My grandmother was dead, but Dennis and Mary Ann still lived with my uncle Lionel. What a joy our meeting! So "thim English" hadn't made mince-meat of me! I was whole and sound, Mary Ann remarked, but mighty spare of flesh and colour. "Just a rag of a creature," Dennis commented, as he lifted my arm. "Why didn't ye write and tell us ye were hungry, alannah?"
"I did so," I promptly retorted; "but Sister Esmeralda rubbed it out, and put in something else which wasn't a bit true."
"Troth, and 'tis meself 'ud enjoy givin' that wan a piece of me moind."
The whiff of the brogue was strong enough to waft you to the clouds. But how good to be with these two honest souls again! Uncle Lionel gave me a crown-piece, when he had tortured my check with his chaven chin, and called me a little renegade because of my English accent, and then I went out to the garden, neglected ever since the death of my grandfather.
Where was Hamlet, and whither had vanished Elsinore? Where was the youth with the future revolutionary name, who used to come bounding over the hedge, cheerily humming "Love among the Roses"? There were no roses now, and the house next door was to let.
After the trim gardens of England, this desolate old slip of garden, where weeds and thick grasses grew along the uncared paths, seemed a cemetery of dead seasons. Fruit-trees that bore neither blossom nor fruit; flower-beds where never leaf nor flower now bloomed; alleys where last year's autumn leaves still lay; broken pots that used to make such a gay parterre of geraniums of every hue when my grandfather lived; defoliaged rose-bushes, now mere summer urns of unfulfilled promise, and scarce a red bunch on the currant-boughs. And the pool, with the circle of watering-cans above, now rusty and untouched, where I used to watch for the first faint line of shadow cast by the gathering dusk, which stole across its clear face in keeping with the stealing flight of light above—how dead and sad all this seemed, despite its quaint familiarity. I was but a child, and yet as I stood once more in that neglected garden, I had some premonition of the immitigable sadness of remembrance, the feeling that there was already a past that had slipped through my fingers, as the waters run ceaselessly from the fountain of life to mingle with the still river of death.
Chapter XXII. A PRINCESS OF LEGEND.
"Is childhood dead?" Lamb asks; "is there not in the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?" Can I now, without a responsive thrill, see myself flash into the unaltered dulness of that Kildare village, a little princess of legend, with the glory of foreign travel about me, the overseas cut of frock and shoes, the haughty and condescending consciousness of superiority?