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_Autobiography of a Child_
_By
HANNAH LYNCH_
[Illustration: Decoration]
_New York_
_Dodd, Mead & Company_
_1899_
_Copyright, 1898_,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Contents
CHAP. PAGE
I. LOOKING BACKWARD 1
II. MARY JANE 7
III. MY BROTHER STEVIE 17
IV. THE LAST DAYS OF HAPPINESS 33
V. MARTYRDOM 43
VI. GRANDFATHER CAMERON 49
VII. PROFILES OF CHILDHOOD 60
VIII. REVOLT 79
IX. MY FRIEND MARY ANN 89
X. THE GREAT NEWS 98
XI. PREPARING TO FACE THE WORLD 107
XII. AN EXILE FROM ERIN 113
XIII. AT LYSTERBY 120
XIV. THE WHITE LADY OF LYSTERBY 129
XV. AN EXILE IN REVOLT 136
XVI. MY FIRST CONFESSION 143
XVII. THE CHRISTMAS HAMPERS 154
XVIII. MR. PARKER THE DANCING-MASTER 160
XIX. EPISCOPAL PROTECTION 170
XX. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 182
XXI. OLD ACQUAINTANCE 188
XXII. A PRINCESS OF LEGEND 201
XXIII. MY FIRST TASTE OF FREEDOM 207
XXIV. MY ELDEST SISTER 212
XXV. OUR BALL 219
XXVI. THE SHADOWS 230
XXVII. A DISMAL END OF HOLIDAYS 238
XXVIII. MY FIRST COMMUNION 246
XXIX. THE LAST OF LYSTERBY AND CHILDHOOD 253
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHILD
Chapter I.
LOOKING BACKWARD.
The picture is clear before me of the day I first walked. My mother, a
handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me, had driven out from town
to nurse's cottage. I shut my eyes, and I am back in the little parlour
with its spindle chairs, an old-fashioned piano with green silk front,
its pink-flowered wall-paper, and the two wonderful black-and-white dogs
on the mantelpiece. There were two pictures I loved to gaze upon--Robert
Emmett in the dock, and Mary Stuart saying farewell to France. I do not
remember my mother's coming or going. Memory begins to work from the
moment nurse put me on a pair of unsteady legs. There were chairs placed
for me to clutch, and I was coaxingly bidden to toddle along, "over to
mamma." It was very exciting. First one chair had to be reached, then
another fallen over, till a third tumbled me at my mother's feet. I
burst into a passion of tears, not because of the fall, but from terror
at finding myself so near my mother. Nurse gathered me into her arms and
began to coo over me, and here the picture fades from my mind.
My nurse loved me devotedly, and of course spoiled me. Most of the
villagers helped her in this good work, so that the first seven years of
my childhood, in spite of baby-face unblest by mother's kiss, were its
happiest period. Women who do not love their children do well to put
them out to nurse. The contrast of my life at home and the years spent
with these rustic strangers is very shocking. The one petted, cherished,
and untroubled; the other full of dark terrors and hate, and a
loneliness such as grown humanity cannot understand without experience
of that bitterest of all tragedies--unloved and ill-treated childhood.
But I was only reminded of my sorrow at nurse's on the rare occasion of
my mother's visits, or when nurse once a month put me into my best
clothes, after washing my face with blue mottled soap--a thing I
detested--and carried me off on the mail-car to town to report my
health and growth. This was a terrible hour for me. From a queen I fell
to the position of an outcast. My stepfather alone inspired me with
confidence. He was a big handsome man with a pleasant voice, and he was
always kind to me in a genial, thoughtless way. He would give me
presents which my mother would angrily seize from me and give to her
other children, not from love, for she was hardly kinder to them than to
me, but from an implacable passion to wound, to strike the smile from
the little faces around her, to silence a child's laughter with terror
of herself. She was a curious woman, my mother. Children seemed to
inspire her with a vindictive animosity, with a fury for beating and
banging them, against walls, against chairs, upon the ground, in a way
that seems miraculous to me now how they were saved from the grave and
she from the dock.
She had a troop of pretty engaging children, mostly girls, only one of
whom she was ever known to kiss or caress, and to the others she was
worse than the traditional stepmother of fairy tale. It was only
afterwards I learned that those proud creatures I, in my abject
solitude, hated and envied, lived in the same deadly fear of her with
which her cold blue eyes and thin cruel lips inspired me with.
But there were, thank God! many bright hours for me, untroubled by her
shadow. I was a little sovereign lady in my nurse's kindly village,
admired and never thwarted. I toddled imperiously among a small world in
corduroy breeches and linsey skirts, roaming unwatched the fields and
lanes from daylight until dark. We sat upon green banks and made daisy
chains, and dabbled delightedly with the sand of the pond edges, while
we gurgled and chattered and screamed at the swans.
The setting of that nursery biography is vague. It seemed to me that the
earth was made up of field beyond field, and lanes that ran from this
world to the next, with daisies that never could be gathered, they were
so many; and an ocean since has impressed me less with the notion of
immensity of liquid surface than the modest sheet of water we called the
Pond. Years afterwards I walked out from town to that village, and how
small the pond was, how short the lanes, what little patches for fields
so sparsely sprinkled with daisies! A more miserable disillusionment I
have not known.
I have always marvelled at the roll of reminiscences and experiences of
childhood told consecutively and with coherence. Children live more in
pictures, in broken effects, in unaccountable impulses that lend an
unmeasured significance to odd trifles to the exclusion of momentous
facts, than in story. This alone prevents the harmonious fluency of
biography in an honest account of our childhood. Memory is a random
vagabond, and plays queer tricks with proportion. It dwells on pictures
of relative unimportance, and revives incidents of no practical value in
the shaping of our lives. Its industry is that of the idler's, wasteful,
undocumentary, and untrained. For vividness without detail, its effects
may be compared with a canvas upon which a hasty dauber paints a
background of every obscure tint in an inextricable confusion, and
relieves it with sharply defined strokes of bright colour.
Jim Cochrane, my everyday papa, as I called him, was a sallow-faced man
with bright black eyes, which he winked at me over the brim of his
porter-measure, as he refreshed himself at the kitchen fire after a hard
day's work. He was an engine-driver, and once took me on the engine with
him to the nearest station, he and a comrade holding me tight between
them, while I shrieked and chattered in all the bliss of a first
adventure.
This is a memory of sensation, not of sight. I recall the rush through
the air, the sting, like needle-points against my cheeks and eyelids, of
the bits of coal that flew downward from the roll of smoke, the shouting
men laughing and telling me not to be afraid, the red glare of the
furnace whenever they slid back the grate opening, the whiff of fright
and delight that thrilled me, and, above all, the confidence I had that
I was safe with nurse's kind husband.
Poor Jim! His was the second dead face I looked upon without
understanding death. The ruthless disease of the Irish peasant was
consuming him then, and he died before he had lived half his life
through.