Memoir of Annie Keary

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Part I

" T WISH her gentle life were written. Her works J. are not the full expression of herself; no thine: could express all the wealth of her ft f> >f )f >>

ft

ERRATA.

line 23, delete "back."

26, /or **firstan(i self," read **self and first." 27, delete "comma," after "opening." 31, /or "sunshine," read "beauty." 23, /or "teaching," read "teachings." 5, /or "BourdilJon," read "Papillon."

19, delete "at first." 22, /or "when," read "that."

14, for " bent," read "best." 23, iTwer^ "comma," a/fer "whicli." 30, *7Mer^ "of," after "this."

20, inseH "commas," after "think and signs." 13, for " scenal," read " scenic." 10, delete "of," a/ifer " taking a room."

1, delete "of," after "seeing."

15, for "flat bread cakes," read "flat loaves of bread."

r-^^ !1¥ ™^^ ^® ^*^^»" ^^<^ **a man we call." hfor "Rhamses," read "Ramses."

22, /or " unaltered," r<ra<^ "altered."

ft

MEMOIR

OF

PART I.

*' T WISH her gentle life were written. Her works JL are not the full expression of herself; no written thing could express all the wealth of her gracious womanhood, and sweet human-heartedness." These words, which appeared in a notice of Annie Keary's writings in the pages oiMacmUlarCs Magazine, and the wishes of many friends who have said to me, " You ought to tell us something more about her," have made me consider whether there might not be something that I ought to say, some simple record that I might make, which would give pleasure to those who knew Annie Keary personally, as well as to those who have known her heretofore only through her works. I must premise that her life was a very quiet one, almost uneventful; the task before me is indeed rather to trace the growth of a character than to give the record of a life. I invite my readers to walk step by step with the subject of

B these pages ; from gracious childhood, through peaceful useful prime, up to the sudden opening of that gate -through which she passed from mortal sight. Perhaps some soothing influence may flow out upon us in this contact with one of a gentle, unworldly nature. If it should seem to some that we linger unduly over the picture of Annie's early childhood, I would ask them to recall how much they lived in those days when every sensation was new to them, and to take account of the moulding power which the impressions of childhood have had upon them.

Of the persons and things that surrounded Annie I wish to speak in their action upon her life, therefore any detailed description of them in their relation to others is unnecessary. A few words will suffice to introduce her family and parents. Annie's father was William Keary, the only son of an Irish gentleman, of Clough, near Tuam, in the county of Galway. Her mother was Lucy, the fifth daughter of Hall Plumer, Esq., of Bilton Hall, near Wetherby, in Yorkshire. Mr. Keary entered the army very early in life, and served through the greater part of the Peninsular war. He came back to England from the Continent when he was twenty-three, and married. Shortly after, on account of an entire change in his prospects from the loss of his property in Ireland, he was forced to sell out of the army. He then settled in England, and in the course of a year or two he took holy orders. He was appointed to the living of Bilton, and afterwards to the perpetual curacy of Sculcoates, a part of the town of Hull, with which

ANJ^IE KEAKY. 3

preferment he also held the small living of Nunnington in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Annie's father was a man of great power of mind, and of intellectual tastes, a patient student of theology, and the author of several books upon controversial and religious subjects. He was an eloquent preacher, and, as a parish clergyman, he is still remembered with love and reverence in the places where he lived and worked. In all his labour amongst the poor he had the help and sympathy of his wife, who, almost equally with himself, was looked up to and valued by his parishioners. During a considerable portion of his later life he was unfortunately debarred by great physical suflfering from undertaking either active duty or literary work, or from in any way making his influence publicly felt.

At the time of Annie's birth her father was the rector of Bilton, her mother s own early home, and it was there, on the 3rd of March, 1825 — a genial third of March as it chanced to be that year, when snowdrops and violets were making glad the nooks of the rector's quiet garden — that Annie Keary was bom, being the sixth child in a family which akeady numbered four sons and one daughter. One can fancy how she might have pictured her surroundings in after years, looking back to the small first self opening, loving, wondering eyes upon the home. At once the young spirit, could it have been conscious of such things, would have recognised the materials out of which many of its joyous fancies were hereafter to be woven. First there was Annie's father,

B 2 of whom we have already spoken, and to whom she was by nature more akin than were any of his other children. He was somewhat broken in health even as Annie first remembered him ; gentle, genial, not very gay tempered, enthusiastically religious, aflfectionate, sensitive, with all the outward and inward graces that belong to the best of the Irish race, and with some of the weaknesses also, but these of such a nature as only made him the dearer to his children- Between him and Annie, even the child Annie, there existed always a tender aflfection and a full confidence. They understood each other so well, these two, who represented the Irish side of the family, who both loved their books so tenderly, who thought and dreamed, who lived and met in an ideal upper region, exchanging sweet smiles and confidences there over the heads of the drudging world below. There was ever a sort of comradeship between them, and when Annie was quite a small thing she would sit upon her father's knee for hours while he told her stories of his youth ; sometimes it might be of his wild Irish home, or again of the adventures in his campaigning career, when as a soldier he had lived out aU the dashing, gay, thoroughly Irish part of him. "This and this you and I did or dared together, Nannie," he would then say, humouring a favourite childish fancy of hers that she had really been his companion in arms, the comrade of all his early life. " 'Twas you and I held fast side by side through that stiflf march across the common in the heat ; we two stormed Badajoz together, child ; " and the child, as her imagination fed greedily upon such congenial food, believed more firmly in the fancy which had originated in her own small brain, and began already to live the two lives of the dreamer, the tale-teller, taking her first lesson in novel- writing at her father s knee. *' Yes, yes," she would dreain, " it was papa and Annie who fought under Wellington together, and now they sit by the fire in cosy winter evenings, the two old comrades, and live the campaign over again ; " or letting her thoughts reach back to some dim, remoter period of existence, would see sweet, misty pictures of the west, hear the soft clatter of the Irish tongue, run barefooted across the bog with merry little foster-brothers and sisters, to fish in the blue mountain lough, or to feast upon sweet milk and potatoes at the foster-parents' board in the cabin where papa was nursed, and where he laughed and sported away so many careless hours — but, somehow, never without Annie, how could he ever have been anywhere without her ?

I have said that the father, though genial, was not gay tempered, as his younger children remember him. The mother could have told of brightness in the days gone by, when they had been young together,, and the light-hearted Irish officer had won her heart ; but the mother was reserved concerning her deepest feelings, and she did not often talk of those days to her children. She could draw pictures of her own early life for their amusement though ; of the country home in which she had been so happy in spite of what seemed, to our generation, the stifihess and sternness of its constitution. How clearly she made us see her father before whom all trembled excepting herself, his favourite child, how well contrasted with his was the fainter portrait of the lady of the house in the sort of state that surrounded her. Then there were the sisters whose lives she made us realise by her charming description of their old-fashioned childhood, with its country luxuries and amusements, the trim flower gardens, the perfume distilleries, the toy spinning-wheels. But better still were the stories that took us to a generation yet further away, whose scene was laid in a tumble-down old place called Lilling Hall, where our mother's grandmother had lived, with the old maiden aunt of the family, always known by the name of " Little Aunt Anne." Those were almost fairy tales our mother told us of the ideal days which she and her sisters had been wont to pass there in delicious idleness, when the heaviest burden of the summer hours consisted in the picking of rose leaves and lavender for the pot-pourri that little Aunt Anne was so marvellously skilled in making. I have some of the very stuff by me now, in its old purple jar, the last relic of Lilling Hall, and it is still sweet with the scent of a hundred years ago. Yes, the mother could draw smiling English landscapes, well ordered and beautiful, upon her canvas, and portraits too, full of humour, of the hearty Yorkshire folk whom she remembered, around whom quaint stories clustered such as we children loved to listen to, and on the recollection

ANNIE KBARY. 7

of which Annie was able to draw in her writings afterwards. I think that her tale-telling power came in a greater degree from the mother than from the father, certainly her fund of humour was drawn wholly from the maternal source, but she inherited imagination from both her parents.

From the parents we turn to the brothers and sisters of the family. What were the young ones like, amongst whom Annie found herself? What were they to her, as she began to know them ? The relationship between Annie and the very dear eldest brother, who from the height of his greatness was wont to make himself so exquisitely familiar with his much-petted little sister, is pictured in that of Janet to her favourite brother in Annie's novel Janefs Home and also in the love that her " little Helen " is made to feel for her big brother Hilary in the story of Father Phim, " Hilary used to lift Helen on to his shoulder," the story says, "and carry her up the dark back stairs to the smallest of the lumber rooms, where he kept some tame fish in an old water-butt — 'dear old Father Phim,' he would sometimes say, quite softly, using his pet play name for her, as he was carrying 'her up through the dark, and Helen felt as if she were growing very tall, such a quantity of love swelled up in her heart for Hilary."

This brother, the brother next to him in age (with whose life Annie's was intimately connected in later years), and the sister seven years her senior, stand aside as the elders of the group, for they were passing out of the nursery life ias Annie was growing up into it.

The eldest sister well remembers that 3rd of March which gave her first sister to her. More than fifty years afterwards, when on a visit to the old Yorkshire home, she speaks of it thus in a letter written to Annie, then drawing very near to death : —

" How clearly I recalled that bright March morning," she wrote, " when I ran oflf by myself to this sheltered comer of the dear old shrubbery to look for the earliest violets of the season. It had always been ray great pride and delight to bring to our mother the first bunch of violets from the roots that she and her sisters had planted in their happy childish days. How my heart beat with anxiety on that particular day, how my eyes swam with foreboding fear, for it was still rather an early search in that cold northern home. It was the 3rd of March, darling, your birthday, and early in the morning, when Bella the ill-tempered nursery-maid dressed me, she had said in a half-triumphant way several times, ' No more fine times for you, Miss Lucy, mamma won't think nothing of you now ; she's got another little daughter a deal prettier than you are. I firmly believed aU she said, and I thought that, if added to this new claimant on my mother's love, there should be such a failure on my part as the want of the usual spring nosegay, there could indeed be no further chance for me. How strange it was that I should have received with tears and sad forebodings that which brought me the priceless treasure of a sister's love, my first precious sister, the first link in that threefold cord that bound us sisters together in a bond stronger than death, sweeter and deeper than any tongue can tell, and such as few hearts can understand/'

Loving words which brought a joy like the joy of Heaven into the sick room, I remember, for love was always the very bread of life to Annie's gentle soul. She had found the nest well lined with it, we see, into which God laid down her babyhood, and what she received there she gave out to others a hundredfold.

"We," "we two," expressed the earliest loving impulse of the child, " you and me," or " all of us together," but the little hand was oftenest clasped in comradeship of love and mirth by her brother Arthur, the next above Annie in age, her first faithful, untiring playmate. " We'll do what we think proper," was the favourite game of these little urchins, a pastime of ever-varying moods accordingly as it originated in one or the other audacious little brain, but one which never failed to put to the rout all nursery quiet and decorum, and greatly to aggravate the temper of strict old Nurse Bream, the tyrant of the epoch. Nurse Bream had borne with the elder children; it had been a hard struggle enough, but "there was not one of them who ever had inventions such as Master Arthur and Miss Annie had." Inventions — yes, that was the key-note. Perhaps Mrs. Bream did not make sufficient allowance for the circumstances in which the little ones of the second period were placed as compared with those. enjoyed by the elders. Their romping time had been passed at the dear old Kectory, where they had had the run of field and garden, ponies to ride, pet animals to lopk after ; but all this had been changed before Annie became the clever sprite in whose atmosphere the good nurse's - most stringent discipUne found itself at once shortsighted and infirm.

Before the . time when Annie could remember anything, the family had removed from the little Yorkshire village to Hull, the large^ mercantile town, in which a new sphere of work had opened out to the father. The ideal country times were nothing better than a tradition to the younger children therefore, whose pleasures were cruelly circumscribed by the conditions of town life. No roaming about for them just as the fancy took them, no running out of doors at all without hats on. In the house it was not much better. Study and work had to be carried on there ; it was necessary that there should be some limit to the noise ; the whole world was, in fact, nothing but a dull hole of a place, scarcely big enough to turn round in.

Do not plants bring forth flowers only by reason of checks applied to the wildness of their growth ? Take a handful of lily-of-the-valley roots on some early spring day, and crush them into a small flower-pot, and by and by the flowers will bloom and fill our houses with their fragrance. As it is with the flowers, so it was with the children of whom Annie was one; with them imagination flowered with unwearying invention. And there were times, delicious times, when the outward conditions with which that imagination had to deal became transformed as by the wand of a magician. Days when the higher powers would be taken away from the house by outside duties, and the small domain would be untenanted save by the children. At such times, if the nursery rulers also happened to be propitious — on some holiday afternoon perhaps when it rained, and the schoolboys, the big brothers, found no amusement worthy of their attention out of doors — ^it would happen that the whole elder group would condescend to join us inferiors, would accommodate themselves to our fancies, talk for the nonce our jargon, play our plays, live in our world.

Then the house used to swell itself into a magical palace. A palace did I say ? — a kingdom, a region. Every-day things dwindled and dwindled until we could not see them any more. The elders all combining with us to call that particular comer of the nursery a den of thieves, how unspeakably delicious it was ! There must be thieves there if the others saw them too ; it wasn't only Arthur's nonsense then, nor Annie's imagination. Thieves really did come, in some mysterious manner, through the wall, in the twilight of winter evenings. It was too delightful. Lucy herself saw a thief s eyes twinkle in the dusk, twice she felt a bony hand clutch at her from behind the window curtain ; the children's hearts might well beat, their steps must fly indeed if they would reach a place of safety before the thieves could catch them.

And at last, when the place of safety had been reached, and the elders perhaps suddenly decided that all the thieves were dead, what did that matter ? the magic region need not fade away with them. There was another story stranger and more entrancing far than the first, around which our thoughts were always hanging, into which we were ready to plunge at any moment and always with new delight. A story, yes, a story that had no end, that seemed to have grown up of itself and simply out of a name. A dwarfed woman passed the house one rainy day whilst two little faces were pressed against the nursery window-pane, and four bright inquisitive little eyes looked through, and, " That's Mrs. Calkill," said Arthur to Annie. That was all, but it was the beginning of endless bliss. Who was Mrs. Calkill ? Annie knew, of course ; she had known all about her for ever so long, only somehow she had never thought of mentioning her, but now she and Arthur had seen her — they had both seen her by daylight in the street, and they knew what her name was. It was Arthur who knew her name, he must have known her too then, they both knew her, there was a real Mrs. Calkill. She was a fairy, very good, very clever, very strict, very powerful. She could go about just as she pleased anywhere, at any time ; she knew what everybody was thinking about, and what all children did ; she governed her kingdom (the whole world) by means of a system of rewards and of dreadful punishments. She never allowed any one to see her in her true fairy form; now and then she passed down the street, on a wet day, under a green cotton umbrella almost as big as herself, but ordinarily she flew.

She very seldom passed down the street, only once in a hundred years perhaps ; certainly she never passed during the lifetime of the children after that one rainy day. So much the better, that showed that she was a fairy and not a woman; common people do the same thing over and over again, it is always something you least expect that happens about a fairy. Mrs. Calkill had a fairy palace, of course, somewhere, and we knew exactly what it was like, or, rather, we were in the course of knowing, for it would have taken a lifetime to sketch even the outlines of its endless, endless rooms ; but where Mrs. Calkill's palace was, Annie herself did not know. Great was the delight of the little ones, then, when it was revealed to them upon one of those holiday afternoons that the second elder brother knew. It was miles and miles away, yet it was possible to get there and back within the hour of blind man's holiday; the road which led to it had scarcely ever been trodden by human foot, yet it opened from the inside of that very house in which the children were living ; it led straight through their everyday world into the land of magic. If Mrs. CalkiU should be very propitious, and shouU intimate as much, by a sign, to the brother with whom she had been secretly on terms of intimacy for a long time, he would take the children there himself, Annie describes one of these expeditions in her story of " Little Helen," in Blind Man's Holiday,

" If I were quite sure I could trust you," Cousin Stephen is made to say to little Helen, " I think I might perhaps introduce you to my friend Mrs. Calkill. She might not be very much vexed if I were to take you blindfold through the subterranean passage, and let you stand for five minutes in the enchanted palace garden." Then follows an account of the journey Helen takes — exactly like those which Annie remembered to have taken, blindfolded, in her childish days — up and down flights of stairs, and through rooms and passages of the house, whilst the little girl is made to believe that she is crossing streams, or scaling precipices, or walking through the caverns of Mrs. Calkill's underground kingdom.

After the enjoyment of such games as these ; after racing for hours from hiding place to hiding place, after seeing, hearing, feeling, escaping from such dangers as those of the den of thieves; after the excitement of long blindfolded journeys to Magic Land, and of actual contact with the wonders there, grown-up people and nurses might talk as they pleased, might call things by commonplace names, might scold, and trouble, and fuss, but they could not rob us of our knowledge of the truth, they could not shut us up in the prison-house world from which we had had such escape, not for many many days to come at least.

But though we younger ones could thoroughly enter into these delights, and were ever ready to follow into the magical land, it was Annie who sowed the dream-seeds all about the home. I can fancy that I see her now. The inspired child-face pondering at first, then smiling as at the suggestion of joyous little spirits ; then, as the fancies took shape in her thoughts, the sweet eyes dilating with lights and depths of mystery and fun, till at last the dear lips opened that had always something so delightful to say to us, with " Let us suppose now," — and a new world grew up around us, a world that might bloom and fade indeed, but whose seed lay henceforth in its outer self, a power of transformation latent after the first breath of those magic words.

"This house is a story house," Annie makes one of the children say in her tale of Faiher Fhim, when describing just such imaginative games as she remembered to have played in her own childhood. " All the rooms in it have got to be so many places besides themselves, one never gets tired of them ; aud the toys and the furniture have changed so often, and done such curious things in our plays, that when one looks at them, they seem to speak."

But^it was not only in such a circumscribed sphere that Annie's imagination busied itself; after the house, the street, and, by and by, odd glimpses of the town, flashed histories into the child's mind.

The town of Hull was not a very interesting place as far as its natural features were concerned ; that part of it which Annie inhabited was composed of a series of dull-looking streets of nearly unbroken uniformity. The country lay very far off; the roads that led towards it were long and dreary, scarcely any trees grew near them, and no flowers bloomed on the strips of grass that bordered the pathways ; level ground met the eye on every side : a hill, indeed, was a thing which it would have needed a strong imagination in any Hull child to picture to itself. Aimie's walks when she was a child were chiefly taken along these roads, or up and down certain out-of-the-way streets near a waste bit of ground that had been prepared for building purposes, and afterwards deserted. This last place was her favourite resort, for it supplied a great deal of food to her imagination ; there were rubbish-heaps and pits in it that served her for valleys and mountains, and which she loved to call by long-sounding names, taken hap-hazard from the pages of geography books.

Van Diemen's Land, one especially favoured part of this country was christened. It was bounded by a high wall of rough planks painted black, and Annie thought there must be something very wonderful behind those planks ; if she could but see the other side of them she felt sure that some such discovery as that of Columbus would fall to her share. A story founded upon this reminiscence of her childhood forms (me of the collection of tales spoken of before as published under the name of BliTid Man's Holiday.

Sometimes it would be the interest in a single house that would absorb her, selected from itg neighbours perhaps on account of some word that had been dropped about its inhabitants ; or, again, it might be a passer-by, to whom one of the nursery group had chanced suddenly to give a name, as iri the case of Mrs. Calkill, who would supply Annie with a story; the least thing was enough to give an impetus to her invention at any time. But whilst things, places, and grown-up people were as so many enchanted doors into the story world, children were much more than any of these to the child who was always longing to love as well as to know, and to whom the child-sphere outside the home was almost as full of tender interest as she afterwards described it to have been to her little heroine, Elsie, in her novel of Oldhury.

Annie's own first plunge into child-world, outside the family, was made in company with her own playmate brother Arthur, when the two were sent to while away a few morning hours at %. small, old-fashioned dame's school in the town. In one of the quietest . streets of the quietest quarter there stood a row of narrow, three-storied houses, with flights of bright yellow stone steps leading up to the front doors — bright green doors that contrasted sharply with the yellow of the stones. How dull and silent all the houses seemed, how shut up they were — all excepting the house in which the two Miss Staintons lived, whose front door with its brass plate announcing an academy for young ladies and gentlemen, had to open so often to the knocks of the children, whose steps became sadly soiled by the dust of the little feet. To Annie the rooms of that school-house were more interesting than the palaces of Aladdin, or even than Mrs. Calkill's wonderful home. For in the

C school there were cliildren, real children, not make-believe any more — acquaintances, companions, friends. What a living wonder each one was to the questioning new-comer, hungry to know what the world was really like, or, rather, of what kind the children were who inhabited it ; whether their experiences were like her own, whom they loved, or how lovable they were.

Some of the children, too, had true histories belonging to them, which they whispered to one another across copy-books and slates and primers, or at standstill places in sampler-working, whilst all the energies of the good-natured Miss Stainton were perhaps being brought to bear upon the dulness of the child christened "Little Stupid" by her companions. Besides "Little Stupid," there was the '' sugar-plum child,'* who gave her sweets away, and always had plenty of money to buy more. She was rather spoilt at home, but had the most delightful stories to tell about toys, and baby-houses, and picture story-books in her nursery; there was the thin, pale girl, who always moped, and never told anybody anything about herself, so her history had to be invented; there was the "prim little thing," who, by presence of mind, saved her grandmother from being burnt — " Miss Miminy-Piminy," as Annie christened her afterwards in Biind Man's Holiday, The time and the place were brimful of tales.