Lady John Russell Part 44

[117] Dr. Anderson, who had been for nearly thirty years a true and devoted friend.

During her illness she had spoken confidently of recovery, but the night before her death she realized quite clearly that the end was near. Her son and daughter were with her; and just before she sank into a last sleep she spoke, in a firm clear voice, words of love and faith. Her mind had remained unclouded, and her end was as calm and peaceful as those who loved her could have wished. She died on January 17, 1898.

CHAPTER XIV

The immense number of letters received by Lady Russell's son and daughter, from men and women of all cla.s.ses and creeds, bore striking testimony to the widespread and reverent devotion felt for her memory. Only very few selections will be given here. The first letter--written on the day of her death--is from Mr. Farrington, the respected minister of the Richmond Free Church, who had known Lady Russell intimately for many years.

_Rev. Silas Farrington to Lady Agatha Russell_

_January_ 17, 1898

To me your mother has become more and more an inspiration--a kind of tower of cheerful courage and strength. By her steadfast mental and moral bravery, by the sunshine she has been beneath the heavy clouds that have been sweeping over her, she has made one ashamed of the small things that troubled him and rebuked his petty discontent and repining. No one can ever be told how much I both have honoured and loved her for the very greatness of her n.o.ble spirit.

_Rev. Stopford A. Brooke to Lady Agatha Russell_

_January_ 18, 1898

How little I thought when I saw Lady Russell last [118] that I should see her no more! She looked so full of life, and her interest in all things was so keen and eager that I never for a moment thought her old or linked to her lite the imagination of death. It is a sore loss to lose one so fresh, so alive, so ardent in all good and beautiful things, and it must leave you in a great loneliness.... How well, how n.o.bly she lived her life! It shames us to think of all she did, and yet it kindles us so much that we lose our shame in its inspiration.

[118] On October 31, 1897.

_Mr. Frederic Harrison to Lady Agatha Russell_

_February_ 16, 1898

...The news of the great sorrow which has fallen on you came upon my wife and myself as a dreadful surprise.... Over and over again I tried to say to the world outside all that I felt of the n.o.ble nature and the grand life of your mother, but every time I tried my pen fell from my hand. I was too sad to think or write; full only of the sense of the friend whom I had lost, and of the great example she has left to our generation. She has fulfilled her mission on earth, and all those who have known her--and they are very many--will all their lives be sustained by the memory of her courage, dignity, and truth. She had so much of the character of the Roman matron--a type we know so little nowadays--who, being perfect in all the beauty of domestic life, yet even more conspicuously raised the public life of her time. I shall never, while I have life, forget the occasions this last summer and autumn when I had been able to see more of her than ever before, and especially that last hour I spent with her, when you were away at Weston, the memory of which now comes back to me like a death-bed parting. To have known her was to ride above the wretched party politics to which our age is condemned. I cannot bear to think of all that this bereavement means to you. It must be, and will remain, irreparable.

_Mr. James Bryce [119] to Lady Agatha Russell_

_March_ 10, 1898

Your mother always seemed to me one of the most n.o.ble and beautiful characters I had ever known--there was in her so much gentleness, so much firmness, so much earnestness, so ardent a love for all high things and all the best causes. One always came away from seeing her struck afresh by these charms of nature, and feeling the better for having seen how old age had in no way lessened her interest in the progress of the world, her faith in the triumph of good.

[119] The Right Hon. James Bryce, British Amba.s.sador at Washington.

_Mrs. Sinclair to Mr. Rollo Russell_

_January_, 1900

I loved and honoured my dear lady more than any one I ever served.

In my long life of service, where all had been good and kind to me, she was the dearest and best.

The funeral service was held on the 21st of January in the village church at Chenies, where her husband had been buried among his ancestors. The Burial Service of the Church of England, the solemnity and beauty of which she had always deeply felt, was read in the presence of many friends and relations a.s.sembled to pay their last tribute of respect to her memory.

Not long before her death Lady Russell had written these lines:

O shadowy form majestic, nearer gliding, And ever nearer! Thou whose silent tread Not ocean, chasm, or mountain can delay, Not even hands in agony outstretched, Or bitterest tears of breaking hearts, that fain Would stay thy dread approach to those most dear.

Vainly from thee we seek to hide; thou wield'st A sceptred power that none below may challenge; Yet no true monarch thou--but Messenger Of Him, Monarch supreme and Love eternal, Who holdeth of all mysteries the key;-- And in thy dark unfathomable eyes A star of promise lieth.

Then O! despite all failure, guilt and error, Crushing beneath their weight my faltering soul, When my hour striketh, when with Time I part, When face to face we stand, with naught between, Come as a friend, O Death!

Lay gently thy cold hand upon my brow, And still the fevered throb of this blind life, This fragment, mournful yet so fair--this dream, Aspiring, earth-bound, pa.s.sionate--and waft me Where broken harmonies will blend once more, And severed hearts once more together beat; Where, in our Father's fold, all, all shall be fulfilled.

RECOLLECTIONS OF FRANCES, COUNTESS RUSSELL

BY JUSTIN McCARTHY

Some of the dearest and most treasured memories of my lifetime are those belonging to the years during which I had the honour of being received among her friends by the late Countess Russell.

That friendship lasted more than twenty years, and its close on this earth was only brought about by Lady Russell's death.

There hangs now in my study, seeming to look down upon me while I write, a photograph of Lady Russell with her name written on it in her own handwriting. That photograph I received but a short time before her death, and it is to be with me so long as I live and look upon this earth.

I had some slight, very slight, acquaintance with the late Earl Russell, ever best known to fame as Lord John Russell, some years before I became one of his wife's friends. I met Lord John Russell for the first time in 1858, when he was attending a meeting of the Social Science a.s.sociation, held in Liverpool, where I was then a young journalist, and I had the good fortune to be presented to him. After that, when I settled in London, I met him occasionally in the precincts of Westminster Palace, and I had some interesting conversations with him which I have mentioned in published recollections of mine. During all that time I had, however, but a merely slight and formal acquaintanceship with his gifted wife.

When I came to know her more closely she had settled herself in her home at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, and it is with that delightful home that my memories of her are mainly a.s.sociated. She received her friends and acquaintances in general there on certain appointed days in each week. I need hardly say how gladly I availed myself of every opportunity for the enjoyment of such a visit, and especially for the enjoyment of Lady Russell's conversation and companionship.

I have known many gifted women, among them many gifted auth.o.r.esses, but I have not known any woman who could have surpa.s.sed Lady Russell in the varied charms of her conversation. Most of us, men and women, have usually the habit of carrying our occupations with us, metaphorically at least, wherever we go, and therefore have some difficulty in entering with full appreciation into conversational fields in which we do not find ourselves quite at home.

Lady Russell was not like most of us in that quality. Her chief natural interest, one might readily suppose, would have been centred in questions belonging to the domain of politics, national and international, she having been for so great a part of her life the wife and the close companion of one of England's leading statesmen.

But Lady Russell was endowed with a peculiarly receptive mind, and she felt an interest quite natural and spontaneous in every subject which could interest educated and rational human beings--in art, literature, and science; in the history and the growth of all countries; in the condition of the poor and the struggling throughout the world; in every effort made by knowledge, benevolence, and enlightened purpose for the benefit of humanity. She had evidently also a strong desire to add to her own large stock of information, and she appears to have felt that whenever she came into converse with any fellow-being she was in communication with one who could tell her something which she did not already know.

In this characteristic she reminded me strongly of William Ewart Gladstone.

There is, or there used to be, a common impression throughout many social circles in this country, that when Gladstone in private was the centre of any company, he generally contrived to keep most of the talk to himself.

This always seemed to me an entire misconception, for I had many opportunities of observing that Gladstone in social companionship seemed much more anxious to get some new ideas from those around him than to pour out to them from his own treasures of information.

Lady Russell loved to draw forth from the artist something about his art, from the scholar something about his books, to compare the ideas of the politician with her own, to lead the traveller into accounts of his travels, to get from the scientific student some of his experiences in this or that domain of science, and from those who visited the poor some suggestions which might serve her during her constant work in the same direction.

Even on subjects concerning which the greatest and sharpest divisions of opinion might naturally arise--political questions, for instance--Lady Russell seemed as much interested in listening to the clear exposition and defence of a political opponent's views as she might have been in the cordial exchange of sympathetic and encouraging opinions. When I first began to make one of Lady Russell's frequent visitors, there was, of course, between us a natural sympathy of political opinion which was made all the stronger because of momentous events that had lately pa.s.sed, or were then pa.s.sing, in the world around.

The great Civil War in the North American States had come to an end many years before I began to visit Lady Russell at her home, and I need hardly remind my readers that by far the larger proportion of what we call "society" in England had given its sympathies entirely to the cause of the South, and had firmly maintained, almost to the very end, that the South was destined to have a complete victory over its opponents. Lady Russell gave her sympathies to the side of the Northern States, as was but natural, seeing that the success of the North would mean the abolition of that system of slavery which was to her heart and to her conscience incapable of defence or of palliation.

I had paid my first visit to the United States not many years after the end of the Civil War--a visit prolonged for nearly two years and extending from New York to San Francisco and from Maine to Louisiana. I had therefore a good deal to tell Lady Russell about the various experiences I had had during this my first visit to the now reunited States, and the lights which they threw for me on the origin and causes of the Civil War.

I may say here that Lady Russell was always very anxious that the public should fully understand and appreciate the att.i.tude taken by her late husband with regard to the Civil War. In a letter written to me on October 20, 1879, Lady Russell refers me to a speech made by her husband on March 23, 1863, and she goes on to say:

It shows unanswerably how strong was his opinion against the recognition of the Southern States, even at a moment when the tide of battle was so much in their favour that he, in common, I think, with most others, looked upon separation as likely to be the final issue. As long as the abolition of slavery was not openly announced, as he thought it ought to have been, as one of the main objects of the war on the part of the Federals, he felt no warm sympathy with their cause. But after President Lincoln's proclamation it was quite different, and no man rejoiced with deeper thankfulness than he did at the final triumph of the Northern States, for no man held slavery in more utter abhorrence.

I have thought it well to introduce this quotation just here because it is a.s.sociated at once with my earliest recollections of Lady Russell, and at the same time with a subject of controversy which may almost be said to have pa.s.sed out of the realms of disputation since that day.