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 frankness of heart and desire to be of service to her fellow-creatures without a thought of self or a taint of vanity in her intercourse with them. Not for lack of flattery or of real enthusiastic gratitude on their part. It is known that when at Thebes, on more than one of her journeys, the women raised the “cry of joy” as she passed along, and the people flung branches and raiment on her path, as in the old Biblical descriptions of Eastern life. The source of her popularity was in the liberal kindliness of spirit with which she acted on all occasions, more especially towards those she considered the victims of bad government and oppressive laws. She says of herself: “one’s pity becomes a perfect passion when one sits among the people as I do, and sees all they endure. Least of all can I forgive those among Europeans and Christians who can help to break these bruised reeds.” And again: “Would that I could excite the interest of my country in their suffering! Some conception of the value of public opinion in England has penetrated even here.” Sympathizing, helping, doctoring their sick, teaching their children, learning the language, Lady Duff Gordon lived in Egypt, and in Egypt she has died, leaving a memory of her greatness and goodness such as no other European woman ever acquired in that country. It is touching to trace her lingering hopes of life and amended health in her letters to her husband and her mother, and to see how, as they faded out, there rose over those hopes the grander light of fortitude and submission to the will of God.
‘Gradually—how gradually the limits of this notice forbid us to follow—hope departs, and she begins bravely to face the inevitable destiny. And then comes the end of all, the strong yet tender announcement of her own conviction that there would be no more meetings, but a grave opened to receive her in a foreign land.
‘ “Dearest Alick,
‘ “Do not think of coming here, as you dread the climate. Indeed, it would be almost too painful to me to part from you again; and as it is, I can wait patiently for the end, among people who are kind and loving enough to be comfortable without too much feeling of the pain of parting. The leaving Luxor was rather a distressing scene, as they did not think to see me again. The kindness of all the people was really touching, from the Cadi, who made ready my tomb among his own family, to the poorest fellaheen.”
‘Such are the tranquil and kindly words with which she prefaces her death. Those who remember her in her youth and beauty, before disease rather than time had altered the pale heroic face, and bowed the slight, stately figure, may well perceive some strange analogy between soul and body in the Spartan firmness which enabled her to pen that last farewell so quietly.
‘But to the last her thought was for others, and for the services she could render. In this very letter, written, as it were, on the verge of the tomb, she speaks with gratitude and gladness of the advancement of her favourite attendant, Omar. This Omar had been recommended to her by the janissary of the American Consul-General, and so far back as 1862, when in Alexandria, she mentions having engaged him, and his hopeful prophecy of the good her Nile life is to do her. “My cough is bad; but Omar says I shall lose it and ‘eat plenty’ as soon as I see a crocodile.”
‘Omar “could not leave her,” and he had his reward. One of the last events in the life of this gifted and liberal-minded Englishwoman was the visit to her dahabeeyeh, or Nile boat, of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Then poor Omar’s simple and faithful service to his dying mistress was rewarded in a way he could scarcely have dreamt; and Lady Duff Gordon thus relates the incident: “Omar sends you his heartfelt thanks, and begs the boat may remain registered at the Consulate in your name, as a protection, for his use and benefit. The Prince has appointed him his dragoman, but he is sad enough, poor fellow! all his prosperity does not console him for the loss of “the mother he found in the world.” Mahomed at Luxor wept bitterly, and said: “Poor I—poor my children—poor all the people!” and kissed my hand passionately; and the people at Esneh asked leave to touch me “for a blessing,” and everyone sent delicate bread and their best butter and vegetables and lambs. They are kinder than ever now that I can no longer be of any use to them. If I live till September I will go up to Esneh, where the air is softest and I cough less; I would rather die among my own people on the Saeed than here. Can you thank the Prince for Omar, or shall I write? He was most pleasant and kind, and the Princess too; she is the most perfectly simple-mannered girl I ever saw; she does not even try to be civil like other great people, but asks blunt questions and looks at one so heartily with her clear, honest eyes, that she must win all hearts. They were more considerate than any people I have seen, and the Prince, instead of being gracious, was, if I may say so, quite respectful in manner: he is very well bred and pleasant, and has, too, the honest eyes that make one sure he has a kind heart. My sailors were so proud at having the honour of rowing him in our own boat and of singing to him. I had a very good singer in the boat.”
‘Long will her presence be remembered and wept for among the half-civilized friends of her exile, the poor, the sick, the needy and the oppressed. She makes the gentle, half-playful boast in one of her letters from the Nile that she is “very popular,” and has made many cures as a Hakeem, or doctor, and that a Circassian had sat up with a dying Englishman because she had nursed his wife.
‘The picture of the Circassian sitting up with the dying Englishman because an English lady had nursed his wife is infinitely touching, and had its parallel in the speech of an old Scottish landlady known to the writer of this notice, whose son had died in the West Indies among strangers. “And they were so good to him,” said she, “that I vowed if ever I had a lodger sick I would do my best for that stranger in remembrance.” In remembrance! Who shall say what seeds of kindly intercommunion that dying Englishwoman of whom and of whose works we have been speaking may have planted in the arid Eastern soil? Or what “bread she may have cast” on those Nile waters, “which shall be found again after many days”? “Out of evil cometh good,” and certainly out of her sickness and suffering good came to all within her influence.
‘Lady Duff Gordon’s printed works were many. She was an excellent German scholar, and had the advantage in her translations from that difficult language of her labours being shared by her husband. Ranke, Niebuhr, Feuerbach, Moltke, and others, owe their introduction to our English-reading public to the industry and talent of her pen. She was also a classic scholar of no mean pretensions. Perhaps no woman of our own time, except Mrs. Somerville and Mrs. Browning in their very different styles, combined so much erudition with so much natural ability. She was the daughter of Mr. Austin, the well-known professor of jurisprudence, and his gifted wife, Sarah Austin, whose name is familiar to thousands of readers, and whose social brilliancy is yet remembered with extreme admiration and regret by the generation immediately
