The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Part 20

"At first sight it seemed that I was looking, not at a sick man, but rather at a corpse. My first question was, 'Is he alive or dead?' Lady Burton replied that he was still living, and the doctor nodded his head, to confirm what she had said.

"And in fact the doctor was seated on the bed holding in his hands the hand of Sir Richard Burton to feel the beat of his pulse, and from time to time he administered some _corroborante_,[5] or gave an injection.

Which of these two things he did I cannot now recollect, but it was certainly one or the other of them. These are things which one would certainly not do to a corpse, but only to a person still living; or if these acts were performed with knowledge that the person in question was already dead, they could not be done without laying oneself open to an accusation of deception, all the more reprehensible if put in operation at such a solemn moment.

"In such a case all the responsibility would fall upon the doctor in charge, who with a single word, or even a sign given secretly to the priest, would have been able to prevent the administration of the Holy Sacrament of Extreme Unction.

"The second observation which I made to Lady Burton was one concerning religion--namely, "That whoever was of the Evangelical persuasion could not receive the Holy Sacraments in this manner."

"To this observation of mine she answered that some years ago he had received Extreme Unction, being, if I mistake not, at Cannes, and that on this occasion he had abjured the heresy and professed himself as belonging to the Catholic Church. On such a declaration from Lady Burton, I did that which a minister of G.o.d ought to do, and decided to administer to the dying man the last comforts of our holy religion.

As it seemed to me that there was not much time to lose, I wished to administer the Extreme Unction by means of one single anointing on the forehead, as is done in urgent cases; but Lady Burton said that death was not so imminent; therefore she begged me to carry out the prescribed ceremony of Extreme Unction.

"This completed, together with the other customary prayers for the dying, I took my departure. I returned to the house of the Provost, Dr. Sust, and laid everything before him, and he said I had done quite right.

"In a certificate of death drawn up by the Visitatore dei Morti,[6]

Inspector Corani, in the register, under the head of religion, is written 'Catholic.' The funeral also was conducted according to the rites of the Catholic Church. I am convinced that Sir Richard Burton really became a Catholic, but that outwardly he did not wish this to be known, having regard to his position as a Consul to a Government of the Evangelical persuasion; and I have built up the hope that the innumerable prayers for her husband's conversion and good works of his pious wife Lady Burton will have been heeded by that Lord who said unto us, 'Pray, and your prayers shall be answered,' and that his soul will now have been received by the good G.o.d, together with that of the saintly lady his wife.

"One question I permit myself to ask of those who have now published the Life of Sir Richard Burton, which is this, 'Why did they not publish it during the lifetime of Lady Burton? Who better than she would have been able to enlighten the world on this point of much importance? Why publish it now when she is no longer here to speak?'

"Trieste, January 12, 1897, "PIETRO MARTELANI,

"Formerly Parish Priest of the B.V. del Soccorso, now Prebenday and Priest of the Cathedral of Triest."[7]

I am further able to state that the gross travesty of Lady Burton's grief --"her weeping and wailing on the floor," etc., etc.--is the outcome of a malevolent imagination, from which nothing is sacred, not even a widow's tears. Lady Burton bore herself through the most awful trial of her life with quietude, fort.i.tude, and resignation.

And now to turn to the second charge--to wit, that Sir Richard was never a Catholic at all; from which, if true, it follows that he was in fact "kidnapped" by his wife and the priest on his death-bed.

If this charge did not involve a suggestion of bad faith on the part of Lady Burton, I should have ignored it; for I hold most strongly that a man's religion is a matter for himself alone, a matter between himself and his G.o.d, one in which no outsider has any concern. Burton himself took this view, for he once said: "My religious opinion is of no importance to anybody but myself. No one knows what my religious views are. I object to confession, and I will not confess. My standpoint is, and I hope ever will be, the Truth, as it is in me, known only to myself."[8] This att.i.tude he maintained to the world to the day of his death; but to his wife he was different. Let me make my meaning quite clear. I do not say Burton was a Catholic or that he was not; I offer no opinion. But what I do a.s.sert with all emphasis is that _he gave his wife reason to believe that he had become a Catholic_; and in this matter she acted in all good faith, in accordance with the highest dictates of her conscience and her duty. Burton knew how strongly his wife felt on this subject, and how earnest were her convictions. He knew that his conversion to Catholicism was her daily and nightly prayer. These considerations probably weighed with him when he signed the following paper (reproduced in facsimile on the opposite page). He signed it on the understanding that she was to keep it secret till he was a dying man:

"GORIZIA, February 15, 1877.

"Should my husband, Richard Burton, be on his death-bed unable to speak I perhaps already dead--and that he may wish to have the grace to retract and recant his former errors, and to join the Catholic Church, and also to receive the Sacraments of Penance, Extreme Unction, and Holy Eucharist, he might perhaps be able to sign this paper, or make the sign of the cross to show his need.

(signed) "RICHARD F. BURTON."

I do not a.n.a.lyse the motives which led Burton to sign this paper. He may have done it merely to satisfy his wife (for, from the Agnostic point of view, the Sacraments would not have mattered much either way), or he may have done it from honest conviction, or from a variety of causes, for human motives are strangely commingled; _but that he did sign it there is no doubt_. Lady Burton, at any rate, took it all in good faith, and acted accordingly in sending for the priest; the priest, on receiving her a.s.surance, acted in good faith in administering to Sir Richard Burton the last rites of the Church; and the Bishop of Trieste also acted in good faith in conceding to him a Catholic funeral. It is difficult to see how any of them could have acted otherwise.

Lastly, it has been a.s.serted that Sir Richard Burton "loathed" the Roman Catholic Church; and though he was indifferent to most religions, he entertained a "positive aversion" to this one, and therefore to "kidnap"

him on his death-bed was peculiarly cruel. I have read most of Burton's writings, and it is true, especially in his earlier books, that he girds against what he conceives to be certain abuses in the Roman Catholic Church and her priesthood in out-of-the-way countries; but then he attacks other forms of Christianity and other religions too. He had a great hatred of cant and humbug under the cloak of religion, and denounced them accordingly. There is nothing remarkable in this. We all denounce cant and humbug in the abstract, often most loudly when we are humbugs ourselves. If Burton attacked Christianity more than other religions, and Catholicism more than other forms of Christianity, he probably did so because they came more in his way. His religious acts generally appear to have been guided by the principle of "When one is at Rome, do as Rome does." He was a Mohammedan among Mohammedans, a Mormon among Mormons, a sufi among the Shazlis, and a Catholic among the Catholics. One thing he certainly was not in his later years--a member of the Church of England. He was baptized and brought up in the Anglican Communion. He entered at Trinity College, Oxford, and he joined the Indian army as a member of the Church of England; but when he was at Goa in 1847 he left off "sitting under" that garrison chaplain and betook himself to the Roman Catholic chapel, and availed himself of the ministrations of the Goanese priest. From that time, except officially, he never seems to have availed himself of the services of the Church of England. I do not unduly press the point of his attendance at the Roman Catholic chapel at Goa, for it may simply have meant that Burton merely went to the chapel and worshipped as a Catholic among Catholics, just as when he was at Mecca he worshipped as a Mohammedan among the Mohammedans; but it tells against the theory that he "loathed" Catholicism, as the same necessity did not exist at Goa as at Mecca. It was a purely voluntary act on his part. Henceforward it would seem that, so far from being prejudiced against Catholicism, Burton was always coquetting with it; and if he took any religion seriously at all, he may be said to have taken this one seriously. The following facts also go to prove this theory. He married a Catholic wife, of whose strong religious views he was well aware. Before the marriage he signed a paper to the effect that his children, if any, should be brought up in the Roman Catholic faith.

He obtained and used the following letter from Cardinal Wiseman, with whom he was on friendly terms:

"LONDON, June 28, 1856.

"DEAR SIR,

"Allow me to introduce to you Captain Burton, the bearer of this note, who is employed by the Government to make an expedition to Africa, at the head of a little band of adventurers. Captain Burton has been highly spoken of in the papers here; and I have been asked to give him this introduction to you as a Catholic officer.

"I am, dear Sir, "Yours sincerely in Christ, "N. CARD. WISEMAN.

"COLONEL HAMMERTON," etc., etc., etc.

He habitually wore a crucifix, which his wife had given him, next his skin; he championed the cause of the Catholic converts in Syria; and when staying with his wife's family, he would frequently attend a service in a Roman Catholic church, and behave in all things as a Catholic worshipper. I am not saying that these things prove that Burton was a Catholic, but they afford strong presumptive evidence that he had leanings in the direction of Catholicism; and undoubtedly they go to prove that he did not "loathe" the Catholic religion. One thing is certain, he was too much of a scholar to indulge in any vulgar prejudice against the Roman Catholic Church, and too much of a gentleman to insult her priests.

After all there is nothing inherently improbable in Burton's conversion to Catholicism. Most of his life had been spent in countries where Catholicism is practically the only form of Christianity; and such a mind as his, if on the rebound from Agnosticism, would be much more likely to find a refuge in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church than in the half-way house of Evangelical Protestantism. To a temperament like Burton's, steeped in Eastern mysticism and Sufiism, Catholicism would undoubtedly have offered strong attractions; for the links between the highest form of Sufiism and the Gospel of St. John, the _Ecstasis_ of St. Bernard, and other writings of the Fathers of the Church who were of the Alexandrian school, are well known, and could hardly have been ignored by Burton, who made a comparative study of religions.

This, however, is by the way, and has only an indirect bearing on his wife's action. She, who knew him best, and from whom he had no secrets, believed that, in his later years at least, her husband was at heart a Catholic. He gave her ample grounds for this belief, and she acted upon it in all good faith. That he may have deceived her is possible, though not probable; but that she would have deceived a priest of her Church at the most solemn moment of her life, and on one of the most sacred things of her religion, is both impossible and improbable. The whole nature of the woman, her transparent truthfulness, her fervent piety, rise up in witness against this charge, and condemn it. And to what end would she have done this thing? No one knew better than Lady Burton that there is One whom she could not deceive; for with her the things invisible were living realities, and the actualities of this life were but pa.s.sing things which come and fade away.

NOTES:

1. Lady Burton's maid, now dead.

2. _Life of Sir Richard Burton,_ by Isabel his wife, vol. ii., pp. 410-414. This work was published in May, 1893.

3. Miss Stisted's Life of Burton, pp. 409-414.

4. Translated from the Italian.

5. A tonic, a strengthening restorative.

6. An official (generally a physician) who visits the dead, and a.s.sures himself that the death is real, and not an apparent one.

7. The Baroness Paul de Ralli, who procured the above attestation from the priest, sent it in the first instance to Cardinal Vaughan together with the following letter:

"TRIESTE, AUSTRIA, January 19, 1897.

"MY LORD CARDINAL,

"There has lately been published a so-called 'true' Life of the late Sir Richard Burton, written by his niece. Since my letter to _The Catholic Times_, which appeared in the issue of December 24, it has been pointed out to me that it would be well if I could procure a written attestation of the priest who gave Extreme Unction to the late Sir Richard Burton. I am authorized by Monseigneur Sterk to place in the hands of your Eminence the enclosed ma.n.u.script, written by Monseigneur Martelani, who is now Prebendary of the Cathedral here. As an intimate friend of the Burtons, I beg to say that everything said about the life of the Burtons at this place in the 'true' life has been written by dictation, and, furthermore, that I could name the auth.o.r.ess's informant, which makes the book worthless for those who know the source from which the auth.o.r.ess has gathered her information--the same source which has made Lady Burton's life hideous from the day of her husband's death to the time she left this place.

As regards those who claim to have known all about Sir Richard Burton--'They knew the man well,'etc.--allow me to point out that the exoteric subtleties of his character were only exceeded by the esoteric; and to what an extent this is true is only known to those who were at the same time his friends and his wife's intimate friends, of whom there are several here beside myself.

My position at the Villa Gosslett was perhaps a little exceptional.

Having come here from England in 1875 after my marriage, I was looked upon by the Burtons as a sort of ex-subject of theirs.

"Believe me to be, my Lord Cardinal, "Yours faithfully, "CATHERINE DE RALLI."

8. Speech at the Anthropological Society, London, 1865.

BOOK III. WIDOWED. (1890-1896).

"_El Maraa min ghayr Zaujuga mislaha tayaran maksus el Jenakk._"

("The woman without her husband is like a bird with one wing.")

CHAPTER I. THE TRUTH ABOUT "THE SCENTED GARDEN."