THE LAST OF LYSTERBY AND CHILDHOOD.
My mother came over again to Lysterby with Pauline and Birdie, who
shared my last year in that quaint old town. My mother's second visit is
a vague remembrance. I recall a singular old gentleman who joined us in
an expedition to Guy's Cliff, and terrified the life out of us girls by
a harrowing description of the hourly peril he walked under, and a
fervid assurance that he might drop down dead at that very moment of
speech. We walked behind him in frozen fear, and looked each moment to
see him drop dead at our feet, but my mother discoursed in front of us
quite unconcerned. He wore a cloak with a big cape, and said "Madam"
after every second word. Guy's Cliff I remember as a lovely place; but
the chill water of the well was not so chill as my blood while I
contemplated that doomed old man.
Pauline's latest enthusiasm was Miss Braddon, and what glorious things
she made of "Lady Audley's Secret," "Aurora Floyd," and, I fancy, a
tale about a Captain Vulture! I read these books afterwards (that is the
two first), and what poor tawdry stuff, my faith, compared with the
brilliant embroideries of my most imaginative sister, who turned lead
into pure gold!
Years, how many, many years, after, a man of European fame, one of the
rare figures that go to make up a century's portraits, speaking of
Pauline, said she was the cleverest woman he had ever known. But alas!
alas! hers was not a cleverness a woman poor and obscure could utilise.
A man, she would have been a great statesman, for she was a born
politician. Geography was her passion, history her mania,--not that she
could ever have written history, for she was too quick, complex, and
vital to learn so slow a trade as that of a writer's; but hers was a
miraculous intuitive seizure of history, that made it to her imperious
vision present, and not the smallest historical fact in Europe escaped
her attention and remembrance. Could crowned heads but know what a
severe and unflinching gaze was fixed upon them! of what singular and
passionate importance to her was the marriage of their most distant
relatives! Modern history and modern politics became to her what
classical music had been to our daft grandfather, whom she strongly
resembled. They absorbed her, filled the long, long days of sick and
lonely maidenhood, when, such was the vividness, the surprising vitality
of her matchless imagination, that in a dull seaside residence she
found, and lived and died in, her own excitements and gratifications of
mind and soul.
Miss Lawson before leaving the convent had inoculated us, the little
ones, her devoted admirers, with a curious passion for pinafored
mites--whist. Whist for several months became the object of our
existence. Lessons in comparison were but a trivial occupation. When
Birdie and I next went home, we taught the game to still smaller mites,
and such were the gamblers we became, that we have played whist, I the
eldest of the four confederates, twelve, with renowned and aged clubmen,
who found us their match. We slept with a pack of cards under our
pillow, and dawn found us four little night-dressed girls gathered
together in one bed with the lid of a bandbox over our joined knees,
rapturously playing whist.
On the pretext of meeting our father at the station of Dalkey every
evening at half-past six, we took possession of the waiting-room, cards
in hands, and imperiously acquainted our friend the station-master with
the fact that the room was engaged. The novelty of the situation so
tickled the station-master that while we four miscreants in short skirts
played our game of whist, not a soul was allowed to enter the
waiting-room--an injustice I now marvel at.
The boys and girls around us were neglected. We only cared for whist,
which we played from the time we got up until we went to bed, with no
other variation that I remember except sea-bathing and Captain Marryat's
novels. As none of the boys or girls shared our desperate passion, it
followed that I and my three smaller step-sisters became inseparable,
and held all our fellows who did not live for whist to be poor dull
creatures. Once we made part of a children's gathering at Killiney Hill,
but after the cold chicken, jelly, cakes, and lemonade, we speedily
found life intolerable without a pack of cards.
"I say, Angela," whispered Birdie to me, when I was musing of honours
and the odd trick, "I've brought them. Let's go behind a tree and have a
game."
Now I always take a hand with pleasure because of that defunct vice;
but, alas! I am compelled to own that I never played so well as at
eleven.
My next passion, for which Pauline this time was responsible, was
genealogy. We invented a family called the L'Estranges and brought them
over with the Conqueror. Where they had previously come from we did not
ask. What did it matter? To come over with the Conqueror was, we knew, a
certificate of chivalry. The chief, Walter, fought at the Battle of
Hastings. We pictured him with golden locks, a bright and haughty
visage, stern grey eyes that could look ineffably soft in a love-scene,
and beautiful shining armour. We married him to a certain Saxon Edith,
and down as far as the Battle of Bosworth Field, Walter and Edith were
the favourite family names of the L'Estranges. To give piquancy to our
most delightful game, and stimulate our imagination, we founded a
cemetery of the L'Estranges. We made little wooden tombstones, on which
we carved imaginary epitaphs of all the imaginary L'Estranges who had
died since the Battle of Hastings. As we loathed old people in our
dramatic history, except the aged lord who dies blessing a numerous
progeny from time to time, all our resplendent heroes perished in
romantic youth on the Spanish Main, on battle-fields, on the African
coast; or rescuing Turkish princesses, or capturing Grecian isles; while
their brides invariably faded away either of consumption or a broken
heart at seventeen. The cemetery was peopled to excess by the time we
got as far as the Battle of Bosworth Field, where the last hero fell in
front of the enemy before he had time to marry the maiden of his choice.
It is astonishing how little the average child approves of a natural
death. The heroes must die by violence in the flower of youth, and the
heroines must perish or pine away from unnatural causes on the threshold
of maidenhood. Nineteen is even old and commonplace: the age of glory is
seventeen.
If you entered our garden, turned into the cemetery of the L'Estranges,
you would have seen layer upon layer of little wooden sticks that looked
like the indication of hidden seeds, and if you stooped to read the
legend, this is the sort of thing that would have greeted your eyes:--
"Here lies Walter l'Estrange" (or Rupert, or Ralph, or Reginald, for we
were fond of these names), "born such and such a year, wrecked off the
coast of Barbary such and such a year," or "perished in a conflict with
Spanish pirates," &c.; and beside him, with day and date of birth and
burial, "Here lies Edith, his beloved wife, daughter of Lord Seymour or
Admiral So-and-so."
In a big ledger, recorded in Pauline's sprawling calligraphy, were the
lives and characters of the imaginary dead. It was remarkable that all
our heroes were as brave as lions, as modest and mild as lambs, and as
stainless as Galahads. To lend relief to the monotony of their
implacable virtue, we now and then invented a villain, who invariably
died in a vulgar brawl or a duel. The battlefield, the Spanish Main, the
rescue of Turkish princesses, and a noble shipwreck, were kept for the
Galahads.
The last profile of my Lysterby days is that of a radiant and lovely
Irish girl, who came from Southampton, the Mother House of the Ladies of
Mercy, to stay with us until the nuns found her a situation as
governess. Her name was Molly O'Connell: she was doubly orphaned almost
since birth, her mother having died giving life to her, and her father
within the following year. Everybody about her thought it very sad that
her mother should have died on the very day of her birth. But I, alas!
knew a sadder thing. My father, who, I am told, was a very kindly,
tender-hearted man, died some months before my birth. Had I been given
the choice beforehand, and known what was in store for me, I should have
greatly preferred it had been my mother who died many months before my
birth. But, alas! babies in the ante-natal stage are never consulted
upon the question of their own interest.
Molly O'Connell remains upon memory as beauty in a flash. Never since
have I seen such a flashing combination of brilliant effects. Oh! such
teeth--teeth to dream of, teeth that laughed and smiled, that had a sort
of light in them like white sunshine, and were the fullest expression I
have ever known of the word radiance! Then her eyes were pools of violet
light, where you seemed to see straight down to the bottom of a deep
well, violet all the way down to the very end, where you saw yourself
reflected. These glorious eyes, like the teeth, smiled and laughed; they
caressed, too, looked an unfathomable tenderness and sweetness, shone,
irradiated like stars, went through the whole gamut of visual emotion,
from the holiest feeling, the effable eloquence of sentiment, to the
bewildering obscurities of passion. They were eyes, I now know, to damn
a saint, and--Heaven help us all in a world so inexplicable as
ours!--they performed their fatal mission to the bitter end. Add to
these eyes and teeth hair as dark as shadow, as thick as the blackness
of night, a scarlet and white face, round and dimpled, of the divinest
shape, the rarest and ripest combination of fruit and flower, with deep
peach-like bloom upon the soft cheek, and the hue of a crimson cherry
upon the curved full lips, and there you have a woman equipped for her
own destruction, if she have a heart to lose, no brains to speak of, and
only as much knowledge of man, of the world, as a fresh-born kitten or a
toddling babe.
Molly was the joy, the light, the glory, the romance of our lives. We
worshipped her for her unsurpassable loveliness, which kept rows of
young eyes fixed upon her charming visage in round-lidded, wonder and
awe; we adored her for her gaiety, her chatter, her incessant laughter,
and we loved her for the conviction that she was as young and innocent
and helpless and unlettered as ourselves.
Molly was nineteen, but she was a bigger child than any of us; and now I
hold my breath in pain when I remember the nature and quality of her
innocence. She had been brought up from infancy in a convent. Had her
life lain among the roses, such ignorance as hers might be pardoned in
her teachers. But to send out into the world, to earn her living among
selfish and indifferent strangers, a young girl of such bewildering
exquisiteness, and never once hint to her the kind of perils that would
beset her, give her no knowledge of man, nor of herself, nor of nature!
This is an iniquity the nuns of Southampton can never be pardoned.
Now that I know the sequel, and understand what the beginning meant, I
cannot recall our laughter over Molly's first experiences without a
thrill of horror. The nuns had placed her with titled folk--Lord and
Lady E., with whom lived Lady E.'s father, an old earl, a widower. Molly
was the most ingenuous and garrulous of creatures. She spent her first
vacation some months later with us, and kept us at recreation hour in
shouts of laughter and scorn over her adventures. The old earl was the
most extraordinary old man, according to her. He was always meeting her
alone, here, there, and everywhere. She seemed to think it was a sort of
schoolboy's game. Once he showed her in the garden, when no one was by,
a splendid diamond bracelet, which he had bought for her.
"O Molly!" we all screamed in joy, "he wants to marry you, and you'll be
a grand countess, like the gipsy maiden of the song."
But Molly curled her lips haughtily. Did we know that he was seventy, a
queer old gentleman, just fit to be tucked into bed and given gruel? The
suspicion of evil design never once entered her innocent head, for the
simple reason that she had not the ghost of a suspicion of any kind of
evil.
Then Lady E. went up to town, and left this bewitching creature at the
mercy of her husband. Molly again regarded it in the light of a capital
game. The aged earl and his middle-aged son-in-law appeared to be on
strained terms. The poor goose never suspected why. Lord E. insisted on
her sitting in his wife's place at table--and still she suspected
nothing.
One night, she told us, shrieking with laughter as at the height of the
grotesque, Lord E. mistook her room for the nursery, and entered it in
his shirt. Not the faintest feeling of anger or fear on the part of this
blind, silly maid. All she did was to go into convulsions of laughter,
"because he looked so ugly and so ridiculous." But it was still part of
the high old game of life, where everything happens to send one into
fits of laughter. That tears, that trouble, that shame and blighting
misery lay in wait for her, this radiant, unconscious, ignorant, and
foolish innocent could not then suspect.
We, too, thought it a splendid game, laughed heartily at the ridiculous
figure she described Lord E. as cutting in his nightshirt, agreed with
her that the old earl was a monstrous old fool to go skipping in that
absurd way down the park avenues with her, putting his hand upon his
heart, sighing and talking in a wild incoherent way about "the loveliest
girl on earth," whom Molly, the least vain of creatures, never for one
moment suspected was herself. For she was far too busy laughing at
people to understand them. You had but to stand solemnly before her, and
say, "It's a wet day," and off she was on a ringing cascade. What you
said she probably did not understand in the least; but the expression of
your eye, the tone of your voice, made her laugh.
And so the infamous nature of the pursuit of the earl and his son-in-law
quite escaped her, and neither the diamond bracelet, nor Lord E. in his
shirt at night in her room, awoke the faintest throb of alarm. All this
to her and us was part of the eternal joke of nature. And a very, very
few years afterwards, I learned, one who had loved her well and sought
her far discovered her at night in the vicinity of the Haymarket, with
paint upon her cheeks and lips, and the fatal brightness of consumption
looking out of her hollow violet eyes.
My remembrance of the rest of my stay at Lysterby fades away upon the
heavy perfume of incense in the cold aisles of the cathedral, whither we
were conducted by the nuns for the breathlessly interesting offices of
Holy Week. It is a long dream of sombre tones and solemn notes, which I
followed in a passionate absorption in the "Offices of Holy Week,"
printed in Latin and English, for which I paid the sum of four
shillings. I studied those offices so diligently, followed them so
accurately, that afterwards I could detect to a movement, a note, a
Latin word, any error or omission in the Lenten services of the
pro-cathedral of Dublin, where I must say the rites struck me as shorn
of all impressiveness.
But at Lysterby functions were rigidly correct. The evening office of
Tenebræ was a funereal delight. The services of Maundy Thursday, Good
Friday, and Holy Saturday were religious excitements on which to live
for months. I shut my eyes, even now in middle age, and I see again the
long grey cathedral aisles dim in taper-light, altars hung in black, and
the lean aristocratic visage of Father More above the surplice and
violet stole, and I hear him chant in his thin, melodious voice,
"Oremus, flectamus genua!" and listen again for the response, "Levate!"
I cannot precisely define my sensations in this period. Religion with me
was nothing but an intense emotion nourished upon incense, music,
taper-lit gloom, and a mysterious sense of the intangible. It was in the
fullest meaning of the word sensuous; but while its attraction lasted,
nothing I have since known could be compared with it for intensity.
While under its spell, you seem to float in the air, to touch the wings
of the angels, to be yourself part of the heavenly sphere you aspire to
attain. Rapture itself is a mean enough word to define your emotions.
And then you come back to earth with a sense of unspeakable deception
and surprise. You feel hungry, and loathe yourself for the vulgar need.
Your ear is buffeted by loud earthly sounds instead of the roll of the
organ and the monotonous solemnity of Gregorian chant.
To realise this is to understand how so many sentimental, virtuous, and
sensuous souls seek oblivion of life in religious excitement. It is a
mental and moral mixture of opium and alcohol extremely soothing to the
bruised consciousness, a gentle diversion in common-place cares that
poor humanity must not be begrudged; though, as George Eliot has finely
said, it is proof of strength to live and do well without this narcotic.
The return to Ireland coincides with the outbreak of the Franco-German
war. A mist hangs over those terrible months, but Dublin I remember was
French to a man. Every morning my eldest sister marched us off to mass
to pray for the French, and we wept profusely over each tragic telegram.
Our hero Edmond was over there, fighting and lying with equal gallantry.
Several noble dames had tended his wounds and offered to marry him, and
he escaped from prison with the assistance of the jailer's daughter, who
loved him despairingly. I recall our awed inspection of several helmets
and swords brought back from the war by a quantity of heroic young
Irishmen who professed to have laid the Germans low on countless
occasions. I do not now know what they did out there, for there is
always a great deal of Tartarin, an atmosphere of Tarascon, about the
Irishman returned from abroad. But we all went down in a glorified body,
dressed in our very best, to assist at the arrival of Marshal M'Mahon
and his wife, who came all the way from far-off France to thank us for
what they had or had not done.
Here, at the age of twelve, my childhood ends, and youth, troubled
youth, begins.
* * * * * * * *
To stand upon the hill-top and cast a glance of retrospection down the
long path travelled in all its excess of light and shadow; impenetrable
darkness massed against a luminous haze through which rays of blazing
glory filter, each one striking upon memory in a shock of prismatic
hues, until the eye reaches as far back as the start from the
valley,--how astonished we are at the unevenness of the road! So
brilliant, so ineffectual for most of us, is this dear thing called
Youth! The uneasy flutter from the nest, the wild throb of pulses, now
for ever tamed, at each sharp encounter with fate; the courage, the
hope, the passion--alas! how futile and how sad to eyes in middle life
that see the inexorable word "failure" written across that splendid
tear-blotted page of strife, of yearning, of frailty and endeavour. Seen
from the hill-top, how small the big stones are that broke our path! How
easy it might have been to skirt the thorn-bushes and brambles, instead
of tearing an impulsive way through them, and falling so repeatedly on
bleeding face and hands!
Impatience and panting courage have served to carry us through the
unequal battle, and now, resting in the equable tones of middle life,
how sweet a wonder seem the blackness, the purple, the golden lights of
youth! We sit in the unemotional shade, and slake our thirst for the old
joys and sorrows by fondly recalling the ghosts of dead hours and dead
dreams, of forgotten faiths and dim-remembered faces; and though we may
not desire to re-live each year with its burden of pains and pangs,
surely we may tell ourselves that it is good to have lived those past
years, even if tears seem the most prominent part of our inheritance.
Then, however sad the living moment, we still had the consolation of
that beautiful and vision-bearing word "To-morrow." In youth, sorrow
fells us to-day, and joy awakes us to-morrow. It is always--Land may be
in sight to-morrow! The night is dark, but hope dances blithely through
our veins with the delicious assurance that to-morrow brings the sun.
The world is empty, but vague dreams tell us that to-morrow love will
cross our path and fill the universe. Hope is the magician that waved us
forward and carried us recklessly through briar and bramble, with
undaunted confidence in life, in ourselves, and in all things around us.
Each fall was ever the last, each pang the precursor of eternal
happiness.
And now it is over. Hope's magic wand for us is broken, and she has
folded her wings and dropped into slumber that wakens not again:
henceforth our best friend is drab-robed content.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's Autobiography of a Child, by Hannah Lynch