XIII. LAST YEARS OF ESMERALDA
"Sleep sweetly, dear one; thou wilt wake at dawn."--MOSCHUS.
"Her mind was one of those pure mirrors from which the polluting breath passes away as it touches it."--BISHOP HEBER.
"Cette longue et cruelle maladie qu'on appelle la vie, est enfin guérie."--MADEMOISELLE D'ESPINASSE.
"Let her pure soul ... Remain my pledge in heaven, as sent to show How to this portal every step I go."--SIR JOHN BEAUMONT.
I think that I have not written anything concerning the life of my sister after we met her at Rome in the winter of 1865-66. Since that time she had been more incessantly engrossed by the affairs, and often very trivial interests, of the Roman Catholic Church, but without for a moment relaxing her affection and cordiality towards us. Great was my pleasure in watching how, in spite of all religious differences, my mother became increasingly fond of her every time they met. I think it is William Penn who says, "The meek, the just, the pious, the devout, are all of one religion."
On leaving Rome in 1866, Esmeralda made it an object to visit the famous "Nun of Monza," Ancilla Ghizza, called in religion the "Madre Serafina della Croce." This nun had been founding a religious order at Monza, which was at first intended to be affiliated to the Sacramentarie on the Quirinal at Rome. She was supposed to have not only the "stigmata," but the marks of our Lord's scourging, to be gifted with a wonderful power and knowledge of the interior life, and to possess the gift of prophecy. She was summoned to Rome, and, after three years' noviciate at the Sacramentarie, she was permitted, in 1862, to return to Monza, and to begin her community, fifteen nuns being clothed at the same time. She used to distribute little crosses which she declared to have been blessed by our Lord in person, and she was often in an ecstasy, in which it was alleged that her body became so light that she could be raised from the ground by a single hair of her head! Concerning Serafina della Croce, Esmeralda had already received from a celebrated Italian ecclesiastic the following:--
"Venezia, 3 Gennaio, 1864.--Mi scusi se io così presto riprendo la penna, per offrirle il mio povero tentativo di consolarla, sotto la forma di questa piccola croce, che io ebbi dall' Ancilla Ghizzi di Monza, e che è stata benedetta dalle mani stesse di Nostro Signore in una visione. Io potrei dirle molto di queste croci, ma ci vorrebbe troppo tempo. Così io le dirò soltanto per affermare la sua opinione sopra la santità di questa serva di Dio, che io conosco qui un sacerdote che andò a vederla, e al quale il confessore dell' Ancilla delegò la sua autorità, dicendogli che poteva commandarla ed interrogarla per un' ora, come se fosse lui stesso il suo confessore. Infatti, portatosi dall' Ancilla, senza che essa fosse stata avvertita di quest' accordo fra loro, il Sacerdote le diède mentalmente l'obbedienza di unirsi con Dio in orazione, ed essa immediatamente andò in estasi, e continuò un' ora intera in questo stato, nel qual tempo egli le domandò mentalmente varie cose in rapporto a certe persone che desiderebbero essere raccomandate alle sue preghiere, ed essa rispondeva al suo precetto mentale, raccomandogli ogni persona ed ogni domanda al Signore di viva voce, continuando così un dialogo non interrotto. Qualche volta per la soddisfazione di una terza persona che era presente, questo Sacerdote gli diceva all' orecchio il soggetto sopra il quale voleva schiarimento. Debbo aggiungere che in questo stato il suo corpo è così leggiero che la poteva sollevare da terra per un solo dei suoi capelli, come se non avesse più nessun peso. Ho pure veduto dei manoscritti voluminosi del suo confessore pieni di maraviglie, e che dimostrano che la sua familiarità colle cose e colle persone celesti è arrivata ad un tal punto, che si può ben paragonare a tutto ciò che si legge nelle vite dei santi. Anzi a me mi pare che supera tutto quel che io ho letto fin qui."
Another intention of Esmeralda was to visit "Torchio," the inspired cobbler at Turin, and consult him on various subjects. This Torchio had had the most extraordinary visions of the Judgment; but alas! I neglected to write down the long verbal account which my sister gave me of her visit to him, and thus it is lost. I have only the following, written in crossing the Mont Cenis with an Asiatic bishop, to whom Esmeralda had offered a place in her carriage:--
"June 4, 1866.--For three days running before leaving Rome, I had the visits of the venerable Monsignor Natale, and we talked of coming events in the political world. I went over from Pisa to Leghorn, and there I saw a very remarkable person called Suora Carolina. We went to Milan for one day, and from thence to Monza. I saw the bishop, and besought and entreated, and at last he gave permission, and I was the first to pass through the closed door of the convent, and to kneel and kiss the hand of the saint. Auntie went with me. I can never express what I felt. It was like seeing S. Francesco d'Assisi, and it seemed like a dream as, side by side, we walked through the cloisters and then went up into her cell: one so highly favoured! it was too much happiness. All I had heard was nothing to the reality, and there was Auntie sitting in her cell, the other nuns standing round. Her face was quite beautiful, quite heavenly.
"And then we returned to Milan and started for Turin, and there I went to see Torchio, the celebrated Torchio, as he sat on his basket and spoke as he was inspired. It was a wonderful and beautiful sermon, both in word and action. When he spoke of the Passion, one seemed to follow him to Calvary. He is a poor man living at the top of a very poor house, but he is an apostle."
Esmeralda returned to London to Mrs. Thorpe's, but in the autumn she went north and paid visits to the Monteiths and Stourtons and to Lady Herries in Yorkshire. Lady Herries said afterwards that she liked to think of her as she so often saw her in the chapel at Everingham, praying, "oh, so fervently," for hours together. As her life became more absorbed in devotion and religious interests, she was conscious of the danger of neglecting earthly duties and sympathies. On August 4, 1866, she wrote:--
"Let me walk in the presence of God without underrating His gifts, for the underrating of God's gifts is one of the temptations which I am required to fight against."
On September 8 she wrote:--
"Let me surrender entirely my individual will, to be completely united and absorbed in the will of Jesus Christ,--then will the truths of Christianity become a fixed life in my soul.
"The great impediment to the life of Jesus in the soul is the aiming at mediocrity in things pertaining to our Lord and to a spiritual life; whereas our Master would have us aim at perfection, and bear in mind as a command His words, 'Be ye perfect.'"
In August Esmeralda was thrown into real heart-mourning by the news which reached England of the death of "the Great Mother," Maria de Matthias. The following is from Pierina Rolleston, Superior of the Order of the Precious Blood in England:--
"My own dearest in the precious blood, I write in haste, and while I write my tears are flowing, because I have sad news to tell you and dear Mrs. Montgomery, who are both children of the Institute, and love our beloved Mother-General, who is in heaven, praying for us all. The following is a copy of a letter I received yesterday from Monsignor Talbot:--'I write to announce to you the death of your Mother-General. She expired two days ago--died as she lived, after giving examples of patience and resignation in the midst of her sufferings. To-morrow her funeral will be celebrated at the Church of SS. Vincenzo ed Anastasio, and I intend to attend. I do not think you need fear for the future of your Institute, because I think that the successor of your late Mother-General, though she may not be so saintly a person, will be equally able to carry on the business. I do not think you can be too grateful to Almighty God for having such friends as Monsignor Paterson and Miss Hare.' ... My dearest, I write in haste that you may receive all the news of our beloved Mother. Sister Carolina Longo, whom she named as her successor upon her death-bed, is a good clever nun, and she was Mother's dear child. She lived with Mother from a child of eight years old, and became a religious about the age of twenty-two. We have lost one of the dearest of mothers, but can look up to her in heaven, and I am sure she will help us in our work.... With fond love in the precious blood, I am always your most affectionate in Christ,
"PIERINA OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD."
The winter of 1866-67 was chiefly passed by my sister at the house of Mrs. Alfred Montgomery at Ifield near Crawley, where Esmeralda and her aunt for many months shared in the housekeeping. For Esmeralda had been induced to regard Mrs. Montgomery as a religious martyr, and her impressionable nature was completely fascinated by her hostess. While at Ifield, a fatal web was drawn each day more closely by her Catholic associates, by which Esmeralda was induced to entrust large sums to her brother Francis for speculation upon the political prophecies of Madame de Trafford. Her unworldly nature was persuaded to consent to this means of (as Francis represented) largely increasing her income, by the prospect which was held out to her of having more money to employ in assisting various religious objects, especially the establishment of the Servites in London, and the foundation of their church, for which she had promised Father Bosio, General of the Servites, to supply £500, to be obtained either by collections or otherwise, at the expiration of three years. Esmeralda never knew or had the faintest idea of the sum to which her speculations amounted. She was beguiled on from day to day by two evil advisers, and, her heart being in other things, was induced to trust and believe that her worldly affairs were in the hands of disinterested persons. The lists of her intended employments for the next day, so many of which remained amongst her papers, show how little of her time and attention was given to pecuniary matters. From them it is seen that a quarter of an hour allotted to the discussion of investments with her brother would be preceded by an hour spent in writing about the affairs of a French convent or the maintenance of a poor widow in Rome, and followed by an hour devoted to the interests of the Servites or some other religious body. There is no doubt that Esmeralda undertook far more than was good either for her health or for her mind; each hour of every day was portioned out from the day before, and was fully and intensely occupied, especially when she was in London. If visitors or any unexpected circumstance prevented the task for which she had allotted any particular hour, she did not leave it on that account unfulfilled, but only detracted from the hours of rest. One thing alone, her daily meditation, she allowed nothing to interfere with. In the hours of meditation she found the refreshment which helped her through the rest of the day. "Our Lord requires of us that our souls should become a tabernacle for Him to dwell in," she wrote on February 2, 1867, "and the lamp lighted before it is the lamp of our affections."
All through the summer of 1866, my brother William's health had been declining, and in the autumn, in the hope of benefit from the sea-breezes, he was moved to Brighton, which he never left. After Christmas day he was never able to leave the house. The small fortune of his pretty helpless wife had been lost in a bankruptcy, and they were reduced to a state of destitution in which they were almost devoid of the absolute necessaries of life. The following are extracts from William's letters to his sister at this time:--
"You cannot imagine how I miss your letters when you cease to write for any length of time.... Since Sunday I have been confined to my bed, having almost lost all use of my limbs. I could not possibly be moved to our sitting-room, being in so weak and emaciated a condition, and I fear I shall have to keep my bed all through this bitter cold weather. I am so miserably thin that it is with the greatest difficulty that I can contrive to sit or lie in any position. It is, however, God's will that it should be so, and I am enabled to say 'Thy will be done, O Lord.' ... God has mercifully vouchsafed me time for repentance, and has brought me back to Himself, and made me one with Him by strengthening me with His own body, so that, dear sister, I feel supremely happy and at peace with all the world; and should it please Almighty God to call me hence, I feel serene in His love, that He has graciously forgiven me all my sins, and that He will take me to Himself where there is no longer any pain or suffering. Father Crispin came on Wednesday to hear my confession, and on Thursday morning he administered the most Blessed Sacrament to me. ... Dear Edith has received £10 lately, which you may well suppose at this critical time was obtained with very great difficulty; but all this money has been expended on my illness, and there is nothing left for the doctor's visits, medicine, or to pay the butcher, baker, washerwoman, milk, or coal bill. Yet it will not do to give up the doctor in my critical state, or to cease taking his medicine, or to deny myself the necessary restoratives; if I did I must inevitably sink. Will you not, in compassion for my fallen state, consent to make me some sort of allowance during my illness to enable me to obtain what is necessary?
"Mr. Blackwood (you will remember 'Beauty Blackwood,' who married the Duchess of Manchester[376]) has sent me a little book which he has just published--'The Shadow and the Substance,' which he assures me is quite free from controversy, and he desires me to read it with especial care and attention, as being conducive to my comfort during hours of sickness and suffering."
My sister immediately sent William all he required, when he again wrote:--
"How can I thank you sufficiently for so generously responding to my appeal in more senses than one, by sending me money to relieve the pressure of want, books to comfort me in hours of sickness, and wine to cheer and strengthen me?... Should I be spared, I must accept this illness as one of the greatest, indeed the greatest blessing I could possibly receive, for it has taught me my own nothingness, my all insufficiency, and it has drawn me from a sphere of sin into a sphere of grace; it has caused me to despise the world and all its vanities, and has diverted my heart and whole being to Almighty God; it has brought me into close communion with Him, strengthened by the graces of His Holy Sacraments, and has made me feel the blessedness of constant prayer. Oh, I would not change my present state for worlds; and should it please Almighty God to call me from hence, I feel that He will receive me into everlasting peace. Father Crispin called last evening: he considers me so prostrate that he intends administering the sacrament of Extreme Unction. Pray for me! I cannot express to you how rejoiced I am that we are again hand in hand together. You should not forget the days of our youth, we were always inseparable; we were then estranged from each other, and a very, very bitter time that was to me. I cannot say that I am any better."
After the receipt of this letter my sister hurried to Brighton, and she was there when William died. On the 11th of March she wrote to me:--
"We are here to be with William, to wait by his bedside during these last days of his illness. On Thursday night, and again on Friday night, it seemed as if the last hour was come, but there is now a slight, a very slight improvement, so that he may live a few days longer. Yesterday there came over him a momentary wish to recover, but it passed away, and his calm resignation was really unbroken and continues the same to-day. He does not murmur, though his sufferings must be terrible.... From time to time he asks me to read aloud a few lines of the 'Imitation of Christ,' but I can scarcely do it without breaking down as I look up and see those sunken cheeks and large glazed eyes fixed upon me with such a deep look of intense suffering."
Two unexpected friends appeared to cheer William's last days. One was the young Duchess of Sutherland, who had been intimate with him as a child, and having never met him since the days when they both lived in the Maison Valin, heard accidentally of his illness at Brighton; she came repeatedly to see him, and supplied him with many comforts, and even luxuries. The other was the well-known Miss Marsh, the authoress of the "Memorials of Hedley Vicars,"--the staunch Protestant, but liberal Christian. She happened to call to see the landlady of the lodging where he was, when, hearing of William's illness and poverty, she went constantly to visit him, and laying aside in the shadow of death all wish for controversy, read and prayed with him in the common sympathy of their Christian faith and trust. She wrote afterwards:--
"Blessed be God that I have no doubt that the dying friend in whom I have been so deeply interested was in Christ and is now with Him. We never spoke together of Romanism or Protestantism; all I cared for was to persuade him, by the help of the Holy Ghost, to accept at once the offer of a free and present salvation through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and through Him only: and to believe God's word that he that believeth on the Son of God hath everlasting life, because of His one sacrifice once offered for the sins of the whole world. And he did believe it, and false confidences faded away like shadows before the sunrise. 'Jesus only' became all his salvation and all his desire, and he passed into His presence with a radiant smile of joy. I was not with him when he died, but the hour of communing with his spirit that same evening was one of the sweetest I have spent on earth."
My sister has left some notes of that which occurred after William's death:--
"After all was over, and when the room was decorated and the body laid out, Miss Marsh came to see him, and taking his dead hand, she placed a white camellia in it. Then kneeling by the side of the bed, she offered up the most beautiful prayer aloud, in which she described as in a picture our Blessed Lord and the angels receiving his soul. It was quite wonderfully beautiful: there was only one thing she left out; she never mentioned Our Blessed Lady; she placed the angels before our Lady. I was standing at the foot of the bed with a crucifix, and when she ceased praying, I said, 'But you have never spoken of Our Lady: I cannot let Our Lady be passed over.' And Miss Marsh was not angry; no, she only rose from her knees, and coming to me, she threw her arms round my neck and said, 'Do not let us dispute upon this now; we have one God and one Saviour in common, let us rest upon these,' and she came to see me afterwards when I was ill in London.
"'Know thou that courtesy is one of God's own properties, who sendeth His rain and His sunshine upon the just and the unjust out of His great courtesy; and verily Courtesy is the sister of Charity, who banishes hatred and cherishes love.' Were not these the words of the dear S. Francis of Assisi?
"During William's illness Miss Marsh came every day with something for him, and quite stripped her own room to give him her own chair, and even her mattress. She was just the one person William wanted. Any dried-up person might have driven him back, but she was daily praying by his side, handsome, enthusiastic, dwelling only on the love of God, and she helped him on till he began really to think the love of God the only thing worth living for.
"'O sister,' he said to me once, 'if it should please God that I should live, all my life would be given up to Him.'
"The doctor who went up to him when he was told that he could not live many hours came down with tears upon his face. 'There must indeed be something in religion,' he said, 'when that young man can be so resigned to die.'"
On the Saturday after William's death my sister wrote to us:--
"Now that dear William's last call has come, I feel thankful for his sake. The good priest who attended him in all the latter part of his illness wrote to me the day after his death that I could have no cause of anxiety for his everlasting welfare. It was a beautiful death, he was so happy, peaceful, and resigned. I had only left him a very short time when he again asked for Edith. She came up to his bedside, and then there seemed to come over William's face a bright light illuminating his countenance, and fixing his eyes upwards with a short sigh, he breathed his last. There was no suffering then, no agony. I had asked him if he feared death. 'No,' he said, and looked as if he wondered at the thought coming into my mind. He felt he had found the only true peace and happiness. He told me he wished to be buried at Kensal Green. His only anxiety was about poor Edith, and when I told him that I would do what lay in my power for her, he seemed satisfied, and never, I believe, gave this world another thought, but prepared to meet our Blessed Lord. That beautiful look of peace was on his face after death. Francis arrived too late to see him alive, but when he looked on William's face he said, 'Oh, sister, how beautiful!' The little room was draped with black and white. There he lay, and we were coming and going, and praying by the side of the open coffin. On Tuesday will be the funeral. On Monday the body will be removed to the Church of St. Mary of the Angels, Bayswater, where it will remain through the night, according to devout Roman custom."
After the funeral Esmeralda wrote:--
"Ifield Lodge, Crawley.--When the long sad week was over, I felt all power of further exertion gone, and yet it seemed, as it does now, that for the soul God had taken to Himself, should the happiness of that soul not yet be perfected, prayers must be obtained, and that I must work on and on as long as life lasts. There is a feeling of longing to help in the mind of every Catholic for those departed. On Monday the 24th the dear remains were moved from Brighton by the 6 P.M.train. Auntie and I went up by the same train from Three Bridges, and Francis came to the Victoria Station to meet the coffin; but such was the heavy feeling of sorrow, that, though we were on the platform at the same time, we did not see each other.
"The next morning I went for Edith, and we arrived at the church early. The body had been placed in one of the side-chapels, and had remained there through the night. Before mass it was brought out, and remained before the high-altar during mass. There were many of William's friends present, and also Margaret Pole, now Mrs. Baker. The funeral procession formed at the door of the church. As the body was moved down the church, Edith and I followed after the officiating priests. I held Edith's hand tightly, and did not intend her to get into one of the mourning coaches, but suddenly, as the hearse moved slowly from the church door, she wrenched her hand from my grasp and was gone before I had time to speak. Four nuns went to say the responses at the grave. One was the nun who had nursed dear Mama through her last hours, and had stayed on with me in Bryanston Street. I returned from the church to the hotel, and there Auntie and Edith found me after the funeral was over.
"The funeral service in the church was very solemn, but there was no weight of gloom or sadness. The strong feeling of the safety of the soul was such a consolation, that the end for which that soul had been created had been gained, and that if it were not then in heaven, the day would come soon, and could be hastened by the prayers said for it. His dear remains rest now under the figure of Our Lady of Sorrows, which he had so wished to see erected. I never looked forward to such a deathbed for William, where there would be so much peace and love of God, and now I can never feel grateful enough for such grace granted at the eleventh hour. May we all and each have as beautiful an end and close of life. Edith says, 'Oh I wish I could see what William saw when he looked up with that bright light on his face.' With that look all suffering is blotted out of poor Edith's mind, all her long watchings.
"I can never feel grateful enough to Miss Marsh for all her kindness to William. It helped him to God, and it was very, very beautiful.... I hope still to go to Rome for the funzione in June, and also to Hungary for the coronation of the Emperor."
May 1867 was passed by my sister in London, where, by her astonishing cleverness and perseverance, she finally gained the last of her lawsuits, that for the family plate, when it had been lost in three other courts. Soon after, in spite of the great heat of the summer, Esmeralda started for Rome, to be present at the canonisation of the Japanese martyrs, paying a visit to Madame de Trafford on the way. She wrote to me:--
"When I first went to Beaujour, I was afraid to tell Madame de Trafford that I intended to go to Rome. 'Mais où allez vous donc, ma chère?' said Madame de Trafford. 'Mais, Madame, je vais ... en voyage.'--'Vous allez en voyage, ça je comprends, mais ça ne répond pas à ma question: vous allez en voyage, mais il faut aller quelque part, où allez vous donc?'--'Mais, Madame, vous verrez de mon retour.'--'Mais où allez vous donc, ma chère? dites-moi, où allez vous?'--'Je vais à ... Rome!' Madame de Trafford sprang from her chair as I said this, and exclaimed, 'Rome, Rome, ce mot de Rome, Rome, Rome ... et vous allez à Rome ... moi aussi je vais à Rome,' and she went with us. From the time that Madame de Trafford determined to go, Auntie made no opposition to our going, and was quite satisfied."
The journey to Rome with Madame de Trafford was full of unusual incidents. The heat was most intense, and my sister suffered greatly from it. At Turin she was so ill that she thought it impossible to proceed, but Madame de Trafford insisted upon her getting up and going on. Whilst they were still en route Madame de Trafford telegraphed to Rome for a carriage and every luxury to be in readiness. She also telegraphed to Pisa to bid M. Lamarre, the old family cook of Parisani, go to Rome to prepare for them. My sister telegraphed to Monsignor Talbot to have places reserved for the ceremonies, &c. All the last part of the way the trains were crowded to the greatest possible degree, hundreds of pilgrims joining at every station in Umbria and the Campagna, for whom no places were reserved, so that the train was delayed six or seven hours behind its time, and the heat was increased, by the overcrowding, to the most terrible pitch. My sister wrote:--
"In the carriage with us from Florence was a young Florentine noble, a Count Gondi, all of whose relations I knew. He asked me what I should do after the canonisation. 'Ça dépend, M. le Comte, si on attaquera Rome.'--'Mais, certainement on l'attaquera.'--'Eh bien, done je reste.'--'Mais vous restez, Mademoiselle, si on attaque Rome.'--'Oui, certainement.'--'Et vous, Madame,' said Count Gondi, turning to Madame de Trafford. 'Mais si on attaque Rome,' said Madame de Trafford, 'je ferais comme Mademoiselle Hare, je reste, bien sure.' His amazement knew no bounds.
"When we arrived at Rome, I was so afraid that Madame de Trafford might do something very extraordinary that I made her sleep in my room, and slept myself in the little outer room which we used to call the library, so that no one could pass through it to my room without my knowing it. The morning after we arrived she came into my room before I was up. I said, 'Mais, Madame, c'était à moi de vous rendre cette visite?'--'Laissez donc ces frivolités,' said Madame de Trafford, 'nous ne sommes pas ici pour les frivolités comme cela: parlons du sérieux; commençons.'"
The ceremonies far more than answered my sister's expectations. She entered St. Peter's with Madame de Trafford by the Porta Sta. Marta, and they saw everything perfectly. She met the Duchess Sora in the church, radiant with ecstasy over what she considered so glorious a day for Catholicism. "I knew you would be here," said the Duchess; "you could not have been away." The meeting was only for a moment, and was their last upon earth. "When the voices of the three choirs swelled into the dome," wrote Esmeralda, "then I felt what the Pope expressed in words, 'the triumph of the Church has begun.' When we first went into St. Peter's, Giacinta,[377] who had felt I should be there, was waiting for me. 'Eccola, la figlia,' she said, 'io l'aspettava.'"
Afterwards Giacinta came to see my sister at the Palazzo Parisani. "I shall never forget the meeting of those two souls," wrote Esmeralda, "when Giacinta first saw Madame de Trafford. They had never heard of one another before: I had never mentioned Giacinta to Madame de Trafford, and she had never heard of Madame de Trafford, but they understood one another at once. Madame de Trafford passed through the room while Giacinta was talking to me, and seeing only a figure in black talking, she did not stop and passed on. Giacinta started up and exclaimed, 'Chi è?'--'Una signora,' I said. 'Quello se vede,' said Giacinta, 'ma quello non è una risposta--chi è?'--and when I told her, 'O vede un' anima,' she exclaimed. Madame de Trafford then did what I have never known her do for any other person; she looked into the room and said, 'Faites la passer dans ma chambre,' and we went in, and the most interesting conversation followed."
As she returned through Tuscany, Esmeralda had her last meeting with her beloved Madame Victoire, who had then no presentiment of the end. At Paris she took leave of Madame de Trafford, and returned to London, where she for the first time engaged a permanent home--5 Lower Grosvenor Street. The furnishing of this house was the chief occupation of the next two months, though Esmeralda began by depositing in the empty rooms a large crucifix which Lady Lothian had given her, and saying, "Now the house is furnished with all that is really important, and Providence will send the rest." A room at the top of the house was arranged as an oratory; an altar was adorned with lace, flowers, and images; a lamp burned all night long before the crucifix, and if Esmeralda could not sleep, she was in the habit of retiring thither and spending long hours of darkness in silent prayer. There also she kept the vigil of "the Holy Hour." Early every morning the Catholic household in Grosvenor Street was awakened by the sharp clang of the prayer-bell outside the oratory door.
I went to stay with my sister in August for a few days. Esmeralda was at this time looking very pale and delicate, but not ill. Though the beauty of her youth had passed away, and all her troubles had left their trace, she was still very handsome. Her face, marble pale, was so full of intelligence and expression, mingled with a sort of sweet pathos, that many people found her far more interesting than before, and all her movements were marked by a stately grace which made it impossible for her to pass unobserved. Thus she was when I last saw her, pale, but smiling her farewell, as she stood in her long black dress, with her heavy black rosary round her neck, leaning against the parapet of the balcony outside the drawing-room window.
All through the winter Esmeralda wrote very seldom. She was much occupied with her different books, some of which seemed near publication. "The Study of Truth," upon which she had been occupied ever since 1857, had now reached such enormous dimensions, that the very arrangement of the huge pile of MS. seemed almost impossible. A volume of modern American poetry was to be brought out for the benefit of the Servites, and was also in an advanced state; yet her chief interest was a collection of the "Hymns of the Early Church," obtained from every possible source, but chiefly through the aid of foreign monasteries and convents. Upon this subject she kept up an almost daily correspondence with the Padre Agostino Morini of the Servites, who was her chief assistant, especially in procuring the best translations, as the intention was that the original Latin hymn should occupy one page and that the best available translation should in every case be opposite to it: many hundreds of letters remain of this correspondence. In the autumn Esmeralda was again at Ifield Lodge, where she was persuaded into a wild scheme for building a town for the poor at Crawley. Land was bought, measurements and plans were taken, and a great deal of money was wasted, but Esmeralda fortunately withdrew from the undertaking before it was too late.
But the state of excitement and speculation in which she was now persuaded to live had a terrible effect upon Esmeralda, who had continued in a weak and nervous state ever since her hurried journey to Rome. She now found it difficult to exist without the stimulus of daily excitement, and she added one scheme and employment to another in a way which the strongest brain could scarcely have borne up against. On her return to London she threw herself heart and soul into what she called a scheme for the benefit of the "poor rich." She remembered that when she was herself totally ruined, one of her greatest trials was to see her mother suffer from the want of small luxuries in the way of food to which she had been accustomed, and that though their little pittance allowed of what was absolutely necessary, London prices placed chickens, ducks, cream, and many other comforts beyond their reach. Esmeralda therefore arranged a plan by which she had over twice a week, from certain farms in Normandy, large baskets containing chickens (often as many as eighty at a time), ducks, geese, eggs, apples, and various other articles. The prices of the farm produce in Normandy were so low, that she was able, after paying the carriage, to retail the contents of her hampers to the poor families she was desirous of assisting, besides supplying her own house, at a cost of not more than half the London prices. Many families of "poor rich" availed themselves of this help and were most grateful for it, but of course the trouble involved by so many small accounts, with the expenditure of time in writing notes, &c., about the disposition of her poultry was enormous. It was in the carrying out of this scheme that Esmeralda became acquainted with a person called Mrs. Dunlop, wife of a Protestant, but herself a Roman Catholic. Esmeralda never liked Mrs. Dunlop; on the contrary, she both disliked and distrusted her; but owing to her interesting herself in the same charities, she inevitably saw a great deal of her.
During the winter an alarming illness attacked my brother Francis. He was my brother by birth, though I had seldom even seen him, and scarcely ever thought about him. Looking back now, in the distance of years, I wonder that my Mother and I never spoke of him; but he was absolutely without any part in our lives, and we never did, till this winter, when my sister mentioned his refusing to go to live with her in Grosvenor Street, which she had hoped that he would do when she took the house, and of his putting her to the unnecessary expense of paying for lodgings for him. Here he caught cold, and one day, unexpectedly, Dr. Squires came to tell Esmeralda that he considered him at the point of death. She flew to his bedside and remained with him all through the night. As she afterwards described it, she "could not let him die, and she breathed her life into his: she was willing to offer her life for his."
After this Esmeralda wrote to us (to Rome) that the condition of Francis was quite hopeless, and that her next letter must contain the news of his death. What was our surprise, therefore, when the next letter was from Francis himself (who had never written to us before), not merely saying that he was better, but that he was going to be married immediately to a person with whom he had long been acquainted. At the time of this marriage, Esmeralda went away into Sussex, and afterwards, when she returned to London, she never consented to see Mrs. Francis Hare.
My sister's cheque-books of the last year of her life show that during that year alone her brother Francis had received £900 from her, though her income at the most did not exceed £800. He had also persuaded Esmeralda to take a house called "Park Lodge" in Paddington, with an acre and a half of garden. The rent was certainly low, and the arrangement, as intended by Esmeralda, was that her brother should live in two or three rooms of the house, and that the rest should be let furnished. But tenants never came, and Francis lived in the whole of the house, after furnishing it expensively and sending in the bills to his sister, who paid them in her fear lest anxiety about money matters might make him ill again.
At the end of March Esmeralda received a letter from Madame de Trafford, of which she spoke to Mrs. Dunlop. She said, "Madame de Trafford has written to me in dreadful distress. She says she sees me in a very dark, narrow place, where no one can ever get at me, and where no one will ever be able to speak to me any more." Esmeralda laughed as she told this, and said she supposed it referred to the prison to which Augustus said she would have to go for her extravagance; but it was the grave of which Madame de Trafford spoke.
In March, Esmeralda talked to many of her friends of her plans for the future. She said that in consequence of the expense of keeping up the house, she should be obliged to part with Grosvenor Street, and that she should go abroad--to Rome, and eventually to Jerusalem. She did more than merely form the plan of this journey. She had the dresses made which she intended to wear in the East, and for three nights she sat up arranging all her papers, and tying up the letters of her different friends in separate parcels, so that they might more easily be returned to them. To Mary Laffam, her then maid, who assisted her in this, she said, "Mary, I am going on a very, very long journey, from which I may never return, and I wish to leave everything arranged behind me."
In the beginning of May Esmeralda went with her aunt to spend three weeks in Sussex. After she returned to Grosvenor Street, she was very ill with an attack like that from which she had suffered at Dijon several years before. Having been very successfully treated then in France, she persuaded her aunt to obtain the direction of a French doctor. The remedy which this doctor administered greatly increased the malady. This was on Tuesday 19th.
On Thursday 21st my sister was so much weakened and felt so ill, that she dismissed the French doctor, and sent again for her old doctor, Squires, who came at once. He was much shocked at the change in her, and thought that she had been terribly mistreated, but he was so far from being alarmed, that he saw no reason why her house should not be let, as arranged, on the following Tuesday, to Mademoiselle Nilsson, the Swedish songstress, and said that the change would do her good.
About this time, by Esmeralda's request, my aunt wrote to tell Madame de Trafford of the illness, but she did not then express any alarm. On Saturday the good and faithful Mrs. Thorpe[378] saw Esmeralda, and was much concerned at the change in her. She remained with her for some time, and bathed her face with eau-de-Cologne. Esmeralda then took both Mrs. Thorpe's hands in hers, and said no one could do for her as she did. Mrs. Thorpe was so much alarmed at Esmeralda's manner, which seemed like a leave-taking, that she went down to our Aunt Eleanor and tried to alarm her; but she said that as long as the house could be let on Tuesday to Mademoiselle Nilsson, the doctor must be perfectly satisfied, and there could not possibly be anything to apprehend.
Sunday passed without any change except that, both then and on Saturday, whenever her brother Francis was mentioned, Esmeralda became violently agitated, screamed, and said that he was on no account to be admitted.
Father Galway was away, but on Monday Esmeralda sent for Father Eccles, and from him she received the Last Sacraments. When I asked my aunt afterwards if this did not alarm her, she said, "No, it did not, because Esmeralda was so nervous and so dreadfully afraid of dying without the Last Sacraments, that whenever she felt ill she always received them, and the doctor still assured her that all was going on well."
That night (Monday, May 25), a nun of the Misericorde sat up in the room. Aunt Eleanor went to bed as usual. At half-past four in the morning she was called. The most mysterious black sickness had come on, and could not be arrested. Dr. Squires, summoned in haste, says that he arrived exactly as a clock near Grosvenor Square struck five. He saw at once that the case was quite hopeless, still for three hours he struggled to arrest the malady. At the end of that time, Esmeralda suddenly said, "Dr. Squires, this is very terrible, isn't it?"--"Yes," he replied, throwing as much meaning as possible into his voice, "it is indeed most terrible." Upon this Esmeralda started up in the bed and said, "You cannot possibly mean that you think I shall not recover?" Dr. Squires said, "Yes, I am afraid it is my duty to tell you that you cannot possibly recover now."--"But I do not feel ill," exclaimed Esmeralda; "this sickness is very terrible, but still I do not feel ill."--"I cannot help that," answered Dr. Squires, "but I fear it is my duty to tell you that it is quite impossible you can live."
"It was then," said her doctor, "that her expression lost all its anxiety. Death had no terror for her. She was almost radiant." The serenity of her countenance remained unchanged, and to her last moment she was as one preparing for a festival.
After a pause she said, "Tell me how long you think it possible that I should live." Dr. Squires said, "You might live two days, but it is quite impossible that you should live longer than that." She at once asked for writing materials, and with a firm hand, as if she were well, she wrote a telegraphic despatch bidding Madame de Trafford to come to her at once. (The office was then closed, and when it was opened, it was already too late to send the despatch.) Then Dr. Squires kindly and wisely said, "I fear you have little time to lose, and if you wish to make any changes in your will, you had better make them at once." My sister answered, "Oh, I must alter everything. I never thought it possible that I should die before my aunt, and I wish to leave things so that my death will make no difference to her." The doctor, seeing a great change coming on, was afraid to leave the room even to get a sheet of paper, and he wrote upon a scrap of paper which he picked up from the floor. My sister then made a very simple will, leaving everything to her (Protestant) aunt, Miss Paul, except her interest in Park Lodge and a chest of plate which she left to Francis, and her claims to a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds,[379] which she left to me.
When Esmeralda had dictated the page containing these bequests, her doctor wisely made her sign it in the presence of her servants before she proceeded to dictate anything else. Thus the first portion of her will is valid, but before she had come to the end of another page containing small legacies to the Servites, to the Nuns of the Precious Blood, &c., the power of signature had failed, and it was therefore valueless.
Esmeralda then said almost playfully, "You had better send for the Nuns of the Precious Blood, for they would never forgive me, even after all is over, if they had not been sent for," and a maid went off in a cab to fetch the Abbess Pierina. It was then that a priest arrived from Farm Street to administer extreme unction, and Dr. Squires, seeing that he could do nothing more, and that my sister was already past observing who was present, went away.
The Abbess Pierina says that she arrived at the house about nine o'clock, and saw at once that Esmeralda was dying. A priest was praying by the bedside. She remained standing at the foot of the bed for about ten minutes, then she went up to Esmeralda, who said, "I am dying." A few minutes afterwards, in a loud and clear voice, she called "Auntie," and instantly fell back and died.
Thus the day which she looked for as her Sabbath and high day came to her, and she passed to the rest beyond the storm--beyond the bounds of doubt or controversy--to the company of those she justly honoured, and of some whom she never learnt to honour here, in the many mansions of an all-reconciling world. Let us not look for the living amongst the dead. She exchanged her imperfect communion with God here for its full fruition in the peace of that Sabbath which knows no evening.
* * * * *
During the whole of the last terrible hours our poor deaf aunt was in the room, but she had sunk down in her terror and anguish upon the chair which was nearest the door as she came in, and thence she never moved. She never had strength or courage to approach the bed: she saw all that passed, but she heard nothing.
Soon after all was over, the Abbess Pierina came down to my aunt, and revealed--what none of her family had known before--that Esmeralda had long been an Oblate Sister of the Precious Blood, and she begged leave to dress her in the habit of the Order. All the furniture of the room was cleared away or draped with white, and the bed was left standing alone, surrounded night and day by tall candles burning in silver sconces, with a statue of "Our Lady of Sorrows" at the head, and at the foot the great crucifix from the oratory. Esmeralda was clothed in a long black dress, which she had ordered for her journey to Jerusalem, but had never worn, and round her waist was the scarlet girdle of the Precious Blood. On her head was a white crape cap and a white wreath, as for a novice nun.
As soon as Aunt Eleanor was able to think, she sent for her sister, Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, who arrived at 11 A.M. She, as a strong Protestant, said that she could never describe how terrible the next three days were to her. All day long a string of carriages was ceaselessly pouring up the street, and a concourse of people through the house, nuns of the Precious Blood being posted on the different landings to show them where to go. Each post brought letters from all kinds of people they had never heard of before, asking to have anything as a memorial, even a piece of old newspaper which Esmeralda had touched.
On the day after we arrived at Holmhurst from Germany (Sunday 31st), I went up to try to comfort my broken-hearted aunt at the house in Grosvenor Street. The rooms in which I had last seen Esmeralda looked all the more intensely desolate from being just finished, new carpets and chintzes everywhere, only the last pane of the fernery in the back drawing-room not yet put in. My aunt came in trembling all over. It was long before she was able to speak: then she wrung her hands. "Oh, it was so sudden--it was so sudden," she said; and then she became more collected, and talked for hours of all that had passed. Those present said that for the whole of the first day she sat in a stupor, with her eyes fixed on vacancy, and never spoke or moved, or seemed to notice any one who went in or out.
The coffin was already closed, and stood in the middle of the room covered with a white pall, and surrounded by burning candles and vases of flowers. Upon the coffin lay the crucifix which both Italima and Esmeralda held in their hands when they were dying. Near it was the bed, with the mark where the head had lain still unremoved from the pillow.
On Monday afternoon there was a long wearying family discussion as to whether the remains were to be taken to Kensal Green in the evening, to remain throughout the night in the cemetery chapel. Francis insisted that it should be so. Our Aunt Fitz-Gerald declared that if it was done she would not go to the funeral, as she would not follow nothing. I agreed with Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, and the nuns of the Precious Blood were most vehement that the body should not be removed. Eventually, however, Francis carried his point. At 9 P.M. we all went up for the last time to the room, still draped like a chapel, where the coffin lay, covered with fresh flowers, with the great crucifix still standing at the foot between the lighted candles. Then what remained of Esmeralda was taken away.
The next day (June 2) was the funeral. At the cemetery the relations who came from the house were joined by Mr. Monteith, Lady Lothian, Lady Londonderry, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, the Abbess Pierina, and all the nuns of the Precious Blood, with several nuns of the Misericorde.
The chapel was full of people, but it is very small, and a very small part of it is used for seats. The larger part was spread with a rich crimson carpet, in the midst of which rose a kind of catafalque, upon which lay the coffin, covered with a long purple velvet pall, embroidered in golden letters--"May all the holy saints and angels receive her soul." Round this were six candles burning in very tall brass candlesticks. After the priest had gone round with the holy water and incense, a door at the east end of the church was thrown open and the pall removed, when the light poured in upon the coffin and its silver ornaments and the large silver cross lying upon it. Then we all passed out round the shrubberies to the grave, where the vault was opened just behind the beautiful seated statue of "Our Lady of Sorrows" under the cross, which Esmeralda had herself erected. Upon the coffin was engraved--
ANNE FRANCES MARIA LOUISA HARE, E. de M. (Enfant de Marie), Oblate of the Order of the Precious Blood. Born October 9, 1832. Died May 26, 1868.
As the priest said all the leading sentences, the nuns, with clear voice, sang the responses. The whole service occupied nearly an hour and a half. We drove home in total silence: Aunt Fitz-Gerald led Auntie into the desolate house.
Thus was my sweet sister Esmeralda taken from us--being removed from the evil to come.
"Souls of the Holy Dead! Though fancy whispers thus to musing hearts, We would not call ye back, whence ye are fled, To take your parts In the old battle-strife; or break With our heartache-- The rest which ye have won and in Christ's presence take."
XIV. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CONSPIRACY
"Glory to Thee in Thine Omnipotence, Who dost dispense, As seemeth best to Thine unerring will The lot of victory still; Edging sometimes with might the sword unjust, And bowing to the dust The rightful cause, that so much seeming ill May Thine appointed purposes fulfil."
--SOUTHEY.
"Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden."
--Swiss Inscription.
"If you your lips would keep from slips, Of five things have a care: To whom you speak, of whom you speak, And how, and when, and where."
--Old Distich.
At eleven o'clock on the morning of my sister's death, our aunt, Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, arrived in Grosvenor Street. She wrote to me afterwards:--
"When Eleanor sent for me, after I recovered the shock, I went immediately to Grosvenor Street, and the first thing I asked before going up to Eleanor was, 'Is Mr. Hare (Francis) upstairs?' The maid made answer, 'Oh, no; Miss Hare would not hear of seeing him, and forbade us to let him enter the house, declaring that he had her death to answer for.' I could not believe this statement, and I called another servant into the dining-room, who repeated exactly the same thing, saying also that things had taken place in that house which were fearful, and that they were afraid of their lives. I was the innocent cause of Francis coming to sleep in the house, as I did not think it was right that Eleanor should be left alone with the dead body of your sister. I did not know till the following morning, when the servants told me, that people had been walking about the house the whole night, and that the Rev. Mother (Pierina) had forbid them to leave the kitchen, hear what they would."[380]
Upon this, and all succeeding nights until the funeral, the three maids persistently refused at night to go upstairs, saying that they had seen a spirit there, and they remained all through the night huddled up together in a corner of the kitchen. By day even they manifested the greatest terror, especially Mary Laffam, the lady's-maid, who started and trembled whenever she was spoken to, and who entreated to be allowed to go out when she heard the lawyer was coming, "for fear he should ask her any questions." If they had the opportunity, they always made mysterious hints of poison, and of Esmeralda's death having been caused by unnatural means. To the Rev. Mother Pierina, Mary Laffam said at one time that Miss Hare had told her she knew that she should die of poison.[381] All the servants constantly repeated to the Rev. Mother their conviction that Miss Hare was poisoned. They talked a great deal, especially Mary Laffam, who horrified the Abbess by saying that Miss Hare had herself said in her last moments, "I am poisoned and I die of poison."[382] In consequence of all that the servants had said to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald of their certain conviction that my sister had been poisoned, she was most anxious, before my return to England, for a post-mortem examination, but Francis violently opposed this, and he carried his point.
The opinion that my sister's death was caused by poison was shared by many of those who came to see her after death. They could not but recollect that though Dr. Squires then said he believed her to have died of ulceration of the intestines, up to the day before the death he had said that she might be removed, that the house might be let, and had suggested no such impression. For two days after death, black blood continued to stream from the mouth, as is the case from slow corrosive poison, and three eminent physicians, on hearing of the previous symptoms and the after appearances (Dr. Hale, Sir Alexander Taylor, and Dr. Winslow), gave it as their opinion that those were the usual symptoms and appearances induced by corrosive poison. Mrs. Baker (Marguerite Pole) wrote to me on June 24:--"The idea of poison is the one I formed the first moment I saw the body, as for some years I was practically versed in medicine, and I was at a loss how to account for various appearances in a natural way--i.e., from illness."
When I arrived at the house on May 31 (the death having taken place on the 26th), I found all its inmates agitated by the various reports which were going about. Mrs. Fitz-Gerald was full of a dreadful message which she believed to have been given by my dying sister to the Abbess Pierina. "When I am dead, go to my brother Francis, and tell him that he was the cause of my death, and that he will have to answer for it." This message was also repeated to me by Mrs. Baker and by Mrs. William Hare, and was always spoken of as having been given to the Rev. Mother herself. On each occasion on which I heard it spoken of, I said that the message had much better not be given to Francis, as he was in such a weak state of health that it might do him serious injury; and that probably when my sister gave it, she was in a state of semi-delirium, brought on by her extreme weakness. I entirely declined to question the servants, consequently I heard nothing directly from them, only their words as repeated by Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, and the many persons to whom the Mother Pierina had related them.
I never had any interview with or heard anything directly from Pierina herself. The reason of this was that, three days after the death, she had a violent scene with Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, who had intercepted her in the act of carrying off two large heavy silver candelabra from the oratory, and some valuable point-lace, which she had ripped off the altar-cloth and concealed in her pocket. She also took away a quantity of small articles (rosaries, crucifixes, &c.), which were afterwards returned with the more valuable articles by order of Monsignor Paterson, who wrote to express his extreme grief and annoyance at her conduct. My own impression still is that Pierina was a simple and devout character, who would not willingly do anything she believed to be wrong, but that she was really convinced (as she said) that it was a duty to take away these things, which had been dedicated to the service of a Roman Catholic altar, in order to prevent their being applied to secular uses in a Protestant household. After this, however, which occurred before my arrival, the Abbess Pierina was never allowed to return to the house, so that I never saw her.
Immediately after the death, all the small articles in my sister's room had been hastily removed, in order that the room might be draped with white, and to give it as much as possible the appearance of a chapel. On the day before the funeral, I saw Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, who was in the inner drawing-room, after opening a davenport and looking into a blotting-book, suddenly burst into tears. "Oh," she said, "the whole mystery is revealed now; it is all quite plain; you may see what it was that killed your sister," and she held up a letter from Francis, written on the Friday evening before her death--a cruel letter, telling her in the harshest terms that she was totally ruined, that she might sell her house and her plate, and all else that she possessed, for she had nothing whatever left to live upon; but that, as he did not wish her to starve, she and her aunt might come to live with his wife. This letter Esmeralda must have received on Saturday morning, soon after writing the affectionate note to Francis, which was read afterwards at Guildford in proof of the happy terms on which she was living with him. But it was her peculiar habit, when she was ill or suffering, to put letters aside, whoever they might be from, and not to read them till she felt better; it is therefore quite possible that she did not open this letter till Monday, when it gave the fatal blow. This was my impression at the time, and then and always afterwards, when others spoke of poison, I said, "There were strange signs of poison, and many people think she was poisoned, but it is my firm conviction that she did not die of poison, but of a broken heart--a heart broken by her brother Francis."
On the 6th of June I spent the whole morning in the office of my sister's solicitor examining accounts and papers, and the afternoon at Coutts' Bank to find out what was left. The result of the investigation was to show that in October my sister possessed £12,000 clear, besides a great quantity of plate, diamonds, and other valuables, and the house in Grosvenor Street paid for and clear from debt, as well as the property in the Palazzo Parisani at Rome. At the time of her death she possessed, interest and principal combined, £216, and debts to a considerable amount, while the diamonds and plate seemed to have disappeared without leaving a trace behind them.
Several days afterwards, while I was taking an envelope out of the envelope-box on the table, I saw a bit of bluish paper sticking up between the partitions of the box. I absently poked it up with a paper-knife, and then found that it was a pawn-ticket from Attenborough for £120 upon diamonds. Turning out a quantity of old Times from a cupboard, I afterwards found there a pawn-ticket for £100 upon plate; later I found a third ticket for £82 upon some diamond earrings. Attenborough told me that Francis had brought his sister there at different times and placed the plate and diamonds in pawn.
Whilst I was still in Grosvenor Street, many of my sister's Catholic friends came to see me. Mrs. Montgomery came three times. I had never liked her, and had greatly deprecated my sister's intimacy with her, but in the presence of what I believed to be a common grief I could not refuse to receive her, and she was apparently most sympathising and even affectionate. The second time she came she sat by me on the sofa and spoke of Esmeralda's death as making a blank in her whole future life. She said what a comfort and happiness it would be to her if she were ever able to be of use to me in any way,--in any way to supply the place of her I had lost.... Yet ten days after![383]
Mrs. Dunlop came several times. On June 8 she would not get out of her carriage, but begged me to come down to her and speak to her in it. She then said, "Now I know you would not speak of these things to any one else, but you know you may trust me: now do tell me, was it not most extraordinary that Francis should, in spite of her forbidding him, force his way into his sister's house just upon the one day on which he knew his aunt was away? Now of course you would not speak of this to every one, but Esmeralda loved me as a sister. You know you may trust me." She went on very long in the same strain. At last I was so shocked that I got up and said, "Mrs. Dunlop, I see what you wish me to say. You wish me to say that I think my brother poisoned my sister. Recollect that I do not think so. I distinctly think that he was the cause of her death, but I think that she died of a broken heart," and so saying I left her.
In the face of this Mrs. Dunlop afterwards asserted that I had told her that Francis poisoned my sister. In fact, I shall always believe that the whole of the poisoning story, as it appeared at the trial which ensued, originated, sprung up, and fructified with Mrs. Dunlop, the most unscrupulous of the conspirators concerned. "Where the devil cannot go, he sends an old woman," is an old German proverb.
* * * * *
On June 9 I received a letter from my adopted mother's niece, Mary Stanley, saying that some friends had come up to her at a party, and spoken of the cruel way in which Mr. (Francis) Hare had been treated by his Protestant relations. When she asked an explanation, they said that Mrs. Montgomery had asserted (it was at Lord Denbigh's) that the doors of the house in Grosvenor Street were forcibly closed upon Mr. and Mrs. Francis Hare during Miss Hare's illness, and that she was influenced in her last moments to cancel a will in which she had left all her money to her brother Francis; also that neither Francis nor his wife were then allowed to enter the house or to see their aunt, and that they had nothing to live upon, owing to their having been disinherited by Miss Hare, who supported them during her life. Mary Stanley, a Roman Catholic, shocked at such falsehoods promulgated by a member of her own creed, and seeing the discredit it was likely to bring upon her party, strongly urged my writing to Mrs. Montgomery, who had professed such intimate friendship for me, stating that I had heard such a report was circulated, though not by whom, and after putting her in possession of the facts, as my sister's dearest friend, urging her to contradict it.
Having an inward distrust of Mrs. Montgomery, and a shrinking from any communication with her, I did not then write as Mary Stanley wished.
On June 11 Mary Stanley came down to Holmhurst, and again vehemently urged my writing to Mrs. Montgomery in defence of Miss Paul. On June 12 I yielded to her repeated solicitations, and wrote--Mary Stanley and my adopted mother looking over the letter and approving it sentence by sentence. When it was finished, Mary Stanley said, "That letter is perfect: you must not alter a word: it could not be better." The letter was as follows:--
"Holmhurst, June 13, 1868.--Dear Mrs. Montgomery, I have heard on good authority that a report has been circulated in London to the effect that the doors were perfectly closed upon Mr. and Mrs. Francis Hare during Miss Hare's illness, and that she was influenced in her last moments to cancel a will in which she had left all her money to her brother Francis; also that neither Francis nor his wife are now allowed to enter the house or to see their aunt, and that they have nothing to live upon, owing to their being disinherited by Miss Hare, who supported them during her life.
"As it is a pity that this impression should be allowed to gain ground, and as you were latterly the most intimate friend my dearest sister possessed, I venture to put you in possession of the facts.
1. "In her previous will my sister had not even mentioned Francis' name. She had left £4000 to me, a very large legacy to Lady G. Fullerton, legacies to other friends, and the remainder to her aunt. Francis was not even alluded to.
2. "Francis was not allowed to see my sister during the last days of her life at her own especial request: the very mention of his name made her scream with horror. In her last moments she left a solemn message with the Superior of the Precious Blood, to be given him after her death. This message was of so terrible a kind that, owing to Francis' critical state of health and the uncertainty of his life, he has hitherto been spared the pain of hearing it.
3. "Francis and his wife are not allowed, by the lawyer's direction, to see my aunt until the whole terrible story of my sister's sudden death is cleared up. In the month of November, besides Grosvenor Street, bought and paid for, she possessed £12,000 in money; when she died she was absolutely penniless, except £216, interest and principal combined, and she was overwhelmed with debts. There is no trace of any part of her fortune except of £2000 which was lost on the Stock Exchange through brokers to whom Francis introduced her.
4. "My dear sister's accounts at Coutts' show only too clearly that Francis had the greater part of her income. He will henceforward receive nothing from his aunt, who is totally ruined, and will scarcely have enough left to buy daily bread, as £2400 of her own little fortune is gone owing to signatures which Francis persuaded her to give.
"I am sure you will forgive my troubling you thus far with our family affairs, but I am certain that many, knowing your intimacy with my sister, may ask you for information, and I wish you to be in a position to give it. Believe me yours very truly,
"AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE."
In writing this letter, I had no idea of the significance which it might be made possible to attribute to the sentence No. 3--"Until the whole story of my sister's sudden death is cleared up." My own mind dwelt entirely and fixedly upon the impression that my sister's terribly sudden death was caused by the cruel shock of Francis' ungrateful letter coming to her in her weak state. To have it cleared up would be in my mind to have it clearly ascertained that she was poisoned, as most people believed, because in that case it would be certain that Francis might be held guiltless of her death, since--putting other reasons aside--he had never once been allowed to enter the house during the last days of the illness, and therefore could have nothing to do with it.
The statements about the money were perfectly correct; my sister's solicitor vouched for them. I believed all the other statements to be correct also, for I wrote them, not upon what I had heard from one person, but from what I had heard repeatedly and from many. I did not know till long afterwards that "the message" was not given by my sister herself to the Superior of the Precious Blood, but that the Superior had received it through the servants. It will be borne in mind that I had never myself seen the Superior, except in the group of mourners round the grave.
It was not till after I had written the letter to Mrs. Montgomery that I was able to read all the details of my sister's former will, annulled upon her death-bed. All that I had said and more than that was true. The will was of great length and detail, but Francis was not even alluded to. It began by leaving £4000, the family diamonds, miniatures, and plate, with various other valuables, to me, but it also left me residuary legatee. There was a legacy of £4000 to Lady Georgiana Fullerton, or, if she were dead, to her husband, Alexander Fullerton; £200 to Lady Lothian; £200 to Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Galton; £200 to Father Galway--in all about £5000 to Roman Catholics. Besides these, there were considerable legacies to Victoire, to Flora Limosin and her daughter, to Clémence Boissy,[384] and £200 annuity to her aunt. There were small legacies to various nuns--Serafina della Croce, Pierina of the Precious Blood, the "Saint of St. Peter's," &c.
From the virulence and avarice afterwards displayed by the Roman Catholics, and by the fact of their bringing an action to get the exact sum, £5000, we could only conclude that they had discovered that my sister had originally left them that sum and that they determined to extort it from the Protestant part of the family, in spite of the fact that she had really left nothing, so that even the last will was valueless, and that, if it had not been so, I should have been the chief sufferer, having been residuary legatee under the old will.[385]
In less than a week from the time of my sending the letter to Mrs. Montgomery, I received one from a lawyer, who had long been mixed up with Francis' affairs, stating that unless I at once withdrew and apologised for every part of that letter, an action for libel would be brought against me. Knowing that Francis was utterly insolvent, my family and I treated this as an idle threat, and declining any correspondence with the person in question, referred him to my solicitor. Mrs. Montgomery and Mrs. Dunlop had persuaded Francis to these proceedings, and Mrs. Montgomery had at once begun to stir up strife by taking the letter to him.
On hearing what had happened, Mary Stanley wrote:--
"July 16, 9 A.M.--You may imagine that my indignation is boundless. I can scarcely believe it. There must be some mistake, because there is no sense in it. You were not in England when the will was made: it is Miss Paul, if any one, from whom they ought to extort money, if they wish it.
"2 P.M.--All morning I have been out in your service. I went first to Farm Street, to see if I could see any of the priests who knew anything of the matter, but only two were in, who knew nothing. Then I went to Lady G. Fullerton, she was out; to Lady Lothian, she was out; then to find out Monsignor Paterson's direction, and happily I found it and him. I wish you could have heard all he said. The moment I mentioned the name principally concerned he stopped me--'You need say no more; I can believe anything of that person.' Nothing could be stronger than his words about her.... He was just as indignant at the whole transaction as you and I are. He said Francis, finding all else fail, was now trading on his faith. The Abbess Pierina had told him all that your sister said on her deathbed, and Monsignor Paterson desired me to say that you had only to command his services, and he would keep her to her words."
Meanwhile the action for libel was declared, an action which openly avowed its object, to extort £5000. Meanwhile, also, it was found that Mr. and Mrs. Monteith of Carstairs had joined the conspirators, and were hand in hand with Mrs. Dunlop and Mrs. Montgomery. Soon after I reached home, Mrs. Monteith had written to me, expressing her great devotion to my sister's memory, and begging me to send all the sad details connected with her death. I answered to the effect that those who were present could better tell the story of my sister's death. Had I written to Mrs. Monteith, doubtless my letter to her would have been used in the action, instead of that which I wrote, when I fell into the more skilful trap laid by Mrs. Montgomery. The Monteiths before this were intimate friends of mine. I had spent a week at Carstairs in the preceding October. With Francis they were previously unacquainted. Therefore it could have been only the interests of their Church which incited them to the course they pursued.
On the 18th of July Mary Stanley wrote:--
"At last I have got into the enemy's camp. I found Mrs. Dunlop this morning, and for an hour heard her version, and was aghast at the violence with which she spoke. I am very glad I have seen her, because it gives me a fresh insight into the state of things. She said Francis himself was absolutely passive, and allowed his friends to act for him; that he was now living on charity, and of course his friends must defray the cost of prosecution.
"She also said that Mrs. Montgomery's letter was used for the prosecution only because it happened to be more convenient than Mrs. Dunlop's evidence. They were resolved to prosecute you.
"I was so afraid of doing mischief, I scarcely knew what to say, but the general point I urged was that I had heard from a Catholic priest to whom I had spoken on the subject that the accusation of poison originated with the Abbess, who had told my informant that Miss Hare had said so to her!--and that my informant was ready to hold her to these words."
I do not think that any words could describe my misery at this time--"battered and fretted into great sorrow of heart," as Carlyle would say. It was naturally of far more consequence to me than to any one else to screen the miserable Francis, whom I alone had cared for and helped during the long years of his prison life, and who was now--as a last resource--consenting to extort what was equivalent to hush-money from me--either hush-money to save the family from the exposure of his own past life, or a provision for life from the Roman Catholic conspirators, if they were successful in the scheme to which he lent himself. Yet I possessed nothing, and even if I could have brought myself to let the Roman Catholics so far triumph, I could not have allowed my adopted mother to impoverish herself by the purchase of their silence. And all the time there was the unutterable weariness of contradicting all the false reports, of making over and over again the statement that if my sister were poisoned, then Francis, who had never seen her during her illness, was innocent of her death, but that if she were not poisoned, then the moral cause of it must be attributed to him; and mingled through the whole were silent bursts of indignant misery over the cruel sufferings which Esmeralda had undergone, and the calumnious falsehood of her friends, with anguish over her so recent death.
* * * * *
When it became quite evident that the only real object of the conspiracy was to extort money from me, because I was supposed to be, as Mrs. Dunlop expressed it, "the richest of the family," I did all I could to save family scandal by offering to withdraw the letter to Mrs. Montgomery altogether. My solicitor made every possible offer on my part, but was always answered that they must have "pecuniary compensation,"--in fact, it was always made a question of buying back the letter to Mrs. Montgomery. The conspirators, as Mrs. Dunlop said, were "resolved to prosecute," and wished to use the letter to Mrs. Montgomery because "it was more convenient to use than anything else." They would listen to nothing, consider nothing. Is it not Whyte-Melville who says, "I never knew but one woman who could understand reason, and she wouldn't listen to it?"
When we knew that the trial was inevitable, we did what we could to prepare for it. I was strongly advised to put the case entirely into the hands of my sister's solicitor, who was already acquainted with all the dark page of Francis' past life, rather than to give it to my adopted mother's respectable, old-fashioned solicitor, who was totally unacquainted with it. I afterwards regretted this course, as the one remark made by the latter, "that the Abbess should now be allowed to deliver her message," showed greater perspicuity than anything which was done by the former. He, on the contrary, insisted that there should be no communication at all with Pierina till just before the trial, and begged that I would not see her at all; he also allowed himself entirely to lose sight of the servants, in spite of my repeated entreaties. His plan seems to have consisted in ferreting out all the proofs of what Francis' conduct had been for many years past, and of the way in which he preyed upon his sister during the last year of his life, as shown by his own letters and my sister's accounts, which were in our hands.
In the "declaration of the action for libel" it was set forth as the necessary "injury" that it had caused Francis to be avoided by all his friends and acquaintances. Upon this we sued for particulars. Francis returned a list of the persons whom he declared to have been led to avoid him--"Mrs. Montgomery, Mrs. Dunlop, Mr. Monteith, Mrs. Monteith, Marchioness of Lothian, and Miss Bowles," a list which included the very persons (several of whom he had not known before) who were at that time in constant communication with him, and were bringing on and subscribing for the action, which was nominally on his behalf. On Tuesday, July 28, the Roman Catholic lawyer asked permission to fix the day for the trial. This courtesy was not refused. He fixed the day instantly and summoned his witnesses, but he did not let us know till Saturday, August 1, that the trial was to be on Monday, August 3, when, owing to the want of a London post on Sunday, it was most difficult, almost impossible, to summon the witnesses on our side.
On Friday, July 31, my acting solicitor went to Monsignor Paterson and took down his deposition as to Pierina's account to him of the death-bed. Monsignor Paterson then deposed that "the message" had been given by my sister in the form already described, and that my sister had also said she was "poisoned, and knew that she died of poison." Upon receiving this evidence, my solicitor naturally felt sure of his cause. He then went to see the Abbess Pierina in Mecklenburgh Square, when, to his utter amazement, she totally denied ever having received the message; but (being terrified by threats as to the "legal consequences" which might accrue to her) she did not then say that the message had been given to the servants and by them delivered to her to give to Francis.
On Saturday afternoon, August 1, Monsignor Paterson again saw Pierina, and, to his amazement, was informed that the message which he had so positively declared to have been given to the Abbess was not what Miss Hare said to her, but what Miss Hare had said to the maids, who had told her. Monsignor Paterson wrote this immediately to my solicitor, who (owing to the want of London post on Sunday) only received it in court.
On Saturday, August 1, the announcement came that the trial would take place at Guildford on Monday the 3rd. On Monday morning Mary Stanley and I drove early to the Waterloo station to go down to Guildford. There were so many passengers for the trial that a special train was put on. At the station I was close to Mr. Monteith, who had come from Scotland to represent his wife, and young Gerard, who was to open the prosecution, but there was no speech between us. Sir Alexander Taylor went down with us, and at Guildford we were joined by many other friends.
The heat of that day was awful, a broiling sun and not a breath of air. We had a little room to meet in at the hotel. Almost immediately I was hurried by my solicitor to the room where our senior counsel, the great Hawkins, was breakfasting at the end of a long table. He complained of the immense mass of evidence he had had to go through. He said--what I knew--that such a trial must expose terrible family scandals--that it would be a disgrace not to snatch at any chance of bringing it to a close--that probably the judge would give it for private investigation to some other Queen's counsellor--that, in fact, it was never likely to be a trial.
When I came down from Mr. Hawkins, Mary Stanley and I were taken to court. There were so many cases to be tried, that ours could not come on for some time. As Leycester Penrhyn was there, who was chairman of the Quarter Sessions at Guildford, we were given places on the raised daïs behind the judge, and there we all sat waiting through many hours. In that intensely hot weather, the court-house, with its high timber roof and many open windows, was far cooler than the outer air, and we did not suffer from the heat. But the judge, Baron Martin, whom I have heard described as far more at home on a racecourse than on the judgment-seat, was suffering violently from diarrhœa, was most impatient of the cases he had to try, and at last snatched his wig from his head and flung it down upon the ground beside him.
About three o'clock in the afternoon we were assured that it was quite impossible our case could be brought on that day, as there were still so many others to be tried, and we were advised to go out and rest. So Mary Stanley and I went back to the hotel and remained there in a cool room. Presently, to our horror, a messenger came running down from the court and said, "Your case is on, and has been on twenty minutes already." We rushed to the court and found the whole scene changed. All the approaches to the court were crowded, literally choked up with witnesses and Roman Catholic spectators. The court itself was packed to overflowing. As I was hurried through the crowd, I recognised the individuals forming the large group of figures immediately behind the judge. There were Pierina of the Precious Blood and her attendant nuns in their long black veils and scarlet girdles; there, in her quaint peaked head-dress, was the nun of the Misericorde who had watched through the illness; there was the burly figure of Mr. Monteith; the sallow face of Mrs. Dunlop; her husband the Admiral; Mrs. Montgomery, beautiful still; Lady Lothian in her deep mourning and looking very sad at being subpœnaed, which was a terrible pain to her; Dr. Squires, Mr. Seyer, and Miss Bowles.
When I was brought in, all seemed to be confusion, every one speaking at once; Mr. Hawkins was in vain trying to put in a word, the judge was declaiming that he would have an end of the trial, whilst Serjeant Parry for the prosecution was in a loud voice reading the letter to Mrs. Montgomery and giving his comments upon it.
The proceedings had commenced by the judge saying that he considered the case one which it would be most undesirable to discuss in a public court; and suggesting, indeed trying to enforce, that it should be left to the arbitration of some friend of the family. Repeatedly Baron Martin urged the expediency of a private investigation, saying that he "felt it his duty to make the suggestion, and that he thought the learned counsel (Parry) might act upon it." But the lawyers for the opposition refused any compromise whatever, for they knew what the evidence of Pierina and the servants was to be.
Serjeant Parry then opened his speech by describing between whom the action was taking place. He drew a picture of the nominal prosecutor's life in which he dwelt on "the brilliant examination at Sandhurst," but touched lightly upon the time which he had passed in the gaieties both of the Continent and of this country, after which he became "not embarrassed, but reduced in circumstances." He then said that Esmeralda had recently had a tolerable fortune, and was doubtless "supposed at her death to be in possession of it, but she was not, for she entered into speculations which had proved unsuccessful, so that she died a comparatively poor woman." He then described the death-bed will. He asserted that the only cause of the death was inflammation of the bowels. He then said that he should proceed to read the letter, "supplementing it with evidence to prove that the defendant was actuated by the wickedest malice."
It was at this point that we arrived in court. When a little silence was obtained, Parry began to read the letter, and having concluded the first sentence, said, "When the defendant states that a report has been circulated in London, &c., he states a deliberate falsehood. No such report ever was heard by him, and I will not say it is the effect of his imagination, it is simply an invention for the purpose of damaging the character of his brother."[386]
Serjeant Parry then read the paragraph saying that in the first will Francis was not even alluded to. "I have reason to believe that this also is totally false," he said, and that with the will itself lying open upon the table before him.
Parry passed over the third paragraph of the letter, without any criticism except an absolute denial, but he read a note written by my sister before she received Francis' fatal letter, in proof of the affectionate terms on which they were living. That the "mention of his name made her scream with horror," he declared to be utterly false, and he asserted (for the first time stating facts) that the Abbess Pierina would deny that any message was given by my sister to her. Finally, Parry denied that there was any truth in the statement that Francis had received money from his sister, beyond the sum of £300.
As Serjeant Parry concluded his speech, Mrs. Montgomery was called into the witness-box. While the preliminary questions were being put to her, the confusion in court increased; a letter was brought in to Mr. Harrison and handed on by him to Mr. Hawkins. It was the letter from Monsignor Paterson, written on Saturday evening, which announced that Pierina would deny and belie the deposition he had made. Immediately Mr. Hawkins turned round to me and said, "Our cause has received a fatal blow; the Abbess Pierina is about to deny all the evidence she has given before--deny all that she has said to Monsignor Paterson, and will swear that your sister's death-bed passed in total silence, save for the single word 'Auntie,' and under these circumstances it is perfectly useless to go on; our antagonists will get the money they long for; for money is all they really care for."--"But," I said, "we can bring endless persons and Monsignor Paterson's own deposition to prove what the Abbess's former statements have been."--"No," said Mr. Hawkins, "you cannot bring a witness to prove a witness."--"But," I said, "we can prove every other part of the letter."--"That will do no good," said Mr. Hawkins; "if you fail in proving a single point, you fail in proving the whole, and the Roman Catholics will get the money; besides, you cannot prove every other part of the letter, for where is the maid, Mary Laffam?--she is not here." And in truth, Mary Laffam (whose evidence was all-important, who was to swear to the screaming at the very mention of Francis' name, who was constantly present during the illness) was mysteriously missing, and no trace of her could then be found. Two days afterwards she was traced, and it was discovered that she had been sent abroad by the Roman Catholic confederates to be out of the way--sent by them to the Augustinian Abbey of Charentan in France.
During the discussion which was now taking place, the utmost excitement prevailed in court. Almost every one stood up. Mr. Hawkins urged--"Are your adopted family prepared to pay what the Roman Catholics claim?"--"Certainly not."--"Then you must submit to a verdict."--"I leave it in your hands." So I wrote on a bit of paper, "Say no more than this. I withdraw anything that may be legally taken as libellous in the letter to Mrs. Montgomery." Then the group opened, and Mr. Hawkins again stood up and said that he was in a position to withdraw the letter--if it contained any libellous statements to apologise for them. At the same time "his client could not submit to be told that he had either acted maliciously or invented anything: he was absent from England at the time of his sister's death, and had throughout acted entirely upon information he had received from those upon the spot."
"I will have an end of this, gentlemen," exclaimed the judge--"I give a verdict for forty shillings."
"Make it ten guineas, my Lord," shouted the Roman Catholic lawyer, who had previously interrupted Serjeant Parry by saying "We will have money, we will have money." "There shall be an end of this, gentlemen," said the judge; "I give a verdict for forty shillings," and he walked out of court. And so this painful ordeal came to an end. It was not till afterwards that I was aware that the verdict of forty shillings obliged me to pay the costs of both sides--£199 to my lawyer, and £293 to the Roman Catholic lawyer, which was afterwards reduced by a taxing-master to £207, 9s. 1d.
As soon as we left the court and returned to the hotel, our solicitor came in, and, before all those of our family who were present, declared how, by my desire, he had repeatedly offered to withdraw the letter to Mrs. Montgomery, but how money was always demanded as its price, and how money was proved throughout to be the only real object of those who brought the action. In looking back, therefore, upon the whole of this terrible affair, I only see three ways in which the trial could have been avoided:--
1. If Miss Stanley had had the courage to go openly to Mrs. Monteith and Lady Lothian, and say boldly that she, a Roman Catholic, was the cause of my writing the letter to Mrs. Montgomery; that as to the "report," I acted entirely and exclusively on information which she gave; that at first I had hesitated to do as she wished, but that she had continued to urge it; and that she, a Catholic, had looked over the letter before it was sent, and begged me not to alter a word of it.
2. If my solicitor had acted upon the one piece of advice given by Mr. Phelps, and weeks before the trial had requested Pierina to deliver her "message," we should then have known that the message was not given to her except through the medium of the servants, and therefore that by English law the wording of the letter was indefensible.
3. If my solicitor had been less supine in summoning witnesses--if he had at once subpœnaed Mary Laffam and the other maids on our side, and had also summoned my Aunt Fitz-Gerald, who would have been willing and glad to give her evidence, and whose very appearance would have made Francis shrink from allowing the Roman Catholic confederacy to continue the trial.
Mary Stanley and I went early to the Guildford station to wait for the train which was to take us back to London. We had not been long on the platform before all the Roman Catholic party emerged upon it. I went at once to meet and pass them, thinking it better at once to establish the terms on which we were to remain through life. The Mother Pierina alone lingered behind the rest, and, with streaming eyes and outstretched hands, came towards me. "Oh, I thought it would have been for peace," she said. I could not refuse to take her hand, when Mr. Monteith, turning round, roughly seized her by the shoulder and led her away, saying, "Reverend Mother, I must insist that you do not speak to that ... person." Afterwards, when she was entering the railway carriage after the others, Mrs. Dunlop seized Pierina and pushed her out of the carriage, almost throwing her down upon the platform, and slammed the carriage-door in her face. Admiral Dunlop immediately forced his wife to get out of the carriage and apologise to the Reverend Mother. I did not know till long afterwards the reason of Mrs. Dunlop's violence, which was the persistence with which Pierina throughout that day had dwelt upon the wicked unfairness of having the trial in the absence of Mary Laffam, who was the witness really responsible for all that had been said. On August 19 Mary Stanley wrote to me:--
"Yesterday I saw Sister Pierina. She said how extremely grieved she had been for you. She said the lawyer on the Catholic side read the evidence to all the party at Guildford, and that she then expressed her dissent, saying that it was not in accordance with what Mary Laffam had said to her and others, and that in justice to you, she, Laffam, ought to be present. All through that day (which she said was most dreadful to her) she asserted and reasserted this, and that you were not fairly dealt with, and to me she complained sadly of the un-christian spirit in which the affair had been carried on: Mrs. Dunlop, she said, was far the worst.
"Pierina denies nothing. She could only say, when asked about the message, that none was given directly to her, and that to her your sister had only said, 'Tell Francis that he has been the cause of my death.' She was forbidden to say to whom the message was given. So far from going over to the other side, she was at war with them the whole day, and told me she did not believe any of that party would ever come near her again; and I met Monsignor Paterson on Sunday, who told me that Mrs. Dunlop had been to him to complain bitterly of her."
Afterwards the feeling of the conspirators, especially of Mrs. Dunlop and Mrs. Montgomery, became so violent against the Mother Pierina (on account of her persisting in the injustice of the trial), that they not only stopped their own subscriptions to her charities, but induced others to do so, and eventually, by the interest of Mr. Monteith with Monsignor Talbot and other Roman authorities, they brought about her recall and persecuted her out of England altogether.
On August 7, Monsignor Paterson wrote a long letter to Mary Stanley, explanatory of his conduct in the affair. It contained the following remarkable passage:--
"A day or two after Miss Hare's death, which took me quite by surprise, I went to her house, and there saw Sister Pierina, who told me she had been summoned, and found Miss Hare actually dying; that she seemed very suffering, and had some difficulty in resigning herself to the will of God. I remember also hearing that she expressed distress at some conduct on the part of Mr. Francis Hare, and I thought that other expressions used implied a suspicion on her part of some kind of foul play. Of course, had I taken this au sérieux, it would have made a great impression, but I set it down, after a moment's reflection, as a random (perhaps almost delirious) expression, such as people who are very ill sometimes use with very little meaning at all."
Strange certainly that an eminent Roman Catholic priest should call at his friend's house, hear that she had died suddenly, and that she had said on her death-bed that she died from "foul play," and yet be able so easily to dismiss the subject from his mind!
Soon after the trial I wrote a long account of the whole proceedings to Archbishop Manning. His answer was very kind but very evasive--"Miss Hare's death was most sad ... the trial must have been most painful," he "sympathised deeply," &c., but without giving a direct opinion of any kind.
It was not till some months later that I became acquainted with a secret which convinced me that, though my sister's end was probably hastened by the conduct of her brother Francis, yet poison was the original cause of her death. When we next visited Pisa, Madame Victoire told me how, when my sister was a little girl of six years old at Paris, she and her own little girl, Victoria Ackermann, were sitting on two little stools doing their needlework side by side. Suddenly there was a terrible outcry. Little Anna Hare had swallowed her thimble. The whole house was in consternation, doctors were summoned in haste, the child was given emetics, was held upside down, everything was done that could be done to bring the thimble back, but it was too late. Then the doctors inquired what the thimble was like, and on seeing the thimble of the little Victoria, who had received one at the same time, were satisfied that it was not dangerous, as the thimble being of walnut-wood, would naturally dissolve with time, and they gave medicines to hasten its dissolution. But, in the midst of the confusion, came Mrs. Large, the nurse, who confessed with bitter tears that, owing to her folly, the thimble was not what it was imagined to be. She had not liked to see the child of the mistress with the same thimble as the child of the maid, and had given little Anna one with a broad band which looked like gold but was really copper. When the doctors heard this, the accident naturally assumed a serious aspect, and they redoubled their efforts to bring back the thimble. But everything failed; the wooden thimble dissolved with time, but the copper band remained. Gradually, as Esmeralda grew stronger, the accident was forgotten by all but her mother, Mrs. Large, and Madame Victoire, who observed from time to time, in childish illnesses of unusual violence, symptoms which they alone could recognise, but which were such as would arise through slight injury from poison of verdigris. As my sister grew, the copper ring grew also, attenuated to the minutest thread, but encircling her body. From time to time she was seriously affected by it, but her mother could not bear it to be spoken of, and her repulsion for the subject communicated itself to Esmeralda herself. She was warned to evade a damp climate or the use of vegetables. When she was seized with her violent illness at Dijon, the symptoms were all such as would be caused by poison of verdigris. She then went to Pisa, where Madame Victoire was alarmed by what she heard, and insisted upon the best advice being procured, and a medical examination. The doctors who saw her, even then spoke to Madame Victoire of her state as very serious, and requiring the most careful watching. When Esmeralda went to Rome to the canonisation in the summer of 1867, she returned by Pisa. The faithful Madame Victoire then sent for a famous medical professor of the University of Bologna to meet her, and insisted upon her being examined by him. He afterwards told Madame Victoire privately that though, by intense care, Miss Hare might live for many years, her life, in case of accident, hung on a thread, and that it was highly improbable that she would live long, for that the copper ring was beginning to tell very seriously upon her constitution, and that when she died it would probably be suddenly of black sickness, with every appearance of poison--poison of verdigris. And so it was.
* * * * *
One of the principal actors in the scene at Guildford was soon after called to account before a higher tribunal than any that earth can afford. On the 18th of November (1868) I received (at Rome), to my great surprise, a letter from Madame Flora Limosin, of the Hôtel de Londres at Pisa (Victoire's youngest daughter), saying that Francis was about to arrive there from Hyères. He had been sent away from England some time before, having then £80 in his possession. Whether this sum was obtained by a Roman Catholic subscription, I have never been able to learn, but from this time the Roman Catholic conspirators ceased to help him: he had failed as the instrument for which they required him, and they now flung him aside as useless. His folly at Guildford, in lending himself to their designs, had also alienated the whole of his own family, even to the most distant degrees of relationship. Not knowing where to turn, he could only think of two persons who would receive him in his destitution. His mother's faithful maid Madame Victoire and her daughter Flora were still living at Pisa, and to them, when he had only £20 left, he determined to make his way. On landing at Spezia, though even then in a dying state, he would not enter a hotel, because he felt that if he entered it he would never have strength to leave it again, and he sat for hours upon his luggage on the platform of the station till the train started. For the sake of their old companionship in childhood, and of the kindness she had received from my father, Flora Limosin not only received Francis, but also the person to whom he was married, and gave them some quiet rooms opening upon the garden of the Hôtel de Londres, where he was nursed by the faithful friends of his infancy.[387] He was attended by Padre Pastacaldi, who administered to him the last offices of the Church, and says that he died penitent, and sent me a message hoping that I forgave him for all that had passed at Guildford. He died on the 27th of November, utterly destitute, and dependent upon the charity of his humble friends. He was buried by them in a corner of the Campo Santo at Pisa, near their own family burial-place, where the letters F. H. in the pavement alone mark the resting-place of Francis George Hare, the idolised son of his mother.[388]