The Project Gutenberg EBook of Autobiography of a Child, by Hannah Lynch This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Autobiography of a Child Author: Hannah Lynch Release Date: April 30, 2018 [EBook #57072] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHILD *** Produced by ellinora, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Autobiography of a Child By HANNAH LYNCH New York Dodd, Mead & Company 1899 Copyright, 1898, By Dodd, Mead and Company Contents CHAP. PAGE I. Looking Backward 1 II. Mary Jane 7 III. My Brother Stevie 17 IV. The Last Days of Happiness 33 V. Martyrdom 43 VI. Grandfather Cameron 49 VII. Profiles of Childhood 60 VIII. Revolt 79 IX. My Friend Mary Ann 89 X. The Great News 98 XI. Preparing to Face the World 107 XII. An Exile from Erin 113 XIII. At Lysterby 120 XIV. The White Lady of Lysterby 129 XV. An Exile in Revolt 136 XVI. My First Confession 143 XVII. The Christmas Hampers 154 XVIII. Mr. Parker the Dancing-Master 160 XIX. Episcopal Protection 170 XX. Home for the Holidays 182 XXI. Old Acquaintance 188 XXII. A Princess of Legend 201 XXIII. My First Taste of Freedom 207 XXIV. My Eldest Sister 212 XXV. Our Ball 219 XXVI. The Shadows 230 XXVII. A Dismal End of Holidays 238 XXVIII. My First Communion 246 XXIX. The Last of Lysterby and Childhood 253 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHILD Chapter I. LOOKING BACKWARD. The picture is clear before me of the day I first walked. My mother, a handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me, had driven out from town to nurse's cottage. I shut my eyes, and I am back in the little parlour with its spindle chairs, an old-fashioned piano with green silk front, its pink-flowered wall-paper, and the two wonderful black-and- white dogs on the mantelpiece. There were two pictures I loved to gaze upon—Robert Emmett in the dock, and Mary Stuart saying farewell to France. I do not remember my mother's coming or going. Memory begins to work from the moment nurse put me on a pair of unsteady legs. There were chairs placed for me to clutch, and I was coaxingly bidden to toddle along, "over to mamma." It was very exciting. First one chair had to be reached, then another fallen over, till a third tumbled me at my mother's feet. I burst into a passion of tears, not because of the fall, but from terror at finding myself so near my mother. Nurse gathered me into her arms and began to coo over me, and here the picture fades from my mind. My nurse loved me devotedly, and of course spoiled me. Most of the villagers helped her in this good work, so that the first seven years of my childhood, in spite of baby-face unblest by mother's kiss, were its happiest period. Women who do not love their children do well to put them out to nurse. The contrast of my life at home and the years spent with these rustic strangers is very shocking. The one petted, cherished, and untroubled; the other full of dark terrors and hate, and a loneliness such as grown humanity cannot understand without experience of that bitterest of all tragedies— unloved and ill-treated childhood. But I was only reminded of my sorrow at nurse's on the rare occasion of my mother's visits, or when nurse once a month put me into my best clothes, after washing my face with blue mottled soap—a thing I detested—and carried me off on the mail-car to town to report my health and growth. This was a terrible hour for me. From a queen I fell to the position of an outcast. My stepfather alone inspired me with confidence. He was a big handsome man with a pleasant voice, and he was always kind to me in a genial, thoughtless way. He would give me [Pg 1] [Pg 2] [Pg 3] presents which my mother would angrily seize from me and give to her other children, not from love, for she was hardly kinder to them than to me, but from an implacable passion to wound, to strike the smile from the little faces around her, to silence a child's laughter with terror of herself. She was a curious woman, my mother. Children seemed to inspire her with a vindictive animosity, with a fury for beating and banging them, against walls, against chairs, upon the ground, in a way that seems miraculous to me now how they were saved from the grave and she from the dock. She had a troop of pretty engaging children, mostly girls, only one of whom she was ever known to kiss or caress, and to the others she was worse than the traditional stepmother of fairy tale. It was only afterwards I learned that those proud creatures I, in my abject solitude, hated and envied, lived in the same deadly fear of her with which her cold blue eyes and thin cruel lips inspired me with. But there were, thank God! many bright hours for me, untroubled by her shadow. I was a little sovereign lady in my nurse's kindly village, admired and never thwarted. I toddled imperiously among a small world in corduroy breeches and linsey skirts, roaming unwatched the fields and lanes from daylight until dark. We sat upon green banks and made daisy chains, and dabbled delightedly with the sand of the pond edges, while we gurgled and chattered and screamed at the swans. The setting of that nursery biography is vague. It seemed to me that the earth was made up of field beyond field, and lanes that ran from this world to the next, with daisies that never could be gathered, they were so many; and an ocean since has impressed me less with the notion of immensity of liquid surface than the modest sheet of water we called the Pond. Years afterwards I walked out from town to that village, and how small the pond was, how short the lanes, what little patches for fields so sparsely sprinkled with daisies! A more miserable disillusionment I have not known. I have always marvelled at the roll of reminiscences and experiences of childhood told consecutively and with coherence. Children live more in pictures, in broken effects, in unaccountable impulses that lend an unmeasured significance to odd trifles to the exclusion of momentous facts, than in story. This alone prevents the harmonious fluency of biography in an honest account of our childhood. Memory is a random vagabond, and plays queer tricks with proportion. It dwells on pictures of relative unimportance, and revives incidents of no practical value in the shaping of our lives. Its industry is that of the idler's, wasteful, undocumentary, and untrained. For vividness without detail, its effects may be compared with a canvas upon which a hasty dauber paints a background of every obscure tint in an inextricable confusion, and relieves it with sharply defined strokes of bright colour. Jim Cochrane, my everyday papa, as I called him, was a sallow-faced man with bright black eyes, which he winked at me over the brim of his porter-measure, as he refreshed himself at the kitchen fire after a hard day's work. He was an engine-driver, and once took me on the engine with him to the nearest station, he and a comrade holding me tight between them, while I shrieked and chattered in all the bliss of a first adventure. This is a memory of sensation, not of sight. I recall the rush through the air, the sting, like needle-points against my cheeks and eyelids, of the bits of coal that flew downward from the roll of smoke, the shouting men laughing and telling me not to be afraid, the red glare of the furnace whenever they slid back the grate opening, the whiff of fright and delight that thrilled me, and, above all, the confidence I had that I was safe with nurse's kind husband. Poor Jim! His was the second dead face I looked upon without understanding death. The ruthless disease of the Irish peasant was consuming him then, and he died before he had lived half his life through. Chapter II. MARY JANE. Mary Jane was my first subject and my dearest friend. She lived in a little cottage at the top of the village that caught a tail-end view of the pond and the green from the back windows. It is doubtful if I ever knew what calling her father followed, and I have forgotten his name. But Mary Jane I well remember, and the view from those back windows. She was older than I, and was a very wise little woman, without my outbursts of high spirits and inexplicable reveries. She had oiled black curls, the pinkest of cheeks, and black eyes with a direct and resolute look in them, and she read stories that did not amuse or interest me greatly, because they were chiefly concerned with good everyday boys and girls. She tried to still a belief in fairies by transforming them into angels, but she made splendid daisy chains, and she could balance herself like a bird upon the branches that overhung the pond. Here she would swing up and down in fascinating peril, her black curls now threatening confusion with the upper branches, her feet then skimming the surface of the water. It was a horrible joy to watch her and calculate the moment when the water would close over branch and boots and curls. My first attempt to imitate her resulted in my own immersion, and a crowd to the rescue from the nearest public-house. After the shock and the pleasant discovery that I was not drowned, and was really nothing the worse for my bath, I think I enjoyed the sensation of being temporarily regarded in the light of a public personage. But Mary Jane howled in a rustic abandonment to grief. She told me afterwards she expected to be taken to prison, and believed the Queen [Pg 4] [Pg 5] [Pg 6] [Pg 7] [Pg 8] would sentence her to be hanged. It took longer to comfort her than to doctor me. It was some time after that before I again attempted to swing upon the branches over the pond, but contented myself with feeding the swans from the bank upon a flat nauseous cake indigenous to the spot, I believe, which a shrivelled old woman used to sell us at a stall hard by. There were flower-beds and a rural châlet near the pond, which now leads me to conclude that the green was a single-holiday resort, for I remember a good deal of cake-crumbs, orange-peels, and empty ginger-beer bottles about the place. The old woman was very popular with us. Even when we had no pennies to spend, she would condescend to chat with us as long as we cared to linger about her stall of delights, and she sometimes wound up the conversation by the gift of our favourite luxury, a crab-apple. I fear there was not one of us that would not cheerfully have signed away our future both here and hereafter for an entire trayful of crab-apples. Each tray held twelve, placed two and two, like school-ranks; and I know not which were the more bewitching to the eye, the little trays or the demure double rows of little apples. The child rich enough to hold out a pinafore for Bessy to wreck this harmony of tray and line by pouring twelve heavenly balls into it, asked nothing more from life in the way of pleasure. The pride of Mary Jane's household was an album containing views of New York, whither Mary Jane's eldest brother had gone. New York, his mother told us, was in America. The difficulty for my understanding was to explain how any place so big as New York could find another place big enough to stand in. Why was New York in America and not America in New York? Neither Mary Jane nor her mother could make anything of my question. They said you went across the sea in a ship to New York, and when they added that the sea was all water, I immediately thought that they must mean the pond, and that if I once got to the other side of it I should probably find America and New York. Until then I had believed the other side of the pond to be heaven, because the sky seemed to touch the tops of the trees. But it was nicer to think of it as America, because there was a greater certainty of being able to get back from America than from heaven,—above all, when I was so unexpectedly made acquainted with the extremely disagreeable method by which little children are transported thither. I do not know where nurse can have taken Mary Jane and me once. I have for years cherished the idea that it was to Cork, which was a long way off; but I am assured since that she never took me anywhere in a train, and that certainly I never was in Cork. This is a mystery to me, for the most vivid recollection of those early years is a train journey with nurse and Mary Jane. I remember the train steaming slowly into a station: the hurry, the bustle, the different tone of voices round me, and Mary Jane's knowing exclamation, "Angela, this is Cork, one of the biggest towns of Ireland—as fine, they say, as Dublin." Now, if I were never in Cork, never travelled with nurse and Mary Jane, will any one explain to me how I came to remember those words so distinctly? Odder still, I am absolutely convinced that nurse took my hand in an excited grasp, and led me, bewildered and enchanted, through interminable streets full of such a diversity of objects and interests as dazed my imagination like a blow. Not that I was unacquainted with city aspects; but this was all so different, so novel, so much more brilliant than the familiar capital! I remember the vivid shock of military scarlet in a luminous atmosphere, and smiling foreign faces, and several ladies stopped to look at me and cry, "Oh, the little angel!" I was quite the ideal wax doll, pretty, delicate, and abnormally fair. I believe Mary Jane worshipped me because of the whiteness of my skin and for my golden hair. Memories of this journey I never made and of this town I never visited do not end here. After eternal wanderings through quite the liveliest streets I have ever known, without remembrance of stopping, of entrance or greetings, I find myself in an unfamiliar room with nurse, Mary Jane, a strange lady, and my mother. My mother was dressed in pale green poplin, and looked miraculously beautiful. I know the dress was poplin, because nurse said so when I touched the long train and wondered at its stiffness. She looked at me coldly, and said to nurse— "That child has had sunstroke. I never saw her so red. You must wash her in new milk." Whereupon she rang a bell, and cried out to somebody I did not see to fetch a basin of milk and a towel. I shuddered at the thought that perhaps my mother would wash my face instead of nurse, for I dreaded nothing so much as contact with that long white hand of sculptural shape. Among the mysteries of my life nothing seems so strange to me as the depth of this physical antipathy to my mother. The general reader to whom motherhood is so sacred will not like to read of it. But to suppress the most passionate instinct of my nature, would be to suppress the greater part of my mental and physical sufferings. As a baby I went into convulsions, I am told, if placed in my mother's arms. As a child, a girl, nothing has been so dreadful to me as the most momentary endurance of her touch. [Pg 9] [Pg 10] [Pg 11] [Pg 12] [Pg 13] Once when I was threatened with congestion of the brain from over-study, I used to lie in frenzied apprehension of the feel of her hand on my brow, and she was hardly visible in the doorway before a nervous shudder shook my frame, and voice was left me to mutter, "Don't touch me! oh, don't touch me!" Her glance was quite as repulsive to me, and I remember how I used to feel as if some one were walking over my grave the instant those unsmiling blue eyes fell upon me. An instinct stronger than will, even in advanced girlhood, inevitably compelled me to change my seat to get without their range. I recall this feeling, to-day quite dead, as part of my childhood's sufferings, and I wonder that the woman who inspired it should in middle life appear to me a woman of large and liberal and generous character, whose foibles and whose rough temper in perspective have acquired rather a humorous than an antipathetic aspect. But children, but girls, are not humorists, and they take life and their elders with a lamentable gravity. On this occasion it was my mother who washed my face in new milk. The fragrance and coolness of the milk were delicious, if only a rougher and coarser hand had rubbed my cheeks. While still submitting to the process, I stared eagerly round the room. There was a grand piano in black polished wood, the sofa was blue velvet and black wood, and the carpet a very deep blue. The air smelt of gillyflowers, and there were big bunches in several vases. Yet my mother assures me she never met me at Cork or elsewhere, never washed my face in new milk, is unacquainted with that black piano, the blue velvet sofa, and the gillyflowers. She admits she did possess a pale green robe of poplin with an enormous train, bought for a public banquet given to distinguished Americans, but doubts if I ever saw it. Nurse, whom I questioned years after, laughed at the idea as at a nightmare. Still that journey to Cork, Mary Jane's words and my mother's, the bowl of new milk, the green poplin dress, the blue- and-black sofa, the grand piano, and the gillyflowers, remain the strongest haunting vision of those years. The first sampler I ever saw was worked by Mary Jane. I associate the alphabet in red and green wool with shining blue-black curls behind a bright-green tracery of foliage upon a blue sky. Mary Jane used to sit upon a high bank, and work assiduously at her sampler. I thought her achievement very wonderful, but I own I never could see anything in coloured wools and a needle to tempt an imaginative child. So much sitting still was dull, and the slow growth of letters or sheep or flowers exasperating to young nerves on edge. My affection for Mary Jane, however, was so strong, that I gallantly endeavoured to learn from her, but it was in the butterfly season, and there was my friend Johnny Burke racing past after a splendid white butterfly. What was the letter "B" in alternate stitches of red and green in comparison with the capture of that butterfly? So the child, the poet tells us, is always mother of the woman, and not even the sane and sobering influence of the years has taught me that serious matters are of greater consequence than the catching of some beautiful butterfly. As I bartered childhood to agreeable impulses, so have I bartered youth and middle age, and if I now am a bankrupt in the face of diminishing impulses, who is to blame, after all, but perverse and precarious nature? What became of Mary Jane I have never known. Upon my memory she is eternally impaled: a child of indefinite years from eight to eleven, with oily ringlets and clear black eyes, pink-cheeked, smiling, over-staid for her age (except in the matter of swinging recklessly over the pond), working samplers, telling a group of unlettered babies exceedingly moral tales, devoted to me and to a snub-nosed doll I abhorred; with inexhaustible gifts, including a complete knowledge of the views of New York, an enthusiasm for that mysterious being Mary Stuart, and an acquaintance with national grievances vaguely embodied in a terror of Queen Victoria's power over her Irish subjects. She must have grown into a woman of principle and strong views. Chapter III. MY BROTHER STEVIE. I must have been about five when my sovereignty was seriously threatened by the coming of Stevie. The ceremony of arrival I do not remember. He seems to have started into my life like Jack out of his box to kneel for ever in his single attitude,—upon a sofa, with his elbows on a little table drawn up in front of the sofa, and his head resting either on one or both palms. Do not ask me if he ever slept, lay down, or walked as other children. I have no memory of him except kneeling thus upon the parlour sofa, looking at me or out of the window with beautiful unearthly eyes of the deepest brown, full of passionate pain and revolt. Only for my tender nurse did this fierce expression soften to a wistfulness still more sad. That Stevie's head was impressive, almost startlingly great, even eyes so young as mine could discern. Auburn hair the colour of rich toned wood, that only reveals the underlying red when the sun or firelight draws it out, and looks like heavy shadow upon a broad white forehead when no gleam is upon it; strong features not pinched but beautified by [Pg 14] [Pg 15] [Pg 16] [Pg 17] [Pg 18] disease, and a depth and eloquence of regard such as are rarely looked for under children's lids. The head expressed not pathos so much as tragedy. The frame I never saw; I cannot tell if Stevie were tall or dwarfed. A tipsy town nurse had dropped him down the length of two long flights of stairs, and a strong child's back was broken. He did not bear his sorrow patiently, I fear, but with sullen courage and with a corrosive silent fretting. He hated me in envy of my health and nimble limbs, but what he hated still more than even the sight of my vivacious pleasures was any question about his health. I never saw a glance so deadly as that with which he responded to the kindly hope of Mary Jane's mamma that his back was feeling better. If a look could kill, Mary Jane had been motherless on the spot. But alas for me! no longer a sole sovereign. My serene al fresco kingdom was invaded by the darker passions. I did not like Stevie. He was a boy a little girl might be sorry for in her better moments, but could not love. He was querulous whenever I was near, and had a spiteful thirst for whatever I had set my heart upon. Nurse transferred the better part of her affection and attention to him. This was as it should be, but I was sadly sore about it in those unreasoning times. The little packages of round hard sweets in transparent glazed paper, pink and violet, that Jim Cochrane used to bring me home from the big shop we called the Co. (i. e., Co-operative Store), were now offered to Stevie, who took all my old privileges as his due. Even Mary Jane would sit on the window-sill, when she should have been playing with me outside, and gaze at him in prolonged owlish fascination, drawn by the fierce pain of those suffering eyes, with their terrible tale of revolt and anger. Stevie got into the way of tolerating Mary Jane's society. You see she could sit still for hours; she was a quiet little body who enjoyed her sampler and a book—not a creature of nerves, that raced and danced through the hours and was dropped into slumber by exhausted limbs. He would even let Mary Jane sit at his table and stroke his white hand with an air of deprecating tenderness, while he stared silently out upon the noisy green, where boys and girls were romping with straight backs and strong limbs. What wonder this poor little fellow with the soul of a buccaneer hated us all. Did his favourite books, read and re-read, not amply reveal his tastes, though of these he never spoke? The lust of travel, of adventure, of daring deed filled his dreaming, and yet he never had the courage to ask a soul if he should one day be well and fit to meet the glory of active manhood. Let remembrance dwell rather with this thought than upon the darker side of his temper, upon the subtle cruelty of the glance that met mine, upon the quiver of baffled desire that shook his fine nostrils and the vindictive clutch of his bloodless fingers whenever I thoughtlessly raced near him. If he gave me my first draught of the soul's bitters, I still owe him pity and sympathy, and I had my pleasures abroad to console me for his hate. There were the wide fields and the birds, the swans on the pond, our friend the applewoman, and a band of merry shock-headed playmates outside for me. There were the seasons for my choosing: the spring lanes in their bloomy fragrance; the warm summer mornings, when it was good to sit under trees and pretend to be a bewitched palace waiting for the coming of the prince, or dabble on the brim of pool edges; the autumn luxuriance of fallen leaves, which lent the charmed excitement of rustle to our path along the lanes: and the frost of winter, with the undying joys of sliding and snowballs and the fun of deciphering the meaning of Jack Frost's beautiful pictures on the window-panes and his tricks upon the branches. If Stevie disliked my restlessness, it gave him great satisfaction to despise my artistic sensibilities, and jeer at my lack of learning. I adored music, and often amused myself for hours at a time crooning out what I must have conceived as splendid operas, until my voice would break upon a shower of tears. I naturally thought my wordless singing must be very beautiful to move me to such an ecstasy of emotion, and I think I enjoyed the tears even more than my melancholy howling. But Stevie did not. On the first occasion of this odd performance, he watched me in a convulsion of unjoyous laughter. "What an awful fool you are, Angela!" he hissed, when he saw the pathetic tears begin to roll quickly down my cheeks. I rushed from the parlour, and the sweet water of artistic emotion turned into the bitter salt of chagrin. I must have inherited this tendency from my mother's father, a music-daft Scotsman, who was never quite sure whether he was Hamlet or Bach. At long intervals he would stroll out of town by the Kildare road in an operatic cloak and a wide-leafed sombrero, to inspect us. He had a notion that I, if left to my own devices, might turn out a second Catherine Hayes, and after his visits I invariably returned to my dirges and cantatas with ardour. During the year that Stevie lived at nurse's, visits from the people I significantly called my Sunday parents (because, I suppose, I wore my Sunday frock and shoes in their honour) were more frequent. Golden-haired little ladies, in silk frocks and poky bonnets, came and looked at me superciliously. The bland hauteur of one of those town creatures in superior raiment once maddened me to that degree (it was the dog-days, no doubt) that I walked up to the chair on which she complacently sat, and hit her cheek. This naturally afforded my mother an excuse for pronouncing me dangerous and prolonging my absence from the family circle. [Pg 19] [Pg 20] [Pg 21] [Pg 22] [Pg 23] I was, I will admit, a desperate little spitfire, full of uncontrollable passion. But I had some rudimentary virtue, I am glad to know. I never lied, and I was surprisingly valiant for a delicately-built little girl. I cannot remember the period of transition, but I suddenly see Stevie in quite a new part. The vitality and unfathomable yearning burnt themselves out of his eyes, and there was a wearied gentleness in them even for me. He would watch me quiescently without envy or bitterness, and speak to me in slow unfamiliar tones. He turned with indifference from his books, and seemed to know no active desires. "Does your back hurt, Stevie?" I asked, staring at him solemnly. Even now I can feel the moving sadness of his grave look. "It always hurts;" and then he added, with a ring of his old spite, "but you needn't be sorry for me, Angela." "I am sorry, ever so sorry, Stevie," I sobbed, not knowing why. "I wasn't good to you at all," he muttered, dreamily. "Oh, I don't mind now. I'm fonder of you, Stevie. I wish you'd get well, I do. I wouldn't mind being ill to keep you company." "I think I'd be fond of you, Angela, if I got well. Would you mind," he looked at me uneasily for help in his awkwardness, and then a little pink colour came into his cheek, and he spoke so low that it was hard to hear him—"I think I'd like you to put your arms round my neck and kiss me, Angela." It was our first kiss and our last. The impulsive affection of my embrace pleased him, and he kept my cheek near his for some moments, while in silence we both gazed out upon the blotch of dusty green that mingled with the pale blue of the sky. I feared to move or even wink an eyelid, this new mood of Stevie's so awed me. "You may have my books and my penknife," said Stevie, breaking the spell. "They're awful nice books. Grandpa gave them to me. I'll explain the pictures to-morrow. But perhaps you wouldn't like boys' books, Angela," he said, dejectedly, and scanned my face in a humble way. "Oh yes, I would," I cried, eagerly. "Then you'll be fonder of me," he sighed, satisfied. "Grandpa once read me about a little boy that was ill like me, and he had a sister. He was very fond of her. He didn't hate people that are well, like me, but I don't think that's true, Angela. A boy can't feel good and nice if he is always in pain, can he? It wouldn't be so hard for little girls, for they don't mind sitting still so much." This, I think, is how he talked, musingly, with none of the old vehement revolt of voice and glance that still lingers with me as the most vivid interpretation of his personality. "I can't believe any boy was ever like that queer little fellow. I wonder, if grandpa knew I wanted it very much, would he bring out that book and read it all over again to me. I want to see if it's realler." I drew my arms away from his neck, and ran off screaming for nurse to drive into town, and tell grandpa to come and read about a sick little boy to Stevie. Nurse came to him, ready to do his slightest behest. I still see her standing looking at him anxiously, and see lifted to her that awful quietude of gaze, out of a face sharply thinned so suddenly. "Bring me some gingerbread-nuts and lots of pipes to blow bubbles with," he said, and I felt the childish request soothed nurse's alarm. "Faith, an' ye'll have them galore, my own boy," she cried, "if nurse has to walk barefoot to Dublin for them." Mary Jane's mother came over to stay with us while nurse drove off to town. Stevie knelt in his eternal position, with his cheek against his open palm and cushions piled around him. He did not speak, but stared out of the window. I went and sat with "Robinson Crusoe" on the window-ledge, to watch nurse's departure and wave my hand to her. Not to wave my hand from the window and blow kisses to her would be to miss the best part of the fun of this unexpected incident. The world outside rested in the unbroken stillness of noon. When nurse was out of sight, I turned to acquaint Stevie with the fact. His eyes were shut. So he remains in my memory, a kneeling statue of monumental whiteness and stillness. A strange way for a little lad to die! Not a sigh, not a stir of hand or body, not a cry, no droop of head or jaw. A long, silent stare upon the sunny land, lids quietly dropped, and then the long unawakeable sleep. To my thinking it was an ideal close to a short life of such unrest and pain and misery. It was indeed rest robbed of all the horrors of death. The horror remained for one who loved him, and this was no blood relative, but an ignorant nurse. Mary Jane's mamma came to see how matters were with the children. Stevie, as I thought, still slept, kneeling with his cheek upon his palm, and elbow resting on a cushion between it and the table. She looked at him quickly, flung up her hands, and trembled from head to foot. Then she bethought herself of me, and ordered me to go and sit with my book in the garden, and [Pg 24] [Pg 25] [Pg 26] [Pg 27] keep very still. That was a long afternoon. I thought nurse would never come back. I had looked at all the pictures, spoken to each flower, hunted for ladybirds, and solaced myself with operatic diversion. Now I wanted to go back to Stevie, but the door was shut against me and the blinds were all drawn down, though it was not night—the sun had not even begun to dip westward. Judge my delight to catch the sound of wheels along the road. I raced down to the gate to meet nurse and see all the wonders from town. Grandpa was not with her, and she came up the little path swinging her basket blithely. "They knew the book at once, and I've got it—'tis by a man called Dickens. Your grandpa and mamma will come to- morrow and read it. They're giving a grand party to-night. Such a power of flowers and jellies and things. But the pipes I've brought Stevie in dozens and gingerbread-nuts galore." Then her eye fell upon the blinded windows, and the colour flew from her blooming rustic face. She was nearly as white as Stevie inside. She flung away her basket, and the pipes, the book, and cakes rolled out on the gravel, to my amazement. More wonderful still, she broke out in wild guttural sounds and whirled around in a dance of madness. I had never seen a grown person behave so oddly, and it enchanted me. I caught her skirt and began to spin round too in an ecstasy of shrill sympathy. She looked down at me in a queer wild way, as if she had never seen me before and resented my kindness, and then she cast me from her with such unexpected force that I fell among the flower-beds, too astounded to cry. Decidedly, grown-up people, I reflected, are hard to understand. I had given up wondering at all the unusual things that happened the rest of that day. People kept coming and going, and spoke softly, often weeping. Nobody paid the least attention to me, though I repeatedly asserted that I was hungry. Then at last a comparative stranger took me into the kitchen, and made me a bowl of bread and milk. She forgot the sugar, and I was very angry. Big people often do forget the essential in a thoughtless way. Men, too, came pouring in, and talked in undertones, looking at me as if I had been naughty. I resented those looks quite as much as the unwonted neglect of my small person, and was cheered, just upon the point of tears, by the appearance of Mary Jane, who invited me to go home and sleep with her that night. I did not object. I never objected to any fresh excitement, and I was fond of Mary Jane's brindled cat. But why did Mary Jane cry over me and treat me as a prisoner all next day? She managed to keep me distracted in spite of her tears, and I slept a second night with the brindled cat in my arms, quite happy. The second day of imprisonment did not pass so well. I was restless, and wanted to see Stevie again. I wanted several things that nobody seemed to understand, and I moped in a corner and wept, miserable and misunderstood. On the morning of the third day I could bear my lot no longer. I scorned Mary Jane's hollow friendship, and ran away without hat or jacket. Outside nurse's gate knots of villagers were gathered in their best clothes. It looked like Sunday. I ran past them and shot in through the open hall-door. Nobody saw me, and I made straight for Stevie's room, which he never left before noon. I felt a rogue, and smiled in pleased recognition of the fact. How glad Stevie would be to see me! The door was ajar, and I entered cautiously. On Stevie's bed I saw a long queer box with a lid laid beside it, and there was quite a quantity of flowers, and tapers were lit upon a table beside the bed. Was Stevie going away? But what use were candles when the sun was shining as brightly as possible? I wanted to see what was inside the box, and drew over a chair which enabled me to climb upon the bed. Anger shook me like a frenzy. To put sick Stevie in a horrid box! Whoever heard of such a monstrous thing? It was worse than any of the dreadful things the wicked fairies did in stories. They had taken care, I noted, to pad the box with nice white satin to make it soft; and they put a pretty new nightgown, with satin and white flowers all over it, on Stevie. All the same, I was not going to be softened by these small concessions of cruel people. Stevie I supposed to be in a bewitched sleep, like the poor princess, and I was determined to save him. I did not blame nurse. I imagined she was down-stairs in enchanted slumber too. I would save her afterwards. After calling passionately on Stevie, touching his face, which was colder than stone, I slipped my hands over him down the sides of the box, nearly toppling in myself in the energy of labour. I see myself now, with pursed lips and frowning brows, panting in the extremity of haste. At last my hands met under the poor narrow shoulders, and I proceeded to drag the body out of the box. I had nearly accomplished the feat, and Stevie's head and one arm hung over the side, when the door opened and my stepfather stood upon the threshold, dazed with horror, I can now believe. His look so terrified me that I clambered down from the chair, with an inclination to cry. "What have they done to Stevie?" I gasped, as I saw him gently lift back the dark head and desecrated limb. My stepfather's eyes brimmed over, and he took me into his arms, murmuring vague words about heaven and angels, [Pg 28] [Pg 29] [Pg 30] [Pg 31] [Pg 32] with his wet cheek pressed upon mine. This was how I learnt that Stevie was dead. Chapter IV. THE LAST DAYS OF HAPPINESS. After the vivid impression of Stevie's death, the days are a blank. Memory only revives upon a fresh encounter with my kind. A little boy, a friend of my parents, was sent down to nurse's to gain strength by a first-hand acquaintance with cows' milk and the life of the fields. Louie was an exciting friend. He had the queerest face in the world, like that of an old and wrinkled baby's, for mouth a comical slit, and two twinkling grey eyes as small as a pig's. His hair was white, and he grinned from morning till night, so that, like the Cheshire cat, he rises before me an eternal grin. He taught me a delightful accomplishment, which afforded me entertainment for several months—the repetition of nursery rhymes. He possessed a book of this fanciful literature, and his private store as well was inexhaustible. We spent a day of misery together once because he could not remember the end of one that began— "There was an old man who supposed The street door was partially closed." For nights I dreamed of that old man, and wondered and wondered what happened because of his error about the street door. I beheld him, grey-haired, with a nightcap on his hair, with a dressing-gown wrapped round him and held in front by one hand, while the other grasped a candle, and the old man looked fearfully over his shoulder at the door. I must have seen something to suggest this clear picture, but I cannot tell what it was. Sometimes his face underwent all sorts of transformations, resembled in turn every animal I had ever seen and several new monsters I was unacquainted with. The eyes changed places with the mouth and the ears distorted themselves into noses. Before I had done with him, he had become quite a wonderful old man. Our great amusement was to repeat the rhymes in a way of our own invention, taking turns to be chief and echo. This was how we did it:— Louie. "There was an old man of the Angela. Hague Louie. Whose ideas were extremely Angela. vague. Louie. He built a Angela. balloon Louie. To examine the Angela. moon, Louie. This curious old man of the Angela. Hague." My passionate admiration of the courage of the young lady of Norway made me always insist on taking the principal part when it came to her turn. The neighbors used to drop in of an evening, and add the enthusiasm of an audience to our own. They were specially proud of me as almost native-grown, and my eagerness to show off the attractions of the young lady of Norway generally resulted in my suppressing Louie's final rhyme. This was what we made of it:— Angela. "There was a young lady of Louie. Norway Angela. Who occasionally sat in the Louie. doorway; Angela. When the door squeezed her Louie. flat, Angela. She exclaimed, 'What of Louie. that?' Angela. This courageous young lady of Louie. Norway." Poor Louie, I learnt years afterwards, went to the dogs, and was despatched to the Colonies by an irate father. He was last heard of as a music-hall star at Sydney. [Pg 33] [Pg 34] [Pg 35] [Pg 36] What sends bright and laughing children forth to a life of shame? Louie was the kindest little comrade on earth, unselfish, devoted, and of a tenderness only surpassed by my nurse's. Was this not proved when I began to droop and pine, missing the picture of Stevie kneeling on his sofa and staring out of the window? I cannot say how long after Stevie's death it was before this want broke out as a fell disease. I worried everybody about the absence of that tragic face, and plied nurse with unanswerable questions. Neither Mary Jane nor the brindled cat, not even the applewoman and her tempting trays, nor the pond, nor my new terrier-pup that often washed my face, had power to comfort me. I went about disconsolate, and was glad of a listener to whom it was all fresh, to discourse upon heaven and the queer means that were taken to despatch little children thither—an ugly box, when wings would be so much prettier. Louie listened to me as I, with a burning cheek, told the roll of my sorrows and unfolded my ideas of the mysteries that surrounded me. Louie was not an intelligent listener, but he made up for his deficiency by an exquisite sense of comradeship. He would hold my hand and protest in the loudest voice that it was a shame, the while I suspect his mind ran on those nursery rhymes. But he loved me, there can be no doubt of that. I think he meant to marry me when we grew up. I know when illness and a dreadful cough overtook me, he would let me lie on the floor with my head in his lap, while the exertion of coughing drew blood from my ears and nose. This too, he cried, was an awful shame. I once saw him watch me through a convulsion with tears in his eyes, and I was immediately thrilled with the satisfaction of being so interesting and so deeply commiserated. It filled me with the same artistic emotion that followed my appreciation of the melancholy of my wordless singing. Deep down in the heart of childhood—even bitterly suffering childhood—is this dramatic element, this love of sensation, this vanity of artist. So much of childhood is, after all, make-believe, unconscious acting. We are ill, and we cannot help noting the effect of our illness upon others. The amount of sympathy we evoke in grown-up people is the best evidence of our success as experimental artists with life. Even when we cower under a bed to weep away from our kind, we secretly hope that God or our guardian angel is watching us and feeling intensely sorry for us; and our finest conception of punishment of cruel elders is their finding us unexpectedly dead, and their being consumed with remorse for their flagrant injustice to such virtue as ours. Who can limit the part as admiring audience a child condemns his guardian angel to play? For him, when humanity is cold and unobservant—as humanity too often is in the eyes of childhood—does he so gallantly play the martyr, the hero, the sufferer in proud silence. For his admiration did a little sister of mine once put her hand in the fire. She thought it was heroic, like the early Christians, and hoped her guardian angel would applaud, while common elders shouted in angry alarm. Ah, never prate so idly of the artlessness and the guilelessness of children. They are as full of vanity and innocent guile and all the arts and graces as the puppies and kittens we adore. How much, for instance, had the hope of praise and admiration to do with Louie's magnanimous kindness in that affair of the gipsies? I lay ill and exhausted from coughing on the sofa when he rushed in, panting with eagerness, to tell me that the gipsies had arrived over-night and were camped on the green, where they had a merry-go-round. I had never seen a gipsy, but Mary Jane had, and she often told me the most surprising things about them—how dark they were, how queerly they spoke, and how romantic they looked, like strange people in story-books. Of course I pined to see them, and the thought that I was chained to my sofa, when outside the world was all agog, and rapture awaited happier children upon the green, filled my eyes with tears. I turned my face to the wall and wept bitterly. My heart was heavy with the sombre hate of Cain, and when I looked gloweringly at the blest little Abel by my side, he looked quite as miserable as my evil, envious heart could desire. His comic face underwent a variety of contortions before finally he made up his mind to blurt out an offer to forego the pleasures of the green, and stay with me. But I was not a selfish child, and generosity always spurred me to emulation. Besides, I was already greatly comforted by the extent of Louie's sympathy, so I ordered him off to see the gipsies, and come back and tell me what a merry-go- round was like. Still I did not mend, in spite of all nurse's care and tenderness, and it was decided to remove me to town. This was the decision of my stepfather, who was probably nervous since Stevie had dropped out of life in that quick and quiet way. How well I remember the last day among all my dear friends! Mary Jane, Louie, and I, hand in hand, walked about all our favourite spots. The applewoman gave me an entire trayful of crab-apples, and wished I might come back with my rosy cheeks. I asked her to kiss me, and then she thrust a bun into my hand, and said huskily, "God bless you, my little lady!" We went across to Mary Jane's, and I had a conviction that my heart was broken. I was going away into the land of the ogres and witches, and though I should probably be happy at last, since all things come right in children's tales, vague terror held me at the prospect of the unknown trials that awaited me. Mary Jane's mamma gave me raspberry vinegar and my tears mingled with the syrup. I asked to be let look once more at the views of New York, and then asked her if [Pg 37] [Pg 38] [Pg 39] [Pg 40] [Pg 41] she would feel very sorry at my death. They were still consoling me, and I was sobbing wildly in the arms of Mary Jane's mamma, while Louie relieved his stricken soul by protesting repeatedly that "it was an awful shame," when nurse and Jim Cochrane, in his Sunday clothes, came to carry me off to the car. All the village flocked to see me off, and breathed cordial love and benediction upon my departure. Kindly Irish peasants, with their pretty speech and pretty manners! Is there any other race whose common people can throw such warmth and natural grace into greetings and farewell? Big-hearted, foolish, emotional children, upon whose sympathetic faces, at their ugliest, still play the smiles and frowns, the lights and shadows of expressive and variable childhood. How they cheered and soothed me with their kind words, their little gifts, their packages of comfits and posies, a blue-and-white mug with somebody else's name in gilt letters upon it, and a tiny plate with a dog in a circle of fascinating white knobs. This was the end of my brief sovereignty. Though of those old associations, for which I was destined to yearn so passionately many a year, memory may have become so dim as to leave only a trace of blurred silhouettes upon an indistinct background emerging from a haze of multiplied experience, I like to think that I owe to that bright start the humour and courage that have served to help me through a clouded life. Chapter V. MARTYRDOM. It would seem that happiness imprints itself more clearly and more permanently upon the mind than misery. Beyond a sense of enduring wretchedness, I can recall very little of my home life. My sisters had a big play-room at the top of the house. Here they had ladders, which they used to rest in the four corners and climb up, pretending they were climbing up great mountains. They were much more learned than I in the matter of pretence and games. They knew all sorts of things, and could pretend anything. They had been to the pantomime, and could dance like the fairies. One of them had a brilliant imagination, and told lovely stories. In the matter of invention I have never since met her equal in children of either sex; but she was apt to carry experiment too far, for reading of somebody that hanged himself by tying a handkerchief round his neck and attaching it to a nail on the wall, she immediately proceeded to test the efficacy of the method upon the person of a pretty stepsister of four, whom she worshipped. The child was beginning to turn colour already at the moment of rescue, and then followed the solitary instance of my stepfather's punishing one of us. But my sisters were not kinder to me than my mother. I was an alien to them, and I loved strangers. They could not understand a sensitiveness naturally morbid, and nurtured upon affection. It was impossible that they could escape the coarsening influence of my mother's extraordinary treatment and neglect of them. Left to grow up without love or moral training, cuffed and scolded, allowed illimitable liberty from dawn to dark, they were more like boys than girls. They never kissed one another or any one else. They were straightforward, honest, rather barbarous in their indifference to sentiment, deeply attached to each other under a mocking manner, vital, and surprisingly vivid and individual for children. There was not a particle of vanity or love of dress amongst the lot, though beauty was their common heritage. Their fault was that they never considered the sensibilities of a less breezy nature; that they were rough, unkind, for the fun of the thing, and could never understand the suffering they inflicted upon me. One of their fancies, seeing how I shrank from hardness of touch or look or voice, was t...