Part 42

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We made another expedition, over the border into County Clare. A white plastered pillared house this, dating from the terrible neo-Italian period of the end of the last century. There dwells an eccentric gentleman, one of the chief instigators of the Young Ireland movement; but he was unfortunately away. We visited the house, and were entertained by his housekeeper. This lady’s name was Mrs. Quinlan, and she was an old friend of our hostesses. We think we enjoyed that afternoon as well as any of our excursions; and certainly we laughed as much as ever.

Mrs. Quinlan came creaking down in a flowing black silk, which brought me instantly back to the Sundays of my childhood and the genteel appearance of my mother’s maid. We sat in the early Victorian drawing-room and had tea and Albert biscuits, listening with unremitting amusement to the conversation between Miss Caroline and Mrs. Quinlan. Be it mentioned that the owner of Curriestown has long been a widower and that the question of his remarriage has never ceased to agitate the bosoms of his neighbours since the event, so many years ago, which qualified him once again for the matrimonial market.

Mrs. Quinlan stood, her perfectly unwashed hands crossed on the last button of her black silk bodice; her faded face all over lines, querulous, good-humoured, quizzical, under the untidy wisps of her yellow-grey hair; and, while we ate and drank, she flowed continuously on, stimulated by a question here and there, or an appropriate comment.

“And indeed, Miss Caroline, it’s very busy I am. For sure, didn’t the master wire there’d be twelve of them here the day after to-morrow? It’s getting all the rooms ready I am, and the Professor here and all. Not that he’s much trouble, the crathur. Them’s his shoes, in the hall beyant. I’m sorry he’s out, then, for it’s the queer-looking body he is. He’s wearing the kilt, ye know, Miss Carrie. And not a word out of him but Irish! Musha, I don’t know what he’d be saying!—It’s a deal of store they do be setting on speaking the Irish now, Miss.”

Here Mrs. Quinlan, seized with a paroxysm of silent laughter, claps one of the grimy hands over her mouth and doubles herself in two.

“The master’s wild about it, God help him!” she proceeds presently. “But sure, I do be tellin’ him, I’m too old to be thinkin’ about that kind of thing at my time of life. Troth, and it’s queer times we do be having! Isn’t the master bringing back a black lady on us!”

“A black lady?” ejaculated Miss Carrie, startled out of her placidity. “Good gracious, Mrs. Quinlan!”

“Indeed, and it’s true. A rale black lady I hear she is, and it’s in Paris he met her.”

“In Paris!”

It seemed a strange place from which to bring a black lady. We were all full of the liveliest interest.

“I suppose,” says Miss Caroline, “you mean a very dark lady, Mrs. Quinlan—a brunette?”

“I do not, then—rale black she is, I’m told. Out of the Indies, or Africa, or some of them places.”

“Dear me!” Our hostess is much puzzled. “Is he thinking of marrying her, Mrs. Quinlan?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him. I wouldn’t put anything past him, Miss Carrie!”

A black lady! Was this to be the end of twenty-five years’ expectation?

“Well, now, and is he bringing her with him to-morrow night?”

“Och, maybe he is! He’s coming by the midnight train, Miss Carrie, and the Lord knows what time in the world they’ll be up here.”

“Oh, he must mean to marry her!” says Miss Carrie, and Mrs. Quinlan laughs again exhaustedly with an undercurrent of plaintiveness, and remarks once more that she wouldn’t put it past him.

We go through the house in Mrs. Quinlan’s wake. There is something that looks like a kitchen rubber laid over one corner of the mahogany table in the great red-papered dining-room; and on it a crusty loaf flanks a dim glass and a cracked plate. Mrs. Quinlan casts a phrase of explanation as she trails us around.

“He do be looking for his bit of dinner early.” We presume “he” to be the “crathur that gives no trouble.”

We pass through a bewildering series of bedrooms. The damp has been coming in very copiously at Curriestown. Mrs. Quinlan points out the worst places in each apartment as we go along:

“Look athere, now! Just cast your eye on that, Miss Carrie, and sure it’s nothing to what’s behind the bed. If ye could see the way it is at the back of that press, Miss Carrie, you’d be hard set to believe it. Och, the house is in a tirrible state! Me heart’s broke pulling the furniture about, thrying to get them bad bits covered.”

Some one suggests that perhaps the owner will have it painted for the black lady. But Honoria Quinlan is still of opinion that you couldn’t tell what he’d be at.

* * * * *

On the way back we burst a tyre, not far from one of those hamlets which are typical of the western coast. Set in surroundings of the wildest beauty, it is practically deserted. The four walls of the ruined chapel gaping to the sky, and the long row of empty broken-down cottages testify still to the ruthless policy that laid the country waste in far Cromwellian times. Perhaps there are no more than fifteen smoking hearths left, beaten by passionate seas, guarded by the tremendous black cliffs. Life here, it would seem, must be hard won indeed from stony fields and treacherous waters.

Very soon, while the chauffeur worked at the wheel, a small knot of onlookers gathers about us; children with a tangled thatch of bleached hair, and eyes that look half-fiercely, half-appealingly out from under it. Black eyes they seem at first sight, set as they are with raven lashes. It is only on examination that you find them to be richly violet. There is an old man fantastically attired in a blanket laced with twine down to his knees. Such a creature of savage primitiveness he seems that one of the party is moved to ask him humorously if he has ever driven in a motor-car. He surveys us with his mild blue eyes that are as innocent as the child’s beside him, and shakes his shaggy white head.

“Bedad, I have,” he then says unexpectedly. “And sure it never touched the ground at all but an odd time between here and Connemara.”