Part 9 (1/2)
In May 1883, Major Ewing returned home from Ceylon, and was stationed at Taunton. This change brought back much comfort and happiness into my sister's life. She once more had a pretty home of her own, and not only a home but a garden. When the Ewings took their house, and named it Villa _Ponente_ from its aspect towards the setting sun, the ”garden” was a potato patch, with soil chiefly composed of refuse left by the house-builders; but my sister soon began to acc.u.mulate flowers in the borders, especially herbaceous ones that were given to her by friends, or bought by her in the market. Then in 1884 she wrote ”Mary's Meadow,” as a serial for _Aunt Judy's Magazine_, and the story was so popular that it led to the establishment of a ”Parkinson Society for lovers of hardy flowers.” Miss Alice Sargant was the founder and secretary of this, and to her my sister owed much of the enjoyment of her life at Taunton, for the Society produced many friends by correspondence, with whom she exchanged plants and books, and the ”potato patch” quickly turned into a well-stocked flower-garden.
Perhaps the friend who did most of all to beautify it was the Rev, J.
Going, who not only gave my sister many roses, but planted them round the walls of her house himself, and pruned them afterwards, calling himself her ”head gardener.” She did not live long enough to see the roses sufficiently established to flower thoroughly, but she enjoyed them by antic.i.p.ation, and they served to keep her grave bright during the summer that followed her death.
Next to roses I think the flowers that Julie had most of were primulas of various kinds, owing to the interest that was aroused in them by the incident in ”Mary's Meadow” of Christopher finding a Hose-in-hose cowslip growing wild in the said ”meadow.” My sister was specially proud of a Hose-in-hose cowslip which was sent to her by a little boy in Ireland, who had determined one day with his brothers and sisters, that they would set out and found an ”Earthly Paradise” of their own, and he began by actually finding a Hose-in-hose, which he named it after ”Christopher,” and sent a bit of the root to Mrs. Ewing.
The last literary work that she did was again on the subject of flowers. She began a series of ”Letters from a Little Garden” in the number of _Aunt Judy_ for November 1884, and these were continued until February 1885. The Letter for March was left unfinished, though it seemed, when boxes of flowers arrived day by day during Julie's illness from distant friends, as if they must almost have intuitively known the purport of the opening injunction in her unpublished epistle, enjoining liberality in the practice of cutting flowers for decorative purposes! Her room for three months was kept so continuously bright by the presence of these creations of G.o.d which she loved so well:--
”DEAR LITTLE FRIEND,
”A garden of hardy flowers is pre-eminently a garden for cut flowers. You must carefully count this among its merits, because if a constant and undimmed blaze outside were the one virtue of a flower-garden, upholders of the bedding-out system would now and then have the advantage of us. For my own part I am prepared to say that I want my flowers quite as much for the house as the garden, and so I suspect do most women.” The gardener's point of view is not quite the same.
”Speaking of women, and recalling Mr. Charles Warner's quaint idea of all his 'Polly' was good for on the scene of his conflicts with Nature, the 'striped bug' and the weed 'Pusley,'--namely, to sit on an inverted flower-pot and 'consult' him whilst he was hoeing,--it is interesting to notice that some generations ago the garden was very emphatically included within woman's 'proper sphere,' which was not, in those days, a wide one.”
The Letters were the last things that my sister wrote; but some brief papers which she contributed to _The Child's Pictorial Magazine_ were not published until after her death. In the May number ”Tiny's Tricks and Toby's Tricks” came out, and in the numbers for June, July, and August 1885, there were three ”Hoots” from ”The Owl in the Ivy Bush; or the Children's Bird of Wisdom.” They are in the form of quaint letters of advice, and my sister adopted the _Spectator's_ method of writing as an eye-witness in the first person, so far as was possible in addressing a very youthful cla.s.s of readers. She had a strong admiration for many of both Steele and Addison's papers.
The list that I promised to give of Julie's published stories is now completed; and, if her works are to be valued by their length, it may justly be said that she has not left a vast amount of matter behind her, but I think that those who study her writings carefully, will feel that some of their greatest worth lies in the wonderful condensation and high finish that they display. No reviewer has made a more apt comparison than the American one in _Every other Sat.u.r.day_, who spoke of ”Jackanapes” as ”an exquisite bit of finished work--a Meissonier, in its way.”
To other readers the chief value of the books will be in the high purpose of their teaching, and the consciousness that Julie held her talent as a direct gift from G.o.d, and never used it otherwise than to His glory. She has penned nothing for which she need fear reproach from her favourite old proverb, ”A wicked book is all the wickeder because it can never repent.” It is difficult for those who admire her writings to help regretting that her life was cut off before she had accomplished more, but to still such regrets we cannot do better than realize (as a kind friend remarked) ”how much she has been able to do, rather than what she has left undone.” The work which she did, in spite of her physical fragility, far exceeds what the majority of us perform with stronger bodies and longer lives. This reflection has comforted me, though I perhaps know more than others how many subjects she had intended to write stories upon. Some people have spoken as if her _forte_ lay in writing about soldiers only, but her success in this line was really due to her having spent much time among them. I am sure her imagination and sympathy were so strong, that whatever cla.s.s of men she was mixed with, she could not help throwing herself into their interests, and weaving romances about them. Whether such romances ever got on to paper was a matter dependent on outward circ.u.mstances and the state of her health.
One of the unwritten stories which I most regret is ”Grim the Collier”; this was to have been a romance of the Black Country of coal-mines, in which she was born, and the t.i.tle was chosen from the description of a flower in a copy of Gerarde's _Herbal_, given to her by Miss Sargant:--
_Hieracium hortense latifolium, sine Pilosella maior_, Golden Mouseeare, or Grim the Colliar. The floures grow at the top as it were in an vmbel, and are of the bignesse of the ordinary Mouseeare, and of an orenge colour. The seeds are round, and blackish, and are carried away with the downe by the wind. The stalks and cups of the flours are all set thicke with a blackish downe, or hairinesse, as it were the dust of coles; whence the women who keepe it in gardens for novelties sake, have named it Grim the Colliar.
I wish, too, that Julie could have written about sailors, as well as soldiers, in the tale of ”Little Mothers' Meetings,” which had been suggested to her mind by visits to Liverpool. The sight of a baby patient in the Children's Hospital there, who had been paralyzed and made speechless by fright, but who took so strange a fancy to my sister's sympathetic face that he held her hand and could scarcely be induced to release it, had affected her deeply. So did a visit that she paid one Sunday to the Seamen's Orphanage, where she heard the voices of hundreds of fatherless children ascending with one accord in the words, ”I will arise and go to my Father,” and realized the Love that watched over them. These scenes were both to have been woven into the tale, and the ”Little Mothers” were boy nurses of baby brothers and sisters.
Another phase of sailor life on which Julie hoped to write was the ”Guild of Merchant Adventurers of Bristol.” She had visited their quaint Hall, and collected a good deal of historical information and local colouring for the tale, and its lesson would have been one on mercantile honour.
I hope I have kept my original promise, that whilst I was making a list of Julie's writings, I would also supply an outline biography of her life; but now, if the Children wish to learn something of her at its End, they shall be told in her own words:--
Madam Liberality grew up into much the same sort of person that she was when a child. She always had been what is termed old-fas.h.i.+oned, and the older she grew the better her old-fas.h.i.+onedness became her, so that at last her friends would say to her, ”Ah, if we all wore as well as you do, my dear! You've hardly changed at all since we remember you in short petticoats.” So far as she did change, the change was for the better. (It is to be hoped we do improve a little as we get older.) She was still liberal and economical. She still planned and hoped indefatigably. She was still tender-hearted in the sense in which Gray speaks--
”To each his sufferings: all are men Condemned alike to groan, The tender for another's pain, The unfeeling for his own.”
She still had a good deal of ill-health and ill-luck, and a good deal of pleasure in spite of both. She was happy in the happiness of others, and pleased by their praise. But she was less head-strong and opinionated in her plans, and less fretful when they failed. It is possible, after one has cut one's wisdom-teeth, to cure oneself even of a good deal of vanity, and to learn to play the second fiddle very gracefully; and Madam Liberality did not resist the lessons of life.
G.o.d teaches us wisdom in divers ways. Why He suffers some people to have so many troubles, and so little of what we call pleasure in this world, we cannot in this world know. The heaviest blows often fall on the weakest shoulders, and how these endure and bear up under them is another of the things which G.o.d knows better than we.
Julie did absolutely remain ”the same” during the three months of heavy suffering which, in G.o.d'S mysterious love, preceded her death. Perhaps it is well for us all to know that she found, as others do, the intervals of exhausted relief granted between attacks of pain were not times in which (had it been needed) she could have changed her whole character, and, what is called, ”prepare to die.” Our days of health and strength are the ones in which this preparation must be made, but for those who live, as she did, with their whole talents dedicated to G.o.d'S service, death is only the gate of life--the path from joyful work in this world to greater capacities and opportunities for it in the other.
I trust that what I have said about Julie's religious life will not lead children to imagine that she was gloomy, and unable to enjoy her existence on earth, for this was not the case. No one appreciated and rejoiced in the pleasures and beauties of the world more thoroughly than she did: no one could be a wittier and brighter companion than she always was.
Early in February 1885, she was found to be suffering from a species of blood-poisoning, and as no cause for this could then be discovered, it was thought that change of air might do her good, and she was taken from her home at Taunton, to lodgings at Bath. She had been three weeks in bed before she started, and was obliged to return to it two days after she arrived, and there to remain on her back; but this uncomfortable position did not alter her love for flowers and animals.
The first of these tastes was abundantly gratified, as I mentioned before, by the quant.i.ties of blossoms which were sent her from friends; as well as by the weekly nosegay which came from her own Little Garden, and made her realize that the year was advancing from winter to spring, when crocuses and daffodils were succeeded by primroses and anemones.
Of living creatures she saw fewer. The only object she could see through her window was a high wall covered with ivy, in which a lot of sparrows and starlings were building their nests. As the sunlight fell on the leaves, and the little birds popped in and out, Julie enjoyed watching them at work, and declared the wall looked like a fine j.a.panese picture. She made us keep bread-crumbs on the window-sill, together with bits of cotton wool and hair, so that the birds might come and fetch supplies of food, and materials for their nests.
Her appreciation of fun, too, remained keen as ever, and, strange as it may seem, one of the very few books which she liked to have read aloud was Mark Twain's ”Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”; the dry humour of it--the natural way in which everything is told from a boy's point of view--and the vivid and beautiful descriptions of river scenery--all charmed her. One of Twain's shorter tales, ”Aurelia's unfortunate Young Man,” was also read to her, and made her laugh so much, when she was nearly as helpless as the ”young man” himself, that we had to desist for fear of doing her harm. Most truly may it be said that between each paroxysm of pain ”her little white face and undaunted spirit bobbed up ... as ready and hopeful as ever.” She was seldom able, however, to concentrate her attention on solid works, and for her religious exercises chiefly relied on what was stored in her memory.