When her own time came, as it did soon after, she met death with the same
fearless, friendly courage. Her thoughts were wholly for those who were
to stay, and she was even playful in urging upon me never to leave Ronald
and the children, but learn to “take her place.” I own I was troubled at
times by what seemed almost levity in the face of death, till I began by
degrees to realise her point of view.
“I think it will be a very short distance,” she said, “perhaps into
another room, perhaps not even so far as that; and the time (to me, at
any rate) will certainly seem short—no longer than the night of sleep
which separates us from our loved ones till the morning.” And of the
future she had no fear. “Nothing,” she said, “could persuade me that the
light which has been fanned and quickened here will be extinguished for
ever by the incident we call death. The jest would be too horribly,
inconceivably malicious. Yet our choice lies between this and the
crowning impossibility of a self-created world.”
Not thoughtlessly, but in the hope of finding a standing ground for
myself, I would ask her sometimes if she had no misgivings regarding the
re-existence of the body, and mutual recognition, and the endless
difficulties that centre round the subject.
“None,” she answered, “none. Why should I? Look at the natural world.
I know that space must be either limited or limitless; but can I form a
conception of either alternative? Yet the problem may be simplicity
itself to some larger mind than ours. So why trouble myself about
difficulties which may be easier of solution still to those who hold the
key? And you think it hard, I know—you have often said so—that many
should die, as we know they must, without a friend on earth to whom they
can look forward for a welcome when they reach the further shore. To me,
I confess, it seems quite the contrary. Surely the burst of welcome will
be greater in their ears than in ours, who have lived surrounded by
friends, and never known the dearth of sympathy.”
And every difficulty, as I raised it, she met with the same calm,
unquestioning certainty.
She died, as she had lived, in ministering to others. Oswald’s death was
the first blow. From the exposure and the physical effects she soon
recovered—sooner than we expected, considering her frail and uncertain
hold on life. But the horror of it was always with her, especially the
feeling that it was she who had suggested the fatal experiment. Ever and
again, as the subject was referred to, I could see her shuddering at the
reminiscence, blaming herself with what was surely the only reproach that
can have harassed her bright and blameless conscience. And the
remembrance was still upon her when her two children sickened with the
scarlet fever. Considering her weak state, and consequent liability to
infection, the doctor had strictly forbidden her to enter their room. “I
can make no promises,” she said; “if they want me I must go. Till then I
will obey your orders. We are told to give up father and mother, and
perhaps oneself for one’s husband, but our children, I think, have a
prior claim to all.” And so she watched and waited at their door,
stealing along the corridor in her robe of white at all hours of the
night, listening and listening to hear if a summons came.
One night, unhappily, it came—a summons she was powerless to resist. The
elder child was delirious, and she heard it moaning piteously, “Mother,
mother, why don’t you come to me?” Without a moment’s hesitation she had
entered the room, signing her own death-warrant in the act.
She did not linger long in dying; lingering was little in her way. On a
grey morning in October, just ten days after she was taken ill, the gun
which welcomes sunrise from the signal-station on the pier echoed like a
call. She opened her eyes to greet us, and with the diamonds flickering
again about her head—only they were sunbeams now—she passed to that
“larger life” of which she, if anyone, held the key.
“Lest we forget.”
* * * * *