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 theconfessional 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 wasclosed, 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.
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 sherryand 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 ofthings. 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."
"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 ofthings. 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 affectionateAngela."
"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 SisterEsmeralda, 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";
"Can you dance a polka? Yes, I can.Up and down the room with a nice young man";
"Can you dance a polka? Yes, I can.Up and down the room with a nice young man";
"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 shouldPlay with the gypsies in the wood;If I did, she would say,Naughty girl to disobey."
"My mother said that I never shouldPlay with the gypsies in the wood;If I did, she would say,Naughty girl to disobey."
"My mother said that I never shouldPlay with the gypsies in the wood;If I did, she would say,Naughty girl to disobey."
"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.
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 thatmakes 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 acrossour 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 hechasséedup 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."
"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."
"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."
"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 responsewith 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 wechasséedandcroisédand 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 skirtsthat 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 ofcommunicating 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 playedat 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 hadheard 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.
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. Howcomforting 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 owncentury, 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. "Butbe 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 mayproudly 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, andstroked 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 hadless 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.
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. Shestayed 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 andcruel 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 knowledgeto 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 loveas 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.
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 arrivesomewhere, 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, andof 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 dullrows 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—