LETTER III.
| 18 Stanfield Gardens, |  |
| South Kensington, | |
| May 28, 1875. |
And there you have us down to date, my Susie. The sunshine and the crisp breezes, the innocent early teas with cresses and prawns, the grand long nights full of sleep, have put us all right with the world again; but after all Brighton's only a bit of West End moved off down by the sea, and if one must live in London at all, why, it's at its best for three or four weeks to come. And we're to get off early to Switzerland this year, for fear that it mayn't be so easy next summer. For Ronayne's father is clearing away to make him stand for that dreary territory of hovels and bogs in which the paternal mansion is situate. Fancy Ronayne an M.P.! And an Irish M.P.! I fight against it—under cover. The dream of my heart is an appartement avec tenasse in Paris, and in summer to turn vagrants and tramps as now. It's so unlucky Ronayne should have been the eldest son: duty, respectability, and the proprieties have such a much stronger gripe upon him, and we're born vagabonds, both.
But, what must be, must. Meanwhile I console myself with my window-gardening. And you should see the house-front!—the balcony that will be a perfect bower presently. My window-boxes, the gayest mosaics of color, and the vestibule lined with callas, acacias, and heath—against a background of ferns and ivy. We were never so magnificent before, and it was Ronayne's surprise for me when we came back from the sea—he having given our florist carte-blanche; whereas I, bearing a conscience, have bargained with him always, and carefully counted my pots.
Mrs. Malise's disciplinary Johanna brought her charge for a little visit to my nursery yesterday. And my heart aches so for that baby! He's a great child, well made, and with his mother's wonderful eyes—but so heavy, listless—"Meek as a work'us' child brought up on skilly," Ronayne renders it—and though he's perfectly clean now, and comfortably clad, nobody would dream he was a young mother's first baby, so ornamentless and sombre-hued are his little garments.
Nurse brings back indignant accounts of the way he's left to amuse himself, or cry his fill, when out for an airing in Kensington Gardens. "Hours, ma'am, she keep that poor thing a-frettin' or a-sleepin' in his perambulator, the east wind a-cuttin' about him as draughty as draughty, while she sits on a bench a-makin' her foolish lace or talkin' to some of them German bandmen. He never gets taken out, nor played with, nor has any playthings. It's just cruelty to animals—that's what it is!" finishes my nursery dragon, who is as soft-hearted as she is grim of exterior and grammatically independent in speech.
Mrs. Malise has been absent at suffrage meetings in Scotland and Ireland for a month past, Miss Hedges told me when dining here just after our return. Mrs. Stainton, the porcelain widow, was invited also, and a curious and wonderfully interesting person we find her: the daintiest small creature—complexion like an ivory painting, deep-set, seeress eyes, and looking fairly spirit-like for fragility, in her long black dress and white lace shawl. Nothing could well be more piquant than to hear this filmy little thing, in a voice that would have fitted Queen Mab, recount her experiences in the most widely separated circles of life and thought, or quietly give utterance to quaint, audacious speculations, as to mysteries that perplex so many of us concerning this existence and the eternity it preludes. "If there be a hereafter!" I heard some one answer to a remark of hers. "Ah, that was never a doubt to me save for a very brief space," she replied. "I am like the Curé de Ars—'I know some one who would be finely taken in if there were no Paradise!'" Her exquisiteness of look, the fascinating talk, the soft, helpless manner are so appealing that one is disposed to treat her as some wandered denizen of the air and skies, though she hangs effortless, her whole weight upon one, and there is scarce a limit to her fine-lady and delicate-organization requirements.
The daughter of a Low Church dean, she became, in her husband's time, first broad church, then rationalist; after his death, because of extraordinary, extra natural occurrences that befell her, a spiritualist, and now she seems to be turning toward Catholicism, though Miss Hedges, who is a Catholic, shakes her head, and says she always feels very hopeless of people essentially given to all manner of vague interpretations, fanciful twistings of simple doctrine, and æsthetic sentimental mysticism.
"Obedience is in the order of existence," says the little lady. "I long for authority; I long for a voice I shall not question, to whose decision I can submit all the questions that torture me."