Whither has he drifted, and what has life made of the meanest little rascal I ever knew? Has he learnt to tell the truth at least? Has some public school licked him into shape, and kicked the cowardice and spitefulness out of him? When I became acquainted with Barnes Newcome afterwards, I always thought of that boy Frank. "Sister So-and-so, that nasty Angela is teasing me." "Mother This, I can't eat my bread-and-milk; that horrid Angela has put salt into it." And then, when no one was looking, and a child weaker than himself was at hand, what sly pinches, and kicks, and vicious tugs at her hair. Noble youth, future pillar of the British empire, I picture you an admirable hypocrite and bully!
I wonder why the bishop singled me out of all that small crowd for a stupendous honour. He had asked my name, and after a luxurious lunch with a few privileged mothers in the convent, he requested somebody to fetch me. The nuns did not fail to impress the full measure of this honour upon me, and when I came into the refectory, where the bishop was enthroned like a prince, I caught a reassuring beam from my dear friend, Mother Aloysius!
The bishop pushed back his chair and held out both arms to me. I was a singularly pretty child, I know. My enemy, Sister Esmeralda, had even said that I had the face of an angel with the heart of a fiend. A delicate, proud, and serious little visage, with the finish, the fairness, the transparency of a golden-haired doll, meant to take the prize in an exhibition. But this would hardly explain the extraordinary distinction conferred on me by a man who has passed into history,—a grave and noble nature, with as many cares as a Prime Minister, a man who saw men and women in daily battalions, and to whom a strange little girl of nine he had never spoken to, could scarcely seem a more serious creature in life than a rabbit or a squirrel.
He had a kind and thoughtful face, deeply lined and striking. I liked his smile at once, and went up to him without any feeling of shyness.
He lifted me on to his knee, kissed my forehead, and looked steadily and long into my steady eyes. Then he kissed me again, and called for a big slice of plum-cake, which Mother Aloysius, smiling delightedly at me, was quick to hand him. He took it from the plate, and placed it in my willing grasp.
"A fine and most promising little face," I distinctly heard him say to the superioress. "But be careful of her. A difficult and dangerous temperament, all nerves and active brain, and a fearful suffering little heart within. Manage her, manage her. I tell you there's the stuff of a great saint or a great sinner here, if she should see twenty-one, which I doubt."
Alas! I have passed twenty-one years and years ago, with difficulty, it is true, with ever the haunting shadow of death about me, and time has revealed me neither the saint nor the sinner, just a creature of ordinary frailty and our common level of virtue. If I have not exactly gone to perdition—an uncheerful proceeding my sense of humour would always guard me from—I have not scaled the heights. I have lived my life, by no means as well as I had hoped in the days we are privileged to hope and to dream, not as loftily, neither with distinction nor success; but I have not accomplished any particular villainy, or scandal, or crime that would justify my claiming an important place in the ranks of sinners. I have had a good deal more innocent fun, and known a great deal more suffering, than fall to the common lot; and I have enjoyed the fun with all the intensity of the mercurial Irish temperament, and endured the other with what I think I may proudly call the courage of my race. I have not injured or cheated a human being, though I have been greatly injured and cheated by more than I could now enumerate. There ends my scaling of the hill of virtues.
Of my sins it behoves me not to speak, lest I should fall into the grotesque and delightful attitude of the sailor I once heard in London make his public confession to a Salvation Army circle.
"My brothers, I am a miserable sinner. In Australia I murdered a man; I drank continually, I thieved, I ran after harlots, and led the life of debauchery. Oh, my friends, pray for me, for now I am converted and know Jesus. I am one of the just, may I remain so. But wicked and debauched and drunken as I was, there were lots more out there much worse than I." In summing up our errors and frailties, it is always a kindly comfort offered our conceit to think that there are on all sides of us "lots more much worse than we." Unless our pride chooses to take refuge in the opposite reflection, so we prefer to glory in being much worse than others.
And so ends my single interview with an eminent ecclesiastic. He kissed me repeatedly, and stroked my hair while I munched my plum-cake on his knee. He questioned me, and discovered my passionate interest in Napoleon and Josephine and the Queen of Prussia, the King-maker, and the children in the Tower. And then, having prophesied my early death and luminous or lurid career, he filled my two small hands with almond-drops and toffee, and sent me away, a being henceforth of something more than common clay.