A PRINCESS OF LEGEND.
"Is childhood dead?" Lamb asks; "is there not in the best some of the
child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?" Can I now,
without a responsive thrill, see myself flash into the unaltered dulness
of that Kildare village, a little princess of legend, with the glory of
foreign travel about me, the overseas cut of frock and shoes, the
haughty and condescending consciousness of superiority?
They were all so visibly at my feet, so glad to worship and admire, so
eager to praise, so beset with wonder. I was to spend a week in their
midst, a delightful week, as long as a story, as brief as a play, a puff
of happiness blown across the bleak wind of solitude, a prolonged and
hilarious scamper through sensation as vivid and vital as morning light.
Mary Jane was there, with the unchanged oiled black ringlets, and in my
honour she wore them bound with a bright blue ribbon. Louie came out
from town to behold me, and gazed in stupefied awe. I had been in a ship
across the sea. I had traversed half of England in a railway-carriage.
Had I seen an elephant? Mary Jane wanted to know if I had seen the
Queen.
No; but I had seen a naked lady, with beautiful golden hair down her
back, ride through the town of Lysterby on a white pony, while twelve
lovely pages in silver and gold and satin rode before, and twelve lovely
maidens with long velvet cloaks lined with white satin rode behind her.
This sounded as grand as a royal procession, and I glided ingeniously
over the ignominy of having been to England and not having seen the
Queen.
Mary Jane's mamma gave me a bowl of milk and a plate of arrowroot
biscuits, and as I devoured them, with what a splendid air I recognised
the old and faded views of New York! I scorned my past ignorance, and
off-handedly mentioned that "You know, the sea isn't a bit like the
pond." And then the search for a brilliant and captivating
comparison--arm extended to suggest immensity; heaving wave, rolling
ship.
"Isn't she wonderful?" they cried; "and the fine language of her!"
From cottage to cottage, from shop to shop, I wandered, intoxicated by
the incense of admiration. I embroidered fact and invented fiction with
the readiness of the fanciful traveller. Sister Esmeralda became an
unimaginable fiend, who had persecuted me as if I had been the heroine
of the fairy-tale I was acting, till the entire village was fit to rise
and shout for her blood.
"The likes of that did you ever hear?" a gaunt peasant in corduroy would
ask his neighbour in dismay.
"Troth and 'tis thim English as is a quare lot. Beat a little lady as is
fit to rule the lot of them, and lock her up in dungeons along with
spirits and goblins, and starve the life and soul out of her! Sure 'tis
worse they are than in the days of Cromwell."
Naturally, in the amazing record of my experiences, the hidden bones and
marble hand of my old friend, the White Lady of the Ivies, played a
prominent and shuddering part.
Under the influence of such an audience I tasted the fascinating results
of suffering. I was in that brief week repaid for all the previous
slights of fortune. I reposed in the lap of adulation, and turned my
woes into a dramatic enjoyment. I had suffered; but the romantic
activity of my imagination, with a natural mirthfulness of temperament,
preserved me from the self-centred and subjective misery of the
visionary, and from the embittering anguish of rancour. Once I had
excited the local mind against Sister Esmeralda and the wretched
superioress of the ladies of Mercy, my anger against them vanished, and
they simply remained in memory as picturesque instruments of misfortune.
But for the moment I was too full of the joy of living for anything like
morbid self-pity. I preferred to loll on the grass beside Bessy the
applewoman, and treat all the children of the green to her darling trays
of apples with uncle Lionel's bright crown-piece. Bessy never tired of
assuring me that I was a wonderful creature, which I fully believed, and
Louie made frequent mention of his thirst to be old enough to marry me.
It soothed him to hear that he was much nicer than Frank, the horrid
Lysterby boy. Louie had not made his first confession, and he was
thrillingly and fearfully interested in the tale of mine.
"You know," I dolefully remarked, "the priest won't let you confess any
of the nice interesting-looking sins, with the lovely big names, like
a-dul-tery and for-ni-fi-ca-tion and de-fraud-ing. He makes you tell
awful little sins, like talking in class and answering a nun, and all
that sort of thing."
"Oh, but I say," shouted Louie, wagging a remonstrative head, "the
priest can't prevent you from saying you committed adultery."
"Yes, but he says you didn't; and then it seems you're telling a lie to
the Holy Ghost, and you may be struck dead in the confessional-box."
This Louie regarded as an excessive risk to run for the simple pleasure
of confessing a nice big sin. He thought the matter over in bed that
night, and communicated to me next morning his intention to confess to
having stolen two marbles from Johnnie Magrath, and having licked Tim
Martin.
"You know, Angy, I really did lick him, he's such an awful beast, and
made his nose bleed rivers, with a black dab under his eyes as big as my
fist; and here are the two marbles I stole."
He went back to town that afternoon, with his little gray eyes moist
over the brimming smiles of his lively comic mouth. His was a hilarious
depression, a rowdy melancholy, emblematic of the destiny in store for
him. He grimaced wonderfully, with screwed-up eyelids and twisted and
bunched-out lips, and kept on muttering all the time we walked together
to the coach-house where the mail-car started from: "It's an awful
shame, so it is. A fellow can't do what he likes, but there's always
somebody bothering him and ordering him about."
Dear, honest, little playmate! That was the last, last glimpse I had of
him. We exchanged our last kiss at the top of the village street, and I
wildly waved my handkerchief until a deep bend of the long white Kildare
road hid the car, as it seemed to roll off the flat landscape.