This was written in the autumn following Mr. Tucker’s dangerous illness. After a long and tedious convalescence, his health had steadily improved through the summer months, and during the autumn he seemed to be almost himself again,—able to walk out regularly, able to read much and thoroughly to enjoy being read to by his wife and daughters. In the evenings he would delight in their music, varied by merry talk and by an occasional rubber of whist.

With the coming of winter acute neuralgic pains took possession of him; and though some little improvement was seen with the advent of spring, it was not permanent. In the end of May 1851 he was taken to Brighton for a few days’ change; after which he became worse and then again better. Amid these fluctuations, which included at times very severe suffering, his manly courage and patience were never known to fail.

On the tenth of June he seemed so far improved as to talk of going next day to the India House, for the Wednesday’s Council. The Doctor strongly opposed this; and Mr. Tucker went instead to a Flower-Show, with his daughters. For two days afterward he seemed particularly well. On Friday night there was no apparent change for the worse; and his usual tender good-night to them all had in it no shadow of approaching calamity.

But the end was at hand. Before morning sharp illness had seized upon him; and before twelve o’clock he had passed away.

It was a heavy blow to all who knew him; above all to his wife and children. He had been the very life of the house, the very spring of home-brightness. Charlotte’s little niece, Bella Frances, daughter of the elder brother, Henry Carre Tucker, came to spend her first English holidays in the house, not long after Mr. Tucker’s death, and she found the whole family ‘plunged in gloom,’—Charlotte Tucker being exceedingly sad and grave. The only one, indeed, of the whole party who was able to speak cheerfully was Laura. It is probable that Laura had at that date a dawning outside interest in her life, not possessed by any of the others, which may have enabled her to bear up somewhat better than they could.

Many months earlier, after the sharp illness of the preceding year, Mr. Tucker had written a letter to all his children, thanking them for their ‘late unwearied and devoted attentions’ to him. After desiring them ‘not to give way to strong emotions,’ he had gone on to say,—‘I have reached a very advanced age, and must be prepared for a change. Old age has its infirmities and suffering, and a prolonged existence is not to be desired. Your care should now be to comfort and console your beloved mother, who has been everything to me and everything to you all. I trust that she will not leave this house, in which we have all enjoyed so much happiness; and I feel assured that you will all tenderly watch over her, and contribute by every means in your power to her future comfort.’

This wish was fulfilled. Mrs. Tucker never did leave No. 3 Upper Portland Place, except of course for necessary change. It remained her home, and the home of her daughters, from the year 1851, when her husband died, until her own death in the year 1869.

How much of life’s sunshine had been swept out of Charlotte’s life by the loss of her Father, it is perhaps impossible for any one to estimate who did not personally know Mr. Tucker. Not that all her sunshine had departed! Apart from her own inherent elasticity of spirit, she was devotedly attached to her Mother; and she had still the tender and satisfying companionship of Laura.

That while deeply saddened, she was not crushed, is shown by the following letter to her little niece, Bella F. Tucker, dated August 9, 1851:—

There is a tone of quiet sadness running through the letter, in marked contrast with those joyous epistles to her sister Laura quoted earlier in this chapter. The world could never again be to her ‘so bright, so fair!’ as in the days when her Father was still upon earth. No doubt as time went on the buoyancy of her temperament reasserted itself; but life was no longer unshadowed; and other troubles soon followed.

One of these must certainly have been the marriage of her sister Laura, though no letters are at hand to show what she felt. Mr. Otho Hamilton, elder brother to the Rev. Frederick Hamilton, who had married Charlotte’s eldest sister, sought Laura’s hand; and he was accepted.

Not entirely without hesitation. Perhaps few girls can say, or ought to say, ‘Yes’ at once, without time for consideration. When the offer came, Laura’s first impulse was, naturally, to go to her Mother for advice; her second impulse was to go to her friend-sister. It is not hard to realise what the thought must have been to Charlotte of losing this dearly-loved companion,—her room-mate and the constant sharer of her thoughts and interests from very infancy; nor is it difficult to believe how bravely she would put aside the recollection of herself, viewing the question from Laura’s standpoint alone. It must, however, be remembered that Charlotte was romantically enthusiastic on the subject of others’ engagements, and was through life ardently interested in the marriages of her friends. In the present case her knowledge of how highly her Father had thought of Mr. Hamilton would be an additional incentive to put no obstacle in the way. It seems that Laura’s hesitation had arisen, not from any doubt as to her own feelings, but simply from a desire to be sure of her duty. The engagement took place; and on the 19th of October 1852, Laura Tucker became Mrs. Hamilton. So another leaf was turned in the story of Charlotte’s life.

And now, in the very midst of these changes and losses arose a new interest. Hitherto, Charlotte had written a good deal, but she had never published, perhaps had never even thought of publishing. What first led her to adopt the style of fiction, by which she was soon to become known, it is possible at least to conjecture. In 1850, as we have seen, she wrote another of her merry plays, full of fun and humour. Now, suddenly, she seems to have plunged into the line of children’s stories, having each a very prominent ‘purpose,’—her earliest being The Claremont Tales. It may be that the shock of her first great sorrow, the death of Mr. Tucker, making her to realise intensely the shortness of life on earth, and the supreme weight of things unseen, had the effect of turning her mind with a new energy to the thought of doing good by means of her pen. It may be also that, now he was gone for whom and with whom she had written her plays, all zest in that direction was gone with him, and the gift of writing, like a river dammed up in one direction and forced to turn elsewhere, sought naturally a fresh outlet,—an outlet with which there should be no overpoweringly sad associations. Moreover, the home-circle was no longer what it had been. Two of the sisters, to whom she had read her plays, were gone; and with the changed order of life came a new order of writing.

Exactly when she began or finished The Claremont Tales is not known. With her usual reserve she at first said nothing about the completed MS.—beyond, at all events, reading the stories to the children. Probably she felt doubtful about her own venture; and some little time seems to have passed before she showed it to her Mother. Mrs. Tucker was much delighted with the attempt, said at once that it ought to be published, and insisted on action being taken.

So, on November 19, 1851, the MS. was sent to Messrs. W. and R. Chambers, with the accompanying letter:—

The date is given, but no name and no address; and a letter more quaintly stiff and unbusiness-like can surely never have won a Publisher’s smile. To return the MS. to herself, if disapproved of, was not possible; and, as it happened, The Claremont Tales did not belong to the class of publications undertaken by Messrs. Chambers. Very kindly, however, they passed it on to the house of Messrs. Gall and Inglis; and by them the little book was brought out. One can imagine how eagerly Charlotte, while preserving her strict incognita, must have watched for the possible appearance of her Tales, and how delighted she would be to see the name advertised. When this occurred, she wrote again—

Three months later comes another letter, still further relaxing her secrecy, and still on the subject of the ‘volume of poems’:—

Others were disposed to take a different view as to the peculiar attractiveness of such a name as The White Shroud, and when the volume was published it came out as Glimpses of the Unseen.

A first interview between Charlotte and one of her Publishers, recalled by some of the family, probably took place at about this date, or not very long afterwards. She is said to have been shy on seeing him, though not commonly supposed to suffer from shyness. In any case it is to be hoped that few Authors are, at first starting, so absolutely convinced of their own powers as not to go through certain twinges of bashfulness.

One copy of The Claremont Tales was sent out to her brother, Mr. St. George Tucker, who was again in India, and had recently gone to Azimgurh. When the book arrived, he sat up reading it until past one o’clock in the morning; no small compliment to a young Author. He then despatched a messenger on horseback to Benares, with the volume,—a ride of sixty miles,—that his brother, Mr. Henry Carre Tucker, might with all speed enjoy the same pleasure. Charlotte, hearing this through her Mother, was not a little gratified.

Thenceforth Charlotte went steadily in for Authorship. Volume after volume flowed from her fertile pen; most of them for children; many of them exceedingly amusing; all of them definitely designed to teach something. One is rather disposed to fancy that in the writing of these books there may have been, in the beginning, something of a struggle. Charlotte was by nature ambitious; and her literary gift was considerable; and some of its potentialities appear to have been sacrificed to her ardent desire for usefulness. Whether she ever could or would have made her mark in any of the higher walks of literature is a question which could only have been decided by actual experiment; but at least she must have felt it to lie within the bounds of possibility. Some people may think that her desire for usefulness was a little too ardent in its manifestation, since it led to so extremely didactic a mode of writing as that of many among her books. No one can deny that some of the said volumes do contain a large amount of direct ‘preaching’; not merely of life-lessons, interwoven with the story in such wise that the one could not be read and the other missed, but rather of little sermons so alternating with the story that a child might read the latter and skip the former. Probably, most children, when reading to themselves, did follow this plan. Directness to a fault was, however, a leading characteristic of Charlotte all through life. The same tendency,—many would say in plain terms, the same mistake—is apparent in the later years of her Indian work, in the mode of her Zenana teaching.

With respect to her writings, nothing is more impossible than to gauge correctly the amount of comparative good worked in any age, by different books or different styles of composition. That which makes the most stir, that which has the greatest apparent success, is by no means always the most wide in its influence. Some of us may be inclined to think that A. L. O. E. might have reached a larger circle, might have gained a more extensive influence, if she had less anxiously pressed so very much didactic talk into her tales,—if too she had more studiously cultivated her own dramatic instincts, and had more closely studied human nature. All this we are quite at liberty to believe. For the question as to ‘doing good’ through a book does not rest upon the amount of religious teaching which may be packed into a given number of printed pages, but rather upon the force with which a certain lesson is presented, with or without many words. There is no especial power in an abundance of words; rather the reverse!

But the main gist of the matter as regarded Charlotte herself lies outside all these questions. It is found in the simple fact that she determinately stamped down her own personal ambitions, and bent her powers with a most single heart to this task of ‘doing good’; that she resolutely yielded herself and her gifts to the Service of her Heavenly Father, desiring only that His Name might be honoured in what she undertook. Whether she always carried out this aim in the wisest manner is a secondary consideration. From the literary and artistic point of view, one may say that she undoubtedly did make some mistakes. From the standpoint of a simple desire to do good, one may question whether she could not have done yet more good by a different style of writing. But with regard to the purity and earnestness of her desire, with regard to the putting aside of personal ambitions, with regard to the single-heartedness of her aims, there can be no two opinions. And He who looks on the heart, He who gauges our actions not by results but by the motives which prompt them,—He, we may well believe, honoured His servant for her faithful work in His Service.

Nor must we ignore the measure of marked success which she certainly had, if one may judge from the speed with which her books came out, and the demand which apparently existed for them. Even in her most didactic tales there are keen and witty touches, and droll descriptions. For ‘teaching’ purposes her boys may sometimes converse together as boys never do converse; but none the less those boys are real, and they recur in after years to the memory as only living people or vivid creations ever do recur. In some of her rather higher flights, such as Pride and his Prisoners, are to be found stirring scenes, drawn with dramatic power.

One thing should be noted: the curiously allegorical or symbolical style of thought which was natural to her.

It did not appear in the girlish dramatic efforts,—unless in the direction of a perpetual play upon words,—but in her published books it developed speedily. This was remarkable in her; not because of any peculiar result from it in England, but because of its very peculiar adaptation to Indian needs. One may almost think of her authorship in England as mainly a long preparation for her Indian toil; the continuous practice in habits of imagery and allegory, by no means especially suited to our Western minds, gradually fitting her to deal with the Oriental mind, little as she yet dreamt of any such destination for herself. All these years, without knowing it, she was waiting for and was working upward to ‘the Crown of her Life,’ as it may be termed; those eighteen years in the Panjab. All these years she was being prepared and made ready, till she should be as a ‘sharpened instrument’ in the Hand of her Master, fitted for the work which He would give her to do.

Among the many volumes published during the first fifteen or twenty years of authorship were the following:—The Giant-Killer, The Roby Family, The Young Pilgrim, History of a Needle, and Rambles of a Rat, before 1858; Flora, The Mine, Precepts in Practice, Idols in the Heart, and Whispering Unseen, before 1860; Pride and his Prisoners, The Shepherd of Bethlehem, My Neighbour’s Shoes, War and Peace, Light in the Robber’s Cave, and The Silver Casket, before 1864. A trio of volumes appeared in succession, the first of which she wrote at her Mother’s suggestion,—Exiles in Babylon, Rescued from Egypt, and Triumph of Midian. Another trio, coming in due course,—Fairy Know-a-Bit, Parliament in the Playroom, and The Crown of Success,—were bright little books, containing a good deal of useful information. Besides these were published at intervals House Beautiful, Living Jewels, Castle of Carlmont, Hebrew Heroes, Claudia, Cyril Ashley, The Lady of Provence, The Wreath of Smoke, and very many others.

One of the most strongly allegorical of her earlier works was The Giant-Killer; and in that little book she no doubt made free use of her own experiences.

It is easy to believe that she must have had many a hard battle with Giant Sloth, before she gained the habit of always rising at six o’clock in the morning, a habit persevered in through life. Again, one of her eager and impulsive temperament could not have been naturally free from a clinging to her own way, and from a certain vigorous self-seeking; and many a bitter conflict must have been gone through, before friends could, with an all but unanimous voice, speak of hers as a peculiarly unselfish character. In the struggles of Fides to get out of the Pit of Selfishness, we may read between the lines of Charlotte’s girlish battlings.

Even more, in the fight with Giant Pride we seem to see her hardest tussle of all, and the mode in which victory came to her. Giant Pride’s assumed name of ‘High Spirit,’ his hatred of Meanness, Gluttony, Cowardice, and Untruth, are all an echo of parts of herself. The polishing of the darkened gold of her Will she had long known in the small unavoidable frictions of everyday life; and the plunging of that Will into furnace-heat, and the straightening of its crookedness by means of heavy successive blows, she had begun to know in the death of her dear Father, and would soon know more fully through other sorrows coming after. But many more than three blows were needed for the shapening of Charlotte Tucker’s Will. She may have dreamt when she wrote the book that three would be enough, and that the King’s call to Fides might in her case be soon repeated. She little knew the long years of toil and patience which stretched far ahead.

A tiny glimpse of the daily fighting, which she like all others had to go through, may be seen in the succeeding letter, written to her sister, Laura, a year or two before the death of old Mr. Tucker:—

CHAPTER VIII
A.D. 1854-1857
CRIMEA, AND THE INDIAN MUTINY

In the year 1854 Mr. St. George Tucker again came home from India; and in the autumn he took his Mother and sisters for three months to The Mote, an old country house about six miles north of Tonbridge, hoping that the change would do good to Mrs. Tucker’s health and spirits. Those were the terrible days of the Crimean War; and in that autumn the battles of Balaclava and Inkerman were fought. Several letters of interest belong to about this period.

In the August of 1855 she had the pleasure of going with her brother, Mr. St. George Tucker, to the great French Exhibition at Paris. This was the celebrated occasion of the Queen’s visit to Napoleon, after the close of the Crimean War; and Paris was thronged. So full was the place that rooms in Paris itself were not to be had, and they went to an hotel in Versailles, occupying apartments which had once been occupied by Louis Napoleon. Charlotte’s warlike enthusiasm showed itself in the fact that she was willing to pay twenty-five francs apiece for seats at the Champs de Mars, where they might witness the review of 45,000 French troops. When Her Majesty had quitted Paris, it became possible to obtain rooms at the Hôtel Bristol.

From Versailles she wrote to Mrs. Hamilton, on the 21st of August:—

The Crimean War was ended; and two years later came the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny, with its awful carnage, its heaps of slain, its tortured women and children, its heroic determination, its dauntless courage. Then was seen a Continent, lost apparently in one day, won back to the British Crown by mere handfuls of indomitable men facing armed myriads. Such a tale had never been told before.

If Charlotte’s patriotism had been stirred by the Crimean struggle, this came nearer to her yet! She had five brothers, all in India, all more or less in daily peril. Mr. Henry Carre Tucker was Commissioner at Benares; Mr. St. George Tucker was at Mirzapore; Mr. William Tucker was in a less acutely unsafe position; Mr. Charlton Tucker, after seeing his Colonel shot down, was for weeks in hiding. All these escaped. But her early companion, Robert,—the father of her ‘Robins,’—was among the slain; and the three children, already long half-orphaned, became now wholly orphaned.

Robert Tucker’s remarkable powers, and his successes at Haileybury, have been earlier spoken about. Naturally of a serious and stern disposition, though not without lighter traits, he had been a good deal saddened by troubles, which no doubt resulted in the more complete dedication of himself and all that he possessed to the Service of his Divine Master. A short sketch of his life, written by his sister Charlotte, and published by the S.P.C.K., tells of his work at Futteypore, where for many years he was Judge.

About four years before the Mutiny he had written home about the ‘extraordinary success’ which was attending his Christian school, established and kept going by himself. On Sundays he was in the habit of regularly addressing a collected crowd of Natives; literally ‘the poor, the maimed, the halt, the blind’; and he did not teach them only, but also ministered liberally to their bodily needs.

In her little sketch Charlotte says of him,—‘Careless of his own comfort, restricting his personal expenses to a very narrow compass, he gave to the Missionary cause at the rate of forty pounds monthly, and one year even more’; adding that with ‘shrinking from ostentation’ he had never given his name on these occasions. And again—‘It was his deep and abiding sense of the debt which he owed to his Saviour, which made the Judge devote not only his substance but his heart and his soul to the Lord. How deep was the gratitude which he expressed in these words—“If every hair upon my head were a life, it would be too little to sacrifice to the Lord Jesus Christ!”’

A clue to many things in Charlotte’s own later life may be perhaps found here. There can be no doubt that the story of her brother’s self-denying life and tragical death made a profound impression upon her mind. His example, long after, was closely copied by this sister, when she too ‘restricted her personal expenses to a very narrow compass,’ precisely as he had done, and with the same object, that she might have the more to give away. Also his energy in teaching was reflected by her own burning desire, in old age, to speak on all occasions to the Natives of their deepest needs, and never to miss an opportunity of trying to lead some poor Hindu or Muhammadan to Christ, always with the vivid sense upon her, when she met man or woman, that the call to herself might come before they could meet again, and so a second opportunity might never recur. Another eighteen years had, however, yet to elapse before she would go out to India, to follow in his steps, and to render to Hindustan a loving return for this ‘year of horrors.’

In June 1857, like a thunder-clap, not indeed utterly unforeseen but practically unexpected by the majority of Englishmen, came the fearful outbreak; and for a while it did really almost seem that the British Raj in India was at an end. But those who thought so were soon to be undeceived.

When first the storm broke, Robert Tucker did not expect to be himself one of its earlier victims. His brother, Mr. St. George Tucker, says,—‘Robert was in high spirits when the Mutiny broke out. He wrote to me that he had seen a magnificent horse, and that if he could buy him, he could ride from Futteypore to Delhi, and soon finish the war. Robert was the Judge, and Sherer was the Magistrate. Sherer decided that all the Europeans must leave Futteypore and fly to Banda. Robert refused to leave Futteypore, and said that his duty required him to protect the Natives. The rest of the Europeans went off to Banda.’

Many Native Christians fled also,—among others a Native Catechist, Gopi Nath. He was taken by Muhammadans, imprisoned and cruelly treated; and he it was whose sinking courage was revived by the almost dying words of the English boy-officer, Arthur Cheek, the ‘Martyr of Allahabad.’

But with the spirit of a soldier, Robert Tucker, the intrepid Judge of Futteypore, remained at his post, the only European among countless Natives, bent still on doing his duty.

The night preceding the tenth of June he passed at his Cutcherry or Office; and in the early morning news was brought that his own house had been set on fire. He then tried to collect some of the landholders, to protect the Natives in the town, and their houses; but not all his efforts could prevent the burning of the latter. His next step was to ride off to the Jail, in the hope of securing the prisoners; but he was too late, the prisoners having been already set at liberty. Mr. Tucker fearlessly reprimanded the Jail-Guard; whereupon the Guard, belonging to a bad Cawnpore regiment, opened fire. Though every shot missed, Mr. Tucker must then have seen that all was up. Everything was in confusion; the Native officers would not support him; and he stood absolutely alone.

He rode to the Cutcherry, no man daring to intercept him, and took up his position on the top; and for hours he remained, fearless and calm, awaiting his death. The day was intensely hot, causing him to suffer terribly from thirst; and one of his horsekeepers at length brought him some milk,—a deed of mercy, which shows that one man at least was not devoid of gratitude.

‘There he remained during that fearful day,’ wrote Charlotte Tucker. ‘There, as evening was closing in, he made his last lion-like stand, when the fanatic Musselmans, bearing a green flag, the emblem of their faith, came in a fierce crowd to attack him.’ How many he shot as they advanced is not certain; some say twenty, or even thirty; but at length one of his assailants shot him in the head, and the moment he fell, they took courage to rush up the stairs and to finish their work.

For Robert Tucker himself, cut off though he was in the very prime of life, there could be no regrets, except on the score of all that he might have done, had he lived. No man could be more ready than he was to go. But the blow fell heavily on those who loved him; and though for nine years he had not seen his children, whereby the sorrow to them was softened, yet the loss to their future could not but be great.

‘So he fell,’ wrote one who had escaped; ‘and in his fall the constant and fervent prayer of his latter days was answered, for he fell at the post of duty. All who knew him well mourn in him the loss of a true and noble friend, generous even to prodigality, highly talented, a thorough gentleman, and an upright judge.’

Mention of this event was made at the time in the Journal Letter of Viscountess Canning,[6] worth quoting in addition to the above.