THE GREAT NEWS.
A grown-up young lady, with yellow ringlets, in a black-and-white silk
dress, paid a visit to my grandmother one day, when I heard myself
described as "bold and saucy,"--heaven knows why, since I never uttered
a word in that formidable presence, and felt less than a mouse's courage
if I but accidentally encountered those severe black eyes. The young
lady offered to show me her dolls. I never cared for dolls, and I went
without enthusiasm. It was my first glimpse of girlish luxury. The room
in which her treasures were kept seemed to me as large as a chamber of
the palaces of story. There were trains, carriages, perambulators, about
two dozen dolls of all sizes, with gorgeous wardrobes; there were beds,
bonnets, parasols, kitchen utensils, dear little cups; babies in long
clothes, peasants, dancing-girls, and queens with crowns on their heads
and long cloaks. The young girl was one of the many extinguishable
flames of my uncle Lionel, destined, like Goethe, to sigh for one, and
then another in sentimental freedom, and end in bondage of an execrable
kind. She is blurred for me, but that palatial doll's chamber and all
those undreamed-of splendours remain still a vivid vision, like the
lovely pantomime, whither Dennis took me with his pockets full of
oranges to suck between the acts. Oh, that bewildering paradisiacal
sight of the fairies! the speechless emotions of the transformation
scene! the thirst, the yearning, for short muslin skirts, and limelight,
and feet twinkling rapturously in fairyland! The humours of the clown
and the harlequin left me cold; for, being acquainted with the extreme
tenderness of the human body through harsh experience, I could not
understand the pleasure the clown found in continually banging and
knocking down the harmless harlequin. Each unprovoked blow left me
sadder and more harassed. I felt the old man must be very much hurt, and
wondered why the audience seemed to enjoy his repeated discomfiture so
hugely. But the fairy dancing was quite different. Here was an
untempered joy that did not pass my comprehension. To be a fairy by
night, and possess all the young girl's toys by day! This was the dream
harshly broken by the appearance of my sisters, themselves demure
little fairies in green silk dresses and poky green silk bonnets.
They lured me out among the dead branches, where the robins were
dolefully hopping in search of crumbs, and exclaimed together: "Oh,
Angela, wait till you hear the news!"
What news? Why, I was to go away, across the sea, which was always
awfully wet, like the pond, only bigger and deeper. A ship, they said,
was like those little paper-boats the boys used to make at Kildare, and
you sat in it and rocked up and down, unless a shark came and ate you
up. Somebody told them that the English were dreadfully proud, and
thought no end of themselves, and looked down on the Irish.
"But you must stand up for yourself, Angela. Tell them your father was
king of Ireland lots of hundreds of years ago, and that long ago, when
the kings lived, all your cousins and brothers were red-cross knights."
"What were red-cross knights?" I asked, deeply impressed.
"Oh, they were men who wore long cloaks with red crosses on them, and
rode about on steeds."
"What's steeds?" I breathlessly inquired.
"Horses," was the pettish answer; "only you know they go quicker than
horses, and knights always preferred steeds. And they took things from
the rich and gave them to the poor."
"What things?" I again asked.
"Isn't she stupid? I declare she knows nothing. Why, food and money and
clothes, to be sure. They'll say the Irish are dreadful ignorant and
stupid when they see Angela, won't they?"
A great deal more was of course said between four passionate and voluble
children; but all I remember of that winter afternoon was the stupendous
news that I was going away in a ship soon across the sea to a foreign
land, where I should be submitted to insult, perhaps torture, because I
was Irish, if I were not previously devoured by a shark--a creature the
more terrible because of my complete ignorance not only of its
existence, but of its general features; and the mention of a new animal
was something like the menace of the devil: large, luminous, potent, and
indistinct. I already knew through Mary Jane that there was a Queen who
put Irish people into prison, and entertained herself by hanging them at
her leisure, and that evening I startled Mary Ann out of her senses by
asking her if it was likely I should be hanged in England like Robert
Emmet. And then, in order that she should have a proper notion of the
extent of my acquaintance with Robert Emmet, I stood in the middle of
the kitchen, with my arms strenuously folded, my brows gathered in a
fearful frown to reproduce the attitude of Robert Emmet in the dock, as
depicted in the parlour of Mary Jane's mamma.
"You know the English hanged him 'cause he was Irish," I explained,
extremely proud to impart my information. "Mary Jane told me so. When I
fell into the pond she cried, 'cause she was afraid the Queen would hang
her too."
Mary Ann laughed till she wept, and then drying her eyes, vowed she
would like to see "thim English" touch a gould hair of my head. "If thim
monsthers as much as lay a hand on ye, darlint, you just send me word,
and me and Dennis 'll soon come over and whack them all round."
Perfidious Mary Ann! She failed to keep this large and liberal promise
when, in my sore hour of need, I indited an ill-spelt epistle to her
from Saxon shores, and urged her to come and save me. I did not insist
upon the whacking, I only entreated to be taken back to Erin. Probably
the letter never reached her.
I think that it was immediately after this engrossing hour that I found
Mary Ann sobbing over an open trunk in the lumber-room. "Your very own,
alannah; look at the big white letters," she cried, and wiped her eyes
in a new linen garment before pressing it into the box. "Thim monsthers
can't say as you haven't chimmies fit for any lady of the land. Ye're to
wear a black cashmere o' a Sunday, just as if all your relatives was
dead. Did ye ever hear the likes?"
I certainly never did, for strange to say I had not worn a black dress
after Stevie's death. I did not, however, dislike the notion. Black was
not a hue with which I was familiar. Still musing on all the
extraordinary things that were continually happening, and wondering
whether the eventual climax of an uncertain career would prove the shark
or the gallows, not, however, using this superb word in my reflections
on the end of a little girl precariously balanced on the boards of
existence, I found myself confronted with my terrible grandmother in a
farewell interview.
She was propped up with pillows, and her eternal egg-flip was beside her
on a little table, along with her prayer-book, her spectacles, her
rosary, and her favourite novel, which I afterwards learned was "Adam
Bede." My mind reverted then, and has since often reverted, to an
abominable scene in that chamber I abhored. I had been noisy or
disobedient,--raced down the passage, or refused to go to bed when uncle
Lionel shouted to me from above the kitchen-stairs, probably stamping my
foot with the air of a little fury, which was my sad way in those
untamed days. With a Napoleonic gesture, my uncle caught my ear, and
dragged me into the awful presence. Here he was solemnly ordered to
fetch the knife-sharpener, which he did; heated it among the flames till
it glowed incandescent scarlet; then, my grandmother looking fiendishly
on, gathered me between his knees, held my mouth open with one hand, and
approached it to my lips. Of course it did not touch me, but memory
shrinks, a blank, into the void of terror.
The precise text of my grandmother's address I forget, but the nature of
her harangue is unforgettable. She addressed me as might a magistrate a
refractory subject about to be discharged from a reformatory. I was
exhorted not to be bold, or bad, or saucy, to say my prayers, to tell
the truth, not to thieve (oh! that damson-jam and those coppers), not to
get caught again by the police; I was warned that I might drop dead in
one of my violent fits of rage, and then I would surely go to hell; was
adjured to learn my lessons, to respect my superiors, to break none of
the Commandments, to avoid the seven deadly sins, learn the Catechism by
heart, with the alternative of having my hair cut short and being sent
to the poorhouse. She then held out her yellow hand, and placed a
sparkling sovereign in my small palm.
"Don't lose it. There are twenty shillings in it, and in each shilling
twelve pennies. Good-bye, and don't forget all I've said."
She shook my hand in her loose gentlemanly fashion, as if I were a young
man going to college instead of a baby girl of seven about to be
expatriated alone among strangers, in an alien land, for no conceivable
reason but the singular caprice of her who had given me so ill a gift as
life. It was the last time I saw my grandmother. I heard soon of her
death with complete indifference.
"Polly was a jolly Japanese," sang my uncle cheerily, as he caught me up
in his arms, and carried me down to the cab, on which Dennis had placed
my trunk. Mary Ann was weeping on the steps. She handed me a bag of
gingerbread and two apples, and told me I was not to be "down."
"'Tis yourself that's worth all the English that ever was born," she
asserted, and I dolorously assured her that whatever happened, even if
the Queen came in person to hang me, I would keep "up."
"That's me hearty," roared Dennis, holding the cab-door. "In with you,
and do something for your living."
Uncle Lionel lifted me in, gave me a crown-piece, and to my astonishment
kissed both my cheeks without hurting me. He stood on the pavement,
handsome, smiling, and elegant, as the cab drove off with solitary,
bewildered little me as surely a waif as any orphan. And waving his
hand, he turned unconcerned on his heel.