MY FIRST TASTE OF FREEDOM.
My parents had taken a house at Dalkey, with a garden a dream of
delights, that ran by shadowy slopes and bosky alleys down to the grey
rocks where the sea seemed to become our very own, as it rolled over the
rocks, and made, from time to time, when the tide ran high, little pools
along the sanded fringes of the garden. The house was large and
rambling, and of a night when the waves roared and the artillery of the
heavens shook at the foundations of earth, it afforded us enormous
gratifications of every kind. We were fascinated by terror, and
shuddered in silence during the long nights when our parents were kept
in town by a theatre, a race, a party. Then we were left in the charge
of our eldest sister, a young person of a sentimental and despotic turn
of mind. She ruled us with a rod of iron, then invited us to weep with
her over the poems of Adelaide Ann Procter. And while she read to us in
a tremor of eager sensibilities the legend of Provence, she ruthlessly
confiscated "Waverley," "Kenilworth," "Rob Roy," which I kept under my
pillow, and read aloud at night to my younger sisters. Novels she held
to be the kernel of every iniquity under the sun, but Longfellow and
Adelaide Ann Procter were the sole ennobling influences of life. She was
sustained in this crooked conviction by a pensive little stitcher, who
used to come and sew and mend for us all several hours a-week, and could
recite in their entirety "Evangeline" and the "Golden Legend."
A quaint and original figure this white-haired, sad-eyed little
stitcher. She had had her romance, stranger than Evangeline's. Her lover
had gone to America, and had fought in the Federal war. With a few
savings, she followed him across the Atlantic, and sought him out in
State after State, walking several leagues a-day, with lifts here and
there in waggons, subsisting for months on a daily crust and a root or
two, to end her dolorous peregrinations in a hospital with her dying
lover's head upon her faithful breast. She returned to Ireland the
heroine of a real novel, with black hair bleached and eyes dim from
weeping. She had won the right to be cheerless, and stand with flowing
eyes "on the bridge at midnight," and tell us "in mournful numbers life
is but an empty dream."
We were a wild lot, no doubt, and worked wonders in villainy and
mischief. Even our sister's sentimentality at times succumbed to our
monstrous spirits; and she forgot Longfellow and Miss Procter, to drop
into Irish farce. All the houses round about us were filled with boys
and girls of all ages up to sixteen. We needed no introduction to form a
general family of some thirty or forty vagrants and imps of both sexes.
The head of the troop was a red-headed youth, destined to adorn the
medical profession, and a pale proud-looking boy of fourteen, my first
love, Arthur by name, of an exalted family, and now, I believe, a
distinguished colonel. When we joined the boys on the cricket-field, I
always picked up his balls and handed them to him reverentially, and my
reward was to be told in an offhand way that "I was a nice little
thing." To me he was Quentin Durward, Waverley, with a dash of Leicester
and Prince Ferdinand. He certainly was quite as haughty-looking and
distinguished as any of these decorative heroes. His father, an amiable,
high-mannered old lord, sometimes treated us to fireworks; and then his
sisters, prouder than ever Cinderella's could have been, would come out
and smile down benevolently upon us all, with the air of court-ladies
distributing prizes at a village festival. Arthur himself was a very
simple boy, extremely flattered by my mute adoration, which he
encouraged by all sorts of little airs and manoeuvres.
It was the red-headed leader who invented the most delightful
entertainment in the world. He formed us into a band of beggars. He
played a banjo and sang nigger songs, and Arthur, in shirt-sleeves, with
a rakish cap rowdily posed on his aristocratic flaxen head, went round
with a hat to gather coin. We went from house to house, an excited troop
of young rascals, sang and danced and begged and shouted in each garden
until the grown-up people appeared and flung a sixpence, sometimes even
a shilling, into Arthur's hat. The old lord occasionally rose to
half-a-crown. The parents enjoyed the fun as much as we did, and never
pretended to recognise us.
What tales we invented! What lies we told! One pretty little girl, with
brown ringlets round the rosiest of faces, won a half-sovereign from my
stepfather, who was smoking on the lawn when the band invaded his
solitude, by assuring his honour that she was "the mother of fourteen
children, with their bed-clothes on her back." When she flung the
sparkling piece into Arthur's hat, he shouted "Gold!" and a frantic
cheer went up from the band. We rushed off in a joyous body next day to
Killiney Hill, and had a feast of lemonade and oranges, and toffee and
cake. The red-haired chief paid the bill with a flourish, and if there
was any change he kept it.
Each parent took his turn in providing the company with an official
feast. The old lord monopolised the fireworks. My stepfather instituted
races. A wealthy barrister, our neighbour, inveigled a circus for our
delectation; and seven delightful old maids, who lived in a kind of
castle of their own, outdid all the fathers royally by a regatta of our
own. All the boatmen of Dalkey were hired, and each boat ran up a sail.
Mighty powers! what a day that was. Were ever youngsters so gratified,
so excited, so conscious of being a little community apart, with the sea
and the land for its entertainment?
And there was an amiable old judge, who offered us the freedom of his
big orchard, where the apples grew in quantities, and we climbed the
trees like squirrels, and devoured fruit without fear or restraint.