Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/211

 herself up with the remark, "But I am getting too near complaint; it has been the appointment of God, however secondary causes may have operated."

In the summer of 1816 she was able to pay a visit—which she must have known would be her last—to the old home at Steventon; and when she returned to Chawton, she continued to work at Persuasion, though under great difficulty from bodily weakness. It was, we feel, the consciousness of approaching death that touched that exquisite novel—the last she ever completed—with the wonderful pathetic sweetness and grace in which it stands alone among her works; even the happy termination having a sort of subdued radiance about it quite unlike the endings of her other stories. Considering her state of health, it is wonderful that she could write at all. She had been obliged to give up all walking and almost all driving, while inside the house she could seldom find comfort or rest, except by lying down. The little drawing-room of Chawton Cottage contained only one sofa, which was appropriated to Mrs. Austen, then more than seventy years old, but if she had seen that her daughter needed it, she would, probably, have refused to use it herself. Jane, who carried on all her work, literary or otherwise, in the midst of her family, made herself a sort of couch with some chairs, and declared that she preferred this to the real sofa—a "pious fraud" which the grown-up members of the family respected in silence. One of her little nieces, however, with the candeur brutale de l'enfance, expressed so much astonishment at her aunt's taste, that Jane was obliged to explain the truth privately to her, and so silence her indiscreet remarks. It was another proof of the loving