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, themost 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, thedivine, 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 openingexistence 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 andanecdote, 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 RoryEvans 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, likeMary 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.
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 myuncle 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 brokenby 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 likeRobert 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 afterwardslearned 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 getcaught 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 ofgingerbread 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.
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 neveryet 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 sightof 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 andpersecution 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.
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 notesof 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 trustednot 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'tcare" 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, thetriumphant 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 thepantomime! 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.
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 myveiled 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 armssecurely 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 bebeautiful. 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!"
"Catholics, Catholics, quack, quack, quack,Go to the devil and never come back!"
"Catholics, Catholics, quack, quack, quack,Go to the devil and never come back!"
"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 likea 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 thegreatest 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 hurlmy 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.
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 aflight 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 theirknees 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.
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 toldthe 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, andvowed 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 personswalking 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 bloodgushed 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.
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 awedadmiration 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 angrywords 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 abstrusecontents 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 sinagainst 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 SisterEsmeralda 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 theexcitement 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.