My dear Stephen:
Thanks for your letter that reached me just before I left town. This is my address: what else would it be? And the enclosed [an invitation to lecture] is sent to show you that you are not the only Beppo on the peach (damn your British metaphors!): you might not believe it otherwise. But you may picture the courteous terms in which I declined.
There is nothing for nervous dyspepsia or gastric horribobblums like seven goodish hours in a swift and powerful railway-express. I have been free from pain or sickness for the first night since Wednesday week. But I slept little. From 1 a.m. onwards I spent a sleepless, painless night.
The hotel is comfortable and commodious in an old-fashioned country-house way; no central heating, but big fires; a certain amount of intrigue with Lizzie the chambermaid to secure a really hot bath: you know the sort of thing; immense grounds, a very park of 100 acres, which I shall never leave, because, if I did, I should never get back: we stand too high.
Bless you.
Ever yours,
Tex.
It was the last letter that I ever received from him; and on Monday, December the fifth, as I was in the middle of answering it, a telegram informed me that he had died that morning. As he was getting up, he collapsed in his wife’s arms and slipped, unconscious, on the floor. Death was instantaneous and, it may be presumed and hoped, painless. He was buried in the Holy Roman Catholic Cemetery at St. Ives; and a requiem mass for the repose of his soul was said at the Brompton Oratory.
Even those with best cause to suspect how nerveless was his grasp on life could not readily believe that one who loved life so well was to enjoy no more of it. “He was spared old age,” said one friend; but to another Tex had lately confessed that he would like to live for ever.
Before he left London, we said good-bye for five months: he was to winter in Cornwall, I in the West Indies. In seeing again the exquisite handwriting of these many hundreds of letters that commemorate our friendship for the last six years of his life, I at least cannot feel that his voice has grown silent or that his laughter is at an end. The big, solemn figure is vividly present; the favourite phrases and the familiar gestures are stamped for ever on the memory of any one that loved him.