1844.
My extreme loneliness.--Thoughts of flight.--My father's last illness
and death.--Circumstances of my last interview with him.--His funeral.
It was one of the effects of the constant anxiety and excitement, and
the dreadful wretchedness of that time, that my brain received the
images of all surrounding creatures and things with an unnatural
clearness and intensity, and that they were impressed upon it for life.
Even now everything about Ivy Cottage is as clear as if the forty years
were only as many days, and the writing of these chapters brings
everything before me most vividly, not only the faces of the people and
the habits and motions of the animals, but even the furniture, of which
I remember every detail, down to the coloring of the services in the
bedrooms, and the paint on my father's rocking-chair. An anecdote has
been told in these pages about exercise with dumb-bells and an appeal to
the clock. In writing that, I saw the real clock with the moon on its
face (for it showed the phases of the moon), and my aunt standing near
the window with her work in her hand and glancing up from the work to
the clock, just as she did in reality.
Amongst other particular occasions I remember one night when the moon
shone very brightly in the garden, and I was sitting near my bedroom
window looking over it, meditating flight. My father's cruelty had then
reached its highest point. I was always spoken to harshly when he
condescended to take any notice of me at all, and was very frequently
beaten. Our meals together had become perfectly intolerable. He would
sit and trifle with his cutlet, and cover it with pepper, for his
appetite was completely gone, and there was no conversation except
perhaps an occasional expression of displeasure. The continual tension
caused by anxiety made my sleep broken and uncertain, and that night I
sat up alone in the bedroom longer than usual and looking down upon the
moonlit garden. There was an octagonal summer-house of trellis-work on
the formal oblong lawn, and on the top of it was a large hollow ball of
sheet-copper painted green that had cost my grandmother three pounds. It
is oddly associated with my anxieties on that night, because I looked
first at it and then at the moon alternately whilst thinking. The
situation had become absolutely intolerable, the servants were my only
protectors, and though devoted they never dared to interfere when their
master was actually beating me. I therefore seriously weighed, in my own
childish manner, the possibilities of a secret flight. The moonlight was
tempting--it would be easy to go alone to the stable and saddle the
pony. On a fine night I could be many miles away before morning. There
was no difficulty whatever about money; I had plenty of sovereigns in a
drawer to be accounted for afterwards to my father, and meanwhile could
employ them in escaping from him. Still, I knew that such an employment
of _his_ money would be looked upon by him as a breach of trust, and
would, in fact, _be_ a breach of trust. This consideration was not
easily set aside, though I now see that it was needlessly scrupulous,
and have no doubt whatever that if a child is left by the ignorance or
the carelessness of superior authority in the hands of a madman, it has
a clear right to provide for its own safety by any means in its power.
But where was I to go? My uncles were two very cool lawyers, always on
the side of authority, and they would not be likely to believe my story
entirely. A vague but sure instinct warned me that they would set me
down for a rebellious boy who wanted to escape from justly severe
paternal authority, and that they would at once send me back to Ivy
Cottage. One of my two maiden aunts would be very likely to take the
same view, but if the other received me with kindness, she could not
have strength to resist my father, who would send or go to her at once
and claim me. After thinking over all these things, I came to the
conclusion that real safety was only to be found amongst strangers, and
it seemed so hazardous to ask protection from unknown people that I
decided to remain; but a very little would have settled it the other
way. If those sovereigns had been really my own, I should probably have
crept out of the house, saddled the pony, and ridden many miles; but so
young a boy travelling alone would have been sure to attract attention,
and the attempt to win deliverance would have been a failure. In after
years, one of my elder relatives said that the attempt would almost
certainly have caused my father to disinherit me by a new will, as my
mother's property had been left to him absolutely. This danger was quite
of a serious kind (more serious than the reader will think probable from
what I choose to say in this place), as my father had another heir in
view whom I never saw, but who was held _in terrorem_ over me.
I awoke one bleak winter's morning about five o'clock, and heard the
strangest cries proceeding from his room. His manservant had been
awakened before me and had gone to the room already, where he was
engaged in a sort of wrestling match with my father, who, in the belief
that the house was full of enemies, was endeavoring to throw himself out
of the window. Other men had been called for, who speedily arrived, and
they overpowered him, though even the remnant of his mighty strength was
such that it took six men to hold him on his bed. The attack lasted a
whole week, and the house would have been a perfect hell, had not a
certain event turned it for me into a Paradise.
I had not been able somehow to get to sleep late at night for a short
time, when a light in the room awoke me. The horrible life I had been
leading for many a day and night had produced a great impressionability,
and I was particularly afraid of my father in the night-time, so I
started up in bed with the idea that he was come to beat me, when lo!
instead of his terrible face, I saw what for me was the sweetest and
dearest face in the whole world! It was his sister Mary, she who had
taken my mother's place, and whom I loved with a mingled sentiment of
filial tenderness and gratitude that remained undiminished in force,
though it may have altered in character, during all the after years. For
the suddenness of revulsion from horror to happiness, there has never
been a minute in my existence comparable to the minute when I realized
the idea that she had come. At first it seemed only a deceptive dream.
Such happiness was incredible, and I did not even know she had been sent
for; but the sweet reality entered into my heart like sunshine, and
throwing my arms about her neck I burst into a passion of tears. She, in
her quiet way, for she hardly ever yielded to a strong emotion, though
her feelings were deep and tender, looked at me sadly and kindly and
told me to sleep in peace, as she was going to remain in the house some
time. Then she left the room, and I lay in the darkness, but with a new
light brighter than sunshine in the hope that the miserable life with my
father had at length come to an end. It had only been six months in all,
but it had seemed longer than any half-dozen years gone through before
or after.
If this book were a novel, a very effective chapter might be written to
describe my father's sufferings during his week of delirium, and all the
dreadful fancies by which his disordered brain was oppressed and
tortured; but I prefer to skip that week altogether, and come to a
morning when his recovery was thought to be assured. He was no longer
delirious, but apparently quite calm, though his manner was hard and
imperious. He ordered me to be sent up to him, and I went almost
trembling with the old dread of him, and with a wretched feeling that
after my single week of respite the tyranny was to begin again. Such may
have been the feelings of an escaped slave when he has been caught and
brought back in irons, and stands once more in his master's presence. I
tried to congratulate my master on his recovery in a clumsy childish
way, but he peremptorily ordered me to fetch the "Times" and read to
him. I began, as usual, one of the leading articles on the politics of
the day, and before I had read many sentences my hearer declared that I
was reading badly and made the article nonsense. Why had I put in such
and such words of my own? he asked. His own precept that I was always to
tell the truth under any circumstances had habituated me to be truthful
even to him, so I answered boldly that I had not inserted the words
attributed to me. Then I read a little farther, and he accused me of
inserting something else that was not and could not be in the text; I
said it was he who was mistaken, and he flew into an uncontrollable
fury, one of those rages in which it had been his custom to punish me
without mercy. What he might have done to me I cannot tell; he raised
himself in bed and glared at me with an expression never to be
forgotten. My aunt, however, had been listening at the door, thinking it
probable that I should be in danger, and she now opened it and told me
to come away. I have a confused recollection of reaching the door under
a parting volley of imprecations.
It was a mistake to let my father see me, as, in the perverted state of
his mind, the mere sight of me was enough to make him furious. Whether
he hated me or not, nobody knows; but he treated me as if I was the most
odious little object that could be brought before his eyes. Very soon
after the scene about the article in the "Times," and probably in
consequence of the excitement brought on by it, my father had a fit of
apoplexy, and lingered till the next morning about nine o'clock. I was
not in the room when he died, but my aunt took me to see him immediately
after, and then I received an impression which has lasted to the present
day. The corpse was lying on its side amidst disordered bedclothes, and
to this day I can never go into a bedroom where the bed has not been
made without feeling as if there were a corpse in it. That dreadful
childish sensation received when I saw my father's body just as it lay
at the close of the death-agony, can even now be revived by the sight of
a disordered bed; such is the force of early impressions, especially
when they are received by a nervous system that has been overwrought by
the extreme of mental wretchedness.
The reader will hardly believe that the death of so hard a father could
have been felt otherwise than as an inexpressible relief, and yet I was
deeply affected by his loss. The kindest of fathers could hardly have
been wept for more. My aunt's tears were more explicable; she was old
enough to understand the frightful waste of the best gifts involved in
that premature ending; as for my grief, perhaps the true explanation of
it may be that I mourned rather the father who had been kind to me in
Wales, than the cruel master at Ivy Cottage.
I sometimes try to imagine what he might have been under more favorable
circumstances. There were times after his wife's death when he meditated
a complete change of residence, which might have saved him. He would
always have been severe and authoritative, but without alcohol he would
probably not have been cruel.
I remember the day of the funeral quite distinctly. My father's two
brothers came, though he had had scarcely any intercourse with them for
years. They were most respectable men, quite free from my father's
errors; but they had not half his life and energy. Such was the strength
of his constitution that so recently as the time of our journey in Wales
his health was not visibly impaired, and at the time of his death he had
that rare possession for a man of thirty-nine, a complete set of
perfectly sound teeth.
His coffin was carried on the shoulders of six men from Ivy Cottage to
the graveyard near the chapel. Shaw at that time had only a chapel, a
hideous building on a bleak piece of rising ground, surrounded by many
graves. It never looked more dreary than on that wretched January day in
1844, when we stood round as the sexton threw earth on my father's
coffin. He was laid in the same tomb with the poor young wife who had
loved him truly, and to whom he had been a tender and devoted husband
whilst their short union lasted.
I am the only survivor of that day's ceremony. The little procession has
all followed my father into the darkness, descending one by one into
graves separated by great spaces of land and sea. And when this is
printed I, too, shall be asleep in mine.