‘I sang snatches of the Hallelujah Chorus, as I looked on the waterfall by moonlight. There was no distinct play of moonbeams on the water; there was an immense amount of mist,—one felt as if looking down on clouds. Presently the clouds in the sky flushed rosy in the dawn; the moon grew pale; Niagara with her emerald green more distinct. I waited till I had seen the sunrise—it was not a very bright one—and then I retired to my room, and went to sleep again.... Solitude is congenial at Niagara.... I do not care to write on trifling themes now....
‘A thought came to my mind as I was resting just now. As photographs, however faithful, convey but a very inadequate idea of the real Niagara, so must our highest conceptions of Heaven fall short of Heaven itself. Who that has merely seen a photograph, or many photographs, of the Falls, can drink in the beauty of the living, bounding, changing, glorious miracle of Nature, which is beheld here? Yet Niagara itself is but a bubble, compared with “the glory which shall be revealed.”’
Towards the end of July she returned home, to spend a few last weeks with her dear ones before bidding them a long farewell and going forth to her Indian campaign. Through all these weeks she does not seem to have relaxed in her persevering study of Hindustani, or in her struggle with the difficult gutturals which had to be mastered. Apart from this she must have had enough to occupy her time. Among lesser employments, she is said to have spent hours at a time in looking through her papers and letters—the collection of a literary lifetime—and consigning masses of the same to destruction. One cannot but wish that the destruction had been less wholesale.
The Dismissal Meeting of Missionaries was on the 11th of October; and two or three days later the Strathclyde sailed.
To most of her relatives the parting was a good deal softened by the conviction that Charlotte Tucker would surely soon find herself compelled to give in, and to return to England. One of her nieces can say: ‘We all thought, when she left us for India, that she would fail in health, and be obliged to come home again. And so I could stand at the doorway, and watch her as she turned round in our carriage to wave her last good-bye, without any misgiving that it was indeed the last time that I should see that bright smile.’
But her sister, Mrs. Hamilton, the loved Laura of early days, had a truer prescience of how things would be. Speaking afterwards to a friend about that day of parting, and about the intense, loving devotion which had always existed between them, she said: ‘When my sister and I parted from one another, it was a parting for ever on Earth. My sister will not return to England on furlough, as other Missionaries do, for the reason that she could not again go through the pain of separation.’
At the time little was said in letters about that heart-rending pain. It had to be endured, and it was endured courageously.
So ended the fifty-four years of Charlotte Maria Tucker’s English Life. She turned herself now, with a smile of good cheer, to the eighteen years of her Indian Life—the Evening of her days. Three-quarters of her tale is told, counting by years. Only one-quarter remains to be told.
Fifty-four years of preparation; and then the Evening of hard toil. Fifty-four years given to slow perfecting of the instrument; and then eighteen years of use for that instrument. This was what it came to. Not that her English life had been without its uses and its fruits; but the long, quiet home-existence had doubtless been mainly a making ready—or rather, a being made ready—for that which was to come after. The first was subordinate to the second.