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Miss Carlyle descended in the startling costume the reader has seen, took her seat at the breakfast-table, and there sat bolt upright. Mr. Carlyle came down next; and then Lady Isabel entered, in an elegant half-mourning dress, with flowing black ribbons. "Good morning, ma'am. I hope you slept well," was Miss Carlyle's salutation.
Jeannie gave all, and she saw her best thought used carried further, written out and given to the world as that of another but she uttered no protest. But Jeannie Welsh Carlyle lives in the hearts of all who reverence the sweet, the gentle, the patient, the earnest, the loving spirit of the womanly woman: lives because she ministered to the needs of a great man. She was ever a frail body.
To have the friendship of Landor, Dickens, and Procter through long years; to have Carlyle for a constant votary, and to be mourned by him with an abiding sorrow, these are no slight tributes to purity of purpose.
"He never ceased," says Mrs. Orr, "to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his wife, or to believe that, in the matter of their domestic unhappiness, she was the more responsible of the two.... He always thought her a hard unlovable woman, and I believe little liking was lost between them ... Yet Carlyle never rendered him that service easy as it appears which one man of letters most justly values from another, that of proclaiming the admiration which he privately professed for his work."
I, being young, and owing so much to Carlyle, wrote to him, the first and almost the only time I ever did anything of the kind, assuring him that there was at least one person who believed in him. This was his answer: "CHELSEA, 9th March, 1850.
I could not give account of myself if challenged. I delight in telling what I think, but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men, The year before, his oration on the American Scholar had filled Carlyle with delight.
Drawing her perfumed lace handkerchief from her pocket, she leaned over and wiped away the bloody foam that oozed across his lips, and lifting his hot head turned it sufficiently to expose the right ear, where a large mole was hidden by the thick hair. "Maurice Carlyle! But what a fearful wreck?" She covered her eyes with her hand, and moaned. The nurse came nearer, and said hesitatingly,
The insults and revilings I have, on these occasions, sometimes submitted to I will narrate to no man, for they would bring me no respect in a cynical age like this an age which Carlyle spits at and the great and good John Ruskin chides. Sometimes my dear friend Mr. Cyril has accompanied me on these occasions, and he has seen how I have been humiliated.
"And you," she asked, "did you think it had the Stevensonian touch?" "No," he answered, "it seemed to me to have more of your touch." "What's that like?" she demanded. "They couldn't suppress you," he explained. "Sir Thomas More with his head under his arm, bloody old Bluebeard, grim Queen Bess, snarling old Swift, Pope, Addison, Carlyle the whole grisly crowd of them!
The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration, confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute, expressive of weakness under possibility of strength . . . a heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much suffering man." *Carlyle.
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