Part 33

No, we did not like Green, the herd; and I, the smallest of the “lovely lot,” would cling to my mother’s skirts when his little twinkling eye turned in my direction.

* * * * *

For a long time he was associated in my mind with the horror of a conversation which passed between him and my mother. How well I remember that day! We were walking through one of the upper fields towards a village called Hop Hall, which also belonged to the estate. It was a lovely meadow with a curious little wood in the middle of it, ringed like a moat by a streamlet in which the cattle drank. This wood was full of wild Crab-apples; the blossom of it hung over the water and was mirrored therein. The field caught the sweep of wind that blew from the top of the hill with the breath of the Pine-trees. It was a carpet of Cowslips in the right season.

Well, as we walked, my mother and four little girls and one little boy, the herd stumping along with a stick—he had a lame leg—his ragged dog behind him, there came the following interchange of remarks, which set a seal of terror on my young mind. My mother mentioned her intention of visiting Hop Hall, and then inquired how a certain old woman might be who dwelt there. She had been long bedridden.

“Troth, and she’s the same as ever!”

“My goodness,” exclaimed my mother, “why, she must be nearly a hundred!”

“She must be that, me lady.—Begorra, she’ll have to be shot!”

My mother laughed, and so did the herd. The anguish of the small listener passes description; and there ensued a veritable haunting. The herd she could understand, she knew him to be a criminal of the deepest dye. But her mother!...

It was months before a benevolent governess discovered the hidden sore, and explained and consoled. It was only a joke! It left a rankling tenderness. I could see no humour in it.

* * * * *

It is no wonder that Irish children should be fanciful, surrounded as they are, or were in my day, with the quaint, superstitious beliefs of servants and peasantry. Our chief nursery comfort and most beloved companion was the old housekeeper, who had begun her life in the service of our mother’s grandmother. That takes one back! Whenever we had a free moment we trotted into her sitting-room for pleasant conversation and, maybe, a biscuit, a bit of chocolate or candy. She had the key of the stores.

“I declare if I was made of sugar, you’d have me eaten!” she would say; a cannibalistic possibility I made it a point of earnestly disclaiming.

The linen room was where she sat, in a quaint, painted, high-backed armchair by the window. She gazed straight out across a yard to a shrubbery dominated by three large Fir trees over which the evening star would peep, a tremulous yellow. She called those Fir trees her Three Kings, and never failed to lift her hands in wonder and gratitude over the beauty of the star. Poetry goes deep into the hearts of the Irish.

* * * * *

I can see that room now. The whole of one side was filled with cupboards—presses, we called them—where, behind buff wire gratings and beautifully fluted bright pink calico, the linen was stored. A few nursery groceries, biscuit and dessert oddments were kept in a cupboard just at the entrance; and there was always a faint fragrance of raisins and spice in the atmosphere. I can see the dear occupant of the room too; the picture of beautiful old age, with banded silver hair beneath the snow-white cap which was tied with muslin strings under her chin. I can see her apple-blossom cheeks and her blue eyes, clear and innocent as a child’s, yet so wise! She had a white starched kerchief folded across her black bodice, and her black skirt was gathered with a great many pleats round the comfortable rotundity of her figure. We used to find her sitting by the casement in the twilight, gazing out. If the mood took me, I would sit on her knee and stare out too. Every few minutes or so she would sigh, not with sadness, but gently, as the woods sigh, with scarcely perceptible movement on a still night. But though I knew it to be no sigh of distress, it nevertheless troubled me. I would ask anxiously:

“Why do you sigh, Mobie?”

Her answer was always the same:

“Old age, Alanna!”

Her name was Mrs. O’Brien, which was interpreted Mobie by our baby lips.

In same fashion the first nurse, whom I only vaguely remember, erect, small, severe, and kind, had degenerated from Mrs. Hughes into Shuzzie; and the queer, tiny head housemaid, baptized Bridget, was Dadgie. A unique personage this, minute as she was active, with bobbing bunches of grey curls on each side of her grey net cap with purple ribbons which were tied under her chin. Upon the rare occasions when some damage occurred to the china or glass under her hands, she would trot into my mother with the announcement:

“Oh, ma’am, I’ve made a ‘foo pas!’”

No one knew where she had picked up this inappropriate bit of French.

Dear, quaint, pathetic, busy little creature, buzzing about the house with a flapping duster! I have a vision of her too, as I write: her huge poke bonnet overshadowing the small, important face; her bobbing curls as she fluttered in to confession in the oratory on those monthly occasions when the old parish priest—another figure out of long past times, he too, with his white head, his black stockings and buckle shoes, his full-skirted coat—came out from the little country town to “hear” the household.

* * * * *

My mother used to call the three old women servants her three duchesses. Alas! two of these dignitaries passed away very early in my recollection. Fortunately, Mobie, the best beloved, was left to us till later years. It is to her that my thoughts most readily return.

She was a store-house of anecdotes and legends. Never would she speak, nor allow anyone to speak before her, of the fairies otherwise than as “the good people”; and then it was with bated breath. It was established as a fact among us that in her girlhood she had had communication with them. Certainly, we believed, she had seen them one evening dancing in a ring; but never could she be got to tell us in detail anything about these experiences. The very mystery of her silence confirmed our theory.

What a delightful volume one could have made out of the tales that fell from her lips upon our small listening ears by the nursery fire; or in the linen room with its uncurtained window and its vision of the Three Kings and the Star.

From many memories one floats back to me. It made a great impression: