all the children and young folk round about us had parents who, if they went into town of a morning, were safe to return at night. most of them had mothers and aunts who lived at dalkey all the summer. only we were happy enough to be so neglected by indifferent parents as to possess a large house at our exclusive disposition four or five entire days and nights of the week. picture our rare and wild abuse of that freedom, and imagine the envy it inspired in the bosoms of other children, of natures as independent as ours!
"i say," proposed the red-headed chief, "what a capital idea if we had a ball in your house some evening when they're away."
between my eldest sister and me were two little maids, less of the rascal and less of the saint than either of us. pauline, the teller of wonderful tales at lysterby, seized upon the notion with avidity. a ball! our own ball, given[pg 220] by ourselves, and all the vagrant band between the dances refreshed by our ingenious efforts and exploits! it was a grand idea. how we clapped our hands, danced, and stamped our feet in the exuberance of content.
at first saint agnes demurred. she, after all, was the head of the house by deputy. not only was she responsible for our immortal souls, but for our fragile bodies; above all, was she responsible for the state of the larder. it was she who told the servant what to order at the general grocer; she who drew attention to the condition of the cellar, in provision for the horde of sunday visitors, and the interminable file of eager friends who made a point of inquiring after the health of my parents and their progeny on band nights.
you never understand how extremely popular you are until you are in a position to entertain at a pleasant seaside resort, within easy distance of the metropolis, where a fashionable gathering meets twice a-week to listen to the evening band, and where there are regattas. the most distant acquaintance suddenly remembers that he is your dearest friend. troops invade your garden; your drawing-room is never empty. shoals devour the refreshments of your [pg 221]dining-room. at ten o'clock, when you are on the point of barricading your too hospitable doors, men arrive cheerily to bid you the time of day, and claim a whisky-and-soda. i speak of dublin, naturally, where, as a rule, we begin our afternoon calls at midnight, and where the early awakened lark is safe to find us snoring. inhabit that same seaside place in winter, and even your dearest friend will forget to remember that he knows you. irish hospitality is justly famous. there is nothing to match it on the face of the earth. but irish abuse of hospitality is, perhaps, insufficiently recorded, and there is nothing more speedily forgotten than the unlimited favours of "open house."
my parents kept "open house" with a vengeance, which is the reason to-day that none of us possess the needful sixpence to jingle on the traditional tombstone. it was the reason also that, when our ball came off, we children were in a position to offer our thirty or forty miniature guests flowing bowls of innocuous lemonade by the dozens, ham-sandwiches, boxes of huntley & palmer's biscuits, baskets of apples purchased by the hundred by my stepfather from his friend the judge, whose orchards we daily pillaged. there was also claret and soda-water, and even[pg 222] genial port and sherry, for that portion of the community we regarded as "the grown-up,"—arthur, the red-headed boy, saint agnes, pauline, and a few others of both sexes.
we discovered that my parents designed to sit out a play on a certain evening, which meant that they would never give themselves the trouble to catch the last train, and would sleep in town. invitations were instantly despatched, saint agnes giving her consent reluctantly, but young enough to enjoy the prospect of the escapade. the ball was to open as soon as possible after the seven o'clock tea, for at dalkey, in those days, all the children dined at two o'clock and sat down at seven to a meal of tea and bread-and-butter, with barmbrack and buttered toast on high holidays.
by eight o'clock the long drawing-room was full. we lit the clusters of tapers round the walls, which were reserved for the pleasures of our elders. the gas flared in every jet of the big chandelier. you might have fancied we were celebrating a royal birthday, such was the brilliancy of our illuminated ball-room. arthur had brought down, before tea, bunches of flowers from his father's hothouse, and saint agnes[pg 223] was ever a veritable witch in the arrangement of flowers.
the red-haired chief, as master of the ceremonies, wore a huge peony in his buttonhole, and with what gusto he marshalled us about, told off couples, and shouted "lancers now," or "look out now, the caledonian quadrille." three quaint little girls had been allowed to come with their governess, who entered heartily into the spirit of the thing, and never left the piano. quadrille after polka, waltz after schottische, "sir roger de coverley," mazurka, and gallop. and, between the dances, what riotous fun, when we cast ourselves upon the refreshments, and noisy boys risked death and assassination as they opened lemonade and soda-water bottles with a splendid flourish! our elders might drink themselves to frenzy on whisky and yet remain more sober than we were as we capered and laughed and quaffed big draughts of harmless fluid. and the sandwiches we ate, the biscuits and apples we devoured, the bread-and-butter we munched, and flick, flack! there was miss montgomery at the piano, and dozens of little feet were again twinkling about the floor.
i, proud being, danced twice with arthur. we floundered in amazing fashion through a set of lancers, the master of ceremonies shouting the while indignantly at our heels. and later he invited me to go through some mysterious measure he called a gallop, which consisted in a wild charge for the other end of the room, helter-skelter, couples knocking each other down delightedly, rolling over each other, and picking one another up in the best of tempers.
and then, as we mopped our faces, and drank lemonade, somebody proposed that i should give an imitation of mr. parker. arthur and i were the only travelled personages of the assembly. he had been to eton and i had been to lysterby, and it was his slightly sarcastic voice that determined me. "oh, i say, by all means. i hear he was a capital fellow that dancing-master of yours, and you do him to a t."
to prove that i did, i began the chassé-croisé, to the tune of an imaginary violin, chanting nora creina, amid shrieks of approbation. how often since have my friends lamented my missed vocation! on the stage, whether actress or dancer, my fortune would long ago have been made, and as an acrobat i should have won glory in my teens. but old-fashioned parents never think of these things. if you are a girl, and fortune forsakes the domestic hearth, they tell you to go and be a governess, and bless your stars that, thanks to their good sense, you are enabled to earn a miserable crust in the path of respectability. when they find a child with extraordinary mimic capacities, an abnormal physical suppleness, and a passion for the ballet, it does not occur to them that it would be wiser and more humane to seek to turn these advantages to some account, instead of condemning the little wretch to future misery and self-effacement as a governess.
pauline, who knew every moment of the famous mr. parker by heart, wandered out into the front garden with a lad of her own age to look at the stars and talk of their ideal. it was a few minutes after the hourly train from dublin stopped at dalkey, and as they sat on the wall discussing their favourite book of the hour, manzoni's "betrothed," they saw a large and lofty figure steadily approach the gate. good heavens! it was my mother. pauline was a creature of resource, and she had some understanding of that formidable person.
"quick, quick, eddie," she whispered. "run in and tell agnes to get them all out by the pantry window, which shows into the laneway. i'll keep mamma outside talking about the stars."
effectively, when my mother opened the gate, she encountered the solemn sentimental regard of a student of the stars. nothing enchanted my mother more than an unexpected revelation of intelligence in one of her children. she was a woman of colossal intelligence, of wide knowledge, a brilliant talker, and at all times, whatever her temper, you could put her instantly into good-humour, and wean her thoughts from the irritating themes of daily life, by addressing yourself to her intellect, and speaking of remote subjects like the constellations, south africa, the federal war, belgian farming, or the german empire. she knew everything, was interested in everything, had read everything, could talk like a specialist on any given subject, except mathematics and metaphysics, which she professed to hold in contempt. another mother would have been staggered to find a girl of thirteen alone beneath the new-lit stars; but my mother found nothing at all odd in being begged to deliver a lecture on astronomy at that hour, and fell into the trap with ingenuous fervour.
and now i beseech you to conceive the scene inside. ten minutes to clear the house of some[pg 227] thirty excited children, obliged to make a precipitous exit through a narrow pantry window, stifling with hysterical laughter, and in danger of breaking their limbs upon the hard ground as they dropped into the lane that ran alongside the garden into the highroad. ten minutes to clear the drawing-room of empty bottles and glasses and plates, and put the chairs and tables and couches into order. ten minutes for us to scamper up-stairs, and get into our night-gear in the dark. good lord! what fun! one would willingly endure again the thrashing for those ten brave minutes of fire and fury.
"it was grand!" said arthur next day to pauline, after he had tried in vain to look woe-begone over our castigation.
only the body of the red-headed chief rebelled against the limited space of the pantry window. what puffing and blowing and pushing to get his fat carcass through! "steady!" shouted the servant, bridget, a big-boned country girl; and with a bound she ran head-foremost like a charging bull, who meditates the destruction of his enemy. a crash outside, and we thrust anxious heads out of the window to ascertain if the unfortunate youth lay in pieces upon the ground. but no; with smothered laughter he was tearing down the lane for dear life.
with the last evidences of our feast effaced from view, we little ones trod on each other's heels in our flight up-stairs, and staid agnes went outside, by the way, to induce her mooning sister to go to bed. she simulated the necessary surprise and delight on beholding my mother, and after a few more words upon the heavenly spheres, the three entered the house, now cast, as agnes fondly believed, into complete darkness.
my mother carelessly explaining why she had decided at the last minute not to sleep in town, turned the handle of the drawing-room door. the tapers, forgotten in the fray, blazed away in all their fatal admission, though the gas of the chandelier had been duly extinguished. the result was that soon the heavenly spheres were round about us instead of on high. agnes and pauline rapidly were made to see stars elsewhere than in the sky. when they lay prone and prostrate, not sure that their members were whole, up offended majesty came to us, shivering in our night-dresses. what did it all mean? she wanted to know. empty bottles heaped up in the pantry corner, a ham vanished, tin boxes empty of their layers of biscuits, knives, plates, glasses, in tell-tale disarray, a broken pane in the pantry window.
we had had our fun, and now came the bad quarter of the hour, when we were expected to pay the bill in beaten flesh. how our ears tingled, our cheeks pained, our heads ached, and our arms smarted! you see it was a very long account, and it took a good deal of blows to make it up. but even the most infuriated creditor is appeased in the long-run, when the gathering in of his dues implies the excessive expenditure of nerve and muscle as such a scene as that of our castigation. the strongest woman cannot beat a half-dozen of children throughout an entire night, and my mother retired, pleased to regard her life in danger by a consequent fit of nervous exhaustion and blood to the head.
