EPISCOPAL PROTECTION.
The succeeding years in Lysterby are obscured. Here and there I recall a
vivid episode, an abiding impression. Papa came over with one of my
elder sisters. They arrived at night, and I, half asleep, was dressed
hurriedly and taken down to the parlour. A big warm wave of delight
overwhelmed me as my stepfather caught me in his arms and whisked me up
above his fair head. It was heaven to meet his affectionate blue eyes
dancing so blithely to the joy of my own. Seated upon his shoulder, I
touched a mole on his broad forehead, and cried, as if I had made a
discovery--
"You've got the same little ball on your forehead, papa, that you had
when you used to come down to Kildare."
Bidding me good-night, he promised to come for me early next day, and
told me I should sleep in the Craven Arms, and spend two whole days
driving about the country with him. How comforting the well-filled
table, the cold ham, the bacon and eggs at breakfast, the bread and
marmalade, all served on a spotless tablecloth, and outside the smell of
the roses and honeysuckle, and the exciting rumble of flies up and down
the narrow street! I was so happy that I quite forgot my woes, and did
not remember to complain of my enemies. There was so much to eat, to
see, to think of, to feel, to say! I not only wanted to know all about
everybody at home, but I wanted to see and understand all about me.
In the Abbey we saw Vandyke's melancholy Charles, and it was a rare
satisfaction for me to be able to tell how he had been beheaded. At the
great Castle we saw Queen Elizabeth's bed with the jewel-wrought quilt,
and my romantic elder sister, fresh from reading "The Last of the
Barons," passionately kissed the King-maker's armour. She told us the
thrilling tale as we sat in the famous cedar avenue, when the earl's
daughter, all summery in white muslin and Leghorn hat, passed us with
her governess, and although she was a fresh slip of a girl just like my
sister, because of her name we felt that a living breath of history had
brushed us. She was not for us an insignificant girl of our own
century, but something belonging to the King-maker, a breathing memory
of the Wars of the Roses, the sort of creature the dreadful Richard
might have wooed in his hideous youth.
And then at night, in the old inn, we discovered two big illustrated
volumes about Josephine and Napoleon. I had not got so far in history as
Napoleon, and here was an unexplored world, whose fairy was my voluble
and imaginative sister. With a touch of her wand she unrolled before my
enthralled vision scenes of the French Revolution and the passionate
loves of Bonaparte and the young Viscountess de Beauharnais. I wish
every child I know two such nights as I passed, listening to this
evocative creature revive so vividly one of the intensest and most
dramatic hours of history. Thanks to her eloquence, to her genius,
Napoleon, vile monster, became one of my gods. I think the thrilling
tale she read me was by Miss Muloch. Impossible now to recall the
incidents that sufficed to turn succeeding weeks into an exquisite
dream. Who, for instance, was the beauteous creature in amber and purple
velvet, with glittering diamonds, that usurped such a fantastic place in
the vague aspirations of those days? And the lovely Polish countess
Napoleon loved? And those letters from Egypt to Josephine, and
Josephine's shawls and flowers, and the ghost-stories of Malmaison, and
the last adieu the night before the divorce. Hard would it be to say
whom I most loved and deeply pitied, the unadmirable Josephine or the
admirable queen of Prussia. My sister read aloud, as we sat up in bed
together, I holding the candle, and gazing in awe and delight, wet-eyed,
at the coarse engravings.
Other sisters came in quick succession, but they remained strangers to
me. They fawned on Sister Esmeralda, whom I hated: they were older and
wiser than I; they aspired to the ribbon of the Children of Mary, and
walked submissively with the authorities of Church and State. They
played "Il Baccio" on the piano, and a mysterious duet called the "Duet
in D." The only sister I remember of those days as an individual was
Pauline, who had opened to me a world of treasures. At school, she
naturally forsook me for girls of her own age; but on play-days, when we
were free to do as we liked all day, she sometimes condescended to
recall my existence, and told me with an extraordinary vivacity of
recital the stories of "East Lynne," "The Black Dwarf," "Rob Roy," and
"Kenilworth."
But for the rest she was a great and glorious creature who dwelt aloft,
and possessed the golden key of the chambers of fiction. My immediate
friend was Polly Evans, whose mamma once took me to tea in an old
farmhouse along the Kenilworth road.
There were strawberries and cream on the table, and delicious little
balls of butter in blue-and-white dishes, and radishes, which I had
never before eaten; and the air was dense with the smell of the flowers
on table, sideboard, mantelpiece, and brackets. Polly and I, with her
brother Godfrey, played all the long afternoon in the hay-field, drunk
with the odour, the sunny stillness, the hum of the bees--drunk, above
all, with this transient bliss of freedom and high living.
Another time Mrs. Evans took me with Polly and Godfrey to Kenilworth
Castle, where we dined among the ruins on ham, cold chicken, fruit, and
lemonade. Yet she herself is no remembered personality: I cannot recall
a single feature of hers, and even Polly herself is less clear in memory
than Mary Jane of Kildare, than the abominable Frank.
Years after, Polly and her brother visited Ireland as tourists, and
having all that time treasured my parents' address, called to see me.
But I was abroad, a hopeless wanderer. Godfrey, I learnt, was quite a
fine young fellow, who shared his sister's attachment to me. Polly was
sprightly and pretty, it seems, engaged too. But I never saw them again.
An eminent bishop came to confirm us, and we were taken down to town
church, where, to our infinite amusement, we occupied several rows of
benches opposite a boys' school, also brought hither for the same
ceremony, each with a white rosette in his button-hole. None of us took
the rite very seriously. We found it droll to be tapped on the cheek by
a white episcopal hand and told that we were soldiers, and we watched
the boys to see if their bearing were more martial than ours. They
seemed equally preoccupied with us, and looked as if they felt
themselves fools, awkward and shamefaced. They stared hard at our noble
youth, Frank, in his eternal skirts--his curls had recently been
clipped--and nudged and giggled. Much of a soldier looked Frank! Heaven
help the religion of Christ or the Constitution if either reposed faith
in his prowess!
Whither has he drifted, and what has life made of the meanest little
rascal I ever knew? Has he learnt to tell the truth at least? Has some
public school licked him into shape, and kicked the cowardice and
spitefulness out of him? When I became acquainted with Barnes Newcome
afterwards, I always thought of that boy Frank. "Sister So-and-so, that
nasty Angela is teasing me." "Mother This, I can't eat my
bread-and-milk; that horrid Angela has put salt into it." And then, when
no one was looking, and a child weaker than himself was at hand, what
sly pinches, and kicks, and vicious tugs at her hair. Noble youth,
future pillar of the British empire, I picture you an admirable
hypocrite and bully!
I wonder why the bishop singled me out of all that small crowd for a
stupendous honour. He had asked my name, and after a luxurious lunch
with a few privileged mothers in the convent, he requested somebody to
fetch me. The nuns did not fail to impress the full measure of this
honour upon me, and when I came into the refectory, where the bishop was
enthroned like a prince, I caught a reassuring beam from my dear friend,
Mother Aloysius!
The bishop pushed back his chair and held out both arms to me. I was a
singularly pretty child, I know. My enemy, Sister Esmeralda, had even
said that I had the face of an angel with the heart of a fiend. A
delicate, proud, and serious little visage, with the finish, the
fairness, the transparency of a golden-haired doll, meant to take the
prize in an exhibition. But this would hardly explain the extraordinary
distinction conferred on me by a man who has passed into history,--a
grave and noble nature, with as many cares as a Prime Minister, a man
who saw men and women in daily battalions, and to whom a strange little
girl of nine he had never spoken to, could scarcely seem a more serious
creature in life than a rabbit or a squirrel.
He had a kind and thoughtful face, deeply lined and striking. I liked
his smile at once, and went up to him without any feeling of shyness.
He lifted me on to his knee, kissed my forehead, and looked steadily and
long into my steady eyes. Then he kissed me again, and called for a big
slice of plum-cake, which Mother Aloysius, smiling delightedly at me,
was quick to hand him. He took it from the plate, and placed it in my
willing grasp.
"A fine and most promising little face," I distinctly heard him say to
the superioress. "But be careful of her. A difficult and dangerous
temperament, all nerves and active brain, and a fearful suffering little
heart within. Manage her, manage her. I tell you there's the stuff of a
great saint or a great sinner here, if she should see twenty-one, which
I doubt."
Alas! I have passed twenty-one years and years ago, with difficulty, it
is true, with ever the haunting shadow of death about me, and time has
revealed me neither the saint nor the sinner, just a creature of
ordinary frailty and our common level of virtue. If I have not exactly
gone to perdition--an uncheerful proceeding my sense of humour would
always guard me from--I have not scaled the heights. I have lived my
life, by no means as well as I had hoped in the days we are privileged
to hope and to dream, not as loftily, neither with distinction nor
success; but I have not accomplished any particular villainy, or
scandal, or crime that would justify my claiming an important place in
the ranks of sinners. I have had a good deal more innocent fun, and
known a great deal more suffering, than fall to the common lot; and I
have enjoyed the fun with all the intensity of the mercurial Irish
temperament, and endured the other with what I think I may proudly call
the courage of my race. I have not injured or cheated a human being,
though I have been greatly injured and cheated by more than I could now
enumerate. There ends my scaling of the hill of virtues.
Of my sins it behoves me not to speak, lest I should fall into the
grotesque and delightful attitude of the sailor I once heard in London
make his public confession to a Salvation Army circle.
"My brothers, I am a miserable sinner. In Australia I murdered a man; I
drank continually, I thieved, I ran after harlots, and led the life of
debauchery. Oh, my friends, pray for me, for now I am converted and know
Jesus. I am one of the just, may I remain so. But wicked and debauched
and drunken as I was, there were lots more out there much worse than I."
In summing up our errors and frailties, it is always a kindly comfort
offered our conceit to think that there are on all sides of us "lots
more much worse than we." Unless our pride chooses to take refuge in the
opposite reflection, so we prefer to glory in being much worse than
others.
And so ends my single interview with an eminent ecclesiastic. He kissed
me repeatedly, and stroked my hair while I munched my plum-cake on his
knee. He questioned me, and discovered my passionate interest in
Napoleon and Josephine and the Queen of Prussia, the King-maker, and the
children in the Tower. And then, having prophesied my early death and
luminous or lurid career, he filled my two small hands with almond-drops
and toffee, and sent me away, a being henceforth of something more than
common clay.
From that hour my position in Lysterby was improved. I was never even
slapped again, though I had had the stupendous good luck to see, unseen
myself, the lay-sister who had flogged me go into a cupboard on the
staircase, whose door, with the key on the outside, opened outward, and
crawling along on hands and knees, reached the door in time to lock her
in. I was also known to have climbed fruit-trees, when I robbed enough
unripe fruit to make all the little ones ill. Yet nobody beat me, and I
was let off with a sharp admonishment. I went my unruly way, secretly
protected by the bishop's admiration.
If I did not amend, and loved none the more my tyrants, their rule being
less drastic, I had less occasion to fly out at them. Besides,
semi-starvation had subdued me for the while. I suffered continually
from abscesses and earache, and spent most of my time in the infirmary,
dreaming and reading.