Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/67

Rh sense of supposed duty, or from any other motive. I have paid heavily for doing so... I should be glad to warn you off a similar fate.'

Lord Dalhousie had most truly given his life to India. He deliberately elected, as we have seen, to finish his task, at the imminent peril of his life, and in spite of the protest of his physicians. He had now to pay the penalty. The curtain must fall upon the two remaining years of his sufferings. They were cheered for a moment by the marriage of his younger daughter, Lady Edith Ramsay, to Sir James Fergusson, Baronet, of Kilkerran, whose public services she shared during thirteen years. But the stricken Governor-General found his great consolation during his remaining painful months on earth, in the tender and unwearied ministrations of his eldest daughter. Lady Susan. 'Now, Brigadier,' he said to his kinsman General Ramsay, after a convulsive seizure; 'now, Brigadier, when I am dead, you must stay here and take care of poor Sue; for she will require it.' In the last wintry days of 1860 they laid him, not yet forty-nine, in the ancient burial-place of the Dalhousies, within his own quiet parish of Cockpen.