Autobiography of a Child

by Hannah Lynch

Now I always take a hand with pleasure because of that defunct vice; but, alas! I am compelled to own that I never played so well as at eleven.

My next passion, for which Pauline this time was responsible, was genealogy. We invented a family called the L'Estranges and brought them over with the Conqueror. Where they had previously come from we did not ask. What did it matter? To come over with the Conqueror was, we knew, a certificate of chivalry. The chief, Walter, fought at the Battle of Hastings. We pictured him with golden locks, a bright and haughty visage, stern grey eyes that could look ineffably soft in a love-scene, and beautiful shining armour. We married him to a certain Saxon Edith, and down as far as the Battle of Bosworth Field, Walter and Edith were the favourite family names of the L'Estranges. To give piquancy to our most delightful game, and stimulate our imagination, we founded a cemetery of the L'Estranges. We made little wooden tombstones, on which we carved imaginary epitaphs of all the imaginary L'Estranges who had died since the Battle of Hastings. As we loathed old people in our dramatic history, except the aged lord who dies blessing a numerous progeny from time to time, all our resplendent heroes perished in romantic youth on the Spanish Main, on battle-fields, on the African coast; or rescuing Turkish princesses, or capturing Grecian isles; while their brides invariably faded away either of consumption or a broken heart at seventeen. The cemetery was peopled to excess by the time we got as far as the Battle of Bosworth Field, where the last hero fell in front of the enemy before he had time to marry the maiden of his choice.

It is astonishing how little the average child approves of a natural death. The heroes must die by violence in the flower of youth, and the heroines must perish or pine away from unnatural causes on the threshold of maidenhood. Nineteen is even old and commonplace: the age of glory is seventeen.

If you entered our garden, turned into the cemetery of the L'Estranges, you would have seen layer upon layer of little wooden sticks that looked like the indication of hidden seeds, and if you stooped to read the legend, this is the sort of thing that would have greeted your eyes:—

"Here lies Walter l'Estrange" (or Rupert, or Ralph, or Reginald, for we were fond of these names), "born such and such a year, wrecked off the coast of Barbary such and such a year," or "perished in a conflict with Spanish pirates," &c.; and beside him, with day and date of birth and burial, "Here lies Edith, his beloved wife, daughter of Lord Seymour or Admiral So-and-so."

In a big ledger, recorded in Pauline's sprawling calligraphy, were the lives and characters of the imaginary dead. It was remarkable that all our heroes were as brave as lions, as modest and mild as lambs, and as stainless as Galahads. To lend relief to the monotony of their implacable virtue, we now and then invented a villain, who invariably died in a vulgar brawl or a duel. The battlefield, the Spanish Main, the rescue of Turkish princesses, and a noble shipwreck, were kept for the Galahads.

The last profile of my Lysterby days is that of a radiant and lovely Irish girl, who came from Southampton, the Mother House of the Ladies of Mercy, to stay with us until the nuns found her a situation as governess. Her name was Molly O'Connell: she was doubly orphaned almost since birth, her mother having died giving life to her, and her father within the following year. Everybody about her thought it very sad that her mother should have died on the very day of her birth. But I, alas! knew a sadder thing. My father, who, I am told, was a very kindly, tender-hearted man, died some months before my birth. Had I been given the choice beforehand, and known what was in store for me, I should have greatly preferred it had been my mother who died many months before my birth. But, alas! babies in the ante-natal stage are never consulted upon the question of their own interest.

Molly O'Connell remains upon memory as beauty in a flash. Never since have I seen such a flashing combination of brilliant effects. Oh! such teeth—teeth to dream of, teeth that laughed and smiled, that had a sort of light in them like white sunshine, and were the fullest expression I have ever known of the word radiance! Then her eyes were pools of violet light, where you seemed to see straight down to the bottom of a deep well, violet all the way down to the very end, where you saw yourself reflected. These glorious eyes, like the teeth, smiled and laughed; they caressed, too, looked an unfathomable tenderness and sweetness, shone, irradiated like stars, went through the whole gamut of visual emotion, from the holiest feeling, the effable eloquence of sentiment, to the bewildering obscurities of passion. They were eyes, I now know, to damn a saint, and—Heaven help us all in a world so inexplicable as ours!—they performed their fatal mission to the bitter end. Add to these eyes and teeth hair as dark as shadow, as thick as the blackness of night, a scarlet and white face, round and dimpled, of the divinest shape, the rarest and ripest combination of fruit and flower, with deep peach-like bloom upon the soft cheek, and the hue of a crimson cherry upon the curved full lips, and there you have a woman equipped for her own destruction, if she have a heart to lose, no brains to speak of, and only as much knowledge of man, of the world, as a fresh-born kitten or a toddling babe.

Molly was the joy, the light, the glory, the romance of our lives. We worshipped her for her unsurpassable loveliness, which kept rows of young eyes fixed upon her charming visage in round-lidded, wonder and awe; we adored her for her gaiety, her chatter, her incessant laughter, and we loved her for the conviction that she was as young and innocent and helpless and unlettered as ourselves.

Molly was nineteen, but she was a bigger child than any of us; and now I hold my breath in pain when I remember the nature and quality of her innocence. She had been brought up from infancy in a convent. Had her life lain among the roses, such ignorance as hers might be pardoned in her teachers. But to send out into the world, to earn her living among selfish and indifferent strangers, a young girl of such bewildering exquisiteness, and never once hint to her the kind of perils that would beset her, give her no knowledge of man, nor of herself, nor of nature! This is an iniquity the nuns of Southampton can never be pardoned.