“That same foot she released from her high-heeled shoe on arriving, driven from Cork in a ‘Jarvey,’ and, when the Cocher said ‘Stop Madam, you haven’t paid!’ she threw the money on the ground, and with her shoe she dealt him a smart box on the ear and said,
“‘Take that before the Grand Jury!’ (meaning she could do anything and would not get fined.)
“Une maïtresse femme!”
Thus my cousin concludes her story, not without a certain approbation of our ancestress.
Indisputably the coming of the Palefaces slackened the moral fibre of Castle Townshend; the fire has gone out of the fights and the heat out of the hatreds. I do not claim for the later generations a higher standard; peace is mainly ensued by lack of concentration; it is not so much that we forgive, as that we forget. I regret that these early histories do not present my departed relatives in a more attractive light, but personal experience has taught me how infinitely boring can be the virtues of other people’s families.
A strange product of these high explosives was my father, who, as was said of another like unto him, was “The gentlest crayture ever came into a house.” He had no brothers and but one sister, a fact that did not, I think, distress my grandparents, who were in advance of their period in considering the prevalent immense families ill-bred; and even had the matter been for them a subject of regret, they had at least one consolation—a consolation offered in a similar case to a cousin of Martin’s—“Afther all,” it was said, “if ye had a hundhred of them ye couldn’t have a greater variety.”
An only son, with a solitary sister, brought up in the days when the difference between the sexes was clearly defined by the position of the definite article, “an only son” being by no means in the same case, grammatical or otherwise, with “only a daughter,” it would not have been surprising had he developed into such a flower of culture as had blossomed in “Johnny Wild.” I expect that the rare and passionate devotion of his father to his mother taught him a lesson not generally inculcated in his time. In truth, his love and consideration for his mother and sister amounted to anachronism in those days, when chivalry was mostly relegated to the Eglinton Tournament, and unselfishness was bracketed with needlework as a graceful and exclusive attribute of the Ministering Angel.
Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, once defined the two men of her acquaintance whom most she delighted to honour as
“Preux Chevaliers! Christian gentlemen, who feed their dogs from the dinner-table!”
I find it impossible to better this as a description of my father. I recognise the profound conventionality of saying that dogs and children adored him, yet, conventional though the statement may be, it is inflicted upon me by the facts of the case. In him children knew, intuitively, the kindred soul, dogs recognised, not by mere intuition, but by force of intellect, their slave. I can see him surreptitiously passing forbidden delicacies from his plate to the silent watchers beneath the surface, his eyes disingenuously fixed upon the window to divert my mother’s suspicions, and I can still hear his leisurely histories of two imaginary South African Lion-slayers, named, with a massive simplicity, Smith and Brown, whose achievements were for us, as children, the last possibility of romance.