“Friend John, forgive me if I pain. I
showed not my feeling to others when it would wound,
but only to you, my old friend, whom I can trust.
If you could have looked into my heart then when I
want to laugh, if you could have done so when the
laugh arrived, if you could do so now, when King Laugh
have pack up his crown, and all that is to him, for
he go far, far away from me, and for a long, long
time, maybe you would perhaps pity me the most of
all.”
I was touched by the tenderness of his tone, and asked
why.
And now we are all scattered, and for many a long
day loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding
wings. Lucy lies in the tomb of her kin, a lordly
death house in a lonely churchyard, away from teeming
London, where the air is fresh, and the sun rises over
Hampstead Hill, and where wild flowers grow of their
own accord.
So I can finish this diary, and God only knows if
I shall ever begin another. If I do, or if I
even open this again, it will be to deal with different
people and different themes, for here at the end, where
the romance of my life is told, ere I go back to take
up the thread of my life-work, I say sadly and without
hope, “Finis”.
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised
with a series of events which seem to run on lines
parallel to those of what was known to the writers
of headlines as “The Kensington Horror,”
or “The Stabbing Woman,” or “The
Woman in Black.” During the past two or
three days several cases have occurred of young children
straying from home or neglecting to return from their
playing on the Heath. In all these cases the
children were too young to give any properly intelligible
account of themselves, but the consensus of their
excuses is that they had been with a “bloofer
lady.” It has always been late in the evening
when they have been missed, and on two occasions the
children have not been found until early in the following
morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood
that, as the first child missed gave as his reason
for being away that a “bloofer lady” had
asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked
up the phrase and used it as occasion served.
This is the more natural as the favourite game of
the little ones at present is luring each other away
by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to
see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the “bloofer
lady” is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists
might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque
by comparing the reality and the picture. It
is only in accordance with general principles of human
nature that the “bloofer lady” should
be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
Our correspondent naively says that even Ellen Terry
could not be so winningly attractive as some of these
grubby-faced little children pretend, and even imagine
themselves, to be.
