Which was probably true, but was a counsel of perfection that we were too feeble to accept.
It is indeed indisputable that my mother breathed easily a larger air than the lungs of her children could compete with. Handsome, impetuous, generous, high-spirited, yet with the softest and most easily-entreated heart, she was like a summer day, with white clouds sailing high in a clear sky, and a big wind blowing. Hers was the gift of becoming, without conscious effort, the rallying point of any entertainment. It was she who never failed to supply the saving salt of a dull dinner-party; her inveterate joie-de-vivre made a radiance that struck responsive sparkles from her surroundings, whatever they might be.
She was a brilliant pianiste, and played with the same spirit with which she tackled the other affairs of life. She was renowned as an accompanist, having been trained to that most onerous and perilous office by an accomplished and exacting elder brother—and nothing can be as relentlessly exacting as a brother who sings—and she had a gift of reading music, with entire facility, that is as rare among amateurs as it is precious.
Music, books, pictures, politics, were in her blood. Music, with plenty of tune; painting, with plenty of colour and a rigid adherence to fact; novels, compact of love-making; and politics, of the most implacable party brand. Alas! she did not live to see many of our books, but I fear that such as she did see, with their culpable economy of either love-makings or happy endings, were a disappointment to her. In her opinion the characters should leave a story, as the occupants left Noah’s Ark, in couples. I remember the indignation in her voice when, having finished reading “An Irish Cousin,” she said:
“But you never said who Mimi Burke married.”
Those who have done us the honour of reading that early work will, I think, admit that our description of Miss Mimi Burke might have exonerated us from the necessity of providing her with a husband.
My mother was one of the most thorough and satisfying letter-writers of a family skilled in that art, having in a high degree the true instinct in the matter of material, and knowing how to separate the wheat from the chaff (and—bien entendu—to give the preference to the chaff). She was a Woman Suffragist, unfaltering, firm, and logical; a philanthropist, practical and energetic.
“Where’d we be at all if it wasn’t for the Colonel’s Big Lady!” said the hungry country women, in the Bad Times, scurrying, barefooted, to her in any emergency, to be fed and doctored and scolded. She was a Spiritualist, wide-minded, eager, rejoicing in the occult, mysterious side of things, with the same enthusiasm with which she faced her sunshiny everyday life. Not that it was all sunshine. My grandfather, Thomas Somerville, of Drishane, died in 1882. With him, as Martin has said of his contemporary, her father, passed the last of the old order, the unquestioned lords of the land. Mr. Gladstone’s successive Land Acts were steadily making themselves felt, and my father and mother, like many another Irish father and mother, began to learn what it was to have, as a tenant said of himself, “a long serious family, and God knows how I’ll make the two ends of the candle meet!”
