The unhappiest little child that ever drew breath has immediate compensations between the dark hours undreamed of by elders. One of the persons that lent the relief of sparkle to those sombre months, and by whose aid I wandered blithely enough down the sunny avenues of imagination, which, like a straight road running into the sky, lead to Paradise, was my Scottish grandfather.
Grandpapa was a sombre-visaged little gentleman, not in the least like his formidable daughter. He had very dark eyes, and he often assured me that Stevie got his beautiful red-brown hair from him. I needed the assurance pretty frequently, for grandpapa\'s hair was white. He proudly drew my attention to the fact that there was not a bald spot, however.
In all ordinary matters of existence, grandpapa was of a happy facility. He tolerated every error, every crime, I believe, except a false note or an inferior taste in music. He loved me, not because of the accuracy of my ear, for I had none to speak of, but because of my instinctive passion for music. Still, in middle life, I can say there never has been for me a grief that could resist the consolation of music well interpreted.
If grandpapa found me in a corner white and dejected, he asked no questions,—he wished to be in ignorance of his daughter\'s domestic affairs, which was the reason, I suppose, he so sedulously avoided the society of my stepfather—but he took me off with him to hear music or singing somewhere. In winter he took me to the pantomime, and we sat in the pit, and he indulged me with an orange to suck.
In the Dublin season he took me to the Opera or the Opera-Bouffe with equal readiness. Sometimes there were morning or afternoon concerts, and I sat out with exemplary gravity sonatas and concerts or part-singing, and woke up to genial comprehension of the ballads and simple melodies.
Grandpapa had one great charm. He never spoke to me as a child, and I rarely understood the tenth of his talk. That was why, no doubt, as a personage grandpapa appealed so delightfully to my imagination. He was a mystery, a[Pg 51] problem, a permanent excitement. A month or a year—perhaps, to be more accurate, a month—would elapse without my seeing him, and then suddenly he would again enter the chaos of dreams and visions, a smiling dark-eyed old gentleman, with a long black cloak flung round his shoulder and a slouched felt hat that left revealed his abundant white hair.
He would place a finger on his lip and say, "Hush!" so mysteriously, looking round the room. How well I, who lived in such fear of my mother\'s presence, understood that attitude and look.
I have since been assured that grandpapa was a harmless lunatic. If so, he made lunacy more attractive to a child than sanity.
"Hush! I have that to say to you, child, which common ears may not hear. These people call me Cameron. But, Angela, my real name is Hamlet. I was born at Elsinore. I will take you to Elsinore some day. It is far away in a country called Denmark. You yourself, Angela, look like a Dane, with your yellow hair and blue eyes. Come, there is a concert at Earlsfort Terrace. They play Bach. I will take you."
Could anything be more calculated to win a child\'s esteem and reverence than this assertion[Pg 52] that the world knew him by a false name?—that he was really quite another person from the person they believed him to be? Then, what sonorous words, Hamlet, Elsinore! Denmark I liked less—it sounded more like an everyday place—but Elsinore was as good as a fairy-tale in its awful beauty.
I asked him if you went in a ship over the sea to Elsinore, as Mary Jane told me you went to America; and when he nodded and said "Yes," I got to imagine there was no common sunlight on the sea as the ship crossed it to Elsinore, but the lovely white light I had seen at the theatre when the fairies danced, and all the people in the ship wore beautiful garments of white and green gauze, and there was soft music all the way, and the water shone like silver.
What I could not understand was why I should be a Dane because my eyes were blue, when grandpapa\'s, who was so obviously more of a Dane than I, were black. But grandpapa always frowned, and an odd flame shot into his mild glance, if you asked him questions.
He gave you facts, and expected you to make what you could of them. He was unreasonably proud, I thought, of his Scottish blood, all the same. He was a Highlander, he said, while my[Pg 53] grandmother, he explained contemptuously, was a Glasgow lass. My uncle Douglas, he added, favoured his side, while my mother was a blonde Ferguson. Pity it was an intelligent little girl like me did not take more after the Camerons; but I had my uncle Douglas\'s nose, and with a Cameron nose I need never fear the future.
This was surely an excess of faith on my grandfather\'s side not justified by experience. He had been only saved from the poorhouse by a thrifty and judicious if hard-hearted wife, while my splendid uncle Douglas, with his curly head of Greek god, had wandered from debt through every expensive caprice, and was drowned sailing a little pleasure-boat on one of the Killarney lakes at the inappropriate age of twenty-four.
The Cameron nose has done as little for his young brother, my uncle Willie. I have always loved the image I have made to myself of my boy-uncle Willie, chiefly, I suppose, because of his brilliant promise and early death; but largely, I believe, because not only grandpapa Cameron, but others who remember him, tell me I resemble him in character and feature.
They say it was his death, coming so soon after the blow of uncle Douglas\'s doom, that turned my grandfather\'s brain. Willie had been[Pg 54] articled to a well-known architect, who, being musical like my grandfather, was interested in his musical friend\'s bright-faced and witty lad, with about as much knowledge of music as a healthy puppy. This lamentable deficiency, however, brought about no disastrous clash between master and pupil.
The distinguished architect loved Willie Cameron for his good-humour, his industry, his quickness, and his impromptu jingling rhymes. He made everything rhyme with a delicious comic absurdity, even the technical terms of his profession, and in consequence no one was jealous of the master\'s preference for his funny Scottish pupil. You see, he was so much more of an Irish than a Scottish lad. Born on Irish soil, he seems to have inherited the best of native virtues, and was universally beloved. Even his eldest sister, who never sinned on the side of tenderness, could not speak of uncle Willie without a smile.
So there were universal congratulations when Willie, barely of age, got his first commission. No one accused the architect of favouritism, though the first commission of a son could not have been of greater moment to him. Uncle Willie posted triumphantly off to the country,[Pg 55] and the master told him to telegraph for his presence in the event of doubt or difficulty. The season was wet, and uncle Willie reached his inn that night drenched and shivering. They put him into damp sheets. The next day was no drier, and uncle Willie drove off on a car in the rain. It was his last drive alive. Ten days later what remained of him was driven to the cemetery amid plumes and crape and white flowers.
It was curious that while grandpapa Cameron was always ready to speak of his handsome son Douglas, of Willie, whom he loved best, he only spoke to me once,—that was when he showed me an indefinite boy\'s picture, and curtly told me it was my uncle Willie\'s portrait, and added, dreamily, that I was the only one of his grandchildren who resembled Willie.
That fact, perhaps, had more to do than my musical proclivities with his preference for me. He would give me five-shilling pieces from time to time, and beg me "not to mention it." I took the pieces gratefully, pleased with their brightness and largeness; but I own I found pennies more useful. A child can buy almost anything for a penny, but the only use of a silver five-shilling piece seemed to me to be able to look at it from time to time. Had I known anything[Pg 56] of arithmetic, I might have calculated how many pennies were contained in these big silver pieces, and have changed them for an inexhaustible store of my favourite coin.
But I was not clever enough to think of this, and by the time I was sent across the sea to school in Warwickshire a year later, I had as many as six five-shilling pieces in a box, which then did stout service in supplying cakes and sweets on the scarce occasions I was allowed to make such needful investments.
Grandpapa Cameron lived in a little cottage out of town, with a long back-garden, where he spent his time cultivating roses. He had a disagreeable old cook and a red-nosed gardener, and he saw no society but a couple of priests, who took it in turn to drop in of an evening to play cribbage.
On Sunday he went to the one church where Mozart\'s and Beethoven\'s masses were sung. Once a new hardy organist with a fanciful French taste introduced Gounod.
My grandfather\'s face changed. He cocked an indignant ear, turned abruptly in his seat facing the altar, and looked long and angrily up at the choir. The horrid and sentimental strains of Gounod continued, and, unable to bear it any[Pg 57] longer, my grandfather clapped his hat over his eyes, with a disregard for the religious prejudices of his neighbours no less brutal than the new organist\'s disregard for his musical sensibilities.
He walked out of church, and meditated upon his protest for a week. When I mention my belief that my grandfather had only become a convert from Scottish Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism because of Mozart\'s and Beethoven\'s masses, it will be recognised what a desperately serious matter for him was this impertinent introduction of light French music into church.
He succeeded in gathering a cluster of musical maniacs, one of whom was his friend the distinguished architect. The four planted themselves, with arms folded and furious purpose in their eyes, not in the least like Christians come to Sunday prayers, but like heroes bent upon showing an uncompromising front to injury. They heard in silence the opening roll of the organ, then the thin sweetness of Monsieur Gounod\'s religious strains filled the church, and the faithful sat up to listen to the Kyrie Eleison.
A distinct and prolonged hiss burst from the lips of the four musical maniacs, and my grandfather began to pound his stick upon the floor with an eloquence that left no one in doubt as[Pg 58] to how he would treat the organist\'s head if he had it within reach. The officiating priests glanced round in surprise and astonishment. People rubbed their eyes, and wondered if they were dreaming.
There sat the four maniacs, hissing, booing, knocking their sticks on the floor, and "ohing" as they do in the House of Commons. Surprise was effaced in consternation, and a priest came down to the miscreants from the altar.
"Let that fellow stop his French nonsense and we\'ll stop too," shouted my grandfather. "I\'ve been coming to this church for the past twenty-five years, and during that time have paid bigger fees than any of my neighbours. Why? Because there was a decent feeling for music here. Because you respected yourselves and gave us the best. But if you\'re going to degrade yourselves and follow an ignoble fashion and adopt French fads—well, sir, I swear I\'ll wreck the church—I will indeed."
The fight ended in my grandfather\'s defeat, and he never put his foot again into church. He carried his indignation so far as to insult an old French acquaintance, Monsieur Pruvot, the manager of a large wine house. Still sore upon the triumph of Gounod, he was accosted[Pg 59] affably by Monsieur Pruvot, who cried out to him, waving his hat—
"How do you do, my dear Monsieur Camerone?"
"My name\'s Cameron, and I\'m Mister, none of your damned French Monsieurs, Mr. Pruvot," roared my grandfather, pronouncing the mute t of the Frenchman\'s name with a vicious emphasis.
It is easy to imagine the amazement of the Frenchman, in ignorance of the Beethoven-Gounod episode, and who until then had always found my grandfather a genial and inoffensive neighbour. He made, by way of insinuating concessions to wrath, a complimentary remark upon "this charming little town of Dublin," pronouncing it in the French way.
"We call it Dublin, sir. Yes, I\'ve no doubt it is a finer town than your native Bordox. I see no reason, sir, why we in Dublin should treat your town with a courtesy you, residing here, deny ours. If you can\'t learn to say Dublin, we may well decline to say Bordeaux. A very good morning, Mr. Pruvot."
Poor grandpapa Cameron! This was his last battle on earth, either in the interests of Beethoven or Dublin. A few days later he was found in bed with his face to the wall—dead.