Reaching it, and finding the door as usual open, they enter what might be the hall in another house, but is here the kitchen. There is no leading up to it. From the moment you cross the threshold the kitchen lies before you.
It is a large room, if it may so be called, with a huge fireplace in which a dozen fires might be stowed away and forgotten. Just now there is a flame somewhere in its blackmost depths that cannot possibly annoy these June visitors, as one has to search for it to find it.
An old woman, infirm and toothless, yet with all the remains of great beauty, sits cowering over this hidden turf fire, mumbling to herself, it may be, of golden days now past and gone, when she had been the fairest colleen at mass or pattern, and had counted her lovers by the score. Yea, those were good old times, when the sky was ever blue and all the earth was young.
Two young women, sitting near her, but farther from the chimney-nook, are gossiping idly, but persistently, in the soft, mellifluous brogue that distinguishes the county Cork.
As the Beresford girls enter, these two latter women rise simultaneously and courtesy with deep respect. The youngest of them, who is so like the handsome old woman in the corner of the fireplace as to be unmistakably of kin to her, comes quickly forward to greet her visitors with the kindly grace and the absence of consciousness that distinguish the Irish peasantry when doing the honors of their own homes. This lack of mauvaise honte arises perhaps from the fact that they are so honestly glad to welcome a guest beneath their roof that they forget to be shy or backward.
She makes a slight effort to pull down her tucked-up sleeves, and then desists, for which any one with a mind artistic should be devoutly grateful, as her arms, brown as they are from exposure to the sun, are at least shaped to perfection. She is dressed in a maroon-colored skirt and body, the skirt so turned up in fishwife fashion (as we wore it some seasons ago) that a dark-blue petticoat beneath, of [some] coarse description, can be distinctly seen.
Her throat is a little bare, arms, as I have said, quite so, far up above the elbows. She is stout and comely, with a beautiful laughing mouth, and eyes of deepest gray, merry as her lips. Outside, lying about, half naked in the warm sunshine, are three or four boys with the same eyes and mouth, undeniably her children.
"Wisha! 'tis meself's glad to see ye," she says, with a beaming smile. "Good luck to yer faces. 'Tis a long time now, Miss Beresford, since ye came, or Miss Kit there."
"I promised your mother a pudding, and I have brought it," says Kit.
"Look at that, now! 'Tis a trouble we are to ye entirely. Mother, wake up a bit, an' thank Miss Kit for what she's brought ye."