Father and Son | Page 8

entire resignation to the will of
God and not less entire disdain of the judgement and opinion of man.
My parents founded every action, every attitude, upon their
interpretation of the Scriptures, and upon the guidance of the Divine
Will as revealed to them by direct answer to prayer. Their ejaculation in
the face of any dilemma was, 'Let us cast it before the Lord!'
So confident were they of the reality of their intercourse with God, that
they asked for no other guide. They recognized no spiritual authority
among men, they subjected themselves to no priest or minister, they
troubled their consciences about no current manifestation of 'religious
opinion'. They lived in an intellectual cell, bounded at its sides by the
walls of their own house, but open above to the very heart of the
uttermost heavens.
This, then, was the scene in which the soul of a little child was planted,
not as in an ordinary open flower-border or carefully tended social
parterre, but as on a ledge, split in the granite of some mountain. The

ledge was hung between night and the snows on one hand, and the
dizzy depths of the world upon the other; was furnished with just soil
enough for a gentian to struggle skywards and open its stiff azure stars;
and offered no lodgement, no hope of salvation, to any rootlet which
should stray beyond its inexorable limits.

CHAPTER II
OUT of the darkness of my infancy there comes only one flash of
memory. I am seated alone, in my baby-chair, at a dinner-table set for
several people. Somebody brings in a leg of mutton, puts it down close
to me, and goes out. I am again alone, gazing at two low windows,
wide open upon a garden. Suddenly, noiselessly, a large, long animal
(obviously a greyhound) appears at one window-sill, slips into the
room, seizes the leg of mutton and slips out again. When this happened
I could not yet talk. The accomplishment of speech came to me very
late, doubtless because I never heard young voices. Many years later,
when I mentioned this recollection, there was a shout of laughter and
surprise: 'That, then, was what became of the mutton! It was not you,
who, as your Uncle A. pretended, ate it up, in the twinkling of an eye,
bone and all!'
I suppose that it was the startling intensity of this incident which
stamped it upon a memory from which all other impressions of this
early date have vanished.
The adventure of the leg of mutton occurred, evidently, at the house of
my Mother's brothers, for my parents, at this date, visited no other. My
uncles were not religious men, but they had an almost filial respect for
my Mother, who was several years senior to the elder of them. When
the catastrophe of my grandfather's fortune had occurred, they had not
yet left school. My Mother, in spite of an extreme dislike of teaching,
which was native to her, immediately accepted the situation of a
governess in the family of an Irish nobleman. The mansion was only to
be approached, as Miss Edgeworth would have said, 'through eighteen

sloughs, at the imminent peril of one's life', and when one had reached
it, the mixture of opulence and squalor, of civility and savagery, was
unspeakable. But my Mother was well paid, and she stayed in this
distasteful environment, doing the work she hated most, while with the
margin of her salary she helped first one of her brothers and then the
other through his Cambridge course. They studied hard and did well at
the university. At length their sister received, in her 'ultima Thule',
news that her younger brother had taken his degree, and then and there,
with a sigh of intense relief, she resigned her situation and came
straight back to England.
It is not to be wondered at, then, that my uncles looked up to their sister
with feelings of especial devotion. They were not inclined, they were
hardly in a position, to criticize her modes of thought. They were
easy-going, cultured and kindly gentlemen, rather limited in their views,
without a trace of their sister's force of intellect or her strenuous temper.
E. resembled her in person, he was tall, fair, with auburn curls; he
cultivated a certain tendency to the Byronic type, fatal and melancholy.
A. was short, brown and jocose, with a pretension to common sense;
bluff and chatty. As a little child, I adored my Uncle E., who sat silent
by the fireside holding me against his knee, saying nothing, but looking
unutterably sad, and occasionally shaking his warm-coloured tresses.
With great injustice, on the other hand, I detested my Uncle A., because
he used to joke in a manner very displeasing to me, and