"From you have I been absent in the spring,When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,Hath put a spirit of youth in everything."
"From you have I been absent in the spring,When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,Hath put a spirit of youth in everything."
"From you have I been absent in the spring,When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,Hath put a spirit of youth in everything."
"From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything."
What can it be that poetry says to children, since they can neither understand the rhythm, nor metre, nor beauty, nor sentiment of it? And the child who (as I was then) is susceptible to the charm of poetry that sweeps through the infinite, weeps with delicious emotion without the ghost of an idea why. I was but a child of nine, when my sister in response to my prayer, withmy cheek still stinging from that blow along the Warwick road, opened the fairyland of Shakespeare to me. With a rapture I would I now could feel, I thrilled to the glamour of the moonlight scene of the "Merchant." We never went to bed without rehearsing it, each in turn being Jessica or Lorenzo. I only remember one other sensation as passionate and vivid and absorbing, my first hearing of the Moonlight Sonata, also at an age when it was perfectly impossible that I should understand more than a mouse or a linnet a particle of its beauty or meaning. Yet there they stand out in extraordinary relief from a confusion of childish impressions, two distinct moments of inexplicable ecstasy, the reveries of Lorenzo and Jessica and the impassioned utterance of the master's soul in the divinest of sound played, possibly not well, by my eldest sister's governess in a soft summer twilight so long ago.
Meanwhile I have left Mrs. Clement, excited and pathetic, holding my thin little visage in the cup of her folded palms. She was just as faded and fair and melancholy as ever, and the same young man's head showed in the brooch frame on the unchanged black silk gown. She kissed me several times, and stroked my hair, andexpressed amazement at the change in me. And while she, dear kindly soul, was only thinking of me, there was I, volatile little rascal, looking around me, delighted to see again the beautiful big red-and-white cups, and smell the spices of the cupboard. Has tea, have bread-and-milk, ever tasted again as these modest luxuries tasted in those beautiful cups? The very remembrance of them brings the water of envy to the mouth of age. I forget the miseries of childhood only to recall the pleasure I took in that warm and rich pottery, and the brilliant effect of bowls and plates and cups upon the morning and evening damask.
And that first night at home, four little girls sleeping together in two large beds, three night-dressed forms perched on a single bed, while I, the stranger returned from abroad, mimicked Mr. Parker for their shrieking delight, and held my night-dress high up on either side to perform the famous curtsey of Queen Anne. And then a furious shout outside on the landing, and my mother's voice—
"What's the meaning of that noise? Go to sleep instantly, or I'll come in and whip you all round."
A sudden scamper of white-robed limbs, andin a twinkling four heads are hidden under the sheets. Silence down the corridors, silence throughout the high old house; only the breathing of night, and four little heads are again bobbing over the pillows.
"Oh, I say, Angela, we didn't tell you, there's a new baby up-stairs. Susanna! Did you ever hear of such a name? Everybody has pretty names but us. Birdie was so jealous when it came, because nurse said her nose would be out of joint, that she tried to smash its head with a poker one day. She was caught in time."
And so there was. Another lamentable little girl born into this improvident dolorous vale of Irish misery. Elsewhere boys are born in plenty. In Ireland,—the very wretchedest land on earth for woman, the one spot of the globe where no provision is made for her, and where parents consider themselves as exempt of all duty, of tenderness, of justice in her regard, where her lot as daughter, wife, and old maid bears no resemblance to the ideal of civilisation,—a dozen girls are born for one boy. The parents moan, and being fatalists as well as Catholics, reflect that it is the will of God, as if they were not in the least responsible; and while they assure you that they have not wherewith to fill an extramouth, which is inevitably true, they continue to produce their twelve, fifteen, or twenty infants with alarming and incredible indifference. This is Irish virtue. The army of inefficient Irish governesses and starving illiterate Irish teachers cast upon the Continent, forces one to lament a virtue whose results are so heartless and so deplorable. If my most sympathetic and most satisfactory race were only a little less virtuous in its own restricted sense of the word, and a tiny bit more rational! And not content, alas! with the iniquity of driving these poor maimed creatures upon foreign shores in the quest of daily bread, hopelessly ill-equipped for the task, without education, or knowledge of domestic or feminine lore, incapable of handling a needle or cooking an egg, without the most rudimentary instinct of order or personal tidiness, incompetent, and vague, and careless,—these same parents at home expect these martyrs abroad to replenish their coffers with miserably earned coin. I have never met an Irish governess on the Continent who had a sou to spend on her private pleasures, for the simple reason that she sent every odd farthing home. It's the iniquitous old story. Irishmen go to America, marry, and make their fortunes; but thelandlord and shopkeeper at home are paid by the savings of the peasant-girls, without a "Thank you" from their parents. Let Jack or Tom send them a five-pound note in the course of a prosperous career, "Glory be to God, but 'tis the good son he is," piously ejaculate the old folk. Let Bessy or Jane give them her heart's blood, deny herself every pleasure, not only the luxuries but the very necessaries of life, and the same old folk nod their sapient heads,—"'Tis but her duty, to be sure."
Needless to say, this inappropriate burst of indignation was not inspired in those days by the sight of my new little sister in her cradle, as white as milk, with eyes like big blue stars, the eyes of her Irish father, soft and luminous and gay. She dwelt on earth just eighteen months, and then took flight to some region where it is to be hoped she found a warmer nest than fate would have offered her here below.
My grandmother was dead, but Dennis and Mary Ann still lived with my uncle Lionel. What a joy our meeting! So "thim English" hadn't made mince-meat of me! I was whole and sound, Mary Ann remarked, but mighty spare of flesh and colour. "Just a rag of a creature," Dennis commented, as he lifted my arm."Why didn't ye write and tell us ye were hungry, alannah?"
"I did so," I promptly retorted; "but Sister Esmeralda rubbed it out, and put in something else which wasn't a bit true."
"Troth, and 'tis meself 'ud enjoy givin' that wan a piece of me moind."
The whiff of the brogue was strong enough to waft you to the clouds. But how good to be with these two honest souls again! Uncle Lionel gave me a crown-piece, when he had tortured my check with his chaven chin, and called me a little renegade because of my English accent, and then I went out to the garden, neglected ever since the death of my grandfather.
Where was Hamlet, and whither had vanished Elsinore? Where was the youth with the future revolutionary name, who used to come bounding over the hedge, cheerily humming "Love among the Roses"? There were no roses now, and the house next door was to let.
After the trim gardens of England, this desolate old slip of garden, where weeds and thick grasses grew along the uncared paths, seemed a cemetery of dead seasons. Fruit-trees that bore neither blossom nor fruit; flower-beds where never leaf nor flower now bloomed; alleys wherelast year's autumn leaves still lay; broken pots that used to make such a gay parterre of geraniums of every hue when my grandfather lived; defoliaged rose-bushes, now mere summer urns of unfulfilled promise, and scarce a red bunch on the currant-boughs. And the pool, with the circle of watering-cans above, now rusty and untouched, where I used to watch for the first faint line of shadow cast by the gathering dusk, which stole across its clear face in keeping with the stealing flight of light above—how dead and sad all this seemed, despite its quaint familiarity. I was but a child, and yet as I stood once more in that neglected garden, I had some premonition of the immitigable sadness of remembrance, the feeling that there was already a past that had slipped through my fingers, as the waters run ceaselessly from the fountain of life to mingle with the still river of death.
"Is childhood dead?" Lamb asks; "is there not in the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?" Can I now, without a responsive thrill, see myself flash into the unaltered dulness of that Kildare village, a little princess of legend, with the glory of foreign travel about me, the overseas cut of frock and shoes, the haughty and condescending consciousness of superiority?
They were all so visibly at my feet, so glad to worship and admire, so eager to praise, so beset with wonder. I was to spend a week in their midst, a delightful week, as long as a story, as brief as a play, a puff of happiness blown across the bleak wind of solitude, a prolonged and hilarious scamper through sensation as vivid and vital as morning light.
Mary Jane was there, with the unchanged oiled black ringlets, and in my honour she wore them bound with a bright blue ribbon. Louiecame out from town to behold me, and gazed in stupefied awe. I had been in a ship across the sea. I had traversed half of England in a railway-carriage. Had I seen an elephant? Mary Jane wanted to know if I had seen the Queen.
No; but I had seen a naked lady, with beautiful golden hair down her back, ride through the town of Lysterby on a white pony, while twelve lovely pages in silver and gold and satin rode before, and twelve lovely maidens with long velvet cloaks lined with white satin rode behind her. This sounded as grand as a royal procession, and I glided ingeniously over the ignominy of having been to England and not having seen the Queen.
Mary Jane's mamma gave me a bowl of milk and a plate of arrowroot biscuits, and as I devoured them, with what a splendid air I recognised the old and faded views of New York! I scorned my past ignorance, and off-handedly mentioned that "You know, the sea isn't a bit like the pond." And then the search for a brilliant and captivating comparison—arm extended to suggest immensity; heaving wave, rolling ship.
"Isn't she wonderful?" they cried; "and the fine language of her!"
From cottage to cottage, from shop to shop, I wandered, intoxicated by the incense of admiration. I embroidered fact and invented fiction with the readiness of the fanciful traveller. Sister Esmeralda became an unimaginable fiend, who had persecuted me as if I had been the heroine of the fairy-tale I was acting, till the entire village was fit to rise and shout for her blood.
"The likes of that did you ever hear?" a gaunt peasant in corduroy would ask his neighbour in dismay.
"Troth and 'tis thim English as is a quare lot. Beat a little lady as is fit to rule the lot of them, and lock her up in dungeons along with spirits and goblins, and starve the life and soul out of her! Sure 'tis worse they are than in the days of Cromwell."
Naturally, in the amazing record of my experiences, the hidden bones and marble hand of my old friend, the White Lady of the Ivies, played a prominent and shuddering part.
Under the influence of such an audience I tasted the fascinating results of suffering. I was in that brief week repaid for all the previous slights of fortune. I reposed in the lap of adulation, and turned my woes into a dramaticenjoyment. I had suffered; but the romantic activity of my imagination, with a natural mirthfulness of temperament, preserved me from the self-centred and subjective misery of the visionary, and from the embittering anguish of rancour. Once I had excited the local mind against Sister Esmeralda and the wretched superioress of the ladies of Mercy, my anger against them vanished, and they simply remained in memory as picturesque instruments of misfortune. But for the moment I was too full of the joy of living for anything like morbid self-pity. I preferred to loll on the grass beside Bessy the applewoman, and treat all the children of the green to her darling trays of apples with uncle Lionel's bright crown-piece. Bessy never tired of assuring me that I was a wonderful creature, which I fully believed, and Louie made frequent mention of his thirst to be old enough to marry me. It soothed him to hear that he was much nicer than Frank, the horrid Lysterby boy. Louie had not made his first confession, and he was thrillingly and fearfully interested in the tale of mine.
"You know," I dolefully remarked, "the priest won't let you confess any of the nice interesting-looking sins, with the lovely big names, likea-dul-tery and for-ni-fi-ca-tion and de-fraud-ing. He makes you tell awful little sins, like talking in class and answering a nun, and all that sort of thing."
"Oh, but I say," shouted Louie, wagging a remonstrative head, "the priest can't prevent you from saying you committed adultery."
"Yes, but he says you didn't; and then it seems you're telling a lie to the Holy Ghost, and you may be struck dead in the confessional-box."
This Louie regarded as an excessive risk to run for the simple pleasure of confessing a nice big sin. He thought the matter over in bed that night, and communicated to me next morning his intention to confess to having stolen two marbles from Johnnie Magrath, and having licked Tim Martin.
"You know, Angy, I really did lick him, he's such an awful beast, and made his nose bleed rivers, with a black dab under his eyes as big as my fist; and here are the two marbles I stole."
He went back to town that afternoon, with his little gray eyes moist over the brimming smiles of his lively comic mouth. His was a hilarious depression, a rowdy melancholy, emblematic of the destiny in store for him. Hegrimaced wonderfully, with screwed-up eyelids and twisted and bunched-out lips, and kept on muttering all the time we walked together to the coach-house where the mail-car started from: "It's an awful shame, so it is. A fellow can't do what he likes, but there's always somebody bothering him and ordering him about."
Dear, honest, little playmate! That was the last, last glimpse I had of him. We exchanged our last kiss at the top of the village street, and I wildly waved my handkerchief until a deep bend of the long white Kildare road hid the car, as it seemed to roll off the flat landscape.
My parents had taken a house at Dalkey, with a garden a dream of delights, that ran by shadowy slopes and bosky alleys down to the grey rocks where the sea seemed to become our very own, as it rolled over the rocks, and made, from time to time, when the tide ran high, little pools along the sanded fringes of the garden. The house was large and rambling, and of a night when the waves roared and the artillery of the heavens shook at the foundations of earth, it afforded us enormous gratifications of every kind. We were fascinated by terror, and shuddered in silence during the long nights when our parents were kept in town by a theatre, a race, a party. Then we were left in the charge of our eldest sister, a young person of a sentimental and despotic turn of mind. She ruled us with a rod of iron, then invited us to weep with her over the poems of Adelaide Ann Procter. And while she read to us in a tremor of eagersensibilities the legend of Provence, she ruthlessly confiscated "Waverley," "Kenilworth," "Rob Roy," which I kept under my pillow, and read aloud at night to my younger sisters. Novels she held to be the kernel of every iniquity under the sun, but Longfellow and Adelaide Ann Procter were the sole ennobling influences of life. She was sustained in this crooked conviction by a pensive little stitcher, who used to come and sew and mend for us all several hours a-week, and could recite in their entirety "Evangeline" and the "Golden Legend."
A quaint and original figure this white-haired, sad-eyed little stitcher. She had had her romance, stranger than Evangeline's. Her lover had gone to America, and had fought in the Federal war. With a few savings, she followed him across the Atlantic, and sought him out in State after State, walking several leagues a-day, with lifts here and there in waggons, subsisting for months on a daily crust and a root or two, to end her dolorous peregrinations in a hospital with her dying lover's head upon her faithful breast. She returned to Ireland the heroine of a real novel, with black hair bleached and eyes dim from weeping. She had won the right to be cheerless, and stand with flowing eyes "onthe bridge at midnight," and tell us "in mournful numbers life is but an empty dream."
We were a wild lot, no doubt, and worked wonders in villainy and mischief. Even our sister's sentimentality at times succumbed to our monstrous spirits; and she forgot Longfellow and Miss Procter, to drop into Irish farce. All the houses round about us were filled with boys and girls of all ages up to sixteen. We needed no introduction to form a general family of some thirty or forty vagrants and imps of both sexes.
The head of the troop was a red-headed youth, destined to adorn the medical profession, and a pale proud-looking boy of fourteen, my first love, Arthur by name, of an exalted family, and now, I believe, a distinguished colonel. When we joined the boys on the cricket-field, I always picked up his balls and handed them to him reverentially, and my reward was to be told in an offhand way that "I was a nice little thing." To me he was Quentin Durward, Waverley, with a dash of Leicester and Prince Ferdinand. He certainly was quite as haughty-looking and distinguished as any of these decorative heroes. His father, an amiable, high-mannered old lord, sometimes treated us to fireworks; and then his sisters, prouder than ever Cinderella's couldhave been, would come out and smile down benevolently upon us all, with the air of court-ladies distributing prizes at a village festival. Arthur himself was a very simple boy, extremely flattered by my mute adoration, which he encouraged by all sorts of little airs and manœuvres.
It was the red-headed leader who invented the most delightful entertainment in the world. He formed us into a band of beggars. He played a banjo and sang nigger songs, and Arthur, in shirt-sleeves, with a rakish cap rowdily posed on his aristocratic flaxen head, went round with a hat to gather coin. We went from house to house, an excited troop of young rascals, sang and danced and begged and shouted in each garden until the grown-up people appeared and flung a sixpence, sometimes even a shilling, into Arthur's hat. The old lord occasionally rose to half-a-crown. The parents enjoyed the fun as much as we did, and never pretended to recognise us.
What tales we invented! What lies we told! One pretty little girl, with brown ringlets round the rosiest of faces, won a half-sovereign from my stepfather, who was smoking on the lawn when the band invaded his solitude, by assuringhis honour that she was "the mother of fourteen children, with their bed-clothes on her back." When she flung the sparkling piece into Arthur's hat, he shouted "Gold!" and a frantic cheer went up from the band. We rushed off in a joyous body next day to Killiney Hill, and had a feast of lemonade and oranges, and toffee and cake. The red-haired chief paid the bill with a flourish, and if there was any change he kept it.
Each parent took his turn in providing the company with an official feast. The old lord monopolised the fireworks. My stepfather instituted races. A wealthy barrister, our neighbour, inveigled a circus for our delectation; and seven delightful old maids, who lived in a kind of castle of their own, outdid all the fathers royally by a regatta of our own. All the boatmen of Dalkey were hired, and each boat ran up a sail. Mighty powers! what a day that was. Were ever youngsters so gratified, so excited, so conscious of being a little community apart, with the sea and the land for its entertainment?
And there was an amiable old judge, who offered us the freedom of his big orchard, where the apples grew in quantities, and we climbed the trees like squirrels, and devoured fruit without fear or restraint.
My eldest sister was only fourteen, but she was already, had ever been, a sage and a saint. At the age of eight she had put her hand into a blazing fire in order to die the death of a Christian martyr. She shrieked dismally for several hours afterwards. Another time, staying with relatives in the country, she knelt in the gloaming in a big barn, praying with fervently closed eyes, in the hopes of being devoured by lions. She heard the distant growlings of an angry mastiff, and thought her prayer was granted, and that this was the ravening lion about to make a meal of her. She fell down in a fit of convulsions, and had to be nursed by several doctors.
When she came back to consciousness, with her hair shorn and wan little hands upon the coverlet, she recognised our tender mother seated beside her bed, and contentedly shortening her last new frock for my second sister. Sheoffered up the mortification for her sins, and instantly said a prayer to her patron saint, Agnes. At dinner she never ate pudding or pie, not even damson-pie, for which I in those gluttonous days would have sold, not only my own soul, but hers as well; but after dinner she invariably carried her share of these luxurious edibles to the nearest poor person.
She visited the poor continually, always provided with tea and sugar and such things; and Pauline, who accompanied her on these missions of mercy, assured me that she often saw the pet cases of misery dash under the bed excellent dishes of bacon and eggs and bottles of Guinness' stout, while the traditional invalid would jump into bed, gather the clothes about her, and begin to whine, "Sure, your little ladyship, 'tis our lonesome selves as hasn't had bit or sup since last we saw your purty face."
My eldest sister was a bewitching beauty. She had large dusky blue eyes in constant communion with the heavenly spheres. She had ruddy golden hair that shown adown her back like pounded guineas, and her complexion was a thing to gape at. Indeed we had all inherited from our mother wonderful golden locks and dazzling complexions.
This sentimental and saintly creature wrought the utmost havoc around her, and went dreamily through life unconscious or sublimely indifferent, with her gaze of impassioned sadness fixed upon her heavenly home. Youths went down before her like ninepins, and trembled when they addressed her. One lad of sixteen rode past the door with a crimson cravat, which he fondly hoped to be becoming, and the moody intensity of expression that betokens a broken heart. She minded him not. She was reading "Fabiola" for the hundredth time in the front garden. The gate was open. In his amorous distraction the youth forgot the proprieties, and rode through the gate in lordly style. The door likewise was open, and the pony gallantly galloped into the hall.
My sister's dismay was nothing to the youth's. He stammered and stuttered and went so red that the wonder was he ever grew pale again. But we were used to these commotions aroused by our young Saint Agnes in the bosom of excitable youth. It did not hurt her, and it did not harm them. With gracious gravity she escorted the poor lad to the gate; but we who knew her knew that she was stifling with suppressed laughter. For my eldest sister had apretty humour, even an irony of her own, and gaiety, as will be seen, was not contraband in her religion.
She constituted herself our veritable mother in that old rambling house of Dalkey. She ruled us like an autocrat, and punished us with a lamentable severity. To teach us self-control and fearlessness, she insisted that the smallest baby should be taken in her night-dress, half asleep, and flung into the wild Irish sea that roared at the foot of the garden. No mercy was shown a recalcitrant babe. Howl she never so dolorously, she was plunged in head-foremost, sputtering salt through her rebellious lips.
At night, when our parents stayed in town, she gathered us together in the long low drawing-room, and insisted that we should examine our consciences, meditate, and say the Rosary aloud to keep away robbers and ghosts. All the boys got to know of this edifying practice, and outside the window a crowd of arch-villains would gather, and shout the responses derisively. We could hear Arthur's high-bred tones sing out "Holy Mary, Mother of God," above the deep bass notes of the red-headed chief. Arthur's brother, an elegant guardsman, staying with the old lord for a couple of weeks, oftencondescended to join the band of reprobates; and once I peeped out through the big chinks of the shutter, and saw the man of fashion, with the hall-light directly upon his lean and bronzed visage, eyes devoutly lifted to heaven in mimicry of my eldest sister's ecstatic gaze, and hands folded like those of a stained-glass picture: "Holy Mary! pray for me, a miserable sinner. Blessed St. Agnes, help, oh help to convert me!"
Even the devotion of my eldest sister was unsettled, and we could see her mobile lips twitch. It sufficed to reveal to us that the autocrat was off guard, and we lay about the floor, and shrieked with delight.
Whenever he met my eldest sister upon the roads or rocks, the elegant guardsman raised his hat with the air of a prince, and never a hint about him of nocturnal iniquities.
But austere as she was in all things pertaining to discipline and religion, she allowed us unbounded freedom out-of-doors. Some notion of our use of that liberty may be seized from the following ejaculations of an elderly bachelor, a political friend, who came to visit my stepfather, and was confronted with this young saint of the golden locks, the established mistress of a large household.
The elderly gentleman, looking out of the window in front, perceived two little boots dangling from the branch of a high tree, almost against the heaven.
"Who's up that tall tree?" asked the elderly gentleman.
"Oh, that's Angela. She always reads up there."
"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the elderly gentleman.
After further conversation, he walked down the room to examine the view from the back. In gazing across the sea, seemingly near Howth, he detected a rock point surrounded with heavy waves, and two little specks upon this rock.
"It looks as if there were some creatures in danger of being drowned," remarked the elderly gentleman.
"Oh, not at all. That's Pauline's rock. She and Birdie always go out when the tide is out, and spend the whole day wading there, and they come back when the tide runs out again."
"My God!" cried the elderly gentleman.
Looking later up to the stable roof, he saw three little golden heads bent over cards.
"What's that?" he blankly asked.
"Those are the three youngest, playing beggar-my-neighbour on the roof."
"What extraordinary children!" muttered the elderly gentleman.
She devised a notable and original punishment for me whenever I flew into one of my diabolical rages. She would order Miss Kitty, the sentimental little stitcher, to hold my feet, a servant to hold my head, and while I lay thus on the ground in durance vile, she would piously besprinkle me with holy water, and audibly beseech the Lord and my guardian angel to deliver me of the devil. It would be difficult for me to conceive an operation more suitable as entertainment of the devil than my sister's pious and fiendish method of obtaining his dismissal. The first thing I inevitably did, when liberated, was to go into the yard, and pump all the holy water off my wicked person. Then, dripping like a Newfoundland, I would return to the house and decline to change my dress or shoes, in the vociferated hope of immediate death from consumption.
All the children and young folk round about us had parents who, if they went into town of a morning, were safe to return at night. Most of them had mothers and aunts who lived at Dalkey all the summer. Only we were happy enough to be so neglected by indifferent parents as to possess a large house at our exclusive disposition four or five entire days and nights of the week. Picture our rare and wild abuse of that freedom, and imagine the envy it inspired in the bosoms of other children, of natures as independent as ours!
"I say," proposed the red-headed chief, "what a capital idea if we had a ball in your house some evening when they're away."
Between my eldest sister and me were two little maids, less of the rascal and less of the saint than either of us. Pauline, the teller of wonderful tales at Lysterby, seized upon the notion with avidity. A ball! our own ball, givenby ourselves, and all the vagrant band between the dances refreshed by our ingenious efforts and exploits! It was a grand idea. How we clapped our hands, danced, and stamped our feet in the exuberance of content.
At first Saint Agnes demurred. She, after all, was the head of the house by deputy. Not only was she responsible for our immortal souls, but for our fragile bodies; above all, was she responsible for the state of the larder. It was she who told the servant what to order at the general grocer; she who drew attention to the condition of the cellar, in provision for the horde of Sunday visitors, and the interminable file of eager friends who made a point of inquiring after the health of my parents and their progeny on band nights.
You never understand how extremely popular you are until you are in a position to entertain at a pleasant seaside resort, within easy distance of the metropolis, where a fashionable gathering meets twice a-week to listen to the evening band, and where there are regattas. The most distant acquaintance suddenly remembers that he is your dearest friend. Troops invade your garden; your drawing-room is never empty. Shoals devour the refreshments of yourdining-room. At ten o'clock, when you are on the point of barricading your too hospitable doors, men arrive cheerily to bid you the time of day, and claim a whisky-and-soda. I speak of Dublin, naturally, where, as a rule, we begin our afternoon calls at midnight, and where the early awakened lark is safe to find us snoring. Inhabit that same seaside place in winter, and even your dearest friend will forget to remember that he knows you. Irish hospitality is justly famous. There is nothing to match it on the face of the earth. But Irish abuse of hospitality is, perhaps, insufficiently recorded, and there is nothing more speedily forgotten than the unlimited favours of "open house."
My parents kept "open house" with a vengeance, which is the reason to-day that none of us possess the needful sixpence to jingle on the traditional tombstone. It was the reason also that, when our ball came off, we children were in a position to offer our thirty or forty miniature guests flowing bowls of innocuous lemonade by the dozens, ham-sandwiches, boxes of Huntley & Palmer's biscuits, baskets of apples purchased by the hundred by my stepfather from his friend the judge, whose orchards we daily pillaged. There was also claret and soda-water, and evengenial port and sherry, for that portion of the community we regarded as "the grown-up,"—Arthur, the red-headed boy, Saint Agnes, Pauline, and a few others of both sexes.
We discovered that my parents designed to sit out a play on a certain evening, which meant that they would never give themselves the trouble to catch the last train, and would sleep in town. Invitations were instantly despatched, Saint Agnes giving her consent reluctantly, but young enough to enjoy the prospect of the escapade. The ball was to open as soon as possible after the seven o'clock tea, for at Dalkey, in those days, all the children dined at two o'clock and sat down at seven to a meal of tea and bread-and-butter, with barmbrack and buttered toast on high holidays.
By eight o'clock the long drawing-room was full. We lit the clusters of tapers round the walls, which were reserved for the pleasures of our elders. The gas flared in every jet of the big chandelier. You might have fancied we were celebrating a Royal birthday, such was the brilliancy of our illuminated ball-room. Arthur had brought down, before tea, bunches of flowers from his father's hothouse, and Saint Agneswas ever a veritable witch in the arrangement of flowers.
The red-haired chief, as master of the ceremonies, wore a huge peony in his buttonhole, and with what gusto he marshalled us about, told off couples, and shouted "Lancers now," or "Look out now, the Caledonian Quadrille." Three quaint little girls had been allowed to come with their governess, who entered heartily into the spirit of the thing, and never left the piano. Quadrille after polka, waltz after schottische, "Sir Roger de Coverley," mazurka, and gallop. And, between the dances, what riotous fun, when we cast ourselves upon the refreshments, and noisy boys risked death and assassination as they opened lemonade and soda-water bottles with a splendid flourish! Our elders might drink themselves to frenzy on whisky and yet remain more sober than we were as we capered and laughed and quaffed big draughts of harmless fluid. And the sandwiches we ate, the biscuits and apples we devoured, the bread-and-butter we munched, and flick, flack! there was Miss Montgomery at the piano, and dozens of little feet were again twinkling about the floor.
I, proud being, danced twice with Arthur. We floundered in amazing fashion through a set ofLancers, the master of ceremonies shouting the while indignantly at our heels. And later he invited me to go through some mysterious measure he called a gallop, which consisted in a wild charge for the other end of the room, helter-skelter, couples knocking each other down delightedly, rolling over each other, and picking one another up in the best of tempers.
And then, as we mopped our faces, and drank lemonade, somebody proposed that I should give an imitation of Mr. Parker. Arthur and I were the only travelled personages of the assembly. He had been to Eton and I had been to Lysterby, and it was his slightly sarcastic voice that determined me. "Oh, I say, by all means. I hear he was a capital fellow that dancing-master of yours, and you do him to a T."
To prove that I did, I began thechassé-croisé, to the tune of an imaginary violin, chanting Nora Creina, amid shrieks of approbation. How often since have my friends lamented my missed vocation! On the stage, whether actress or dancer, my fortune would long ago have been made, and as an acrobat I should have won glory in my teens. But old-fashioned parents never think of these things. If you are a girl, and fortune forsakes the domestic hearth, theytell you to go and be a governess, and bless your stars that, thanks to their good sense, you are enabled to earn a miserable crust in the path of respectability. When they find a child with extraordinary mimic capacities, an abnormal physical suppleness, and a passion for the ballet, it does not occur to them that it would be wiser and more humane to seek to turn these advantages to some account, instead of condemning the little wretch to future misery and self-effacement as a governess.
Pauline, who knew every moment of the famous Mr. Parker by heart, wandered out into the front garden with a lad of her own age to look at the stars and talk of their ideal. It was a few minutes after the hourly train from Dublin stopped at Dalkey, and as they sat on the wall discussing their favourite book of the hour, Manzoni's "Betrothed," they saw a large and lofty figure steadily approach the gate. Good heavens! It was my mother. Pauline was a creature of resource, and she had some understanding of that formidable person.
"Quick, quick, Eddie," she whispered. "Run in and tell Agnes to get them all out by the pantry window, which shows into the laneway.I'll keep mamma outside talking about the stars."
Effectively, when my mother opened the gate, she encountered the solemn sentimental regard of a student of the stars. Nothing enchanted my mother more than an unexpected revelation of intelligence in one of her children. She was a woman of colossal intelligence, of wide knowledge, a brilliant talker, and at all times, whatever her temper, you could put her instantly into good-humour, and wean her thoughts from the irritating themes of daily life, by addressing yourself to her intellect, and speaking of remote subjects like the constellations, South Africa, the Federal war, Belgian farming, or the German Empire. She knew everything, was interested in everything, had read everything, could talk like a specialist on any given subject, except mathematics and metaphysics, which she professed to hold in contempt. Another mother would have been staggered to find a girl of thirteen alone beneath the new-lit stars; but my mother found nothing at all odd in being begged to deliver a lecture on astronomy at that hour, and fell into the trap with ingenuous fervour.
And now I beseech you to conceive the scene inside. Ten minutes to clear the house of somethirty excited children, obliged to make a precipitous exit through a narrow pantry window, stifling with hysterical laughter, and in danger of breaking their limbs upon the hard ground as they dropped into the lane that ran alongside the garden into the highroad. Ten minutes to clear the drawing-room of empty bottles and glasses and plates, and put the chairs and tables and couches into order. Ten minutes for us to scamper up-stairs, and get into our night-gear in the dark. Good Lord! what fun! One would willingly endure again the thrashing for those ten brave minutes of fire and fury.
"It was grand!" said Arthur next day to Pauline, after he had tried in vain to look woe-begone over our castigation.
Only the body of the red-headed chief rebelled against the limited space of the pantry window. What puffing and blowing and pushing to get his fat carcass through! "Steady!" shouted the servant, Bridget, a big-boned country girl; and with a bound she ran head-foremost like a charging bull, who meditates the destruction of his enemy. A crash outside, and we thrust anxious heads out of the window to ascertain if the unfortunate youth lay in pieces upon the ground.But no; with smothered laughter he was tearing down the lane for dear life.
With the last evidences of our feast effaced from view, we little ones trod on each other's heels in our flight up-stairs, and staid Agnes went outside, by the way, to induce her mooning sister to go to bed. She simulated the necessary surprise and delight on beholding my mother, and after a few more words upon the heavenly spheres, the three entered the house, now cast, as Agnes fondly believed, into complete darkness.
My mother carelessly explaining why she had decided at the last minute not to sleep in town, turned the handle of the drawing-room door. The tapers, forgotten in the fray, blazed away in all their fatal admission, though the gas of the chandelier had been duly extinguished. The result was that soon the heavenly spheres were round about us instead of on high. Agnes and Pauline rapidly were made to see stars elsewhere than in the sky. When they lay prone and prostrate, not sure that their members were whole, up offended majesty came to us, shivering in our night-dresses. What did it all mean? she wanted to know. Empty bottles heaped up in the pantry corner, a ham vanished, tin boxesempty of their layers of biscuits, knives, plates, glasses, in tell-tale disarray, a broken pane in the pantry window.
We had had our fun, and now came the bad quarter of the hour, when we were expected to pay the bill in beaten flesh. How our ears tingled, our cheeks pained, our heads ached, and our arms smarted! You see it was a very long account, and it took a good deal of blows to make it up. But even the most infuriated creditor is appeased in the long-run, when the gathering in of his dues implies the excessive expenditure of nerve and muscle as such a scene as that of our castigation. The strongest woman cannot beat a half-dozen of children throughout an entire night, and my mother retired, pleased to regard her life in danger by a consequent fit of nervous exhaustion and blood to the head.
All this hilarity does not imply the total absence of sadness in those bright days. I had lived and suffered too long in solitude not to have reserved a private corner for unuttered griefs, into which no regard of sister or stranger could ever penetrate. It is extraordinary the art with which a circle of children can make one chosen by mutual consent feel in all things, at every moment of the day, an intruder. The two elder than I were sworn friends, the three younger likewise; both groups united as allies. I stood between them, an outsider. I shared their games, it is true, as I shared their meals; but when they had any secrets to impart, I was left out in the cold. I daresay now, on looking back, that had my sullen pride permitted a frank and genial effort, I might easily enough have broken down this barrier. But I was morbidly sensitive, and these young barbarians were very rough and hard. Not ill-natured, but most untender.
I wonder if any other child has been so ruthlessly stabbed by home glances as I. The tale of the Ugly Duckling is, I believe, as common as all the essential legends of human grief and human joy. My dislike of large families is born of the conviction that every large family holds a victim. Amid so many, there is always one isolated creature who weeps in frozen secrecy, while the others shout with laughter. The unshared gaiety of the group is a fresh provocation of repulsion on both sides, and not all the good-will of maturity can serve to bridge that first sharp division of infancy. The heart that has been broken with pain in childhood is never sound again, whatever the sequel the years may offer. To escape the blighting influence of cynicism and harshness is as much as one may hope for; but the muffled apprehension of ache, the rooted mistrust bred by early injustice, can never be effaced.
I cannot now remember the cause of all those dreadful hours, of all those bitter, bitter tears, nor do I desire to recall them. But I still see myself many and many a day creeping under the bed that none might see me cry, and there sobbing as if the veins of my throat should burst. Always, I have no doubt, for somefoolish or inadequate cause: a hostile look in response to some spontaneous offer of affection, a disagreeable word when a tender one trembled on my lips, some fresh proof of my isolation, a rough gesture that thrust me out of the home circle as an intruder, and a scornful laugh in front of me as the merry band wandered off among the rocks and left me forlorn in the garden. A robuster and less sensitive nature would have laughed down all these small troubles, and have scampered into their midst imperious and importunate. A healthier child, with sensibilities less on the edge of the skin, not cursed with what the French call anombrageuxtemper, would have broken through this unconscious hostility, and have captured her place on the domestic hearth—would probably not have been aware of an unfriendly atmosphere.
But this same morbid sensitiveness, mark of my unblessed race, has been the unsleeping element of martyrdom in my whole existence. "Meet the world with a smile," said a wise and genial friend of mine, "and it will give you back a smile." But how can one smile with every nerve torn in the dumb anguish of anticipated pain and slight? How can one smile burdened by the edged sensibilities and nervousness ofsex and race, inwardly distraught and forced to face the world, unsupported by fortune, family, or friends, with a brave front? It is already much not to cry. But I shed all my tears in childhood, and left my sadness behind me. When the bigger troubles and tragedies came, as they speedily did, I found sustainment and wisdom in arming myself with courage and gaiety, and so I faced the road. I had then, as ever since, plenty of pleasure to temper unhappiness, plenty of bright rays to guide me through the obscurities of sentiment and suffering. An unfailing beam of humour then and now shed its smile athwart the dim bleak forest of emotions through which destiny bade me cut my way.
One dark moment of peculiar bitterness now makes me smile. I record it as proof of the tiny mole-hills of childhood that constitute mountains. It shows the kind of booby I was, and have ever been, but none the less instructs upon the nature of infant miseries.
We were walking along the road one afternoon with Miss Kitty. A public vehicle tore down the hill led by four horses, three white and one brown. We were four: I the eldest, and my three pretty step-sisters. Birdie shouted—
"Oh, look at the three lovely white horses! That's us three. Angela is the brown horse."
I regarded this choice as a manifest injustice. There was no reason on earth that I should be a brown horse any more than one of my step-sisters. I was angry and sore at what I deemed a slight, and cried—
"I won't be the brown horse. I'll be one of the white horses, or else I'll go away and leave you."
"No, you won't, and you may go if you like. We don't want you. We're three nice white horses."
Here was an instance when I might have laughed down the exclusiveness of these proud babies. But no. I must turn back, and walk home alone, sulky and miserable, nursing my usual feeling of being alone in a cold universe.
An hour of terrible fright for all of us was the morning Birdie fell into Colamore Harbour. We were coming down from Killiney Hill, a lovely spot more prosperous lands might envy us. Birdie walked inside, in a pretty short frock of pale green alpaca, and a new hat with red poppies among the ribbon. In those days Birdie and I ran it closely as infant beauties. Her hair was a shade more flaxen than mine, andthe roses of her cheeks a shade paler. She was fatter, too, and less vapoury; but I carried the palm as an ethereal doll, with a classic profile. Alas! the promise of that period was never fulfilled. Both profile and pride of beauty vanished on the threshold of girlhood, to make way for the appearance of a dairymaid in their distinguished stead.
The wall of Colamore Harbour was protected by an iron chain that swung low from the big stones that divided the festoons. Birdie's foot slipped, and the child in a twinkling tumbled over, and plunged, with a hollow crash, into the heavy grey sea. Happily there were bathing-women and fishermen within hail, and as quickly as she had taken an unexpected bath, Birdie was once more in our midst, dripping like a Newfoundland, white and shaking with terror. One of the big boys took her up in his arms and tenderly carried her home. We all followed, awed and hysterical.
My mother was standing in the front garden talking to the gardener, when the party marched in upon her. She frowned as Birdie was deposited on the gravel path in a woeful state—her wet green skirt clinging to her little legs,the discoloured poppies of her hat flat upon the wet ribbon.
"Change that child's clothes," said my mother, indifferently, as if she were all her life accustomed to the sight of a terrified child rescued from the deep, and went on talking to the gardener.
It would be a bold and inhuman assertion to make, and certainly one I am far from maintaining, that harsh treatment is the proper training of children. But my mother's method has undoubtedly answered better than that of many a tender or self-sacrificing mother. It built us in an admirable fashion for adversity,—taught us to rely upon ourselves, taught us, above all, that necessary lesson, how to suffer and not whine. It is only when I observe how feebly and shabbily a spoiled woman can face trouble and pain, that I feel one may with reason cherish some pride of the power of enduring both with a smile. And when, stupefied and shamed, I contemplate the petty trickeries to which worldliness and untruthfulness can reduce a woman, the infamous devices a slender purse can drag educated ladies into, thus am I partially consoled for the sufferings of childhood. It is much, when one fronts battle, to have been reared in anatmosphere of absolute rectitude, of truthful and honourable instinct. It is a blessing indeed when love includes all this. But bleak as the start was, I would not have had it otherwise at the cost of these great and virile virtues. And since it would appear that the Irish habit of boasting is an incorrigible weakness, and that even in these democratic days my people still persist in descending from kings who have slept in peace over seven hundred years, and may without any extravagant scorn of fact be presumed to have passed for ever into the state of legend, I am glad to acknowledge the priceless debt of common-sense to a Scottish mother. Kings are all very well in their way, especially if they happen to be reigning; but when one learns as authentic fact that an Irish journalist has offered an article to an unknown editor, accompanied with a letter stating that the blood of seven kings runs in his veins, one feels that such a race is all the more rational for a little foreign blood to modify the imperishable and universal blight of royalty.
For the joy of our small kingdom a delightful Fenian dropped into our midst. It was breathed among us in fatal undertones that he had actually shot a man. He was a figure of romance, if ever there was one. He went about with long boots, and an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. He had lovely dark-blue eyes, which Pauline described as Byronic, and lisped most captivatingly. He was a kind of adopted relative, and, as a special correspondent, has passed into history. He became our elder brother, and in the years to come solaced himself in camp by regarding Agnes as a lost early love. We lay about him on the grass as he told us the tales of the Wonderful Nights. Better still, he invented adventures of his own almost as alarming and enthralling. He told us that he had been to Persia, which was not true—but no matter. We believed in the Persian princess who had swung herself, at the risk of life, fromthe harem window to become a Christian and marry him; and the king, her royal father, who followed the lovers on horseback and was stabbed in the breast by Edmond's trusty sword. The incoherence of his reminiscences constituted their conspicuous charm. To-day we left him at Samarcand, and on the morrow found him with a fresh and more perilous love-adventure at Constantinople.
It was entrancing.
And then he would offer us a taste of adventure for ourselves: in the absence of our parents he would crowd us into the waggonette, and drive my stepfather's pet horses at a diabolical rate up by the exquisite coast-road of Sorrento, into Bray and through the Wicklow mountains, each curve and hollow and hilly bank menacing to lay us in pieces upon the landscape, and we shouting and hurrahing, in a fond notion that we were offering to the universe the spectacle of the instability of the United Kingdom. Edmond's formidable method of conspiring against the Government at that time consisted in delighting and amusing a troop of little girls!
Foolish, reckless creature, alcohol absorbed and tarnished his brilliant gifts, and his boneslie scattered at far-off Khartoum. He made of a life that might have been a heroic poem a mere trivial legend, and, with his lust for adventure and peril, he met the death he wished for, brief and glorious.
His fear of my mother filled us with a rapturous sense of comradeship, though this fear was quite foolish, for my mother never concealed her preference for his sex, and to men was always as amiable as she was the reverse to us. He beamed and joked with her, but was careful to scan her visage, on the look-out for the first symptoms of storm. The bolt fell rudely upon his shoulders the day he lamed the horses, and did some damage to the waggonette. I never knew what she said to him; but it must have been exceedingly bitter and unbearable, for his cheeks were as white as paper, and his eyes as black as sloes. He was penniless for the moment, and down on his luck, which makes a man more nervously sensitive to slight than in his happier hours.
My stepfather was sorry for him; but, remembering the horses, was relieved to send him off to Spain with a new outfit and the inevitable opera-glasses.
"I shall never forget the old Dalkeygarden," he said to Agnes, on the morning of his departure, quite as sentimentally as if he were talking to a grown-up young person. The rascal was always playing a part for his own imagination, and even a slip of a girl of fourteen was better than nobody to regret after a three weeks' stay in a romantically situated house. It was stronger than him. He could not exist without a fancied love-affair on hand.
In the Carlist War, where he claimed to have saved the colours of Spain, rejected the hand of an Infanta, and lent his last five-pound note to Don Carlos, which that illustrious person forgot to return,—'tis a way, he would say musingly, with princes,—as he started for battle, he pathetically adjured his comrades to cut off a lock of his blue-black hair and send it to Agnes, with the assurance that his last thought was given to her. In the pauses of battle he actually entertained himself by composing an imaginary correspondence with an ardent and amorous Agnes, which he read aloud to his dearest friend, with tears in his voice.
But that, as Mr. Kipling in his earlier manner would say, is quite another story, and has nothing to do with the tale of little Angela.
I had no time to lament this fresh eclipseof romance, for Miss Kitty was busy preparing my things for Lysterby, and two days after Edmond's sentimental farewell and departure, I myself most dolefully had said a bitterer good-bye to the rocks and harbour and hills of Dalkey, and had been transported into the town house, to see Mrs. Clement for the last time, and, along with her, make my farewell visit to Kildare.
It was a grievous hour for poor Nurse Cochrane. Jim, her husband, who was down at Wexford two months ago when I came back from Lysterby, had returned a fortnight earlier with death in his eyes.
When we got down at the post-house, the soft fine rain of Ireland was drizzling over the land. A few steps brought us to the top of the green, with the slit of water along the sky and two wild swans visible through the pearl mist. All the blinds of nurse's windows were drawn down, and I instantly recalled a like picture the day Stevie dropped out of life.
The door was open, and a group of working men, in their Sunday suits, were talking in undertones.
"What has happened?" asked Mrs. Clement, alarmed.
"Troth, ma'am, an' 'tis a bad day for herself," said one.
"A power of ill-luck," said another. "A fine young man struck down like that in the flower of youth."
Mrs. Clement hurried inside, and I followed her in excited silence. In the familiar old parlour, with the china dogs and the green spinet, dear kindly nurse sat back in the black horsehair arm-chair, sobbing and moaning in the frantic way peasants will when grief strikes them, and around her in voluble sympathy women hushed and exclaimed and ejaculated, "Glory be to God!" "But who'd think of it?" "Poor Jim! but 'tis himself was the good poor crathur."
I advanced hesitatingly, abashed and frightened by such an explosion of sorrow—I who always went under a bed to weep lest others should mock me. Not then or since could I ever have given expression to such expansive and boisterous feeling, restrained by a fierce and indomitable pride even at so young an age.
Nurse caught sight of me, and held out both hands. I encircled her neck with my arms, and pressed my cheek against hers, and when hersobs had subsided, she stood up, holding me still in a frenzied clasp.
"Come, darling, and look at him for the last time. Poor Jim! He loved you as if you had been his own, his very own, for sure never a child had he."
She took me into Stevie's room, the best bedroom, and on the bed lay a long rigid form. I hardly recognised the dear friendly Jim of my babyhood, on whose knee I so often sat, in the pallid emaciated visage, with the lank black hair round it, and the moustache and beard as black as pitch against the hollow waxen cheek. The same candles were alight upon the table in daytime, and the air yielded the same heavy odour of flowers as on that other day I had penetrated into this room, and found Stevie in his coffin. I shuddered and clung to nurse's skirt, sick with a nameless repulsion, yet I am thankful now that I found courage, when she asked me to kiss him, not to shrink from that simple duty of gratitude. I allowed her to lift me, and I put my mouth to the frozen forehead, with what a sense of fear and horror I even can recall to-day. I was glad to nestle up against Mrs. Clement on the mail-car and press my lips against her live arm to get the cold contact from them. I felt so miserable,so broken was my faith in life, that the return to Lysterby passed unnoticed. I remember neither the departure, the journey, nor the arrival at school.
The episode of my first vacation closed with that dread picture of a dead man and a white shroud, and in the lugubrious illumination of tapers, and nurse sobbing and keening, with no hope of comfort. After that the troubles of home and school looked poor enough, and for some time the nuns found me a very sober and studious little girl. It was long before even Mr. Parker could raise a smile; and Play Day, when we were permitted to do as we liked all day, found me with no livelier desire than to sit still and pore over the novels of Lady Georgiana Fullerton.