Again at Brighton. I may here say, the delight of myself and brother to
this day is the recollection of Mrs. Wallinger, our aunt, long gone, and
of the eccentricity of her mental powers, increasing as time went on.
I have spoken of her often in an earlier page, but her sayings were
really droll enough to be put on record. I often make the new generation
laugh by repeating them.
When she had done anything that gave her a triumph, she would say to one
of us, “Did I not, my dear, show my great good sense? Am I not always
right?” Of course we assented with a smile of mental reservation.
As she grew old and less capable, and ceased to feed her friends, she
dropped into a more melancholy mood, and, looking upwards with her fine
large eyes, and a sigh, would say, “What a world it is, isn’t it, my
dear? Here we are, my dear, all alone, one with another.”
She did everything in her power for her relations with kindness of heart
and ample means, but it only made her feel that she was everybody’s
victim, so all her good deeds made her sorrowful.
She reached to a very advanced age, when her decay of memory showed
itself in a curious manner; she would forget, in part, the very subject
she was dwelling upon. Thus, when the sad story of Sir Thomas Troubridge
was made public, that he lost both arms and legs in the Crimea; that
the lady he was engaged to marry before the war did not shrink from her
pledge on his return, she was greatly impressed by the circumstance, and
would say, “If it had been me, my dear, I could not have married him. I
know it would have been very dishonourable of me, but I should have said,
‘Sir, I can’t!’ Only think, my dear, how dreadful it would have been, he
in so helpless a condition, not able even to wash his own hands!”
Some in this mental state will in speaking forget even their last word,
when it has served as a clue to the one that comes next. Thus, such a
person repeating Lord Lytton’s earlier names, Sir Edward _Lytton Bulwer
Lytton_, would never stop, because after Lytton he is necessitated to say
Bulwer, after Bulwer, Lytton, after Lytton, Bulwer again, and so on for
ever.
When the memory begins to fade, the ghost of a word sought still haunts
the mind, and by dwelling on it for some time, the substance will return
to the shadow, and the word again lives. The memory must be far gone
to encounter total obliteration—threads to every subject long remain;
but the difficulty, then the impossibility of finding and taking up
the thread at last follows. The lady of whom I have spoken, the kindly
aunt, was brought up at Exeter. I once asked her if she remembered
Northern-hay. Her reply was, she had never heard the name. I spoke of
other places, beginning with St. Bartholomew’s. We lived there, she said,
after we left Bowhill House, and we used to walk up Fore Street to St.
Sidwell’s, and then across Northern-hay Hill.
I have mentioned how in her better days this generous, kind-hearted lady
felt herself the victim of her family, spontaneous as was her interest in
all that concerned them. My mother, while we were at Brighton, had a fall
on the stairs, which produced a severe dislocation of the hip-joint. I
hastened to Mrs. Wallinger’s house to acquaint her with the distressful
news. She evidently took in all at a glance, with the weeks of kindness
she would be compelled to bestow on the sufferer, and her first remark,
accompanied with a sigh and upturned, pathetic eyes, was, “Is it not very
hard on me, my dear? To think of my family!”
I must not omit a very frequent saying of this lady. Her house was a
model of cleanliness, and to that virtue she would allude with pride.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” she would say; “for what else is
there, my dear?”
I cannot resist noting another favourite exclamation of hers, always
uttered when any event, serious and unexpected, transpired. On such
occasions, she would look piously upwards, and say, “Does it not show how
true everything is, my dear?” just as if the whole of the holy Scriptures
had suddenly flashed across her mind.