agatha, this won't do! I don't want (to quote my pal, Mrs. D.) to give you the "bloomin' 'ump". One must remember that Jane was not always ill or unhappy. Jane had her bright days and her friends, "dandering individuals dropping in," Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson. Note this little vignette of the latter: "Passing through a long, dim passage" (she was at the theatre) "I came on a tall man leant to the wall, with his head touching the ceiling like a caryatid, to all appearances asleep, or resolutely trying it under most unfavourable circumstances. 'Alfred Tennyson,' I exclaimed in joyful surprise. 'Well,' said he, taking the hand I held out to him and forgetting to let it go again, 'I should like to know who you are. I know that I know you, but I cannot tell your name.'"