I wish grown-up persons could realise the shudder of terror that ran through me and momentarily dimmed for me the light of day, when I heard that loud voice, encountered the mock ferocity of that blue glance, and then felt myself roughly captured by strong arms, lifted up, and a shaven chin drawn excruciatingly across my tender small visage. These are trifles to read of, but what is a trifle in childhood? A child feeds greedily upon its own excesses of sensation, thrives upon them, or is consumed by them. To these early terrors, these accumulated emotions, these swift alternations of anguish and rapture, which made opening existence for me a sort of swing, perpetually flying and dropping between tears and laughter, from radiant heights, without transition, to pitch darkness, do I attribute the nervous illnesses that have so remorselessly pursued me in after-years. The wonder is the mind itself did not give way.
Big language for a handsome young man with a blonde moustache and an elegant figure to have provoked, with his Corbleu, madame! his theatrical fury, and his shaven chin. He now and then gave me a shilling to console me, which shilling I spontaneously offered to Mary Ann, whose real consolation it was, since it filled the steaming glass for her and my friend Dennis, the red-nosed coachman, and permitted me to sit in front of them, a grave and awed spectator of their aged frolics.
Immoral undoubtedly, yet that evening bumper of punch converted Mary Ann into a charming companion. She and the fire in front of us—for it was on the verge of winter—cheered me as I had not yet been cheered since I had left my kind Kildare folk. The tyrants sat above in state, while I, enthralled below, listened to Mary Ann, as she wandered impartially from legend to reminiscence and anecdote, and not infrequently burst into song and dance.
Her sense of hospitality was warm and unlimited. Dennis she welcomed with a "Troth an' 'tis yourself, Dennis, me boy." For me she placed a chair opposite her own, and sometimes, in the midst of her enjoyment, stopped to help me to a spoonful of the stimulating liquid from her tumbler, remarking with a wink that it brightened my eyes and considerably heightened my beauty. It certainly made me cough, sputter, and smartened my eyelids with the quick sensation of tears, and then she would meditatively refer to the days when she too was young, and had pink cheeks and eyes the boys thought were never intended for the salvation of her soul. I was a curious child, and was eager for an explanation of the dark saying, on which Dennis would chuck my chin, with the liveliest of sympathetic grimaces across at the irresistible Mary Ann, which made the saying darker still, and Mary Ann would fling herself back in her chair convulsed with laughter.
"Ah, Miss Angela, 'twas the devil of a colleen I was in thim days, most outrageous, with a foot, I tell ye, as light as thim cratures as dances be moonlight. Sure didn't I once dance down Rory Evans in the big barn of Farmer Donoghue's at Clonakilty, when there was that cheering, I tell ye, fit to lift the roof off the house."
At this point she invariably illustrated the tale of her terpsichorean prowess in a legendary past by what she called "illigant step dancing," and endeavoured to teach me the Irish jig. She observed with indulgent contempt that I showed a fine capacity for the stamping and whirling and the triumphant shout, but I failed altogether in the noble science of "step dancing."
But what I preferred to the dancing, exciting as it was, were the ghost-stories, the legends of banshees, the thrilling and beautiful tales of the Colleen Bawn and Feeney the Robber. Those two were for long the hero and heroine of my infancy. Gerald Griffin's romance she, oddly enough, knew by heart. I forget now most of the names of the persons of the drama, but at seven I knew them all as dear and intimate friends: the forlorn young man who wrote those magic lines, "A place in thy memory, dearest"—did even Shelley later ever stir my bosom with fonder and deeper and less lucid emotions than those provoked by those tinkling lines, breathed from the soul of Mary Ann upon the fumes of punch?—the perfidious hero who once, like Mary Ann, drank too much and danced a jig when he ought to have been otherwise engaged, Miles, Anne Chute, and the lovely betrayed Eily.
I knew them all, wept for them as I had never wept for myself, and was only lifted out of a crushing sense of universal woe when Dennis produced an orange, which was his habit whenever he saw me on the point of succumbing under alien disaster.
Sometimes, to entertain my hosts, I would volunteer to warble my strange symphonies, and was never so ecstatically happy as when I felt the tears of musical rapture roll down my cheeks, when Dennis, by way of applause, always observed lugubriously—
"Ah, 'twas the poor master was proud indeed of her voice. 'She'll be a Catherine Hayes yet, you'll see, Dennis,' he used to say, 'or maybe she'll compose illigant operas.'"