The Personal Life of David Livingstone: Chiefly from his Unpublished Journals and Correspondence in the Possession of His FamilyBlaikie, William Garden
Religion
The Personal Life of David Livingstone: Chiefly from his Unpublished Journals and Correspondence in the Possession of His Family
Blaikie, William Garden
Livingstone, David, 1813-1873
When the "Pioneer" arrived at the bar, it found that owing to the
weather the ship had been forced to leave the coast, and she did not
return for a fortnight. There was thus another long waiting from 17th
March to 2d April. Dr. and Mrs. Livingstone then returned to Shupanga.
The long detention in the most unhealthy season of the year, and when
fever was at its height, was a sad, sad calamity.
We are now arrived at the last illness and the death of Mrs.
Livingstone. After she had parted from her husband at the Cape in the
spring of 1858, she returned with her parents to Kuruman, and in
November gave birth there to her youngest child, Anna Mary. Thereafter
she returned to Scotland to be near her other children. Some of them
were at school. No comfortable home for them all could be formed, and
though many friends were kind, the time was not a happy one. Mrs.
Livingstone's desire to be with her husband was intense; not only the
longings of an affectionate heart, and the necessity of taking counsel
with him about the family, but the feeling that when over-shadowed by
one whose faith was so strong her fluttering heart would regain, its
steady tone, and she would be better able to help both him and the
children, gave vehemence to this desire. Her letters to her husband tell
of much spiritual darkness; his replies were the very soul of tenderness
and Christian earnestness. Providence seemed to favor her wish; the
vessel in which she sailed was preserved from imminent destruction, and
she had the great happiness of finding her husband alive and well.
On the 21st of April Mrs. Livingstone became ill. On the 25th the
symptoms were alarming--vomitings every quarter of an hour, which
prevented any medicine from remaining on her stomach. On the 26th she
was worse and delirious. On the evening of Sunday the 27th Dr. Stewart
got a message from her husband that the end was drawing near. "He was
sitting by the side of a rude bed formed of boxes, but covered with a
soft mattress, on which lay his dying wife. All consciousness had now
departed, as she was in a state of deep coma, from which all efforts to
rouse her had been unavailing. The strongest medical remedies and her
husband's voice were both alike powerless to reach the spirit which was
still there, but was now so rapidly sinking into the depths of slumber,
and darkness and death. The fixedness of feature and the oppressed and
heavy breathing only made it too plain that the end was near. And the
man who had faced so many deaths, and braved so many dangers, was now
utterly broken down and weeping like a child."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
The Personal Life of David Livingstone: Chiefly from his Unpublished Journals and Correspondence in the Possession of His Family — John Shaqi
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