Page:Mrs. Siddons (IA mrssiddons00kennrich).pdf/220

208 mine? One would think common benevolence, setting affection quite aside, might have induced some of you to alleviate as much as possible such distress as you know I must feel. The last letter from Mr. Siddons stated that she was better. Another letter from Mr. Montgomery, at Oxford, says that George gave him the same account. Why—why am I to hear this only from a person at that distance from her, and so ill-informed as the writer must be of the state of her health? Why should not you or Mr. Siddons have told me this? I cannot account for your silence at all, for you know how to feel. I hope to sail to-night, and to reach London the third day. God knows when that will be. Oh God! what a home to return to, after all I have been doing! and what a prospect to the end of my days."

At last she was able to cross to Holyhead. At Shrewsbury she received a letter from Mr. Siddons confirming the worst accounts of Sally's illness, but begging her to "remember the preciousness of her own life, and not to endanger it by over-rapid travelling." As she read, Miss Wilkinson was called from the room; a messenger had arrived with the news of the girl's death. Mrs. Siddons guessed what had happened by the expression of Miss Wilkinson's face when she returned, and, sinking back speechless, lay for a day "cold and torpid as a stone, with scarcely a sign of life."

Her own family came forward with consolation and help. Her brother John wrote a letter, which she received at Oxford; her brother Charles came to meet her, and conducted her on her first visit to her widowed mother. Every other grief had sunk into insignificance by the side of the death of her daughter.