With the last evidences of our feast effaced from view, we little ones trod on each other's heels in our flight up-stairs, and staid Agnes went outside, by the way, to induce her mooning sister to go to bed. She simulated the necessary surprise and delight on beholding my mother, and after a few more words upon the heavenly spheres, the three entered the house, now cast, as Agnes fondly believed, into complete darkness.
My mother carelessly explaining why she had decided at the last minute not to sleep in town, turned the handle of the drawing-room door. The tapers, forgotten in the fray, blazed away in all their fatal admission, though the gas of the chandelier had been duly extinguished. The result was that soon the heavenly spheres were round about us instead of on high. Agnes and Pauline rapidly were made to see stars elsewhere than in the sky. When they lay prone and prostrate, not sure that their members were whole, up offended majesty came to us, shivering in our night-dresses. What did it all mean? she wanted to know. Empty bottles heaped up in the pantry corner, a ham vanished, tin boxes empty of their layers of biscuits, knives, plates, glasses, in tell-tale disarray, a broken pane in the pantry window.
We had had our fun, and now came the bad quarter of the hour, when we were expected to pay the bill in beaten flesh. How our ears tingled, our cheeks pained, our heads ached, and our arms smarted! You see it was a very long account, and it took a good deal of blows to make it up. But even the most infuriated creditor is appeased in the long-run, when the gathering in of his dues implies the excessive expenditure of nerve and muscle as such a scene as that of our castigation. The strongest woman cannot beat a half-dozen of children throughout an entire night, and my mother retired, pleased to regard her life in danger by a consequent fit of nervous exhaustion and blood to the head.
Chapter XXVI. THE SHADOWS.
All this hilarity does not imply the total absence of sadness in those bright days. I had lived and suffered too long in solitude not to have reserved a private corner for unuttered griefs, into which no regard of sister or stranger could ever penetrate. It is extraordinary the art with which a circle of children can make one chosen by mutual consent feel in all things, at every moment of the day, an intruder. The two elder than I were sworn friends, the three younger likewise; both groups united as allies. I stood between them, an outsider. I shared their games, it is true, as I shared their meals; but when they had any secrets to impart, I was left out in the cold. I daresay now, on looking back, that had my sullen pride permitted a frank and genial effort, I might easily enough have broken down this barrier. But I was morbidly sensitive, and these young barbarians were very rough and hard. Not ill-natured, but most untender.
I wonder if any other child has been so ruthlessly stabbed by home glances as I. The tale of the Ugly Duckling is, I believe, as common as all the essential legends of human grief and human joy. My dislike of large families is born of the conviction that every large family holds a victim. Amid so many, there is always one isolated creature who weeps in frozen secrecy, while the others shout with laughter. The unshared gaiety of the group is a fresh provocation of repulsion on both sides, and not all the good-will of maturity can serve to bridge that first sharp division of infancy. The heart that has been broken with pain in childhood is never sound again, whatever the sequel the years may offer. To escape the blighting influence of cynicism and harshness is as much as one may hope for; but the muffled apprehension of ache, the rooted mistrust bred by early injustice, can never be effaced.
I cannot now remember the cause of all those dreadful hours, of all those bitter, bitter tears, nor do I desire to recall them. But I still see myself many and many a day creeping under the bed that none might see me cry, and there sobbing as if the veins of my throat should burst. Always, I have no doubt, for some foolish or inadequate cause: a hostile look in response to some spontaneous offer of affection, a disagreeable word when a tender one trembled on my lips, some fresh proof of my isolation, a rough gesture that thrust me out of the home circle as an intruder, and a scornful laugh in front of me as the merry band wandered off among the rocks and left me forlorn in the garden. A robuster and less sensitive nature would have laughed down all these small troubles, and have scampered into their midst imperious and importunate. A healthier child, with sensibilities less on the edge of the skin, not cursed with what the French call an ombrageux temper, would have broken through this unconscious hostility, and have captured her place on the domestic hearth—would probably not have been aware of an unfriendly atmosphere.