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[Pg 44] 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[Pg 45] 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 to teach me how to run away from a ghost.
It was a very high house, with several flights of stairs, and two of these inquisitors would take me between them, and tear me at a running pace down the whole length of stairs, my heels lifted from the ground, and only the tips of my toes bruised against each stair. At night I would go to bed aching with pain and terror, and sob myself to sleep, yearning for the faces and sights and sounds that had passed out of my life.
Ah, what tears I shed in that strange home! To have cried in childhood as I cried then, incessantly and for months, sometimes for the greater part of the day under a bed, that none of these mocking young creatures might see me and laugh at me; to have stood so intolerably alone among so many, without a hand to dry my eyes, a kiss to comfort me, a soft breast against which I could rest my tired little head and sob out my tale of sorrow,—this is to start permanently maimed for the battle of life. What compensation can the years bring us for such [Pg 46]injustice? Could any possible future paradise make up to us for infancy in hell?
There are faces that stand out upon memory with some kindness in them for a pitiable little outcast. Chiefly, of course, my stepfather, who was as serviceably good to me as a man\'s unreasoning terror of a woman\'s temper permitted him to be. He saved me from many a cruel beating, and when I seemed more than usually miserable, he would, with an air of secrecy and guilt that charmed me, himself help to fasten on my hat and little coat, and carry me out upon his business calls.
They used to represent me to him as a dangerous small devil, describing my outbursts of fury but suppressing the provocation; and I once heard him exclaim angrily—"I am sick of these complaints of Angela\'s temper. When she is with me she is better behaved and gentler than any of them. You can twist an angel into a devil if you worry and ill-use it."
I know now that he suffered for his partisanship of me, and that he forsook my cause at last from sheer weariness of spirit and flesh. He thought it better for his own peace to leave me to the mercies of my mother, concluding probably that I should not be worse off.
Our home must have resembled the American man-of-war in the vicinity of which, the French Admiral wrote, nothing was heard from morning till night but the angry voices of the officers and the howling of trounced sailors. Up-stairs in their play-room the children were happy enough, but to venture down-stairs was the hardihood of mouse in the neighbourhood of lion. One or the other, for no reason on earth, but for the impertinent or irrational obviousness of her existence, was seized by white maternal hands, dragged by the hair, or banged against the nearest article of furniture. My mother never punished her children for doing wrong; she was simply exasperated by their inconceivable incapacity to efface themselves and "lie low." To show themselves also in her vicinity was an intolerable offence which called for instant chastisement.
Servants have been known to fly to the rescue. Once when I came home from a walk, one of the nurses complained in my mother\'s hearing that I had wilfully splashed my boots with mud. Instantly I was grasped, and the mystery to me to-day is how I survived such treatment. One of the servants, a delicate, fair young man, called Gerald, rushed up-stairs, scarlet with [Pg 48]indignation, and tore me from my mother\'s hands. I have forgotten what he said, but he gave her notice on the spot in order to express himself more freely.
Once, again, I was rescued by a young lady in a silk gown of many shades. Her face is a blank to me, but I distinctly remember the green and purple lights of her shot-silk gown, and the novel sound of her name, Anastasia Macaulay. She had come to lunch that day, and had taken a fancy to me, which was quite enough to excite my mother. The scene is indistinct. I sat on Anastasia\'s lap, playing with her watch-chain, and suddenly I was on the floor, with smarting face and aching back. Anastasia saved me from worse. She sent me a picture-book and a doll, but never entered the house again.