The altered arrangements were a cause of grief to my mother, but I am
bound to confess that for me they had certain compensations. One of them
was the greater ease with which I could slip out to Tommy the Mate, who
had been a sailor before he was a gardener, and was still a fine old
salt, with grizzled beard and shaggy eyebrows, and a merry twinkle in
what he called his "starboard" eye.
I think Tommy was one of the few about my father's house who were really
fond of me, but perhaps that was mainly because he loathed aunt Bridget.
He used to call her the Big Woman, meaning that she was the master and
mistress of everything and everybody about the place. When he was told
of any special piece of her tyranny to servant or farmhand he used to
say: "Aw, well, she'll die for all"; and when he heard how she had
separated me from my mother, who had nothing else to love or live for,
he spat sideways out of his mouth and said:
"Our Big Woman is a wicked devil, I'm thinking, and I wouldn't trust
[shouldn't wonder] but she'll burn in hell."
What definite idea I attached to this denunciation I do not now recall,
but I remember that it impressed me deeply, and that many a night
afterwards, during the miserable half-hours before I fell asleep with my
head under the clothes in the cold bedroom over the hall to which (as
Nessy MacLeod had told me) the bad fairies came for bad children, I
repeated the strange words again and again.
Another compensation was the greater opportunity I had for cultivating
an acquaintance which I had recently made with the doctor's son, when he
came with his father on visits to my mother. As soon as the hoofs of the
horse were heard on the gravel, and before the bell could be rung, I
used to dart away on tiptoe, fly through the porch, climb into the gig
and help the boy to hold the reins while his father was upstairs.
This led to what I thought a great discovery. It was about my mother. I
had always known my mother was sick, but now I got a "skute" (as old
Tommy used to say) into the cause of her illness. It was a matter of
milk. The doctor's boy had heard his father saying so. If my mother
could only have milk morning, noon and night, every day and all day,
"there wouldn't be nothing the matter with her."
This, too, impressed me deeply, and the form it took in my mind was that
"mammy wasn't sed enough," a conclusion that gained colour from the fact
that I saw Betsy Beauty perched up in a high chair in the dining-room
twice or thrice a day, drinking nice warm milk fresh from the cow. We
had three cows, I remember, and to correct the mischief of my mother's
illness, I determined that henceforth she should not have merely more of
our milk--she should have all of it.
Losing no time in carrying my intentions into effect, I crept into the
dairy as soon as the dairymaid had brought in the afternoon's milking.
There it was, still frothing and bubbling in three great bowls, and
taking up the first of them in my little thin arms--goodness knows
how--I made straight for my mother's room.
But hardly had I climbed half-way up the stairs, puffing and panting
under my burden, when I met Nessy MacLeod coming down, and she fell on
me with her usual reproaches.
"Mary O'Neill, you wilful, underhand little vixen, whatever are you
doing with the milk?"
Being in no mood for explanations I tried to push past, but Nessy
prevented me.
"No, indeed, you shan't go a step further. What will your Aunt Bridget
say? Take the milk back, miss, this very minute."
Nessy's loud protest brought Betsy Beauty out of the dining-room, and in
a moment my cousin, looking more than ever like a painted doll in her
white muslin dress with a large blue bow in her yellow hair, had run
upstairs to assist her step-sister.
I was now between the two, the one above and the other below, and they
laid hold of my bowl to take it from me. They tugged and I resisted and
there was a struggle in which the milk was in danger of being spilled.
"She's a stubborn little thing and she ought to be whipped," cried
Nessy.
"She's stealing my milk, and I'll tell mamma," said Betsy.
"Tell her then," I cried, and in a burst of anger at finding myself
unable to recover control of my bowl I swept it round and flung its
contents over my cousin's head, thereby drenching her with the frothing
milk and making the staircase to run like a river of whitewash.
Of course there was a fearful clamour. Betsy Beauty shrieked and Nessy
bellowed, whereupon Aunt Bridget came racing from her parlour, while my
mother, white and trembling, halted to the door of her room.
"Mally, Mally, what have you done?" cried my mother, but Aunt Bridget
found no need of questions. After running upstairs to her dripping
daughter, wiping her down with a handkerchief, calling her "my poor
darling," and saying, "Didn't I tell you to have nothing more to do with
that little vixen?" she fell on my mother with bitter upbraidings.
"Isabel, I hope you see now what your minx of a child is--the little
spiteful fury!"
By this time I had dropped my empty bowl on the stairs and taken refuge
behind my mother's gown, but I heard her timid voice trying to excuse
me, and saying something about my cousin and a childish quarrel.
"Childish quarrel, indeed!" cried my Aunt; "there's nothing childish
about that little imp, nothing. And what's more, I shall be obliged to
you, Isabel, if you will never again have the assurance to speak of my
Betsy Beauty in the same breath with a child of yours."
That was more than I could hear. My little heart was afire at the
humiliation put upon my mother. So stepping out to the head of the
stairs, I shouted down in my shrillest treble:
"Your Betsy Beauty is a wicked devil, and I wouldn't trust but she'll
burn in hell!"
Never, to the last hour of my life, shall I forget the effect of that
pronouncement. One moment Aunt Bridget stood speechless in the middle of
the stairs, as if all breath had been broken out of her. Then, ghastly
white and without a word, she came flying up at me, and, before I could
recover my usual refuge, she caught me, slapped me on the cheek and
boxed both my ears.
I do not remember if I cried, but I know my mother did, and that in the
midst of the general tumult my father came out of his room and demanded
in a loud voice, which seemed to shake the whole house, to be told what
was going on.
Aunt Bridget told him, with various embellishments, which my mother did
not attempt to correct, and then, knowing she was in the wrong, she
began to wipe her eyes with her wet handkerchief, and to say she could
not live any longer where a child was encouraged to insult her.
"I have to leave this house--I have to leave it to-morrow," she said.
"You don't have to do no such thing," cried my father. "But I'm just
crazy to see if a man can't be captain in his own claim. These children
must go to school. They must all go--the darned lot of 'em."