A Writers Recollections, vol 2 | Page 9

of the house. Poor devil! Forgive strong language--but really my sympathy is deep.
I have, however, some really nice friends here, and am not entirely discontented. Mr. Gerald Balfour left the other day. He is very clever--and quite beautiful--like a young god. I wonder if you know him. I know you know Arthur.... Lionel Tennyson, who was also here with Gerald Balfour, has a splendid humor--witty and "fin," which is rare in England. Lord Houghton, Alfred Lyttelton, Godfrey Webb, George Curzon, the Chesterfields, the Hayters, Mary Gladstone, and a lot more have been here. I went north, too, to the land of Thule and was savagely happy. I wore no hat--no gloves--I bathed, fished, boated, climbed, and kissed the earth, and danced round a cairn. It was opposite Skye at a Heaven called Loch Ailsa.... Such beauty--such weather--such a fortnight will not come again. Perhaps it would be unjust to the crying world for one human being to have more of the Spirit of Delight; but one is glad to have tasted of the cup, and while it was in my hands I drank deeply.
I have read very little. I am hungering for a month or two's silence.
But there was another lover than the west wind waiting for this most lovable of mortals. A few days afterward she wrote to me from a house in Hampshire, where many of her particular friends were gathered, among them Alfred Lyttelton.
The conversation is pyrotechnic--and it is all quite delightful. A beautiful place--paradoxical arguments--ideals raised and shattered--temples torn and battered--temptations given way to--newspapers unread--acting--rhyming--laughing--ad infinitum. I wish you were here!
Six weeks afterward she was engaged to Mr. Lyttelton. She was to be married in May, and in Easter week of that year we met her in Paris, where she was buying her trousseau, enjoying it like a child, making friends with all her dressmakers, and bubbling over with fun about it. "It isn't 'dressing,'" she said, "unless you apply main force to them. What they want is always--_presque pas de corsage, et pas du tout de manches!_"
One day she and Mr. Lyttelton and Mr. Balfour and one or two others came to tea with us at the Hotel Chatham to meet Victor Cherbuliez. The veteran French novelist fell in love with her, of course, and their talk--Laura's French was as spontaneous and apparently as facile as her English--kept the rest of us happy. Then she married in May, with half London to see, and Mr. Gladstone--then Prime Minister--mounted on the chair to make the wedding-speech. For by her marriage Laura became the great man's niece, since Alfred Lyttelton's mother was a sister of Mrs. Gladstone.
Then in the autumn came the hope of a child--to her who loved children so passionately. But all through the waiting time she was overshadowed by a strangely strong presentiment of death. I went to see her sometimes toward the end of it, when she was resting on her sofa in the late evening, and used to leave her listening for her husband's step, on his return from his work, her little weary face already lit up with expectation. The weeks passed, and those who loved her began to be anxious. I went down to Borough Farm in May, and there, just two years after she had sat with us under the hawthorn, I heard the news of her little son's birth, and then ten days later the news of her death.
With that death a ray of pure joy was quenched on earth. But Laura Lyttelton was not only youth and delight--she was also embodied love. I have watched her in a crowded room where everybody wanted her, quietly seek out the neglected person there, the stranger, the shy secretary or governess, and make her happy--bring her in--with an art that few noticed, because in her it was nature. When she died she left an enduring mark in the minds of many who have since governed or guided England; but she was mourned also by scores of humble folk, and by disagreeable folk whom only she befriended. Mrs. Lyttelton quotes a letter written by the young wife to her husband:
Tell me you love me and always will. Tell me, so that when I dream I may dream of Love, and when I sleep dreamless Love may be holding me in his wings, and when I wake Love may be the spirit in my feet, and when I die Love may be the Angel that takes me home.
And in the room of death, when the last silence fell on those gathered there, her sister Margot--by Laura's wish, expressed some time before--read aloud the "will," in which she spoke her inmost heart. Since its publication it belongs to those records of life and feeling which are part of our common inheritance.
"She was a