Letters from Egypt | Page 7

and pity when she looked
down on her faithful Nubian servant.
In 1851 my father took a house at Esher, which was known as 'The
Gordon Arms,' and much frequented by our friends. In a letter, written
about that time to C. J. Bayley, then secretary to the Governor of the
Mauritius, Lady Duff Gordon gives the first note of alarm as to her
health: 'I fear you would think me very much altered since my illness; I
look thin, ill, and old, and my hair is growing gray. This I consider hard
upon a woman just over her thirtieth birthday. I continue to like Esher
very much; I don't think we could have placed ourselves better.

Kinglake has given Alick a great handsome chestnut mare, so he is well
mounted, and we ride merrily. I expressed such exultation at the idea of
your return that my friends, all but Alick, refused to sympathize.
Philips, Millais, and Dicky Doyle talked of jealousy, and Tom Taylor
muttered something about a "hated rival." Meanwhile, all send friendly
greetings to you.'
One summer Macaulay was often at Esher, his brother-in-law having
taken a house near ours. He shared my mother's admiration for Miss
Austen's novels, and they used to talk of her personages as though they
were living friends. If, perchance, my grandfather Austin was there, the
talk grew indeed fast and furious, as all three were vehement, eloquent,
and enthusiastic talkers.
When my mother went to Paris in the summer of 1857 she saw Heine
again. As she entered the room he exclaimed 'Oh! Lucie has still the
great brown eyes!' He remembered every little incident and all the
people who had been in the inn at Boulogne. 'I, for my part, could
hardly speak to him,' my mother wrote to Lord Houghton, who asked
her to give him some recollections of the poet for his 'Monographs,' 'so
shocked was I by his appearance. He lay on a pile of mattresses, his
body wasted so that it seemed no bigger than a child's under the sheet
that covered him, the eyes closed and the face altogether like the most
painful and wasted Ecce Homo ever painted by some old German
painter. His voice was very weak, and I was astonished at the animation
with which he talked; evidently his mind had wholly survived his
body.' He wished to give my mother the copyright of all his works,
made out lists how to arrange them, and gave her carte-blanche to cut
out what she pleased, and was especially eager that she should do a
prose translation of his songs against her opinion of its practicability.
To please him she translated 'Almanzor' and several short poems into
verse--the best translations I know.
After trying Ventnor for two winters, my mother went out to the Cape
of Good Hope in a sailing vessel, but on her return was unfortunately
persuaded to go to Eaux Bonnes in the autumn of 1862, which did her
great harm. Thence she went to Egypt, where the dry hot climate

seemed to arrest the malady for a short time. The following memoir
written by Mrs. Norton in the Times gives a better picture of her than
could any words of mine, the two talented and beautiful women were
intimate friends, and few mourned more deeply for Lucie Duff Gordon
than Caroline Norton:
'"In Memoriam." The brief phrase whose solemnity prefaced millions
of common place epitaphs before Tennyson taught grief to speak,
lamenting his dead friend in every phase and variety of regret. With
such gradation and difference of sorrow will the recent death of a very
remarkable woman, Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, be mourned for by all
who knew her, and with such a sense of blank loss will they long
continue to lament one whose public success as an author was only
commensurate with the charm of her private companionship. Inheriting
from both parents the intellectual faculties which she so nobly
exercised, her work has been ended in the very noontide of life by
premature failure of health; and the long exile she endured for the sake
of a better climate has failed to arrest, though it delayed, the doom
foretold by her physicians. To that exile we owe the most popular,
perhaps, of her contributions to the literature of her country, "Letters
from the Cape," and "Letters from Egypt," the latter more especially
interesting from the vivid, life-like descriptions of the people among
whom she dwelt, her aspirations for their better destiny, and the
complete amalgamation of her own pursuits and interests with theirs.
She was a settler, not a traveller among them. Unlike Lady Hester
Stanhope, whose fantastic and half-insane notions of rulership and
superiority have been so often recorded for our amazement, Lady Duff
Gordon kept the simple