Philip Gilbert Hamerton | Page 7

fine one, and I hope he
will be reared, though it often happens that when the mother is
consumptive the baby dies. I do hope when John is able to look after
his office a little that the occupation of his mind will give him calm. He
walks from room to room, and if I meet him and he is able to articulate
at all, he says, 'Ah! where must I be? what must I do?' He says nobody
had such a wife, and I do think nobody ever had. He wanted me not to
write till arrangements were made about the funeral. I thought you
would be sorry to be informed late upon a subject so near John's heart,
and that it was too late for Mr. Hinde [Footnote: The Rev. Thomas
Hinde, Vicar of Featherstone, brother-in-law of the writer of the letter.]
to come to the funeral. I have really nothing to say except that our poor
sister was so tolerable on Wednesday morning that I went with the
Milnes of Park House to Henton Park races, which I liked very well,
but as things have turned out I heartily repent going. Ann was, we
hoped, positively recovering on Monday and Tuesday, but it seems to
have been a lightening before death. She was a very long time in the
agonies of death, but seemed to suffer very little. Our afflicted brother
joins me in best love to you and your dear children. Kind compliments
to Mr. Hinde.
"I remain,
"Your affectionate Sister,
"M. HAMMERTON."
The letter is without date, but it bears the Manchester postmark of
September 27, 1834, and the day of my birth was the tenth of the same
month. The reader may have observed a discrepancy with reference to

my mother's health. First it is said that the doctors all agreed in the
opinion that she died of mere weakness, without any absolute disease,
but afterwards consumption is alluded to. I am not sure, even yet,
whether my mother was really consumptive or only suffered from
debility. Down to the time when I write this (fifty-one years after my
mother's death) there have never been any symptoms of consumption in
me.
No portrait of my mother was ever taken, so that I have never been able
to picture her to myself otherwise than vaguely, but I remember that on
one occasion in my youth when I played the part of a young lady in a
charade, several persons present who had known her, said that the
likeness was so striking that it almost seemed as if she had appeared to
them in a vision, and they told me that if I wanted to know what my
mother was like, I had only to consult a looking-glass. She had blue
eyes, a very fair complexion, and hair of a rich, strongly-colored
auburn, a color more appreciated by painters than by other people. In
the year 1876 I was examining a large boxful of business papers that
had belonged to my father, and burning most of them in a garden in
Yorkshire, when a little packet fell out of a legal document that I was
just going to throw upon the fire. It was a lock of hair carefully folded
in a piece of the bluish paper my father used for his law correspondence,
and fastened with an old wire-headed pin. I at once took it to a lady
who had known my mother, and she said without a moment's hesitation
that the hair was certainly hers, so that I now possess this relic, and it is
all I have of my poor mother whose face I never saw, and whose voice
I never heard. Few people who have lived in the world have left such
slight traces. There are no letters of hers except one or two formal
compositions written at school under the eye of the mistress, which of
course express nothing of her own mind or feelings. Those who knew
her have told me that she was a very lively and amiable person,
physically active, and a good horsewoman. She and my father were
fond of riding out together, and indeed were separated as little as might
be during their brief happiness. She even, on one occasion, went out
shooting with him and killed something, after which she melted into
tears of pity over her victim. [Footnote: A lady related to my mother
shot well, and killed various kinds of game, of which I remember

seeing stuffed specimens as trophies of her skill.]
The reader will pardon me for dwelling thus on these few details of a
life so sadly and prematurely ended. The knowledge that my mother
had died early cast a certain melancholy over my childhood; I found
that people looked at me