The wall of Colamore Harbour was protected by an iron chain that swung low from the big stones that divided the festoons. Birdie's foot slipped, and the child in a twinkling tumbled over, and plunged, with a hollow crash, into the heavy grey sea. Happily there were bathing-women and fishermen within hail, and as quickly as she had taken an unexpected bath, Birdie was once more in our midst, dripping like a Newfoundland, white and shaking with terror. One of the big boys took her up in his arms and tenderly carried her home. We all followed, awed and hysterical.
My mother was standing in the front garden talking to the gardener, when the party marched in upon her. She frowned as Birdie was deposited on the gravel path in a woeful state—her wet green skirt clinging to her little legs, the discoloured poppies of her hat flat upon the wet ribbon.
"Change that child's clothes," said my mother, indifferently, as if she were all her life accustomed to the sight of a terrified child rescued from the deep, and went on talking to the gardener.
It would be a bold and inhuman assertion to make, and certainly one I am far from maintaining, that harsh treatment is the proper training of children. But my mother's method has undoubtedly answered better than that of many a tender or self-sacrificing mother. It built us in an admirable fashion for adversity,—taught us to rely upon ourselves, taught us, above all, that necessary lesson, how to suffer and not whine. It is only when I observe how feebly and shabbily a spoiled woman can face trouble and pain, that I feel one may with reason cherish some pride of the power of enduring both with a smile. And when, stupefied and shamed, I contemplate the petty trickeries to which worldliness and untruthfulness can reduce a woman, the infamous devices a slender purse can drag educated ladies into, thus am I partially consoled for the sufferings of childhood. It is much, when one fronts battle, to have been reared in an atmosphere of absolute rectitude, of truthful and honourable instinct. It is a blessing indeed when love includes all this. But bleak as the start was, I would not have had it otherwise at the cost of these great and virile virtues. And since it would appear that the Irish habit of boasting is an incorrigible weakness, and that even in these democratic days my people still persist in descending from kings who have slept in peace over seven hundred years, and may without any extravagant scorn of fact be presumed to have passed for ever into the state of legend, I am glad to acknowledge the priceless debt of common-sense to a Scottish mother. Kings are all very well in their way, especially if they happen to be reigning; but when one learns as authentic fact that an Irish journalist has offered an article to an unknown editor, accompanied with a letter stating that the blood of seven kings runs in his veins, one feels that such a race is all the more rational for a little foreign blood to modify the imperishable and universal blight of royalty.
Chapter XXVII. A DISMAL END OF HOLIDAYS.
For the joy of our small kingdom a delightful Fenian dropped into our midst. It was breathed among us in fatal undertones that he had actually shot a man. He was a figure of romance, if ever there was one. He went about with long boots, and an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. He had lovely dark-blue eyes, which Pauline described as Byronic, and lisped most captivatingly. He was a kind of adopted relative, and, as a special correspondent, has passed into history. He became our elder brother, and in the years to come solaced himself in camp by regarding Agnes as a lost early love. We lay about him on the grass as he told us the tales of the Wonderful Nights. Better still, he invented adventures of his own almost as alarming and enthralling. He told us that he had been to Persia, which was not true—but no matter. We believed in the Persian princess who had swung herself, at the risk of life, from the harem window to become a Christian and marry him; and the king, her royal father, who followed the lovers on horseback and was stabbed in the breast by Edmond's trusty sword. The incoherence of his reminiscences constituted their conspicuous charm. To-day we left him at Samarcand, and on the morrow found him with a fresh and more perilous love-adventure at Constantinople.
It was entrancing.
And then he would offer us a taste of adventure for ourselves: in the absence of our parents he would crowd us into the waggonette, and drive my stepfather's pet horses at a diabolical rate up by the exquisite coast-road of Sorrento, into Bray and through the Wicklow mountains, each curve and hollow and hilly bank menacing to lay us in pieces upon the landscape, and we shouting and hurrahing, in a fond notion that we were offering to the universe the spectacle of the instability of the United Kingdom. Edmond's formidable method of conspiring against the Government at that time consisted in delighting and amusing a troop of little girls!