clii 



MEMOIR 



Death of 



Mrs. 



Jenkin. 



Effect on 

 Fleeming. 



finished vein of childish madrigal : c The Captain bows to you, 

 my love, across the table.' When the end was near and it was 

 thought best that Fleeming should no longer go home but sleep 

 at Merchiston, he broke his news to the Captain with some tre- 

 pidation, knowing that it carried sentence of death. ' Charming, 

 charming charming arrangement,' was the Captain's only com- 

 mentary. It was the proper thing for a dying man, of Captain 

 Jenkin's school of manners, to make some expression of his 

 spiritual state ; nor did he neglect the observance. With his 

 usual abruptness, c Fleeming,' said he, * I suppose you and I 

 feel about all this as two Christian gentlemen should.' A last 

 pleasure was secured for him. He had been waiting with pain- 

 ful interest for news of Gordon and Khartoum ; and by great 

 good fortune, a false report reached him that the city was relieved, 

 and the men of Sussex (his old neighbours) had been the first 

 to enter. He sat up in bed and gave three cheers for the Sussex 

 regiment. The subsequent correction, if it came in time, was 

 prudently withheld from the dying man. An hour before mid- 

 night on the fifth of February, he passed away : aged eighty-four. 



Word of his death was kept from Mrs. Jenkin ; and she 

 survived him no more than nine and forty hours. On the day 

 before her death, she received a letter from her old friend Miss 

 Bell of Manchester, knew the hand, kissed the envelope and 

 laid it on her heart ; so that she too died upon a pleasure. 

 Half an hour after midnight, on the eighth of February, she fell 

 asleep : it is supposed in her seventy-eighth year. 



Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors 

 of this family were taken away ; but taken with such features 

 of opportunity in time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that 

 grief was tempered with a kind of admiration. The effect on 

 Fleeming was profound. His pious optimism increased and 

 became touched with something mystic and filial. ' The grave 

 is not good, the approaches to it are terrible,' he had written 

 in the beginning of his mother's illness : he thought so no more, 

 when he had laid father and mother side by side at Stowting. 

 He had always loved life ; in the brief time that now remained 

 to him, he seemed to be half in love with death. ' Grief is no 



