Whether this imputed to the Black a specially severe standard of taste, or if it meant that even the most insensate savage would be roused to enthusiasm by my mother’s beauty, I am unable to determine.
I have a letter from my companion Gold Stick, from which I think a few quotations, in exemplification, may be permitted.
Hildegarde Somerville to E. Œ. S. (Feb., 1891.)
“The women have swarmed since you left. I really think I know every one of them now, by voice, sight, and smell, notably Widow Catherine Cullinane, who has besieged us daily. Her voice is not dulcet, especially when raised in abusive entreaty, but she has not got anything out of me yet. It is as well that C. (a brother) and I are here to manage the show, as Mother is, to say the least, lavish. I was out one day when a woman called, a Mrs. Michael Kelleher; she has the most magnificent figure, walk, and throat that I have ever seen. She is tall, and her throat is exactly like the Rossetti women’s throats, long and round, and like cream. She would make a splendid model for you. I had seen her before, and proved her not deserving,” (O wise young judge of quite nineteen!) “her husband being a caretaker with a house and 4s. a week, and the use of two cows, besides a daughter out as a nursemaid. She really did not exactly beg, but came to see if she had ‘a shance of the sharity.’ Her eldest boy, aged eleven, had fallen off the cowhouse roof on to a cow’s back (neither hurt!), and we gave her Elliman, which cured him. But the day I was out, Mother saw her, and although I had given full particulars in the book as to her means”—(her princely affluence in fact, as compared with her fellows)—“she gave her bread, tea, sugar, and meal, simply because she had a baby the other day and had a child with a bad cold.”
Regarding the matter dispassionately, and from a distance, I should say that either affliction amply justified my mother’s action, but H. did not then think so.
“I don’t think this will happen again,” she resumes, severely, “as Mother now regrets having done it. All the same, I had the greatest difficulty in stopping her from clothing an entire family with the Dorcas things, (which are lovely) as I told her, there are not 100 things, and there are over 200 people, and it seems wicked to clothe one family from top to toe, so I prevailed. E. says the Balfour Fund will help very few of our women.” (E. was my cousin Egerton Coghill, who, like Robert Martin, had given his services to the Government as a distributor of the Fund, and, in the south and west of the County Cork, had some of the worst districts in Ireland under his jurisdiction.)
“No one with less than a quarter of an acre of land is entitled to get help,” my sister’s letter continues, “as they can get Out-door Relief from the Rates, and no one with one ‘healthy male’ able to work on the Balfour road can have it, in fact, only those with sick husbands, or widows with farms, are eligible. As the fund is over £44,000, and I have estimated that £150 would keep our Western women going for 6 months, it seems to me very unfair to send the quarter-acre people on to the Rates.”
It may be gathered from this that the difficulties of administration were not light; it may also, perhaps, be inferred that the ancient confidence in the landlord class (none of these people were tenants of my father’s), which modern teaching has done its best to obliterate, was not entirely misplaced. I do not claim any exceptional virtues for my father and mother. Their efforts on behalf of their distressed neighbours were no more than typical of what their class was, and is, accustomed to consider the point of honour. It remains to be seen if the substitutes for the old order will adopt and continue the tradition of “Noblesse oblige.”
I have heard a beggar-woman haranguing on this topic.
“I towld them,” she cried, with, I admit, an eye on my hand as it sought my pocket, “you were the owld stock, and had the glance of the Somervilles in your eye! God be with the owld times! The Somervilles and the Townshends! Them was the rale genthry! Not this shipwrecked crew that’s in it now!”