Across The Stream

CHAPTER I

Certain scenes, certain pictures of his very early years of childhood, stood out for Archie, when he came to the mature age of eight or nine, above the dim clouds that engulfed the time when the power of memory was only beginning to germinate. He had no doubt (and was probably right about it) as to which the earliest of those was: it was the face of his nurse Blessington leaning over his crib. She held a candle in her hand which a little dazzled him, but the sight of her face, tender and anxious and divinely reassuring, was the point of that

memory. He had been asleep, and had awoke with a start, and finding himself alone in the midst of the immense desolation of the dark that pressed like an invader from all sides onto him, he had lifted up his voice

and yelled. Then as by a conjuring- trick Blessington had appeared with her comforting presence that quite

robbed the dark of its terrors. It must still have been early in the night, for she had not yet gone to bed, and

had on above her smooth grey hair her cap with its adorable blue ribands in it. At her throat was the brooch

made of the same stuff as the shining shillings with which a year or two later she bought the buns and sponge-cakes for tea. He remembered no more than that, he knew nothing of what she had said: the whole of that memory consisted in the fact of the entire comfort and relief which her face brought. It was just a vignette of memory, the earliest of all; there was nothing whatever before it, and for some time nothing after.

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