Chapter IX. MY FRIEND MARY ANN.
Seven has been described as the age of reason. I am curious to know why, since many of us at fifty can hardly be said to have attained that rare and sublime period. John Stuart Mill, for his misfortune, at seven may have discovered some rudimentary development of sense, but no other child of my acquaintance past or present. But if seven is not marked for me by the dawn of reason, it is important as the start of continuous reminiscence.
Memory is no longer fragmentary and episodic. Life here begins to be a story, ever broken, ever clouded, with radiant hours amid its many sadnesses, quaint and adorable surprises ever coming to dry the tears of blank despair and solitude; an Irish melody of mirth and melancholy, all sorts of unimaginable tempests of passion and tears, soothed as instantaneously as evoked, by the quickening touch of rapture and racial buoyancy. Mine was the loneliest, the most tragic of childhoods, yet I doubt if any little creature has ever been more susceptible to the intoxication of laughter, more vividly responsive to every mirthful and emotional claim of life.
After my singular and enchanting experience of the police-station, where, as a rule, the hardened instruments of justice are not permitted to show themselves in so gracious and hospitable a light, it was decided to expatriate the poor little rebel beyond the strip of sullen sea that divides the shamrock shores from the home of the rose. There, at least, vagrant fancies would be safely sheltered behind high conventual walls, and the most unmerciful ladies of Mercy, in a picturesque midland town of England, were requested to train and guide me in the path I was not destined to adorn, or indeed to persevere in.
Pending the accomplishment of my doom, I was removed from the centre of domestic discord and martyrdom to the suburban quiet of my grandfather's house.
This decision had its unexpected compensation. The cross old cook, whom I had not seen since the day I stole her bowl of damson-jam, had disappeared to make way for Mary Ann, the divine, the mysterious, the sublime, the ever-delicious Mary Ann. Where did she come from, whither has she vanished, the soother of the sorrows of those most lamentable days?
Alas! now I know the secret of her enchantment, of those perishable surprises of mood and imagination that so perpetually lifted me out of my miserable self, diverted me in my tragic gloom, and sent me to bed each night in a state of delightful excitement. Mary Ann drank punch, and on the fiery wings of alcoholism wafted herself and me, her astonished satellite, into the land of revelry and mad movement. How ardently, then, I yearned for the reform of poor humanity through the joyous amenities of punch. Had my grandmother up-stairs consumed punch instead of her embittering egg-flip! Had the ladies of Mercy, my future persecutors, drunk punch, the world might have proved a hilarious playground for me instead of a desperate school of adversity.
Mary Ann possessed a single blemish in a nature fashioned to captivate a lonely and excitable child. She worshipped my uncle Lionel. My uncle Lionel was his mother's favourite—a Glasgow lad, my grandfather contemptuously defined him, without the Cameron nose; a fine, handsome, fair young fellow, the picture of my mother, extremely distinguished in manner and appearance, and reputed to be a genius. He is said to have written quantities of superlative verse which he disdained to publish; but as nobody ever saw even the manuscript, we may regard the achievement as apocryphal. He had finished his studies in Paris, which explained a terrifying habit, whenever he met me—frightening the wits out of me the while by his furious look—of bursting out into what I afterwards learnt to be an old French song: "Corbleu, madame, que faites vous ici?"