How grossly and wickedly mismanaged children are by people who do not think or stop to study them! So many tears and tremors and moments of black despair, because angry and impatient persons will not take the trouble to use the right words and correct with justice and sense. To abuse an ignorant little child in disproportionate language, at an age when imagination exaggerates and magnifies everything, for an impulsive action and an inconsequent error, and tell her "she would catch it," is surely a hideous perversion of strength and power.
Relatively speaking, that moment was not less vivid and awful for me than the worst hour of a heretic in the days of the Inquisition. And I had as little faith in the justice or kindness of my judges as any wretch of those times.
My grandmother sat in bed with her glass of egg-flip in her hand, presiding relentlessly over my castigation. Again I was informed that my crime was an appalling one. I had robbed money and robbed jam. There was no softening of my grandmother's face when I said, through my sobs of terror, that I only took the money to give it to a little boy that had hurt his foot and was crying. Cook administered an unmerciful whipping, as if there were not beatings enough for me without cause down in the big town house I hated.
No, verily; there are times, when I look at happier children to-day and remember that poor unhappy little child of years ago, I feel there are wrongs we cannot be expected to forgive, scars no time can efface, blunders no after good will ever rectify. I could weep to-day as bitterly for that little child, so alone, so throbbing with untamed fears, as ever she wept for herself then.
Chapter VIII. REVOLT.
I do not know how long my martyrdom in the town house had endured before I resolved to make an end of it myself. Nor do I yet quite understand how the scene that led to an excess of misery so terminated began.
I had been more contented that day than usual. The nurse had let me sit by the nursery fire while she bathed and dressed the latest addition to our family circle, a baby boy with a pink wrinkled face. Compared with that gurgling morsel of humanity, I felt very wise and old indeed. After that the nursemaid came and took me on her knee, and while perched there she sang me a song. I slept in the next room, and was not often allowed into the nursery, or I am sure the nurse and nursemaid would have made life easier for me.