AT LYSTERBY.
A born traveller, the vagabond's instinct of forming pleasant
friendships along the highroads that are buried with the last hand-shake
showed itself on this my first voyage, and has never forsaken me
throughout an accidented and varied career. I might have treasured
sheaves of visiting-cards with names in every language bearing addresses
in every possible town of Europe and Asia and numbers of American
States. On this occasion no names or cards were exchanged between me and
the lady with the sealskin coat. But she adopted me for the hours that
passed until we reached Crewe, when I was ejected from the warm home of
her lap, and cast out into the cold of a winter's night.
She led me by the hand to look again at the ropes and the sailors, and
tumble down and scramble up the companion-stairs, while Sister Clare
groaned and prayed in her cabin. Indeed, I may say that I had forgotten
all about my veiled jailor, and, my tears once dried, prattled
delightedly to this pretty sympathetic creature, whose lovely furs and
wide hat of black plumes and black velvet made of her a princess of
fairyland. Then when the caprices of the sea distressed us in our
wanderings, I fell asleep in her lap, luxurious and happy, being quite
at rest now about the sharks, since my new friend had patiently assured
me there was nothing to fear from them.
I can now imagine what a quaint picture this motherly young lady, with
the softly folding arms and the humid dusky glance, that was in itself
the sweetest of caresses, may have made afterwards of our friendship,
the tenderness with which she would sketch my portrait and repeat my
childish confidences, the pity and indignation with which my forlornness
must have filled her. A child with a home, a mother, a family, cast
adrift on a grey winter's sea! Travelling from one land to another, like
a valueless packet given in charge to a stranger!
I hardly remember our parting. It was late, and I was dreaming, heaven
knows of what,--of the chocolate drops she had given me, or of the dear
little trays of apples Bessy the applewoman sold down at Kildare. Hard
arms securely caught me, and whisked me out of my delicious nest.
Instead of warm fur against my cheek, I felt a blast of black-grey air,
and with a howl of dismay I found myself blinking in the noisy glitter
of a big station. The lady bent her charming head out of the window,
smiling sadly at me from under the heavy shadow of her velvet plumed
hat. I felt that she parted from me reluctantly, and knew that she had
given me a passing shelter in her kind heart.
The night outside seemed bitterly cold without her protecting
tenderness, and I made a stoic effort to swallow my tears, and let
myself be dragged ferociously by Sister Clare, for whom I was merely
baggage, to the Birmingham train. As for impressions, these were
stationary, not going beyond the voice and furs of my new friend, and I
was far too sorry and sleepy and weary to note anything fresh.
Lysterby, I have since been informed, is an ugly little town; but in
those remote, uncritical days it appeared to me the centre of
loveliness. Flowers are rare in Ireland, and here roses, red and white,
grew wild and luxuriant along the lanes. But to an imaginative and
romantic child, a place so peopled with legend and gay and tragic
historical figures could not fail to be beautiful. In one of the common
streets you looked up and saw the painted bust of a medieval knave,
craning his ruffianly neck out of a window-frame, and the fellow, you
were told, answered to the name of Peeping Tom. Instantly the street
ceased to be real, and you were pitched pell-mell into the heart of
romance.
I have not seen the place since childhood; but it remains in memory
blotted, fragmentary, picturesque, an old-fashioned little town, with
spired churches, rough, clean little streets, rare passers-by, never so
hurried that the double file from the Ivies, under the guard of the
austere ladies of Mercy, did not attract their attention, and sometimes
with discomposing emphasis, as when the little street blackguards would
shout after us:--
"Catholics, Catholics, quack, quack, quack,
Go to the devil and never come back!"
I remember the Craven Arms, a medieval inn all hung with roses and ivy,
where my parents stayed when they came to see me, and where my sister
and I slept in a long low-beamed chamber, with windows made of a
surprising pattern of tiny diamond squares and green lattices that
excited our enthusiastic admiration. I remember the bowling-green, that
appeared to roll like a sea straight to the sky, and the long, long
roads with fields on either side, and the great historic ruin that has
given its name to one of Scott's novels.
To me it is impossible to recall the leafy lanes, rose-scented; the
narrow pavements and sleepy little shops; the great pageant, when the
town's legend became for thrilled infants an afternoon of fugitive and
barbaric splendour,--without evoking vague scenes from history, and
marshalling before the mind's eye brilliant and memorable figures. Dull
enough, I have no doubt, for those outside the convent walls, who had to
live its dull life: no discord between the outlying farmsteads and the
scarcely competitive shops; the time of day not too eagerly noted, in
spite of the fame of its watches; and the vociferations of the
newsvendors a thing unknown. But sectarian spirit ran pretty high, if I
remember rightly, and Lysterby was represented in Parliament by a fierce
anti-Catholic, whose dream, we imagined, it was to hang all Jesuits and
deport the nuns. His name was whispered within the convent walls in awed
undertones, as a pagan persecutor may have been spoken of in the
Catacombs by the early Christians. But except the veiled ladies,
romantically conscious of the proximity of persecution, with the joy of
a name to pronounce in shuddering alarm, all Lysterby was at peace, and
free to go to bed with the lambs, with nothing to disturb it in its
morning dreams less melodious than the lark's song. Private wars were of
the usual anodyne and eternal character: Smith the baker not on speaking
terms with Jones the butcher; Grubb the weaver, in embittered monotony
of conviction, supported on unlimited quantities of beer, ready to
assert every evening that Collins the miller, who lived on the other
side of the common, was a scoundrel.
Of the troubles outside we little ones had no time to think. Our
troubles within were abundant and absorbing, and no less absorbing and
abundant were our small joys. There were ten of us only--ten queer,
curious little girls; and one ragged specimen of the trousered sex--a
horrid small boy, the scion of a distinguished house, whom the ladies of
Mercy kept, long past the time, quaintly apparelled in black frocks and
white pinafores, as an injudicious concession to claustral modesty. A
boy of eight in skirts, with long brown curls upon his shoulders!
To suit his raiment, nature made him the greatest little coward and
minx of the lot of us. Beside him I felt myself a brave, a gentleman, a
hero of adventure. He had all the vices I intuitively abhorred. He was
spiteful, a tell-tale, an ignoble whiner; and before I was a month at
the Ivies I was for him "that nasty little Irish girl," whose fine
furies terrified the wits out of his mean little body, whose frank boxes
on a rascally small ear sent him into floods of tears, and whose
masterly system of open persecution kept him ever in alarm, ever on the
race to Sister This or Mother That. How we loathed that boy Frank!
On the other hand, I was speedily as popular as a creature of
legend--not by reason of my virtues, which, by a rare modesty, kept
themselves concealed, but because of my high spirits, untamable once let
loose; my imagination, which incessantly devised fresh shudders for
these timid and unimaginative children; my prodigality in invention, and
my general insubordination.
The cowed and suffering baby of Ireland on Saxon shores at once revealed
the Irish rebel, the instinctive enemy of law and order. I was
commander-in-chief in revolt, with a most surprising gift of the gab; a
satanic impulse to hurl my small weak self against authority on all
occasions, and an abnormal capacity for flying out at every one with
power to do me harm. Whatever may be said of the value of my courage,
its quality even I the owner (who should be the last to recognise it!),
must admit to be admirable. Alas! it was a virtue ever persistently
wasted then as now. While it never procured me a single stroke of
happiness or fortune, it has boundlessly added to the miseries of an
imprudent career.
The start in Lysterby ends my patient martyrdom. Here I became the
active and abominable little fiend unkindness and ill-management made of
one of the gentlest and most sensitive of natures. The farther I
travelled the road of childhood the more settled became my conviction
that grown-up humanity, which I gradually began to loath more than even
I once had feared, was my general implacable enemy. I might have grown
sly and slavish in this conviction; but I am glad to say that I took the
opposite course. I may be said to have planted myself against a moral
wall and furiously defied all the authorities of Church and State "to
come on," hitting in blind recklessness out at every one, quite
indifferent to blow and defeat.
Little Angela of Kildare and Dublin, over whose sorrows I have invited
the sympathetic reader to weep, was a pallid and pathetic figure. But
Angela of Lysterby held her own--more even than her own, for she fought
for others as well as for herself, and gave back (with a great deal more
trouble at least) as much pain and affliction as she endured.