Washerwomen do not, as a rule, assimilate the principles of their trade.
In Lismoyle, the row of cottages most affected by ladies of that
profession was, indeed, planted by the side of the lake, but except in
winter, when the floods sent a muddy wash in at the kitchen doors of
Ferry Row, the customers’ linen alone had any experience of its waters.
The clouds of steam from the cauldrons of boiling clothes ascended from
morning till night, and hung in beads upon the sooty cobwebs that draped
the rafters; the food and wearing apparel of the laundresses and their
vast families mingled horribly with their professional apparatus, and,
outside in the road, the filthy children played among puddles that
stagnated under an iridescent scum of soap-suds. A narrow strip of
goose-nibbled grass divided the road from the lake shore, and at almost
any hour of the day there might be seen a slatternly woman or two
kneeling by the water’s edge, pounding the wet linen on a rock with a
flat wooden weapon, according to the immemorial custom of their savage
class.
The Row ended at the ferry pier, and perhaps one reason for the absence
of self-respect in the appearance of its inhabitants lay in the fact
that the only passers-by were the country people on their way to the
ferry, which here, where the lake narrowed to something less than a
mile, was the route to the Lismoyle market generally used by the
dwellers on the opposite side. The coming of a donkey-cart down the Row
was an event to be celebrated with hooting and stone-throwing by the
children, and, therefore, it can be understood that when, on a certain
still, sleepy afternoon Miss Mullen drove slowly in her phaeton along
the line of houses, she created nearly as great a sensation as she would
have made in Piccadilly.
Miss Mullen had one or two sources of income which few people knew of,
and about which, with all her loud candour, she did not enlighten even
her most intimate friends. Even Mr. Lambert might have been surprised to
know that two or three householders in Ferry Row paid rent to her, and
that others of them had money dealings with her of a complicated kind,
not easy to describe, but simple enough to the strong financial
intellect of his predecessor’s daughter. No account books were taken
with her on these occasions. She and her clients were equally equipped
with the absolutely accurate business memory of the Irish peasant, a
memory that in few cases survives education, but, where it exists, may
be relied upon more than all the generations of ledgers and account
books.
Charlotte’s visits to Ferry Row were usually made on foot, and were of
long duration, but her business on this afternoon was of a trivial
character, consisting merely in leaving a parcel at the house of Dinny
Lydon, the tailor, and of convincing her washerwoman of iniquity in a
manner that brought every other washerwoman to her door, and made each
offer up thanks to her most favoured saint that she was not employed by
Miss Mullen.
The long phaeton was at last turned, with draggings at the horse’s mouth
and grindings of the fore-carriage; the children took their last stare,
and one or two ladies whose payments were in arrear emerged from their
back gardens and returned to their washing-tubs. If they flattered
themselves that they had been forgotten, they were mistaken; Charlotte
had given a glance of grim amusement at the deserted washing-tubs, and
as her old phaeton rumbled slowly out of Ferry Row, she was computing
the number of customers, and the consequent approximate income of each
defaulter.
To the deep and plainly expressed chagrin of the black horse, he was not
allowed to turn in at the gate of Tally Ho, but was urged along the road
which led to Rosemount. There again he made a protest, but, yielding to
the weighty arguments of Charlotte’s whip, he fell into his usual
melancholy jog, and took the turn to Gurthnamuckla with dull
resignation. Once steered into that lonely road, Charlotte let him go at
his own pace, and sat passive, her mouth tightly closed, and her eyes
blinking quickly as she looked straight ahead of her with a slight
furrow of concentration on her low forehead. She had the unusual gift of
thinking out in advance her line of conversation in an interview, and,
which is even less usual, she had the power of keeping to it. By sheer
strength of will she could force her plan of action upon other people,
as a conjurer forces a card, till they came to believe it was of their
own choosing; she had done it so often that she was now confident of her
skill, and she quite understood the inevitable advantage that a fixed
scheme of any sort has over indefinite opposition. When the clump of
trees round Gurthnamuckla rose into view, Charlotte had determined her
order of battle, and was free to give her attention to outward
circumstances. It was a long time since she had been out to Miss Duffy’s
farm, and as the stony country began to open its arms to the rich, sweet
pastures, an often repressed desire asserted itself, and Charlotte
heaved a sigh that was as romantic in its way as if she had been sweet
and twenty, instead of tough and forty.
Julia Duffy did not come out to meet her visitor, and when Charlotte
walked into the kitchen, she found that the mistress of the house was
absent, and that three old women were squatted on the floor in front of
the fire, smoking short clay pipes, and holding converse in Irish that
was punctuated with loud sniffs and coughs. At sight of the visitor the
pipes vanished in the twinkling of an eye, and one of the women
scrambled to her feet.
“Why, Mary Holloran, what brings you here?” said Charlotte, recognising
the woman who lived in the Rosemount gate lodge.
“It was a sore leg I have, yer honour, miss,” whined Mary Holloran;
“it’s running with me now these three weeks, and I come to thry would
Miss Duffy give me a bit o’ a plashther.”
“Take care it doesn’t run away with you altogether,” replied Charlotte
facetiously; “and where’s Miss Duffy herself?”
“She’s sick, the craythure,” said one of the other women, who, having
found and dusted a chair, now offered it to Miss Mullen; “she have a
wakeness like in her head, and an impression on her heart, and Billy
Grainy came afther Peggy Roche here, the way she’d mind her.”
Peggy Roche groaned slightly, and stirred a pot of smutty gruel with an
air of authority.
“Could I see her, d’ye think?” asked Charlotte, sitting down and looking
about her with sharp appreciation of the substantial excellence of the
smoke-blackened walls and grimy woodwork. “There wouldn’t be a better
kitchen in the country,” she thought, “if it was properly done up.”
“Ye can, asthore, ye can go up,” replied Peggy Roche, “but wait a while
till I have the sup o’ grool hated, and maybe yerself’ll take it up to
herself.”
“Is she eating nothing but that?” asked Charlotte, viewing the pasty
compound with disgust.
“Faith, ’tis hardly she’ll ate that itself.” Peggy Roche; rose as she
spoke, and, going to the dresser, returned with a black bottle. “As for
a bit o’ bread, or a pratie, or the like o’ that, she couldn’t use it,
nor let it past her shest; with respects to ye, as soon as she’d have it
shwallied it’d come up as simple and as pleashant as it wint down.” She
lifted the little three-legged pot off its heap of hot embers, and then
took the cork out of the black bottle with nimble, dirty fingers.
“What in the name of goodness is that ye have there?” demanded Charlotte
hastily.
Mrs. Roche looked somewhat confused, and murmured something about “a
weeshy suppeen o’ shperits to wet the grool.”
Charlotte snatched the bottle from her, and smelt it.
“Faugh!” she said, with a guttural at the end of the word that no Saxon
gullet could hope to produce; “it’s potheen! that’s what it is, and
mighty bad potheen too. D’ye want to poison the woman?”
A loud chorus of repudiation arose from the sick-nurse and her friends.
“As for you, Peggy Roche, you’re not fit to tend a pig, let alone a
Christian. You’d murder this poor woman with your filthy fresh potheen,
and when your own son was dying, you begrudged him the drop of spirits
that’d have kept the life in him.”
Peggy flung up her arms with a protesting howl.
“May God forgive ye that word, Miss Charlotte! If ’twas the blood of me
arrm, I didn’t begridge it to him; the Lord have mercy on him--”
“Amen! amen! You would not, asthore,” groaned the other women.
“--but doesn’t the world know its mortial sin for a poor craythur to go
into th’ other world with the smell of dhrink on his breath!”
“It’s mortal sin to be a fool,” replied Miss Mullen, whose medical skill
had often been baffled by such winds of doctrine; “here, give me the
gruel. I’ll go give it to the woman before you have her murdered.” She
deftly emptied the pot of gruel into a bowl, and, taking the spoon out
of the old woman’s hand, she started on her errand of mercy.
The stairs were just outside the door, and making their dark and
perilous ascent in safety, she stood still in a low passage into which
two or three other doors opened. She knocked at the first of these, and,
receiving no answer, turned the handle quietly and looked in. There was
no furniture in it except a broken wooden bedstead; innumerable flies
buzzed on the closed window, and in the slant of sunlight that fell
through the dim panes was a box from which a turkey reared its red
throat, and regarded her with a suspicion born, like her chickens, of
long hatching. Charlotte closed the door and noiselessly opened the
next. There was nothing in the room, which was of the ordinary
low-ceiled cottage type, and after a calculating look at the broken
flooring and the tattered wall-paper, she went quietly out into the
passage again. “Good servants’ room,” she said to herself, “but if she’s
here much longer it’ll be past praying for.”
If she had been in any doubt as to Miss Duffy’s whereabouts, a voice
from the room at the end of the little passage now settled the matter.
“Is that Peggy?” it called.
Charlotte pushed boldly into the room with the bowl of gruel.
“No, Miss Duffy, me poor old friend, it’s me, Charlotte Mullen,” she
said in her most cordial voice; “they told me below you were ill, but I
thought you’d see me, and I brought your gruel up in my hand. I hope
you’ll like it none the less for that!”
The invalid turned her night-capped head round from the wall and looked
at her visitor with astonished, bloodshot eyes. Her hatchety face was
very yellow, her long nose was rather red, and her black hair thrust
itself out round the soiled frill of her night-cap in dingy wisps.
“You’re welcome, Miss Mullen,” she said with a pitiable attempt at
dignity; “won’t you take a cheer?”
“Not till I’ve seen you take this,” replied Charlotte, handing her the
bowl of gruel with even broader _bonhomie_ than before.
Julia Duffy reluctantly sat up among her blankets, conscious almost to
agony of the squalor of all her surroundings, conscious even that the
blankets were of the homespun, madder-dyed flannel such as the poor
people use, and taking the gruel, she began to eat it in silence. She
tried to prop herself in this emergency with the recollection that
Charlotte Mullen’s grandfather drank her grandfather’s port wine under
this very roof, and that it was by no fault of hers that she had sunk
while Charlotte had risen; but the wornout boots that lay on the floor
where she had thrown them off, and the rags stuffed into the broken
panes in the window, were facts that crowded out all consolation from
bygone glories.
“Well, Miss Duffy,” said Charlotte, drawing up a chair to the bedside,
and looking at her hostess with a critical eye, “I’m sorry to see you so
sick; when Billy Grainy left the milk last night he told Norry you were
laid up in bed, and I thought I’d come over and see if there was
anything I could do for you.”
“Thank ye, Miss Mullen,” replied Julia stiffly, sipping the nauseous
gruel with ladylike decorum, “I have all I require here.”
“Well, ye know, Miss Duffy, I wanted to see how you are,” said
Charlotte, slightly varying her attack; “I’m a bit of a doctor, like
yourself. Peggy Roche below told me you had what she called ‘an
impression on the heart,’ but it looks to me more like a touch of
liver.”
The invalid does not exist who can resist a discussion of symptoms, and
Miss Duffy’s hauteur slowly thawed before Charlotte’s intelligent and
intimate questions. In a very short time Miss Mullen had felt her pulse,
inspected her tongue, promised to send her a bottle of unfailing
efficacy, and delivered an exordium on the nature and treatment of her
complaint.
“But in deed and in truth,” she wound up, “if you want my opinion, I’ll
tell you frankly that what ails you is you’re just rotting away with the
damp and loneliness of this place. I declare that sometimes when I’m
lying awake in my bed at nights, I’ve thought of you out here by
yourself, without an earthly creature near you if you got sick, and
wondered at you. Why, my heavenly powers! ye might die a hundred deaths
before anyone would know it!”
Miss Duffy picked up a corner of the sheet and wiped the gruel from her
thin lips.
“If it comes to that, Miss Mullen,” she said with some resumption of her
earlier manner, “if I’m for dying I’d as soon die by myself as in
company; and as for damp, I thank God this house was built by them that
didn’t spare money on it, and it’s as dry this minyute as what it was
forty years ago.”
“What! Do you tell me the roof’s sound?” exclaimed Charlotte with
genuine interest.
“I have never examined it, Miss Mullen,” replied Julia coldly, “but it
keeps the rain out, and I consider that suffeecient.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s not a word to be said against the house,”
Charlotte made hasty reparation; “but, indeed, Miss Duffy, I say--and
I’ve heard more than myself say the same thing--that a delicate woman
like you has no business to live alone so far from help. The poor
Archdeacon frets about it, I can tell ye. I believe he thinks Father
Heffernan’ll be raking ye into his fold! And I can tell ye,” concluded
Charlotte, with what she felt to be a certain rough pathos, “there’s
plenty in Lismoyle would be sorry to see your father’s daughter die with
the wafer in her mouth!”
“I had no idea the people in Lismoyle were so anxious about me and my
affairs,” said Miss Duffy. “They’re very kind, but I’m able to look
afther my soul without their help.”
“Well, of course, everyone’s soul is their own affair; but, ye know,
when no one ever sees ye in your own parish church--well, right or
wrong, there are plenty of fools to gab about it.”
The dark bags of skin under Julia Duffy’s eyes became slowly red, a
signal that this thrust had gone home. She did not answer, and her
visitor rose, and moving towards the hermetically sealed window, looked
out across the lawn over Julia’s domain. Her roundest and weightiest
stone was still in her sling, while her eye ran over the grazing cattle
in the fields.
“Is it true what I hear, that Peter Joyce has your grazing this year?”
she said casually.
“It is quite true,” answered Miss Duffy, a little defiantly. A liver
attack does not pre-dispose its victims to answer in a Christian spirit
questions that are felt to be impertinent.
“Well,” returned Charlotte, still looking out of the window, with her
hands deep in the pockets of her black alpaca coat, “I’m sorry for it.”
“Why so?”
Julia’s voice had a sharpness that was pleasant to Miss Mullen’s ear.
“I can’t well explain the matter to ye now,” Charlotte said, turning
round and looking portentously upon the sick woman, “but I have it from
a sure hand that Peter Joyce is bankrupt, and will be in the courts
before the year is out.”
When, a short time afterwards, Julia Duffy lay back among her madder
blankets and heard the last sound of Miss Mullen’s phaeton wheels die
away along the lake road, she felt that the visit had at least provided
her with subject for meditation.