Penelope's Irish Experiences. Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ thought most favourably of Buttevant, but on prudently inquiring the guard’s opinion, he said it was not a comfortable place for an invalid lady, and that Mallow was much more the thing. At Limerick Junction, then, we all alighted, and in the ten minutes’ wait saw Benella escorted up the hotel stairway by a sympathetic head waiter.

      Detached from Salemina’s fostering care and prudent espionage, separated, above all, from the depressing Miss Dusenberry, we planned every conceivable folly in the way of guidebook expeditions. The exhilarating sense of being married, and therefore properly equipped to undertake any sort of excursion with perfect propriety, gave added zest to the affair in my eyes. Sleeping at Cork in an Imperial Hotel was far too usual a proceeding,—we scorned it. As the very apex of boldness and reckless defiance of common-sense, we let our heavy luggage go on to the capital of Munster, and, taking our handbags, entered a railway carriage standing on a side track, and were speedily on our way,—we knew not whither, and cared less. We discovered all too soon that we were going to Waterford, the Star of the Suir,—

      ‘The gentle Shure, that making way

      By sweet Clonmell, adorns rich Waterford’;

      and we were charmed at first sight with its quaint bridge spanning the silvery river. It was only five o’clock, and we walked about the fine old ninth-century town, called by the Cavaliers the Urbs Intacta, because it was the one place in Ireland which successfully resisted the all-conquering Cromwell. Francesca sent a telegram at once to

      MISS PEABODY AND MAID, Great Southern Hotel, Limerick Junction.

      Came to Waterford instead Cork.  Strongbow landed here 1771, defeating Danes and Irish. Youghal to-morrow, pronounced Yawl. Address, Green Park, Miss Murphy’s. How’s Derelict?

FRANELOPE.

      It was absurd, of course, but an absurdity that can be achieved at the cost of eighteen-pence is well worth the money.

      Nobody but a Baedeker or a Murray could write an account of our doings the next two days. Feeling that we might at any hour be recalled to Benella’s bedside, we took a childlike pleasure in crowding as much as possible into the time. This zeal was responsible for our leaving the Urbs Intacta, and pushing on to pass the night in something smaller and more idyllic.

      I dissuaded Francesca from seeking a lodging in Ballybricken by informing her that it was the heart of the bacon industry, and the home of the best-known body of pig-buyers in Ireland; but her mind was fixed upon Kills and Ballies. On asking our jarvey the meaning of Bally as a prefix, he answered reflectively: “I don’t think there’s annything onderhanded in the manin’, melady; I think it means BALLY jist.”

      The name of the place where we did go shall never be divulged, lest a curious public follow in our footsteps; and if perchance it have not our youth, vigour, and appetite for adventure, it might die there in the principal hotel, unwept, unhonoured, and unsung. The house is said to be three hundred and seventy-five years old, but we are convinced that this is a wicked understatement of its antiquity. It must have been built since the Deluge, else it would at least have had one general spring cleaning in the course of its existence. Cromwell had been there too, and in the confusion of his departure they must have forgotten to sweep under the beds. We entered our rooms at ten in the evening, having dismissed our car, knowing well that there was no other place to stop the night. We gave the jarvey twice his fare to avoid altercation, ‘but divil a penny less would he take,’ although it was he who had recommended the place as a cosy hotel. “It looks like a small little house, melady, but ‘tis large inside, and it has a power o’ beds in it.” We each generously insisted on taking the dirtiest bedroom (they had both been last occupied by the Cromwellian soldiers, we agreed), but relinquished the idea, because the more we compared them the more impossible it was to decide which was the dirtiest. There were no locks on the doors. “And sure what matther for that, Miss? Nobody has a right (i.e. business) to be comin’ in here but meself,” said the aged woman who showed us to our rooms.

      Chapter VIII. Romance and reality

      ‘But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,

      With his martial cloak around him.’

Charles Wolfe.

      At midnight I heard a faint tap at my door, and Francesca walked in, her eyes wide and bright, her cheeks flushed, her long, dark braid of hair hanging over her black travelling cloak. I laughed as I saw her, she looked so like Sir Patrick Spens in the ballad play at Pettybaw,—a memorable occasion when Ronald Macdonald caught her acting that tragic role in his ministerial gown, the very day that Himself came from Paris to marry me in Pettybaw, dear little Pettybaw!

      “I came in to find out if your bed is as bad as mine, but I see you have not slept in it,” she whispered.

      “I was just coming in to see if yours could be any worse,” I replied. “Do you mean to say that you have tried it, courageous girl? I blew out my candle, and then, after an interval in which to forget, sat down on the outside as a preliminary; but the moon rose just then, and I could get no further.”

      I had not unpacked my bag. I had simply slipped on my macintosh, selected a wooden chair, and, putting a Cromwellian towel over it, seated myself shudderingly on it and put my feet on the rounds, quoting Moore meantime—

      ‘And the best of all ways

      To lengthen our days

      Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear!”

      Francesca followed my example, and we passed the night in reading Celtic romances to each other. We could see the faint outline of sweet Slievenamann from our windows—the mountain of the fair women of Feimheann, celebrated as the hunting-ground of the Finnian Chiefs.

      ‘One day Finn and Oscar

      Followed the chase in Sliabh-na-mban-Feimheann,

      With three thousand Finnian chiefs

      Ere the sun looked out from his circle.’

      In the Finnian legend, the great Finn McCool, when much puzzled in the choice of a wife, seated himself on its summit. At last he decided to make himself a prize in a competition of all the fair women in Ireland. They should start at the foot of the mountain, and the one who first reached the summit should be the great Finn’s bride. It was Grainne Oge, the Gallic Helen, and daughter of Cormac, the king of Ireland, who won the chieftain, ‘being fleetest of foot and longest of wind.’

      We almost forgot our discomforts in this enthralling story, and slept on each other’s nice clean shoulders a little, just before the dawn. And such a dawn! Such infinite softness of air, such dew-drenched verdure! It is a backward spring, they say, but to me the woods are even lovelier than in their summer wealth of foliage, when one can hardly distinguish the beauty of the single tree from that of its neighbours, since the colours are blended in one universal green. Now we see the feathery tassels of the beech bursting out of their brown husks, the russet hues of the young oak leaves, and the countless emerald gleams that ‘break from the ruby-budded lime.’ The greenest trees are the larch, the horse-chestnut, and the sycamore, three naturalised citizens who apparently still keep to their native fashions, and put out their foliage as they used to do in their own homes. The young alders and the hawthorn hedges are greening, but it will be a fortnight before we can realise the beauty of that snow-white bloom, with its bitter-sweet fragrance. The cuckoo-flower came this year before instead of after the bird, they tell us, showing that even Nature, in these days of anarchy and misrule, is capable of taking liberties with her own laws. There is a fragrance of freshly turned earth in the air, and the rooks are streaming out from the elms by the little church, and resting for a bit in a group of plume-like yews. The last few days of warmth and sunshine have inspired the birds, and as Francesca and I sit at our windows breathing in СКАЧАТЬ