My father’s brother Henry, my god-father, died early and unmarried. He was Rector of Templeton, and was very intimate with his neighbours there, the Edgeworths and Granards. The greater part of the library at Newbridge, as it was in my time, had been collected by him, and included an alarming proportion of divinity. The story of his life might serve for such a novel as his friend, Miss Edgeworth, would have written and entitled “Procrastination.” He was much attached for a long time to a charming Miss Lindsay, who was quite willing to accept his hand, had he offered it. My poor uncle, however, continued to flirt and dangle and to postpone any definite declaration, till at last the girl’s mother—who, I rather believe, was a Lady Charlotte Lindsay, well known in her generation—told her that a conclusion must be put to this sort of thing. She would invite Mr. Cobbe to their house for a fortnight, and during that time every opportunity should be afforded him of making a proposal in form, if he should be so minded. If, however, at the end of this probation, he had said nothing, Miss Lindsay was to give him up, and he was to be allowed no more chances of addressing her. The visit was paid, and nothing could be more agreeable or devoted than my uncle; but he did not propose to Miss Lindsay! The days passed, and as the end of the allotted time drew near, the lady innocently arranged a few walks en tête-à-tête, and talked in a manner which afforded him every opportunity of saying the words which seemed always on the tip of his tongue. At last the final day arrived. “My dear,” said Lady Charlotte (if such was the mother’s name) to her daughter, “I shall go out with the rest of the party for the whole day and leave you and Mr. Cobbe together. When I return, it must be decided one way or the other.”
The hours flew in pleasant and confidential talk—still no proposal! Miss Lindsay, who knew that the final minutes of grace were passing for her unconscious lover, once more despairingly tried, being really attached to him, to make him say something which she could report to her mother. As he afterwards averred he was on the very brink of asking her to marry him when he caught the sound of her mother’s carriage returning to the door, and said to himself, “I’ll wait for another opportunity.”
The opportunity was never granted to him. Lady Charlotte gave him his congé very peremptorily next morning. My uncle was furious, and in despair; but it was too late! Like other disappointed men he went off rashly, and almost immediately engaged himself (with no delay this time) to Miss Flora Long of Rood Ashton, Wiltshire, a lady of considerable fortune and attractions and of excellent connections, but of such exceedingly rigid piety of the Calvinistic type of the period, that I believe my uncle was soon fairly afraid of his promised bride. At all events his procrastinations began afresh. He remained at Templeton on one excuse after another, till Miss Long wrote to ask; “Whether he wished to keep their engagement?” My poor uncle was nearly driven now to the wall, but his health was bad and might prove his apology for fresh delays. Before replying to his Flora, he went to Dublin and consulted Sir Philip Crampton. After detailing his ailments, he asked what he ought to do, hoping (I am afraid) that the great surgeon would say, “O you must keep quiet!” Instead of this verdict Crampton said, “Go and get married by all means!” No further excuse was possible, and my poor uncle wrote to say he was on his way to claim his bride. Ere he reached her, however, while stopping at his mother’s house in Bath, he was found dead in his bed on the morning on which he should have gone to Rood Ashton. He must have expired suddenly while reading a good little book. All this happened somewhere about 1823.
To return to our old life at Newbridge, about 1833 and for many years afterwards, the assembling of my father’s brothers, and brothers’ wives and children at Christmas was the great event of the year in my almost solitary childhood. Often a party of twenty or more sat down every day for three or four weeks together in the dining-room, and we younger ones naturally spent the short days and long evenings in boyish and girlish sports and play. Certain very noisy and romping games—Blindman’s buff, Prisoner’s Bass, Giant, and Puss in the Corner and Hunt the Hare—as we played them through the halls below stairs, and the long corridors and rooms above, still appear to me as among the most delightful things in a world which was then all delight. As we grew a little older and my dear, clever brother Tom came home from Oxford and Germany, charades and plays and masquerading and dancing came into fashion. In short ours was, for the time, like other large country houses, full of happy young people, with the high spirits common in those old days. The rest of the year, except during the summer vacation, when brothers and cousins mustered again, the place was singularly quiet, and my life strangely solitary for a child. Very early I made a concordat with each of my four successive governesses, that when lessons were ended, precisely at twelve, I was free to wander where I pleased about the park and woods, to row the boat on the pond or ride my pony on the sands of the sea-shore two miles from the house. I was not to be expected to have any concern with my instructress outside the doors. The arrangement suited them, of course, perfectly; and my childhood was thus mainly a lonely one. I was so uniformly happy that I was (what I suppose few children are) quite conscious of my own happiness. I remember often thinking whether other children were all as happy as I, and sometimes, especially on a spring morning of the 18th March,—my mother’s birthday, when I had a holiday, and used to make coronets of primroses and violets for her,—I can recall walking along the grass walks of that beautiful old garden and feeling as if everything in the world was perfect, and my life complete bliss for which I could never thank God enough.
When the weather was too bad to spend my leisure hours out of doors I plunged into the library at haphazard, often making “discovery” of books of which I had never been told, but which, thus found for myself, were doubly precious. Never shall I forget thus falling by chance on Kubla Khan in its first pamphlet-shape. I also gloated over Southey’s Curse of Kehama, and The Cid and Scott’s earlier works. My mother did very wisely, I think, to allow me thus to rove over the shelves at my own will. By degrees a genuine appetite for reading awoke in me, and I became a studious girl, as I shall presently describe. Beside the library, however, I had a play-house of my own for wet days. There were, at that time, two garrets only in the house (the bedrooms having all lofty coved ceilings), and these two garrets, over the lobbies, were altogether disused. I took possession of them, and kept the keys lest anybody should pry into them, and truly they must have been a remarkable sight! On the sloping roofs I pinned the eyes of my peacock’s feathers in the relative positions of the stars of the chief constellations; one of my hobbies being Astronomy. On another wall I fastened a rack full of carpenter’s tools, which I could use pretty deftly on the bench beneath. The principal wall was an armoury of old court-swords, and home-made pikes, decorated with green and white flags (I was an Irish patriot at that epoch), sundry javelins, bows and arrows, and a magnificently painted shield with the family arms. On the floor of one room was a collection of shells from the neighbouring shore, and lastly there was a table with pens, ink and paper; implements wherewith I perpetrated, inter alia, several poems of which I can just recall one. The motif of the story was obviously borrowed from a stanza in Moore’s Irish Melodies. Even now I do not think the verses very bad for 12 or 13 years old.
THE FISHERMAN OF LOUGH NEAGH.
The autumn wind was roaring high
And the tempest raved in the midnight sky,
When the fisherman’s father sank to rest
And left O’Nial the last and best