The Woman Thou Gavest Me | Page 7

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