"Go away from me, Miss Christian!" shouted Mrs. Twomey (but this was
merely an ejaculation of pleased surprise, not to be taken literally).
"Go-to-God-he-did-not!"
"He did, indeed, Mrs. Twomey!" replied Christian, rooting at her habit
pocket, and extracting her purse. "He said that he'd won the
scholarship, and he knew you were praying hard for him or he wouldn't
have got it, and he said I was to give you this, with his love."
"This" was a golden sovereign, a coin that did not often in its beauty
and entirety come Mrs. Twomey's way.
She curtseyed so low that since--as has been said--she was but little
over four feet, Christian had to lean low over Harry's withers in
order to drop the sovereign into her hand.
"That the sun may shine on his soul, my lovely gentleman! That he may
never want crown, pown', nor shi'n, nor you nayther! The Kingdom o'
Heaven is your due, the pair of yee, and may yee be long going there!
Amin!"
A silent and prayerful moment followed on the benedictions, and Mrs.
Twomey's bright little eyes rolled devoutly heavenwards. This
concession to the solemnity of the occasion disposed of, the
beneficiary became normal again.
"Look!" she resumed, while she bestowed the sovereign in an incredibly
old bag-purse with a brass rim; "tell him there's always one foolish
in a family, and what it is with Masther Larry, he's too give-ish!
That's what he is!"
"You can tell him so yourself," replied Christian. "He'll be home in a
week."
"Very good, faith! There's a welcome before him whatever time he'll
come! Sure I thought he'd be kept back in England till the Christmas?"
"He's finished with school now," said Christian. "He's going abroad
for a bit after Christmas, and then he's going to Oxford!"
The glory in Christian's voice conveyed more to Mrs. Twomey than any
statement of fact could achieve.
"Well, well! I'm proud out of him, the poor child! But I wisht it was
home in his own house he was to be," she replied, raising her skirt,
and stuffing the purse into a large pocket that hung round her waist
over a red flannel petticoat; "han't he lessons enought learnt?"
"Oh, but he _loves_ going to Oxford, Mrs. Twomey," said
Christian; "he's looking forward to it awfully; and _I'm_ going
to France to do lessons, too! I'll be talking French to you, Mrs.
Twomey, when I come back!"
Mrs. Twomey uttered a screech of well-simulated horror.
"For God's sake, child, do not!" she exclaimed; "didn't I know one o'
thim in Boyshton, a docther he was, and a German. He had as many
slishes and sloshes as'd fill a book! Sure I thought I'd lose me life
thrying could I make off at all what he said to me!"
"Well, I shall be slishing and sloshing to you when I come home, Mrs.
Twomey!" said Christian, who was skilled in converse with such as Mrs.
Twomey; "but it will be in French. I suppose you talked German to your
Boston doctor?"
"H'th indeed! Little enough I said to him! I never had anny wish for
thim docthors at all. Look at the little rakeen that's after gettin'
the Dispinsary at Cunnock-a-Ceoil! Three hundred pound the father ped
for it for him! A low, hungry little fella, that'd thravel the
counthry for the sake of a ha'penny--God!"
The flow of Mrs. Twomey's eloquence ceased in shock, as Major
Talbot-Lowry and Miss Coppinger emerged from the dairy behind her.
"Well, Mary," said Dick, "who is it who's so hard up for ha'pence?"
Mrs. Twomey's equanimity was not slow to re-establish itself. She and
the Major were "the one age," and they had grown up together.
"Why then, your Honour knows him well, and too well!" she snapped at
him, looking up his long length to his handsome, good natured face,
much as a minute female cur-dog might look and snap, presuming on her
sex, at a Great Dane. "It's the new little docthor, Danny Aherne, that
your Honour is afther putting in the Dispinsary!"
"Oh, that poor little fellow?" said Dick, laughing, but with a touch
of discomposure; "_I_ didn't put him there. What's the matter
with him, any how? Why, he hasn't been at the job three months! Give
the man time, Mary, give him time! I'll engage you'll all be in love
with him by this time next year!"
Mrs. Twomey glanced at Miss Coppinger, and replied with decorous
piety:
"God grant it!"
She then, with an admirable assumption of respect for her superiors,
and zeal for her office, moved past her visitors into the dairy.
Dick Talbot-Lowry hesitated a moment or two, then he laughed again,
and strode after her into the dark dairy; Miss Coppinger followed him.
Mrs. Twomey, a tiny and almost imperceptible bundle, was already on
her knees in a corner, scrubbing a glistening metal churn, and so
engrossed in her task as to be unaware of her visitors.
"Look here, Mary," began the Major, with a touch of severity; "what's
all this about Doctor Aherne?"
Mrs. Twomey rose from her knees, dried her little scarlet claws in her
apron, and stood to attention. Having opened the debate by calling
fervently upon her God to witness that she knew nothing of the matter,
she proceeded, like a solo pianist, to run her fingers, as it were,
lightly over the keys. Passing swiftly from her own birth, upbringing,
invincible respectability, and remoteness from all neighbours, or
knowledge of neighbours, she coruscated in a cadenza in which the
families of Talbot-Lowry and Coppinger, and her devotion to both, were
dazzlingly blended, and finished in a grand chord on the apparently
irrelevant fact that she would die dead before she would put down any
dirty stain before the Major's honour.
"But Mary," interposed Frederica, with an inartistic directness that
was in painful contrast to the cadenza, "what has the Major got to say
to Doctor Aherne?"
The question was ignored; the artist dashed on into a presto movement,
in which, as far as any direct theme was discernible, Dr. Mangan, his
cupidity, his riches, the riches of Dr. Aherne's parents were the
leading motives. Also, parenthetically, that Danny Aherne was without
shoe or stocking to his foot when he was going to school in Pribawn
with her own poor little boy. "And look at him now!" continued Mrs.
Twomey, on a high reciting note, and still presto, "with his car and
his horse, and his coat with an owld cat skin for a collar on it, and
his Tommy-shirts without tails!"
There was an instant of pause, and Frederica breathed the words
"'Dicky' shirt-fronts!" to her bewildered cousin.
"Himself and the Big Docthor walking the streets of Cluhir like two
paycocks!" went on Mrs. Twomey with ever-increasing speed and fury.
"Ha! Ha! Didn't I meet him back in Pribawn ere yistherday. 'How great
you are in yourself!' says I to him. 'It done _you_ no harm to
kill a woman!' says I. 'Mind your own business!' says he to me.
'Throth then, an' I _will_ mind it!' says I, 'an' I'll have
plenty to mind it without you! I'll have plenty to mind it without
yourself! Dannileen alay!'"
"What on earth are you talking about?" Dick broke in impatiently.
Mrs. Twomey flung a glance to the doorway. Christian was no longer
there. On a lower key, and directed to Miss Coppinger, a fresh stream
flowed. A young woman had died; a young woman who had been privileged
to marry a relative, of a degree of relationship obscure, but still
honoured, of Mikey Twomey's; "and she afther having a young son, and
the boy that marrit her as proud!--and a very good baby, and what
misfortune came to her no one'd know, only the Lord God Almighty, but
she died on them. And she a fine, hard, hearty, blushy, big lump of a
gerr'l. And 'tis true what they said--"
The details that followed were hissed, prestissimo, into the ear of
Miss Coppinger, but that Dr. Aherne was to be blamed, was made as
clear to Dick Talbot-Lowry as to his cousin.
The tale was concluded in tears.
"Look! I has to cry when I thinks of it!"
It is impossible with Mrs. Twomey, and her like, to argue a point, or
to attempt an appeal to reason. A flat and dictatorial contradiction
may have some temporary effect, and Major Talbot-Lowry adopted this
method, for lack of better, in defence of his nominee. Mrs. Twomey,
however, continued to weep.
"But Mary," urged Frederica, "there isn't a doctor in the world who
doesn't lose a patient sometimes. It may not have been this
unfortunate young man's fault in the least--"
"'Tisn't that I'm crying for at all," sobbed Mrs. Twomey, a deplorable
little figure, her head bent down, while she wiped violently and
alternately her nose and her eyes in her sacking apron. "But it is
what the people is sayin' on the roads about" (sob) "about"
(sniff)--
"About _what_?' said Dick, who was being bored.
"About your Honour!" returned Mrs. Twomey, in a sort of roar.
"And what the devil are they saying about me?"
"God forbid that I'd put down any dirty stain before your Honour,"
sobbed Mrs. Twomey, recurring to her earlier metaphor; "it's that big
horse that ye're afther buyin' from Docthor Mangan; they say that he
gave him to ye too cheap on the head of it--"
"On the head of what, woman?" shouted Dick, now passing, by the
well-worn channel of anxiety, from boredom to anger.
"On the head of the Dispinsary! Sure they says 'twas your Honour gave
it to Danny Aherne!"
It is unnecessary to record Major Talbot-Lowry's indignation on
hearing this charge. The dairy, with its low ceiling and paven floor,
echoed, submissively, his well-justified strictures on the lies and
evil speaking of his humbler neighbours, and Mrs. Twomey dried her
eyes (much as she would scrub out one of her milk-pans) and hearkened.
Who shall say if she believed him? There is a standard of honour,
rigid and stern, for gentlemen, just as there is quite another
standard for those who do not, in the opinion of a people, Austrian in
their definition of what is or is not gentle birth, merit that title.
Dick Talbot-Lowry was a gentleman, and, in her own words, no "dirty
stain" would ever be attributed to him by Mary Twomey, but even she
knew that the ethics of buying and selling a horse apply to no other
transaction, and she knew also that in the disposal of a "place," more
may occur than meets the eye. She resented the slur on her chieftain,
but, in spite of her wrath, she could not feel quite certain that the
accusation was entirely unfounded.