I marvel now, when I think of their courage and their gallant self-denial. The long, but far from serious, family, numbering no less than five sons and two daughters, thought little of Land Acts at the time, and took life as lightly as ever. The stable was cut down, but there were no hounds then, and I was in the delirium of a first break into oil colours, after a spring spent in Paris in drawing and painting, and even horses were negligible quantities. There was no change made in the destined professions for the sons; it was on themselves that my father and mother economised; and with effort, and forethought, and sheer self-denial, somehow they “made good,” and pulled through those bad years of the early ‘eighties, when rents were unpaid, and crops failed, and Parnell and his wolf-pack were out for blood, and the English Government flung them, bit by bit, the property of the only men in Ireland who, faithful to the pitch of folly, had supported it since the days of the Union. When the Russian woman threw the babies to the wolves, at least they were her own.
I have claimed for my mother moral courage and self-denial, and, in making good that claim, said that the stable establishment at Drishane—never a large one—had been cut down. I feel I ought to admit that this particular economy cannot be said to have afflicted her. She had an unassailable conviction that every horse was “at heart a rake.” Though she was not specially active, no rabbit could bolt before a ferret more instantaneously than she from a carriage at the first wink of one of the “bright eyes of danger.” No horse was quiet enough for her, few were too old.
“Slugs?” she has said, in defence of her carriage-horses, “I love slugs! I adore them! And slugs or no, I will not be driven by B——” (a massive sailor son). “He’s no more use on the box than a blue bottle!”
There was an occasion when she was discovered halfway up a ladder, faintly endeavouring to hang a picture, and unable to do so by reason of physical terror. She was restored to safety, and with recovered vigour she countered reproaches with the singular yet pertinent inquiry: “May I ask, am I a paralysed babe?”
Her similes were generally unexpected, but were invariably to the point. It often pleases me to try to recall some of the flowers of fancy that she has lavished upon my personal appearance. I think I should begin by saying that her ideal daughter had been denied to her. This being should have had hair of dazzling gold, blue eyes as big as mill-wheels, and should have been incessantly enmeshed in the most lurid flirtation. My eyes did indeed begin by being blue, but, as was said by an old nurse who held by the Somerville tradition of brown ones,
“By the help of the Lord they’ll change!”
They did change, but as the assistance was withdrawn when they had merely attained to a non-committal grey, neither in eyes, nor in the other conditions, did I gratify my mother’s aspirations.
I have been at a dinner-party with her, and have found, to my great discomfort, her eyes dwelling heavily upon my head. Her face wore openly the expression of a soul in torment. I knew that in some way, dark to me, I was the cause. After dinner she took an early opportunity of assuring me that my appearance had made her long to go under the dinner-table.
“Never,” she said, “have I seen your hair so abominable. It was like a collection of filthy little furze-bushes.”