A DISMAL END OF HOLIDAYS.
For the joy of our small kingdom a delightful Fenian dropped into our
midst. It was breathed among us in fatal undertones that he had actually
shot a man. He was a figure of romance, if ever there was one. He went
about with long boots, and an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. He
had lovely dark-blue eyes, which Pauline described as Byronic, and
lisped most captivatingly. He was a kind of adopted relative, and, as a
special correspondent, has passed into history. He became our elder
brother, and in the years to come solaced himself in camp by regarding
Agnes as a lost early love. We lay about him on the grass as he told us
the tales of the Wonderful Nights. Better still, he invented adventures
of his own almost as alarming and enthralling. He told us that he had
been to Persia, which was not true--but no matter. We believed in the
Persian princess who had swung herself, at the risk of life, from the
harem window to become a Christian and marry him; and the king, her
royal father, who followed the lovers on horseback and was stabbed in
the breast by Edmond's trusty sword. The incoherence of his
reminiscences constituted their conspicuous charm. To-day we left him at
Samarcand, and on the morrow found him with a fresh and more perilous
love-adventure at Constantinople.
It was entrancing.
And then he would offer us a taste of adventure for ourselves: in the
absence of our parents he would crowd us into the waggonette, and drive
my stepfather's pet horses at a diabolical rate up by the exquisite
coast-road of Sorrento, into Bray and through the Wicklow mountains,
each curve and hollow and hilly bank menacing to lay us in pieces upon
the landscape, and we shouting and hurrahing, in a fond notion that we
were offering to the universe the spectacle of the instability of the
United Kingdom. Edmond's formidable method of conspiring against the
Government at that time consisted in delighting and amusing a troop of
little girls!
Foolish, reckless creature, alcohol absorbed and tarnished his brilliant
gifts, and his bones lie scattered at far-off Khartoum. He made of a
life that might have been a heroic poem a mere trivial legend, and, with
his lust for adventure and peril, he met the death he wished for, brief
and glorious.
His fear of my mother filled us with a rapturous sense of comradeship,
though this fear was quite foolish, for my mother never concealed her
preference for his sex, and to men was always as amiable as she was the
reverse to us. He beamed and joked with her, but was careful to scan her
visage, on the look-out for the first symptoms of storm. The bolt fell
rudely upon his shoulders the day he lamed the horses, and did some
damage to the waggonette. I never knew what she said to him; but it must
have been exceedingly bitter and unbearable, for his cheeks were as
white as paper, and his eyes as black as sloes. He was penniless for the
moment, and down on his luck, which makes a man more nervously sensitive
to slight than in his happier hours.
My stepfather was sorry for him; but, remembering the horses, was
relieved to send him off to Spain with a new outfit and the inevitable
opera-glasses.
"I shall never forget the old Dalkey garden," he said to Agnes, on the
morning of his departure, quite as sentimentally as if he were talking
to a grown-up young person. The rascal was always playing a part for his
own imagination, and even a slip of a girl of fourteen was better than
nobody to regret after a three weeks' stay in a romantically situated
house. It was stronger than him. He could not exist without a fancied
love-affair on hand.
In the Carlist War, where he claimed to have saved the colours of Spain,
rejected the hand of an Infanta, and lent his last five-pound note to
Don Carlos, which that illustrious person forgot to return,--'tis a way,
he would say musingly, with princes,--as he started for battle, he
pathetically adjured his comrades to cut off a lock of his blue-black
hair and send it to Agnes, with the assurance that his last thought was
given to her. In the pauses of battle he actually entertained himself by
composing an imaginary correspondence with an ardent and amorous Agnes,
which he read aloud to his dearest friend, with tears in his voice.
But that, as Mr. Kipling in his earlier manner would say, is quite
another story, and has nothing to do with the tale of little Angela.
I had no time to lament this fresh eclipse of romance, for Miss Kitty
was busy preparing my things for Lysterby, and two days after Edmond's
sentimental farewell and departure, I myself most dolefully had said a
bitterer good-bye to the rocks and harbour and hills of Dalkey, and had
been transported into the town house, to see Mrs. Clement for the last
time, and, along with her, make my farewell visit to Kildare.
It was a grievous hour for poor Nurse Cochrane. Jim, her husband, who
was down at Wexford two months ago when I came back from Lysterby, had
returned a fortnight earlier with death in his eyes.
When we got down at the post-house, the soft fine rain of Ireland was
drizzling over the land. A few steps brought us to the top of the green,
with the slit of water along the sky and two wild swans visible through
the pearl mist. All the blinds of nurse's windows were drawn down, and I
instantly recalled a like picture the day Stevie dropped out of life.
The door was open, and a group of working men, in their Sunday suits,
were talking in undertones.
"What has happened?" asked Mrs. Clement, alarmed.
"Troth, ma'am, an' 'tis a bad day for herself," said one.
"A power of ill-luck," said another. "A fine young man struck down like
that in the flower of youth."
Mrs. Clement hurried inside, and I followed her in excited silence. In
the familiar old parlour, with the china dogs and the green spinet, dear
kindly nurse sat back in the black horsehair arm-chair, sobbing and
moaning in the frantic way peasants will when grief strikes them, and
around her in voluble sympathy women hushed and exclaimed and
ejaculated, "Glory be to God!" "But who'd think of it?" "Poor Jim! but
'tis himself was the good poor crathur."
I advanced hesitatingly, abashed and frightened by such an explosion of
sorrow--I who always went under a bed to weep lest others should mock
me. Not then or since could I ever have given expression to such
expansive and boisterous feeling, restrained by a fierce and indomitable
pride even at so young an age.
Nurse caught sight of me, and held out both hands. I encircled her neck
with my arms, and pressed my cheek against hers, and when her sobs had
subsided, she stood up, holding me still in a frenzied clasp.
"Come, darling, and look at him for the last time. Poor Jim! He loved
you as if you had been his own, his very own, for sure never a child had
he."
She took me into Stevie's room, the best bedroom, and on the bed lay a
long rigid form. I hardly recognised the dear friendly Jim of my
babyhood, on whose knee I so often sat, in the pallid emaciated visage,
with the lank black hair round it, and the moustache and beard as black
as pitch against the hollow waxen cheek. The same candles were alight
upon the table in daytime, and the air yielded the same heavy odour of
flowers as on that other day I had penetrated into this room, and found
Stevie in his coffin. I shuddered and clung to nurse's skirt, sick with
a nameless repulsion, yet I am thankful now that I found courage, when
she asked me to kiss him, not to shrink from that simple duty of
gratitude. I allowed her to lift me, and I put my mouth to the frozen
forehead, with what a sense of fear and horror I even can recall to-day.
I was glad to nestle up against Mrs. Clement on the mail-car and press
my lips against her live arm to get the cold contact from them. I felt
so miserable, so broken was my faith in life, that the return to
Lysterby passed unnoticed. I remember neither the departure, the
journey, nor the arrival at school.
The episode of my first vacation closed with that dread picture of a
dead man and a white shroud, and in the lugubrious illumination of
tapers, and nurse sobbing and keening, with no hope of comfort. After
that the troubles of home and school looked poor enough, and for some
time the nuns found me a very sober and studious little girl. It was
long before even Mr. Parker could raise a smile; and Play Day, when we
were permitted to do as we liked all day, found me with no livelier
desire than to sit still and pore over the novels of Lady Georgiana
Fullerton.