Chapter XXIX. THE LAST OF LYSTERBY AND CHILDHOOD.
My mother came over again to Lysterby with Pauline and Birdie, who shared my last year in that quaint old town. My mother's second visit is a vague remembrance. I recall a singular old gentleman who joined us in an expedition to Guy's Cliff, and terrified the life out of us girls by a harrowing description of the hourly peril he walked under, and a fervid assurance that he might drop down dead at that very moment of speech. We walked behind him in frozen fear, and looked each moment to see him drop dead at our feet, but my mother discoursed in front of us quite unconcerned. He wore a cloak with a big cape, and said "Madam" after every second word. Guy's Cliff I remember as a lovely place; but the chill water of the well was not so chill as my blood while I contemplated that doomed old man.
Pauline's latest enthusiasm was Miss Braddon, and what glorious things she made of "Lady Audley's Secret," "Aurora Floyd," and, I fancy, a tale about a Captain Vulture! I read these books afterwards (that is the two first), and what poor tawdry stuff, my faith, compared with the brilliant embroideries of my most imaginative sister, who turned lead into pure gold!
Years, how many, many years, after, a man of European fame, one of the rare figures that go to make up a century's portraits, speaking of Pauline, said she was the cleverest woman he had ever known. But alas! alas! hers was not a cleverness a woman poor and obscure could utilise. A man, she would have been a great statesman, for she was a born politician. Geography was her passion, history her mania,—not that she could ever have written history, for she was too quick, complex, and vital to learn so slow a trade as that of a writer's; but hers was a miraculous intuitive seizure of history, that made it to her imperious vision present, and not the smallest historical fact in Europe escaped her attention and remembrance. Could crowned heads but know what a severe and unflinching gaze was fixed upon them! of what singular and passionate importance to her was the marriage of their most distant relatives! Modern history and modern politics became to her what classical music had been to our daft grandfather, whom she strongly resembled. They absorbed her, filled the long, long days of sick and lonely maidenhood, when, such was the vividness, the surprising vitality of her matchless imagination, that in a dull seaside residence she found, and lived and died in, her own excitements and gratifications of mind and soul.
Miss Lawson before leaving the convent had inoculated us, the little ones, her devoted admirers, with a curious passion for pinafored mites—whist. Whist for several months became the object of our existence. Lessons in comparison were but a trivial occupation. When Birdie and I next went home, we taught the game to still smaller mites, and such were the gamblers we became, that we have played whist, I the eldest of the four confederates, twelve, with renowned and aged clubmen, who found us their match. We slept with a pack of cards under our pillow, and dawn found us four little night-dressed girls gathered together in one bed with the lid of a bandbox over our joined knees, rapturously playing whist.
On the pretext of meeting our father at the station of Dalkey every evening at half-past six, we took possession of the waiting-room, cards in hands, and imperiously acquainted our friend the station-master with the fact that the room was engaged. The novelty of the situation so tickled the station-master that while we four miscreants in short skirts played our game of whist, not a soul was allowed to enter the waiting-room—an injustice I now marvel at.
The boys and girls around us were neglected. We only cared for whist, which we played from the time we got up until we went to bed, with no other variation that I remember except sea-bathing and Captain Marryat's novels. As none of the boys or girls shared our desperate passion, it followed that I and my three smaller step-sisters became inseparable, and held all our fellows who did not live for whist to be poor dull creatures. Once we made part of a children's gathering at Killiney Hill, but after the cold chicken, jelly, cakes, and lemonade, we speedily found life intolerable without a pack of cards.
"I say, Angela," whispered Birdie to me, when I was musing of honours and the odd trick, "I've brought them. Let's go behind a tree and have a game."