'I had only time to write once yesterday, as all hands were full of
bustle in entertaining our guests. I never wish to see forty better
gentlemen than we had here last night. As all was quiet, we had
supper--cold beef, bread and beer--with songs, sentiments and toasts,
such as "Success to the roof we are under," "Liberty, brotherhood and
order." Then they bivouacked in the different houses till five this
morning, when they started home. Among the party was a stray
policeman, who looked rather wonder-struck. Tom Taylor was capital,
made short speeches, told stories, and kept all in high good-humour;
and Alick came home from patrolling as a special constable, and was
received with great glee and affection. All agreed that the fright,
to us at least, was well made up by the kindly and pleasant evening.
As no one would take a penny, we shall send books to the library, or
a contribution to the school, all our neighbours being quite anxious
to pay, though not willing to fraternise. I shall send cravats as a
badge to the "Gordon volunteers."
'I enclose a letter from Eothen [Kinglake] about Paris, which will
interest you. My friends of yesterday unanimously decided that Louis
Blanc would "just suit the 'lazy set.'"
'We had one row, which, however, ceased on the appearance of our
stalwart troop; indeed, I think one Birmingham smith, a handsome
fellow six feet high, whose vehement disinterestedness would neither
allow to eat, drink, or sleep in the house, would have scattered
them.'
Mr. and Mrs. Austin established themselves at Weybridge in a low,
rambling cottage, and we spent some summers with them. The house was
cold and damp, and our dear Hassan died in 1850 from congestion of the
lungs. I always attributed my mother's bad health to the incessant colds
she caught there. I can see before me now her beautiful pale face
bending over poor Hassan as she applied leeches to his chest, which a new
maid refused to do, saying, with a toss of her head, 'Lor! my lady, I
couldn't touch either of 'em!' The flash of scorn with which she
regarded the girl softened into deep affection and pity when she looked
down on her faithful Nubian servant.
In 1851 my father took a house at Esher, which was known as 'The Gordon
Arms,' and much frequented by our friends. In a letter, written about
that time to C. J. Bayley, then secretary to the Governor of the
Mauritius, Lady Duff Gordon gives the first note of alarm as to her
health: 'I fear you would think me very much altered since my illness; I
look thin, ill, and old, and my hair is growing gray. This I consider
hard upon a woman just over her thirtieth birthday. I continue to like
Esher very much; I don't think we could have placed ourselves better.
Kinglake has given Alick a great handsome chestnut mare, so he is well
mounted, and we ride merrily. I expressed such exultation at the idea of
your return that my friends, all but Alick, refused to sympathize.
Philips, Millais, and Dicky Doyle talked of jealousy, and Tom Taylor
muttered something about a "hated rival." Meanwhile, all send friendly
greetings to you.'
One summer Macaulay was often at Esher, his brother-in-law having taken a
house near ours. He shared my mother's admiration for Miss Austen's
novels, and they used to talk of her personages as though they were
living friends. If, perchance, my grandfather Austin was there, the talk
grew indeed fast and furious, as all three were vehement, eloquent, and
enthusiastic talkers.
When my mother went to Paris in the summer of 1857 she saw Heine again.
As she entered the room he exclaimed 'Oh! Lucie has still the great
brown eyes!' He remembered every little incident and all the people who
had been in the inn at Boulogne. 'I, for my part, could hardly speak to
him,' my mother wrote to Lord Houghton, who asked her to give him some
recollections of the poet for his 'Monographs,' 'so shocked was I by his
appearance. He lay on a pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it
seemed no bigger than a child's under the sheet that covered him, the
eyes closed and the face altogether like the most painful and wasted
_Ecce Homo_ ever painted by some old German painter. His voice was very
weak, and I was astonished at the animation with which he talked;
evidently his mind had wholly survived his body.' He wished to give my
mother the copyright of all his works, made out lists how to arrange
them, and gave her _carte-blanche_ to cut out what she pleased, and was
especially eager that she should do a prose translation of his songs
against her opinion of its practicability. To please him she translated
'Almanzor' and several short poems into verse--the best translations I
know.
After trying Ventnor for two winters, my mother went out to the Cape of
Good Hope in a sailing vessel, but on her return was unfortunately
persuaded to go to Eaux Bonnes in the autumn of 1862, which did her great
harm. Thence she went to Egypt, where the dry hot climate seemed to
arrest the malady for a short time. The following memoir written by Mrs.
Norton in the _Times_ gives a better picture of her than could any words
of mine, the two talented and beautiful women were intimate friends, and
few mourned more deeply for Lucie Duff Gordon than Caroline Norton:
'"In Memoriam." The brief phrase whose solemnity prefaced millions of
common place epitaphs before Tennyson taught grief to speak, lamenting
his dead friend in every phase and variety of regret. With such
gradation and difference of sorrow will the recent death of a very
remarkable woman, Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, be mourned for by all who knew
her, and with such a sense of blank loss will they long continue to
lament one whose public success as an author was only commensurate with
the charm of her private companionship. Inheriting from both parents the
intellectual faculties which she so nobly exercised, her work has been
ended in the very noontide of life by premature failure of health; and
the long exile she endured for the sake of a better climate has failed to
arrest, though it delayed, the doom foretold by her physicians. To that
exile we owe the most popular, perhaps, of her contributions to the
literature of her country, "Letters from the Cape," and "Letters from
Egypt," the latter more especially interesting from the vivid, life-like
descriptions of the people among whom she dwelt, her aspirations for
their better destiny, and the complete amalgamation of her own pursuits
and interests with theirs. She was a settler, not a traveller among
them. Unlike Lady Hester Stanhope, whose fantastic and half-insane
notions of rulership and superiority have been so often recorded for our
amazement, Lady Duff Gordon kept the simple frankness of heart and desire
to be of service to her fellow-creatures without a thought of self or a
taint of vanity in her intercourse with them. Not for lack of flattery
or of real enthusiastic gratitude on their part. It is known that when
at Thebes, on more than one of her journeys, the women raised the "cry of
joy" as she passed along, and the people flung branches and raiment on
her path, as in the old Biblical descriptions of Eastern life. The
source of her popularity was in the liberal kindliness of spirit with
which she acted on all occasions, more especially towards those she
considered the victims of bad government and oppressive laws. She says
of herself: "one's pity becomes a perfect passion when one sits among the
people as I do, and sees all they endure. Least of all can I forgive
those among Europeans and Christians who can help to break these bruised
reeds." And again: "Would that I could excite the interest of my country
in their suffering! Some conception of the value of public opinion in
England has penetrated even here." Sympathizing, helping, doctoring
their sick, teaching their children, learning the language, Lady Duff
Gordon lived in Egypt, and in Egypt she has died, leaving a memory of her
greatness and goodness such as no other European woman ever acquired in
that country. It is touching to trace her lingering hopes of life and
amended health in her letters to her husband and her mother, and to see
how, as they faded out, there rose over those hopes the grander light of
fortitude and submission to the will of God.
'Gradually--how gradually the limits of this notice forbid us to
follow--hope departs, and she begins bravely to face the inevitable
destiny. And then comes the end of all, the strong yet tender
announcement of her own conviction that there would be no more meetings,
but a grave opened to receive her in a foreign land.
'"DEAREST ALICK,
'"Do not think of coming here, as you dread the climate. Indeed, it
would be almost too painful to me to part from you again; and as it
is, I can wait patiently for the end, among people who are kind and
loving enough to be comfortable without too much feeling of the pain
of parting. The leaving Luxor was rather a distressing scene, as
they did not think to see me again. The kindness of all the people
was really touching, from the Cadi, who made ready my tomb among his
own family, to the poorest fellaheen."
'Such are the tranquil and kindly words with which she prefaces her
death. Those who remember her in her youth and beauty, before disease
rather than time had altered the pale heroic face, and bowed the slight,
stately figure, may well perceive some strange analogy between soul and
body in the Spartan firmness which enabled her to pen that last farewell
so quietly.
'But to the last her thought was for others, and for the services she
could render. In this very letter, written, as it were, on the verge of
the tomb, she speaks with gratitude and gladness of the advancement of
her favourite attendant, Omar. This Omar had been recommended to her by
the janissary of the American Consul-General, and so far back as 1862,
when in Alexandria, she mentions having engaged him, and his hopeful
prophecy of the good her Nile life is to do her. "My cough is bad; but
Omar says I shall lose it and 'eat plenty' as soon as I see a crocodile."
'Omar "could not leave her," and he had his reward. One of the last
events in the life of this gifted and liberal-minded Englishwoman was the
visit to her dahabeeyeh, or Nile boat, of the Prince and Princess of
Wales. Then poor Omar's simple and faithful service to his dying
mistress was rewarded in a way he could scarcely have dreamt; and Lady
Duff Gordon thus relates the incident: "Omar sends you his heartfelt
thanks, and begs the boat may remain registered at the Consulate in your
name, as a protection, for his use and benefit. The Prince has appointed
him his dragoman, but he is sad enough, poor fellow! all his prosperity
does not console him for the loss of "the mother he found in the world."
Mahomed at Luxor wept bitterly, and said: "Poor I--poor my children--poor
all the people!" and kissed my hand passionately; and the people at Esneh
asked leave to touch me "for a blessing," and everyone sent delicate
bread and their best butter and vegetables and lambs. They are kinder
than ever now that I can no longer be of any use to them. If I live till
September I will go up to Esneh, where the air is softest and I cough
less; I would rather die among my own people on the Saeed than here. Can
you thank the Prince for Omar, or shall I write? He was most pleasant
and kind, and the Princess too; she is the most perfectly simple-mannered
girl I ever saw; she does not even try to be civil like other great
people, but asks blunt questions and looks at one so heartily with her
clear, honest eyes, that she must win all hearts. They were more
considerate than any people I have seen, and the Prince, instead of being
gracious, was, if I may say so, quite respectful in manner: he is very
well bred and pleasant, and has, too, the honest eyes that make one sure
he has a kind heart. My sailors were so proud at having the honour of
rowing him in _our own boat_ and of singing to him. I had a very good
singer in the boat."
'Long will her presence be remembered and wept for among the
half-civilized friends of her exile, the poor, the sick, the needy and
the oppressed. She makes the gentle, half-playful boast in one of her
letters from the Nile that she is "very popular," and has made many cures
as a Hakeem, or doctor, and that a Circassian had sat up with a dying
Englishman because she had nursed his wife.
'The picture of the Circassian sitting up with the dying Englishman
because an English lady had nursed his wife is infinitely touching, and
had its parallel in the speech of an old Scottish landlady known to the
writer of this notice, whose son had died in the West Indies among
strangers. "And they were so good to him," said she, "that I vowed if
ever I had a lodger sick I would do my best for that stranger in
remembrance." In remembrance! Who shall say what seeds of kindly
intercommunion that dying Englishwoman of whom and of whose works we have
been speaking may have planted in the arid Eastern soil? Or what "bread
she may have cast" on those Nile waters, "which shall be found again
after many days"? "Out of evil cometh good," and certainly out of her
sickness and suffering good came to all within her influence.
'Lady Duff Gordon's printed works were many. She was an excellent German
scholar, and had the advantage in her translations from that difficult
language of her labours being shared by her husband. Ranke, Niebuhr,
Feuerbach, Moltke, and others, owe their introduction to our
English-reading public to the industry and talent of her pen. She was
also a classic scholar of no mean pretensions. Perhaps no woman of our
own time, except Mrs. Somerville and Mrs. Browning in their very
different styles, combined so much erudition with so much natural
ability. She was the daughter of Mr. Austin, the well-known professor of
jurisprudence, and his gifted wife, Sarah Austin, whose name is familiar
to thousands of readers, and whose social brilliancy is yet remembered
with extreme admiration and regret by the generation immediately
preceding our own.
'That Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, inherited the best of the intellect and
qualities of both these parents will, we think, hardly be disputed, and
she had besides, of her own, a certain generosity of spirit, a widespread
sympathy for humanity in general, without narrowness or sectarianism,
which might well prove her faith modelled on the sentence which appeals
too often in vain from the last page of the printed Bible to resenting
and dissenting religionists, "Multae terricolis linguae, coelestibus
una."'
* * * * *
The last two years of my mother's life were one long struggle against
deadly disease. The last winter was cheered by the presence of my
brother, but at her express desire he came home in early summer to
continue his studies, and my father and I were going out to see her, when
the news came of her death at Cairo on July 14, 1869. Her desire had
been to be among her 'own people' at Thebes, but when she felt she would
never see Luxor again, she gave orders to be buried as quietly as
possible in the cemetery at Cairo. The memory of her talent, simplicity,
stately beauty, and extraordinary eloquence, and her almost passionate
pity for any oppressed creature, will not easily fade. She bore great
pain, and what was almost a greater trial, absence from her husband, her
little daughter Urania, and her many friends, uncomplainingly, gleaning
what consolation she could by helping her poor Arab neighbours, who
adored her, and have not, I am told, forgotten the 'Great Lady' who was
so good to them.
* * * * *
The first volume of Lady Duff Gordon's 'Letters from Egypt' was published
by Messrs. Macmillan and Co. in May, 1865, with a preface by her mother,
Mrs. Austin, who edited them, and was obliged to omit much that might
have given offence and made my mother's life uncomfortable--to say the
least--in Egypt. Before the end of the year the book went through three
editions.
In 1875 a volume containing the 'Last Letters from Egypt,' to which were
added 'Letters from the Cape,' reprinted from 'Vacation Tourists' (1864),
with a Memoir of my mother by myself, was published by Messrs. Macmillan
and Co. A second edition appeared in 1876.
I have now copied my mother's letters as they were written, omitting only
the purely family matter which is of no interest to the public. Edward
Lear's drawing of Luxor was printed in 'Three Generations of
Englishwomen,' edited by Mrs. Ross, but the other illustrations are now
reproduced for the first time.
The names of villages alluded to in the 'Letters' have been spelt as in
the Atlas published by the Egyptian Exploration Fund.