THAT I might die in my early childhood was a thought which
frequently recurred to the mind of my Mother. She endeavoured,
with a Roman fortitude, to face it without apprehension. Soon
after I had completed my fifth year, she had written as follows
in her secret journal:
'Should we be called on to weep over the early grave of the dear
one whom now we are endeavouring to train for heaven, may we be
able to remember that we never ceased to pray for and watch over
him. It is easy, comparatively, to watch over an infant. Yet
shall I be sufficient for these things? I am not. But God is
sufficient. In his strength I have begun the warfare, in his
strength I will persevere, and I will faint not until either I
myself or my little one is beyond the reach of earthly
solicitude.'
That either she or I would be called away from earth, and that
our physical separation was at hand, seems to have been always
vaguely present in my Mother's dreams, as an obstinate conviction
to be carefully recognized and jealously guarded against.
It was not, however, until the course of my seventh year that the
tragedy occurred, which altered the whole course of our family
existence. My Mother had hitherto seemed strong and in good
health; she had even made the remark to my Father, that 'sorrow
and pain, the badges of Christian discipleship', appeared to be
withheld from her. On her birthday, which was to be her last, she
had written these ejaculations in her locked diary:
'Lord, forgive the sins of the past, and help me to be faithful in
future! May this be a year of much blessing, a year of jubilee!
May I be kept lowly, trusting, loving! May I have more blessing
than in all former years combined! May I be happier as a wife,
mother, sister, writer, mistress, friend!'
But a symptom began to alarm her, and in the beginning of May,
having consulted a local physician without being satisfied, she
went to see a specialist in a northern suburb in whose judgement
she had great confidence. This occasion I recollect with extreme
vividness. I had been put to bed by my Father, in itself a
noteworthy event. My crib stood near a window overlooking the
street; my parents' ancient four-poster, a relic of the
eighteenth century, hid me from the door, but I could see the
rest of the room. After falling asleep on this particular
evening, I awoke silently, surprised to see two lighted candles
on the table, and my Father seated writing by them. I also saw a
little meal arranged.
While I was wondering at all this, the door opened, and my Mother
entered the room; she emerged from behind the bed-curtains, with
her bonnet on, having returned from her expedition. My Father
rose hurriedly, pushing back his chair. There was a pause, while
my Mother seemed to be steadying her voice, and then she replied,
loudly and distinctly, 'He says it is--' and she mentioned one of
the most cruel maladies by which our poor mortal nature can be
tormented. Then I saw them hold one another in a silent long
embrace, and presently sink together out of sight on their knees,
at the farther side of the bed, whereupon my Father lifted up his
voice in prayer. Neither of them had noticed me, and now I lay
back on my pillow and fell asleep.
Next morning, when we three sat at breakfast, my mind reverted to
the scene of the previous night. With my eyes on my plate, as I
was cutting up my food, I asked, casually, 'What is--?'
mentioning the disease whose unfamiliar name I had heard from my
bed. Receiving no reply, I looked up to discover why my question
was not answered, and I saw my parents gazing at each other with
lamentable eyes. In some way, I know not how, I was conscious of
the presence of an incommunicable mystery, and I kept silence,
though tortured with curiosity, nor did I ever repeat my inquiry.
About a fortnight later, my Mother began to go three times a week
all the long way from Islington to Pimlico, in order to visit a
certain practitioner, who undertook to apply a special treatment
to her case. This involved great fatigue and distress to her, but
so far as I was personally concerned it did me a great deal of
good. I invariably accompanied her, and when she was very tired
and weak, I enjoyed the pride of believing that I protected her.
The movement, the exercise, the occupation, lifted my morbid
fears and superstitions like a cloud. The medical treatment to
which my poor Mother was subjected was very painful, and she had
a peculiar sensitiveness to pain. She carried on her evangelical
work as long as she possibly could, continuing to converse with
her fellow passengers on spiritual matters. It was wonderful that
a woman, so reserved and proud as she by nature was, could
conquer so completely her natural timidity. In those last months,
she scarcely ever got into a railway carriage or into an omnibus,
without presently offering tracts to the persons sitting within
reach of her, or endeavouring to begin a conversation with some
one of the sufficiency of the Blood of Jesus to cleanse the human
heart from sin. Her manners were so gentle and persuasive, she
looked so innocent, her small, sparkling features were lighted up
with so much benevolence, that I do not think she ever met with
discourtesy or roughness. Imitative imp that I was, I sometimes
took part in these strange conversations, and was mightily puffed
up by compliments paid, in whispers, to my infant piety. But my
Mother very properly discouraged this, as tending in me to
spiritual pride.
If my parents, in their desire to separate themselves from the
world, had regretted that through their happiness they seemed to
have forfeited the Christian privilege of affliction, they could
not continue to complain of any absence of temporal adversity.
Everything seemed to combine, in the course of this fatal year
1856, to harass and alarm them. Just at the moment when illness
created a special drain upon their resources, their slender
income, instead of being increased, was seriously diminished.
There is little sympathy felt in this world of rhetoric for the
silent sufferings of the genteel poor, yet there is no class that
deserves a more charitable commiseration.
At the best of times, the money which my parents had to spend was
an exiguous and an inelastic sum. Strictly economical, proud--in
an old-fashioned mode now quite out of fashion--to conceal the
fact of their poverty, painfully scrupulous to avoid giving
inconvenience to shop-people, tradesmen or servants, their whole
financial career had to be carried on with the adroitness of a
campaign through a hostile country. But now, at the moment when
fresh pressing claims were made on their resources, my Mother's
small capital suddenly disappeared. It had been placed, on bad
advice (they were as children in such matters), in a Cornish
mine, the grotesque name of which, Wheal Maria, became familiar
to my ears. One day the river Tamar, in a playful mood, broke
into Wheal Maria, and not a penny more was ever lifted from that
unfortunate enterprise. About the same time, a small annuity
which my Mother had inherited also ceased to be paid.
On my Father's books and lectures, therefore, the whole weight
now rested, and that at a moment when he was depressed and
unnerved by anxiety. It was contrary to his principles to borrow
money, so that it became necessary to pay doctor's and chemist's
bills punctually, and yet to carry on the little household with
the very small margin. Each artifice of economy was now exercised
to enable this to be done without falling into debt, and every
branch of expenditure was cut down, clothes, books, the little
garden which was my Father's pride, all felt the pressure of new
poverty. Even our food, which had always been simple, now became
Spartan indeed, and I am sure that my Mother often pretended to
have no appetite that there might remain enough to satisfy my
hunger. Fortunately my Father was able to take us away in the
autumn for six weeks by the sea in Wales, the expenses of this
tour being paid for by a professional engagement, so that my
seventh birthday was spent in an ecstasy of happiness, on golden
sands, under a brilliant sky, and in sight of the glorious azure
ocean beating in from an infinitude of melting horizons. Here,
too, my Mother, perched in a nook of the high rocks, surveyed the
west, and forgot for a little while her weakness and the gnawing,
grinding pain.
But in October, our sorrows seemed to close in upon us. We went
back to London, and for the first time in their married life, my
parents were divided. My Mother was now so seriously weaker that
the omnibus journeys to Pimlico became impossible. My Father
could not leave his work and so my Mother and I had to take a
gloomy lodging close to the doctor's house. The experiences upon
which I presently entered were of a nature in which childhood
rarely takes a part. I was now my Mother's sole and ceaseless
companion; the silent witness of her suffering, of her patience,
of her vain and delusive attempts to obtain alleviation of her
anguish. For nearly three months I breathed the atmosphere of
pain, saw no other light, heard no other sounds, thought no other
thoughts than those which accompany physical suffering and
weariness. To my memory these weeks seem years; I have no measure
of their monotony. The lodgings were bare and yet tawdry; out of
dingy windows we looked from a second storey upon a dull small
street, drowned in autumnal fog. My Father came to see us when he
could, but otherwise, save when we made our morning expedition to
the doctor, or when a slatternly girl waited upon us with our
distasteful meals, we were alone, without any other occupation
than to look forward to that occasional abatement of suffering
which was what we hoped for most.
It is difficult for me to recollect how these interminable hours
were spent. But I read aloud in a great part of them. I have now
in my mind's cabinet a picture of my chair turned towards the
window, partly that I might see the book more distinctly, partly
not to see quite so distinctly that dear patient figure rocking
on her sofa, or leaning, like a funeral statue, like a muse upon
a monument, with her head on her arms against the mantelpiece. I
read the Bible every day, and at much length; also,--with I
cannot but think some praiseworthy patience,--a book of
incommunicable dreariness, called Newton's 'Thoughts on the
Apocalypse'. Newton bore a great resemblance to my old aversion,
Jukes, and I made a sort of playful compact with my Mother that
if I read aloud a certain number of pages out of 'Thoughts on the
Apocalypse', as a reward I should be allowed to recite 'my own
favourite hymns'. Among these there was one which united her
suffrages with mine. Both of us extremely admired the piece by
Toplady which begins:
What though my frail eyelids refuse
Continual watchings to keep,
And, punctual as midnight renews,
Demand the refreshment of sleep.
To this day, I cannot repeat this hymn without a sense of
poignant emotion, nor can I pretend to decide how much of this is
due to its merit and how much to the peculiar nature of the
memories it recalls. But it might be as rude as I genuinely think
it to be skilful, and I should continue to regard it as a sacred
poem. Among all my childish memories none is clearer than my
looking up,--after reading, in my high treble,
Kind Author and Ground of my hope,
Thee, Thee for my God I avow;
My glad Ebenezer set up,
And own Thou hast help'd me till now;
I muse on the years that are past,
Wherein my defence Thou hast prov'd,
Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last
A sinner so signally lov'd,--
and hearing my Mother, her eyes brimming with tears and her
alabastrine fingers tightly locked together, murmur in
unconscious repetition:
Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last
A sinner so signally lov'd.
In our lodgings at Pimlico I came across a piece of verse which
exercised a lasting influence on my taste. It was called 'The
Cameronian's Dream', and it had been written by a certain James
Hyslop, a schoolmaster on a man-of-war. I do not know how it came
into my possession, but I remember it was adorned by an extremely
dim and ill-executed wood-cut of a lake surrounded by mountains,
with tombstones in the foreground. This lugubrious frontispiece
positively fascinated me, and lent a further gloomy charm to the
ballad itself. It was in this copy of mediocre verses that the
sense of romance first appealed to me, the kind of nature-romance
which is connected with hills, and lakes, and the picturesque
costumes of old times. The following stanza, for instance,
brought a revelation to me:
'Twas a dream of those ages of darkness and blood,
When the minister's home was the mountain and wood;
When in Wellwood's dark valley the standard of Zion,
All bloody and torn, 'mong the heather was lying.
I persuaded my Mother to explain to me what it was all about, and
she told me of the affliction of the Scottish saints, their
flight to the waters and the wilderness, their cruel murder while
they were singing 'their last song to the God of Salvation'. I
was greatly fired, and the following stanza, in particular,
reached my ideal of the Sublime:
The muskets were flashing, the blue swords were gleaming,
The helmets were cleft, and the red blood was streaming,
The heavens grew dark, and the thunder was rolling,
When in Wellwood's dark muirlands the mighty were falling.
Twenty years later I met with the only other person whom I have
ever encountered who had even heard of 'The Cameronian's Dream'.
This was Robert Louis Stevenson, who had been greatly struck by
it when he was about my age. Probably the same ephemeral edition
of it reached, at the same time, each of our pious households.
As my Mother's illness progressed, she could neither sleep, save
by the use of opiates, nor rest, except in a sloping posture,
propped up by many pillows. It was my great joy, and a pleasant
diversion, to be allowed to shift, beat up, and rearrange these
pillows, a task which I learned to accomplish not too awkwardly.
Her sufferings, I believe, were principally caused by the
violence of the medicaments to which her doctor, who was trying a
new and fantastic 'cure', thought it proper to subject her. Let
those who take a pessimistic view of our social progress ask
themselves whether such tortures could today be inflicted on a
delicate patient, or whether that patient would be allowed to
exist, in the greatest misery in a lodging with no professional
nurse to wait upon her, and with no companion but a little
helpless boy of seven years of age. Time passes smoothly and
swiftly, and we do not perceive the mitigations which he brings
in his hands. Everywhere, in the whole system of human life,
improvements, alleviations, ingenious appliances and humane
inventions are being introduced to lessen the great burden of
suffering.
If we were suddenly transplanted into the world of only fifty
years ago, we should be startled and even horror-stricken by the
wretchedness to which the step backwards would reintroduce us. It
was in the very year of which I am speaking, a year of which my
personal memories are still vivid, that Sir James Simpson
received the Monthyon prize as a recognition of his discovery of
the use of anaesthetics. Can our thoughts embrace the mitigation
of human torment which the application of chloroform alone has
caused? My early experiences, I confess, made me singularly
conscious, at an age when one should know nothing about these
things, of that torrent of sorrow and anguish and terror which
flows under all footsteps of man. Within my childish conscience,
already, some dim inquiry was awake as to the meaning of this
mystery of pain--
The floods of the tears meet and gather;
The sound of them all grows like thunder;
Oh into what bosom, I wonder,
Is poured the whole sorrow of years?
For Eternity only seems keeping
Account of the great human weeping;
May God then, the Maker and Father,
May He find a place for the tears!
In my Mother's case, the savage treatment did no good; it had to
be abandoned, and a day or two before Christmas, while the fruits
were piled in the shop-fronts and the butchers were shouting
outside their forests of carcases, my Father brought us back in a
cab through the streets to Islington, a feeble and languishing
company. Our invalid bore the journey fairly well, enjoying the
air, and pointing out to me the glittering evidences of the
season, but we paid heavily for her little entertainment, since,
at her earnest wish the window of the cab having been kept open,
she caught a cold, which became, indeed, the technical cause of a
death that no applications could now have long delayed.
Yet she lingered with us six weeks more, and during this time I
again relapsed, very naturally, into solitude. She now had the
care of a practised woman, one of the 'saints' from the Chapel,
and I was only permitted to pay brief visits to her bedside. That
I might not be kept indoors all day and everyday, a man, also
connected with the meeting-house, was paid a trifle to take me
out for a walk each morning. This person, who was by turns
familiar and truculent, was the object of my intense dislike. Our
relations became, in the truest sense, 'forced'; I was obliged to
walk by his side, but I held that I had no further responsibility
to be agreeable, and after a while I ceased to speak to him, or
to answer his remarks. On one occasion, poor dreary man, he met a
friend and stopped to chat with him. I considered this act to
have dissolved the bond; I skipped lightly from his side,
examined several shop-windows which I had been forbidden to look
into, made several darts down courts and up passages, and
finally, after a delightful morning, returned home, having known
my directions perfectly. My official conductor, in a shocking
condition of fear, was crouching by the area-rails looking up and
down the street. He darted upon me, in a great rage, to know
'what I meant by it?' I drew myself up as tall as I could, hissed
'Blind leader of the blind!' at him, and, with this inappropriate
but very effective Parthian shot, slipped into the house.
When it was quite certain that no alleviations and no medical
care could prevent, or even any longer postpone the departure of
my Mother, I believe that my future conduct became the object of
her greatest and her most painful solicitude. She said to my
Father that the worst trial of her faith came from the feeling
that she was called upon to leave that child whom she had so
carefully trained from his earliest infancy for the peculiar
service of the Lord, without any knowledge of what his further
course would be. In many conversations, she most tenderly and
closely urged my Father, who, however, needed no urging, to watch
with unceasing care over my spiritual welfare. As she grew nearer
her end, it was observed that she became calmer, and less
troubled by fears about me. The intensity of her prayers and
hopes seemed to have a prevailing force; it would have been a sin
to doubt that such supplications, such confidence and devotion,
such an emphasis of will, should not be rewarded by an answer
from above in the affirmative. She was able, she said, to leave
me 'in the hands of her loving Lord', or, on another occasion,
'to the care of her covenant God'.
Although her faith was so strong and simple, my Mother possessed
no quality of the mystic. She never pretended to any visionary
gifts, believed not at all in dreams or portents, and encouraged
nothing in herself or others which was superstitious or
fantastic. In order to realize her condition of mind, it is
necessary, I think, to accept the view that she had formed a
definite conception of the absolute, unmodified and historical
veracity, in its direct and obvious sense, of every statement
contained within the covers of the Bible. For her, and for my
Father, nothing was symbolic, nothing allegorical or allusive in
any part of Scripture, except what was, in so many words,
proffered as a parable or a picture. Pushing this to its extreme
limit, and allowing nothing for the changes of scene or time or
race, my parents read injunctions to the Corinthian converts
without any suspicion that what was apposite in dealing with
half-breed Achaian colonists of the first century might not
exactly apply to respectable English men and women of the
nineteenth. They took it, text by text, as if no sort of
difference existed between the surroundings of Trimalchion's
feast and those of a City dinner. Both my parents, I think, were
devoid of sympathetic imagination; in my Father, I am sure, it
was singularly absent. Hence, although their faith was so
strenuous that many persons might have called it fanatical, there
was no mysticism about them. They went rather to the opposite
extreme, to the cultivation of a rigid and iconoclastic
literalness.
This was curiously exemplified in the very lively interest which
they both took in what is called 'the interpretation of
prophecy', and particularly in unwrapping the dark sayings bound
up in the Book of Revelation. In their impartial survey of the
Bible, they came to this collection of solemn and splendid
visions, sinister and obscure, and they had no intention of
allowing these to be merely stimulating to the fancy, or vaguely
doctrinal in symbol. When they read of seals broken and of vials
poured forth, of the star which was called Wormwood that fell
from Heaven, and of men whose hair was as the hair of women and
their teeth as the teeth of lions, they did not admit for a
moment that these vivid mental pictures were of a poetic
character, but they regarded them as positive statements, in
guarded language, describing events which were to happen, and
could be recognized when they did happen. It was the explanation,
the perfectly prosaic and positive explanation, of all these
wonders which drew them to study the Habershons and the Newtons
whose books they so much enjoyed. They were helped by these
guides to recognize in wild Oriental visions direct statements
regarding Napoleon III and Pope Pius IX and the King of Piedmont,
historic figures which they conceived as foreshadowed, in
language which admitted of plain interpretation, under the names
of denizens of Babylon and companions of the Wild Beast.
My Father was in the habit of saying, in later years, that no
small element in his wedded happiness had been the fact that my
Mother and he were of one mind in the interpretation of Sacred
Prophecy. Looking back, it appears to me that this unusual mental
exercise was almost their only relaxation, and that in their
economy it took the place which is taken, in profaner families,
by cards or the piano. It was a distraction; it took them
completely out of themselves. During those melancholy weeks at
Pimlico, I read aloud another work of the same nature as those of
Habershon and Jukes, the _Horae Apocalypticae_ of a Mr. Elliott.
This was written, I think, in a less disagreeable style, and
certainly it was less opaquely obscure to me. My recollection
distinctly is that when my Mother could endure nothing else, the
arguments of this book took her thoughts away from her pain and
lifted her spirits. Elliott saw 'the queenly arrogance of Popery'
everywhere, and believed that the very last days of Babylon the
Great were came. Lest I say what may be thought extravagant, let
me quote what my Father wrote in his diary at the time of my
Mother's death. He said that the thought that Rome was doomed (as
seemed not impossible in 1857) so affected my Mother that it
'irradiated' her dying hours with an assurance that was like 'the
light of the Morning Star, the harbinger of the rising sun'.
After our return to Islington, there was a complete change in my
relation to my Mother. At Pimlico, I had been all-important, her
only companion, her friend, her confidant. But now that she was
at home again, people and things combined to separate me from
her. Now, and for the first time in my life, I no longer slept in
her room, no longer sank to sleep under her kiss, no longer saw
her mild eyes smile on me with the earliest sunshine. Twice a
day, after breakfast and before I went to rest, I was brought to
her bedside; but we were never alone; other people, sometimes
strange people, were there. We had no cosy talk; often she was
too weak to do more than pat my hand; her loud and almost
constant cough terrified and harassed me. I felt, as I stood,
awkwardly and shyly, by her high bed, that I had shrunken into a
very small and insignificant figure, that she was floating out of
my reach, that all things, but I knew not what nor how, were
corning to an end. She herself was not herself; her head, that
used to be held so erect, now rolled or sank upon the pillow; the
sparkle was all extinguished from those bright, dear eyes. I
could not understand it; I meditated long, long upon it all in my
infantile darkness, in the garret, or in the little slip of a
cold room where my bed was now placed; and a great, blind anger
against I knew not what awakened in my soul.
The two retreats which I have mentioned were now all that were
left to me. In the back-parlour someone from outside gave me
occasional lessons of a desultory character. The breakfast-room
was often haunted by visitors, unknown to me by face or name,--
ladies, who used to pity me and even to pet me, until I became
nimble in escaping from their caresses. Everything seemed to be
unfixed, uncertain; it was like being on the platform of a
railway-station waiting for a train. In all this time, the
agitated, nervous presence of my Father, whose pale face was
permanently drawn with anxiety, added to my perturbation, and I
became miserable, stupid--as if I had lost my way in a cold fog.
Had I been older and more intelligent, of course, it might have
been of him and not of myself that I should have been thinking.
As I now look back upon that tragic time, it is for him that my
heart bleeds,--for them both, so singularly fitted as they were
to support and cheer one another in an existence which their own
innate and cultivated characteristics had made little hospitable
to other sources of comfort. This is not to be dwelt on here. But
what must be recorded was the extraordinary tranquillity, the
serene and sensible resignation, with which at length my parents
faced the awful hour. Language cannot utter what they suffered,
but there was no rebellion, no repining; in their case even an
atheist might admit that the overpowering miracle of grace was
mightily efficient.
It seems almost cruel to the memory of their opinions that the
only words which rise to my mind, the only ones which seem in the
least degree adequate to describe the attitude of my parents, had
fallen from the pen of one whom, in their want of imaginative
sympathy, they had regarded as anathema. But John Henry Newman
might have come from the contemplation of my Mother's death-bed
when he wrote: 'All the trouble which the world inflicts upon us,
and which flesh cannot but feel,--sorrow, pain, care,
bereavement,--these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the
intensity with which faith gazes at the Divine Majesty.' It was
'tranquillity', it was not the rapture of the mystic. Almost in
the last hour of her life, urged to confess her 'joy' in the
Lord, my Mother, rigidly honest, meticulous in self-analysis, as
ever, replied: 'I have peace, but not _joy_. It would not do to go
into eternity with a lie in my mouth.'
When the very end approached, and her mind was growing clouded,
she gathered her strength together to say to my Father, 'I shall
walk with Him in white. Won't you take your lamb and walk with
me?' Confused with sorrow and alarm, my Father failed to
understand her meaning. She became agitated, and she repeated two
or three times: 'Take our lamb, and walk with me!' Then my Father
comprehended, and pressed me forward; her hand fell softly upon
mine and she seemed content. Thus was my dedication, that had
begun in my cradle, sealed with the most solemn, the most
poignant and irresistible insistence, at the death-bed of the
holiest and purest of women. But what a weight, intolerable as
the burden of Atlas, to lay on the shoulders of a little fragile
child!