They clung around Hester where she stood like a rock in a stormy sea
Artist: Thomas Morten (1836-66)
Engraver: The Dalziels
Wood engraving
1863
Source: Good Words
This story of a woman's bravery during the Sepoy rebellion reveals much about Good Words and the real sincerity of Victorian religion. Hester, whose little boy has just died from illness, finds herself the source of strength for the panicked woman and children surrounding her. [continued below]
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Image capture, formatting, and text by George P. Landow
Shortly after she discovers her own husband has been murdered by his mutinous troops, she finds herself standing with “shrieking, appalled women . . . huddling around her; and as the inhuman strife began, and the rattle of artillery was heard at the barricades thrown up on the dreadful spur of the moment, these maddened women grew madder.” Interesting and perhaps characteristic of a story in religiously oriented magazine, the author presents the women not as martyrs but as women who came to India for an easy, luxurious lives:
They had come out of England for a very different fate; for many humble servants and much easy luxury, for dressing and driving and visiting ad libitum. Not to the wilds of Africa had they come; not as missionary women to the islands of the Pacific, ready to spend and be spent, and, if need be, to enter heaven wearing the pale crown of martyrdom. But many of them (God knows, not all) were gay women — thoughtless and soft young girls, or proud and defiant ones, who had boasted nothing should move them — and see, their challenge is awfuUy taken up, and they are weighed in the grim balance and found wanting. They forgot Mrs. Durham's higher rank and reticence, in the present hour of common danger. They even forgot the sacredness of her recent widowhood, and her husband's blood fresh spilt at her gate.
They clung around Hester, where she stood like a rock in a stonny sea. One passionate girl, bold in her approach to the last, clutched her shawl; one devoted mother thrust her baby into those passive aims, empty of children of their own. They clamoured to her, they all but prayed to her to save them, so struck were the whole terrified band with the silent strength of her composure — so inevitably did every living creature there elect the calm woman their leader and guide, that even a little whining dog came and crouched at her feet.
That little dog is a very Victorian touch, one that appears in countless genre paintings, but this short story about the Indiana Mutiny of 1857 ends with no rescue. Instead, Hester, who has been living until now without a purpose, tells the panicked women:
Christ died for you; and my boy Roger died smiling with love for Him, and I tell you the tale."
Over and over again she preached that sermon, with the light of Heaven growing brighter and broader on her face. Her hearers did not tire of listening to the few simple words. The bold girl behind her burst into tears of penitence and ravished love, and laid her head on her sister's shoulder; the fainting woman's relaxed hands re- covered hold, and tremblingly grasped her skirt. The baby on her lap smiled, and stretched up its dimpled hands to her beautiful, inspired face. The very little dumb dog nestled, as if in peace, beside her.
At this point the author tells her readers, “A mist comes over the group, a silence settles on the tumult,” after which she asks “Were they saved by a miracle of gallantry and bravery,” did the “one poor bungalow hold out,” or did the women and children escape to eventual safety? Tytler rather pulls the rug out from under the reader, announcing bluntly, “They did not,” and she continues that rescue wouldn't have been a more “blessed a fate” once Hester's words had “caught and melted” these poor women. In fact, she concludes, these “poor women and little children went up within the hour in a fiery chariot, spanned by the bow of Christ's love, straight to God's mercy-seat.” Hester here in her final hours found something to live for just as her life came to a close. She saved others.
Unlike most fictional and nonfictional narratives of the Indian Mutiny, particularly those written by men, Tytler's pays very little attention to the mutinous troops and certainly doesn't call for revenge. She doesn't even present the colonizers favorably. Instead, like many Victorian evangelicals, she emphasizes a blessed death — one that comes at a moment one one is in a state of belief. She achieves her goals of turning our attention away from the agents of destruction and toward the dead women and children's scent to heaven by avoiding the word “death” itself and instead describing what was obviously a massacre of women and children as an ascent in something like Elijah's fiery chariot.
References
Tytler, Sarah. “What Hester Durham lived for.” Good Words. Ed. Norman Macleod. (1863): 488-93. Inernet Archive version. Web. 14 December 2012.
Last modified 14 December 2012