Perfidious Mary Ann! She failed to keep this large and liberal promise when, in my sore hour of need, I indited an ill-spelt epistle to her from Saxon shores, and urged her to come and save me. I did not insist upon the whacking, I only entreated to be taken back to Erin. Probably the letter never reached her.
I think that it was immediately after this engrossing hour that I found Mary Ann sobbing over an open trunk in the lumber-room. "Your very own, alannah; look at the big white letters," she cried, and wiped her eyes in a new linen garment before pressing it into the box. "Thim monsthers can't say as you haven't chimmies fit for any lady of the land. Ye're to wear a black cashmere o' a Sunday, just as if all your relatives was dead. Did ye ever hear the likes?"
I certainly never did, for strange to say I had not worn a black dress after Stevie's death. I did not, however, dislike the notion. Black was not a hue with which I was familiar. Still musing on all the extraordinary things that were continually happening, and wondering whether the eventual climax of an uncertain career would prove the shark or the gallows, not, however, using this superb word in my reflections on the end of a little girl precariously balanced on the boards of existence, I found myself confronted with my terrible grandmother in a farewell interview.
She was propped up with pillows, and her eternal egg-flip was beside her on a little table, along with her prayer-book, her spectacles, her rosary, and her favourite novel, which I afterwards learned was "Adam Bede." My mind reverted then, and has since often reverted, to an abominable scene in that chamber I abhored. I had been noisy or disobedient,—raced down the passage, or refused to go to bed when uncle Lionel shouted to me from above the kitchen-stairs, probably stamping my foot with the air of a little fury, which was my sad way in those untamed days. With a Napoleonic gesture, my uncle caught my ear, and dragged me into the awful presence. Here he was solemnly ordered to fetch the knife-sharpener, which he did; heated it among the flames till it glowed incandescent scarlet; then, my grandmother looking fiendishly on, gathered me between his knees, held my mouth open with one hand, and approached it to my lips. Of course it did not touch me, but memory shrinks, a blank, into the void of terror.
The precise text of my grandmother's address I forget, but the nature of her harangue is unforgettable. She addressed me as might a magistrate a refractory subject about to be discharged from a reformatory. I was exhorted not to be bold, or bad, or saucy, to say my prayers, to tell the truth, not to thieve (oh! that damson-jam and those coppers), not to get caught again by the police; I was warned that I might drop dead in one of my violent fits of rage, and then I would surely go to hell; was adjured to learn my lessons, to respect my superiors, to break none of the Commandments, to avoid the seven deadly sins, learn the Catechism by heart, with the alternative of having my hair cut short and being sent to the poorhouse. She then held out her yellow hand, and placed a sparkling sovereign in my small palm.
"Don't lose it. There are twenty shillings in it, and in each shilling twelve pennies. Good-bye, and don't forget all I've said."
She shook my hand in her loose gentlemanly fashion, as if I were a young man going to college instead of a baby girl of seven about to be expatriated alone among strangers, in an alien land, for no conceivable reason but the singular caprice of her who had given me so ill a gift as life. It was the last time I saw my grandmother. I heard soon of her death with complete indifference.
"Polly was a jolly Japanese," sang my uncle cheerily, as he caught me up in his arms, and carried me down to the cab, on which Dennis had placed my trunk. Mary Ann was weeping on the steps. She handed me a bag of gingerbread and two apples, and told me I was not to be "down."
"'Tis yourself that's worth all the English that ever was born," she asserted, and I dolorously assured her that whatever happened, even if the Queen came in person to hang me, I would keep "up."