CHAPTER VIII
HERSELF
“It was on a Sunday, the eleventh day of a lovely June,” her sister, Mrs. Edward Hewson, has written, “that Violet entered the family. A time of roses, when Ross was at its best, with its delightful old-fashioned gardens fragrant with midsummer flowers, and its shady walks at their darkest and greenest as they wandered through deep laurel groves to the lake. She was the eleventh daughter that had been born to the house, and she received a cold welcome.
“‘I am glad the Misthress is well,’ said old Thady Connor, the steward; ‘but I am sorry for other news.’
“I think my father’s feelings were the same, but he said she was ‘a pretty little child.’ My mother comforted herself with the reflection that girls were cheaper than boys.
“At a year old she was the prettiest child I ever saw, with her glorious dark eyes, and golden hair, and lovely colour; a dear little child, but quite unnoticed in the nursery. Charlie was the child brought forward. I think the unnoticed childhood had its effect. She lived her own life apart. Then came the reign of the Governesses, and their delight in her. I never remember the time she could not read, and she played the piano at four years old very well. (At twelve years old she took first prize for piano-playing at an open competition, held in Dublin, for girls up to eighteen.)
“Her great delight at four or five years old was to slip into the drawing-room and read the illustrated editions of the poets. Her favourite was an edition of Milton, with terrifying pictures; this she read with delight. One day there was an afternoon party, and, as usual, Violet stole into the drawing-room and was quickly engrossed in her loved Milton, entirely oblivious of the company. Later on, she was found fast asleep, with her head resting on the large volume. The scene is present with me; the rosy little face, and the golden hair resting on the book.
“I remember that Henry H—— said ‘Some day I shall boast that I knew Violet as a child!’”
She was christened Violet Florence, by her mother’s cousin, Lord Plunket, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, in the drawing-room at Ross, the vessel employed for the rite being, she has assured me, the silver slop-basin, and at Ross she spent the first ten happy years of her life.
I, also, had a happy childhood, full of horses and dogs and boats and dangers (which latter are the glory of life to any respectable child with suitable opportunity), but after I had seen Ross I could almost have envied Martin and her brother, Charlie, nearest to her in age, their suzerainty over Ross demesne.
“I thravelled Ireland,” said someone, “and afther all, there’s great heart in the County of Cork!”, and I am faithful to my own county; but there is a special magic in Galway, in its people and in its scenery, and for me, Ross, and its lake and its woods, is Galway. The beauty of Ross is past praising. I think of it as I saw it first, on a pensive evening of early spring, still and grey, with a yellow spear-head of light low in the west. Still and grey was the lake, too, with the brown mountain, Croagh-Keenan, and the grey sky, with that spear-thrust of yellow light in it, lying deep in the wide, quiet water, that was furrowed now and then by the flapping rush of a coot, or streaked with the meditative drift of a wild duck; farther back came the tall battalions of reeds, thronging in pale multitudes back to the shadowy woods; and for foreground, the beautiful, broken line of the shore, with huge boulders of limestone scattered on it, making black blots in the pearl-grey of the shallows.