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.
SPEAKING THE IRISH
“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.