I remember the Craven Arms, a medieval inn all hung with roses and ivy, where my parents stayed when they came to see me, and where my sister and I slept in a long low-beamed chamber, with windows made of a surprising pattern of tiny diamond squares and green lattices that excited our enthusiastic admiration. I remember the bowling-green, that appeared to roll like a sea straight to the sky, and the long, long roads with fields on either side, and the great historic ruin that has given its name to one of Scott's novels.
To me it is impossible to recall the leafy lanes, rose-scented; the narrow pavements and sleepy little shops; the great pageant, when the town's legend became for thrilled infants an afternoon of fugitive and barbaric splendour,—without evoking vague scenes from history, and marshalling before the mind's eye brilliant and memorable figures. Dull enough, I have no doubt, for those outside the convent walls, who had to live its dull life: no discord between the outlying farmsteads and the scarcely competitive shops; the time of day not too eagerly noted, in spite of the fame of its watches; and the vociferations of the newsvendors a thing unknown. But sectarian spirit ran pretty high, if I remember rightly, and Lysterby was represented in Parliament by a fierce anti-Catholic, whose dream, we imagined, it was to hang all Jesuits and deport the nuns. His name was whispered within the convent walls in awed undertones, as a pagan persecutor may have been spoken of in the Catacombs by the early Christians. But except the veiled ladies, romantically conscious of the proximity of persecution, with the joy of a name to pronounce in shuddering alarm, all Lysterby was at peace, and free to go to bed with the lambs, with nothing to disturb it in its morning dreams less melodious than the lark's song. Private wars were of the usual anodyne and eternal character: Smith the baker not on speaking terms with Jones the butcher; Grubb the weaver, in embittered monotony of conviction, supported on unlimited quantities of beer, ready to assert every evening that Collins the miller, who lived on the other side of the common, was a scoundrel.
Of the troubles outside we little ones had no time to think. Our troubles within were abundant and absorbing, and no less absorbing and abundant were our small joys. There were ten of us only—ten queer, curious little girls; and one ragged specimen of the trousered sex—a horrid small boy, the scion of a distinguished house, whom the ladies of Mercy kept, long past the time, quaintly apparelled in black frocks and white pinafores, as an injudicious concession to claustral modesty. A boy of eight in skirts, with long brown curls upon his shoulders!
To suit his raiment, nature made him the greatest little coward and minx of the lot of us. Beside him I felt myself a brave, a gentleman, a hero of adventure. He had all the vices I intuitively abhorred. He was spiteful, a tell-tale, an ignoble whiner; and before I was a month at the Ivies I was for him "that nasty little Irish girl," whose fine furies terrified the wits out of his mean little body, whose frank boxes on a rascally small ear sent him into floods of tears, and whose masterly system of open persecution kept him ever in alarm, ever on the race to Sister This or Mother That. How we loathed that boy Frank!
On the other hand, I was speedily as popular as a creature of legend—not by reason of my virtues, which, by a rare modesty, kept themselves concealed, but because of my high spirits, untamable once let loose; my imagination, which incessantly devised fresh shudders for these timid and unimaginative children; my prodigality in invention, and my general insubordination.
The cowed and suffering baby of Ireland on Saxon shores at once revealed the Irish rebel, the instinctive enemy of law and order. I was commander-in-chief in revolt, with a most surprising gift of the gab; a satanic impulse to hurl my small weak self against authority on all occasions, and an abnormal capacity for flying out at every one with power to do me harm. Whatever may be said of the value of my courage, its quality even I the owner (who should be the last to recognise it!), must admit to be admirable. Alas! it was a virtue ever persistently wasted then as now. While it never procured me a single stroke of happiness or fortune, it has boundlessly added to the miseries of an imprudent career.
The start in Lysterby ends my patient martyrdom. Here I became the active and abominable little fiend unkindness and ill-management made of one of the gentlest and most sensitive of natures. The farther I travelled the road of childhood the more settled became my conviction that grown-up humanity, which I gradually began to loath more than even I once had feared, was my general implacable enemy. I might have grown sly and slavish in this conviction; but I am glad to say that I took the opposite course. I may be said to have planted myself against a moral wall and furiously defied all the authorities of Church and State "to come on," hitting in blind recklessness out at every one, quite indifferent to blow and defeat.
Little Angela of Kildare and Dublin, over whose sorrows I have invited the sympathetic reader to weep, was a pallid and pathetic figure. But Angela of Lysterby held her own—more even than her own, for she fought for others as well as for herself, and gave back (with a great deal more trouble at least) as much pain and affliction as she endured.