‘It is like a book,’ says Emily Tennyson, ‘all so perfectly happy and yet I feel ungrateful when I say so, for so long as one believes in truth and love, so long must one believe in the possibility of happiness, and I myself, having so much of the reality, should most of all dare to believe in the possibility for others. Let them be married soon—I may be pardoned for a horror of long engagements.’
In 1859 the Camerons were still on Putney Heath, but Mr. Cameron was preparing to visit his estates in Ceylon, of which disquieting news had reached him.
‘Charles speaks to me of the flower of the coffee plant. I tell him that the eyes of the first grandchild should be more beautiful than any flower could ever seem,’ so Mrs. Cameron used to exclaim pathetically, and she wrote to her friend:
‘As for me I have been fairly drowned in troubles and cares, and the waters seem to pass over one’s soul. The 20th November is now fast approaching and whilst it approaches I am not at all more prepared in heart or in deed. I have not had courage to make the necessary preparation. To-day the portmanteaux have been dragged out, and they stand to me threatening, to Charles promising departure.’
Mr. Cameron was seized with illness about this time.
‘I tell him this should be a warning to him not to leave home and home care and comforts. He assures me that the sea voyage is the best thing for him and Ceylon is the cure for all things. I look upon this illness as the tender rebuke of a friend. He requires home and its comforts. He has been having strong beef-tea thickened with arrowroot six times a day!...’
Here is Mrs. Cameron’s menu when the invalid, her husband, was recovering. What would nurses of to-day say to it?
‘The patient has poached eggs at eight, gets up at eleven, has his dinner; gravy soup and curry, at one, mulligatawny soup and meat at five, a free allowance of port wine, averaging a bottle a day. Ten drops of Jeremie’s opiate every morning, a dose of creosote zinc and gum arabic before his meals, and a dose of quinine after each meal.’
Notwithstanding home comforts and his wife’s remonstrance, the invalid started with one of his sons while she remained with the younger children. To add to her troubles Sir Henry Taylor was also very ill at this time and suffering terribly from the complications of asthma.