Her Gentle Deeds

Front matter

HER GENTLE DEEDS BOOKS BY SARAH TYTLER. Crown 8vo, Cloth Gilt Extra. s. d. Her Gentle Deeds 5 0 Papers for Thoughtful Girls ...50 Heroines in Obscurity 5 0 Girlhood and Womanhood .... 5 O Days of Yore 5 O The Diamond Rose 5 0 Old Masters and their Pictures ..46 Modern Painters and their Paintings 4 6 Musical Composers and their Works 4 Kirsten and Miss Ussie. HER GENTLE DEEDS " A thought ungentle ne'er could be The thought o' Mary Morrison." — Burns By SARAH TYTLER AUTHOR OF "PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS," "LADY BELL," " CITOYENNE JACQUELINE." LONDON Wm. ISBISTER, limited 56, LUDGATE HILL Novello, Ewer & Co,, Printers, 69 & 70, Dean Street, Soho, London, W. CONTENTS.

Chapter I. Kirsten

jijifO^JlJiHE first impression which Kirsten Stewart's k§g! B§!g 'jcc oave was hardly that of gentleness. Bag|J-5%jj It rather conveyed the idea of truth. It was a face honest to bluntness. No one could imagine the frank though somewhat shy eyes beam ing with persuasive smiles, and the candid lips shaped to tell pleasant falsehoods. Kirsten Stewart's single-heartedness and loyalty were written on her face and spoken in her words, her exceeding tenderness had to be discovered in her actions. As for Kirsten's looks, apart from her feelings, she was a well-made, comely girl of twenty years of age, a bright looking though somewhat pale brunette, with rather a disproportionate weight of forehead to ordinary observers. To those who knew and loved her, she was very bonnie ; but it must be B confessed these partial persons mixed up spiritual" and physical attractions in inextricable entangle ment in their regard.

They could not see the big forehead apart from the heaven of peace which rested on it, or the full straight lips without beholding the sweet serenity which lay enfolded in the delicate curves. Lovable as Kirsten was, she resembled Wordsworth's Lucy in having very few to love her. Her way, too, had lain in paths all but untrodden till she had completed her twentieth year. Her great modesty, which formed one of her most dis tinguishing characteristics, with its common accom paniment, the strong reserve that was partly an individual, partly a national and inherited attribute, prevented her from being easily known, or likely to do herself justice in letting her sympathies and interests be directed to any great extent beyond her own household. Kirsten was the child of the old age of an excel lent couple, Scotch, but long forth of Scotland.

Ensign Stewart had engaged himself when he was without a penny beyond the pay — barely sufficient for his maintenance — to a half-pay officer's equally penniless daughter. The engagement had lasted long enough to tire the patience and try the con stancy of any pair less simply devoted to each other ; and when promotion came it was still of the slenderest description. Yet, by the time Stewart saw himself gazetted captain without purchase, he Kirsten. 3 found himself disabled by the effects of hard knocking about and a succession of damaging climates from further active service with the hope of rising higher in his profession. He had to retire on half-pay, -which was, however, pittance enough for the loving elderly woman who had, during many a year, looked forward half-despairingly to her Dugald's becoming a captain on full pay as the summit of earthly prosperity, the opening of Elysium to her.

But she could be content, happy as a cricket, under existing circumstances. It might have been hard for her to cope with the expenses of a regiment on the ample income, but when there was only Dugald and herself to be considered, and they could retire to some inexpensive town and arrange their household to suit their means, she could manage on next to nothing. She not only said it, she did it, keeping her husband out of debt, furnishing him with necessaries and a wonderful amount of comforts ; above all, charming him by her smile and by the one little daughter she bore him. The parents, in the honest dignity of their old fashioned ways, proudly gave to the child her ma ternal grandmother's old-fashioned name, according to time-honoured precedent. The name was once common in Scotland, while it always carried with it a Norse flavour and ring.

The Stewarts dearly loved their baby, but they could not conceive her too good B for her good grandmother's name. Indeed, they thought this little Kirsten could not have a more honourable baptismal title. To their sensible Scotch ears fondly familiar words with a meaning in them and a reason for them were welcome. The racy were preferable to the sweet. Many of the last favourite English names — Ethels and Florences, Roses and Amys — sounded either fantastic or namby-pamby to the Stewarts, while what is called a fancy name was purely detestable to them. What ! name a little girl after nobody in particular, in contempt of all the brave, true women who have lived and died since the world began ! Deprive the innocent helpless infant of a kindly human, even when not a kindred, relation ! The Stewarts were a little matter-of-fact, but this conclusion implied to them a very bathos of matter-of-factness of which they were incapable.

Years might have brought care for Kirsten, but a happily timed bequest of two thousand pounds from a wealthy bachelor cousin, on whose favour the couple had never counted, relieved them from all anxiety on their daughter's behalf. Two thousand pounds may appear a paltry sum to many people, but in Captain and Mrs. Stewart's eyes it seemed a very fair provision for their only child. It might serve her for a liberal dowry, or if she remained unmarried, the father and mother, who had been so easily suited and so happy on a narrow income, never doubted that the interest would be Kirsten. 5 sufficient to maintain according to her rank a gently born single lady, brought up quietly and plainly as Kirsten had been reared, so their minds were set at rest on this point. The girl was anything save self-indulgent.

She had been trained by her mother to be a capital, practical housewife. She delighted in housewifely activities and achievements ; she was too much of a lady to dream that she could demean herself by them. She would rise at five o'clock in the summer mornings on occasions to save the expense of a gardener, and surprise the Captain, who had become too stiff to weed his plots and beds, or to clip their low box edging, by showing them all in apple-pie order at breakfast time. She always pulled the peas, the strawberries, and the gooseberries in the season ; she dusted the drawing-room and her father's study still more unfailingly. She could make her own bed as well as any amateur nurse could make a patient's bed in an hospital. She could let a new servant see how to cook nearly as well as any German girl could do it ; nay, Kirsten was undutifully proud, except, to be sure, that the mother exulted still more than the daughter in the fact when she surpassed the old lady in certain dishes, some of them the Captain's favourites ; Kirsten made a large proportion of her own and her mother's clothes, with the reservation of their best gowns, which neither of the ladies attempted to construct.

But the younger trimmed all her mother's best caps as well as her own hats and bonnets. What she did for the Captain's head was to clip his grey hair once a month and take a kiss from him instead of a barber's fee. She could clear-starch to perfection, and her marketing was only second to Mrs. Stewart's. Withal, Kirsten's shapely young hands remained perfectly presentable, and her voice was as tuneful as if it had never engaged in a bargain. From the enumeration of Kirsten's performances, it may be easily guessed that the Stewarts had taken up their residence in a remote, primitive little town, where domestic economy and efficiency were still viewed as virtues which could be practised by gentle folks with advantage, without the least detriment or disgrace to the performers. Other families much in the same position in Haythorpe were as honour ably striving and industrious as the Stewarts showed themselves.

Captain and Mrs. Stewart had not returned to Scotland and the Highlands for various reasons, one of them being the long expensive journey north, and the impossibility of the travellers ever flying south again after they took the first flight. They had made up their minds by a great effort to give up Lowland leas and Highland hills, broad belts of gleaming friths, long sinuous glittering lochs, foaming rivers, tinkling burns, the parish kirk and the parish school, the old songs and the old proverbs with all Kirsten. 7 their priceless associations. The heads of the house that was to be had resolved to settle in the peaceful little town of Haythorpe, in an out-of-the-way agri cultural county, where agricultural produce continued cheap in spite of railways, which for that matter did not approach within a radius of half-a-dozen miles ; milk, butter, eggs, and fowls, rent and domestic service, in the favoured locality, did not rise to above twice the price which Mrs. Stewart fondly remembered them in her district of the Highlands.

She could keep house there on the Captain's half-pay. The neighbours, if they were a little rustic, and, what was worse, a little wild, a good many of them, in the old rough, reckless dissipation which is apt to linger longer in quarters to which skin-deep civilisation and superfine refinement have been slow to penetrate, were not wilder or rougher than members of the old Highland upper classes as the Stewarts had known them ; while both classes were, perhaps, more hospitable and friendly than more fastidious and scrupulous but less generous people are apt to prove. Upon the whole, the family did very well at Haythorpe, while neither husband nor wife ever yielded to the looser standards and coarser self indulgence around them. For this very reason, in addition to Captain and Mrs. Stewart's sterling uprightness and benevolence, they were much respected in the place, and Kirsten, as she grew up, became a welcome figure among the not very numerous young people in the best houses of the town that hovered on the skirts of the nearest county gentry.

Was not her father, the spare, active captain, an army man? a gallant officer who had fought for his country in China and India ? and was not her mother, the stout, cheerful matron, a lady born and bred, as well as an excellent house keeper ? though neither of the two had much to spare. In fact, any return which the Stewarts made to the town's hospitalities was necessarily of the most frugal description, and did not go beyond a rubber, with a glass of the Captain's good whisky toddy and a plate of short-bread for the old people, and a carpet dance with negus and sandwiches for the young. Really the unsophisticated disinterested ness of the cultivation of the Stewarts, by their town's people in Haythorpe, offered an example worthy of being copied in more precise and pre tentious circles. Kirsten's regular education had not been neglected — that was not likely where her father and mother were a well-bred Scotch couple of the old school.

A little provincial town may seem a bad field for the education of youth, but it has its advantages. Kirsten, busy as she was, had always plenty of time. She found leisure to digest what she learned, she was not crammed with unsuitable fare, nor confused or mystified by a multitude of sciences with hosts of Kirsten. 9 details pressed upon her, before she was ready for them. She acquired the ordinary elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with the outlines of geo graphy and history, at a useful, harmless ladies' school. What she had gained was immediately im pressed on her and seemed to grow and fructify. She had to write portions of her mother's correspondence with friends at a distance, especially with a half sister in Australia, as well as letters on her own account to every girl friend who had — what never happened to Kirsten — quitted Haythorpe for a season.

She had to help her father with his diary of the weather and the crops. She was early trained to keep accounts in a clear, correct fashion. She read aloud nearly every evening. There was a respectable library in the little town, from which the Stewarts had many of the standard books of all generations, which could not have been easily got from a modern book-club, and a few good new books. Through these, and through her father and mother's intimate acquaintance and sympathy with the most of them, Kirsten attained to a highly in telligent, and one may say a deeply affectionate, knowledge of English literature. Her father when he was quartered in French Canada had won a mastery over the French language, of which he was innocently vain. This he took pains to impart to his daughter. Her mother had something like a genius for music, and at one time in her life she had commanded a rare opportunity for the development of the gift.

She had been brought into close temporary contact with a great German master. Mrs. Stewart had availed herself of the boon and could still bring forth from the old deficient piano, which had nevertheless been one of her most cherished household goods when she came to Hay thorpe, not merely " Scots wha'^hae " and " The land o' the leal," but sonatas of Beethoven, and canzonets of Haydn as few who had not devoted their lives to them could render them. Kirsten had only a moderate share of her mother's talent in this respect, but what musical faculty she possessed was carefully and truly guided and made the most of. Drawing had been altogether omitted from her curriculum, neither her father nor her mother having had any special inclination or information in that line. This was a pity, for though a notion existed that Kirsten had inherited a defective sense of the perpendicular and of perspective, and this notion had prevented her from being put into the hands of the drawing-master — and he might have been an Old Crone — who represented that branch of art in her school, she had certainly a fine eye for colour, and a perfectly spontaneous original sense of what was harmonious and graceful in modelling, grouping, and lively action.

Haythorpe was not so antediluvian as to fail to Kirsten. 11 •employ an ex-sergeant for a drill-master, while it imported a peripatetic dancing-master to finish the physical education of its youth. Kirsten hardly needed them ; she had been taught to march, to square her shoulders and hold up her head, by her father. Her mother's musical bent had early de lighted in setting the child to dance in fit time and tune, with appropriate steps and gestures, to her gavottes and mazourkas, strathspeys and reels. Above all — for this was at once the core and crown of the girl's education — Kirsten had a fine mind and heart. It is not meant that she was exceptionally clever as men reckon cleverness, but she was in wonderfully true relation to the world around her, the world of nature and the world of humanity alike ; the world of the past, the present, the future.

She could respond to multitudes of influences on all sides, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The spring ing, sprouting, and earing of the corn, the forms and tints of trees, every growth in the garden — that of the humblest vegetable as well as the loveliest flower — a sunset, a rainbow, the fresh glitter of the dew, the silver of the hoar frost, the joyous note of a bird, the warning bark of a dog, the wistful low of a cow, each came to her with its own charm. In the same manner human life had endless interest for her. Withal, Kirsten Stewart was neither a prodigy of mental ability nor moral goodness, while she was more •of the latter than the former. In intellect she had sound reason, something of bright wit, and certainly a wonderful amount of sympathy — that was the sum total and secret of her powers.

But she could not have been so good as she was without being con sciously or unconsciously a deeply religious girl, though she was one of those with regard to whom the apostle wrote that they are a law unto them selves, and therefore she lived rather than thought, far less spoke, religion. She was, without speculat ing about it, at peace with God and man ; a human embodiment of the highest principles of Christianity — a humble, hearty, unquestioning follower of a Divine Master. Like her father and mother, Kirsten was decidedly respected and liked in Haythorpe. She was even depended upon, young as she was, in a way — a quiet, circumscribed way. But she was not at all widely known, or raved about, or yearned over, or passion ately prized except by her father and mother. Yet none was so happy at youthful gatherings, for she had little or no vanity to exact attention, and still less egotism to feel wounded if the attention which would only have troubled her was not paid to her ; none was so content "out of company in the mingled freedom and manifold obligations and responsibilities of home, as gleeful as a child, ready to laugh at the smallest innocent jest, sometimes quaintly humorous in her close observation, diverted where other people were burdened or depressed or provoked.

However, Kirsten . 13 this graciously rounded character was not constituted to be a popular heroine. Kirsten Stewart might slip through the world, serving it with her best all the time, and not be generally noticed ; not be generally missed when her unselfish, unobtrusive service was ended. Only to a few would she be incompar able, the pearl among women here, one of God's saints yonder.

Chapter II. Changes

llRSTEN STEWART'S peaceful youth came to a speedy, rather abrupt termina tion. Her father and mother died within a year of each other, without any prolonged break ing up of their health and habits. It was a terrible blow to the loving young creature to whom house hold affection and household duty had been so much. Yet she bore even sorrow characteristically : she said little about it, and did not cry out loudly against her orphan lot, as if she were singled out for misery. She showed her thankfulness for the happiness that was gone by accepting God's sentence, and by finding her solace in striving through her lonely tears, as through her social smiles, to do her duty and His will. Yet the iron had entered into the tender soul. Kirsten looked half-a-dozen years older from that date, and although she continued to appear the young woman she was, she never regained the air of light-hearted girlishness, with not much to remember and still less to regret.

For the stillness Changes. 15 of death was around Kirsten when she rose up and when she lay down. The emptiness of her house and heart and life was ever present with her. Of course Kirsten was not by any means without sympathisers and well-wishers in her native town. That last word exactly expressed their relation. They stood outside her life, outside her nature. They and she were on perfectly friendly terms, most willing to help each other, but it was at what one is tempted to call a polite distance, behind a barrier which could not be thrown down. She could no more help keeping herself and her sorrows largely to herself, till friends like her father and mother should come and claim their share in them, or till she should go to rejoin her oldest friends, than she could help refraining from sobs and tears.

She was not a tearful woman ; only the bitterest crises of anguish wrung sobs and tears from her. In this light the gentlest of women was like a strong man. There was another Scotch family near Haythorpe. By a coincidence they were also Stewarts — branches of the same clan, though not from the same High land district, or counting any save a remote kinship with Captain Stewart's family. To these Kirsten's father and mother, with their strong nationality and lingering prejudice, had turned longingly when they desired friends for their daughter, and anticipated the day that she might want them in the rending of nearer ties. But there had been some blindness in the selection, since there was no real resemblance and very little sympathy between the heads of the houses. Mr. Stewart, of Cope Hall — in proximity to the town — as distinguished from Captain Stewart, had come to the neighbourhood in the character of cham berlain to its largest proprietor — a very big man indeed, a duke in the peerage.

The worldly great ness of his employer appeared to possess the spirits and turn the heads slightly of both Mr. Stewart and his wife — a handsome, dashing couple of the Roman nose, brilliant complexion, expanded chest, and long neck type. They had in full the Celtic susceptibility to outward influences. The couple were impressed by their reflected consequence as representatives of ducal power and magnificence, and fired by an ambition for their children, which they illustrated in a manner more common and more comprehensible than it is commendable. Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, in their foolish extravagance, balanced by an occasional equally foolish meanness, aped the Duke and Duchess, at a respectful distance, with an antique, feudal subserviency and a crass vanity which would have been purely ludicrous if it had not been also pitiable and a little alarming.

The chamberlain and his wife were in their lower station very pretentious people, passionately absorbed in all the company they could procure, which, among Changes 17 other benefits conferred, saved the host and hostess from what was not always the too pleasant process of thinking. At the same time, the couple were perfectly respectable— as yet ; while Mr. Stewart had a deserved reputation for energy and punctuality in business, which gave him some kind of fitness to be not only chamberlain to a duke, but as the chamber lain was appointed executor of Captain Stewart's short will, guardian to Kirsten till she married or arrived at a more mature age. Mrs. Stewart, feverishly engrossed as she was, had some motherly instincts. She would have taken Kirsten to Cope Hall for a time, and even intermitted her hot pursuit of the spurious rank and gaiety for which she had acquired a desperate taste, to try and find an advantageous marriage for the young girl when the days of her mourning should be ended.

This effort of benevolence would have been all the livelier because Kirsten's portion was trifling, while she had not the slightest style beyond what might be conceded to the instincts of a gentlewoman. But Kirsten gravely and sincerely thanked Mrs. Stewart for what was kindly meant in the invitation and declined it, greatly preferring her own solitary home and domestic habits. With regard to the young Stewarts of Cope Hall, and to the influence they might have had over Kirsten, the elder boys and girls were away from home, boarded at a variety of as costly and aspiring c schools and colleges as the chamberlain's liberal income could compass. The young people had thus been banished for what was supposed to be their good, except during holiday intervals, ever since the Stewarts came to Cope Hall.

Kirsten, by a succession of chances, knew little or nothing of these juniors, the less so that the eldest girl stood two or three years apart from her in age. Haythorpe was so far out of the world that it did not absolutely recognise an impropriety in so sensible and worthy a young woman as Kirsten Stewart living on by herself, save for her single servant, who, to be sure, was not very much older than Kirsten, and was not nearly so wise, any more than it would have censured her for taking apartments at the seaside on her own responsibility and for her sole use. But Kirsten herself saw that there was a necessity for a change ; something to break the bright, blythe past from what appeared the shaded, pensive future. She had a longing to visit her father and [mother's Highlands, of which she had heard much.

She was certain the thunder-haunted mountains of Appin, the wild Atlantic surf breaking against the shore, the very pungent scent of the gale, which she had never smelt except in a dry, withered branch, and the reek of such peats as the single specimen which had once reached Haythorpe by a succession of carriers, would speak to her in an echo of the voices she had best loved to hear, while their unbroken silence was bow- Changes. 19 ing her head and crushing her heart. But she had no nearer kindred in the Highlands than cousins once or twice removed, personal strangers to her, and the season was winter, unsuited for northern travel. Then Kirsten received a letter from Australia from the woman who had. long been the principal representative of her mother's family, who was now, in fact, Kirsten's nearest surviving relative.

This was a Mrs. Latham, a half-sister of Mrs. Stewart's, so very much younger that she was not above ten years older than her niece Kirsten, whom she had never seen, for the young aunt had been taken in her childhood to Australia, where she had married at eighteen. She was still living at Sydney, a sufficiently provided-for widow of little more than thirty, with a small family of young children. Mrs. Latham's widowhood was so recent that the letter bringing the sad news crossed that which ■conveyed the tidings of Kirsten's last loss. The next letter which condoled with the girl on the death of both her parents besought her, as if on the impulse of an affectionate heart, to come out at once to her widowed and equally sorrowing aunt, to whom and to whose little children Kirsten would be the greatest " boon."

The word caught the girl's fancy as the word "pleasure" might have tickled the imagination of another girl in a different mood. In the blight c which had fallen on Kirsten, nothing had so cut her to the heart as the sense that she was no longer of any moment or use to anybody. She had been everything to the elderly couple who were gone, and had been very happy in knowing it. The con viction that she was little or nothing to the myriads. each unit with its own interest, that remained in the world, somehow pierced her, unassuming as she was, with a stab of mingled humiliation and desolation. Her humility rather helped this conclusion. It did not enter her head that she could go abroad in the world and aid her fellows. A multitude of men and women were far better qualified than she could be for what was undeniably honourable work.

Why, she was a mere home-bird girl, not gifted in any way, with an old-fashioned horror of notoriety, even of publicity, which she was persuaded constituted in her case a sure indication of what she could and could not do. Of course there must be some purpose in her continuing in the world still, or God would not keep her there, but it was dreary for her to feel doubtful, the first time in her life, for what that purpose could be — whether it might be only for her to bear the dismal burden of loneliness, and live, as far as lay in her, blamelessly till the discipline was ended. Kirsten caught at the mention of service to the nearest relation that was left to her. What was there to hinder her from going out to Australia ? She shrank, no doubt, as was inevitable with her Changes. 21 youthful nature, from the uprooting of her existence at Haythorpe, the parting from her graves, her dear old home, and her father and mother's and her own friends and acquaintances.

It was little less than torture to anticipate the break-up of all that remained of the household, and what must take place if she carried out her half-formed intention : the sale of the furniture, with the disposal of such articles as her mother's piano and her father's writing-desk, so full of little sweet associations for her. And the long, perhaps stormy and dangerous, voyage, with the landing in a strange land, and the first interview between Kirsten and an unknown aunt, were also not without their terrors, doubts, and fears. But the attraction of being courted and wanted, together with the sick restlessness of sorrow, however kept under, proved greater than any amount of repulsion in the step which was pro posed to the girl. Kirsten Stewart was a quietly courageous and patiently resolute rather than a high-spirited or an adventurous woman.

But what others could do she might do, and when she had once made up her mind, she would no longer count the difficulties and brood over the cost. People at sleepy Haythorpe opened their eyes to hear that Kirsten Stewart, who had never gone ten miles off, was about to take a voyage to Australia. But nobody had a valid objection to offer. It was right and natural in her to go to a surviving relative. It would be a change with a vengeance ; still a new world was for a young woman as well as for a young man. No doubt she would form fresh ties and settle there. Mr. Stewart, of Cope Hall, who held a right to interfere, had nothing to say against the departure. Everything was arranged ; the severe ordeals of the sale, and the leave-takings, which Kirsten had most dreaded, were gone through loyally and unsparingly, the traveller's passage in the ship was taken out, when a fresh light was shed on the arrangements.