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Title: Autobiography of a Child
Author: Lynch, Hannah
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Autobiography of a Child" ***
_Autobiography of a Child_
_By
HANNAH LYNCH_
[Illustration: Decoration]
_New York_
_Dodd, Mead & Company_
_1899_
_Copyright, 1898_,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Contents
CHAP. PAGE
I. LOOKING BACKWARD 1
II. MARY JANE 7
III. MY BROTHER STEVIE 17
IV. THE LAST DAYS OF HAPPINESS 33
V. MARTYRDOM 43
VI. GRANDFATHER CAMERON 49
VII. PROFILES OF CHILDHOOD 60
VIII. REVOLT 79
IX. MY FRIEND MARY ANN 89
X. THE GREAT NEWS 98
XI. PREPARING TO FACE THE WORLD 107
XII. AN EXILE FROM ERIN 113
XIII. AT LYSTERBY 120
XIV. THE WHITE LADY OF LYSTERBY 129
XV. AN EXILE IN REVOLT 136
XVI. MY FIRST CONFESSION 143
XVII. THE CHRISTMAS HAMPERS 154
XVIII. MR. PARKER THE DANCING-MASTER 160
XIX. EPISCOPAL PROTECTION 170
XX. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 182
XXI. OLD ACQUAINTANCE 188
XXII. A PRINCESS OF LEGEND 201
XXIII. MY FIRST TASTE OF FREEDOM 207
XXIV. MY ELDEST SISTER 212
XXV. OUR BALL 219
XXVI. THE SHADOWS 230
XXVII. A DISMAL END OF HOLIDAYS 238
XXVIII. MY FIRST COMMUNION 246
XXIX. THE LAST OF LYSTERBY AND CHILDHOOD 253
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHILD
Chapter I.
LOOKING BACKWARD.
The picture is clear before me of the day I first walked. My mother, a
handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me, had driven out from town
to nurse's cottage. I shut my eyes, and I am back in the little parlour
with its spindle chairs, an old-fashioned piano with green silk front,
its pink-flowered wall-paper, and the two wonderful black-and-white dogs
on the mantelpiece. There were two pictures I loved to gaze upon--Robert
Emmett in the dock, and Mary Stuart saying farewell to France. I do not
remember my mother's coming or going. Memory begins to work from the
moment nurse put me on a pair of unsteady legs. There were chairs placed
for me to clutch, and I was coaxingly bidden to toddle along, "over to
mamma." It was very exciting. First one chair had to be reached, then
another fallen over, till a third tumbled me at my mother's feet. I
burst into a passion of tears, not because of the fall, but from terror
at finding myself so near my mother. Nurse gathered me into her arms and
began to coo over me, and here the picture fades from my mind.
My nurse loved me devotedly, and of course spoiled me. Most of the
villagers helped her in this good work, so that the first seven years of
my childhood, in spite of baby-face unblest by mother's kiss, were its
happiest period. Women who do not love their children do well to put
them out to nurse. The contrast of my life at home and the years spent
with these rustic strangers is very shocking. The one petted, cherished,
and untroubled; the other full of dark terrors and hate, and a
loneliness such as grown humanity cannot understand without experience
of that bitterest of all tragedies--unloved and ill-treated childhood.
But I was only reminded of my sorrow at nurse's on the rare occasion of
my mother's visits, or when nurse once a month put me into my best
clothes, after washing my face with blue mottled soap--a thing I
detested--and carried me off on the mail-car to town to report my
health and growth. This was a terrible hour for me. From a queen I fell
to the position of an outcast. My stepfather alone inspired me with
confidence. He was a big handsome man with a pleasant voice, and he was
always kind to me in a genial, thoughtless way. He would give me
presents which my mother would angrily seize from me and give to her
other children, not from love, for she was hardly kinder to them than to
me, but from an implacable passion to wound, to strike the smile from
the little faces around her, to silence a child's laughter with terror
of herself. She was a curious woman, my mother. Children seemed to
inspire her with a vindictive animosity, with a fury for beating and
banging them, against walls, against chairs, upon the ground, in a way
that seems miraculous to me now how they were saved from the grave and
she from the dock.
She had a troop of pretty engaging children, mostly girls, only one of
whom she was ever known to kiss or caress, and to the others she was
worse than the traditional stepmother of fairy tale. It was only
afterwards I learned that those proud creatures I, in my abject
solitude, hated and envied, lived in the same deadly fear of her with
which her cold blue eyes and thin cruel lips inspired me with.
But there were, thank God! many bright hours for me, untroubled by her
shadow. I was a little sovereign lady in my nurse's kindly village,
admired and never thwarted. I toddled imperiously among a small world in
corduroy breeches and linsey skirts, roaming unwatched the fields and
lanes from daylight until dark. We sat upon green banks and made daisy
chains, and dabbled delightedly with the sand of the pond edges, while
we gurgled and chattered and screamed at the swans.
The setting of that nursery biography is vague. It seemed to me that the
earth was made up of field beyond field, and lanes that ran from this
world to the next, with daisies that never could be gathered, they were
so many; and an ocean since has impressed me less with the notion of
immensity of liquid surface than the modest sheet of water we called the
Pond. Years afterwards I walked out from town to that village, and how
small the pond was, how short the lanes, what little patches for fields
so sparsely sprinkled with daisies! A more miserable disillusionment I
have not known.
I have always marvelled at the roll of reminiscences and experiences of
childhood told consecutively and with coherence. Children live more in
pictures, in broken effects, in unaccountable impulses that lend an
unmeasured significance to odd trifles to the exclusion of momentous
facts, than in story. This alone prevents the harmonious fluency of
biography in an honest account of our childhood. Memory is a random
vagabond, and plays queer tricks with proportion. It dwells on pictures
of relative unimportance, and revives incidents of no practical value in
the shaping of our lives. Its industry is that of the idler's, wasteful,
undocumentary, and untrained. For vividness without detail, its effects
may be compared with a canvas upon which a hasty dauber paints a
background of every obscure tint in an inextricable confusion, and
relieves it with sharply defined strokes of bright colour.
Jim Cochrane, my everyday papa, as I called him, was a sallow-faced man
with bright black eyes, which he winked at me over the brim of his
porter-measure, as he refreshed himself at the kitchen fire after a hard
day's work. He was an engine-driver, and once took me on the engine with
him to the nearest station, he and a comrade holding me tight between
them, while I shrieked and chattered in all the bliss of a first
adventure.
This is a memory of sensation, not of sight. I recall the rush through
the air, the sting, like needle-points against my cheeks and eyelids, of
the bits of coal that flew downward from the roll of smoke, the shouting
men laughing and telling me not to be afraid, the red glare of the
furnace whenever they slid back the grate opening, the whiff of fright
and delight that thrilled me, and, above all, the confidence I had that
I was safe with nurse's kind husband.
Poor Jim! His was the second dead face I looked upon without
understanding death. The ruthless disease of the Irish peasant was
consuming him then, and he died before he had lived half his life
through.
Chapter II.
MARY JANE.
Mary Jane was my first subject and my dearest friend. She lived in a
little cottage at the top of the village that caught a tail-end view of
the pond and the green from the back windows.
It is doubtful if I ever knew what calling her father followed, and I
have forgotten his name. But Mary Jane I well remember, and the view
from those back windows. She was older than I, and was a very wise
little woman, without my outbursts of high spirits and inexplicable
reveries. She had oiled black curls, the pinkest of cheeks, and black
eyes with a direct and resolute look in them, and she read stories that
did not amuse or interest me greatly, because they were chiefly
concerned with good everyday boys and girls. She tried to still a belief
in fairies by transforming them into angels, but she made splendid daisy
chains, and she could balance herself like a bird upon the branches that
overhung the pond.
Here she would swing up and down in fascinating peril, her black curls
now threatening confusion with the upper branches, her feet then
skimming the surface of the water. It was a horrible joy to watch her
and calculate the moment when the water would close over branch and
boots and curls.
My first attempt to imitate her resulted in my own immersion, and a
crowd to the rescue from the nearest public-house. After the shock and
the pleasant discovery that I was not drowned, and was really nothing
the worse for my bath, I think I enjoyed the sensation of being
temporarily regarded in the light of a public personage. But Mary Jane
howled in a rustic abandonment to grief. She told me afterwards she
expected to be taken to prison, and believed the Queen would sentence
her to be hanged. It took longer to comfort her than to doctor me.
It was some time after that before I again attempted to swing upon the
branches over the pond, but contented myself with feeding the swans from
the bank upon a flat nauseous cake indigenous to the spot, I believe,
which a shrivelled old woman used to sell us at a stall hard by. There
were flower-beds and a rural _châlet_ near the pond, which now leads me
to conclude that the green was a single-holiday resort, for I remember
a good deal of cake-crumbs, orange-peels, and empty ginger-beer bottles
about the place.
The old woman was very popular with us. Even when we had no pennies to
spend, she would condescend to chat with us as long as we cared to
linger about her stall of delights, and she sometimes wound up the
conversation by the gift of our favourite luxury, a crab-apple.
I fear there was not one of us that would not cheerfully have signed
away our future both here and hereafter for an entire trayful of
crab-apples. Each tray held twelve, placed two and two, like
school-ranks; and I know not which were the more bewitching to the eye,
the little trays or the demure double rows of little apples. The child
rich enough to hold out a pinafore for Bessy to wreck this harmony of
tray and line by pouring twelve heavenly balls into it, asked nothing
more from life in the way of pleasure.
The pride of Mary Jane's household was an album containing views of New
York, whither Mary Jane's eldest brother had gone. New York, his mother
told us, was in America. The difficulty for my understanding was to
explain how any place so big as New York could find another place big
enough to stand in. Why was New York in America and not America in New
York?
Neither Mary Jane nor her mother could make anything of my question.
They said you went across the sea in a ship to New York, and when they
added that the sea was all water, I immediately thought that they must
mean the pond, and that if I once got to the other side of it I should
probably find America and New York.
Until then I had believed the other side of the pond to be heaven,
because the sky seemed to touch the tops of the trees. But it was nicer
to think of it as America, because there was a greater certainty of
being able to get back from America than from heaven,--above all, when I
was so unexpectedly made acquainted with the extremely disagreeable
method by which little children are transported thither.
I do not know where nurse can have taken Mary Jane and me once. I have
for years cherished the idea that it was to Cork, which was a long way
off; but I am assured since that she never took me anywhere in a train,
and that certainly I never was in Cork.
This is a mystery to me, for the most vivid recollection of those early
years is a train journey with nurse and Mary Jane. I remember the train
steaming slowly into a station: the hurry, the bustle, the different
tone of voices round me, and Mary Jane's knowing exclamation, "Angela,
this is Cork, one of the biggest towns of Ireland--as fine, they say, as
Dublin."
Now, if I were never in Cork, never travelled with nurse and Mary Jane,
will any one explain to me how I came to remember those words so
distinctly? Odder still, I am absolutely convinced that nurse took my
hand in an excited grasp, and led me, bewildered and enchanted, through
interminable streets full of such a diversity of objects and interests
as dazed my imagination like a blow. Not that I was unacquainted with
city aspects; but this was all so different, so novel, so much more
brilliant than the familiar capital!
I remember the vivid shock of military scarlet in a luminous atmosphere,
and smiling foreign faces, and several ladies stopped to look at me and
cry, "Oh, the little angel!" I was quite the ideal wax doll, pretty,
delicate, and abnormally fair. I believe Mary Jane worshipped me because
of the whiteness of my skin and for my golden hair.
Memories of this journey I never made and of this town I never visited
do not end here. After eternal wanderings through quite the liveliest
streets I have ever known, without remembrance of stopping, of entrance
or greetings, I find myself in an unfamiliar room with nurse, Mary Jane,
a strange lady, and my mother. My mother was dressed in pale green
poplin, and looked miraculously beautiful. I know the dress was poplin,
because nurse said so when I touched the long train and wondered at its
stiffness.
She looked at me coldly, and said to nurse--
"That child has had sunstroke. I never saw her so red. You must wash her
in new milk."
Whereupon she rang a bell, and cried out to somebody I did not see to
fetch a basin of milk and a towel. I shuddered at the thought that
perhaps my mother would wash my face instead of nurse, for I dreaded
nothing so much as contact with that long white hand of sculptural
shape.
Among the mysteries of my life nothing seems so strange to me as the
depth of this physical antipathy to my mother. The general reader to
whom motherhood is so sacred will not like to read of it. But to
suppress the most passionate instinct of my nature, would be to suppress
the greater part of my mental and physical sufferings. As a baby I went
into convulsions, I am told, if placed in my mother's arms. As a child,
a girl, nothing has been so dreadful to me as the most momentary
endurance of her touch.
Once when I was threatened with congestion of the brain from over-study,
I used to lie in frenzied apprehension of the feel of her hand on my
brow, and she was hardly visible in the doorway before a nervous shudder
shook my frame, and voice was left me to mutter, "Don't touch me! oh,
don't touch me!" Her glance was quite as repulsive to me, and I remember
how I used to feel as if some one were walking over my grave the instant
those unsmiling blue eyes fell upon me. An instinct stronger than will,
even in advanced girlhood, inevitably compelled me to change my seat to
get without their range.
I recall this feeling, to-day quite dead, as part of my childhood's
sufferings, and I wonder that the woman who inspired it should in middle
life appear to me a woman of large and liberal and generous character,
whose foibles and whose rough temper in perspective have acquired rather
a humorous than an antipathetic aspect. But children, but girls, are
not humorists, and they take life and their elders with a lamentable
gravity.
On this occasion it was my mother who washed my face in new milk. The
fragrance and coolness of the milk were delicious, if only a rougher and
coarser hand had rubbed my cheeks.
While still submitting to the process, I stared eagerly round the room.
There was a grand piano in black polished wood, the sofa was blue velvet
and black wood, and the carpet a very deep blue. The air smelt of
gillyflowers, and there were big bunches in several vases. Yet my mother
assures me she never met me at Cork or elsewhere, never washed my face
in new milk, is unacquainted with that black piano, the blue velvet
sofa, and the gillyflowers.
She admits she did possess a pale green robe of poplin with an enormous
train, bought for a public banquet given to distinguished Americans, but
doubts if I ever saw it. Nurse, whom I questioned years after, laughed
at the idea as at a nightmare.
Still that journey to Cork, Mary Jane's words and my mother's, the bowl
of new milk, the green poplin dress, the blue-and-black sofa, the grand
piano, and the gillyflowers, remain the strongest haunting vision of
those years.
The first sampler I ever saw was worked by Mary Jane. I associate the
alphabet in red and green wool with shining blue-black curls behind a
bright-green tracery of foliage upon a blue sky.
Mary Jane used to sit upon a high bank, and work assiduously at her
sampler. I thought her achievement very wonderful, but I own I never
could see anything in coloured wools and a needle to tempt an
imaginative child. So much sitting still was dull, and the slow growth
of letters or sheep or flowers exasperating to young nerves on edge. My
affection for Mary Jane, however, was so strong, that I gallantly
endeavoured to learn from her, but it was in the butterfly season, and
there was my friend Johnny Burke racing past after a splendid white
butterfly.
What was the letter "B" in alternate stitches of red and green in
comparison with the capture of that butterfly?
So the child, the poet tells us, is always mother of the woman, and not
even the sane and sobering influence of the years has taught me that
serious matters are of greater consequence than the catching of some
beautiful butterfly. As I bartered childhood to agreeable impulses, so
have I bartered youth and middle age, and if I now am a bankrupt in the
face of diminishing impulses, who is to blame, after all, but perverse
and precarious nature?
What became of Mary Jane I have never known. Upon my memory she is
eternally impaled: a child of indefinite years from eight to eleven,
with oily ringlets and clear black eyes, pink-cheeked, smiling,
over-staid for her age (except in the matter of swinging recklessly over
the pond), working samplers, telling a group of unlettered babies
exceedingly moral tales, devoted to me and to a snub-nosed doll I
abhorred; with inexhaustible gifts, including a complete knowledge of
the views of New York, an enthusiasm for that mysterious being Mary
Stuart, and an acquaintance with national grievances vaguely embodied in
a terror of Queen Victoria's power over her Irish subjects.
She must have grown into a woman of principle and strong views.
Chapter III.
MY BROTHER STEVIE.
I must have been about five when my sovereignty was seriously threatened
by the coming of Stevie. The ceremony of arrival I do not remember. He
seems to have started into my life like Jack out of his box to kneel for
ever in his single attitude,--upon a sofa, with his elbows on a little
table drawn up in front of the sofa, and his head resting either on one
or both palms.
Do not ask me if he ever slept, lay down, or walked as other children. I
have no memory of him except kneeling thus upon the parlour sofa,
looking at me or out of the window with beautiful unearthly eyes of the
deepest brown, full of passionate pain and revolt. Only for my tender
nurse did this fierce expression soften to a wistfulness still more sad.
That Stevie's head was impressive, almost startlingly great, even eyes
so young as mine could discern. Auburn hair the colour of rich toned
wood, that only reveals the underlying red when the sun or firelight
draws it out, and looks like heavy shadow upon a broad white forehead
when no gleam is upon it; strong features not pinched but beautified by
disease, and a depth and eloquence of regard such as are rarely looked
for under children's lids.
The head expressed not pathos so much as tragedy. The frame I never saw;
I cannot tell if Stevie were tall or dwarfed. A tipsy town nurse had
dropped him down the length of two long flights of stairs, and a strong
child's back was broken.
He did not bear his sorrow patiently, I fear, but with sullen courage
and with a corrosive silent fretting. He hated me in envy of my health
and nimble limbs, but what he hated still more than even the sight of my
vivacious pleasures was any question about his health. I never saw a
glance so deadly as that with which he responded to the kindly hope of
Mary Jane's mamma that his back was feeling better. If a look could
kill, Mary Jane had been motherless on the spot.
But alas for me! no longer a sole sovereign. My serene _al fresco_
kingdom was invaded by the darker passions. I did not like Stevie. He
was a boy a little girl might be sorry for in her better moments, but
could not love.
He was querulous whenever I was near, and had a spiteful thirst for
whatever I had set my heart upon. Nurse transferred the better part of
her affection and attention to him. This was as it should be, but I was
sadly sore about it in those unreasoning times. The little packages of
round hard sweets in transparent glazed paper, pink and violet, that Jim
Cochrane used to bring me home from the big shop we called the Co.
(_i. e._, Co-operative Store), were now offered to Stevie, who took all
my old privileges as his due.
Even Mary Jane would sit on the window-sill, when she should have been
playing with me outside, and gaze at him in prolonged owlish
fascination, drawn by the fierce pain of those suffering eyes, with
their terrible tale of revolt and anger. Stevie got into the way of
tolerating Mary Jane's society.
You see she could sit still for hours; she was a quiet little body who
enjoyed her sampler and a book--not a creature of nerves, that raced and
danced through the hours and was dropped into slumber by exhausted
limbs. He would even let Mary Jane sit at his table and stroke his
white hand with an air of deprecating tenderness, while he stared
silently out upon the noisy green, where boys and girls were romping
with straight backs and strong limbs.
What wonder this poor little fellow with the soul of a buccaneer hated
us all. Did his favourite books, read and re-read, not amply reveal his
tastes, though of these he never spoke? The lust of travel, of
adventure, of daring deed filled his dreaming, and yet he never had the
courage to ask a soul if he should one day be well and fit to meet the
glory of active manhood.
Let remembrance dwell rather with this thought than upon the darker side
of his temper, upon the subtle cruelty of the glance that met mine, upon
the quiver of baffled desire that shook his fine nostrils and the
vindictive clutch of his bloodless fingers whenever I thoughtlessly
raced near him. If he gave me my first draught of the soul's bitters, I
still owe him pity and sympathy, and I had my pleasures abroad to
console me for his hate.
There were the wide fields and the birds, the swans on the pond, our
friend the applewoman, and a band of merry shock-headed playmates
outside for me. There were the seasons for my choosing: the spring lanes
in their bloomy fragrance; the warm summer mornings, when it was good
to sit under trees and pretend to be a bewitched palace waiting for the
coming of the prince, or dabble on the brim of pool edges; the autumn
luxuriance of fallen leaves, which lent the charmed excitement of rustle
to our path along the lanes: and the frost of winter, with the undying
joys of sliding and snowballs and the fun of deciphering the meaning of
Jack Frost's beautiful pictures on the window-panes and his tricks upon
the branches.
If Stevie disliked my restlessness, it gave him great satisfaction to
despise my artistic sensibilities, and jeer at my lack of learning. I
adored music, and often amused myself for hours at a time crooning out
what I must have conceived as splendid operas, until my voice would
break upon a shower of tears.
I naturally thought my wordless singing must be very beautiful to move
me to such an ecstasy of emotion, and I think I enjoyed the tears even
more than my melancholy howling. But Stevie did not. On the first
occasion of this odd performance, he watched me in a convulsion of
unjoyous laughter.
"What an awful fool you are, Angela!" he hissed, when he saw the
pathetic tears begin to roll quickly down my cheeks. I rushed from the
parlour, and the sweet water of artistic emotion turned into the bitter
salt of chagrin.
I must have inherited this tendency from my mother's father, a
music-daft Scotsman, who was never quite sure whether he was Hamlet or
Bach. At long intervals he would stroll out of town by the Kildare road
in an operatic cloak and a wide-leafed sombrero, to inspect us. He had a
notion that I, if left to my own devices, might turn out a second
Catherine Hayes, and after his visits I invariably returned to my dirges
and cantatas with ardour.
During the year that Stevie lived at nurse's, visits from the people I
significantly called my Sunday parents (because, I suppose, I wore my
Sunday frock and shoes in their honour) were more frequent.
Golden-haired little ladies, in silk frocks and poky bonnets, came and
looked at me superciliously. The bland hauteur of one of those town
creatures in superior raiment once maddened me to that degree (it was
the dog-days, no doubt) that I walked up to the chair on which she
complacently sat, and hit her cheek.
This naturally afforded my mother an excuse for pronouncing me dangerous
and prolonging my absence from the family circle.
I was, I will admit, a desperate little spitfire, full of
uncontrollable passion. But I had some rudimentary virtue, I am glad to
know. I never lied, and I was surprisingly valiant for a
delicately-built little girl.
I cannot remember the period of transition, but I suddenly see Stevie in
quite a new part. The vitality and unfathomable yearning burnt
themselves out of his eyes, and there was a wearied gentleness in them
even for me. He would watch me quiescently without envy or bitterness,
and speak to me in slow unfamiliar tones. He turned with indifference
from his books, and seemed to know no active desires.
"Does your back hurt, Stevie?" I asked, staring at him solemnly. Even
now I can feel the moving sadness of his grave look.
"It always hurts;" and then he added, with a ring of his old spite, "but
you needn't be sorry for me, Angela."
"I am sorry, ever so sorry, Stevie," I sobbed, not knowing why.
"I wasn't good to you at all," he muttered, dreamily.
"Oh, I don't mind now. I'm fonder of you, Stevie. I wish you'd get well,
I do. I wouldn't mind being ill to keep you company."
"I think I'd be fond of you, Angela, if I got well. Would you mind," he
looked at me uneasily for help in his awkwardness, and then a little
pink colour came into his cheek, and he spoke so low that it was hard to
hear him--"I think I'd like you to put your arms round my neck and kiss
me, Angela."
It was our first kiss and our last. The impulsive affection of my
embrace pleased him, and he kept my cheek near his for some moments,
while in silence we both gazed out upon the blotch of dusty green that
mingled with the pale blue of the sky. I feared to move or even wink an
eyelid, this new mood of Stevie's so awed me.
"You may have my books and my penknife," said Stevie, breaking the
spell. "They're awful nice books. Grandpa gave them to me. I'll explain
the pictures to-morrow. But perhaps you wouldn't like boys' books,
Angela," he said, dejectedly, and scanned my face in a humble way.
"Oh yes, I would," I cried, eagerly.
"Then you'll be fonder of me," he sighed, satisfied. "Grandpa once read
me about a little boy that was ill like me, and he had a sister. He was
very fond of her. He didn't hate people that are well, like me, but I
don't think that's true, Angela. A boy can't feel good and nice if he is
always in pain, can he? It wouldn't be so hard for little girls, for
they don't mind sitting still so much."
This, I think, is how he talked, musingly, with none of the old vehement
revolt of voice and glance that still lingers with me as the most vivid
interpretation of his personality.
"I can't believe any boy was ever like that queer little fellow. I
wonder, if grandpa knew I wanted it very much, would he bring out that
book and read it all over again to me. I want to see if it's realler."
I drew my arms away from his neck, and ran off screaming for nurse to
drive into town, and tell grandpa to come and read about a sick little
boy to Stevie.
Nurse came to him, ready to do his slightest behest. I still see her
standing looking at him anxiously, and see lifted to her that awful
quietude of gaze, out of a face sharply thinned so suddenly.
"Bring me some gingerbread-nuts and lots of pipes to blow bubbles with,"
he said, and I felt the childish request soothed nurse's alarm.
"Faith, an' ye'll have them galore, my own boy," she cried, "if nurse
has to walk barefoot to Dublin for them."
Mary Jane's mother came over to stay with us while nurse drove off to
town. Stevie knelt in his eternal position, with his cheek against his
open palm and cushions piled around him. He did not speak, but stared
out of the window.
I went and sat with "Robinson Crusoe" on the window-ledge, to watch
nurse's departure and wave my hand to her. Not to wave my hand from the
window and blow kisses to her would be to miss the best part of the fun
of this unexpected incident.
The world outside rested in the unbroken stillness of noon. When nurse
was out of sight, I turned to acquaint Stevie with the fact. His eyes
were shut. So he remains in my memory, a kneeling statue of monumental
whiteness and stillness.
A strange way for a little lad to die! Not a sigh, not a stir of hand or
body, not a cry, no droop of head or jaw. A long, silent stare upon the
sunny land, lids quietly dropped, and then the long unawakeable sleep.
To my thinking it was an ideal close to a short life of such unrest and
pain and misery. It was indeed rest robbed of all the horrors of death.
The horror remained for one who loved him, and this was no blood
relative, but an ignorant nurse. Mary Jane's mamma came to see how
matters were with the children. Stevie, as I thought, still slept,
kneeling with his cheek upon his palm, and elbow resting on a cushion
between it and the table. She looked at him quickly, flung up her hands,
and trembled from head to foot. Then she bethought herself of me, and
ordered me to go and sit with my book in the garden, and keep very
still.
That was a long afternoon. I thought nurse would never come back. I had
looked at all the pictures, spoken to each flower, hunted for ladybirds,
and solaced myself with operatic diversion. Now I wanted to go back to
Stevie, but the door was shut against me and the blinds were all drawn
down, though it was not night--the sun had not even begun to dip
westward.
Judge my delight to catch the sound of wheels along the road. I raced
down to the gate to meet nurse and see all the wonders from town.
Grandpa was not with her, and she came up the little path swinging her
basket blithely.
"They knew the book at once, and I've got it--'tis by a man called
Dickens. Your grandpa and mamma will come to-morrow and read it.
They're giving a grand party to-night. Such a power of flowers and
jellies and things. But the pipes I've brought Stevie in dozens and
gingerbread-nuts galore."
Then her eye fell upon the blinded windows, and the colour flew from her
blooming rustic face. She was nearly as white as Stevie inside. She
flung away her basket, and the pipes, the book, and cakes rolled out on
the gravel, to my amazement. More wonderful still, she broke out in wild
guttural sounds and whirled around in a dance of madness.
I had never seen a grown person behave so oddly, and it enchanted me. I
caught her skirt and began to spin round too in an ecstasy of shrill
sympathy. She looked down at me in a queer wild way, as if she had never
seen me before and resented my kindness, and then she cast me from her
with such unexpected force that I fell among the flower-beds, too
astounded to cry. Decidedly, grown-up people, I reflected, are hard to
understand.
I had given up wondering at all the unusual things that happened the
rest of that day. People kept coming and going, and spoke softly, often
weeping. Nobody paid the least attention to me, though I repeatedly
asserted that I was hungry. Then at last a comparative stranger took me
into the kitchen, and made me a bowl of bread and milk. She forgot the
sugar, and I was very angry. Big people often do forget the essential in
a thoughtless way.
Men, too, came pouring in, and talked in undertones, looking at me as if
I had been naughty. I resented those looks quite as much as the unwonted
neglect of my small person, and was cheered, just upon the point of
tears, by the appearance of Mary Jane, who invited me to go home and
sleep with her that night.
I did not object. I never objected to any fresh excitement, and I was
fond of Mary Jane's brindled cat. But why did Mary Jane cry over me and
treat me as a prisoner all next day? She managed to keep me distracted
in spite of her tears, and I slept a second night with the brindled cat
in my arms, quite happy.
The second day of imprisonment did not pass so well. I was restless, and
wanted to see Stevie again. I wanted several things that nobody seemed
to understand, and I moped in a corner and wept, miserable and
misunderstood. On the morning of the third day I could bear my lot no
longer. I scorned Mary Jane's hollow friendship, and ran away without
hat or jacket.
Outside nurse's gate knots of villagers were gathered in their best
clothes. It looked like Sunday. I ran past them and shot in through the
open hall-door. Nobody saw me, and I made straight for Stevie's room,
which he never left before noon. I felt a rogue, and smiled in pleased
recognition of the fact. How glad Stevie would be to see me!
The door was ajar, and I entered cautiously. On Stevie's bed I saw a
long queer box with a lid laid beside it, and there was quite a quantity
of flowers, and tapers were lit upon a table beside the bed. Was Stevie
going away? But what use were candles when the sun was shining as
brightly as possible?
I wanted to see what was inside the box, and drew over a chair which
enabled me to climb upon the bed. Anger shook me like a frenzy. To put
sick Stevie in a horrid box! Whoever heard of such a monstrous thing? It
was worse than any of the dreadful things the wicked fairies did in
stories.
They had taken care, I noted, to pad the box with nice white satin to
make it soft; and they put a pretty new nightgown, with satin and white
flowers all over it, on Stevie. All the same, I was not going to be
softened by these small concessions of cruel people. Stevie I supposed
to be in a bewitched sleep, like the poor princess, and I was determined
to save him. I did not blame nurse. I imagined she was down-stairs in
enchanted slumber too. I would save her afterwards.
After calling passionately on Stevie, touching his face, which was
colder than stone, I slipped my hands over him down the sides of the
box, nearly toppling in myself in the energy of labour.
I see myself now, with pursed lips and frowning brows, panting in the
extremity of haste. At last my hands met under the poor narrow
shoulders, and I proceeded to drag the body out of the box.
I had nearly accomplished the feat, and Stevie's head and one arm hung
over the side, when the door opened and my stepfather stood upon the
threshold, dazed with horror, I can now believe. His look so terrified
me that I clambered down from the chair, with an inclination to cry.
"What have they done to Stevie?" I gasped, as I saw him gently lift back
the dark head and desecrated limb.
My stepfather's eyes brimmed over, and he took me into his arms,
murmuring vague words about heaven and angels, with his wet cheek
pressed upon mine. This was how I learnt that Stevie was dead.
Chapter IV.
THE LAST DAYS OF HAPPINESS.
After the vivid impression of Stevie's death, the days are a blank.
Memory only revives upon a fresh encounter with my kind.
A little boy, a friend of my parents, was sent down to nurse's to gain
strength by a first-hand acquaintance with cows' milk and the life of
the fields. Louie was an exciting friend. He had the queerest face in
the world, like that of an old and wrinkled baby's, for mouth a comical
slit, and two twinkling grey eyes as small as a pig's. His hair was
white, and he grinned from morning till night, so that, like the
Cheshire cat, he rises before me an eternal grin.
He taught me a delightful accomplishment, which afforded me
entertainment for several months--the repetition of nursery rhymes. He
possessed a book of this fanciful literature, and his private store as
well was inexhaustible.
We spent a day of misery together once because he could not remember
the end of one that began--
"There was an old man who supposed
The street door was partially closed."
For nights I dreamed of that old man, and wondered and wondered what
happened because of his error about the street door. I beheld him,
grey-haired, with a nightcap on his hair, with a dressing-gown wrapped
round him and held in front by one hand, while the other grasped a
candle, and the old man looked fearfully over his shoulder at the door.
I must have seen something to suggest this clear picture, but I cannot
tell what it was.
Sometimes his face underwent all sorts of transformations, resembled in
turn every animal I had ever seen and several new monsters I was
unacquainted with. The eyes changed places with the mouth and the ears
distorted themselves into noses. Before I had done with him, he had
become quite a wonderful old man.
Our great amusement was to repeat the rhymes in a way of our own
invention, taking turns to be chief and echo. This was how we did it:--
_Louie._ "There was an old man of the
_Angela._ Hague
_Louie._ Whose ideas were extremely
_Angela._ vague.
_Louie._ He built a
_Angela._ balloon
_Louie._ To examine the
_Angela._ moon,
_Louie._ This curious old man of the
_Angela._ Hague."
My passionate admiration of the courage of the young lady of Norway made
me always insist on taking the principal part when it came to her turn.
The neighbors used to drop in of an evening, and add the enthusiasm of
an audience to our own. They were specially proud of me as almost
native-grown, and my eagerness to show off the attractions of the young
lady of Norway generally resulted in my suppressing Louie's final rhyme.
This was what we made of it:--
_Angela._ "There was a young lady of
_Louie._ Norway
_Angela._ Who occasionally sat in the
_Louie._ doorway;
_Angela._ When the door squeezed her
_Louie._ flat,
_Angela._ She exclaimed, 'What of
_Louie._ that?'
_Angela._ This courageous young lady of
_Louie._ Norway."
Poor Louie, I learnt years afterwards, went to the dogs, and was
despatched to the Colonies by an irate father. He was last heard of as a
music-hall star at Sydney.
What sends bright and laughing children forth to a life of shame? Louie
was the kindest little comrade on earth, unselfish, devoted, and of a
tenderness only surpassed by my nurse's. Was this not proved when I
began to droop and pine, missing the picture of Stevie kneeling on his
sofa and staring out of the window?
I cannot say how long after Stevie's death it was before this want broke
out as a fell disease. I worried everybody about the absence of that
tragic face, and plied nurse with unanswerable questions. Neither Mary
Jane nor the brindled cat, not even the applewoman and her tempting
trays, nor the pond, nor my new terrier-pup that often washed my face,
had power to comfort me.
I went about disconsolate, and was glad of a listener to whom it was all
fresh, to discourse upon heaven and the queer means that were taken to
despatch little children thither--an ugly box, when wings would be so
much prettier.
Louie listened to me as I, with a burning cheek, told the roll of my
sorrows and unfolded my ideas of the mysteries that surrounded me.
Louie was not an intelligent listener, but he made up for his deficiency
by an exquisite sense of comradeship. He would hold my hand and protest
in the loudest voice that it was a shame, the while I suspect his mind
ran on those nursery rhymes. But he loved me, there can be no doubt of
that. I think he meant to marry me when we grew up.
I know when illness and a dreadful cough overtook me, he would let me
lie on the floor with my head in his lap, while the exertion of coughing
drew blood from my ears and nose. This too, he cried, was an awful
shame.
I once saw him watch me through a convulsion with tears in his eyes, and
I was immediately thrilled with the satisfaction of being so interesting
and so deeply commiserated. It filled me with the same artistic emotion
that followed my appreciation of the melancholy of my wordless singing.
Deep down in the heart of childhood--even bitterly suffering
childhood--is this dramatic element, this love of sensation, this vanity
of artist. So much of childhood is, after all, make-believe, unconscious
acting. We are ill, and we cannot help noting the effect of our illness
upon others. The amount of sympathy we evoke in grown-up people is the
best evidence of our success as experimental artists with life. Even
when we cower under a bed to weep away from our kind, we secretly hope
that God or our guardian angel is watching us and feeling intensely
sorry for us; and our finest conception of punishment of cruel elders is
their finding us unexpectedly dead, and their being consumed with
remorse for their flagrant injustice to such virtue as ours.
Who can limit the part as admiring audience a child condemns his
guardian angel to play? For him, when humanity is cold and
unobservant--as humanity too often is in the eyes of childhood--does he
so gallantly play the martyr, the hero, the sufferer in proud silence.
For his admiration did a little sister of mine once put her hand in the
fire. She thought it was heroic, like the early Christians, and hoped
her guardian angel would applaud, while common elders shouted in angry
alarm.
Ah, never prate so idly of the artlessness and the guilelessness of
children. They are as full of vanity and innocent guile and all the arts
and graces as the puppies and kittens we adore.
How much, for instance, had the hope of praise and admiration to do
with Louie's magnanimous kindness in that affair of the gipsies? I lay
ill and exhausted from coughing on the sofa when he rushed in, panting
with eagerness, to tell me that the gipsies had arrived over-night and
were camped on the green, where they had a merry-go-round. I had never
seen a gipsy, but Mary Jane had, and she often told me the most
surprising things about them--how dark they were, how queerly they
spoke, and how romantic they looked, like strange people in story-books.
Of course I pined to see them, and the thought that I was chained to my
sofa, when outside the world was all agog, and rapture awaited happier
children upon the green, filled my eyes with tears.
I turned my face to the wall and wept bitterly. My heart was heavy with
the sombre hate of Cain, and when I looked gloweringly at the blest
little Abel by my side, he looked quite as miserable as my evil, envious
heart could desire. His comic face underwent a variety of contortions
before finally he made up his mind to blurt out an offer to forego the
pleasures of the green, and stay with me.
But I was not a selfish child, and generosity always spurred me to
emulation. Besides, I was already greatly comforted by the extent of
Louie's sympathy, so I ordered him off to see the gipsies, and come back
and tell me what a merry-go-round was like.
Still I did not mend, in spite of all nurse's care and tenderness, and
it was decided to remove me to town. This was the decision of my
stepfather, who was probably nervous since Stevie had dropped out of
life in that quick and quiet way.
How well I remember the last day among all my dear friends! Mary Jane,
Louie, and I, hand in hand, walked about all our favourite spots. The
applewoman gave me an entire trayful of crab-apples, and wished I might
come back with my rosy cheeks. I asked her to kiss me, and then she
thrust a bun into my hand, and said huskily, "God bless you, my little
lady!"
We went across to Mary Jane's, and I had a conviction that my heart was
broken. I was going away into the land of the ogres and witches, and
though I should probably be happy at last, since all things come right
in children's tales, vague terror held me at the prospect of the unknown
trials that awaited me. Mary Jane's mamma gave me raspberry vinegar and
my tears mingled with the syrup. I asked to be let look once more at
the views of New York, and then asked her if she would feel very sorry
at my death.
They were still consoling me, and I was sobbing wildly in the arms of
Mary Jane's mamma, while Louie relieved his stricken soul by protesting
repeatedly that "it was an awful shame," when nurse and Jim Cochrane, in
his Sunday clothes, came to carry me off to the car. All the village
flocked to see me off, and breathed cordial love and benediction upon my
departure.
Kindly Irish peasants, with their pretty speech and pretty manners! Is
there any other race whose common people can throw such warmth and
natural grace into greetings and farewell? Big-hearted, foolish,
emotional children, upon whose sympathetic faces, at their ugliest,
still play the smiles and frowns, the lights and shadows of expressive
and variable childhood. How they cheered and soothed me with their kind
words, their little gifts, their packages of comfits and posies, a
blue-and-white mug with somebody else's name in gilt letters upon it,
and a tiny plate with a dog in a circle of fascinating white knobs.
This was the end of my brief sovereignty. Though of those old
associations, for which I was destined to yearn so passionately many a
year, memory may have become so dim as to leave only a trace of blurred
silhouettes upon an indistinct background emerging from a haze of
multiplied experience, I like to think that I owe to that bright start
the humour and courage that have served to help me through a clouded
life.
Chapter V.
MARTYRDOM.
It would seem that happiness imprints itself more clearly and more
permanently upon the mind than misery. Beyond a sense of enduring
wretchedness, I can recall very little of my home life.
My sisters had a big play-room at the top of the house. Here they had
ladders, which they used to rest in the four corners and climb up,
pretending they were climbing up great mountains. They were much more
learned than I in the matter of pretence and games. They knew all sorts
of things, and could pretend anything. They had been to the pantomime,
and could dance like the fairies. One of them had a brilliant
imagination, and told lovely stories. In the matter of invention I have
never since met her equal in children of either sex; but she was apt to
carry experiment too far, for reading of somebody that hanged himself by
tying a handkerchief round his neck and attaching it to a nail on the
wall, she immediately proceeded to test the efficacy of the method upon
the person of a pretty stepsister of four, whom she worshipped.
The child was beginning to turn colour already at the moment of rescue,
and then followed the solitary instance of my stepfather's punishing one
of us.
But my sisters were not kinder to me than my mother. I was an alien to
them, and I loved strangers. They could not understand a sensitiveness
naturally morbid, and nurtured upon affection. It was impossible that
they could escape the coarsening influence of my mother's extraordinary
treatment and neglect of them.
Left to grow up without love or moral training, cuffed and scolded,
allowed illimitable liberty from dawn to dark, they were more like boys
than girls. They never kissed one another or any one else. They were
straightforward, honest, rather barbarous in their indifference to
sentiment, deeply attached to each other under a mocking manner, vital,
and surprisingly vivid and individual for children. There was not a
particle of vanity or love of dress amongst the lot, though beauty was
their common heritage. Their fault was that they never considered the
sensibilities of a less breezy nature; that they were rough, unkind,
for the fun of the thing, and could never understand the suffering they
inflicted upon me.
One of their fancies, seeing how I shrank from hardness of touch or look
or voice, was to teach me how to run away from a ghost.
It was a very high house, with several flights of stairs, and two of
these inquisitors would take me between them, and tear me at a running
pace down the whole length of stairs, my heels lifted from the ground,
and only the tips of my toes bruised against each stair. At night I
would go to bed aching with pain and terror, and sob myself to sleep,
yearning for the faces and sights and sounds that had passed out of my
life.
Ah, what tears I shed in that strange home! To have cried in childhood
as I cried then, incessantly and for months, sometimes for the greater
part of the day under a bed, that none of these mocking young creatures
might see me and laugh at me; to have stood so intolerably alone among
so many, without a hand to dry my eyes, a kiss to comfort me, a soft
breast against which I could rest my tired little head and sob out my
tale of sorrow,--this is to start permanently maimed for the battle of
life. What compensation can the years bring us for such injustice?
Could any possible future paradise make up to us for infancy in hell?
There are faces that stand out upon memory with some kindness in them
for a pitiable little outcast. Chiefly, of course, my stepfather, who
was as serviceably good to me as a man's unreasoning terror of a woman's
temper permitted him to be. He saved me from many a cruel beating, and
when I seemed more than usually miserable, he would, with an air of
secrecy and guilt that charmed me, himself help to fasten on my hat and
little coat, and carry me out upon his business calls.
They used to represent me to him as a dangerous small devil, describing
my outbursts of fury but suppressing the provocation; and I once heard
him exclaim angrily--"I am sick of these complaints of Angela's temper.
When she is with me she is better behaved and gentler than any of them.
You can twist an angel into a devil if you worry and ill-use it."
I know now that he suffered for his partisanship of me, and that he
forsook my cause at last from sheer weariness of spirit and flesh. He
thought it better for his own peace to leave me to the mercies of my
mother, concluding probably that I should not be worse off.
Our home must have resembled the American man-of-war in the vicinity of
which, the French Admiral wrote, nothing was heard from morning till
night but the angry voices of the officers and the howling of trounced
sailors. Up-stairs in their play-room the children were happy enough,
but to venture down-stairs was the hardihood of mouse in the
neighbourhood of lion. One or the other, for no reason on earth, but for
the impertinent or irrational obviousness of her existence, was seized
by white maternal hands, dragged by the hair, or banged against the
nearest article of furniture. My mother never punished her children for
doing wrong; she was simply exasperated by their inconceivable
incapacity to efface themselves and "lie low." To show themselves also
in her vicinity was an intolerable offence which called for instant
chastisement.
Servants have been known to fly to the rescue. Once when I came home
from a walk, one of the nurses complained in my mother's hearing that I
had wilfully splashed my boots with mud. Instantly I was grasped, and
the mystery to me to-day is how I survived such treatment. One of the
servants, a delicate, fair young man, called Gerald, rushed up-stairs,
scarlet with indignation, and tore me from my mother's hands. I have
forgotten what he said, but he gave her notice on the spot in order to
express himself more freely.
Once, again, I was rescued by a young lady in a silk gown of many
shades. Her face is a blank to me, but I distinctly remember the green
and purple lights of her shot-silk gown, and the novel sound of her
name, Anastasia Macaulay. She had come to lunch that day, and had taken
a fancy to me, which was quite enough to excite my mother. The scene is
indistinct. I sat on Anastasia's lap, playing with her watch-chain, and
suddenly I was on the floor, with smarting face and aching back.
Anastasia saved me from worse. She sent me a picture-book and a doll,
but never entered the house again.
Chapter VI.
GRANDFATHER CAMERON.
The unhappiest little child that ever drew breath has immediate
compensations between the dark hours undreamed of by elders. One of the
persons that lent the relief of sparkle to those sombre months, and by
whose aid I wandered blithely enough down the sunny avenues of
imagination, which, like a straight road running into the sky, lead to
Paradise, was my Scottish grandfather.
Grandpapa was a sombre-visaged little gentleman, not in the least like
his formidable daughter. He had very dark eyes, and he often assured me
that Stevie got his beautiful red-brown hair from him. I needed the
assurance pretty frequently, for grandpapa's hair was white. He proudly
drew my attention to the fact that there was not a bald spot, however.
In all ordinary matters of existence, grandpapa was of a happy facility.
He tolerated every error, every crime, I believe, except a false note or
an inferior taste in music. He loved me, not because of the accuracy of
my ear, for I had none to speak of, but because of my instinctive
passion for music. Still, in middle life, I can say there never has been
for me a grief that could resist the consolation of music well
interpreted.
If grandpapa found me in a corner white and dejected, he asked no
questions,--he wished to be in ignorance of his daughter's domestic
affairs, which was the reason, I suppose, he so sedulously avoided the
society of my stepfather--but he took me off with him to hear music or
singing somewhere. In winter he took me to the pantomime, and we sat in
the pit, and he indulged me with an orange to suck.
In the Dublin season he took me to the Opera or the Opera-Bouffe with
equal readiness. Sometimes there were morning or afternoon concerts, and
I sat out with exemplary gravity sonatas and concerts or part-singing,
and woke up to genial comprehension of the ballads and simple melodies.
Grandpapa had one great charm. He never spoke to me as a child, and I
rarely understood the tenth of his talk. That was why, no doubt, as a
personage grandpapa appealed so delightfully to my imagination. He was a
mystery, a problem, a permanent excitement. A month or a year--perhaps,
to be more accurate, a month--would elapse without my seeing him, and
then suddenly he would again enter the chaos of dreams and visions, a
smiling dark-eyed old gentleman, with a long black cloak flung round his
shoulder and a slouched felt hat that left revealed his abundant white
hair.
He would place a finger on his lip and say, "Hush!" so mysteriously,
looking round the room. How well I, who lived in such fear of my
mother's presence, understood that attitude and look.
I have since been assured that grandpapa was a harmless lunatic. If so,
he made lunacy more attractive to a child than sanity.
"Hush! I have that to say to you, child, which common ears may not hear.
These people call me Cameron. But, Angela, my real name is Hamlet. I was
born at Elsinore. I will take you to Elsinore some day. It is far away
in a country called Denmark. You yourself, Angela, look like a Dane,
with your yellow hair and blue eyes. Come, there is a concert at
Earlsfort Terrace. They play Bach. I will take you."
Could anything be more calculated to win a child's esteem and reverence
than this assertion that the world knew him by a false name?--that he
was really quite another person from the person they believed him to be?
Then, what sonorous words, Hamlet, Elsinore! Denmark I liked less--it
sounded more like an everyday place--but Elsinore was as good as a
fairy-tale in its awful beauty.
I asked him if you went in a ship over the sea to Elsinore, as Mary Jane
told me you went to America; and when he nodded and said "Yes," I got to
imagine there was no common sunlight on the sea as the ship crossed it
to Elsinore, but the lovely white light I had seen at the theatre when
the fairies danced, and all the people in the ship wore beautiful
garments of white and green gauze, and there was soft music all the way,
and the water shone like silver.
What I could not understand was why I should be a Dane because my eyes
were blue, when grandpapa's, who was so obviously more of a Dane than I,
were black. But grandpapa always frowned, and an odd flame shot into his
mild glance, if you asked him questions.
He gave you facts, and expected you to make what you could of them. He
was unreasonably proud, I thought, of his Scottish blood, all the same.
He was a Highlander, he said, while my grandmother, he explained
contemptuously, was a Glasgow lass. My uncle Douglas, he added, favoured
his side, while my mother was a blonde Ferguson. Pity it was an
intelligent little girl like me did not take more after the Camerons;
but I had my uncle Douglas's nose, and with a Cameron nose I need never
fear the future.
This was surely an excess of faith on my grandfather's side not
justified by experience. He had been only saved from the poorhouse by a
thrifty and judicious if hard-hearted wife, while my splendid uncle
Douglas, with his curly head of Greek god, had wandered from debt
through every expensive caprice, and was drowned sailing a little
pleasure-boat on one of the Killarney lakes at the inappropriate age of
twenty-four.
The Cameron nose has done as little for his young brother, my uncle
Willie. I have always loved the image I have made to myself of my
boy-uncle Willie, chiefly, I suppose, because of his brilliant promise
and early death; but largely, I believe, because not only grandpapa
Cameron, but others who remember him, tell me I resemble him in
character and feature.
They say it was his death, coming so soon after the blow of uncle
Douglas's doom, that turned my grandfather's brain. Willie had been
articled to a well-known architect, who, being musical like my
grandfather, was interested in his musical friend's bright-faced and
witty lad, with about as much knowledge of music as a healthy puppy.
This lamentable deficiency, however, brought about no disastrous clash
between master and pupil.
The distinguished architect loved Willie Cameron for his good-humour,
his industry, his quickness, and his impromptu jingling rhymes. He made
everything rhyme with a delicious comic absurdity, even the technical
terms of his profession, and in consequence no one was jealous of the
master's preference for his funny Scottish pupil. You see, he was so
much more of an Irish than a Scottish lad. Born on Irish soil, he seems
to have inherited the best of native virtues, and was universally
beloved. Even his eldest sister, who never sinned on the side of
tenderness, could not speak of uncle Willie without a smile.
So there were universal congratulations when Willie, barely of age, got
his first commission. No one accused the architect of favouritism,
though the first commission of a son could not have been of greater
moment to him. Uncle Willie posted triumphantly off to the country, and
the master told him to telegraph for his presence in the event of doubt
or difficulty. The season was wet, and uncle Willie reached his inn that
night drenched and shivering. They put him into damp sheets. The next
day was no drier, and uncle Willie drove off on a car in the rain. It
was his last drive alive. Ten days later what remained of him was driven
to the cemetery amid plumes and crape and white flowers.
It was curious that while grandpapa Cameron was always ready to speak of
his handsome son Douglas, of Willie, whom he loved best, he only spoke
to me once,--that was when he showed me an indefinite boy's picture, and
curtly told me it was my uncle Willie's portrait, and added, dreamily,
that I was the only one of his grandchildren who resembled Willie.
That fact, perhaps, had more to do than my musical proclivities with his
preference for me. He would give me five-shilling pieces from time to
time, and beg me "not to mention it." I took the pieces gratefully,
pleased with their brightness and largeness; but I own I found pennies
more useful. A child can buy almost anything for a penny, but the only
use of a silver five-shilling piece seemed to me to be able to look at
it from time to time. Had I known anything of arithmetic, I might have
calculated how many pennies were contained in these big silver pieces,
and have changed them for an inexhaustible store of my favourite coin.
But I was not clever enough to think of this, and by the time I was sent
across the sea to school in Warwickshire a year later, I had as many as
six five-shilling pieces in a box, which then did stout service in
supplying cakes and sweets on the scarce occasions I was allowed to make
such needful investments.
Grandpapa Cameron lived in a little cottage out of town, with a long
back-garden, where he spent his time cultivating roses. He had a
disagreeable old cook and a red-nosed gardener, and he saw no society
but a couple of priests, who took it in turn to drop in of an evening to
play cribbage.
On Sunday he went to the one church where Mozart's and Beethoven's
masses were sung. Once a new hardy organist with a fanciful French taste
introduced Gounod.
My grandfather's face changed. He cocked an indignant ear, turned
abruptly in his seat facing the altar, and looked long and angrily up at
the choir. The horrid and sentimental strains of Gounod continued, and,
unable to bear it any longer, my grandfather clapped his hat over his
eyes, with a disregard for the religious prejudices of his neighbours no
less brutal than the new organist's disregard for his musical
sensibilities.
He walked out of church, and meditated upon his protest for a week. When
I mention my belief that my grandfather had only become a convert from
Scottish Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism because of Mozart's and
Beethoven's masses, it will be recognised what a desperately serious
matter for him was this impertinent introduction of light French music
into church.
He succeeded in gathering a cluster of musical maniacs, one of whom was
his friend the distinguished architect. The four planted themselves,
with arms folded and furious purpose in their eyes, not in the least
like Christians come to Sunday prayers, but like heroes bent upon
showing an uncompromising front to injury. They heard in silence the
opening roll of the organ, then the thin sweetness of Monsieur Gounod's
religious strains filled the church, and the faithful sat up to listen
to the Kyrie Eleison.
A distinct and prolonged hiss burst from the lips of the four musical
maniacs, and my grandfather began to pound his stick upon the floor with
an eloquence that left no one in doubt as to how he would treat the
organist's head if he had it within reach. The officiating priests
glanced round in surprise and astonishment. People rubbed their eyes,
and wondered if they were dreaming.
There sat the four maniacs, hissing, booing, knocking their sticks on
the floor, and "ohing" as they do in the House of Commons. Surprise was
effaced in consternation, and a priest came down to the miscreants from
the altar.
"Let that fellow stop his French nonsense and we'll stop too," shouted
my grandfather. "I've been coming to this church for the past
twenty-five years, and during that time have paid bigger fees than any
of my neighbours. Why? Because there was a decent feeling for music
here. Because you respected yourselves and gave us the best. But if
you're going to degrade yourselves and follow an ignoble fashion and
adopt French fads--well, sir, I swear I'll wreck the church--I will
indeed."
The fight ended in my grandfather's defeat, and he never put his foot
again into church. He carried his indignation so far as to insult an old
French acquaintance, Monsieur Pruvot, the manager of a large wine house.
Still sore upon the triumph of Gounod, he was accosted affably by
Monsieur Pruvot, who cried out to him, waving his hat--
"How do you do, my dear Monsieur Camerone?"
"My name's Cameron, and I'm Mister, none of your damned French
Monsieurs, Mr. Pruvot," roared my grandfather, pronouncing the mute _t_
of the Frenchman's name with a vicious emphasis.
It is easy to imagine the amazement of the Frenchman, in ignorance of
the Beethoven-Gounod episode, and who until then had always found my
grandfather a genial and inoffensive neighbour. He made, by way of
insinuating concessions to wrath, a complimentary remark upon "this
charming little town of Dublin," pronouncing it in the French way.
"We call it Dublin, sir. Yes, I've no doubt it is a finer town than your
native Bordox. I see no reason, sir, why we in Dublin should treat your
town with a courtesy you, residing here, deny ours. If you can't learn
to say Dublin, we may well decline to say Bordeaux. A very good morning,
Mr. Pruvot."
Poor grandpapa Cameron! This was his last battle on earth, either in the
interests of Beethoven or Dublin. A few days later he was found in bed
with his face to the wall--dead.
Chapter VII.
PROFILES OF CHILDHOOD.
The flow of the day in my city home is lost for me. But pictures and
portraits stand out, sometimes blurred, sometimes surprisingly distinct,
upon a confused background. There was food enough for curiosity and
dreaming in the pauses of suffering. I must have lived for several days
in an enchanted world solely by the single glimpse I had of my
godfather.
He had sent me a present of a book about cocks and hens, largely
illustrated. I was sitting in the store-room poring over it in the
dreary society of Mrs. Clement, the new housekeeper. The previous one,
Mrs. Dudley, I remember vaguely as a stern unsympathetic person, with
crimped iron-grey hair under a voluminous cap trimmed with puce ribbons.
She once forced me to swallow a Gregory-powder in a delusive snare of
black-currant jam. I must have swallowed medicines before and since, and
yet the taste and smell and look of that nauseous powder are still with
me whenever my mind reverts to those days. Hence my delight when I
learned that Mrs. Dudley was going away, and my cordial welcome of her
successor, Mrs. Clement.
"So she's in here," somebody cried, rapping with a stick upon the door
ajar.
I looked up from my book and saw a wonderful sight, of which I was
afterwards vividly reminded in a French school by a picture of the
famous "Postillon de Longjumeau," a jaunty figure with a pointed black
beard and a tall wide-brimmed hat on one side. He bore himself
gallantly, wore top-boots, a long coat with several little capes to it,
and carried a smart riding-whip in his hand. This was my godfather.
I had never seen him before, and to my lasting regret I have never seen
him since. He was out in '48, was proscribed, and had wandered about
strange lands. He died in China, having first sent my mother a pretty
case of Imperial tea, which she distributed in minute portions to all
her friends, measuring the tea out with a small silver egg-cup. As fast
as each consumed her portion, she returned for another, and as my mother
had always a greater pleasure in giving than in receiving, my
godfather's present was soon exhausted.
I remember being swung up in the air and shrieking in pretended fright,
for children, sensational and dramatic little creatures, must persuade
themselves there is an element of peril and adventure in their tamest
diversions. Not to imagine oneself afraid is to miss the peculiar zest
of enjoyment.
When I was seated gravely on his knee, my godfather asked me to spell
out a few lines of his book.
"Cocks and hens--eh? Just suit a little girl from the country," he
laughed, helping me to hold the book.
"I had a little dog at Mamma Cochrane's. I liked it better than cocks
and hens," I protested meekly.
"Wants a dog now, does she? Queer little woman! She's still too pale,
Mrs. Clement, much too pale and thin. Fretting for her Mamma Cochrane, I
suppose. Well, I'll see if I can't get her a nice dog with curly hair,
that'll cry 'Bow-wow' when you pull its tail. Know where China is,
missy?"
I had heard of a china doll, and my Mamma Cochrane had two beautiful
black-and-white china dogs. I supposed at once that China was a land
where the dogs and dolls were all of china, and I wondered if the
people were of china too. My godfather laughed as only a big man with a
beard seems to be able to laugh. I was sure you could hear him down in
the hall and up in the nursery. It was very comforting, that loud laugh,
and I became instantly communicative, and told him all I knew about
America and New York. He said it took a much bigger boat to go to China,
which was farther off than New York, and that there were crocodiles in
the rivers that ate men, and there was so much sunshine that the people
were quite yellow.
After that, whenever it was unusually sunny, I was safe to astonish
somebody by saying I supposed it was always like that in China. Somehow,
the image of my jovial godfather was melted in a great glare of yellow
light, through which yellow faces came and went, up and down long
rivers, where unknown monsters, understood to be crocodiles, tossed
about in a ruthless quest of man.
Mrs. Clement, the housekeeper, is another portrait that stands out in
luminous relief from a crowd of unremembered faces. Her dress was
seemingly as unalterable as a uniform. It consisted of a black silk
gown, very wide at the base and gathered in at a slim waist, a white
lawn fichu trimmed with delicate lace, and fastened with a gold brooch
containing the features of a young man with a dark moustache.
I never dared to ask her who the young man was. She was kind to me, but
she kept me at arm's-length by her terrible sadness, and infant
curiosity was the last thing she encouraged. Her face was pale, her thin
yellow hair was pale, and her blue eyes were pale. Those faded hues
suited the melancholy of her smile and regard.
Seeing me persecuted and unhappy, she took me under her protection, and
would let me sit for hours at her feet in the storeroom, while she
mended linen.
I read to her, and when I was tired of reading I told her stories of my
past. Like grown-up mourners, it relieved me to talk of my sorrow and
describe the paradise down there beside the pond and the applewoman's
stall.
She listened with mild interest, and I was not so engrossed in my own
troubles as not to remark the sadness of Mrs. Clement. The children
up-stairs were sure she had committed some dreadful murder, and was
brooding in remorseful reminiscence. They did not like her, because she
once scolded them for their treatment of me; but nothing they could say
would induce me to think ill of my melancholy friend, and I continued
to sit at her feet and watch her in wonder and awe.
Her niece Eily came into our service shortly afterwards. She had a
beautiful fresh face like a wild-flower, made up of sweet dark-blue
eyes, a blossom of a mouth, and morning hues upon her cheek. She was a
girl made to beguile sense and sternness, and transform the lion to a
lamb. Everybody immediately loved her, she had such a delicious way of
saying "Ah, sure!" and lifting up a pair of the most Irish of eyes in
bewitching appeal.
My parents adopted her as a sort of daughter, and a mere hint of a lover
at her heels was enough to wake the Quixote in my stepfather. They
married her afterwards to a promising young Englishman, my father giving
her away and my mother supplying the trousseau.
The Englishman was so enamoured of all things Irish that he gave the
most flagrantly Hibernian names to his children, in opposition to Eily's
romantic tastes, who adored every out-of-the-way name of fiction. When I
met them, years afterwards, his affected drawl and pretty suspicion of
lisp managed to give a foreign charm to our common name "Paddy," by
which the eldest boy was called.
Eily's face was just the same wild-flower, a little faded and drawn,
and "Ah, sure!" was still on the tip of her tongue in all the beguiling
glamour of Erin. But what a sad change! Tears looked fatally near the
surface, and the smile was deprecating and anxious.
She had fallen from petted servitude into troubled servitude, and longed
for the clatter of her aunt's household keys among the linen and china
and preserve-presses of the storeroom. She longed for my stepfather's
cheery "Well, Eily, little puss," and instead had to listen to an
exacting husband's complaints of her deficiencies as housekeeper and
sick-nurse. He had married a bird, and grumbled incessantly because it
lacked the solid capacities of a cow.
"And your aunt, Eily?" I asked.
"Poor aunt died long ago. She never recovered the death of her only
child, Frank, who was drowned going out to America."
So the young man in the brooch was Mrs. Clement's son, after all, and
her melancholy, that had so puzzled my childhood, was not the gloom of
remorse but the stamp of a common bereavement.
By the side of my grandfather's avenue of rose-trees ran a neighbour's
garden. My grandfather was on nodding terms with his neighbour; but
there sometimes came a bright-faced lad with a flaxen down upon his
upper lip. His name caught my fancy, and I thought a fairy prince could
not have a finer one. It now represents to the world a figure so very
different from the vague but pleasant profile memory likes to dwell
upon, that I permit myself to doubt if that kind boy and the O'Donovan
Rossa of New York can be the same person.
The stripling I recall seems to me to have been eternally singing or
whistling. I specially remember one song he was fond of--"Love among the
Roses."
He would look across the low hedge and sing out, "Where's my little
wife?" I kept it as a delightful secret from all the world that I was
married to a boy called O'Donovan Rossa. The world is a cold confidant
in such delicate matters, and has a way of looking as if it did not take
little children seriously.
But O'Donovan Rossa had a little sister of his own whom he loved
devotedly, so he knew all about little girls and their ways, and
appeared to understand my conversation. So few grown-up people do
understand the conversation of children, and children know this.
He would spring over the hedge just like a mythical personage, and
tumble unexpectedly on the grass-plot beside me, and my daisy-chains
were matter of absorbing interest to him. Then what stories he had about
blue dragon-flies, humming-birds, and bewitched crows! You may imagine
if I looked forward to visits to grandpapa Cameron's cottage, with such
a prospective attraction.
I did not disdain the rougher friendship of Dennis, my grandfather's
gardener. He was a cheery individual with a very red face. He once gave
me an orange and a penny when I arrived with cheeks and eyelids swollen
from crying, with a conviction that I could bear my sorrows no longer. I
ate my orange, and suddenly the world seemed brighter, and when I went
off alone to purchase a pennyworth of crab-apples at a fruit-shop hard
by, I began to take pleasure at the thought of to-morrow.
I was further consoled by one of grandpapa's shining five-shilling
pieces, and then Dennis called me to fetch him a tool, shouting, "Look
sharp now, and do something for your living," and I was so enchanted
that all sense of desolation and ill-usage left me.
It is so easy to make a child happy that it is a mystery to me how the
art is not universal with grown-up persons.
Among the blurred memories of days so remote is a ball given in the big
town house. The excitement could not but reach us up-stairs beneath the
stars. The nurse and housemaid were equally aflame, and stood watching
the guests from the corner of the topmost landing, that commanded a
glimpse of the drawing-room lobby. The rustle of silk and the sort of
perfumed chatter that belongs to gatherings in full dress reached us,
broken and vague like the beautiful fancies of dreams. Our little feet
pattered with yearning to be down below in the thick of social
pleasures, and we shouted out our recognition of each side face as a
guest crossed the lobby. It was not the brilliant assortment of silks
and satins and laces, the gleam of jewelled array, or the chatter that
intoxicated me; it was the first blast of music that rolled up to us,
and the penetrating charm of the fiddles.
I was always less looked after than the others, and watching my
opportunity, I slipped down-stairs in my nightdress; I felt I must hear
those fiddles nearer, and see how people looked when they danced. Mrs.
Clement saw me a few steps above the drawing-rooms, and wanted to carry
me back to bed; but I prayed so hard for one look, that she took me into
her arms, and, skirting the lobby, went in on tip-toe to the cardroom,
at the top of the drawing-rooms, where several persons were playing at
little tables. Some of the guests looked up at the melancholy lady in
black silk with the little child in its night-dress, staring in
bewilderment at them. But Mrs. Clement placed her finger on her lips,
and they smiled at me and continued their play.
They were playing "Il Bacio," and even now I can never hear that
tinkling waltz without a throb. It brought tears to my eyes then, and
all night it formed the accompaniment of my dreams. The only couple I
clearly saw in that paradise of colour, light, scent, and sound was my
stepfather, who whirled past us with a tall dark girl in amber satin,
who was smiling most radiantly as she danced.
This girl springs into my pictures of childhood in an odd inconsequent
way. She was very handsome, of the sparkling brunette type, with white
teeth, and hard bright eyes as black as the hair that rippled low down
on either temple, and was caught under the ear in an old-fashioned bunch
of ringlets. She was under my mother's protection, who was very kind and
generous to her, having an inscrutable liking for strangers,--above
all, needy strangers. She was a woman to turn her back inevitably upon a
friend in prosperity, and court him in poverty. There was nothing of the
snob in my mother, I must admit.
Another vivid picture I have of this young girl is a gloomier and more
impressive one. I cannot tell why I was chosen for that drive. I suppose
it was because I looked so delicate and unhappy that my stepfather
insisted on having me. He drove a pair of spirited horses, and I sat
opposite my mother and the dark young girl. She did not smile once that
day, and the extreme sadness of her face riveted my attention. I thought
I had never seen any one so beautiful and interesting, and I wondered
why her eyes kept continually filling with tears.
She and my mother whispered mysteriously from time to time, and the
disconnected words that reached my ears were no enlightenment for my
puzzled brain. Ordinarily I was too dreamy or too excited to have much
curiosity for my fellows. I preferred my own thoughts to speculations
upon creatures so dull and undiverting as big people. But this day it
was different. A brilliant young lady in long dresses, with a glittering
ring upon her finger, whom my parents treated with every kindness and
consideration, could be just as miserable apparently as a small
neglected girl. It was truly a wonderful discovery.
We drove along the Kilmainham road, I now know, and as we went farther
north, the pretty girl's tears flowed more freely, only she did not cry
as we children cry. She bit her lips, and every moment thrust her
handkerchief angrily into her eyes. My mother seemed to scold her for
having wished to come that way, and I thought wanted to divert her
attention from something the girl was evidently anxious to see.
We stopped near a large building, and there was my stepfather turned
towards us and talking a strange jargon. From dint of puzzling over each
word, I arrived at the extraordinary conclusion that somebody this young
girl loved was in prison, that it was not wicked apparently to be locked
up in prison, and that the woodwork they were gazing at, my stepfather
with his hat in his hand, was something bad men were getting ready for
her friend's destruction. The young girl stared up at the woodwork with
streaming passionate eyes, and then buried her face in her handkerchief,
and rocked from side to side in a dreadful way. We were driving on, and
I gazed up to see what my stepfather was doing. He, too, was wiping away
tears, and his hat was right down upon his eyes.
The mystery was solved years afterward. This girl was engaged to a
political prisoner recently condemned to death. My mother used to take
her to see him at Kilmainham Jail, and she had insisted on being driven
round by the prison the day before the execution.
My grandmother lies farther back, a fainter picture in that world of
unsatisfactory grown-up people. While she lived, her favourite present
to each of her granddaughters was either a grey or green silk dress,
with a poky bonnet and ribbons to match. In the grey we must have looked
like little Quakeresses, and in the green like a gathering of the
"gentle people" out of the moonlit woods, our proper dominion.
Her I remember indistinctly as a thin-lipped, unpleasant-looking woman,
who had a fixed opinion that children must either be "saucy" or "bold."
I was bold, because I was always too frightened of her to say anything,
saucy or meek.
She used to lie in bed or on the parlour sofa, sipping egg-flip and
reading religious books. She was very devout; but her religion, I
suspect, served neither to brighten her own nor any one else's life. It
had a sombre, vinegary aspect, more concerned with punishment due than
pleasure merited, more attuned to severity than Christian mildness.
By some unaccountable process she melted out of my existence, having
darkened it for some months, from which I infer that her death passed
unnoted by me or was not explained to me. I did not see her dead, and
can record no gentle deed of hers living. She never kissed me, but
sometimes shook my hand in a loose gentlemanly fashion, and exhorted me
not to be so "bold."
Once she nearly broke my heart. The cook had made some damson jam, and
while I was alone in the parlour turning over the leaves of one of
grandpapa's music-books, which looked so mysteriously wonderful to me,
she carried in a specimen bowl, and left it on the table with some loose
coppers. I still see that bowl. It was white, and had a wreath of pink
roses.
When I tired of my music-book, I wandered by a natural impulse into
temptation. The bowl was out of my reach, but I soon remedied that by
drawing over a chair and climbing upon it. I dipped my finger into the
bowl, and then put it into my mouth. It tasted, as indeed I fully
anticipated, good. You may imagine the alacrity with which I continued
the operation, without any heed of the blotches of jam that dropped upon
the table.
Both the hall-door and parlour-door were open, and I heard loud sobbing.
I was acquainted with sorrow myself, which was a reason I never heard a
child's cry unmoved. I slipped off my chair, and ran out into the hall.
A ragged little follow sat on the doorstep, crying as if his heart would
burst. I raced down the steps, and sat by his side to comfort him. He
had cut his foot, and I asked him if it would not hurt less if he had
some apples to eat. Crab-apples always soothed my own immeasurable woes
and lightened the pangs of solitude for me. The weeping boy looked at me
sullenly, and nodded.
In I flew again and came out with the coppers grasped in my jammy palm,
and holding the bowl of damson jam tightly wedged between my pinafore
and both hands.
"There's splendid jam here," I said, and invited the sufferer to dip his
finger into the bowl.
He did so, and stopped crying. He was quite consoled, and nearly emptied
the bowl in the avidity of his appreciation. Then I gave him the
coppers, and told him the name of the shop where he could get lots of
the nicest crab-apples. The hall-door was still open, and the parlour
was empty when I carried back the bowl. I left it on the table, and went
out into the garden to talk to Dennis.
I had no idea of having done wrong. At nurse's I was free to take what I
liked, and I was not at all familiar with the sin of stealing. Judge,
then, my surprise when cook came out for me with a flaming face, and
assured me I "would catch it." I stopped playing, and felt chill with
apprehension. What was going to happen to me now? Grandpapa was not
there to protect me, and I had not much faith in Dennis's power to save
me.
Cook dragged me up-stairs, scolding me all the way. She called me a
thief, a robber, and said I was worse than the dreadful highwaymen they
wrote of in books. I whimperingly protested. I was not a thief, I cried
indignantly; I was not a robber. I did not know what a highwayman was,
but I was sure I was not that either.
"Ah! you'll catch it," was all cook deigned to reply.
How grossly and wickedly mismanaged children are by people who do not
think or stop to study them! So many tears and tremors and moments of
black despair, because angry and impatient persons will not take the
trouble to use the right words and correct with justice and sense. To
abuse an ignorant little child in disproportionate language, at an age
when imagination exaggerates and magnifies everything, for an impulsive
action and an inconsequent error, and tell her "she would catch it," is
surely a hideous perversion of strength and power.
Relatively speaking, that moment was not less vivid and awful for me
than the worst hour of a heretic in the days of the Inquisition. And I
had as little faith in the justice or kindness of my judges as any
wretch of those times.
My grandmother sat in bed with her glass of egg-flip in her hand,
presiding relentlessly over my castigation. Again I was informed that my
crime was an appalling one. I had robbed money and robbed jam. There was
no softening of my grandmother's face when I said, through my sobs of
terror, that I only took the money to give it to a little boy that had
hurt his foot and was crying. Cook administered an unmerciful whipping,
as if there were not beatings enough for me without cause down in the
big town house I hated.
No, verily; there are times, when I look at happier children to-day and
remember that poor unhappy little child of years ago, I feel there are
wrongs we cannot be expected to forgive, scars no time can efface,
blunders no after good will ever rectify. I could weep to-day as
bitterly for that little child, so alone, so throbbing with untamed
fears, as ever she wept for herself then.
Chapter VIII.
REVOLT.
I do not know how long my martyrdom in the town house had endured before
I resolved to make an end of it myself. Nor do I yet quite understand
how the scene that led to an excess of misery so terminated began.
I had been more contented that day than usual. The nurse had let me sit
by the nursery fire while she bathed and dressed the latest addition to
our family circle, a baby boy with a pink wrinkled face. Compared with
that gurgling morsel of humanity, I felt very wise and old indeed. After
that the nursemaid came and took me on her knee, and while perched there
she sang me a song. I slept in the next room, and was not often allowed
into the nursery, or I am sure the nurse and nursemaid would have made
life easier for me.
Then I wandered into the play-room, and here great doings were afoot.
They were getting up a transformation scene. On the top of each ladder
a little girl sat, representing a fairy, and in the middle of the room a
small child lay with a white cloth about her. When somebody clapped
hands she sprang up, caught her skirts in either hand, and began to
dance as she had seen the fairies in the pantomime.
They were all in high spirits that day, and let me look on without
snubbing or laughing at me. Like all creatures unaccustomed to much
mercy, this small favour filled me with joy, and I expanded upon a whiff
of social equality.
Children resemble dogs in their dislike of intruders, and to these young
people I daresay I, with my sulky miserable face, pale and woe-be-gone
from association with sorrow and from unassuaged longing for other days,
was an unattractive enough intruder. One there was who always resented
my appearance in their midst more than the rest, my mother's favourite,
the five-year-old queen of the establishment. My mother used to call her
queen, and tell her that she was at liberty to do what she liked to me,
as I was only a slave.
What a surprising amount of good must lie at the bottom of a nature so
trained, that it ever developed into good-natured and generous
womanhood! But to expect that the child in those days should have been
other than a little vixen to me, would be to expect the impossible.
The play was interrupted for dinner, and after dinner the troop marched
up again to the play-room to resume their game. I stayed down-stairs,
and stole into the storeroom to talk to Mrs. Clement. Near tea-hour she
sent me on some message, and that, of course, was a proud moment for me.
Children love to be sent on messages between their elders. They
instantly become as inflated as a general's aide-de-camp, and hardly
need a horse in imagination to place them in their own esteem above the
level of other children.
How it all came about I know not. The queen and the slave encountered
somewhere on the way. We met like two young puppies and snarled. The
queen had a despotic notion of her own rights. She might snarl at me,
but I had not the right to reply. If she struck me it was part of my
punishment for being in her way, and my duty was to bear it.
I don't suppose she reasoned this way any more than the young puppy does
when it flies at the throat of a mongrel it dislikes. Anyhow, she struck
me. I was a proud, fierce little devil, and being two years her senior,
I laid her low, with an ugly red stain on her white cheek.
As I do not remember how it began, so I do not recall how it ended.
There is a dark blank of several hours--centuries it seemed to me--and I
was in my cot sobbing myself to sleep, and telling myself that I could
not bear it, and to-morrow would run away to my dear everyday parents.
Next morning I sullenly submitted to be dressed and taken down to
breakfast. But the red-and-white bowl I ate my bread and milk out of no
longer delighted my eye, and no amount of sugar could take the taste of
bitterness out of that bread-and-milk. My stepfather came into the room,
and looked at me in reproachful silence. Usually he kissed me and flung
me up to the ceiling. But now that the poor miserable little worm had
turned and struck the idol of the house, his own child, he had no kind
word for me. He only knew of the affair what he had been told, and how
many thoughtless big people can understand what goes on in the hearts of
sore and lonely babies?
He may have noted the sadness of my face, but what did he know of the
inward bruise, the hunger for love and sympathy, the malady of life
that had begun to gnaw at my soul at an age when other little girls are
out racing among the flowers in a universe bounded and heated and
beautified by the love of mother and father?
Mrs. Clement must have been very busy, for she did not come to comfort
me. Perhaps she, too, thought I was a fiend. But I was too proud to seek
to explain matters to any one. If they wanted to believe I was bad, they
might think I was as bad as ever they liked.
In my open-worked pinafore and little house slippers, bare-headed and
bare-armed, I stole anxiously down-stairs. The baker was carrying in the
bread, and the hall-door was open. This was my chance, and I seized it.
Ah, there were the wide long streets, and however cruel the big people
might be who went up and down them, at least they could not hurt me, for
I did not belong to any of them.
Like a frightened hare I scurried along the pavement until I came to a
big crossing. I paused here in new peril. To go over alone meant to risk
contact with the wheels and horses continually rolling and stamping by.
I had not the courage to do this, and I stood gazing disconsolately
across at the happy people walking so unconcernedly on the other side.
While I stood there a policeman marched up in a leisurely fashion. He
looked as if he might help a little girl, and I knew when robbers
attacked you the proper person to assist you was a policeman.
"Please, Mr. Policeman, will you take me across the street?" I asked,
going boldly up to him.
The amiable giant put out his hand, grasped my eager fingers, and I
pattered along at his side as he gravely led me over the crossing.
Without a word, I raced ahead; the quicker I ran, the quicker I believed
I would reach Mamma Cochrane's house, and my dear friends, nurse, and
Louie, and Mary Jane.
In what direction I ran I know not to-day; I seemed to have been running
down interminable streets for hours and hours, till at last my feet in
their thin slippers began to ache. Gradually my legs stiffened, and it
was less and less easy to continue running. Nobody stopped me, but I
have an idea many stared at me. I hardly knew which I most feared, to be
overtaken and carried back to my mother, or to be let die of hunger in
those big unfriendly streets. Either prospect seemed so terrible to me
in a moment of lucid vision, that I at once dropped upon a doorstep and
began to cry.
"What's the matter, little lady?" a tall policeman asked, with a smile
of insidious kindliness.
"I want to find my everyday mamma so badly," I sobbed. "But it's so far
away,--I'm very tired, and nobody is sorry for me, though I'm so
unhappy."
I gazed anxiously up into the face of the big policeman, and wondered if
such a very big person could possibly understand and pity the sorrows of
such a very small person as myself.
"What's your name?" asked the big policeman.
"Angela."
"And where do you live, missy?"
"Oh, a drefful long way off--in a big house down there," pointing
vaguely in front of me, "in a horrid big house, without any fields or
flowers at all."
"Won't you come along with me, missy?" coaxed the policeman, and if he
had asked me to go to prison with that look and smile, I would
cheerfully have gone, I think.
He lifted me into his arms and carried me, I know now, to the nearest
police-station. Here I was installed upon an inspector's knee, and an
army of giants stood round me and made much of me. How the gentlemen of
the force may appeal to others, I know not, but I must ever regard them
as my kindest friends. They petted me prodigiously, and vied with each
other in providing me with luxuries. One held a piece of bread-and-jam
for me, another a slice of bread-and-honey, and various hands held out
sweetmeats and cakes and apples. The thing was to satisfy everybody and
devour each delicacy successively.
The amiable giants smiled upon me, and appeared to listen to my
confidential chatter with admiration and delight. Out of the gloom of
the domestic circle I could be expansive to rashness. Between bites, I
told them the tale of my private grievances, and they shook sympathetic
heads over my account of Stevie's disappearance in a queer box, and
dropped their jaws when I, charmed with the sensation I had made,
assured them that I too was so miserable and lonely that I would like to
be put in a box and sent to heaven. I would much rather go back to Mamma
Cochrane's than anything; but if I could not find her I would like to
die like Stevie, unless the policemen would take care of me and let me
stay with them always.
The inspector was ready to adopt me on the spot; meanwhile, as I was
tired and the excitement had worn off, he encouraged me to fall asleep
on his knee, which I was nothing loath to do.
The rest is a vague memory. Somebody shook me, and I opened my eyes and
saw my stepfather smiling at me. I thought I was at home, and rubbed my
eyes, and then sat up. But I was still in the inspector's arms--I
recognised his black cap and grey beard. My circle of friendly giants
had vanished; but on a table beside me were heaped unfinished slices of
bread and jam and honey, gingerbread nuts, shrewsbury biscuits, bulls'
eyes, brandy balls, sugar-stick, and apples. A couple of policemen stood
at the door and grinned in eloquent assurance of continued friendship,
and the inspector had not released his comforting clasp of my wearied
body.
"Papa, I'm so happy here. Don't let us go back any more to Sunday mamma.
Let us stay here always with the nice policemen."
My stepfather laughed his joyous cordial laugh, and caught me in his
arms. He shook hands with the inspector and the policemen, and carried
me into a cab. I was still too sleepy and tired to whimper, and we had
hardly set off before I was fast asleep on my stepfather's knee.
Chapter IX.
MY FRIEND MARY ANN.
Seven has been described as the age of reason. I am curious to know why,
since many of us at fifty can hardly be said to have attained that rare
and sublime period. John Stuart Mill, for his misfortune, at seven may
have discovered some rudimentary development of sense, but no other
child of my acquaintance past or present. But if seven is not marked for
me by the dawn of reason, it is important as the start of continuous
reminiscence.
Memory is no longer fragmentary and episodic. Life here begins to be a
story, ever broken, ever clouded, with radiant hours amid its many
sadnesses, quaint and adorable surprises ever coming to dry the tears of
blank despair and solitude; an Irish melody of mirth and melancholy, all
sorts of unimaginable tempests of passion and tears, soothed as
instantaneously as evoked, by the quickening touch of rapture and racial
buoyancy. Mine was the loneliest, the most tragic of childhoods, yet I
doubt if any little creature has ever been more susceptible to the
intoxication of laughter, more vividly responsive to every mirthful and
emotional claim of life.
After my singular and enchanting experience of the police-station,
where, as a rule, the hardened instruments of justice are not permitted
to show themselves in so gracious and hospitable a light, it was decided
to expatriate the poor little rebel beyond the strip of sullen sea that
divides the shamrock shores from the home of the rose. There, at least,
vagrant fancies would be safely sheltered behind high conventual walls,
and the most unmerciful ladies of Mercy, in a picturesque midland town
of England, were requested to train and guide me in the path I was not
destined to adorn, or indeed to persevere in.
Pending the accomplishment of my doom, I was removed from the centre of
domestic discord and martyrdom to the suburban quiet of my grandfather's
house.
This decision had its unexpected compensation. The cross old cook, whom
I had not seen since the day I stole her bowl of damson-jam, had
disappeared to make way for Mary Ann, the divine, the mysterious, the
sublime, the ever-delicious Mary Ann. Where did she come from, whither
has she vanished, the soother of the sorrows of those most lamentable
days?
Alas! now I know the secret of her enchantment, of those perishable
surprises of mood and imagination that so perpetually lifted me out of
my miserable self, diverted me in my tragic gloom, and sent me to bed
each night in a state of delightful excitement. Mary Ann drank punch,
and on the fiery wings of alcoholism wafted herself and me, her
astonished satellite, into the land of revelry and mad movement. How
ardently, then, I yearned for the reform of poor humanity through the
joyous amenities of punch. Had my grandmother up-stairs consumed punch
instead of her embittering egg-flip! Had the ladies of Mercy, my future
persecutors, drunk punch, the world might have proved a hilarious
playground for me instead of a desperate school of adversity.
Mary Ann possessed a single blemish in a nature fashioned to captivate a
lonely and excitable child. She worshipped my uncle Lionel. My uncle
Lionel was his mother's favourite--a Glasgow lad, my grandfather
contemptuously defined him, without the Cameron nose; a fine, handsome,
fair young fellow, the picture of my mother, extremely distinguished in
manner and appearance, and reputed to be a genius. He is said to have
written quantities of superlative verse which he disdained to publish;
but as nobody ever saw even the manuscript, we may regard the
achievement as apocryphal. He had finished his studies in Paris, which
explained a terrifying habit, whenever he met me--frightening the wits
out of me the while by his furious look--of bursting out into what I
afterwards learnt to be an old French song: "Corbleu, madame, que faites
vous ici?"
I wish grown-up persons could realise the shudder of terror that ran
through me and momentarily dimmed for me the light of day, when I heard
that loud voice, encountered the mock ferocity of that blue glance, and
then felt myself roughly captured by strong arms, lifted up, and a
shaven chin drawn excruciatingly across my tender small visage. These
are trifles to read of, but what is a trifle in childhood? A child feeds
greedily upon its own excesses of sensation, thrives upon them, or is
consumed by them. To these early terrors, these accumulated emotions,
these swift alternations of anguish and rapture, which made opening
existence for me a sort of swing, perpetually flying and dropping
between tears and laughter, from radiant heights, without transition, to
pitch darkness, do I attribute the nervous illnesses that have so
remorselessly pursued me in after-years. The wonder is the mind itself
did not give way.
Big language for a handsome young man with a blonde moustache and an
elegant figure to have provoked, with his Corbleu, madame! his
theatrical fury, and his shaven chin. He now and then gave me a shilling
to console me, which shilling I spontaneously offered to Mary Ann, whose
real consolation it was, since it filled the steaming glass for her and
my friend Dennis, the red-nosed coachman, and permitted me to sit in
front of them, a grave and awed spectator of their aged frolics.
Immoral undoubtedly, yet that evening bumper of punch converted Mary Ann
into a charming companion. She and the fire in front of us--for it was
on the verge of winter--cheered me as I had not yet been cheered since I
had left my kind Kildare folk. The tyrants sat above in state, while I,
enthralled below, listened to Mary Ann, as she wandered impartially from
legend to reminiscence and anecdote, and not infrequently burst into
song and dance.
Her sense of hospitality was warm and unlimited. Dennis she welcomed
with a "Troth an' 'tis yourself, Dennis, me boy." For me she placed a
chair opposite her own, and sometimes, in the midst of her enjoyment,
stopped to help me to a spoonful of the stimulating liquid from her
tumbler, remarking with a wink that it brightened my eyes and
considerably heightened my beauty. It certainly made me cough, sputter,
and smartened my eyelids with the quick sensation of tears, and then she
would meditatively refer to the days when she too was young, and had
pink cheeks and eyes the boys thought were never intended for the
salvation of her soul. I was a curious child, and was eager for an
explanation of the dark saying, on which Dennis would chuck my chin,
with the liveliest of sympathetic grimaces across at the irresistible
Mary Ann, which made the saying darker still, and Mary Ann would fling
herself back in her chair convulsed with laughter.
"Ah, Miss Angela, 'twas the devil of a colleen I was in thim days, most
outrageous, with a foot, I tell ye, as light as thim cratures as dances
be moonlight. Sure didn't I once dance down Rory Evans in the big barn
of Farmer Donoghue's at Clonakilty, when there was that cheering, I tell
ye, fit to lift the roof off the house."
At this point she invariably illustrated the tale of her terpsichorean
prowess in a legendary past by what she called "illigant step dancing,"
and endeavoured to teach me the Irish jig. She observed with indulgent
contempt that I showed a fine capacity for the stamping and whirling and
the triumphant shout, but I failed altogether in the noble science of
"step dancing."
But what I preferred to the dancing, exciting as it was, were the
ghost-stories, the legends of banshees, the thrilling and beautiful
tales of the Colleen Bawn and Feeney the Robber. Those two were for long
the hero and heroine of my infancy. Gerald Griffin's romance she, oddly
enough, knew by heart. I forget now most of the names of the persons of
the drama, but at seven I knew them all as dear and intimate friends:
the forlorn young man who wrote those magic lines, "A place in thy
memory, dearest"--did even Shelley later ever stir my bosom with fonder
and deeper and less lucid emotions than those provoked by those tinkling
lines, breathed from the soul of Mary Ann upon the fumes of punch?--the
perfidious hero who once, like Mary Ann, drank too much and danced a
jig when he ought to have been otherwise engaged, Miles, Anne Chute, and
the lovely betrayed Eily.
I knew them all, wept for them as I had never wept for myself, and was
only lifted out of a crushing sense of universal woe when Dennis
produced an orange, which was his habit whenever he saw me on the point
of succumbing under alien disaster.
Sometimes, to entertain my hosts, I would volunteer to warble my strange
symphonies, and was never so ecstatically happy as when I felt the tears
of musical rapture roll down my cheeks, when Dennis, by way of applause,
always observed lugubriously--
"Ah, 'twas the poor master was proud indeed of her voice. 'She'll be a
Catherine Hayes yet, you'll see, Dennis,' he used to say, 'or maybe
she'll compose illigant operas.'"
Alas! I neither sing nor compose, and listen to the singing and the
music of others with unemotional quietude. So many different
achievements have been fondly expected of me, that I have preferred the
alternative of achieving nothing. Better demolish a multitude of
expectations than build one's house of the perishable bricks of a single
one!
Preparations for my departure around me must have been going on, but I
perceived nothing of them. I vaguely remember daily acquaintance with a
dame's school in the neighbourhood, whither Mary Ann conducted me every
morning. But remembrance confines itself to the first positive delights
of a slate and pencil. Next to my own operas and Mary Ann's stories, I
could conceive nothing on earth more fascinating than a certain slate,
after I had arduously polished it, a slate-pencil, and leisure to draw
what I liked on the blue-grey square. There were little boys and girls
on the benches before and behind me, but I only see myself absorbed with
my new pleasure, making strokes and curves and letters, and effacing
them with impassioned gravity.
Chapter X.
THE GREAT NEWS.
A grown-up young lady, with yellow ringlets, in a black-and-white silk
dress, paid a visit to my grandmother one day, when I heard myself
described as "bold and saucy,"--heaven knows why, since I never uttered
a word in that formidable presence, and felt less than a mouse's courage
if I but accidentally encountered those severe black eyes. The young
lady offered to show me her dolls. I never cared for dolls, and I went
without enthusiasm. It was my first glimpse of girlish luxury. The room
in which her treasures were kept seemed to me as large as a chamber of
the palaces of story. There were trains, carriages, perambulators, about
two dozen dolls of all sizes, with gorgeous wardrobes; there were beds,
bonnets, parasols, kitchen utensils, dear little cups; babies in long
clothes, peasants, dancing-girls, and queens with crowns on their heads
and long cloaks. The young girl was one of the many extinguishable
flames of my uncle Lionel, destined, like Goethe, to sigh for one, and
then another in sentimental freedom, and end in bondage of an execrable
kind. She is blurred for me, but that palatial doll's chamber and all
those undreamed-of splendours remain still a vivid vision, like the
lovely pantomime, whither Dennis took me with his pockets full of
oranges to suck between the acts. Oh, that bewildering paradisiacal
sight of the fairies! the speechless emotions of the transformation
scene! the thirst, the yearning, for short muslin skirts, and limelight,
and feet twinkling rapturously in fairyland! The humours of the clown
and the harlequin left me cold; for, being acquainted with the extreme
tenderness of the human body through harsh experience, I could not
understand the pleasure the clown found in continually banging and
knocking down the harmless harlequin. Each unprovoked blow left me
sadder and more harassed. I felt the old man must be very much hurt, and
wondered why the audience seemed to enjoy his repeated discomfiture so
hugely. But the fairy dancing was quite different. Here was an
untempered joy that did not pass my comprehension. To be a fairy by
night, and possess all the young girl's toys by day! This was the dream
harshly broken by the appearance of my sisters, themselves demure
little fairies in green silk dresses and poky green silk bonnets.
They lured me out among the dead branches, where the robins were
dolefully hopping in search of crumbs, and exclaimed together: "Oh,
Angela, wait till you hear the news!"
What news? Why, I was to go away, across the sea, which was always
awfully wet, like the pond, only bigger and deeper. A ship, they said,
was like those little paper-boats the boys used to make at Kildare, and
you sat in it and rocked up and down, unless a shark came and ate you
up. Somebody told them that the English were dreadfully proud, and
thought no end of themselves, and looked down on the Irish.
"But you must stand up for yourself, Angela. Tell them your father was
king of Ireland lots of hundreds of years ago, and that long ago, when
the kings lived, all your cousins and brothers were red-cross knights."
"What were red-cross knights?" I asked, deeply impressed.
"Oh, they were men who wore long cloaks with red crosses on them, and
rode about on steeds."
"What's steeds?" I breathlessly inquired.
"Horses," was the pettish answer; "only you know they go quicker than
horses, and knights always preferred steeds. And they took things from
the rich and gave them to the poor."
"What things?" I again asked.
"Isn't she stupid? I declare she knows nothing. Why, food and money and
clothes, to be sure. They'll say the Irish are dreadful ignorant and
stupid when they see Angela, won't they?"
A great deal more was of course said between four passionate and voluble
children; but all I remember of that winter afternoon was the stupendous
news that I was going away in a ship soon across the sea to a foreign
land, where I should be submitted to insult, perhaps torture, because I
was Irish, if I were not previously devoured by a shark--a creature the
more terrible because of my complete ignorance not only of its
existence, but of its general features; and the mention of a new animal
was something like the menace of the devil: large, luminous, potent, and
indistinct. I already knew through Mary Jane that there was a Queen who
put Irish people into prison, and entertained herself by hanging them at
her leisure, and that evening I startled Mary Ann out of her senses by
asking her if it was likely I should be hanged in England like Robert
Emmet. And then, in order that she should have a proper notion of the
extent of my acquaintance with Robert Emmet, I stood in the middle of
the kitchen, with my arms strenuously folded, my brows gathered in a
fearful frown to reproduce the attitude of Robert Emmet in the dock, as
depicted in the parlour of Mary Jane's mamma.
"You know the English hanged him 'cause he was Irish," I explained,
extremely proud to impart my information. "Mary Jane told me so. When I
fell into the pond she cried, 'cause she was afraid the Queen would hang
her too."
Mary Ann laughed till she wept, and then drying her eyes, vowed she
would like to see "thim English" touch a gould hair of my head. "If thim
monsthers as much as lay a hand on ye, darlint, you just send me word,
and me and Dennis 'll soon come over and whack them all round."
Perfidious Mary Ann! She failed to keep this large and liberal promise
when, in my sore hour of need, I indited an ill-spelt epistle to her
from Saxon shores, and urged her to come and save me. I did not insist
upon the whacking, I only entreated to be taken back to Erin. Probably
the letter never reached her.
I think that it was immediately after this engrossing hour that I found
Mary Ann sobbing over an open trunk in the lumber-room. "Your very own,
alannah; look at the big white letters," she cried, and wiped her eyes
in a new linen garment before pressing it into the box. "Thim monsthers
can't say as you haven't chimmies fit for any lady of the land. Ye're to
wear a black cashmere o' a Sunday, just as if all your relatives was
dead. Did ye ever hear the likes?"
I certainly never did, for strange to say I had not worn a black dress
after Stevie's death. I did not, however, dislike the notion. Black was
not a hue with which I was familiar. Still musing on all the
extraordinary things that were continually happening, and wondering
whether the eventual climax of an uncertain career would prove the shark
or the gallows, not, however, using this superb word in my reflections
on the end of a little girl precariously balanced on the boards of
existence, I found myself confronted with my terrible grandmother in a
farewell interview.
She was propped up with pillows, and her eternal egg-flip was beside her
on a little table, along with her prayer-book, her spectacles, her
rosary, and her favourite novel, which I afterwards learned was "Adam
Bede." My mind reverted then, and has since often reverted, to an
abominable scene in that chamber I abhored. I had been noisy or
disobedient,--raced down the passage, or refused to go to bed when uncle
Lionel shouted to me from above the kitchen-stairs, probably stamping my
foot with the air of a little fury, which was my sad way in those
untamed days. With a Napoleonic gesture, my uncle caught my ear, and
dragged me into the awful presence. Here he was solemnly ordered to
fetch the knife-sharpener, which he did; heated it among the flames till
it glowed incandescent scarlet; then, my grandmother looking fiendishly
on, gathered me between his knees, held my mouth open with one hand, and
approached it to my lips. Of course it did not touch me, but memory
shrinks, a blank, into the void of terror.
The precise text of my grandmother's address I forget, but the nature of
her harangue is unforgettable. She addressed me as might a magistrate a
refractory subject about to be discharged from a reformatory. I was
exhorted not to be bold, or bad, or saucy, to say my prayers, to tell
the truth, not to thieve (oh! that damson-jam and those coppers), not to
get caught again by the police; I was warned that I might drop dead in
one of my violent fits of rage, and then I would surely go to hell; was
adjured to learn my lessons, to respect my superiors, to break none of
the Commandments, to avoid the seven deadly sins, learn the Catechism by
heart, with the alternative of having my hair cut short and being sent
to the poorhouse. She then held out her yellow hand, and placed a
sparkling sovereign in my small palm.
"Don't lose it. There are twenty shillings in it, and in each shilling
twelve pennies. Good-bye, and don't forget all I've said."
She shook my hand in her loose gentlemanly fashion, as if I were a young
man going to college instead of a baby girl of seven about to be
expatriated alone among strangers, in an alien land, for no conceivable
reason but the singular caprice of her who had given me so ill a gift as
life. It was the last time I saw my grandmother. I heard soon of her
death with complete indifference.
"Polly was a jolly Japanese," sang my uncle cheerily, as he caught me up
in his arms, and carried me down to the cab, on which Dennis had placed
my trunk. Mary Ann was weeping on the steps. She handed me a bag of
gingerbread and two apples, and told me I was not to be "down."
"'Tis yourself that's worth all the English that ever was born," she
asserted, and I dolorously assured her that whatever happened, even if
the Queen came in person to hang me, I would keep "up."
"That's me hearty," roared Dennis, holding the cab-door. "In with you,
and do something for your living."
Uncle Lionel lifted me in, gave me a crown-piece, and to my astonishment
kissed both my cheeks without hurting me. He stood on the pavement,
handsome, smiling, and elegant, as the cab drove off with solitary,
bewildered little me as surely a waif as any orphan. And waving his
hand, he turned unconcerned on his heel.
Chapter XI.
PREPARING TO FACE THE WORLD.
Was it six weeks or six months since I left that big town house, a
disgraced and blighted little being? Time to a child is so unequal a
matter. A month may seem a century, a year appear vaguer than a dream.
Indeed, I have never yet been able to tell myself how long a space of
time actually separated my good-bye to Kildare and my departure for
England. Multiplied experiences combined to mislead me.
Simultaneously with the opening of the cab-door opened the big door of
my stepfather's house, and a group of little golden heads showed in the
dark frame. Feet and hands and voluble lips and eyes played together,
and for a very brief while I enjoyed the sensations of a heroine.
This small world was excited prospectively at the thought of my coming
adventures. I was soon to represent to them the unknown, the elsewhere,
the eternal dream of "far fair foreign lands." Things were to happen to
me that never yet happened to mortal. I was to be snubbed by and to
subdue a haughty people. Perhaps if I did something extremely outrageous
I should be put into prison, with chains round my feet and wrists.
Pending which, I was to travel for several hours by land and several
hours by water.
"She has come already," they shouted gleefully. "Oh, such a dreadful
person, Angela! taller than papa, and the skin is quite tight round her
eyes and mouth as if she couldn't laugh."
She was, indeed, an odd-looking woman, the jailer to whom my parents so
unconcernedly confided me. Not unkind, but austere and grotesque in her
black cap and long black veil. She had left a Tipperary village to
become a lady of Mercy in the English convent, and to her was intrusted
the care of my deported self. In religion her name was Sister Clare, and
the impression she has left on me is that of an inoffensive policeman
masquerading in woman's attire, with limbs too long for a decorous
management of them, honest, cold blue eyes, and, instead of the vivid
hues of life upon the lean cheek, discoloured parchment drawn without a
wrinkle tightly over the high-boned impassible visage.
I had the bad taste to show fright upon sight of her lugubrious garb of
postulant, and like the little savage I was, passionately declined her
proffered kiss; but when my stepfather held me on his knees beside her,
and spoke to her with his charming affability, I let myself be coaxed
into equable endurance of the queer picture. I saw then that she was not
dangerous. Indulgence lurked beneath the austere expression, and if the
glance was cold, it was neither hard nor cruel.
Up-stairs in the nursery the hours passed tumultuously in a frenzy of
discussion. Each little head was busy forging its theory of deportment
and action in circumstances so strange and adventurous as those of a
baby girl going out alone among the sharks and foreigners of a cold
undreamed-of world. The immediate fear was that I should disgrace my
land by my Kildare accent. My eldest sister contemptuously declared that
I talked "just like that disgusting little girl with the oily black
ringlets"; and the imminence of a shower at the abrupt reference to the
dear and absent Mary Jane, so far away, so unconscious of my perils and
terrors and importance, averted an outburst of indignation at the wanton
insult cast upon her picturesque head.
It was regarded as an aggravation of my imperfections that I could not
write, else I might have kept up the lively excitement of my departure
by a raw account of my adventures. But by the time I should have
mastered the difficult art of writing and spelling, I should probably
have forgotten all my wonderful experiences, and they would have lost
all interest in the story of my early travels.
If my mother had been an early Christian or a socialist, she could not
have shown herself a more inveterate enemy of personal property. Never
through infancy, youth, or middle age has she permitted any of her
offspring to preserve relics, gifts, or souvenirs. Treasures of every
kind she pounced upon, and either destroyed or gave away,--partly from a
love of inflicting pain, partly from an iconoclastic temper, but more
than anything from a despotic ferocity of self-assertion. The preserving
of relics, of the thousand and one little absurdities sentiment and
fancy ever cling to, implied something beyond her power, something she
could not hope to touch or destroy, implied above all an inner life
existing independent of her harsh authority. The outward signs of this
mental independence she ever ruthlessly effaced.
And my desolation was great when I found the old wooden box I had
brought up from Kildare empty of all my beloved little relics of a
fugitive happiness and of yearned-for friends. Gone the mug with
somebody else's name upon it, gone the plate with the little white knobs
and the painted black dog, gone my book about cocks and hens, the gift
of that vision of romance, my godfather, swallowed up radiantly in
Chinese yellow. Gone, alas! Stevie's "Robinson Crusoe" and his knife,
and every tiny possession of a tiny sentimentalist, whose heart was so
famished for love and kind words and kisses, and clung the more eagerly
for this to these poor trifles.
I sat on the floor beside my empty box, and refused to be comforted.
These things were to have softened the rigours of exile, might have gone
with me to the scaffold as sustainment and benediction, if I had the
misfortune to rouse the ire of that mysterious being, the Queen, whom
Mary Jane depicted as sitting on a high throne, with a crown on her head
and a knife in her hand for the necks of the unruly Irish.
But I had nothing now to take to bed with me, nothing to hug and weep
over, nothing to tell my sorrows to when the society and persecution of
big people become intolerable. I stood, or rather sat, alone in a
desolate universe, with the violated coffin of my regrets in front of
me. Being worn out with all I had gone through that day, I probably fell
asleep sobbing against the empty box, and night robbed me of any further
sense of misfortune.
Chapter XII.
AN EXILE FROM ERIN.
The next day I was too fully conscious of being the heroine of a
sensational drama, to shed tears over my lonely and miserable self. The
boat left the North Wall early in the morning, so that toilet,
breakfast, farewells were a hurry, a scare, the suspension of feeling in
stunned senses. I scarcely tasted tea, but I looked forlornly at the
lovely red-and-white cups as big as bowls, which I still remember as a
comforting joy to the eye.
All the children around me were stamping and shouting, running every
minute between mouthfuls to see if the cab had come, if my box were in
the hall, and read aloud the label, "Passenger to Lysterby by
Birmingham," in awed tones. It seemed so wonderful to them that I should
be described as "passenger" to anywhere. Not a tear was shed by anybody.
Only war-whoops and joyous voluble chatter and thrilling orders that
rang along the passage like the clarion notes of destiny. Elsewhere
hearts under such circumstances might break. Here they only palpitated
with delight in the unusual, and the whole party was filled with a like
impatience to lead me in triumph down to the cab, not from a heartless
desire to get rid of me, but for the grand dramatic instant of farewell.
They greedily yearned to bundle me into the fatal vehicle, for the
intoxicating novelty of waving their handkerchiefs to me from the
doorstep as the cab drove off.
What might follow for me they did not take into account, having neither
imagination nor tenderness to help them to look beyond a glowing moment.
What would follow for them they were already perfectly aware of: a wild
race up-stairs, and a whole entrancing afternoon devoted to discussing
my departure, voyage, and probable experiences.
My stepfather took me up in his arms, kissed me on both cheeks with his
cheery careless affection, and carried me down-stairs. My mother
followed with a shawl, and a packet containing cold chicken, bread,
cake, and milk.
In the hall the terrible postulant stood waiting for me, and met my
scared look with a quick nod, meant to assure me that although her
aspect might be that of an ogre, she could be trusted not to devour a
little girl. My mother gave her the lunch and the shawl, and told her to
keep me warm, as I was not yet recovered from the effects of
whooping-cough. Through the open door I saw my box on the top of the
cab, and it seemed as if hundreds of shrill young voices were shouting
blithely to me, "Good-bye, Angela." Quantities of soft young lips strove
to kiss me at once, and dancing blue eyes sparkled around me, and gave
me the sensation of being already cast out of a warm circle where my
empty place would not be felt, where no word of regret would ever be
uttered for the unwelcome waif that called them sister.
Without a tear or a word, giving back their joyous "Good-bye" without
sorrow or revolt, I carried my mumbed little heart into the cab, so
alone that the companionship of the postulant offered me no promise of
protection or sympathy, and I never once looked at my stepfather sitting
opposite me.
So I began my life, and so has it continued. Some obscure instinct of
pride compelled me to wave my handkerchief in response to excited waves
of white from the pavement. I looked as if I did not care, and this was
the start of a subsequent deliberate development of the "don't care"
philosophy, which the good ladies of Mercy triumphantly prophesied would
eventually lead me to perdition. To perdition it did not lead me, but to
many private hours of despair and suffering, for which I could claim no
alleviation in the support of my fellows, since I had chosen the
attitude of defiance and "don't care."
Heaven knows how much I cared! what salt passionate tears I wept because
I always cared a great deal too much. But this nobody knew. My pride was
to pass for a hardened reprobate, and such were my iniquities and the
ferocity of that same untamable pride that if I achieved success in
nothing else, here my accomplishment could not be disputed.
I can hardly tell now what were my first definite impressions of a ship
and the sea, for it is difficult to recall the time when either
constituted a novelty for me. If there were truth in the theory of
transmigration of the soul, mine ought to be a remnant of a sailor's, or
a child's born at sea. The big vessel inspired me with no fears, but an
acute sensation of delight. The ropes, the sailors, the shouting, the
wonderful file of porters laden with trunks and portmanteaus, cases and
boxes dropping into mysterious depths with such an awful suggestion of
fatality, the triumphant assertion of our herded insignificance, the
captain's air of deity upon the bridge above, the marvels of the cabins
below, and the little perilous stairs one rather slid than walked down,
and the rapture of climbing up again from the stuffy dimness into the
grey brine-tasting air, to laugh aloud in the intoxication of fear as
the ship rose and fell upon the swell of a choppy grey sea rushing into
the river's mouth.
It was sad to be alone, to be going away at seven from one's land and
home among unknown barbarians; but for one strange hour I was not to be
pitied, so quivering with pleasure was this first taste of adventure.
By-and-by I grew stunned and quiescent, and was glad to sit still,
curled up in some pretty lady's lap, where my cheek rested luxuriously
against soft, warm fur. But for the moment I was too eager to see
everything, follow every curious movement with childhood's wide alert
gaze, hear everything, understand everything.
My stepfather, like a big, good-natured man, humoured me, and we seemed
to travel together hand-in-hand over an entire world, looking at all
sorts of odd things, and listening to all sorts of odd noises. It was
less beautiful, to be sure, but how much more interesting than the
pantomime! I provoked a shout of laughter from a man in a greatcoat
with a tremendous black beard, by clamouring to know where the sharks
were. Before the answer could come, a bell rang sharply, and somebody
sang out "All ashore!"
"Good-bye, Angy, and God bless you! Be a good child, now, and don't
fret," said my stepfather, stooping to gather me to him, and there was a
break in his voice I had once before heard, when he found me with dead
Stevie in my arms.
I can imagine what a piteous little object I must have looked, so frail
and fair and small, standing alone on the big deck, without a hand to
clasp, a fond smile to encourage me, lips to kiss away my tears. But he
was too much of the careless, good-tempered Irishman to allow unpleasant
emotions to trouble him except in a vague and transient way. Now I know
how he would blink away the sad vision, and as he turned from me with a
cheery "Don't fret," he waved his hand encouragingly, and his golden
beard shone brightly in the subdued morning lights. He was a brave
picture at all times, so smiling and handsome, and tall, and big, with
the clearest blue eyes I have ever seen and the most winning of
gestures.
I was straining to watch the last of him, forcing my passage through
skirts and trousers, like an excited mouse, when a lady caught me up in
her arms and held me while I frantically shook my handkerchief, and he
to the last stood on the wharf, kissing his hand and waving his hat to
me, as if I were a grown-up person. I was enchanted with his gallant air
and fine courtesy, and flung him kisses with both hands. Then I buried
my head in the lady's fur, and sobbed as if my heart would break.
Ireland was receding from me, the ship was rocking, there was a sullen
deafening roar of steam, and I could no longer discern the one familiar
figure I gazed for in the dim indistinguishable crowd on the thin, dark
shoreline. The only world I knew was fading fast before my wet glance,
and in terror of another I clasped the strange lady's neck, and shivered
into her soothing furs.
Chapter XIII.
AT LYSTERBY.
A born traveller, the vagabond's instinct of forming pleasant
friendships along the highroads that are buried with the last hand-shake
showed itself on this my first voyage, and has never forsaken me
throughout an accidented and varied career. I might have treasured
sheaves of visiting-cards with names in every language bearing addresses
in every possible town of Europe and Asia and numbers of American
States. On this occasion no names or cards were exchanged between me and
the lady with the sealskin coat. But she adopted me for the hours that
passed until we reached Crewe, when I was ejected from the warm home of
her lap, and cast out into the cold of a winter's night.
She led me by the hand to look again at the ropes and the sailors, and
tumble down and scramble up the companion-stairs, while Sister Clare
groaned and prayed in her cabin. Indeed, I may say that I had forgotten
all about my veiled jailor, and, my tears once dried, prattled
delightedly to this pretty sympathetic creature, whose lovely furs and
wide hat of black plumes and black velvet made of her a princess of
fairyland. Then when the caprices of the sea distressed us in our
wanderings, I fell asleep in her lap, luxurious and happy, being quite
at rest now about the sharks, since my new friend had patiently assured
me there was nothing to fear from them.
I can now imagine what a quaint picture this motherly young lady, with
the softly folding arms and the humid dusky glance, that was in itself
the sweetest of caresses, may have made afterwards of our friendship,
the tenderness with which she would sketch my portrait and repeat my
childish confidences, the pity and indignation with which my forlornness
must have filled her. A child with a home, a mother, a family, cast
adrift on a grey winter's sea! Travelling from one land to another, like
a valueless packet given in charge to a stranger!
I hardly remember our parting. It was late, and I was dreaming, heaven
knows of what,--of the chocolate drops she had given me, or of the dear
little trays of apples Bessy the applewoman sold down at Kildare. Hard
arms securely caught me, and whisked me out of my delicious nest.
Instead of warm fur against my cheek, I felt a blast of black-grey air,
and with a howl of dismay I found myself blinking in the noisy glitter
of a big station. The lady bent her charming head out of the window,
smiling sadly at me from under the heavy shadow of her velvet plumed
hat. I felt that she parted from me reluctantly, and knew that she had
given me a passing shelter in her kind heart.
The night outside seemed bitterly cold without her protecting
tenderness, and I made a stoic effort to swallow my tears, and let
myself be dragged ferociously by Sister Clare, for whom I was merely
baggage, to the Birmingham train. As for impressions, these were
stationary, not going beyond the voice and furs of my new friend, and I
was far too sorry and sleepy and weary to note anything fresh.
Lysterby, I have since been informed, is an ugly little town; but in
those remote, uncritical days it appeared to me the centre of
loveliness. Flowers are rare in Ireland, and here roses, red and white,
grew wild and luxuriant along the lanes. But to an imaginative and
romantic child, a place so peopled with legend and gay and tragic
historical figures could not fail to be beautiful. In one of the common
streets you looked up and saw the painted bust of a medieval knave,
craning his ruffianly neck out of a window-frame, and the fellow, you
were told, answered to the name of Peeping Tom. Instantly the street
ceased to be real, and you were pitched pell-mell into the heart of
romance.
I have not seen the place since childhood; but it remains in memory
blotted, fragmentary, picturesque, an old-fashioned little town, with
spired churches, rough, clean little streets, rare passers-by, never so
hurried that the double file from the Ivies, under the guard of the
austere ladies of Mercy, did not attract their attention, and sometimes
with discomposing emphasis, as when the little street blackguards would
shout after us:--
"Catholics, Catholics, quack, quack, quack,
Go to the devil and never come back!"
I remember the Craven Arms, a medieval inn all hung with roses and ivy,
where my parents stayed when they came to see me, and where my sister
and I slept in a long low-beamed chamber, with windows made of a
surprising pattern of tiny diamond squares and green lattices that
excited our enthusiastic admiration. I remember the bowling-green, that
appeared to roll like a sea straight to the sky, and the long, long
roads with fields on either side, and the great historic ruin that has
given its name to one of Scott's novels.
To me it is impossible to recall the leafy lanes, rose-scented; the
narrow pavements and sleepy little shops; the great pageant, when the
town's legend became for thrilled infants an afternoon of fugitive and
barbaric splendour,--without evoking vague scenes from history, and
marshalling before the mind's eye brilliant and memorable figures. Dull
enough, I have no doubt, for those outside the convent walls, who had to
live its dull life: no discord between the outlying farmsteads and the
scarcely competitive shops; the time of day not too eagerly noted, in
spite of the fame of its watches; and the vociferations of the
newsvendors a thing unknown. But sectarian spirit ran pretty high, if I
remember rightly, and Lysterby was represented in Parliament by a fierce
anti-Catholic, whose dream, we imagined, it was to hang all Jesuits and
deport the nuns. His name was whispered within the convent walls in awed
undertones, as a pagan persecutor may have been spoken of in the
Catacombs by the early Christians. But except the veiled ladies,
romantically conscious of the proximity of persecution, with the joy of
a name to pronounce in shuddering alarm, all Lysterby was at peace, and
free to go to bed with the lambs, with nothing to disturb it in its
morning dreams less melodious than the lark's song. Private wars were of
the usual anodyne and eternal character: Smith the baker not on speaking
terms with Jones the butcher; Grubb the weaver, in embittered monotony
of conviction, supported on unlimited quantities of beer, ready to
assert every evening that Collins the miller, who lived on the other
side of the common, was a scoundrel.
Of the troubles outside we little ones had no time to think. Our
troubles within were abundant and absorbing, and no less absorbing and
abundant were our small joys. There were ten of us only--ten queer,
curious little girls; and one ragged specimen of the trousered sex--a
horrid small boy, the scion of a distinguished house, whom the ladies of
Mercy kept, long past the time, quaintly apparelled in black frocks and
white pinafores, as an injudicious concession to claustral modesty. A
boy of eight in skirts, with long brown curls upon his shoulders!
To suit his raiment, nature made him the greatest little coward and
minx of the lot of us. Beside him I felt myself a brave, a gentleman, a
hero of adventure. He had all the vices I intuitively abhorred. He was
spiteful, a tell-tale, an ignoble whiner; and before I was a month at
the Ivies I was for him "that nasty little Irish girl," whose fine
furies terrified the wits out of his mean little body, whose frank boxes
on a rascally small ear sent him into floods of tears, and whose
masterly system of open persecution kept him ever in alarm, ever on the
race to Sister This or Mother That. How we loathed that boy Frank!
On the other hand, I was speedily as popular as a creature of
legend--not by reason of my virtues, which, by a rare modesty, kept
themselves concealed, but because of my high spirits, untamable once let
loose; my imagination, which incessantly devised fresh shudders for
these timid and unimaginative children; my prodigality in invention, and
my general insubordination.
The cowed and suffering baby of Ireland on Saxon shores at once revealed
the Irish rebel, the instinctive enemy of law and order. I was
commander-in-chief in revolt, with a most surprising gift of the gab; a
satanic impulse to hurl my small weak self against authority on all
occasions, and an abnormal capacity for flying out at every one with
power to do me harm. Whatever may be said of the value of my courage,
its quality even I the owner (who should be the last to recognise it!),
must admit to be admirable. Alas! it was a virtue ever persistently
wasted then as now. While it never procured me a single stroke of
happiness or fortune, it has boundlessly added to the miseries of an
imprudent career.
The start in Lysterby ends my patient martyrdom. Here I became the
active and abominable little fiend unkindness and ill-management made of
one of the gentlest and most sensitive of natures. The farther I
travelled the road of childhood the more settled became my conviction
that grown-up humanity, which I gradually began to loath more than even
I once had feared, was my general implacable enemy. I might have grown
sly and slavish in this conviction; but I am glad to say that I took the
opposite course. I may be said to have planted myself against a moral
wall and furiously defied all the authorities of Church and State "to
come on," hitting in blind recklessness out at every one, quite
indifferent to blow and defeat.
Little Angela of Kildare and Dublin, over whose sorrows I have invited
the sympathetic reader to weep, was a pallid and pathetic figure. But
Angela of Lysterby held her own--more even than her own, for she fought
for others as well as for herself, and gave back (with a great deal more
trouble at least) as much pain and affliction as she endured.
Chapter XIV.
THE WHITE LADY OF LYSTERBY.
Do the ladies of Lysterby continue to train atrociously and mismanage
children, to starve and thwart them, as they did in those far-off days,
so remote that on looking back it seems to me now that somebody else and
not I, a pacific and indifferent woman, content with most things round
about me, lived those five years of perpetual passion and frantic
unhappiness? Or has the old convent vanished, and carried off its long
tale of incompetence, ignorance, cruel stupidity, and futile vexation?
For the seeds of many an illness were stored up in young bodies by
systematic under-feeding, and hunger turned most of us into wistful
little gluttons, gazing longingly into the cake-shops as we marched two
by two through the tiny city, dreaming at night of Barmecide feasts, and
envying the fate of the happier children at home, who devoured all the
sweet things we with our empty little stomachs so bitterly remembered.
Sweet things only! Enough of bread-and-butter would have satisfied our
craving. When one of us sickened and rejected the single thin slice of
bread-and-butter allowed the children at breakfast, oh, the prayer and
expectation of each pair of hungry eyes fixed upon the sufferer, to see
to whom she would offer her neglected slice! The slice was cut in two,
and usually offered, while the nun was not looking, to the children on
either side. This miscarriage of appetite, we noted with regret, more
frequently happened at the two tables of the big girls, where such
windfalls were constantly amplifying the meagre breakfasts of somebody
or other in long skirts. But we were only ten, and our appetite was
pretty steady and never satisfied. Now it taxes all my heroism to visit
the dentist; but then I knew each visit was a prospective joy, for, if I
did not cry, the lay-teacher who conducted me thither always allowed me
to buy a jam-tart, which I ate as slowly as possible in the
confectioner's shop, noting the ravages of my teeth in the cake of
delight with melancholy and dismay. I so loved the recompense that I
used to watch anxiously for the first sign of a shaky tooth, and the
instant it was removed, I was sure to shriek out excitedly--
"You see, Miss Lawson, I didn't cry a bit."
But I would not have it thought that those early school-days were days
of untempered bitterness and constant ache. We were a merry lot of
little savages as far as the authorities permitted us to enjoy
ourselves, and life continually revealed its quaint surprises and
thrilling terrors. I learnt to read with amazing rapidity, and my
favourite books were of a kind liberally supplied by the convent
library--Tyburn, wonderful tales of the escapes and underground
adventures of Jesuits, double walls, spring-doors, mysterious passages,
whitened bones in long-forgotten boxes. Thanks to my ingenuity and vivid
imagination, our days became for us all a wild romance. Relegated to the
infirmary by prolonged illnesses, the result of semi-starvation,
naturally I had leisure to read laboriously various volumes of this
edifying literature.
The infirmary itself was a chamber of legend. It was a kind of
out-building to which led a long corridor behind just the sort of door
my mind was fixed upon, a mere panel that in no way differed from the
rest of the wainscoted wall, the very door for a Jesuit to vanish
through from the pursuit of mailed myrmidons. At the end of the corridor
you went down a flight of stairs, then up another flight into a pretty
little green-and-white room, low beamed, with cozy cots, and long
windows looking out beyond the rose-bushes, and a slip of velvet lawn,
where a terrible-looking and most enchanting alley, with the trees
meeting overhead, seemed to lead straight into the twilight of
ghostland.
It did not take me long to see a white lady slip down that alley, like a
white mist swallowed up in sombre night. No power on earth could have
convinced me that I had not seen a ghost, and I stood at the window
straining my eyes out in waiting for the white lady's return, with both
hands frantically clasped upon my heart, which beat as if it projected a
spring through my throat. White-faced and appalled, I hurried to the
infirmarian, who brought me in something hot to take, and screamed out,
"Oh, I've seen her, I've seen her! she was all in white, a real ghost!"
That night I was in full fever, and my poor silly little story-books
were taken away. But they had done their work, and by the time I was
well again my imagination had wrought out the stupendous fiction that
was to communicate its thrill even to some of the big girls, and send a
dozen of little girls crawling upon their knees and hands, victims of
my imagination. The white lady I conceived to be the ghost of a
beautiful Catholic persecuted in the days of Tyburn. She lived in this
old manor-house, for we knew that the Ivies had been a manor. In her
terror she had flown through the panel-door leading to the infirmary.
The flight of stairs, of course, in those days continued beyond the
floor, and the subterranean passage probably led round by the courtyard
to the gate at the end of the dark alley. I decided that there must be
several whitened bones under the floor of this corridor and the
infirmary, and so convinced all my companions, even Frank, that whining
little cad whom we all so heartily detested, that on play-days, during
the holidays, on Sunday afternoons, every moment we could spend in
secrecy, in turn two of us (companionship was necessary to add to the
excitement of labour and the terrors of consequences) would crawl away
from the rest with penknives and pencils, and assiduously cut away at
the wooden floor until we had made a hole large enough to insert our
little fists underneath. It must be admitted we always found something
hard and white, which proved my theory, and those bits of dry chips we
handled in awe.
For some singular months we lived upon this romance, and lived in it so
intensely that all else became but a dream. Dream-like we accomplished
our tasks, filled our slates with figures, copied headlines, recited
verses, the dates of English history, wrought our samplers, and answered
the responses of the rosary. But our thoughts, ourselves, were
elsewhere, with the next beam to make a hole in, and the assurance I had
given them that I had seen through a chink of the infirmary floor a
white hand like marble. I was the first victim of my own invention, for
I honestly believed all I said. I will not say that vanity was an alien
factor in the unconscious invention. I enjoyed my power, my triumph, the
fear I had inspired and so thrillingly shared--above all, I enjoyed the
popularity it gave me as leader of a band of miscreants.
I do not remember how or why the fever abated. Were we found out and
punished for mutilated planks? We so exaggerated the mystery of our
conspiracy that it would be strange indeed if it were not discovered.
But the end of the romance is completely effaced from memory. It has
left no impression whatever. I see myself in turn frozen and fevered
with terror, digging at every mortal spot of the convent open to the
depredations of my penknife, in a wild hunt for bones and secret
passages and forbidden stairs. I see the whole school enthralled by my
ardent whim. And that is all.
Chapter XV.
AN EXILE IN REVOLT.
What surprises me most when I recall those days is my own rapid
development. The tiny inarticulate pensive creature of Ireland is, as if
by magic, turned into a turbulent adventurer, quick with initiation,
with a ready and violent word for my enemies, whom I regarded as many,
with a force of character that compelled children older than myself to
follow me; imperious, passionate, and reckless. How did it come about?
It needed long months of unhappiness at home to make me revolt against
the most drastic rule, and here it sufficed that a nun should doubt my
word to turn me into a glorified outlaw.
I confess that whatever the deficiences of my home training, I had not
been brought up to think that anybody lied. My mother never seemed to
think it possible that any of her children could lie. In fact, lying was
the last vice of childhood I was acquainted with. You told the truth as
you breathed, without thinking of it, for the simple reason that it
could not possibly occur to you not to tell the truth. This was, I knew,
how I took it, though I did not reason so. I believe it was that villain
Frank who broke a statue of an angel, and behind my back asserted that
he had seen me do it. I had no objection in the world to break forty
statues if it came in the day's work, and so far from concealing my
misdeeds, I was safe to glory in any iniquity I could accomplish. So
when charged with the broken angel, I said, saucily enough I have no
doubt--oh! I have no wish to make light of the provocations of my
enemies--that I hadn't done it.
The Grand Inquisitor was a lovely slim young nun, with a dainty gipsy
face, all brown and golden, full-cheeked, pink-lipped, black-browed. I
see her still, the exquisite monster, with her long slim fingers, as
delicate as ivory, and the perfidious witchery of her radiant dark
smile.
"You mustn't tell lies, Angela. You were seen to break the statue."
I stood up in vehement protest, words poured from me in a flood; they
gushed from me like life-blood flowing from my heart, and in my passion
I flung my books on the floor, and vowed I would never eat again, but
that I'd die first, to make them all feel miserable because they had
murdered me. And then the pretty Inquisitor carried me off, dragging me
after her with that veiled brutality of gesture that marks your refined
tyrant. I was locked up in the old community-room, then reserved for
guests, a big white chamber, with a good deal of heavy furniture in it.
"You'll stay here, Angela, until I come to let you out," she hissed at
me.
I heard the key turn in the lock, and my heart was full of savage hate.
I sat and brooded long on the vengeance I desired to wreak. Sister
Esmeralda had said she would come at her good will to let me out. "Very
well," thought I, wickedly; "when she comes she'll not find it so easy
to get in."
My desire was to thwart her in her design to free me when she had a mind
to. My object was to die of hunger alone and forsaken in that big white
chamber, and so bring remorse and shame upon my tyrants. So, with
laboured breath and slow impassioned movements, I dragged over to the
door all the furniture I could move. In my ardour I accomplished feats I
could never have aspired to in saner moments. A frail child of eight, I
nevertheless wheeled arm-chairs, a sofa, a heavy writing-table, every
seat except a small stool, and even a cupboard, and these I massed
carefully at the door as an obstruction against the entrance of my
enemy.
And then I sat down on the stool in the middle of the chamber, and tore
into shreds with hands and teeth a new holland overall. Evening began to
fall, and the light was dim. My passion had exhausted itself, and I was
hungry and tired and miserable. Had any one else except Sister Esmeralda
come to the door, I should have behaved differently, for I was a most
manageable little creature when not under the influence of the terrible
exasperation injustice always provoked in me. But there she stood, after
the repeated efforts of the gardener called up to force open my prison
door, haughty, contemptuous, and triumphant, with me, poor miserable
little me, surrounded by the shreddings of my holland pinafore, in her
ruthless power.
A blur of light, the anger of madness, the dreadful tense sensation of
my helplessness, and before I knew what I had done I had caught up the
stool and wildly hurled it at her triumphant visage. Oh, how I hated
Sister Esmeralda! how I hated her!
The moment was one of exceptional solemnity. I was not scolded, or
slapped, or roughly treated. My crime was too appalling for such
habitual treatment. One would think I already wore the black shroud of
death, that the gallows stood in front of me, and beside it the coffin
and the yawning grave, as my enemy, holding my feeble child's hand in a
vice, marched me down the corridor into the dormitory, where a
lay-sister was commanded to fetch my strong boots, my hat and cloak.
The children were going joyously off to supper, with here and there, I
can imagine, an awed whisper in my concern, as the lay-sister took my
hand in hers; and in silence by her side, in the grey twilight, I walked
from the Ivies beyond the common down to the town convent, where only
the mothers dwelt. I knew something dreadful was going to happen to me,
and being tired of suffering and tired of my short troubled life, I
hoped even then that it would prove death. I did not care. It was so
long since I had thought it worth while caring!
And so I missed the lovely charm of that silent walk through the
unaccustomed twilight, with quaint little shops getting ready their
evening illumination, and free and happy persons walking to and fro,
full of the joy of being, full of the bliss of freedom. My heart was
dead to hope, my intelligence, weary from excess of excitement and pain,
was dull to novelty.
In the town convent I was left awhile in aching solitude in the brown
parlour, with its pious pictures and big crucifix. I strained eye and
ear through the silent dusk, and was relieved when the superioress--a
sort of female pontiff, whom we children saw in reverential stupefaction
on scarce feast-days, when she addressed us from such heights as Moses
on the mountain might have addressed a group of sparrows--with two other
nuns entered. It looked like death, and already the heart within me was
dead. I know so well now how I looked: white, blue-veined, blue-lipped,
sullen, and indifferent.
My wickedness was past sermonising. I was simply led up-stairs to a
brown cell, and here the red-cheeked lay-sister, a big brawny creature,
stripped me naked. Naked, mind, though convent rules forbid the whipping
of girls. I was eight, exceedingly frail and delicate. The superioress
took my head tightly under her arm, and the brawny red-cheeked
lay-sister scourged my back with a three-pointed whip till the blood
gushed from the long stripes, and I fainted. I never uttered a groan,
and I like to remember this infantine proof of my pride and resolute
spirit.
Chapter XVI.
MY FIRST CONFESSION.
The sequel is enfolded in mystery. Was I long unconscious? Was I long
ill? Was there any voice among the alarmed nuns lifted in my favour? Or
was the secret kept among the superioress, the lay-sister who thrashed
me, and the doctor? As a Catholic in a strong and bigoted Protestant
centre, in the pay of a Catholic community, it is not unreasonable to
suppose him anxious to avoid a scandal. For outside there was the
roaring lion, the terrible member for Lysterby, seeking the Catholics he
might devour! That satanic creature who dreamed at night of Tyburn, and,
if he could, would have proscribed every priest and nun of the realm!
Picture the hue and cry in Parliament and out of it, if it were known
that a baby girl had been thrashed by strong, virile hands, as with a
Russian knout, with the ferocity of blood-thirsty jailers instead of the
gentleness of holy women striving to inculcate precepts of virtue and
Christian charity in the breast of a tiny reprobate! And ladies, too,
devoted to the worship of mercy and of Mary, the maiden of sorrow, the
mild mother of humanity.
I know I lay long in bed,--that my wounds, deep red open stripes, were
dressed into scars by lint and sweet oil and herbs. The doctor, a cheery
fellow with a Scottish name, came and sat by my bedside, and gave me
almond-drops, and begged me repeatedly "to look up." The pavement
outside was rough, the little city street was narrow, and the flies
rumbling past from the station to the Craven Arms shook my bed. The
noise was novel, and excited me. I thought of my imaginary friend of the
Ivies, the white lady, and wondered if any one had ever thrashed her.
The cook, Sister Joseph, from time to time stole up-stairs and offered
me, by way of consolation, maybe a bribe, a Shrewsbury biscuit, a
jam-tart, a piece of seed-cake.
Once the pain of my lacerated back subsided I was not at all bored. It
was good to lie in a fresh white bed and listen dreamily to the discreet
murmurs of a provincial town in the quiet convent-house, have nothing to
do, no scrapes to get into, hear no scolding voices, and have plenty of
nice things to eat, after the long famine of nine interminable months.
I do not remember when it was she first came to me. She was a slim,
oldish nun, with a white delicate visage and eyes full of a wistful
sadness, neither blue nor grey. Her voice was very low, and gave me the
same intense pleasure with which the soft touch of her thin small hands
thrilled me. She was called Mother Aloysius, and painted pictures for
the chapel and for the convent. Did she know what had happened, and had
she taken the community's debt to me upon her lean shoulders? Or was I
merely for her a sick and naughty little girl, to whom she was drawn by
sympathy?
She never spoke of my whipping, nor did I. Perhaps with the unconscious
delicacy of sensitive childhood I divined that it would pain her. More
probably still, I was only too glad to be enfolded in the mild warmth of
her unquestioning tenderness. Wickedness dropped from me as a wearisome
garment, and, divested of its weight, I trotted after her heels like a
little lapdog. She took me with her everywhere; into the big garden
where she tended the flowers, and where she allowed me to water and dig
myself out of breath, fondly persuaded that the fate of the flowers next
year depended upon my exertions; to her work-room, where in awed
admiration I watched her paint, and held her brushes and colours for
her; to the chapel where she changed the flowers, and where I gathered
the stalks into little hills and swept them into my pinafore. And all
the time I talked, ceaselessly, volubly,--not of past sufferings, nor of
present pain, but of the things that surprised and perplexed me, of the
countless things I wanted to do, of the tales of Tyburn and the white
lady.
When I was well enough to go back to daily woe and insufficient food, I
was dressed in hat and jacket and strong boots, and while I stood in the
hall the awful superioress issued from the community-room and looked at
me coldly.
"You have had your lesson, Angela. You will be a good child in future, I
hope," she said, and touched my shoulder with a lifeless gesture.
The mischievous impulse of saucy speech and wicked glance died when I
encountered the gentle prayer of my new friend's faded eyes. I was only
a baby, but I understood as well as if I had been a hundred what those
kind and troubled eyes said, glancing at me behind the woman she must
have known I hated. "Be good, dear child; be silent, be respectful.
Forgive, forget, for my sake." I swallowed the angry words I longed to
utter on the top of a sob, and went and held up my cheek to Mother
Aloysius.
"You're a brave little girl, Angela," she said, softly. "You'll see, if
you are good, that reverend mother will let you come down and spend a
nice long day with me soon again; and I'll take you to water the flowers
and fill the vases in the chapel, and watch me paint up-stairs.
Good-bye."
She kissed me on both cheeks, not in the fleshless kiss of the nun, but
with dear human warmth of lips, and her fingers lingered tenderly about
my head. Did she suspect the sacrifice I had made to her kindness?--the
fierce and wrathful words I had projected to hurl at the head of the
superioress, and that I had kept back to please her?
At the Ivies I maintained a steadfast silence upon what had happened. I
cannot now trace the obscure reasons of my silence, which must have
pleased the nuns, for nobody ever knew about my severe whipping. Thanks
to the beneficent influences of my new friend, I was for a while a model
of all the virtues. I studied hard, absorbed pages of useful knowledge
in the "Child's Guide," and mastered the abstruse contents of Cardinal
Wiseman's "History of England." At the end of a month, to the amazement
of everybody and to my own dismay, I was rewarded with a medal of good
conduct, and formally enrolled in that virtuous body, the Children of
the Angels, and wore a medal attached to a brilliant green ribbon.
This transient period of grace, felt no doubt by all around me to be
precarious and unstable, was deemed the fitting moment for my first
confession. What a baby of eight can have to confess I know not. The
value of such an institution for the infantine conscience escapes me.
But there can be no question of its enormous sensational interest for us
all. Two new children had made their appearance since my tempestuous
arrival. They belonged to the band, as well as an idiot girl two years
older than I, and now deemed wise enough to crave pardon for sins she
could not possibly commit. We carefully studied the "Examination of
Conscience," and spelt out the particularly big words with a thrill:
they looked nice mysterious sins, the sort of crimes we felt we would
gladly commit if we had the chance.
I went about sombre and dejected, under the conviction that I must have
sinned the sin against the Holy Ghost, and Polly Evans wondered if
adultery figured upon the list of her misdoings. She was sure, however,
that she had not defrauded the labourer of his daily wage, whatever that
might be, for the simple reason that she had never met a labourer. I was
tortured with a fresh sensational doubt. My foster-mother's cousin at
Kildare was a very nice labourer who often had given me sweets. Could I,
in a moment of temporary aberration, have defrauded him of his wage? And
then adultery! If Polly was sure she had committed adultery, might I not
also have so deeply offended against heaven? I had not precisely killed
anybody, but had I not desired to kill Sister Esmeralda the day I threw
the stool at her?
And so we travelled conscientiously, like humble, but, in the very
secret depths of our being, self-admiring pilgrims, over the weary and
profitless road of self-examination, and assured ourselves with a
fervent thrill that we were indeed miserable sinners. "I'll never get
into a passion again," I swore to Polly Evans, like a monstrous little
Puritan, and before an hour had passed was thirsting for the blood of
some offender.
I even went so far as to include Sister Esmeralda and Frank in my offer
of general amnesty to humanity; and indited at some nun's suggestion a
queer epistle to my mother, something in the tone the prodigal son from
afar might have used writing to his father when he first decided to
abandon the husks and swine, etc. I boldly announced my intention of
forsaking the path of wickedness, with a humble confession of hitherto
having achieved supremacy in that nefarious kingdom, and of walking
henceforth with the saints.
I added a practical postscript, that I was always very hungry, and
stated with charming candour that I did not like any of the nuns except
Mother Aloysius, which was rather a modification of the exuberant burst
of virtue expressed on the first page. This postscript was judiciously
altered past recognition, and I was ordered to copy it out: "I am very
happy at Lysterby. All the dear nuns are so kind to me. We shall have a
little feast soon. Please, dear mamma, send me some money."
If the money ever came, it was naturally confiscated by the dear nuns.
It was not money we mites needed, but bread-and-butter and a cup of good
milk, or a plate of simple sustaining porridge. However, for the moment
the excitement of confession sustained us. Having communicated to each
other the solemn impression that we had broken all the Commandments,
committed the seven deadly sins, and made mockery of the four cardinal
virtues, the next thing to decide was to what length of repentance we
were bound to go. Polly Evans' enthusiasm was so exalted that she
yearned to follow the example of the German emperor we had read of who
walked, or crawled on his knees, I forget which, to Rome, and made a
public confession to the Pope. But this we felt to be an immodest flight
of fancy in a little girl who had done nothing worth speaking of. She
was like my Kildare companion Mary Jane, who constantly saw herself in a
personal scuffle with Queen Victoria.
When the great day came we were bidden to stay in the chapel after the
rest, and then were taken down to the town convent, with instructions to
keep our minds fixed upon the awful sacrament of confession as we walked
two and two through the streets.
"Remember, children," said that infamous Sister Esmeralda, prettier than
ever, as she fixed me with a deadly glance, "to tell a lie in the
confessional box is to tell a lie to the Holy Ghost. You may be struck
dead for it."
Did she mean that for me? Oh, why had I so rashly vowed myself to a life
of virtue? Why had I so precipitously chosen the companionship and
example of the saints? Why had I read the lives of St. Louis of Gonzaga,
St. Stanislaus of Kotska, and other lamb-like creatures, and in a fit of
admiration sworn to resemble them?--since all these good resolutions
debarred me from flinging another stool at that lovely hostile visage.
But having elected momentarily to play the part of a shocking little
prig, I swallowed my wrath, with a compunctious sensation, and felt a
glow all over to think I was already so much of a saint.
In the convent chapel, with our throbbing hearts in our mouths, we
knelt, a diminutive row, in our Sunday uniform (I have worn so many
convent uniforms that I am rather mixed about them, and cannot remember
which was blue on Sunday and which was black, but the Lysterby Sunday
uniform I know was black). Polly Evans was the first to disappear,
swallowed up in the awful box. She issued forth, tremulous and
wide-eyed, and I followed her, pallid and quaking. The square grating
was closed, and the green curtain enfolded me in a terrific dusk. I
felt sick and cold with fright. What was going to happen? Could
something spring suddenly out and clutch me? Was the devil behind me?
Had my guardian angel forsaken me? I had read a great deal of late about
"a yawning abyss," "a black pit," a "bottomless hole." Was I going to
tell a lie to the Holy Ghost unknowing, and so be struck dead like,
like----?
The square slid swiftly back, and I saw a dim man's profile through the
grating. Had I seen Father Morris clear before me, my fears would
instantly have been quelled, for he was a graceful, aristocratic,
soft-voiced man, quick to captivate little children by his winning
smile. But that dim formless thing behind the grating, what was it? They
told me the priest in the confessional was God. The statement was not
such that any childish imagination could grasp. The sickness of terror
overcame me, and I, whom the rough sea of the Irish Channel had not
harmed, fell down in a dreadful fit of nausea that left me prostrate for
days.
Chapter XVII.
THE CHRISTMAS HAMPERS.
Nobody but a hungry and excitable child, exiled from home and happiness,
bereft of toys and kisses, can conceive the mad delight of receiving a
Christmas hamper at school. Picture, if you can, a minute regiment with
eager faces pasted against the frost-embroidered window-panes, watching
a van drive up the Ivies' path, knowing that a hamper is coming for some
fortunate creature--but for whom?
Outside the land is all bridal white, and the lovely snow looks like
deep-piled white velvet upon the lawn, and like the most delicate lace
upon the branches. We see distinctly the driver, with a big
good-humoured face of the hue of cochineal under his snow-covered hat,
and he nods cheerfully to his enthusiastic admirers. He would be a churl
indeed to remain unmoved by our vociferous salutations, as we stamp our
feet, and clap our hands, and shout with all the force of our infant
lungs.
For the Christmas hamper, announced by letter from my stepfather, meant
for me the unknown. But every Christmas afterwards I was wiser, and not
for that less glad. A hamper meant a turkey, a goose, a large plum-cake
with Angela in beautiful pink letters upon the snow-frost ground. It
meant boxes of prunes, of sweets, of figs, lots of oranges and apples,
hot sherry and water, hot port and water in the dormitory of a cold
night, all sorts of surprising toys and picture-books. But it did not
imply by any means as much of those good things (I speak of the
eatables) for me as my parents fancied. The nuns generously helped
themselves to the lion's share of fruit and wine and fowls.
But the cake, best joy of all, was left to us untouched, and also the
sweets. The big round beauty was placed in front of me; with a huge
knife, a lay-sister sliced it up, and I, with a proud, important air,
sent round the plate among hungry and breathless infants, who had each
one already devoured her slice with her eyes before touching it with her
lips.
And at night in the dormitory, all those bright eyes and flushed little
faces, as we laughed and shouted and danced, disgraceful small topers
that we were, drinking my stepfather's sherry and port--drinking
ourselves into rosy paradises, where children lived upon plum-cake and
hot negus.
Oh, the joy of those Christmas excesses, after the compulsory sobriety
of long ascetic months! As each child received a hamper, not quite so
bountifully and curiously filled as mine, for my stepfather was a
typical Irishman--in the matter of hospitality, of generosity, he always
erred on the right side for others, and was as popular as a prince of
legend,--for a fortnight we revelled in a fairyland of toffee and
turkey, of sugared cakes and plum-pudding, of crackers and sweets, and
apples and oranges and bewitching toys. Like heroes refreshed, we were
then able to return to the frugality of daily fare--though, alas! I fear
this fugitive plenty and bliss made us early acquainted with the poet's
suffering in days of misery by the remembering of happier things. This
was my candid epistle, soon after Christmas, despatched to Kildare:--
"MY DERE EVRYDAY MAMA,--i dont like skule a bit. i cant du wat i
like. i dont have enuf tu et. Nun of us have enuf tu et. We had
enuf at crismas when everyboddy sent us lots of things. We were
very glad i had luvly things it wos so nice but i dont like skule,
its horid, theres a horid boy here. i bet him when he called me a
savage. Sister Esmeralda said it first i dont like her. She teches
me. tell Mary Jane to give my black dog 6 kisses. i want to go home
i like yu and Louis and Mary Jane and Bessy the apel woman i want
to clim tres like Johny Burke your affecshunat little girl.
ANGELA."
When this frank outpouring was subjected to revision, it ran:--
"MY DEAR FOSTER-MAMMA,--I am very happy here with the dear nuns. I
hope I shall remain with them a long while. We have such fun
always. We learn ever so many nice things. We love our dear
mistress, Sister Esmeralda. Reverend Mother had a cold, and we all
prayed so hard for her, and now she is better. I want some money
for her feast-day. We are going to give her a nice present. We had
a play and a tea-party. Lady Wilhelmina Osborne's little girl came
over from the Abbey. I hope you are quite well. With love, your
affectionate
ANGELA."
All our mistresses were not like Sister Esmeralda, a Spanish inquisitor
in a shape of insidious charm, nor a burly brute like the lay-sister,
who had so piously welted my naked back, nor a chill and frozen despot
like the pallid superioress. Mother Aloysius was, of course, a far-off
stained-glass vision, a superlative rapture in devotion, not suitable
for daily wear,--a recompense after the prolonged austerities of virtue
and self-denial, a soaring acquaintance with ecstatic admiration. But on
a lower plane there were some younger nuns we found tolerable and
sympathetic. There was Sister Anne, who taught us to play at snowballs,
and took a ball on her nose with companionable humour in the midst of
our shrieking approbation. There was Sister Ignatius, who inspired us
with terpsichorean ambition by dancing a polka with one of the big girls
down the long study hall, to the amiable murmur of--
"Can you dance a polka? Yes, I can.
Up and down the room with a nice young man";
or upon a more imaginative flight--
"My mother said that I never should
Play with the gypsies in the wood;
If I did, she would say,
Naughty girl to disobey."
Her great feat was, however, the Varsovienne, which she told us was a
Polish dance, and that Poland was a bleak and unfortunate country on the
confines of Russia. Ever afterwards I associated the sprightly Sister
Ignatius with a polar bear, especially when I watched her dance the
"Varsovienne," and fling her head over her shoulders in a most laughable
way, just as I imagined a bear would do if he took to dancing the dance
of Poland.
Mother Catherine is a less agreeable memory. I see her still, a tall
gaunt woman in coif and black veil, with austere grey eyes. She used to
watch us in the refectory, and whenever a greedy infant kept a rare
toothsome morsel for the wind-up of a frugal meal, Mother Catherine
would sweep down and confiscate the reserved luxury. "My child, you will
make an act of mortification for the good of your soul." I leave you to
imagine the child's dislike of her immortal soul, as the goody was
carried off.
Chapter XVIII.
MR. PARKER THE DANCING-MASTER.
The joy of my second year at Lysterby was Mr. Parker the dancing-master.
Was he evoked from pantomime and grotesque legend by the sympathetic
genius of Sister Ignatius? We were all solemnly convened, in our best
shoes and frocks, to a great meeting in the big hall to make the
acquaintance of our dancing-master, and learn the polite steps of
society. A wizen cross-looking little creature stood at the top of the
long room, and as we entered in file, all agog, and ready enough, heaven
knows, to shriek for nothing, from sheer animal spirits, he bowed to us,
as I suppose they bowed in the good old days of Queen Anne. For Queen
Anne was his weakness. I wonder why, since she was neither the queen of
grace nor of beauty.
I recall the gist of his first speech: "We are now, young ladies, about
to study one of the most necessary and the most serious of arts, the art
of dancing. It is the art of dancing that makes ladies and gentlemen of
us all. In a ball-room the awkward, those who cannot dance, are in
disgrace. Nobody minds them, nobody admires them. They have not the tone
of society. They are poor creatures, who, for all society cares, might
never have been born. What it behoves you, young ladies, is to acquire
the tone of society from your earliest years, and it is only by a steady
practice of the art of dancing that you may hope to acquire it.
Practice, young ladies, makes perfect--remember that."
Ever afterwards, his first question, before beginning each week's
lesson, was: "What does practice do, young ladies?" and we were all
expected to reply in a single ringing voice: "Makes perfect, Mr.
Parker." Children are heartless satirists, and the follies of poor
little Mr. Parker filled us with wicked glee.
I see him still, unconscious tiny clown, gathering up in a delicate
grasp the tails of his black coat to show us how a lady curtseyed in the
remote days of Queen Anne. And mincing across the polished floor, he
would say, as he daintily picked his steps: "The lady enters the
ball-room on the tip of her toes--so!" Picture, I pray you, the comic
appearance of any woman who dared to enter a ball-room as Mr. Parker
walked across our dancing-hall! Society would stand still to gape. He
minced to right, he minced to left, he minced in and out of the five
positions, and then with eyes ecstatically closed, he would seize his
violin, and play the homely air of "Nora Creina," as he _chasséed_ up
and down the floor for our delectation, singing the while--
"Bend and rise-a--Nora Creina,
Rise on your toes-a--Nora Creina,
Chassez to the right-a--Nora Creina,
And then to the left-a--Nora Creina."
In his least inspired moments, he addressed us in the first position;
but whenever he soared aloft on the wings of imagination, he stood in
the glory of the fifth. In that position he never failed to recite to us
the imposing tale of his successes in the "reception halls" of the
Duchess of Leamington and the Marchioness of Stoke. Once he went so far
as to exhibit to us a new dance he had composed expressly for his
illustrious friend the duchess.
"My dears, that dance will be all the rage next spring in London, you
will see."
He was quite aware that we never would see, having nothing on earth to
do with the London season. But the assertion mystified us, and enchanted
him.
"Thus my hand lightly reposes on the waist of her Grace, her fingers
just touch my shoulders, and, one, two, three--boom!" he was gliding
round the room, clasping lightly an imaginary duchess in his arms, in
beatific unconsciousness of the exquisite absurdity of his appearance
and action, and we children followed his circumvolutions with glances
magnified and brightened by mirth and wonderment.
The irresistible Mr. Parker had a knavish trick of keeping us on our
good behaviour by a delusive promise persistently unfulfilled. Every
Tuesday, after saluting us in the fashion of the eighteenth century and
demanding from us an immense simultaneous curtsey of Queen Anne, holding
our skirts in an extravagant semicircle and trailing our little bent
bodies backward and upward upon the most pointed of toes, he would rap
the table with his bow, clear his throat, adjust his white tie,
straighten himself, and, with a hideous grin he doubtless deemed
captivating, he would address us inclusively--
"Young ladies, it is my intention to bring you a little confectionery
next Tuesday; and now, if you please, attention! and answer. What does
practice do?"
In vain we shouted our customary response with more than our customary
conviction; the confectionery was always for next Tuesday, and never,
alas! for to-day. With longing eyes we watched the slightest movement of
the master towards his pocket. He never produced anything but his
handkerchief, and when he doubled in two to wish us "O reevoyer," he
never omitted to say--
"To-day I did not pass by the confectioner's shop; but it will certainly
be for next Tuesday."
For a long time he took us in, as other so-called magicians have taken
in simpletons as great as we. We believed he had a secret understanding
with the devil, for only to the power of evil could we attribute a
quickness of apprehension such as he boasted. He would stand with his
back to us, playing away at his violin, while we _chasséed_ and
_croiséd_ and heaven knows what else--
"Now, my senses are so acutely alive to the impropriety of a false step,
young ladies, that even with my back turned to you, I shall be able to
tell which of you has erred without seeing her."
Sure enough he always pounced on the bungler, and never failed to switch
round his bow violently and hit her toes. How was it done? Simply
enough, one of us discovered quite by accident. There was a big mahogany
press, as finely polished as a mirror, and in front of this the master
planted himself. The rows of dancers, from crown to heel, were as clear
to him as in a glass. By such simple means may a terrible reputation be
acquired. For months had Mr. Parker shabbily usurped the fame of a
magician.
In his quality of master he could permit himself a brutality of candour
not usually shown by his sex to us without the strictest limits of
intimacy. There was a big girl of sixteen, very stout, very tall,
squarely built, with poultry-yard writ in broad letters over her whole
dull and earthly form. An excellent creature, I have no doubt, though I
knew nothing whatever about her, being half her age, which in school
constitutes a difference of something approaching half a century. Her
name was Janet Twycross, and she came from Shakespeare's town. As befits
a master of the graceful art, Mr. Parker's preference was, given to the
slim and lovely nymph, and such a square emblem of the soil as Janet
Twycross would naturally provoke his impatient contempt. Possibly she
merited all the vicious rage he showered on her poor big feet,
pathetically evident, emerging from skirts that just reached her
ankles. But with my larger experience and knowledge of his sex, I am
inclined to doubt it, and attribute his vindictiveness to a mere
masculine hatred of ugliness in woman rather than to the teacher's
legitimate wrath. Hardly a Tuesday went by but he sent the inoffensive,
great, meek creature into floods of tears; and while she wept and
sobbed, looking less lovely than ever in her sorrow, he would snarl and
snicker at her, imitate her jeeringly, and cast obloquy on her unshapely
feet.
"A ploughboy would be disgraced by such feet as Miss Twycross's," he
would hiss across at her, and then rap them wickedly with his bow.
The art of dancing, Mr. Parker proved to us, is insufficient to make a
gentleman of its adept. Once his unsleeping fury against the unhappy
girl carried him to singular lengths. He bade us all be seated, and
then, with his customary inflated and foolish air began to address us
upon the power of art. With art you can achieve anything, you can even
lend grace to the ungraceful.
"I will now chose from your ranks the most awkward, the most pitiable
and clumsy of her sex. The young lady unassisted cannot dance a single
step; but such is my consummate skill, so finished is my art, that I
shall actually succeed in bestowing some of my own grace as a dancer
upon her. Advance, Miss Twycross."
I leave you to picture the sensations of the unfortunate so addressed
and so described. She advanced slowly, square and sodden, but with an
unmistakable look of anguish in her poor harassed eyes, of a blue as
dull and troubled as her complexion; and a certain twitching of her thin
tight lips was eloquent enough of her unprovoked hurt.
Mr. Parker, with his simpering disgusted air of ill-natured little
dandy, flourished a perfumed handkerchief about her face, to sustain his
affronted nerves, no doubt, placed an arm gingerly about the flat square
waist, clasped her outer hand in evident revulsion, and began to scamper
and drag her round the room in the steps of a wild schottische. Most of
us tittered--could we be expected to measure the misery of the girl,
while nature made us excruciatingly alive to the absurdity of her
tormentor?
As a girl myself I have often laughed in recalling the incident; but I
own that the brute should have been kicked out of the establishment for
such an object-lesson in the art of communicating grace. As for his
boasted achievement, even we babies could perfectly understand that
there was not much to choose between his jerky waxwork steps and the
heavy stamp of his partner. She at least was true to nature and moved as
she looked, an honest cow-like creature, whom you were at liberty not to
admire, but who offered you no reason to despise her. While he, her
vindictive enemy, mean unnatural little body, sheathing a base,
affected, silly little soul, fiddling and scraping away his days which
were neither dignified nor manly, he offered himself to the unlimited
contempt of even such microscopic humanity as ours. We felt he was not a
man with the large capacity of manhood, but a disgraced and laughable
thing, a puppet moving upon springs and speaking artificially,
manufactured as dolls are, for the delectation of little folk.
We enjoyed Mr. Parker, but we never regarded him as more human than the
clown or the harlequin of the pantomime. We imitated him together; we
played _at him_, as we played at soldiers or fairies or social
entertainment. Had we learnt that he was dead or ill, or driven to the
poorhouse, it would have been just as if we had heard such news of
harlequin, or heard that Peeping Tom had fallen from his window and
smashed his head. Mr. Parker was not a person at the Ivies; he was a
capital joke.
Chapter XIX.
EPISCOPAL PROTECTION.
The succeeding years in Lysterby are obscured. Here and there I recall a
vivid episode, an abiding impression. Papa came over with one of my
elder sisters. They arrived at night, and I, half asleep, was dressed
hurriedly and taken down to the parlour. A big warm wave of delight
overwhelmed me as my stepfather caught me in his arms and whisked me up
above his fair head. It was heaven to meet his affectionate blue eyes
dancing so blithely to the joy of my own. Seated upon his shoulder, I
touched a mole on his broad forehead, and cried, as if I had made a
discovery--
"You've got the same little ball on your forehead, papa, that you had
when you used to come down to Kildare."
Bidding me good-night, he promised to come for me early next day, and
told me I should sleep in the Craven Arms, and spend two whole days
driving about the country with him. How comforting the well-filled
table, the cold ham, the bacon and eggs at breakfast, the bread and
marmalade, all served on a spotless tablecloth, and outside the smell of
the roses and honeysuckle, and the exciting rumble of flies up and down
the narrow street! I was so happy that I quite forgot my woes, and did
not remember to complain of my enemies. There was so much to eat, to
see, to think of, to feel, to say! I not only wanted to know all about
everybody at home, but I wanted to see and understand all about me.
In the Abbey we saw Vandyke's melancholy Charles, and it was a rare
satisfaction for me to be able to tell how he had been beheaded. At the
great Castle we saw Queen Elizabeth's bed with the jewel-wrought quilt,
and my romantic elder sister, fresh from reading "The Last of the
Barons," passionately kissed the King-maker's armour. She told us the
thrilling tale as we sat in the famous cedar avenue, when the earl's
daughter, all summery in white muslin and Leghorn hat, passed us with
her governess, and although she was a fresh slip of a girl just like my
sister, because of her name we felt that a living breath of history had
brushed us. She was not for us an insignificant girl of our own
century, but something belonging to the King-maker, a breathing memory
of the Wars of the Roses, the sort of creature the dreadful Richard
might have wooed in his hideous youth.
And then at night, in the old inn, we discovered two big illustrated
volumes about Josephine and Napoleon. I had not got so far in history as
Napoleon, and here was an unexplored world, whose fairy was my voluble
and imaginative sister. With a touch of her wand she unrolled before my
enthralled vision scenes of the French Revolution and the passionate
loves of Bonaparte and the young Viscountess de Beauharnais. I wish
every child I know two such nights as I passed, listening to this
evocative creature revive so vividly one of the intensest and most
dramatic hours of history. Thanks to her eloquence, to her genius,
Napoleon, vile monster, became one of my gods. I think the thrilling
tale she read me was by Miss Muloch. Impossible now to recall the
incidents that sufficed to turn succeeding weeks into an exquisite
dream. Who, for instance, was the beauteous creature in amber and purple
velvet, with glittering diamonds, that usurped such a fantastic place in
the vague aspirations of those days? And the lovely Polish countess
Napoleon loved? And those letters from Egypt to Josephine, and
Josephine's shawls and flowers, and the ghost-stories of Malmaison, and
the last adieu the night before the divorce. Hard would it be to say
whom I most loved and deeply pitied, the unadmirable Josephine or the
admirable queen of Prussia. My sister read aloud, as we sat up in bed
together, I holding the candle, and gazing in awe and delight, wet-eyed,
at the coarse engravings.
Other sisters came in quick succession, but they remained strangers to
me. They fawned on Sister Esmeralda, whom I hated: they were older and
wiser than I; they aspired to the ribbon of the Children of Mary, and
walked submissively with the authorities of Church and State. They
played "Il Baccio" on the piano, and a mysterious duet called the "Duet
in D." The only sister I remember of those days as an individual was
Pauline, who had opened to me a world of treasures. At school, she
naturally forsook me for girls of her own age; but on play-days, when we
were free to do as we liked all day, she sometimes condescended to
recall my existence, and told me with an extraordinary vivacity of
recital the stories of "East Lynne," "The Black Dwarf," "Rob Roy," and
"Kenilworth."
But for the rest she was a great and glorious creature who dwelt aloft,
and possessed the golden key of the chambers of fiction. My immediate
friend was Polly Evans, whose mamma once took me to tea in an old
farmhouse along the Kenilworth road.
There were strawberries and cream on the table, and delicious little
balls of butter in blue-and-white dishes, and radishes, which I had
never before eaten; and the air was dense with the smell of the flowers
on table, sideboard, mantelpiece, and brackets. Polly and I, with her
brother Godfrey, played all the long afternoon in the hay-field, drunk
with the odour, the sunny stillness, the hum of the bees--drunk, above
all, with this transient bliss of freedom and high living.
Another time Mrs. Evans took me with Polly and Godfrey to Kenilworth
Castle, where we dined among the ruins on ham, cold chicken, fruit, and
lemonade. Yet she herself is no remembered personality: I cannot recall
a single feature of hers, and even Polly herself is less clear in memory
than Mary Jane of Kildare, than the abominable Frank.
Years after, Polly and her brother visited Ireland as tourists, and
having all that time treasured my parents' address, called to see me.
But I was abroad, a hopeless wanderer. Godfrey, I learnt, was quite a
fine young fellow, who shared his sister's attachment to me. Polly was
sprightly and pretty, it seems, engaged too. But I never saw them again.
An eminent bishop came to confirm us, and we were taken down to town
church, where, to our infinite amusement, we occupied several rows of
benches opposite a boys' school, also brought hither for the same
ceremony, each with a white rosette in his button-hole. None of us took
the rite very seriously. We found it droll to be tapped on the cheek by
a white episcopal hand and told that we were soldiers, and we watched
the boys to see if their bearing were more martial than ours. They
seemed equally preoccupied with us, and looked as if they felt
themselves fools, awkward and shamefaced. They stared hard at our noble
youth, Frank, in his eternal skirts--his curls had recently been
clipped--and nudged and giggled. Much of a soldier looked Frank! Heaven
help the religion of Christ or the Constitution if either reposed faith
in his prowess!
Whither has he drifted, and what has life made of the meanest little
rascal I ever knew? Has he learnt to tell the truth at least? Has some
public school licked him into shape, and kicked the cowardice and
spitefulness out of him? When I became acquainted with Barnes Newcome
afterwards, I always thought of that boy Frank. "Sister So-and-so, that
nasty Angela is teasing me." "Mother This, I can't eat my
bread-and-milk; that horrid Angela has put salt into it." And then, when
no one was looking, and a child weaker than himself was at hand, what
sly pinches, and kicks, and vicious tugs at her hair. Noble youth,
future pillar of the British empire, I picture you an admirable
hypocrite and bully!
I wonder why the bishop singled me out of all that small crowd for a
stupendous honour. He had asked my name, and after a luxurious lunch
with a few privileged mothers in the convent, he requested somebody to
fetch me. The nuns did not fail to impress the full measure of this
honour upon me, and when I came into the refectory, where the bishop was
enthroned like a prince, I caught a reassuring beam from my dear friend,
Mother Aloysius!
The bishop pushed back his chair and held out both arms to me. I was a
singularly pretty child, I know. My enemy, Sister Esmeralda, had even
said that I had the face of an angel with the heart of a fiend. A
delicate, proud, and serious little visage, with the finish, the
fairness, the transparency of a golden-haired doll, meant to take the
prize in an exhibition. But this would hardly explain the extraordinary
distinction conferred on me by a man who has passed into history,--a
grave and noble nature, with as many cares as a Prime Minister, a man
who saw men and women in daily battalions, and to whom a strange little
girl of nine he had never spoken to, could scarcely seem a more serious
creature in life than a rabbit or a squirrel.
He had a kind and thoughtful face, deeply lined and striking. I liked
his smile at once, and went up to him without any feeling of shyness.
He lifted me on to his knee, kissed my forehead, and looked steadily and
long into my steady eyes. Then he kissed me again, and called for a big
slice of plum-cake, which Mother Aloysius, smiling delightedly at me,
was quick to hand him. He took it from the plate, and placed it in my
willing grasp.
"A fine and most promising little face," I distinctly heard him say to
the superioress. "But be careful of her. A difficult and dangerous
temperament, all nerves and active brain, and a fearful suffering little
heart within. Manage her, manage her. I tell you there's the stuff of a
great saint or a great sinner here, if she should see twenty-one, which
I doubt."
Alas! I have passed twenty-one years and years ago, with difficulty, it
is true, with ever the haunting shadow of death about me, and time has
revealed me neither the saint nor the sinner, just a creature of
ordinary frailty and our common level of virtue. If I have not exactly
gone to perdition--an uncheerful proceeding my sense of humour would
always guard me from--I have not scaled the heights. I have lived my
life, by no means as well as I had hoped in the days we are privileged
to hope and to dream, not as loftily, neither with distinction nor
success; but I have not accomplished any particular villainy, or
scandal, or crime that would justify my claiming an important place in
the ranks of sinners. I have had a good deal more innocent fun, and
known a great deal more suffering, than fall to the common lot; and I
have enjoyed the fun with all the intensity of the mercurial Irish
temperament, and endured the other with what I think I may proudly call
the courage of my race. I have not injured or cheated a human being,
though I have been greatly injured and cheated by more than I could now
enumerate. There ends my scaling of the hill of virtues.
Of my sins it behoves me not to speak, lest I should fall into the
grotesque and delightful attitude of the sailor I once heard in London
make his public confession to a Salvation Army circle.
"My brothers, I am a miserable sinner. In Australia I murdered a man; I
drank continually, I thieved, I ran after harlots, and led the life of
debauchery. Oh, my friends, pray for me, for now I am converted and know
Jesus. I am one of the just, may I remain so. But wicked and debauched
and drunken as I was, there were lots more out there much worse than I."
In summing up our errors and frailties, it is always a kindly comfort
offered our conceit to think that there are on all sides of us "lots
more much worse than we." Unless our pride chooses to take refuge in the
opposite reflection, so we prefer to glory in being much worse than
others.
And so ends my single interview with an eminent ecclesiastic. He kissed
me repeatedly, and stroked my hair while I munched my plum-cake on his
knee. He questioned me, and discovered my passionate interest in
Napoleon and Josephine and the Queen of Prussia, the King-maker, and the
children in the Tower. And then, having prophesied my early death and
luminous or lurid career, he filled my two small hands with almond-drops
and toffee, and sent me away, a being henceforth of something more than
common clay.
From that hour my position in Lysterby was improved. I was never even
slapped again, though I had had the stupendous good luck to see, unseen
myself, the lay-sister who had flogged me go into a cupboard on the
staircase, whose door, with the key on the outside, opened outward, and
crawling along on hands and knees, reached the door in time to lock her
in. I was also known to have climbed fruit-trees, when I robbed enough
unripe fruit to make all the little ones ill. Yet nobody beat me, and I
was let off with a sharp admonishment. I went my unruly way, secretly
protected by the bishop's admiration.
If I did not amend, and loved none the more my tyrants, their rule being
less drastic, I had less occasion to fly out at them. Besides,
semi-starvation had subdued me for the while. I suffered continually
from abscesses and earache, and spent most of my time in the infirmary,
dreaming and reading.
Chapter XX.
HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS.
Home for the holidays! What a joyous sound the words have for little
ears! Holidays--home! Two iridiscent words of rainbow-promise,
expectation in all its warm witchery of dream and enchantment, of
indolence and eager activity, of impulses unrestrained, and of constant
caresses. For me, alas! how much less they meant than for happier
children; but even to me the change was delightful, and I welcomed the
hopes it contained with all the lively emotions of imaginative
childhood. First there was the excitement of the voyage, then the fresh
acquaintance with the land I had left two years ago, my own quaint and
melancholy land I was about to behold again through foreign glasses;
then the captivation of my importance in the family circle, the
wonderful things to tell, the revelations, the surprises, embroidered
fact so close upon the hidden heels of invention!
My mother came to take me home. She stayed at the Ivies. It was
summer-time, and all the rose-bushes were blood-red with blossom, and
one breathed the fragrance of roses as if one were living a Persian
poem. Not a white rose anywhere, but red upon red, through every tone
from crimson to pink. Is it an exaggeration of imagination, or were the
Lysterby lanes and gardens rivers of red, like the torrent-beds of the
Greek isles when the oleander is a-bloom? For, looking back to the
summers of Lysterby, I see nothing on earth but roses, multiplied like
the daisies of the field, a whole county waving perfumed red in memory
of the great historic house whose emblem in a memorable war was the red
rose of Lysterby.
Of my mother's stay at the Ivies, though she stayed there several days,
I remember little definite but two characteristic scenes. Walking across
the lawn toward where she stood in the sunshine talking to Sister
Esmeralda, I see her still as vividly now as then. She made so superb a
picture that even I, who saw her through a hostile and embittered
glance, stopped and asked myself if that imperial creature really were
my mother. The word mother is so close, so familiar, so everyday an
image, and this magnificent woman looked as remote as a queen of
legend. Her very beauty was of a nature to inspire terror, as if the
mere dropping of her white gold-fringed lids meant the sentence of death
to the beholder. My companions round about me were prone in abject
admiration, and of their state I took note with some measure of pride.
Not so had Polly Evans's mother been regarded; not so was even Lady
Wilhelmina, the Catholic peeress who came to benediction on Sunday,
regarded, though she had the haughty upper lip and inscrutable gaze of
sensational fiction.
How to paint her, as she stood thus valorously free to the raking
sunbeams that showed out the mild white bloom and roseleaf pink of her
long, full visage? She wore on her abundant fair hair a black lace
bonnet, trimmed with mauve flowers and a white aigrette, and the long
train of her white alpaca gown lay upon the grass like a queen's robe. I
remember my admiration of the thousand little flounces, black-edged,
that ran in shimmering lines up to her rounded waist. She was in half
mourning for my grandmother, whose existence I had forgotten all about,
and brave and becoming, it must be admitted, were those weeds of
mitigated grief. As I approached, she turned her fine and finished
visage, with the long delicate and cruel nostrils, and the thin
delicate red lips, to me, and her cold blue glance, falling upon my
anxious and distrustful face, turned my heart to stone. I felt as Amy
Robsart, my favourite heroine, must have felt when she encountered the
gaze of royal Elizabeth. Elizabeth, handsome, tall, and stately, with
long sloping shoulders and full bust, not the Elizabeth of history; an
Empress Eugenie without her feminine charm and grace, of the most
wonderful fairness I have ever seen, and also the most surprising
harshness of expression. I have all my life been hearing of my mother's
beauty, and have heard that when the Empress Eugenie's bust was exposed
at the Dublin Exhibition, the general cry was that my mother had been
the sculptor's model, so singular and striking was the resemblance
between these two women of Scottish blood. But then and then only, in
one brief flash, did I seize the insistent claim of that beauty always
closed to my hostile glance. Then and then only was I compelled, by the
sheer splendour of the vision, to own that the mother who did not love
me was the handsomest creature I had ever beheld.
The other episode connected with her visit that has stamped itself upon
memory is typical of her rare method of imparting knowledge to the
infant mind. We were driving in a fly through the rose-smelling country,
and it transpired, as we approached a railway station, that we were
going to visit Shakespeare's grave. "Who is Shakespeare?" I flippantly
asked, looking at my sister, who sat beside my mother.
Pif-paf! a blow on the ear sent sparks flying before my eyes, and rolled
my hat to the ground. Two years inhabiting a sacred county and not to
have heard of the poet's name! a child of hers, the most learned of
women, so ignorant and so unlettered! Thus was I made acquainted with
the name of Shakespeare, and with stinging cheek and humiliated and
stiffened little heart, is it surprising that I remember nothing else of
that visit to his tomb? Indeed it was part of my pride to look at
nothing, to note nothing, but walk about that day in full-eyed sullen
silence.
My mother had not seen me for two years. This was the measure of
maternal tenderness she had treasured up for me in that interval, and so
royally meted out to me. Other children are kissed and cried over after
a week's absence. I am stunned by an unmerited blow when I rashly open
my lips after a two years' separation. And yet I preserve my belief in
maternal love as a blessing that exists for others, born under a more
fortunate star, though the bounty of nature did not reserve a stray beam
to brighten the way for that miserable little waif I was those long,
long years ago.
Chapter XXI.
OLD ACQUAINTANCE.
The most vivid remembrance of my first return to Ireland is the sharp
sensation of ugly sound conveyed in the flat Dublin drawl. I have never
since been able to surmount this unjust antipathy to the accent of my
native town. The intolerable length of the syllables, the exaggerated
roundness of the vowel sounds, the weight and roll of the eternal
r's--it is all like the garlic of Provence, more seizing than
captivating.
And then the squalor, the mysterious ugliness of the North Wall! The air
of affronted leisure that greets you on all sides. A filthy porter
slouches over to you, with an indulgent, quizzical look in his kindly
eyes. "Is it a porther ye'll be wanting?" he asks, in suppressed
wonderment at any such unreasonable need on your part. When he has
sufficiently recovered from the shock, he lounges in among the boxes,
heroically resolved to make a joke of his martyrdom. He meets your
irritated glance with a reassuring smile, nods, and drawls out cheerily:
"Aisy, now, aisy. Sure an' 'twill be all the same in a hundred years."
When at last your trunks are discovered in the disorderly heap, he
volunteers, with the same suggestion of indifferent indulgence: "I
suppose 'twill be a cab or a cyar you'll be wanting next." By
implication you are made to understand that the cab or the cyar is
another exorbitant demand on your part, and that properly speaking you
should shoulder your trunk yourself and march off contentedly to your
inn or lodging or palace. "If ye loike, I'll lift it on to the cab for
you," he adds, good-naturedly.
There are travellers whom these odd ways of Erin amuse; others there are
who are exasperated to the verge of insanity by them. But they amply
explain the lamentable condition of the island and the imperturbable
good-humour of the least troubled and least ambitious of races. The
porter's philosophy resumes the philosophy of the land: "Aisy, now,
aisy. Sure an' 'twill be all the same in a hundred years."
With patience and good-humour on your side, and much voluble sympathy
and information on that of your driver, you are sure to arrive
somewhere, even from such remote latitudes as that of the North Wall and
the Pigeon-house. You are jerked over two lock-bridges, and you thank
your stars with reason that the discoloured and malodorous waters of the
Liffey have not closed over you and your luggage. The catastrophe would
find your driver phlegmatic and philosophic, with a twinkle in his eye
above the infamous depths of mire that suffocated you, assuring you that
when a man is ass enough to travel he must take the consequences of his
folly. For Erin and Iberia, moist shamrock and flaunting carnation, meet
in their conviction that the sage sits at home and smokes his pipe or
twangs his guitar in leisure while the fool alone courts the perils of
foreign highways.
As soon as the hall-door opened, and I stood with my foot upon the first
step of the familiar stairs, a chorus of young voices shouted my name in
glee. "An--gel--a!"
How flat and strange and inharmonious sounded that first greeting of my
name in ears attuned to accents shriller and more thin! The English
Angela was quick and clear; but the long-drawn Dublin Angela set all my
teeth on an edge, and such was the shock that the ardour of my
satisfaction in seeing them all again, and of appearing in their midst
as a travelled personage, was damped.
"How odd you all talk," I remember remarking at tea, and being promptly
crushed: "It's you with your horrid English accent that talks odd."
Still, in spite of this slight skirmish, they were glad enough to see
me. The quaint little booby of Kildare, whom they had bullied to their
liking, had grown into a lean, delicate, and resolute fiend, prepared to
meet every blow by a buffet, every injustice by passionate revolt. I no
longer needed Mrs. Clement's submissive protection. I had tasted the
glory of independent fight, and henceforth my tormentors were entitled
to some meed of pity, though justice bids me, in recording my
iniquities, to remember that their misfortunes were merited and earned
with exceeding rigour.
The first thrill of home-coming, that inexplicable vibration of memory's
chord, which so early marks the development of the creature, and
signifies the sharp division of past and present, ran like a flame
through all my body when the noise of Mrs. Clement's big bunch of keys,
rattling below stairs, reached me through the open drawing-room door.
"Mrs. Clement is down-stairs!" I shouted joyously, and instantly the
band of blond-headed scamps carried me off in triumph.
Into whose hands has that sombre town-house of my parents passed? Heaven
grant the children that play there are happier than ever I was; but if
the old store-room, with the big linen-presses, and the long china-press
with upper doors of wire-screen, the long table and square mahogany and
leather armchairs and sofa, gives to the occupants to-day half the
pleasure it always gave me, they are not to be pitied whatever their
fate.
The wide window looked out upon a hideous little street, but in front
there was a stone terrace, with two huge eagles, where Mrs. Clement kept
pots of plants and flowers that, alas! never bloomed, watered she them
never so sedulously; and above the terraces, if you ignored the sordid
street, the sunset traced all its fairest and rarest effects upon the
broad arch of heaven that spanned the street opening. Those Irish skies!
you must go to Italy and Greece to find hues as heavenly. How many a
sorrow unsuspected, that filled me with such intensity of despair as
only childhood can feel, has been smoothed by that mysterious slip of
sky between two dull rows of houses, against which in the liquid summer
of blue dusk the eagles, with all the lovely significance of a romantic
image, were sketched in sculptured stone. I dried my eyes to dream of
lands where eagles flew as common as sparrows. I cannot now tell why,
but I remember well that I grew to associate that distant glimpse of
heaven from the old store-room with the isle of Prospero and Miranda.
And when I learnt the Sonnets--which I knew by heart, as well as "The
Tempest" and "The Merchant of Venice" before the holidays were over--I
always found some strange connection between the abortive, sickly
cowslips and primroses Mrs. Clement cultivated on her terrace in wooden
boxes and those magic lines--
"From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything."
What can it be that poetry says to children, since they can neither
understand the rhythm, nor metre, nor beauty, nor sentiment of it? And
the child who (as I was then) is susceptible to the charm of poetry that
sweeps through the infinite, weeps with delicious emotion without the
ghost of an idea why. I was but a child of nine, when my sister in
response to my prayer, with my cheek still stinging from that blow
along the Warwick road, opened the fairyland of Shakespeare to me. With
a rapture I would I now could feel, I thrilled to the glamour of the
moonlight scene of the "Merchant." We never went to bed without
rehearsing it, each in turn being Jessica or Lorenzo. I only remember
one other sensation as passionate and vivid and absorbing, my first
hearing of the Moonlight Sonata, also at an age when it was perfectly
impossible that I should understand more than a mouse or a linnet a
particle of its beauty or meaning. Yet there they stand out in
extraordinary relief from a confusion of childish impressions, two
distinct moments of inexplicable ecstasy, the reveries of Lorenzo and
Jessica and the impassioned utterance of the master's soul in the
divinest of sound played, possibly not well, by my eldest sister's
governess in a soft summer twilight so long ago.
Meanwhile I have left Mrs. Clement, excited and pathetic, holding my
thin little visage in the cup of her folded palms. She was just as faded
and fair and melancholy as ever, and the same young man's head showed in
the brooch frame on the unchanged black silk gown. She kissed me several
times, and stroked my hair, and expressed amazement at the change in
me. And while she, dear kindly soul, was only thinking of me, there was
I, volatile little rascal, looking around me, delighted to see again the
beautiful big red-and-white cups, and smell the spices of the cupboard.
Has tea, have bread-and-milk, ever tasted again as these modest luxuries
tasted in those beautiful cups? The very remembrance of them brings the
water of envy to the mouth of age. I forget the miseries of childhood
only to recall the pleasure I took in that warm and rich pottery, and
the brilliant effect of bowls and plates and cups upon the morning and
evening damask.
And that first night at home, four little girls sleeping together in two
large beds, three night-dressed forms perched on a single bed, while I,
the stranger returned from abroad, mimicked Mr. Parker for their
shrieking delight, and held my night-dress high up on either side to
perform the famous curtsey of Queen Anne. And then a furious shout
outside on the landing, and my mother's voice--
"What's the meaning of that noise? Go to sleep instantly, or I'll come
in and whip you all round."
A sudden scamper of white-robed limbs, and in a twinkling four heads
are hidden under the sheets. Silence down the corridors, silence
throughout the high old house; only the breathing of night, and four
little heads are again bobbing over the pillows.
"Oh, I say, Angela, we didn't tell you, there's a new baby up-stairs.
Susanna! Did you ever hear of such a name? Everybody has pretty names
but us. Birdie was so jealous when it came, because nurse said her nose
would be out of joint, that she tried to smash its head with a poker one
day. She was caught in time."
And so there was. Another lamentable little girl born into this
improvident dolorous vale of Irish misery. Elsewhere boys are born in
plenty. In Ireland,--the very wretchedest land on earth for woman, the
one spot of the globe where no provision is made for her, and where
parents consider themselves as exempt of all duty, of tenderness, of
justice in her regard, where her lot as daughter, wife, and old maid
bears no resemblance to the ideal of civilisation,--a dozen girls are
born for one boy. The parents moan, and being fatalists as well as
Catholics, reflect that it is the will of God, as if they were not in
the least responsible; and while they assure you that they have not
wherewith to fill an extra mouth, which is inevitably true, they
continue to produce their twelve, fifteen, or twenty infants with
alarming and incredible indifference. This is Irish virtue. The army of
inefficient Irish governesses and starving illiterate Irish teachers
cast upon the Continent, forces one to lament a virtue whose results are
so heartless and so deplorable. If my most sympathetic and most
satisfactory race were only a little less virtuous in its own restricted
sense of the word, and a tiny bit more rational! And not content, alas!
with the iniquity of driving these poor maimed creatures upon foreign
shores in the quest of daily bread, hopelessly ill-equipped for the
task, without education, or knowledge of domestic or feminine lore,
incapable of handling a needle or cooking an egg, without the most
rudimentary instinct of order or personal tidiness, incompetent, and
vague, and careless,--these same parents at home expect these martyrs
abroad to replenish their coffers with miserably earned coin. I have
never met an Irish governess on the Continent who had a sou to spend on
her private pleasures, for the simple reason that she sent every odd
farthing home. It's the iniquitous old story. Irishmen go to America,
marry, and make their fortunes; but the landlord and shopkeeper at home
are paid by the savings of the peasant-girls, without a "Thank you" from
their parents. Let Jack or Tom send them a five-pound note in the course
of a prosperous career, "Glory be to God, but 'tis the good son he is,"
piously ejaculate the old folk. Let Bessy or Jane give them her heart's
blood, deny herself every pleasure, not only the luxuries but the very
necessaries of life, and the same old folk nod their sapient
heads,--"'Tis but her duty, to be sure."
Needless to say, this inappropriate burst of indignation was not
inspired in those days by the sight of my new little sister in her
cradle, as white as milk, with eyes like big blue stars, the eyes of her
Irish father, soft and luminous and gay. She dwelt on earth just
eighteen months, and then took flight to some region where it is to be
hoped she found a warmer nest than fate would have offered her here
below.
My grandmother was dead, but Dennis and Mary Ann still lived with my
uncle Lionel. What a joy our meeting! So "thim English" hadn't made
mince-meat of me! I was whole and sound, Mary Ann remarked, but mighty
spare of flesh and colour. "Just a rag of a creature," Dennis commented,
as he lifted my arm. "Why didn't ye write and tell us ye were hungry,
alannah?"
"I did so," I promptly retorted; "but Sister Esmeralda rubbed it out,
and put in something else which wasn't a bit true."
"Troth, and 'tis meself 'ud enjoy givin' that wan a piece of me moind."
The whiff of the brogue was strong enough to waft you to the clouds. But
how good to be with these two honest souls again! Uncle Lionel gave me a
crown-piece, when he had tortured my check with his chaven chin, and
called me a little renegade because of my English accent, and then I
went out to the garden, neglected ever since the death of my
grandfather.
Where was Hamlet, and whither had vanished Elsinore? Where was the youth
with the future revolutionary name, who used to come bounding over the
hedge, cheerily humming "Love among the Roses"? There were no roses now,
and the house next door was to let.
After the trim gardens of England, this desolate old slip of garden,
where weeds and thick grasses grew along the uncared paths, seemed a
cemetery of dead seasons. Fruit-trees that bore neither blossom nor
fruit; flower-beds where never leaf nor flower now bloomed; alleys
where last year's autumn leaves still lay; broken pots that used to
make such a gay parterre of geraniums of every hue when my grandfather
lived; defoliaged rose-bushes, now mere summer urns of unfulfilled
promise, and scarce a red bunch on the currant-boughs. And the pool,
with the circle of watering-cans above, now rusty and untouched, where I
used to watch for the first faint line of shadow cast by the gathering
dusk, which stole across its clear face in keeping with the stealing
flight of light above--how dead and sad all this seemed, despite its
quaint familiarity. I was but a child, and yet as I stood once more in
that neglected garden, I had some premonition of the immitigable sadness
of remembrance, the feeling that there was already a past that had
slipped through my fingers, as the waters run ceaselessly from the
fountain of life to mingle with the still river of death.
Chapter XXII.
A PRINCESS OF LEGEND.
"Is childhood dead?" Lamb asks; "is there not in the best some of the
child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?" Can I now,
without a responsive thrill, see myself flash into the unaltered dulness
of that Kildare village, a little princess of legend, with the glory of
foreign travel about me, the overseas cut of frock and shoes, the
haughty and condescending consciousness of superiority?
They were all so visibly at my feet, so glad to worship and admire, so
eager to praise, so beset with wonder. I was to spend a week in their
midst, a delightful week, as long as a story, as brief as a play, a puff
of happiness blown across the bleak wind of solitude, a prolonged and
hilarious scamper through sensation as vivid and vital as morning light.
Mary Jane was there, with the unchanged oiled black ringlets, and in my
honour she wore them bound with a bright blue ribbon. Louie came out
from town to behold me, and gazed in stupefied awe. I had been in a ship
across the sea. I had traversed half of England in a railway-carriage.
Had I seen an elephant? Mary Jane wanted to know if I had seen the
Queen.
No; but I had seen a naked lady, with beautiful golden hair down her
back, ride through the town of Lysterby on a white pony, while twelve
lovely pages in silver and gold and satin rode before, and twelve lovely
maidens with long velvet cloaks lined with white satin rode behind her.
This sounded as grand as a royal procession, and I glided ingeniously
over the ignominy of having been to England and not having seen the
Queen.
Mary Jane's mamma gave me a bowl of milk and a plate of arrowroot
biscuits, and as I devoured them, with what a splendid air I recognised
the old and faded views of New York! I scorned my past ignorance, and
off-handedly mentioned that "You know, the sea isn't a bit like the
pond." And then the search for a brilliant and captivating
comparison--arm extended to suggest immensity; heaving wave, rolling
ship.
"Isn't she wonderful?" they cried; "and the fine language of her!"
From cottage to cottage, from shop to shop, I wandered, intoxicated by
the incense of admiration. I embroidered fact and invented fiction with
the readiness of the fanciful traveller. Sister Esmeralda became an
unimaginable fiend, who had persecuted me as if I had been the heroine
of the fairy-tale I was acting, till the entire village was fit to rise
and shout for her blood.
"The likes of that did you ever hear?" a gaunt peasant in corduroy would
ask his neighbour in dismay.
"Troth and 'tis thim English as is a quare lot. Beat a little lady as is
fit to rule the lot of them, and lock her up in dungeons along with
spirits and goblins, and starve the life and soul out of her! Sure 'tis
worse they are than in the days of Cromwell."
Naturally, in the amazing record of my experiences, the hidden bones and
marble hand of my old friend, the White Lady of the Ivies, played a
prominent and shuddering part.
Under the influence of such an audience I tasted the fascinating results
of suffering. I was in that brief week repaid for all the previous
slights of fortune. I reposed in the lap of adulation, and turned my
woes into a dramatic enjoyment. I had suffered; but the romantic
activity of my imagination, with a natural mirthfulness of temperament,
preserved me from the self-centred and subjective misery of the
visionary, and from the embittering anguish of rancour. Once I had
excited the local mind against Sister Esmeralda and the wretched
superioress of the ladies of Mercy, my anger against them vanished, and
they simply remained in memory as picturesque instruments of misfortune.
But for the moment I was too full of the joy of living for anything like
morbid self-pity. I preferred to loll on the grass beside Bessy the
applewoman, and treat all the children of the green to her darling trays
of apples with uncle Lionel's bright crown-piece. Bessy never tired of
assuring me that I was a wonderful creature, which I fully believed, and
Louie made frequent mention of his thirst to be old enough to marry me.
It soothed him to hear that he was much nicer than Frank, the horrid
Lysterby boy. Louie had not made his first confession, and he was
thrillingly and fearfully interested in the tale of mine.
"You know," I dolefully remarked, "the priest won't let you confess any
of the nice interesting-looking sins, with the lovely big names, like
a-dul-tery and for-ni-fi-ca-tion and de-fraud-ing. He makes you tell
awful little sins, like talking in class and answering a nun, and all
that sort of thing."
"Oh, but I say," shouted Louie, wagging a remonstrative head, "the
priest can't prevent you from saying you committed adultery."
"Yes, but he says you didn't; and then it seems you're telling a lie to
the Holy Ghost, and you may be struck dead in the confessional-box."
This Louie regarded as an excessive risk to run for the simple pleasure
of confessing a nice big sin. He thought the matter over in bed that
night, and communicated to me next morning his intention to confess to
having stolen two marbles from Johnnie Magrath, and having licked Tim
Martin.
"You know, Angy, I really did lick him, he's such an awful beast, and
made his nose bleed rivers, with a black dab under his eyes as big as my
fist; and here are the two marbles I stole."
He went back to town that afternoon, with his little gray eyes moist
over the brimming smiles of his lively comic mouth. His was a hilarious
depression, a rowdy melancholy, emblematic of the destiny in store for
him. He grimaced wonderfully, with screwed-up eyelids and twisted and
bunched-out lips, and kept on muttering all the time we walked together
to the coach-house where the mail-car started from: "It's an awful
shame, so it is. A fellow can't do what he likes, but there's always
somebody bothering him and ordering him about."
Dear, honest, little playmate! That was the last, last glimpse I had of
him. We exchanged our last kiss at the top of the village street, and I
wildly waved my handkerchief until a deep bend of the long white Kildare
road hid the car, as it seemed to roll off the flat landscape.
Chapter XXIII.
MY FIRST TASTE OF FREEDOM.
My parents had taken a house at Dalkey, with a garden a dream of
delights, that ran by shadowy slopes and bosky alleys down to the grey
rocks where the sea seemed to become our very own, as it rolled over the
rocks, and made, from time to time, when the tide ran high, little pools
along the sanded fringes of the garden. The house was large and
rambling, and of a night when the waves roared and the artillery of the
heavens shook at the foundations of earth, it afforded us enormous
gratifications of every kind. We were fascinated by terror, and
shuddered in silence during the long nights when our parents were kept
in town by a theatre, a race, a party. Then we were left in the charge
of our eldest sister, a young person of a sentimental and despotic turn
of mind. She ruled us with a rod of iron, then invited us to weep with
her over the poems of Adelaide Ann Procter. And while she read to us in
a tremor of eager sensibilities the legend of Provence, she ruthlessly
confiscated "Waverley," "Kenilworth," "Rob Roy," which I kept under my
pillow, and read aloud at night to my younger sisters. Novels she held
to be the kernel of every iniquity under the sun, but Longfellow and
Adelaide Ann Procter were the sole ennobling influences of life. She was
sustained in this crooked conviction by a pensive little stitcher, who
used to come and sew and mend for us all several hours a-week, and could
recite in their entirety "Evangeline" and the "Golden Legend."
A quaint and original figure this white-haired, sad-eyed little
stitcher. She had had her romance, stranger than Evangeline's. Her lover
had gone to America, and had fought in the Federal war. With a few
savings, she followed him across the Atlantic, and sought him out in
State after State, walking several leagues a-day, with lifts here and
there in waggons, subsisting for months on a daily crust and a root or
two, to end her dolorous peregrinations in a hospital with her dying
lover's head upon her faithful breast. She returned to Ireland the
heroine of a real novel, with black hair bleached and eyes dim from
weeping. She had won the right to be cheerless, and stand with flowing
eyes "on the bridge at midnight," and tell us "in mournful numbers life
is but an empty dream."
We were a wild lot, no doubt, and worked wonders in villainy and
mischief. Even our sister's sentimentality at times succumbed to our
monstrous spirits; and she forgot Longfellow and Miss Procter, to drop
into Irish farce. All the houses round about us were filled with boys
and girls of all ages up to sixteen. We needed no introduction to form a
general family of some thirty or forty vagrants and imps of both sexes.
The head of the troop was a red-headed youth, destined to adorn the
medical profession, and a pale proud-looking boy of fourteen, my first
love, Arthur by name, of an exalted family, and now, I believe, a
distinguished colonel. When we joined the boys on the cricket-field, I
always picked up his balls and handed them to him reverentially, and my
reward was to be told in an offhand way that "I was a nice little
thing." To me he was Quentin Durward, Waverley, with a dash of Leicester
and Prince Ferdinand. He certainly was quite as haughty-looking and
distinguished as any of these decorative heroes. His father, an amiable,
high-mannered old lord, sometimes treated us to fireworks; and then his
sisters, prouder than ever Cinderella's could have been, would come out
and smile down benevolently upon us all, with the air of court-ladies
distributing prizes at a village festival. Arthur himself was a very
simple boy, extremely flattered by my mute adoration, which he
encouraged by all sorts of little airs and manoeuvres.
It was the red-headed leader who invented the most delightful
entertainment in the world. He formed us into a band of beggars. He
played a banjo and sang nigger songs, and Arthur, in shirt-sleeves, with
a rakish cap rowdily posed on his aristocratic flaxen head, went round
with a hat to gather coin. We went from house to house, an excited troop
of young rascals, sang and danced and begged and shouted in each garden
until the grown-up people appeared and flung a sixpence, sometimes even
a shilling, into Arthur's hat. The old lord occasionally rose to
half-a-crown. The parents enjoyed the fun as much as we did, and never
pretended to recognise us.
What tales we invented! What lies we told! One pretty little girl, with
brown ringlets round the rosiest of faces, won a half-sovereign from my
stepfather, who was smoking on the lawn when the band invaded his
solitude, by assuring his honour that she was "the mother of fourteen
children, with their bed-clothes on her back." When she flung the
sparkling piece into Arthur's hat, he shouted "Gold!" and a frantic
cheer went up from the band. We rushed off in a joyous body next day to
Killiney Hill, and had a feast of lemonade and oranges, and toffee and
cake. The red-haired chief paid the bill with a flourish, and if there
was any change he kept it.
Each parent took his turn in providing the company with an official
feast. The old lord monopolised the fireworks. My stepfather instituted
races. A wealthy barrister, our neighbour, inveigled a circus for our
delectation; and seven delightful old maids, who lived in a kind of
castle of their own, outdid all the fathers royally by a regatta of our
own. All the boatmen of Dalkey were hired, and each boat ran up a sail.
Mighty powers! what a day that was. Were ever youngsters so gratified,
so excited, so conscious of being a little community apart, with the sea
and the land for its entertainment?
And there was an amiable old judge, who offered us the freedom of his
big orchard, where the apples grew in quantities, and we climbed the
trees like squirrels, and devoured fruit without fear or restraint.
Chapter XXIV.
MY ELDEST SISTER.
My eldest sister was only fourteen, but she was already, had ever been,
a sage and a saint. At the age of eight she had put her hand into a
blazing fire in order to die the death of a Christian martyr. She
shrieked dismally for several hours afterwards. Another time, staying
with relatives in the country, she knelt in the gloaming in a big barn,
praying with fervently closed eyes, in the hopes of being devoured by
lions. She heard the distant growlings of an angry mastiff, and thought
her prayer was granted, and that this was the ravening lion about to
make a meal of her. She fell down in a fit of convulsions, and had to be
nursed by several doctors.
When she came back to consciousness, with her hair shorn and wan little
hands upon the coverlet, she recognised our tender mother seated beside
her bed, and contentedly shortening her last new frock for my second
sister. She offered up the mortification for her sins, and instantly
said a prayer to her patron saint, Agnes. At dinner she never ate
pudding or pie, not even damson-pie, for which I in those gluttonous
days would have sold, not only my own soul, but hers as well; but after
dinner she invariably carried her share of these luxurious edibles to
the nearest poor person.
She visited the poor continually, always provided with tea and sugar and
such things; and Pauline, who accompanied her on these missions of
mercy, assured me that she often saw the pet cases of misery dash under
the bed excellent dishes of bacon and eggs and bottles of Guinness'
stout, while the traditional invalid would jump into bed, gather the
clothes about her, and begin to whine, "Sure, your little ladyship, 'tis
our lonesome selves as hasn't had bit or sup since last we saw your
purty face."
My eldest sister was a bewitching beauty. She had large dusky blue eyes
in constant communion with the heavenly spheres. She had ruddy golden
hair that shown adown her back like pounded guineas, and her complexion
was a thing to gape at. Indeed we had all inherited from our mother
wonderful golden locks and dazzling complexions.
This sentimental and saintly creature wrought the utmost havoc around
her, and went dreamily through life unconscious or sublimely
indifferent, with her gaze of impassioned sadness fixed upon her
heavenly home. Youths went down before her like ninepins, and trembled
when they addressed her. One lad of sixteen rode past the door with a
crimson cravat, which he fondly hoped to be becoming, and the moody
intensity of expression that betokens a broken heart. She minded him
not. She was reading "Fabiola" for the hundredth time in the front
garden. The gate was open. In his amorous distraction the youth forgot
the proprieties, and rode through the gate in lordly style. The door
likewise was open, and the pony gallantly galloped into the hall.
My sister's dismay was nothing to the youth's. He stammered and
stuttered and went so red that the wonder was he ever grew pale again.
But we were used to these commotions aroused by our young Saint Agnes in
the bosom of excitable youth. It did not hurt her, and it did not harm
them. With gracious gravity she escorted the poor lad to the gate; but
we who knew her knew that she was stifling with suppressed laughter. For
my eldest sister had a pretty humour, even an irony of her own, and
gaiety, as will be seen, was not contraband in her religion.
She constituted herself our veritable mother in that old rambling house
of Dalkey. She ruled us like an autocrat, and punished us with a
lamentable severity. To teach us self-control and fearlessness, she
insisted that the smallest baby should be taken in her night-dress, half
asleep, and flung into the wild Irish sea that roared at the foot of the
garden. No mercy was shown a recalcitrant babe. Howl she never so
dolorously, she was plunged in head-foremost, sputtering salt through
her rebellious lips.
At night, when our parents stayed in town, she gathered us together in
the long low drawing-room, and insisted that we should examine our
consciences, meditate, and say the Rosary aloud to keep away robbers and
ghosts. All the boys got to know of this edifying practice, and outside
the window a crowd of arch-villains would gather, and shout the
responses derisively. We could hear Arthur's high-bred tones sing out
"Holy Mary, Mother of God," above the deep bass notes of the red-headed
chief. Arthur's brother, an elegant guardsman, staying with the old lord
for a couple of weeks, often condescended to join the band of
reprobates; and once I peeped out through the big chinks of the shutter,
and saw the man of fashion, with the hall-light directly upon his lean
and bronzed visage, eyes devoutly lifted to heaven in mimicry of my
eldest sister's ecstatic gaze, and hands folded like those of a
stained-glass picture: "Holy Mary! pray for me, a miserable sinner.
Blessed St. Agnes, help, oh help to convert me!"
Even the devotion of my eldest sister was unsettled, and we could see
her mobile lips twitch. It sufficed to reveal to us that the autocrat
was off guard, and we lay about the floor, and shrieked with delight.
Whenever he met my eldest sister upon the roads or rocks, the elegant
guardsman raised his hat with the air of a prince, and never a hint
about him of nocturnal iniquities.
But austere as she was in all things pertaining to discipline and
religion, she allowed us unbounded freedom out-of-doors. Some notion of
our use of that liberty may be seized from the following ejaculations of
an elderly bachelor, a political friend, who came to visit my
stepfather, and was confronted with this young saint of the golden
locks, the established mistress of a large household.
The elderly gentleman, looking out of the window in front, perceived
two little boots dangling from the branch of a high tree, almost against
the heaven.
"Who's up that tall tree?" asked the elderly gentleman.
"Oh, that's Angela. She always reads up there."
"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the elderly gentleman.
After further conversation, he walked down the room to examine the view
from the back. In gazing across the sea, seemingly near Howth, he
detected a rock point surrounded with heavy waves, and two little specks
upon this rock.
"It looks as if there were some creatures in danger of being drowned,"
remarked the elderly gentleman.
"Oh, not at all. That's Pauline's rock. She and Birdie always go out
when the tide is out, and spend the whole day wading there, and they
come back when the tide runs out again."
"My God!" cried the elderly gentleman.
Looking later up to the stable roof, he saw three little golden heads
bent over cards.
"What's that?" he blankly asked.
"Those are the three youngest, playing beggar-my-neighbour on the
roof."
"What extraordinary children!" muttered the elderly gentleman.
She devised a notable and original punishment for me whenever I flew
into one of my diabolical rages. She would order Miss Kitty, the
sentimental little stitcher, to hold my feet, a servant to hold my head,
and while I lay thus on the ground in durance vile, she would piously
besprinkle me with holy water, and audibly beseech the Lord and my
guardian angel to deliver me of the devil. It would be difficult for me
to conceive an operation more suitable as entertainment of the devil
than my sister's pious and fiendish method of obtaining his dismissal.
The first thing I inevitably did, when liberated, was to go into the
yard, and pump all the holy water off my wicked person. Then, dripping
like a Newfoundland, I would return to the house and decline to change
my dress or shoes, in the vociferated hope of immediate death from
consumption.
Chapter XXV.
OUR BALL.
All the children and young folk round about us had parents who, if they
went into town of a morning, were safe to return at night. Most of them
had mothers and aunts who lived at Dalkey all the summer. Only we were
happy enough to be so neglected by indifferent parents as to possess a
large house at our exclusive disposition four or five entire days and
nights of the week. Picture our rare and wild abuse of that freedom, and
imagine the envy it inspired in the bosoms of other children, of natures
as independent as ours!
"I say," proposed the red-headed chief, "what a capital idea if we had a
ball in your house some evening when they're away."
Between my eldest sister and me were two little maids, less of the
rascal and less of the saint than either of us. Pauline, the teller of
wonderful tales at Lysterby, seized upon the notion with avidity. A
ball! our own ball, given by ourselves, and all the vagrant band
between the dances refreshed by our ingenious efforts and exploits! It
was a grand idea. How we clapped our hands, danced, and stamped our feet
in the exuberance of content.
At first Saint Agnes demurred. She, after all, was the head of the house
by deputy. Not only was she responsible for our immortal souls, but for
our fragile bodies; above all, was she responsible for the state of the
larder. It was she who told the servant what to order at the general
grocer; she who drew attention to the condition of the cellar, in
provision for the horde of Sunday visitors, and the interminable file of
eager friends who made a point of inquiring after the health of my
parents and their progeny on band nights.
You never understand how extremely popular you are until you are in a
position to entertain at a pleasant seaside resort, within easy distance
of the metropolis, where a fashionable gathering meets twice a-week to
listen to the evening band, and where there are regattas. The most
distant acquaintance suddenly remembers that he is your dearest friend.
Troops invade your garden; your drawing-room is never empty. Shoals
devour the refreshments of your dining-room. At ten o'clock, when you
are on the point of barricading your too hospitable doors, men arrive
cheerily to bid you the time of day, and claim a whisky-and-soda. I
speak of Dublin, naturally, where, as a rule, we begin our afternoon
calls at midnight, and where the early awakened lark is safe to find us
snoring. Inhabit that same seaside place in winter, and even your
dearest friend will forget to remember that he knows you. Irish
hospitality is justly famous. There is nothing to match it on the face
of the earth. But Irish abuse of hospitality is, perhaps, insufficiently
recorded, and there is nothing more speedily forgotten than the
unlimited favours of "open house."
My parents kept "open house" with a vengeance, which is the reason
to-day that none of us possess the needful sixpence to jingle on the
traditional tombstone. It was the reason also that, when our ball came
off, we children were in a position to offer our thirty or forty
miniature guests flowing bowls of innocuous lemonade by the dozens,
ham-sandwiches, boxes of Huntley & Palmer's biscuits, baskets of apples
purchased by the hundred by my stepfather from his friend the judge,
whose orchards we daily pillaged. There was also claret and soda-water,
and even genial port and sherry, for that portion of the community we
regarded as "the grown-up,"--Arthur, the red-headed boy, Saint Agnes,
Pauline, and a few others of both sexes.
We discovered that my parents designed to sit out a play on a certain
evening, which meant that they would never give themselves the trouble
to catch the last train, and would sleep in town. Invitations were
instantly despatched, Saint Agnes giving her consent reluctantly, but
young enough to enjoy the prospect of the escapade. The ball was to open
as soon as possible after the seven o'clock tea, for at Dalkey, in those
days, all the children dined at two o'clock and sat down at seven to a
meal of tea and bread-and-butter, with barmbrack and buttered toast on
high holidays.
By eight o'clock the long drawing-room was full. We lit the clusters of
tapers round the walls, which were reserved for the pleasures of our
elders. The gas flared in every jet of the big chandelier. You might
have fancied we were celebrating a Royal birthday, such was the
brilliancy of our illuminated ball-room. Arthur had brought down, before
tea, bunches of flowers from his father's hothouse, and Saint Agnes was
ever a veritable witch in the arrangement of flowers.
The red-haired chief, as master of the ceremonies, wore a huge peony in
his buttonhole, and with what gusto he marshalled us about, told off
couples, and shouted "Lancers now," or "Look out now, the Caledonian
Quadrille." Three quaint little girls had been allowed to come with
their governess, who entered heartily into the spirit of the thing, and
never left the piano. Quadrille after polka, waltz after schottische,
"Sir Roger de Coverley," mazurka, and gallop. And, between the dances,
what riotous fun, when we cast ourselves upon the refreshments, and
noisy boys risked death and assassination as they opened lemonade and
soda-water bottles with a splendid flourish! Our elders might drink
themselves to frenzy on whisky and yet remain more sober than we were as
we capered and laughed and quaffed big draughts of harmless fluid. And
the sandwiches we ate, the biscuits and apples we devoured, the
bread-and-butter we munched, and flick, flack! there was Miss Montgomery
at the piano, and dozens of little feet were again twinkling about the
floor.
I, proud being, danced twice with Arthur. We floundered in amazing
fashion through a set of Lancers, the master of ceremonies shouting the
while indignantly at our heels. And later he invited me to go through
some mysterious measure he called a gallop, which consisted in a wild
charge for the other end of the room, helter-skelter, couples knocking
each other down delightedly, rolling over each other, and picking one
another up in the best of tempers.
And then, as we mopped our faces, and drank lemonade, somebody proposed
that I should give an imitation of Mr. Parker. Arthur and I were the
only travelled personages of the assembly. He had been to Eton and I had
been to Lysterby, and it was his slightly sarcastic voice that
determined me. "Oh, I say, by all means. I hear he was a capital fellow
that dancing-master of yours, and you do him to a T."
To prove that I did, I began the _chassé-croisé_, to the tune of an
imaginary violin, chanting Nora Creina, amid shrieks of approbation. How
often since have my friends lamented my missed vocation! On the stage,
whether actress or dancer, my fortune would long ago have been made, and
as an acrobat I should have won glory in my teens. But old-fashioned
parents never think of these things. If you are a girl, and fortune
forsakes the domestic hearth, they tell you to go and be a governess,
and bless your stars that, thanks to their good sense, you are enabled
to earn a miserable crust in the path of respectability. When they find
a child with extraordinary mimic capacities, an abnormal physical
suppleness, and a passion for the ballet, it does not occur to them that
it would be wiser and more humane to seek to turn these advantages to
some account, instead of condemning the little wretch to future misery
and self-effacement as a governess.
Pauline, who knew every moment of the famous Mr. Parker by heart,
wandered out into the front garden with a lad of her own age to look at
the stars and talk of their ideal. It was a few minutes after the hourly
train from Dublin stopped at Dalkey, and as they sat on the wall
discussing their favourite book of the hour, Manzoni's "Betrothed," they
saw a large and lofty figure steadily approach the gate. Good heavens!
It was my mother. Pauline was a creature of resource, and she had some
understanding of that formidable person.
"Quick, quick, Eddie," she whispered. "Run in and tell Agnes to get them
all out by the pantry window, which shows into the laneway. I'll keep
mamma outside talking about the stars."
Effectively, when my mother opened the gate, she encountered the solemn
sentimental regard of a student of the stars. Nothing enchanted my
mother more than an unexpected revelation of intelligence in one of her
children. She was a woman of colossal intelligence, of wide knowledge, a
brilliant talker, and at all times, whatever her temper, you could put
her instantly into good-humour, and wean her thoughts from the
irritating themes of daily life, by addressing yourself to her
intellect, and speaking of remote subjects like the constellations,
South Africa, the Federal war, Belgian farming, or the German Empire.
She knew everything, was interested in everything, had read everything,
could talk like a specialist on any given subject, except mathematics
and metaphysics, which she professed to hold in contempt. Another mother
would have been staggered to find a girl of thirteen alone beneath the
new-lit stars; but my mother found nothing at all odd in being begged to
deliver a lecture on astronomy at that hour, and fell into the trap with
ingenuous fervour.
And now I beseech you to conceive the scene inside. Ten minutes to clear
the house of some thirty excited children, obliged to make a
precipitous exit through a narrow pantry window, stifling with
hysterical laughter, and in danger of breaking their limbs upon the hard
ground as they dropped into the lane that ran alongside the garden into
the highroad. Ten minutes to clear the drawing-room of empty bottles and
glasses and plates, and put the chairs and tables and couches into
order. Ten minutes for us to scamper up-stairs, and get into our
night-gear in the dark. Good Lord! what fun! One would willingly endure
again the thrashing for those ten brave minutes of fire and fury.
"It was grand!" said Arthur next day to Pauline, after he had tried in
vain to look woe-begone over our castigation.
Only the body of the red-headed chief rebelled against the limited space
of the pantry window. What puffing and blowing and pushing to get his
fat carcass through! "Steady!" shouted the servant, Bridget, a big-boned
country girl; and with a bound she ran head-foremost like a charging
bull, who meditates the destruction of his enemy. A crash outside, and
we thrust anxious heads out of the window to ascertain if the
unfortunate youth lay in pieces upon the ground. But no; with smothered
laughter he was tearing down the lane for dear life.
With the last evidences of our feast effaced from view, we little ones
trod on each other's heels in our flight up-stairs, and staid Agnes went
outside, by the way, to induce her mooning sister to go to bed. She
simulated the necessary surprise and delight on beholding my mother, and
after a few more words upon the heavenly spheres, the three entered the
house, now cast, as Agnes fondly believed, into complete darkness.
My mother carelessly explaining why she had decided at the last minute
not to sleep in town, turned the handle of the drawing-room door. The
tapers, forgotten in the fray, blazed away in all their fatal admission,
though the gas of the chandelier had been duly extinguished. The result
was that soon the heavenly spheres were round about us instead of on
high. Agnes and Pauline rapidly were made to see stars elsewhere than in
the sky. When they lay prone and prostrate, not sure that their members
were whole, up offended majesty came to us, shivering in our
night-dresses. What did it all mean? she wanted to know. Empty bottles
heaped up in the pantry corner, a ham vanished, tin boxes empty of
their layers of biscuits, knives, plates, glasses, in tell-tale
disarray, a broken pane in the pantry window.
We had had our fun, and now came the bad quarter of the hour, when we
were expected to pay the bill in beaten flesh. How our ears tingled, our
cheeks pained, our heads ached, and our arms smarted! You see it was a
very long account, and it took a good deal of blows to make it up. But
even the most infuriated creditor is appeased in the long-run, when the
gathering in of his dues implies the excessive expenditure of nerve and
muscle as such a scene as that of our castigation. The strongest woman
cannot beat a half-dozen of children throughout an entire night, and my
mother retired, pleased to regard her life in danger by a consequent fit
of nervous exhaustion and blood to the head.
Chapter XXVI.
THE SHADOWS.
All this hilarity does not imply the total absence of sadness in those
bright days. I had lived and suffered too long in solitude not to have
reserved a private corner for unuttered griefs, into which no regard of
sister or stranger could ever penetrate. It is extraordinary the art
with which a circle of children can make one chosen by mutual consent
feel in all things, at every moment of the day, an intruder. The two
elder than I were sworn friends, the three younger likewise; both groups
united as allies. I stood between them, an outsider. I shared their
games, it is true, as I shared their meals; but when they had any
secrets to impart, I was left out in the cold. I daresay now, on looking
back, that had my sullen pride permitted a frank and genial effort, I
might easily enough have broken down this barrier. But I was morbidly
sensitive, and these young barbarians were very rough and hard. Not
ill-natured, but most untender.
I wonder if any other child has been so ruthlessly stabbed by home
glances as I. The tale of the Ugly Duckling is, I believe, as common as
all the essential legends of human grief and human joy. My dislike of
large families is born of the conviction that every large family holds a
victim. Amid so many, there is always one isolated creature who weeps in
frozen secrecy, while the others shout with laughter. The unshared
gaiety of the group is a fresh provocation of repulsion on both sides,
and not all the good-will of maturity can serve to bridge that first
sharp division of infancy. The heart that has been broken with pain in
childhood is never sound again, whatever the sequel the years may offer.
To escape the blighting influence of cynicism and harshness is as much
as one may hope for; but the muffled apprehension of ache, the rooted
mistrust bred by early injustice, can never be effaced.
I cannot now remember the cause of all those dreadful hours, of all
those bitter, bitter tears, nor do I desire to recall them. But I still
see myself many and many a day creeping under the bed that none might
see me cry, and there sobbing as if the veins of my throat should burst.
Always, I have no doubt, for some foolish or inadequate cause: a
hostile look in response to some spontaneous offer of affection, a
disagreeable word when a tender one trembled on my lips, some fresh
proof of my isolation, a rough gesture that thrust me out of the home
circle as an intruder, and a scornful laugh in front of me as the merry
band wandered off among the rocks and left me forlorn in the garden. A
robuster and less sensitive nature would have laughed down all these
small troubles, and have scampered into their midst imperious and
importunate. A healthier child, with sensibilities less on the edge of
the skin, not cursed with what the French call an _ombrageux_ temper,
would have broken through this unconscious hostility, and have captured
her place on the domestic hearth--would probably not have been aware of
an unfriendly atmosphere.
But this same morbid sensitiveness, mark of my unblessed race, has been
the unsleeping element of martyrdom in my whole existence. "Meet the
world with a smile," said a wise and genial friend of mine, "and it will
give you back a smile." But how can one smile with every nerve torn in
the dumb anguish of anticipated pain and slight? How can one smile
burdened by the edged sensibilities and nervousness of sex and race,
inwardly distraught and forced to face the world, unsupported by
fortune, family, or friends, with a brave front? It is already much not
to cry. But I shed all my tears in childhood, and left my sadness behind
me. When the bigger troubles and tragedies came, as they speedily did, I
found sustainment and wisdom in arming myself with courage and gaiety,
and so I faced the road. I had then, as ever since, plenty of pleasure
to temper unhappiness, plenty of bright rays to guide me through the
obscurities of sentiment and suffering. An unfailing beam of humour then
and now shed its smile athwart the dim bleak forest of emotions through
which destiny bade me cut my way.
One dark moment of peculiar bitterness now makes me smile. I record it
as proof of the tiny mole-hills of childhood that constitute mountains.
It shows the kind of booby I was, and have ever been, but none the less
instructs upon the nature of infant miseries.
We were walking along the road one afternoon with Miss Kitty. A public
vehicle tore down the hill led by four horses, three white and one
brown. We were four: I the eldest, and my three pretty step-sisters.
Birdie shouted--
"Oh, look at the three lovely white horses! That's us three. Angela is
the brown horse."
I regarded this choice as a manifest injustice. There was no reason on
earth that I should be a brown horse any more than one of my
step-sisters. I was angry and sore at what I deemed a slight, and
cried--
"I won't be the brown horse. I'll be one of the white horses, or else
I'll go away and leave you."
"No, you won't, and you may go if you like. We don't want you. We're
three nice white horses."
Here was an instance when I might have laughed down the exclusiveness of
these proud babies. But no. I must turn back, and walk home alone, sulky
and miserable, nursing my usual feeling of being alone in a cold
universe.
An hour of terrible fright for all of us was the morning Birdie fell
into Colamore Harbour. We were coming down from Killiney Hill, a lovely
spot more prosperous lands might envy us. Birdie walked inside, in a
pretty short frock of pale green alpaca, and a new hat with red poppies
among the ribbon. In those days Birdie and I ran it closely as infant
beauties. Her hair was a shade more flaxen than mine, and the roses of
her cheeks a shade paler. She was fatter, too, and less vapoury; but I
carried the palm as an ethereal doll, with a classic profile. Alas! the
promise of that period was never fulfilled. Both profile and pride of
beauty vanished on the threshold of girlhood, to make way for the
appearance of a dairymaid in their distinguished stead.
The wall of Colamore Harbour was protected by an iron chain that swung
low from the big stones that divided the festoons. Birdie's foot
slipped, and the child in a twinkling tumbled over, and plunged, with a
hollow crash, into the heavy grey sea. Happily there were bathing-women
and fishermen within hail, and as quickly as she had taken an unexpected
bath, Birdie was once more in our midst, dripping like a Newfoundland,
white and shaking with terror. One of the big boys took her up in his
arms and tenderly carried her home. We all followed, awed and
hysterical.
My mother was standing in the front garden talking to the gardener, when
the party marched in upon her. She frowned as Birdie was deposited on
the gravel path in a woeful state--her wet green skirt clinging to her
little legs, the discoloured poppies of her hat flat upon the wet
ribbon.
"Change that child's clothes," said my mother, indifferently, as if she
were all her life accustomed to the sight of a terrified child rescued
from the deep, and went on talking to the gardener.
It would be a bold and inhuman assertion to make, and certainly one I am
far from maintaining, that harsh treatment is the proper training of
children. But my mother's method has undoubtedly answered better than
that of many a tender or self-sacrificing mother. It built us in an
admirable fashion for adversity,--taught us to rely upon ourselves,
taught us, above all, that necessary lesson, how to suffer and not
whine. It is only when I observe how feebly and shabbily a spoiled woman
can face trouble and pain, that I feel one may with reason cherish some
pride of the power of enduring both with a smile. And when, stupefied
and shamed, I contemplate the petty trickeries to which worldliness and
untruthfulness can reduce a woman, the infamous devices a slender purse
can drag educated ladies into, thus am I partially consoled for the
sufferings of childhood. It is much, when one fronts battle, to have
been reared in an atmosphere of absolute rectitude, of truthful and
honourable instinct. It is a blessing indeed when love includes all
this. But bleak as the start was, I would not have had it otherwise at
the cost of these great and virile virtues. And since it would appear
that the Irish habit of boasting is an incorrigible weakness, and that
even in these democratic days my people still persist in descending from
kings who have slept in peace over seven hundred years, and may without
any extravagant scorn of fact be presumed to have passed for ever into
the state of legend, I am glad to acknowledge the priceless debt of
common-sense to a Scottish mother. Kings are all very well in their way,
especially if they happen to be reigning; but when one learns as
authentic fact that an Irish journalist has offered an article to an
unknown editor, accompanied with a letter stating that the blood of
seven kings runs in his veins, one feels that such a race is all the
more rational for a little foreign blood to modify the imperishable and
universal blight of royalty.
Chapter XXVII.
A DISMAL END OF HOLIDAYS.
For the joy of our small kingdom a delightful Fenian dropped into our
midst. It was breathed among us in fatal undertones that he had actually
shot a man. He was a figure of romance, if ever there was one. He went
about with long boots, and an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. He
had lovely dark-blue eyes, which Pauline described as Byronic, and
lisped most captivatingly. He was a kind of adopted relative, and, as a
special correspondent, has passed into history. He became our elder
brother, and in the years to come solaced himself in camp by regarding
Agnes as a lost early love. We lay about him on the grass as he told us
the tales of the Wonderful Nights. Better still, he invented adventures
of his own almost as alarming and enthralling. He told us that he had
been to Persia, which was not true--but no matter. We believed in the
Persian princess who had swung herself, at the risk of life, from the
harem window to become a Christian and marry him; and the king, her
royal father, who followed the lovers on horseback and was stabbed in
the breast by Edmond's trusty sword. The incoherence of his
reminiscences constituted their conspicuous charm. To-day we left him at
Samarcand, and on the morrow found him with a fresh and more perilous
love-adventure at Constantinople.
It was entrancing.
And then he would offer us a taste of adventure for ourselves: in the
absence of our parents he would crowd us into the waggonette, and drive
my stepfather's pet horses at a diabolical rate up by the exquisite
coast-road of Sorrento, into Bray and through the Wicklow mountains,
each curve and hollow and hilly bank menacing to lay us in pieces upon
the landscape, and we shouting and hurrahing, in a fond notion that we
were offering to the universe the spectacle of the instability of the
United Kingdom. Edmond's formidable method of conspiring against the
Government at that time consisted in delighting and amusing a troop of
little girls!
Foolish, reckless creature, alcohol absorbed and tarnished his brilliant
gifts, and his bones lie scattered at far-off Khartoum. He made of a
life that might have been a heroic poem a mere trivial legend, and, with
his lust for adventure and peril, he met the death he wished for, brief
and glorious.
His fear of my mother filled us with a rapturous sense of comradeship,
though this fear was quite foolish, for my mother never concealed her
preference for his sex, and to men was always as amiable as she was the
reverse to us. He beamed and joked with her, but was careful to scan her
visage, on the look-out for the first symptoms of storm. The bolt fell
rudely upon his shoulders the day he lamed the horses, and did some
damage to the waggonette. I never knew what she said to him; but it must
have been exceedingly bitter and unbearable, for his cheeks were as
white as paper, and his eyes as black as sloes. He was penniless for the
moment, and down on his luck, which makes a man more nervously sensitive
to slight than in his happier hours.
My stepfather was sorry for him; but, remembering the horses, was
relieved to send him off to Spain with a new outfit and the inevitable
opera-glasses.
"I shall never forget the old Dalkey garden," he said to Agnes, on the
morning of his departure, quite as sentimentally as if he were talking
to a grown-up young person. The rascal was always playing a part for his
own imagination, and even a slip of a girl of fourteen was better than
nobody to regret after a three weeks' stay in a romantically situated
house. It was stronger than him. He could not exist without a fancied
love-affair on hand.
In the Carlist War, where he claimed to have saved the colours of Spain,
rejected the hand of an Infanta, and lent his last five-pound note to
Don Carlos, which that illustrious person forgot to return,--'tis a way,
he would say musingly, with princes,--as he started for battle, he
pathetically adjured his comrades to cut off a lock of his blue-black
hair and send it to Agnes, with the assurance that his last thought was
given to her. In the pauses of battle he actually entertained himself by
composing an imaginary correspondence with an ardent and amorous Agnes,
which he read aloud to his dearest friend, with tears in his voice.
But that, as Mr. Kipling in his earlier manner would say, is quite
another story, and has nothing to do with the tale of little Angela.
I had no time to lament this fresh eclipse of romance, for Miss Kitty
was busy preparing my things for Lysterby, and two days after Edmond's
sentimental farewell and departure, I myself most dolefully had said a
bitterer good-bye to the rocks and harbour and hills of Dalkey, and had
been transported into the town house, to see Mrs. Clement for the last
time, and, along with her, make my farewell visit to Kildare.
It was a grievous hour for poor Nurse Cochrane. Jim, her husband, who
was down at Wexford two months ago when I came back from Lysterby, had
returned a fortnight earlier with death in his eyes.
When we got down at the post-house, the soft fine rain of Ireland was
drizzling over the land. A few steps brought us to the top of the green,
with the slit of water along the sky and two wild swans visible through
the pearl mist. All the blinds of nurse's windows were drawn down, and I
instantly recalled a like picture the day Stevie dropped out of life.
The door was open, and a group of working men, in their Sunday suits,
were talking in undertones.
"What has happened?" asked Mrs. Clement, alarmed.
"Troth, ma'am, an' 'tis a bad day for herself," said one.
"A power of ill-luck," said another. "A fine young man struck down like
that in the flower of youth."
Mrs. Clement hurried inside, and I followed her in excited silence. In
the familiar old parlour, with the china dogs and the green spinet, dear
kindly nurse sat back in the black horsehair arm-chair, sobbing and
moaning in the frantic way peasants will when grief strikes them, and
around her in voluble sympathy women hushed and exclaimed and
ejaculated, "Glory be to God!" "But who'd think of it?" "Poor Jim! but
'tis himself was the good poor crathur."
I advanced hesitatingly, abashed and frightened by such an explosion of
sorrow--I who always went under a bed to weep lest others should mock
me. Not then or since could I ever have given expression to such
expansive and boisterous feeling, restrained by a fierce and indomitable
pride even at so young an age.
Nurse caught sight of me, and held out both hands. I encircled her neck
with my arms, and pressed my cheek against hers, and when her sobs had
subsided, she stood up, holding me still in a frenzied clasp.
"Come, darling, and look at him for the last time. Poor Jim! He loved
you as if you had been his own, his very own, for sure never a child had
he."
She took me into Stevie's room, the best bedroom, and on the bed lay a
long rigid form. I hardly recognised the dear friendly Jim of my
babyhood, on whose knee I so often sat, in the pallid emaciated visage,
with the lank black hair round it, and the moustache and beard as black
as pitch against the hollow waxen cheek. The same candles were alight
upon the table in daytime, and the air yielded the same heavy odour of
flowers as on that other day I had penetrated into this room, and found
Stevie in his coffin. I shuddered and clung to nurse's skirt, sick with
a nameless repulsion, yet I am thankful now that I found courage, when
she asked me to kiss him, not to shrink from that simple duty of
gratitude. I allowed her to lift me, and I put my mouth to the frozen
forehead, with what a sense of fear and horror I even can recall to-day.
I was glad to nestle up against Mrs. Clement on the mail-car and press
my lips against her live arm to get the cold contact from them. I felt
so miserable, so broken was my faith in life, that the return to
Lysterby passed unnoticed. I remember neither the departure, the
journey, nor the arrival at school.
The episode of my first vacation closed with that dread picture of a
dead man and a white shroud, and in the lugubrious illumination of
tapers, and nurse sobbing and keening, with no hope of comfort. After
that the troubles of home and school looked poor enough, and for some
time the nuns found me a very sober and studious little girl. It was
long before even Mr. Parker could raise a smile; and Play Day, when we
were permitted to do as we liked all day, found me with no livelier
desire than to sit still and pore over the novels of Lady Georgiana
Fullerton.
Chapter XXVIII.
MY FIRST COMMUNION.
This period of unwonted mildness in a turbulent career was seized by the
good ladies of Lysterby as a fitting moment for my first communion. It
might be only a temporary lull in a course of perversity which would not
occur again, and so I was ordered to study anew the lives of the saints.
This was quite enough to turn my eager mind from thoughts of daring deed
to dreams of sanctity.
I proposed to model my life on that of each fresh saint; was in turn St.
Louis of Gonzague, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Theresa and St.
Stanislaus of Koscuetzo,--for the life of me I cannot remember the
spelling of that Polish name, but it began with a K and ended with an O,
with a mad assortment of consonants and vowels between. St. Elizabeth I
found very charming, until the excessive savagery of her confessor,
Master Conrad, diminished my enthusiasm. When I came to the barbarous
scene where Master Conrad orders the queen to visit him in his
monastery, which was against the monachal law, and then proceeds to
thrash her bare back while he piously recites the Miserere, I shut the
book for ever, and declined upon the spot to become a saint.
Nevertheless I made my first communion in a most edifying spirit. I
spent a week in retreat down in the town convent, and walked for hours
up and down the high-walled garden discoursing with precocious
unctuousness to my good friend Mother Aloysius, who, naïve soul, was
lost in wonder and admiration of my gravity and sanctimoniousness. I
meditated and examined my conscience with a vengeance. I delighted in
the conviction of my past wickedness, and was so thrilled with the
sensation of being a converted sinner that, like Polly Evans, gladly
would I have revived the medieval custom of public confession.
Contrition once more prompted me to pen a conventional letter of
penitence, submission, affection, and promise of good behaviour to my
mother, which virtuous epistle, like a former one, remained without an
answer.
This was part of the extreme sincerity of my mother's character. She
wished her children, like herself, to be "all of a piece," and did not
encourage temporary or sensational developments in them. Since she never
stooped to play for herself or the gallery the part of fond mother, she
kept at bay any inclination in us to dip into filial sentimentalism.
Never was there a parent less likely to kill the fatted calf on the
prodigal's return.
And then, in wreath and veil and white robe, with downcast eyes and
folded hands to resemble the engraving of St. Louis of Gonzague, I
walked up the little chapel one morning without breakfast. The harmonium
rumbled, the novices sang, the smell of flowers and wax was about me,
incense sent its perfumed smoke into the air, and I lay prostrate over
my prie-dieu, weeping from ecstasy. I fancied myself on the rim of
heaven, held in the air by angels. I have a notion now that I wanted to
die, so unbearable was the ache of spiritual joy. I was literally bathed
in bliss, and held communion with the seraphs.
It seemed a vulgar and monstrous impertinence to be carried off, after
such a moment, to the nuns' refectory and there be fed upon buttered
toast and crumpets and cake. With such a feast of good things before me
I could not eat. I wanted to go back to the chapel and resume my
converse with the heavenly spheres. Instead, Mother Aloysius invited me
out to the garden, and there spoke long and earnestly, in her dear,
simple, kindly way, of my duties as a Christian. I was no longer a bad
troublesome child, but a little woman of eleven, with all sorts of grave
responsibilities. I was to become disciplined and studious, check my
passion for reading, take to sewing, and cultivate a respectful attitude
to my superiors. She owned that for the moment I was a model of all the
virtues, but would it last long, she dubiously added.
Wise woman! It did not last long. The normal child is occasionally bad
and generally good. I reversed the order, and was only very occasionally
good and generally as bad as possible. The period of temporary
beatification over, I was speedily at loggerheads again with my old
enemy Sister Esmeralda. Would you know the cause of our last and most
violent quarrel? Lady Wilhelmina of the Abbey had a little girl of my
age, so like me that we might have been twin-sisters. Because of this
strange resemblance, Lady Wilhelmina often invited me up to the Abbey
to play with her daughter Adelaide. She was a dull, proud child, whom I
rather despised, but we got through many an afternoon comfortably
enough, playing cricket with her brother Oswald. One Sunday after
benediction, Adelaide and I were walking side by side when we came near
Sister Esmeralda talking to an elder pupil.
"Isn't it wonderful that those children should be so alike!" exclaimed
the girl. "They might be twins."
"Not at all," cried Sister Esmeralda, tartly. "Lady Adelaide is far
handsomer than Angela, who is only a common little Irish thing."
The words were not meant for my hearing, but they stung me as a buffet.
I flashed back like a wild creature on flame, and stood panting in front
of my enemy, while Adelaide, pale and trembling, caught my dress behind.
"I heard what you said, and it's a lie. I'm not a common little Irish
thing. I am just as good as Lady Adelaide--or you, or anybody else. The
Irish are much nicer than the English any day, ever so much
nicer,--there, and I hate you, so I do."
"Oh, Angela!" sobbed Adelaide, clutching at my dress.
"Let me alone, you too!" I screamed, beside myself with passion. "I
don't care whether you are handsomer than I, for you're just an ordinary
little girl, not half as clever as I."
Adelaide, who had a spirit of her own, retorted in proper fashion, and
before Sister Esmeralda had time to shake me and push me in before her,
I struck the poor little aristocrat full on her angry scarlet cheek.
I was only conscious of the enormity of my fall on receiving a tender
almost broken-hearted note from Mother Aloysius. "Dearest child," it
lovingly ran, "what has become of all your good resolutions? What about
all those nice sensible promises of gentle and submissive behaviour you
made me down here in the garden? Is that how St. Louis of Gonzague, St.
Elizabeth of Hungary, would have acted? Tell Sister Esmeralda how sorry
you are; and write, like my good little Angela, and tell me you are
sorry too."
I penned with great care a fervent and honest reply, which I begged Miss
Lawson, the lay teacher, to carry to my friend in town. "I'm sorry, ever
so sorry, because you are sorry, and you are the only person here I
love. But I won't be sorry for Sister Esmeralda. I hate her. She said I
was a common little Irish thing. It's mean and nasty, for I am only a
child and can't hurt her, and she's big and can hurt me. If I am Irish,
I am as good as her."
Chapter XXIX.
THE LAST OF LYSTERBY AND CHILDHOOD.
My mother came over again to Lysterby with Pauline and Birdie, who
shared my last year in that quaint old town. My mother's second visit is
a vague remembrance. I recall a singular old gentleman who joined us in
an expedition to Guy's Cliff, and terrified the life out of us girls by
a harrowing description of the hourly peril he walked under, and a
fervid assurance that he might drop down dead at that very moment of
speech. We walked behind him in frozen fear, and looked each moment to
see him drop dead at our feet, but my mother discoursed in front of us
quite unconcerned. He wore a cloak with a big cape, and said "Madam"
after every second word. Guy's Cliff I remember as a lovely place; but
the chill water of the well was not so chill as my blood while I
contemplated that doomed old man.
Pauline's latest enthusiasm was Miss Braddon, and what glorious things
she made of "Lady Audley's Secret," "Aurora Floyd," and, I fancy, a
tale about a Captain Vulture! I read these books afterwards (that is the
two first), and what poor tawdry stuff, my faith, compared with the
brilliant embroideries of my most imaginative sister, who turned lead
into pure gold!
Years, how many, many years, after, a man of European fame, one of the
rare figures that go to make up a century's portraits, speaking of
Pauline, said she was the cleverest woman he had ever known. But alas!
alas! hers was not a cleverness a woman poor and obscure could utilise.
A man, she would have been a great statesman, for she was a born
politician. Geography was her passion, history her mania,--not that she
could ever have written history, for she was too quick, complex, and
vital to learn so slow a trade as that of a writer's; but hers was a
miraculous intuitive seizure of history, that made it to her imperious
vision present, and not the smallest historical fact in Europe escaped
her attention and remembrance. Could crowned heads but know what a
severe and unflinching gaze was fixed upon them! of what singular and
passionate importance to her was the marriage of their most distant
relatives! Modern history and modern politics became to her what
classical music had been to our daft grandfather, whom she strongly
resembled. They absorbed her, filled the long, long days of sick and
lonely maidenhood, when, such was the vividness, the surprising vitality
of her matchless imagination, that in a dull seaside residence she
found, and lived and died in, her own excitements and gratifications of
mind and soul.
Miss Lawson before leaving the convent had inoculated us, the little
ones, her devoted admirers, with a curious passion for pinafored
mites--whist. Whist for several months became the object of our
existence. Lessons in comparison were but a trivial occupation. When
Birdie and I next went home, we taught the game to still smaller mites,
and such were the gamblers we became, that we have played whist, I the
eldest of the four confederates, twelve, with renowned and aged clubmen,
who found us their match. We slept with a pack of cards under our
pillow, and dawn found us four little night-dressed girls gathered
together in one bed with the lid of a bandbox over our joined knees,
rapturously playing whist.
On the pretext of meeting our father at the station of Dalkey every
evening at half-past six, we took possession of the waiting-room, cards
in hands, and imperiously acquainted our friend the station-master with
the fact that the room was engaged. The novelty of the situation so
tickled the station-master that while we four miscreants in short skirts
played our game of whist, not a soul was allowed to enter the
waiting-room--an injustice I now marvel at.
The boys and girls around us were neglected. We only cared for whist,
which we played from the time we got up until we went to bed, with no
other variation that I remember except sea-bathing and Captain Marryat's
novels. As none of the boys or girls shared our desperate passion, it
followed that I and my three smaller step-sisters became inseparable,
and held all our fellows who did not live for whist to be poor dull
creatures. Once we made part of a children's gathering at Killiney Hill,
but after the cold chicken, jelly, cakes, and lemonade, we speedily
found life intolerable without a pack of cards.
"I say, Angela," whispered Birdie to me, when I was musing of honours
and the odd trick, "I've brought them. Let's go behind a tree and have a
game."
Now I always take a hand with pleasure because of that defunct vice;
but, alas! I am compelled to own that I never played so well as at
eleven.
My next passion, for which Pauline this time was responsible, was
genealogy. We invented a family called the L'Estranges and brought them
over with the Conqueror. Where they had previously come from we did not
ask. What did it matter? To come over with the Conqueror was, we knew, a
certificate of chivalry. The chief, Walter, fought at the Battle of
Hastings. We pictured him with golden locks, a bright and haughty
visage, stern grey eyes that could look ineffably soft in a love-scene,
and beautiful shining armour. We married him to a certain Saxon Edith,
and down as far as the Battle of Bosworth Field, Walter and Edith were
the favourite family names of the L'Estranges. To give piquancy to our
most delightful game, and stimulate our imagination, we founded a
cemetery of the L'Estranges. We made little wooden tombstones, on which
we carved imaginary epitaphs of all the imaginary L'Estranges who had
died since the Battle of Hastings. As we loathed old people in our
dramatic history, except the aged lord who dies blessing a numerous
progeny from time to time, all our resplendent heroes perished in
romantic youth on the Spanish Main, on battle-fields, on the African
coast; or rescuing Turkish princesses, or capturing Grecian isles; while
their brides invariably faded away either of consumption or a broken
heart at seventeen. The cemetery was peopled to excess by the time we
got as far as the Battle of Bosworth Field, where the last hero fell in
front of the enemy before he had time to marry the maiden of his choice.
It is astonishing how little the average child approves of a natural
death. The heroes must die by violence in the flower of youth, and the
heroines must perish or pine away from unnatural causes on the threshold
of maidenhood. Nineteen is even old and commonplace: the age of glory is
seventeen.
If you entered our garden, turned into the cemetery of the L'Estranges,
you would have seen layer upon layer of little wooden sticks that looked
like the indication of hidden seeds, and if you stooped to read the
legend, this is the sort of thing that would have greeted your eyes:--
"Here lies Walter l'Estrange" (or Rupert, or Ralph, or Reginald, for we
were fond of these names), "born such and such a year, wrecked off the
coast of Barbary such and such a year," or "perished in a conflict with
Spanish pirates," &c.; and beside him, with day and date of birth and
burial, "Here lies Edith, his beloved wife, daughter of Lord Seymour or
Admiral So-and-so."
In a big ledger, recorded in Pauline's sprawling calligraphy, were the
lives and characters of the imaginary dead. It was remarkable that all
our heroes were as brave as lions, as modest and mild as lambs, and as
stainless as Galahads. To lend relief to the monotony of their
implacable virtue, we now and then invented a villain, who invariably
died in a vulgar brawl or a duel. The battlefield, the Spanish Main, the
rescue of Turkish princesses, and a noble shipwreck, were kept for the
Galahads.
The last profile of my Lysterby days is that of a radiant and lovely
Irish girl, who came from Southampton, the Mother House of the Ladies of
Mercy, to stay with us until the nuns found her a situation as
governess. Her name was Molly O'Connell: she was doubly orphaned almost
since birth, her mother having died giving life to her, and her father
within the following year. Everybody about her thought it very sad that
her mother should have died on the very day of her birth. But I, alas!
knew a sadder thing. My father, who, I am told, was a very kindly,
tender-hearted man, died some months before my birth. Had I been given
the choice beforehand, and known what was in store for me, I should have
greatly preferred it had been my mother who died many months before my
birth. But, alas! babies in the ante-natal stage are never consulted
upon the question of their own interest.
Molly O'Connell remains upon memory as beauty in a flash. Never since
have I seen such a flashing combination of brilliant effects. Oh! such
teeth--teeth to dream of, teeth that laughed and smiled, that had a sort
of light in them like white sunshine, and were the fullest expression I
have ever known of the word radiance! Then her eyes were pools of violet
light, where you seemed to see straight down to the bottom of a deep
well, violet all the way down to the very end, where you saw yourself
reflected. These glorious eyes, like the teeth, smiled and laughed; they
caressed, too, looked an unfathomable tenderness and sweetness, shone,
irradiated like stars, went through the whole gamut of visual emotion,
from the holiest feeling, the effable eloquence of sentiment, to the
bewildering obscurities of passion. They were eyes, I now know, to damn
a saint, and--Heaven help us all in a world so inexplicable as
ours!--they performed their fatal mission to the bitter end. Add to
these eyes and teeth hair as dark as shadow, as thick as the blackness
of night, a scarlet and white face, round and dimpled, of the divinest
shape, the rarest and ripest combination of fruit and flower, with deep
peach-like bloom upon the soft cheek, and the hue of a crimson cherry
upon the curved full lips, and there you have a woman equipped for her
own destruction, if she have a heart to lose, no brains to speak of, and
only as much knowledge of man, of the world, as a fresh-born kitten or a
toddling babe.
Molly was the joy, the light, the glory, the romance of our lives. We
worshipped her for her unsurpassable loveliness, which kept rows of
young eyes fixed upon her charming visage in round-lidded, wonder and
awe; we adored her for her gaiety, her chatter, her incessant laughter,
and we loved her for the conviction that she was as young and innocent
and helpless and unlettered as ourselves.
Molly was nineteen, but she was a bigger child than any of us; and now I
hold my breath in pain when I remember the nature and quality of her
innocence. She had been brought up from infancy in a convent. Had her
life lain among the roses, such ignorance as hers might be pardoned in
her teachers. But to send out into the world, to earn her living among
selfish and indifferent strangers, a young girl of such bewildering
exquisiteness, and never once hint to her the kind of perils that would
beset her, give her no knowledge of man, nor of herself, nor of nature!
This is an iniquity the nuns of Southampton can never be pardoned.
Now that I know the sequel, and understand what the beginning meant, I
cannot recall our laughter over Molly's first experiences without a
thrill of horror. The nuns had placed her with titled folk--Lord and
Lady E., with whom lived Lady E.'s father, an old earl, a widower. Molly
was the most ingenuous and garrulous of creatures. She spent her first
vacation some months later with us, and kept us at recreation hour in
shouts of laughter and scorn over her adventures. The old earl was the
most extraordinary old man, according to her. He was always meeting her
alone, here, there, and everywhere. She seemed to think it was a sort of
schoolboy's game. Once he showed her in the garden, when no one was by,
a splendid diamond bracelet, which he had bought for her.
"O Molly!" we all screamed in joy, "he wants to marry you, and you'll be
a grand countess, like the gipsy maiden of the song."
But Molly curled her lips haughtily. Did we know that he was seventy, a
queer old gentleman, just fit to be tucked into bed and given gruel? The
suspicion of evil design never once entered her innocent head, for the
simple reason that she had not the ghost of a suspicion of any kind of
evil.
Then Lady E. went up to town, and left this bewitching creature at the
mercy of her husband. Molly again regarded it in the light of a capital
game. The aged earl and his middle-aged son-in-law appeared to be on
strained terms. The poor goose never suspected why. Lord E. insisted on
her sitting in his wife's place at table--and still she suspected
nothing.
One night, she told us, shrieking with laughter as at the height of the
grotesque, Lord E. mistook her room for the nursery, and entered it in
his shirt. Not the faintest feeling of anger or fear on the part of this
blind, silly maid. All she did was to go into convulsions of laughter,
"because he looked so ugly and so ridiculous." But it was still part of
the high old game of life, where everything happens to send one into
fits of laughter. That tears, that trouble, that shame and blighting
misery lay in wait for her, this radiant, unconscious, ignorant, and
foolish innocent could not then suspect.
We, too, thought it a splendid game, laughed heartily at the ridiculous
figure she described Lord E. as cutting in his nightshirt, agreed with
her that the old earl was a monstrous old fool to go skipping in that
absurd way down the park avenues with her, putting his hand upon his
heart, sighing and talking in a wild incoherent way about "the loveliest
girl on earth," whom Molly, the least vain of creatures, never for one
moment suspected was herself. For she was far too busy laughing at
people to understand them. You had but to stand solemnly before her, and
say, "It's a wet day," and off she was on a ringing cascade. What you
said she probably did not understand in the least; but the expression of
your eye, the tone of your voice, made her laugh.
And so the infamous nature of the pursuit of the earl and his son-in-law
quite escaped her, and neither the diamond bracelet, nor Lord E. in his
shirt at night in her room, awoke the faintest throb of alarm. All this
to her and us was part of the eternal joke of nature. And a very, very
few years afterwards, I learned, one who had loved her well and sought
her far discovered her at night in the vicinity of the Haymarket, with
paint upon her cheeks and lips, and the fatal brightness of consumption
looking out of her hollow violet eyes.
My remembrance of the rest of my stay at Lysterby fades away upon the
heavy perfume of incense in the cold aisles of the cathedral, whither we
were conducted by the nuns for the breathlessly interesting offices of
Holy Week. It is a long dream of sombre tones and solemn notes, which I
followed in a passionate absorption in the "Offices of Holy Week,"
printed in Latin and English, for which I paid the sum of four
shillings. I studied those offices so diligently, followed them so
accurately, that afterwards I could detect to a movement, a note, a
Latin word, any error or omission in the Lenten services of the
pro-cathedral of Dublin, where I must say the rites struck me as shorn
of all impressiveness.
But at Lysterby functions were rigidly correct. The evening office of
Tenebræ was a funereal delight. The services of Maundy Thursday, Good
Friday, and Holy Saturday were religious excitements on which to live
for months. I shut my eyes, even now in middle age, and I see again the
long grey cathedral aisles dim in taper-light, altars hung in black, and
the lean aristocratic visage of Father More above the surplice and
violet stole, and I hear him chant in his thin, melodious voice,
"Oremus, flectamus genua!" and listen again for the response, "Levate!"
I cannot precisely define my sensations in this period. Religion with me
was nothing but an intense emotion nourished upon incense, music,
taper-lit gloom, and a mysterious sense of the intangible. It was in the
fullest meaning of the word sensuous; but while its attraction lasted,
nothing I have since known could be compared with it for intensity.
While under its spell, you seem to float in the air, to touch the wings
of the angels, to be yourself part of the heavenly sphere you aspire to
attain. Rapture itself is a mean enough word to define your emotions.
And then you come back to earth with a sense of unspeakable deception
and surprise. You feel hungry, and loathe yourself for the vulgar need.
Your ear is buffeted by loud earthly sounds instead of the roll of the
organ and the monotonous solemnity of Gregorian chant.
To realise this is to understand how so many sentimental, virtuous, and
sensuous souls seek oblivion of life in religious excitement. It is a
mental and moral mixture of opium and alcohol extremely soothing to the
bruised consciousness, a gentle diversion in common-place cares that
poor humanity must not be begrudged; though, as George Eliot has finely
said, it is proof of strength to live and do well without this narcotic.
The return to Ireland coincides with the outbreak of the Franco-German
war. A mist hangs over those terrible months, but Dublin I remember was
French to a man. Every morning my eldest sister marched us off to mass
to pray for the French, and we wept profusely over each tragic telegram.
Our hero Edmond was over there, fighting and lying with equal gallantry.
Several noble dames had tended his wounds and offered to marry him, and
he escaped from prison with the assistance of the jailer's daughter, who
loved him despairingly. I recall our awed inspection of several helmets
and swords brought back from the war by a quantity of heroic young
Irishmen who professed to have laid the Germans low on countless
occasions. I do not now know what they did out there, for there is
always a great deal of Tartarin, an atmosphere of Tarascon, about the
Irishman returned from abroad. But we all went down in a glorified body,
dressed in our very best, to assist at the arrival of Marshal M'Mahon
and his wife, who came all the way from far-off France to thank us for
what they had or had not done.
Here, at the age of twelve, my childhood ends, and youth, troubled
youth, begins.
* * * * * * * *
To stand upon the hill-top and cast a glance of retrospection down the
long path travelled in all its excess of light and shadow; impenetrable
darkness massed against a luminous haze through which rays of blazing
glory filter, each one striking upon memory in a shock of prismatic
hues, until the eye reaches as far back as the start from the
valley,--how astonished we are at the unevenness of the road! So
brilliant, so ineffectual for most of us, is this dear thing called
Youth! The uneasy flutter from the nest, the wild throb of pulses, now
for ever tamed, at each sharp encounter with fate; the courage, the
hope, the passion--alas! how futile and how sad to eyes in middle life
that see the inexorable word "failure" written across that splendid
tear-blotted page of strife, of yearning, of frailty and endeavour. Seen
from the hill-top, how small the big stones are that broke our path! How
easy it might have been to skirt the thorn-bushes and brambles, instead
of tearing an impulsive way through them, and falling so repeatedly on
bleeding face and hands!
Impatience and panting courage have served to carry us through the
unequal battle, and now, resting in the equable tones of middle life,
how sweet a wonder seem the blackness, the purple, the golden lights of
youth! We sit in the unemotional shade, and slake our thirst for the old
joys and sorrows by fondly recalling the ghosts of dead hours and dead
dreams, of forgotten faiths and dim-remembered faces; and though we may
not desire to re-live each year with its burden of pains and pangs,
surely we may tell ourselves that it is good to have lived those past
years, even if tears seem the most prominent part of our inheritance.
Then, however sad the living moment, we still had the consolation of
that beautiful and vision-bearing word "To-morrow." In youth, sorrow
fells us to-day, and joy awakes us to-morrow. It is always--Land may be
in sight to-morrow! The night is dark, but hope dances blithely through
our veins with the delicious assurance that to-morrow brings the sun.
The world is empty, but vague dreams tell us that to-morrow love will
cross our path and fill the universe. Hope is the magician that waved us
forward and carried us recklessly through briar and bramble, with
undaunted confidence in life, in ourselves, and in all things around us.
Each fall was ever the last, each pang the precursor of eternal
happiness.
And now it is over. Hope's magic wand for us is broken, and she has
folded her wings and dropped into slumber that wakens not again:
henceforth our best friend is drab-robed content.
THE END.
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