“Awfully sorry I will not be able to meet you. Drive to Foley’s Hotel. Will be waiting you there.”
This despatch was put into my hand before I left the steamer at Queenstown. Its genial tone and eccentric grammar were quite in keeping with my ideas of an Irishman. These were at once simple and definite. All Irishmen were genial; most of them were eccentric. In fact, had my uncle and cousin met me on the pier, clad in knee-breeches and tail-coats, and hailed me with what I believed to be the national salutation “Begorra!” I should scarcely have been taken aback.
The outside car on which I drove from the Cork station to the hotel was also a realization of preconceived ideas. In response to the bewildering proffers of “Inside or outside?” I had selected an “outside,” and was quite satisfied with the genuineness of the difficulty I found in remaining on it, as we rattled through the muddy streets. The carman himself was perhaps a little disappointing. His replies to my questions were not only devoid of that repartee which I had understood to be the attribute of all Irish carmen, but were lacking in common intelligence; and on his replying for the third time, “Faith, I dunno, miss,” I concluded I must have hit on an unlucky exception.
The day had lost none of the brilliancy of the early morning. It seemed to me that the sun shone with a deliberate intention of welcome, and the unfamiliar softness of Irish air was almost intoxicating. Everything was conspiring to put me into the highest spirits, and I only laughed when my new dressing-bag was flung on to the pavement by the dislocating jerk with which the car pulled up in front of Foley’s Hotel.
As I walked into the hotel, the porter who had taken in my boxes, went over to a tall young man who was leaning over the bar at the end of the narrow hall, and whispered something to him. He immediately started from his lounging position, and, furtively glancing at the mirror behind the bar, he came up to me.
“How do you do? I’m very glad to see you over here,” he said, with an evident effort to assume an easy cousinly manner. “I hope you didn’t mind not meeting me. I was awfully sorry I couldn’t get down to Queenstown, but I had important business in town.” It was perhaps a consciousness of the interested scrutiny of the young lady behind the bar that caused him to blush an ingenuous red as he spoke. “You’d better come on and have some luncheon,” he continued, without giving me time to answer him. “We’ve only got an hour before the train starts.”
I followed him into the coffee-room, thinking as I did so how different this well-dressed, rather awkward young man was from the picturesque and vivacious creature I had somehow pictured my Irish cousin to be. His accent, however, was unmistakably that of his native country; or, rather, as I afterwards found, that of his particular part of it. His quick, low way of speaking was at first a little unintelligible to me, and almost gave me the idea that what he said was intended to be of a confidential nature; but on the whole I thought his voice a singularly pleasant one, and listened with interest to its friendly modulations.
By the time our luncheon was put on the table he was more at his ease, and had even, with a sheepish, half-deprecating glance from his light grey eyes, addressed me as “Theo.” The almost fraternal familiarity of the head waiter was, on Willy’s explanation that I was his cousin from America, extended in the fullest degree to me.
“Indeed, when I seen her coming in the door, I remarked to Miss Foley how greatly the young lady favoured the Sarsfield family,” he observed blandly; “and Miss Foley said she considered she had a great likeness to yourself, captain.”
This was a little embarrassing. I did not quite know what I was expected to say, and devoted myself to my mutton-chop.