As soon as the hall-door opened, and I stood with my foot upon the first step of the familiar stairs, a chorus of young voices shouted my name in glee. "An—gel—a!"
How flat and strange and inharmonious sounded that first greeting of my name in ears attuned to accents shriller and more thin! The English Angela was quick and clear; but the long-drawn Dublin Angela set all my teeth on an edge, and such was the shock that the ardour of my satisfaction in seeing them all again, and of appearing in their midst as a travelled personage, was damped.
"How odd you all talk," I remember remarking at tea, and being promptly crushed: "It's you with your horrid English accent that talks odd."
Still, in spite of this slight skirmish, they were glad enough to see me. The quaint little booby of Kildare, whom they had bullied to their liking, had grown into a lean, delicate, and resolute fiend, prepared to meet every blow by a buffet, every injustice by passionate revolt. I no longer needed Mrs. Clement's submissive protection. I had tasted the glory of independent fight, and henceforth my tormentors were entitled to some meed of pity, though justice bids me, in recording my iniquities, to remember that their misfortunes were merited and earned with exceeding rigour.
The first thrill of home-coming, that inexplicable vibration of memory's chord, which so early marks the development of the creature, and signifies the sharp division of past and present, ran like a flame through all my body when the noise of Mrs. Clement's big bunch of keys, rattling below stairs, reached me through the open drawing-room door.
"Mrs. Clement is down-stairs!" I shouted joyously, and instantly the band of blond-headed scamps carried me off in triumph.
Into whose hands has that sombre town-house of my parents passed? Heaven grant the children that play there are happier than ever I was; but if the old store-room, with the big linen-presses, and the long china-press with upper doors of wire-screen, the long table and square mahogany and leather armchairs and sofa, gives to the occupants to-day half the pleasure it always gave me, they are not to be pitied whatever their fate.
The wide window looked out upon a hideous little street, but in front there was a stone terrace, with two huge eagles, where Mrs. Clement kept pots of plants and flowers that, alas! never bloomed, watered she them never so sedulously; and above the terraces, if you ignored the sordid street, the sunset traced all its fairest and rarest effects upon the broad arch of heaven that spanned the street opening. Those Irish skies! you must go to Italy and Greece to find hues as heavenly. How many a sorrow unsuspected, that filled me with such intensity of despair as only childhood can feel, has been smoothed by that mysterious slip of sky between two dull rows of houses, against which in the liquid summer of blue dusk the eagles, with all the lovely significance of a romantic image, were sketched in sculptured stone. I dried my eyes to dream of lands where eagles flew as common as sparrows. I cannot now tell why, but I remember well that I grew to associate that distant glimpse of heaven from the old store-room with the isle of Prospero and Miranda. And when I learnt the Sonnets—which I knew by heart, as well as "The Tempest" and "The Merchant of Venice" before the holidays were over—I always found some strange connection between the abortive, sickly cowslips and primroses Mrs. Clement cultivated on her terrace in wooden boxes and those magic lines—
"From you have I been absent in the spring,