Now that I know the sequel, and understand what the beginning meant, I cannot recall our laughter over Molly's first experiences without a thrill of horror. The nuns had placed her with titled folk—Lord and Lady E., with whom lived Lady E.'s father, an old earl, a widower. Molly was the most ingenuous and garrulous of creatures. She spent her first vacation some months later with us, and kept us at recreation hour in shouts of laughter and scorn over her adventures. The old earl was the most extraordinary old man, according to her. He was always meeting her alone, here, there, and everywhere. She seemed to think it was a sort of schoolboy's game. Once he showed her in the garden, when no one was by, a splendid diamond bracelet, which he had bought for her.
"O Molly!" we all screamed in joy, "he wants to marry you, and you'll be a grand countess, like the gipsy maiden of the song."
But Molly curled her lips haughtily. Did we know that he was seventy, a queer old gentleman, just fit to be tucked into bed and given gruel? The suspicion of evil design never once entered her innocent head, for the simple reason that she had not the ghost of a suspicion of any kind of evil.
Then Lady E. went up to town, and left this bewitching creature at the mercy of her husband. Molly again regarded it in the light of a capital game. The aged earl and his middle-aged son-in-law appeared to be on strained terms. The poor goose never suspected why. Lord E. insisted on her sitting in his wife's place at table—and still she suspected nothing.
One night, she told us, shrieking with laughter as at the height of the grotesque, Lord E. mistook her room for the nursery, and entered it in his shirt. Not the faintest feeling of anger or fear on the part of this blind, silly maid. All she did was to go into convulsions of laughter, "because he looked so ugly and so ridiculous." But it was still part of the high old game of life, where everything happens to send one into fits of laughter. That tears, that trouble, that shame and blighting misery lay in wait for her, this radiant, unconscious, ignorant, and foolish innocent could not then suspect.
We, too, thought it a splendid game, laughed heartily at the ridiculous figure she described Lord E. as cutting in his nightshirt, agreed with her that the old earl was a monstrous old fool to go skipping in that absurd way down the park avenues with her, putting his hand upon his heart, sighing and talking in a wild incoherent way about "the loveliest girl on earth," whom Molly, the least vain of creatures, never for one moment suspected was herself. For she was far too busy laughing at people to understand them. You had but to stand solemnly before her, and say, "It's a wet day," and off she was on a ringing cascade. What you said she probably did not understand in the least; but the expression of your eye, the tone of your voice, made her laugh.
And so the infamous nature of the pursuit of the earl and his son-in-law quite escaped her, and neither the diamond bracelet, nor Lord E. in his shirt at night in her room, awoke the faintest throb of alarm. All this to her and us was part of the eternal joke of nature. And a very, very few years afterwards, I learned, one who had loved her well and sought her far discovered her at night in the vicinity of the Haymarket, with paint upon her cheeks and lips, and the fatal brightness of consumption looking out of her hollow violet eyes.
My remembrance of the rest of my stay at Lysterby fades away upon the heavy perfume of incense in the cold aisles of the cathedral, whither we were conducted by the nuns for the breathlessly interesting offices of Holy Week. It is a long dream of sombre tones and solemn notes, which I followed in a passionate absorption in the "Offices of Holy Week," printed in Latin and English, for which I paid the sum of four shillings. I studied those offices so diligently, followed them so accurately, that afterwards I could detect to a movement, a note, a Latin word, any error or omission in the Lenten services of the pro-cathedral of Dublin, where I must say the rites struck me as shorn of all impressiveness.
But at Lysterby functions were rigidly correct. The evening office of Tenebræ was a funereal delight. The services of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday were religious excitements on which to live for months. I shut my eyes, even now in middle age, and I see again the long grey cathedral aisles dim in taper-light, altars hung in black, and the lean aristocratic visage of Father More above the surplice and violet stole, and I hear him chant in his thin, melodious voice, "Oremus, flectamus genua!" and listen again for the response, "Levate!"
I cannot precisely define my sensations in this period. Religion with me was nothing but an intense emotion nourished upon incense, music, taper-lit gloom, and a mysterious sense of the intangible. It was in the fullest meaning of the word sensuous; but while its attraction lasted, nothing I have since known could be compared with it for intensity. While under its spell, you seem to float in the air, to touch the wings of the angels, to be yourself part of the heavenly sphere you aspire to attain. Rapture itself is a mean enough word to define your emotions. And then you come back to earth with a sense of unspeakable deception and surprise. You feel hungry, and loathe yourself for the vulgar need. Your ear is buffeted by loud earthly sounds instead of the roll of the organ and the monotonous solemnity of Gregorian chant.