From this time Aunt Esther resolutely set herself to subdue me thoroughly—to make me feel that any remission of misery at home, any comparative comfort, was as a gift from her. But to make me feel this thoroughly, it was necessary that all pleasure and comfort in my home should first be annihilated. I was a very delicate child, and suffered absolute agonies from chilblains, which were often large open wounds on my feet. Therefore I was put to sleep in "the Barracks"—two dismal unfurnished, uncarpeted north rooms, without fireplaces, looking into a damp courtyard, with a well and a howling dog. My only bed was a rough deal trestle, my only bedding a straw palliasse, with a single coarse blanket. The only other furniture in the room was a deal chair, and a washing-basin on a tripod. No one was allowed to bring me any hot water; and as the water in my room always froze with the intense cold, I had to break the ice with a brass candlestick, or, if that were taken away, with my wounded hands. If, when I came down in the morning, as was often the case, I was almost speechless from sickness and misery, it was always declared to be "temper." I was given "saur-kraut" to eat because the very smell of it made me sick.
When Aunt Esther discovered the comfort that I found in getting away to my dear old Lea, she persuaded my mother that Lea's influence over me was a very bad one, and obliged her to keep me away from her.
A favourite torment was reviling all my own relations before me—my sister, &c.—and there was no end to the insulting things Aunt Esther said of them.
People may wonder, and oh! how often have I wondered that my mother did not put an end to it all. But, inexplicable as it may seem, it was her extraordinary religious opinions which prevented her doing so. She literally believed and taught that when a person struck you on the right cheek you were to invite them to strike you on the left also, and therefore if Aunt Esther injured or insulted me in one way, it was right that I should give her the opportunity of injuring or insulting me in another! I do not think that my misery cost her nothing, she felt it acutely; but because she felt it thus, she welcomed it, as a fiery trial to be endured. Lea, however, was less patient, and openly expressed her abhorrence of her own trial in having to come up to the Rectory daily to dress my mother for dinner, and walk back to Lime through the dark night, coming again, shine or shower, in the early morning, before my mother was up.
I would not have any one suppose that, on looking back through the elucidation of years, I can see no merits in my Aunt Esther Hare. The austerities which she enforced upon my mother with regard to me she fully carried out as regarded herself. "Elle vivait avec elle-même comme sa victime," as Mme. de Staël would describe it. She was the Inquisition in person. She probed and analysed herself and the motive of her every action quite as bitterly and mercilessly as she probed and analysed others. If any pleasure, any even which resulted from affection for others, had drawn her for an instant from what she believed to be the path—and it was always the thorniest path—of self-sacrifice, she would remorselessly denounce that pleasure, and even tear out that affection from her heart. She fasted and denied herself in everything; indeed, I remember that when she was once very ill, and it was necessary for her to see a doctor, she never could be persuaded to consent to it, till the happy idea occurred of inducing her to do so on a Friday, by way of a penance! To such of the poor as accepted her absolute authority, Aunt Esther was unboundedly kind, generous, and considerate. To the wife of the curate, who leant confidingly upon her, she was an unselfish and heroic nurse, equally judicious and tender, in every crisis of a perplexing and dangerous illness. To her own sisters and other members of her family her heart and home were ever open, with unvarying affection. To her husband, to whom her severe creed taught her to show the same inflexible obedience she exacted from others, she was utterly devoted. His requirement that she should receive his old friend, Mrs. Alexander, as a permanent inmate, almost on an equality with herself in the family home, and surround her with loving attentions, she bowed to without a murmur. But to a little boy who was, to a certain degree, independent of her, and who had from the first somewhat resented her interference, she knew how to be—oh! she was—most cruel.
Open war was declared at length between Aunt Esther and myself. I had a favourite cat called Selma, which I adored, and which followed me about at Lime wherever I went. Aunt Esther saw this, and at once insisted that the cat must be given up to her. I wept over it in agonies of grief: but Aunt Esther insisted. My mother was relentless in saying that I must be taught to give up my own way and pleasure to others; and forced to give it up if I would not do so willingly, and with many tears, I took Selma in a basket to the Rectory. For some days it almost comforted me for going to the Rectory, because then I possibly saw my idolised Selma. But soon there came a day when Selma was missing: Aunt Esther had ordered her to be … hung!
From this time I never attempted to conceal that I loathed Aunt Esther. I constantly gave her the presents which my mother made me save up all my money to buy for her—for her birthday, Christmas, New Year, &c.—but I never spoke to her unnecessarily. On these occasions I always received a present from her in return—"The Rudiments of Architecture," price ninepence, in a red cover. It was always the same, which not only saved expense, but also the trouble of thinking. I have a number of copies of "The Rudiments of Architecture" now, of which I thus became the possessor.
Only from Saturday till Monday we had a reprieve. The nearness of Lime to the school which my mother undertook to teach on Sundays was the excuse, but, as I see from her journal, only the excuse, which she made to give me one happy day in the week. How well I remember still the ecstasy of these Saturday evenings, when I was once more alone with the mother of my childhood, who was all the world to me, and she was almost as happy as I was in playing with my kittens or my little black spaniel "Lewes," and when she would sing to me all her old songs—"Hohenlinden," "Lord Ullin's Daughter," &c. &c.—and dear Lea was able to come in and out undisturbed, in the old familiar way.
Even the pleasures of this home-Sunday, however, were marred in the summer, when my mother gave in to a suggestion of Aunt Esther that I should be locked into the vestry of the church between the services. Miserable indeed were the three hours which—provided with a sandwich for dinner—I had weekly to spend there; and though I did not expect to see ghosts, the utter isolation of Hurstmonceaux Church, far away from all haunts of men, gave my imprisonment an unusual eeriness. Sometimes I used to clamber over the tomb of the Lords Dacre, which rises like a screen against one side of the vestry, and be stricken with vague terrors by the two grim white figures lying upon it in the silent desolation, in which the scamper of a rat across the floor seemed to make a noise like a whirlwind. At that time two grinning skulls (of the founder and foundress of the church, it was believed) lay on the ledge of the tomb; but soon after this Uncle Julius and Aunt Esther made a weird excursion to the churchyard with a spade, and buried them in the dusk with their own hands. In the winter holidays, the intense cold of the unwarmed church made me so ill, that it led to my miserable penance being remitted. James II. used to say that "Our Saviour flogged people to make them go out of the temple, but that he never punished them to make them go in."[36] But in my childhood no similar abstinence was observed.
It was a sort of comfort to me, in the real church-time, to repeat vigorously all the worst curses in the Psalms, those in which David showed his most appalling degree of malice (Psalm xxxv. 7–16, Psalm lix., Psalm lxix. 22–29, Psalm cxl. 9, 10, for instance), and apply them to Aunt Esther & Co. As all the Psalms were extolled as beatific, and the Church of England used them constantly for edification, their sentiments were all right, I supposed.
A great delight to me at this time was a cabinet with many drawers which my mother gave me to keep my minerals and shells in, and above which was a little bookcase filled with all my own books. The aunts