The Queen's grief was perhaps excessive, as her love had been beyond
measure, but he was not impatient with it, though he writes from Osborne,
some weeks after the funeral of the Duchess: "She (the Queen) is greatly
upset, and feels her childhood rush back upon her memory with the most
vivid force. Her grief is extreme... For the last two years her constant
care and occupation have been to keep watch over her mother's comfort,
and the influence of this upon her own character has been most salutary.
In body she is well, though terribly nervous, and the children are a
great disturbance to her. She remains almost entirely alone."
How true to nature! When the first love of a life is suddenly uprooted,
all the later growths, however strong, seem to have been torn up with it.
When the mother goes, only the child seems to remain. Victoria, tender
mother as she herself was, and adoring wife, was now the little girl of
Kensington and Claremont, whose little bed was at the side of her
mother's, and who had waked to find that mother's bed empty, and forever
empty! And yet she said in her first sense of the loss: "I seemed to have
lived through a life; to have become old."
We may say that with the coming of that first sorrow went out the youth
of the Queen; for it seems that while her mother lives, a woman is always
young, that there is something of girlhood, of childhood even, lingering
in her life while she can lay her tired head on her mother's knee, or
hide her tearful face against her mother's breast, that most sweet and
restful refuge from the trials and weariness of life.
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