"is childhood dead?" lamb asks; "is there not in the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?" can i now, without a responsive thrill, see myself flash into the unaltered dulness of that kildare village, a little princess of legend, with the glory of foreign travel about me, the overseas cut of frock and shoes, the haughty and condescending consciousness of superiority?
they were all so visibly at my feet, so glad to worship and admire, so eager to praise, so beset with wonder. i was to spend a week in their midst, a delightful week, as long as a story, as brief as a play, a puff of happiness blown across the bleak wind of solitude, a prolonged and hilarious scamper through sensation as vivid and vital as morning light.
mary jane was there, with the unchanged oiled black ringlets, and in my honour she wore them bound with a bright blue ribbon. louie[pg 202] came out from town to behold me, and gazed in stupefied awe. i had been in a ship across the sea. i had traversed half of england in a railway-carriage. had i seen an elephant? mary jane wanted to know if i had seen the queen.
no; but i had seen a naked lady, with beautiful golden hair down her back, ride through the town of lysterby on a white pony, while twelve lovely pages in silver and gold and satin rode before, and twelve lovely maidens with long velvet cloaks lined with white satin rode behind her. this sounded as grand as a royal procession, and i glided ingeniously over the ignominy of having been to england and not having seen the queen.
mary jane's mamma gave me a bowl of milk and a plate of arrowroot biscuits, and as i devoured them, with what a splendid air i recognised the old and faded views of new york! i scorned my past ignorance, and off-handedly mentioned that "you know, the sea isn't a bit like the pond." and then the search for a brilliant and captivating comparison—arm extended to suggest immensity; heaving wave, rolling ship.
"isn't she wonderful?" they cried; "and the fine language of her!"
from cottage to cottage, from shop to shop, i wandered, intoxicated by the incense of admiration. i embroidered fact and invented fiction with the readiness of the fanciful traveller. sister esmeralda became an unimaginable fiend, who had persecuted me as if i had been the heroine of the fairy-tale i was acting, till the entire village was fit to rise and shout for her blood.
"the likes of that did you ever hear?" a gaunt peasant in corduroy would ask his neighbour in dismay.
"troth and 'tis thim english as is a quare lot. beat a little lady as is fit to rule the lot of them, and lock her up in dungeons along with spirits and goblins, and starve the life and soul out of her! sure 'tis worse they are than in the days of cromwell."
naturally, in the amazing record of my experiences, the hidden bones and marble hand of my old friend, the white lady of the ivies, played a prominent and shuddering part.
under the influence of such an audience i tasted the fascinating results of suffering. i was in that brief week repaid for all the previous slights of fortune. i reposed in the lap of adulation, and turned my woes into a dramatic [pg 204]enjoyment. i had suffered; but the romantic activity of my imagination, with a natural mirthfulness of temperament, preserved me from the self-centred and subjective misery of the visionary, and from the embittering anguish of rancour. once i had excited the local mind against sister esmeralda and the wretched superioress of the ladies of mercy, my anger against them vanished, and they simply remained in memory as picturesque instruments of misfortune. but for the moment i was too full of the joy of living for anything like morbid self-pity. i preferred to loll on the grass beside bessy the applewoman, and treat all the children of the green to her darling trays of apples with uncle lionel's bright crown-piece. bessy never tired of assuring me that i was a wonderful creature, which i fully believed, and louie made frequent mention of his thirst to be old enough to marry me. it soothed him to hear that he was much nicer than frank, the horrid lysterby boy. louie had not made his first confession, and he was thrillingly and fearfully interested in the tale of mine.
"you know," i dolefully remarked, "the priest won't let you confess any of the nice interesting-looking sins, with the lovely big names, like[pg 205] a-dul-tery and for-ni-fi-ca-tion and de-fraud-ing. he makes you tell awful little sins, like talking in class and answering a nun, and all that sort of thing."
"oh, but i say," shouted louie, wagging a remonstrative head, "the priest can't prevent you from saying you committed adultery."
"yes, but he says you didn't; and then it seems you're telling a lie to the holy ghost, and you may be struck dead in the confessional-box."
this louie regarded as an excessive risk to run for the simple pleasure of confessing a nice big sin. he thought the matter over in bed that night, and communicated to me next morning his intention to confess to having stolen two marbles from johnnie magrath, and having licked tim martin.
"you know, angy, i really did lick him, he's such an awful beast, and made his nose bleed rivers, with a black dab under his eyes as big as my fist; and here are the two marbles i stole."
he went back to town that afternoon, with his little gray eyes moist over the brimming smiles of his lively comic mouth. his was a hilarious depression, a rowdy melancholy, emblematic of the destiny in store for him. he[pg 206] grimaced wonderfully, with screwed-up eyelids and twisted and bunched-out lips, and kept on muttering all the time we walked together to the coach-house where the mail-car started from: "it's an awful shame, so it is. a fellow can't do what he likes, but there's always somebody bothering him and ordering him about."
dear, honest, little playmate! that was the last, last glimpse i had of him. we exchanged our last kiss at the top of the village street, and i wildly waved my handkerchief until a deep bend of the long white kildare road hid the car, as it seemed to roll off the flat landscape.
