If we opened the garden door we entered a verdant wilderness of paths crossing one another; and each was (and there lay the charm) in itself a solitude. Country lanes may break the grand lines of a landscape; but, in the neighbourhood of a great and crowded city, every glimpse of nature is pleasant and lovely. I remember the sense of serene happiness I felt in walking out with Kate in the early morning, along a quiet path; now, alas! crowded with villas, but then called "Nightingale lane," and sheltered on one side by a cheerful orchard, with its white and fragrant blossoms in Spring, or its bending fruit in Autumn, glittering in the rising sun; and, on the other, screened by a row of elms, whose ancient roots grasped earth in the tenacious hold of ages, and whose broad base young green shoots veiled with a tender grace. The horizon on our left was bounded by an old park, a stately, motionless grove of beech-trees, above which, bending to every breeze, rose a few tall and graceful poplars; to our right, hidden in its garden, lay our humble home. Kate, reading her favourite Thomas ? Kempis, walked on, her eyes bent on the page; I followed more slowly, reading, child though I was, from the Divine book man cannot improve, and vainly tries to mar.
Between the path and the hedge which enclosed the orchard, lay a broad ditch. There grew green grasses, that bent to the breeze like forests, and beneath which flowed a faint thread of water, the river of that small world, peopled with nations of insects, and which to me possessed both attraction and beauty. For there the ground-ivy trailed along the earth, its delicate blue flowers hidden by fresh leaves; there rose the purple bugle, the stately dead-nettle, with its broad leaves and white whorls, and grew the cheerful celandine, bright buttercups, the sunny dandelion, the diminutive shepherd's purse, the starry blossoms of the chickweed, the dark bitter-sweet with its poisonous red berries, the frail and transparent flowers of the bindweed, sheltered in the prickly hedge like shy or captive beauties, with every other common weed and plant which man despises, and God disdained not to fashion.
My communion with nature, though restricted, was very sweet. I was debarred from her wildness and grandeur, but I became all the more familiar with those aspects which she takes around human homes. And is there not a great charm in the very way in which man and nature meet? The narrow garden, its flowers and shrubs so tenderly protected and cared for, the ivy that clings around the porch, the grass that half disputes the little beaten path, have a half wild, half domestic grace, I have often felt as deeply, as the romantic beauty of ancient glens, where mountain torrents make a way through pathless solitudes. My world might seem narrow, but I never found it so whilst the deep skies, with all their changes, spread above to tell of infinity, and the sweet and mysterious song of free birds, under distant cover, allured thought away to many a green and shady bower.
Not less pleasant to me were the autumn evenings. They still stand forth on the background of memory, as vivid and minutely distinct as the home scenes, by light of lamp or fire-flame, which the old masters like to paint. Cornelius loved music and poetry, those two glorious gifts of God to man. He played and sang with taste, and read well. When the piano was closed, he took down some favourite volume from the bookcase, and gave us a few scenes from Shakspeare, a grand passage from Milton, a calm meditative page from Wordsworth. Sometimes he opened AEschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, and, translating freely, transported us into a world gone by, but beautiful and human in its passions and sorrows. Miss O'Reilly listened attentively; then, after hearing some fine fragment from the Bound Prometheus, some stirring description from the Seven against Thebes, she would look up from her work and say, with mingled wonder and admiration—
"That is grand, Cornelius!"
"Is it not?" he would reply, with kindling glance, for they both had the same strong admiration for the heroic and great.
I should have been very happy, but for one drawback. It was natural, perhaps, that having been reared by my father, and never having known my mother, I should attach myself to Cornelius in preference to his sister. But in vain I strove to win his attention and favour; in vain I ran, not merely on his bidding, but on a word and on a look; gave him his hat and gloves in the morning; watched for him every fine evening at the garden gate; followed him about the house like his shadow, sat when he sat, happy if I could but catch his eye; in vain I showed him how devotedly fond I was of him; he treated me with the most tantalizing mixture of kindness, carelessness, and indifference. Half the time, he did not seem to see me about the house; when he became conscious that I existed, he gave me a careless nod and smile. If I did anything for him he thanked me, and stroked my hair; yet if I looked unwell, he was quick to notice it. He occasionally made me small presents of books and toys, and every evening he devoted several hours to the task of teaching me. I worked hard to give him satisfaction, but he only took this as a matter of course; called me a good child, and, as I was quiet and silent, generally allowed me to sit somewhere near him for the rest of the evening, and this was all: he seldom caressed, he never kissed me.
With his sister Cornelius was very different, and I felt the contrast keenly. He loved her tenderly; he was proud of her beauty; he liked to call her his handsome Kate, to talk and jest with her, and often, too, to sit by her and caress her with a fondness more filial than brotherly; whilst I looked on, not merely unheeded, but wholly forgotten.
Of course I was still less thought of, when, as happened occasionally, evening visitors dropped in. I remember a dark-eyed Miss Hart, who kept up a gay quarrel with Cornelius, and of whom I was miserably jealous, until, to my great satisfaction, she got married and went into the country; also a bald and learned Mr. Mountford, whom I disliked heartily for keeping Cornelius to himself, but who, in a lucky hour, having made an offer to Kate and being rejected, came no more; likewise Mr. Leopold Trim, whom I detested on the score of his own merits.
As I entered the front parlour on a mild autumn afternoon which I had spent in the garden, I found Miss O'Reilly entertaining him and another gentleman. Mr. Trim sat by the fire in his usual attitude: that is to say, with his hands benevolently resting on his knees, his little eyes peering about the room, and his capacious mouth good-naturedly open.