“The fact is, Regan had an accident last night,” explains Miss Margaret. “He fell into the old gravel pit going back home and cut his head open, and——”
“It was my fault entirely,” interrupts Miss Caroline in distressed accents. “I had to send him in to Galway town, and to tell him to wait and bring back Captain Blake. And that meant loitering an hour.”
“Dear, dear!” Miss Margaret clacks her tongue. “That was very unfortunate! He—such a steady man! But an hour in Galway town...!”
“It’s only what might have been expected,” Miss Caroline concludes. “I blame myself entirely.—I generally,” she adds, turning to me, “avoid leaving him any time in the town, you know.”
A STEADY MAN
And the best of it is that Regan remains in their minds “the steady man.” How impossible it is for the stranger to understand Ireland and Ireland’s ways! How much humour must you have—and what unlimited patience! There is nothing, of course, that so conduces to patience as a pleasant sense of humour.
The ladies are the Providence of the district. There is a room at the back of the great gallery filled nearly to the ceiling with rolls of homespun made by the peasant women in the villages. Whenever a cottage mother is in want of money she runs up to Miss Margaret or Miss Caroline, bringing or promising the product of her loom. A good deal of money is advanced; a good deal paid in this manner, chiefly out of the ladies’ generous pockets.
“Of course, poor things, you must know the way to take them,” says Miss Caroline in her Irish way. “One of them will come up and declare they’ll all be ‘lost entirely, ruined out and out’ for the want of five pounds. ‘Are you sure you couldn’t do with thirty shillings, now?’ I say to them. ‘Oh, Miss Caroline’—it will be then—‘as thrue as I’m a living woman, I couldn’t do with less than two pound ten!’ ... I get at the truth that way,” she adds.
It is Miss Margaret who undertakes the sale of goods which have already cost Kilcoultra so dear, and no one can say that she shows a commercial spirit.
“Let me see now,” she will say, fingering the stuff—and splendid stuff it is—with tentative finger and thumb. “I think we paid three-and-tenpence a yard for this, or maybe it was four shillings, but”—with a delighted smile—“I’ll let you have it for one-and-six, if you’re sure—really sure—you want it.”