Alas! now I know the secret of her enchantment, of those perishable surprises of mood and imagination that so perpetually lifted me out of my miserable self, diverted me in my tragic gloom, and sent me to bed each night in a state of delightful excitement. Mary Ann drank punch, and on the fiery wings of alcoholism wafted herself and me, her astonished satellite, into the land of revelry and mad movement. How ardently, then, I yearned for the reform of poor humanity through the joyous amenities of punch. Had my grandmother up-stairs consumed punch instead of her embittering egg-flip! Had the ladies of Mercy, my future persecutors, drunk punch, the world might have proved a hilarious playground for me instead of a desperate school of adversity.
Mary Ann possessed a single blemish in a nature fashioned to captivate a lonely and excitable child. She worshipped my uncle Lionel. My uncle Lionel was his mother's favourite--a Glasgow lad, my grandfather contemptuously defined him, without the Cameron nose; a fine, handsome, fair young fellow, the picture of my mother, extremely distinguished in manner and appearance, and reputed to be a genius. He is said to have written quantities of superlative verse which he disdained to publish; but as nobody ever saw even the manuscript, we may regard the achievement as apocryphal. He had finished his studies in Paris, which explained a terrifying habit, whenever he met me--frightening the wits out of me the while by his furious look--of bursting out into what I afterwards learnt to be an old French song: "Corbleu, madame, que faites vous ici?"
I wish grown-up persons could realise the shudder of terror that ran through me and momentarily dimmed for me the light of day, when I heard that loud voice, encountered the mock ferocity of that blue glance, and then felt myself roughly captured by strong arms, lifted up, and a shaven chin drawn excruciatingly across my tender small visage. These are trifles to read of, but what is a trifle in childhood? A child feeds greedily upon its own excesses of sensation, thrives upon them, or is consumed by them. To these early terrors, these accumulated emotions, these swift alternations of anguish and rapture, which made opening existence for me a sort of swing, perpetually flying and dropping between tears and laughter, from radiant heights, without transition, to pitch darkness, do I attribute the nervous illnesses that have so remorselessly pursued me in after-years. The wonder is the mind itself did not give way.