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[Pg 255] 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[Pg 256] 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............