On higher ground above the lake stands the old house, tall and severe, a sentinel that keeps several eyes, all of them intimidating, on all around it. The woods of Annagh, of Bullivawnen, of Cluinamurnyeen, trail down to the lake side, with spaces of grass, and spaces of hazel, and spaces of bog among them. I have called the limestone boulders blots, but that was on an evening in February; if you were to see them on a bright spring morning, as they lie among primroses at the lip of the lake, you would think them a decoration, a collar of gems, that respond to the suggestions of the sky, and are blue, or purple, or grey, bright or sullen, as it requires of them. Things, also, to make a child delirious with their possibilities. One might jump from one huge stone to another, till, especially in a dry summer when the lake was low, one might find oneself far out, beyond even the Turf Quay, or Swans’ Island, whence nothing but one’s own prowess could ever restore one to home and family. If other stimulant were needed, it was supplied by the thought of the giant pike, who were known to inhabit the outer depths. One of them, stuffed and varnished, honoured the hall at Ross with its presence. It looked big and wicked enough to pull down a small girl as easily as a minnow.
When I first went to Ross, a grown-up young woman, I found that seduction of the boulders, and of the chain of leaps that they suggested, very potent. The attraction of the pike also was not to be denied. (We used to try to shoot them with a shot-gun, and sometimes succeeded.) What then must the lake not have meant to its own children?
I don’t suppose that any little girl ever had more accidents than Martin. Entirely fearless and reckless, and desperately short-sighted, full of emulation and the irrepressible love of a lark, scrapes, in the physical as well as the moral sense, were her daily portion, and how she came through, as she did, with nothing worse than a few unnoticeable scars to commemorate her many disasters, is a fact known only to her painstaking guardian angel. Tenants, who came to Ross on their various affairs, found their horses snatched to be galloped by “the children,” their donkeys purloined for like purposes (or the donkeys’ nearest equivalent to a gallop)—and it may be noted that the harder the victimised horses were galloped, the more profound was the admiration, even the exultation, of their owners.
“Sure,” said a southern woman of some children renowned for their naughtiness, “them’s very arch childhren. But, afther all, I dunno what’s the use of havin’ childhren if they’re not arch!”
In certain of the essays in one of our books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” we have pooled memories of our respective childhoods, which, fortunately, perhaps, for the peace of nations, were separated by some hundred miles of moor and mountain, as well as by an interval of years. Their conditions were similar in many respects, and specially so in the government of the nursery. Our mothers, if their nurses satisfied their requirements, had a large indifference to the antecedents of the nurses’ underlings, who were usually beings of the type that is caught at large on a turf-bog and imported raw into the ministry. One such was once described to me—“An innocent, good-natured slob of a gerr’l that was rared in a bog beside me. The sort of gerr’l now that if you were sick would sit up all night to look afther ye, and if you weren’t, she’d lie in bed all day!”
I believe the nurses enjoyed the assimilation of the raw product, much as a groom likes the interest afforded by an unbroken colt, and they found the patronage among the mothers of the disciples a useful asset. In later years, Martin was discoursing of her nursery life, with her foster-mother, who had also been her nurse, Nurse B., a most agreeable person, gifted with a saturnine humour that is not infrequent in our countrywomen.
“Sure didn’t I ketch Kit Sal one time”—(the reigning nursemaid)—“an’ she bating and kicking yerself on the avenue!” Nurse B. began. She then went on to describe how she had fallen on Kit Sal, torn her hair, and “shtuck her teeth in her.”
“The Misthress seen me aftherwards, and she axed me what was on me, for sure I was cryin’ with the rage. ‘Nothin’ Ma’am!’ says I. But I told her two days afther, an’ she goes to Kit Sal, an’ says she, ‘What call had you to bate Miss Wilet?’ says she, ‘Ye big shtump!’ ‘She wouldn’t folly me,’ says Kit. ‘Well indeed,’ says the Misthress, ‘I believe ye got a bigger batin’ yerself from Nurse, and as far as that goes,’ says she, ‘I declare to God,’ says she, ‘I wish she dhrank yer blood!’ says she.”
The tale is above comment, but for those who knew Mrs. Martin’s very special distinction of manner and language, Nurse B.’s paraphrase of her reproof has a very peculiar appeal.
Nurse B. was small, spare, and erect, with a manner that did not conceal her contempt for the world at large—(with one cherished exception, “Miss Wilet”)—and a trenchancy of speech that was not infrequently permitted to express it. At Ross, at lunch one day, during the later time when Mrs. Martin had returned there, the then cat—(the pampered and resented drawing-room lady, not the mere kitchen cat)—exhibited a more than usually inordinate greediness, and Mrs. Martin appealed, with some reproach, to Nurse B., who was at that time acting—and the word may be taken in its stage connection—the part of parlour-maid.