A letter [683] of one of Burton's friends contains the following comments on the work. "I plainly see that the objects of writing the Life were two-fold. First to prove Sir Richard a Roman Catholic, and thus fit him to be buried with her, and secondly to whitewash his escapades and insubordination. As to the first, I know he despised [684] the Roman Catholic religion; and if any very deep sense of religious feeling existed at all, it was of the Mohammedan rather than anything else; but his religion was not very apparent, though he was fundamentally an honest and conscientious man, and I think he had but one enemy—himself. He was a very great man; very like a magnificent machine one part of which had gone wrong—and that was his hot temper."
Lady Burton's book was finished at Mortlake on 24th March 1893, and appeared in the autumn of that year. She then commenced the issue of the Memorial Edition of her husband's works. The Pilgrimage to Al Medinah and Meccah (2 vols.), The Mission to Gelele (2 vols.), and Vikram and the Vampire appeared in 1893, First Footsteps in East Africa in 1894. The venture, however, proved a failure, so no more volumes were issued. She published her husband's Pentameron in 1893, and the Catullus in 1894.
Writing 11th July 1893 to Mrs. E. J. Burton just before a visit to that lady, Lady Burton says—and it must be borne in mind that her complaint often made her feel very ill—"Send me a line to tell me what is the nearest Roman Catholic Church to you, as I must drive there first to make all arrangements for Sunday morning to get an early confession, communion and mass (after which I am at liberty for the rest of the day) because, as you know, I have to fast from midnight till I come back, and I feel bad for want of a cup of tea. ...The Life is out to-day."
The reception accorded to her work by the Press, who, out of regard to Sir Richard's memory, spoke of it with the utmost kindness, gave Lady Burton many happy hours. "It is a great pleasure to me," she says, "to know how kind people are about my book, and how beautifully they speak of darling Richard." [685]
Most of Lady Burton's remaining letters are full of gratitude to God, tender and Christian sentiment, faulty English and bad spelling. [686] "I did see The Times," she says, "and was awfully glad of it. Kinder still is The Sunday Sun, the 1st, the 8th and the 15th of October, five columns each, which say that I have completely lifted any cloud away from his memory, and that his future fame will shine like a beacon in all ages. Thank God!" St. George Burton was wicked enough to twit her for her spelling, and to say that he found out as many as seventeen words incorrectly spelt in one letter. But she deftly excused herself by saying that she used archaic forms. "Never mind St. George," she writes good-humouredly, to Mrs. E. G. Burton, "I like old spelling." She did not excuse her slang by calling it old, or refer her friends to Chaucer for "awfully glad."
The greatest pleasure of her life was now, as she oddly expresses it, to "dress the mausoleum" on "darling Dick's anniversary." She says (21st October 1893 to Mrs. E. J. Burton), [687] "I received your dear flowers, and the mausoleum was quite lovely, a mass of lights and flowers sent by relations and affectionate friends. Yours stood in front of the altar." Then follows a delicious and very characteristic sample of Lady Burton's English: "We had mass and communion," she says, "and crowds of friends came down to see the mausoleum and two photographers."
She was glad to visit and decorate the Mortlake tomb certainly, but the pleasure was a very melancholy one, and she could but say, borrowing a thought from The Arabian Nights:
"O tomb, O tomb, thou art neither earth nor heaven unto me." [688]
When Lady Stisted died (27th December 1893), Lady Burton felt the blow keenly, and she wrote very feelingly on the subject, "Yes," she says, in a letter to Mrs. E. J. Burton, "I was very shocked at poor Maria's death, and more so because I wish nothing had come between us." "Poor Maria," she wrote to St. George Burton, "You would be surprised to know, and I am surprised myself, how much I feel it." In a letter to Madame de Gutmansthal-Benvenuti (10th January 1894), Lady Burton refers to the Burton tableau to Madame Tussaud's. She says, "They have now put Richard in the Meccan dress he wore in the desert. They have given him a large space with sand, water, palms; and three camels, and a domed skylight, painted yellow, throws a lurid light on the scene. It is quite life-like. I gave them the real clothes and the real weapons, and dressed him myself."
"I am so glad," she writes to Miss Stisted, [689] "you went to Tussaud's, and that you admired Dick and his group. I am not quite content with the pose. The figure looks all right when it stands up properly, but I have always had a trouble with Tussaud about a certain stoop which he declares is artistic, and which I say was not natural to him."