_ FIRST PART. MY GIRLHOOD
THIRD CHAPTER
Out of the mist and veil of my own memory, as distinguished from Father Dan's, there comes first the recollection of a big room containing a big bed, a big wardrobe, a big dressing table, a big praying-stool with an image of Our Lady on the wall above it, and an open window to which a sparrow used to come in the mornings and chirp.
When I came to recognise and to classify I realised that this was my mother's room, and that the sweet somebody who used to catch me up in her arms when I went tottering on voyages of discovery round the vast place was my mother herself, and that she would comfort me when I fell, and stroke my head with her thin white hand, while she sang softly and rocked me to and fro.
As I have no recollection of ever having seen my mother in any other part of our house, or indeed in any other place except our carriage when we drove out in the sunshine, I conclude that from the time of my birth she had been an invalid.
Certainly the faces which first emerge from the islands of my memory are the cheerful and sunny ones of Doctor Conrad and Father Dan. I recall the soft voice of the one as he used to enter our room after breakfast saying, "How are we this morning ma'am?" And I remember the still softer voice of the other as he said "And how is my daughter to-day?"
I loved both of them, but especially Father Dan, who used to call me his Nanny and say I was the plague and pet of his life, being as full of mischief as a goat. He must have been an old child himself, for I have clear recollection of how, immediately after confessing my mother, he would go down on all fours with me on the floor and play at hide-and-seek around the legs of the big bed, amid squeals and squeaks of laughter. I remember, too, that he wore a long sack coat which buttoned close at the neck and hung loose at the skirts, where there were two large vertical pockets, and that these pockets were my cupboards and drawers, for I put my toys and my doll and even the remnants of my cakes into them to be kept in safe custody until wanted again.
My mother called me Mally veen (Mary dear) and out of love of her only child she must have weaned me late, for I have vague memories of her soft white breasts filled with milk. I slept in a little wickerwork cot placed near her bed, so that she could reach me if I uncovered myself in the night. She used to say I was like a bird, having something birdlike in my small dark head and the way I held it up. Certainly I remember myself as a swift little thing, always darting to and fro on tiptoe, and chirping about our chill and rather cheerless house.
If I was like a bird my mother was like a flower. Her head, which was small and fair, and her face, which was nearly always tinged with colour, drooped forward from her delicate body like a rose from its stalk. She was generally dressed in black, I remember, but she wore a white lace collar as well as a coif such as we see in old pictures, and when I call her back to my mind, with her large liquid eyes and her sweet soft mouth, I think it cannot be my affection alone, or the magic of my childish memory, which makes me think, after all these years and all the countries I have travelled in, and all the women I have seen, that my darling mother, though so little known and so little loved, was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Even yet I cannot but wonder that other people, my father especially, did not see her with my eyes. I think he was fond of her after his own fashion, but there was a kind of involuntary contempt in his affection, which could not conceal itself from my quick little eyes. She was visibly afraid of him, and was always nervous and timid when he came into our room with his customary salutation,
"How now, Isabel? And how's this child of yours?"
From my earliest childhood I noticed that he always spoke of me as if I had been my mother's child, not his, and perhaps this affected my feeling for him from the first.
I was in terror of his loud voice and rough manner, the big bearded man with the iron grey head and the smell of the fresh air about his thick serge clothes. It was almost as if I had conceived this fear before my birth, and had brought it out of the tremulous silence of my mother's womb.
My earliest recollections are of his muffled shout from the room below, "Keep your child quiet, will you?" when I was disturbing him over his papers by leaping and skipping about the floor. If he came upstairs when I was in bed I would dive under the bedclothes, as a duck dives under water, and only come to the surface when he was gone. I am sure I never kissed my father or climbed on to his knee, and that during his short visits to our room I used to hold my breath and hide my head behind my mother's gown.
I think my mother must have suffered both from my fear of my father and from my father's indifference to me, for she made many efforts to reconcile him to my existence. Some of her innocent schemes, as I recall them now, seem very sweet but very pitiful. She took pride, for instance, in my hair, which was jet black even when I was a child, and she used to part it in the middle and brush it smooth over my forehead in the manner of the Madonna, and one day, when my father was with us, she drew me forward and said:
"Don't you think our Mary is going to be very pretty? A little like the pictures of Our Lady, perhaps--don't you think so, Daniel?"
Whereupon my father laughed rather derisively and answered:
"Pretty, is she? Like the Virgin, eh? Well, well!"
I was always fond of music, and my mother used to teach me to sing to a little upright piano which she was allowed to keep in her room, and on another day she said:
"Do you know our Mary has such a beautiful voice, dear? So sweet and pure that when I close my eyes I could almost think it is an angel singing."
Whereupon my father laughed as before, and answered:
"A voice, has she? Like an angel's, is it? What next, I wonder?"
My mother made most of my clothes. There was no need for her to do so, but in the absence of household duties I suppose it stimulated the tenderness which all mothers feel in covering the little limbs they love; and one day, having made a velvet frock for me, from a design in an old pattern book of coloured prints, which left the legs and neck and arms very bare, she said:
"Isn't our Mary a little lady? But she will always look like a lady, whatever she is dressed in."
And then my father laughed still more contemptuously and replied,
"Her grandmother weeded turnips in the fields though--ninepence a day dry days, and sixpence all weathers."
My mother was deeply religious, never allowing a day to pass without kneeling on her prayer-stool before the image of the Virgin, and one day I heard her tell my father that when I was a little mite, scarcely able to speak, she found me kneeling in my cot with my doll perched up before me, moving my lips as if saying my prayers and looking up at the ceiling with a rapt expression.
"But she has always had such big, beautiful, religious eyes, and I shouldn't wonder if she becomes a Nun some day!"
"A nun, eh? Maybe so. But I take no stock in the nun business anyway," said my father.
Whereupon my mother's lips moved as if she were saying "No, dearest," but her dear, sweet pride was crushed and she could go no farther. _