Dr. Livingstone asked Dr. Stewart to commend her spirit to God, and along with Dr. Kirk they kneeled in prayer beside her. In less than an hour, her spirit had returned to God. Half an hour after, Dr. Stewart was struck with her likeness to her father, Dr. Moffat. He was afraid to utter what struck him so much, but at last he said to Livingstone, "Do you notice any change?" "Yes," he replied, without raising his eyes from her face,--"the very features and expression of her father."
Every one is struck with the calmness of Dr. Livingstone's notice of his wife's death in The Zambesi and its Tributaries. Its matter-of-fact tone only shows that he regarded that book as a sort of official report to the nation, in which it would not be becoming for him to introduce personal feelings. A few extracts from his Journal and letters will show better the state of his heart.
"It is the first heavy stroke I have suffered, and quite takes away my strength. I wept over her who well deserved many tears. I loved her when I married her, and the longer I lived with her I loved her the more. God pity the poor children, who were all tenderly attached to her, and I am left alone in the world by one whom I felt to be a part of myself. I hope it may, by divine grace, lead me to realize heaven as my home, and that she has but preceded me in the journey. Oh my Mary, my Mary! how often we have longed for a quiet home, since you and I were cast adrift at Kolobeng; surely the removal by a kind Father who knoweth our frame means that He rewarded you by taking you to the best home, the eternal one in the heavens. The prayer was found in her papers--'Accept me, Lord, as I am, and make me such as Thou wouldst have me to be.' He who taught her to value this prayer would not leave his own work unfinished. On a letter she had written, 'Let others plead for pensions, I wrote to a friend I can be rich without money; I would give my services in the world from uninterested motives; I have motives for my own conduct I would not exchange for a hundred pensions.'
"She rests by the large baobab-tree at Shupanga, which is sixty feet in circumference, and is mentioned in the work of Commodore Owen. The men asked to be allowed to mount guard till we had got the grave built up, and we had it built with bricks dug from an old house.
"From her boxes we find evidence that she intended to make us all comfortable at Nyassa, though she seemed to have a presentiment of an early death,--she purposed to do more for me than ever.
"11th May, Kongone.--My dear, dear Mary has been this evening a fortnight in heaven,--absent from the body, present with the Lord. To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise. Angels carried her to Abraham's bosom--to be with Christ is far better. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, 'Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints'; ye also shall appear with Him in glory. He comes with them; then they are now with Him. I go to prepare a place for you; that where I am there ye may be also, to behold his glory. Moses and Elias talked of the decease He should accomplish at Jerusalem; then they know what is going on here on certain occasions. They had bodily organs to hear and speak. For the first time in my life I feel willing to die.--D.L."
"May 19, 1862.--Vividly do I remember my first passage down in 1856, passing Shupanga house without landing, and looking at its red hills and white vales with the impression that it was a beautiful spot. No suspicion glanced across my mind that there my loving wife would be called to give up the ghost six years afterward. In some other spot I may have looked at, my own resting-place may be allotted. I have often wished that it might be in some far-off still deep forest, where I may sleep sweetly till the resurrection morn, when the trump of God will make all start up into the glorious and active second existence.
"25th May.--Some of the histories of pious people in the last century and previously tell of clouds of religious gloom, or of paroxysms of opposition and fierce rebellion against God, which found vent in terrible expressions. These were followed by great elevations of faith, and reactions of confiding love, the results of divine influence which carried the soul far above the region of the intellect into that of direct spiritual intuition. This seems to have been the experience of my dear Mary. She had a strong presentiment of death being near. She said that she would never have a house in this country. Taking it to be despondency alone, I only joked, and now my heart smites me that I did not talk seriously on that and many things besides.
"31st May, 1862.--The loss of my ever dear Mary lies like a heavy weight on my heart. In our intercourse in private there was more than what would be thought by some a decorous amount of merriment and play. I said to her a few days before her fatal illness: 'We old bodies ought now to be more sober, and not play so much.' 'Oh, no,' said she,' you must always be as playful as you have always been; I would not like you to be as grave as some folks I have seen.' This, when I know her prayer was that she might be spared to be a help and comfort to me in my great work, led me to feel what I have always believed to be the true way, to let the head grow wise, but keep the heart always young and playful. She was ready and anxious to work, but has been called away to serve God in a higher sphere."
Livingstone could not be idle, even when his heart was broken; he occupied the days after the death in writing to her father and mother, to his children, and to many of the friends who would be interested in the sad news. Among these letters, that to Mrs. Moffat and her reply from Kuruman have a special interest. His letters went round by Europe, and the first news reached Kuruman by traders and newspapers. For a full month after her daughters death, Mrs. Moffat was giving thanks for the mercy that had spared her to meet with her husband, and had made her lot so different from that of Miss Mackenzie and Mrs. Burrup. In a letter, dated 26th May, she writes to Mary a graphic account of the electrical thrill that passed through her when she saw David's handwriting--of the beating heart with which she tried to get the essence of his letter before she read the lines--of the overwhelming joy and gratitude with which she learned that they had met--and then the horror of great darkness that came over her when she read of the tragic death of the Bishop, to whom she had learned to feel as to a friend and brother. Then she pours out her tears over the "poor dear ladies, Miss Mackenzie and Mrs. Burrup," and remembers the similar fate of the Helmores, who, like the Bishop and his friends, had had it in their hearts to build a temple to the Lord in Africa, but had not been permitted. Then comes some family news, especially about her son Robert, whose sudden death occurred a few days after, and was another bitter drop in the family cup. And then some motherly forecastings of her daughter's future, kindly counsel where she could offer any, and affectionate prayers for the guidance of God where the future was too dark for her to penetrate.