On these May nights, if he was at home, Parnell would walk across the park with me and wait on a seat for me till I had obtained the latest bulletin.
One morning, very early, when her night had been restless, I made Mary Ann (my aunt's personal maid) come down and let me in. On going up to the great four-post bed where the dear little old lady lay, looking as small and frail as a child, she put out one, now feeble, white hand, and held mine. I told the maid she could go and rest a bit, and I would call her if my aunt wanted her.
When she was gone, my aunt, who was breathing with difficulty, whispered as I bent down to kiss her hand, "You do believe, do you not, my Swan?" I answered, "Yes, auntie, of course I do believe, most firmly." She said, "I am glad. I wish you could come with me, my darling!" and I sobbingly told her that I wished I could too.
I stayed by her side and smoothed her hand till she ceased to breathe, and then waited by her as all her servants who had been with her for many years filed past the bed, and took a last look at their stern but just and much-loved mistress.
She left a great void in my life, and the sensation of being always wanted and tied to one place that I had sometimes felt so keenly hard I would now have given { 273} much to feel again. With this old lady died, so far as my acquaintance went, the last of the old world--that old world of leisure and books and gentle courtesy of days when men might wear their gallantry without foolishness, and women knew the value of their sex.
Through all those years in which I waited on my aunt I never heard her use a clipped word, or use a sentence not grammatically perfect and beautifully rounded off, and although in the hurry of modern life I sometimes felt impatient when chided for some swallowed pronunciation or ignored g's, I look back upon the years of my life spent in that old-world atmosphere as a very precious memory.
After my aunt's death Eltham became intolerable to me, and I took a small country house near Mottingham till I could let my own house. Directly we left Eltham the pretty garden was devastated by relic-hunters, who pulled the place to pieces in obtaining mementoes of "the house where Parnell had lived."