Once when I was threatened with congestion of the brain from over-study, I used to lie in frenzied apprehension of the feel of her hand on my brow, and she was hardly visible in the doorway before a nervous shudder shook my frame, and voice was left me to mutter, "Don't touch me! oh, don't touch me!" Her glance was quite as repulsive to me, and I remember how I used to feel as if some one were walking over my grave the instant those unsmiling blue eyes fell upon me. An instinct stronger than will, even in advanced girlhood, inevitably compelled me to change my seat to get without their range.
I recall this feeling, to-day quite dead, as part of my childhood's sufferings, and I wonder that the woman who inspired it should in middle life appear to me a woman of large and liberal and generous character, whose foibles and whose rough temper in perspective have acquired rather a humorous than an antipathetic aspect. But children, but girls, are not humorists, and they take life and their elders with a lamentable gravity.
On this occasion it was my mother who washed my face in new milk. The fragrance and coolness of the milk were delicious, if only a rougher and coarser hand had rubbed my cheeks.
While still submitting to the process, I stared eagerly round the room. There was a grand piano in black polished wood, the sofa was blue velvet and black wood, and the carpet a very deep blue. The air smelt of gillyflowers, and there were big bunches in several vases. Yet my mother assures me she never met me at Cork or elsewhere, never washed my face in new milk, is unacquainted with that black piano, the blue velvet sofa, and the gillyflowers.
She admits she did possess a pale green robe of poplin with an enormous train, bought for a public banquet given to distinguished Americans, but doubts if I ever saw it. Nurse, whom I questioned years after, laughed at the idea as at a nightmare.
Still that journey to Cork, Mary Jane's words and my mother's, the bowl of new milk, the green poplin dress, the blue-and-black sofa, the grand piano, and the gillyflowers, remain the strongest haunting vision of those years.
The first sampler I ever saw was worked by Mary Jane. I associate the alphabet in red and green wool with shining blue-black curls behind a bright-green tracery of foliage upon a blue sky.
Mary Jane used to sit upon a high bank, and work assiduously at her sampler. I thought her achievement very wonderful, but I own I never could see anything in coloured wools and a needle to tempt an imaginative child. So much sitting still was dull, and the slow growth of letters or sheep or flowers exasperating to young nerves on edge. My affection for Mary Jane, however, was so strong, that I gallantly endeavoured to learn from her, but it was in the butterfly season, and there was my friend Johnny Burke racing past after a splendid white butterfly.
What was the letter "B" in alternate stitches of red and green in comparison with the capture of that butterfly?
So the child, the poet tells us, is always mother of the woman, and not even the sane and sobering influence of the years has taught me that serious matters are of greater consequence than the catching of some beautiful butterfly. As I bartered childhood to agreeable impulses, so have I bartered youth and middle age, and if I now am a bankrupt in the face of diminishing impulses, who is to blame, after all, but perverse and precarious nature?