“I know,” she turned to me, “that you’re delighting in it! What a pity you haven’t your easel with you!” (Nothing else, presumably, was required.) The attitude of mind is the same, but there is much in the way a thing is said.
A special joy was imparted to Martin’s and my wanderings about Ross by the presence of the Puppet. I had brought him to Paris (and Martin and I had together smuggled him home under the very nose of the Douane); he had accompanied me on a yachting excursion (in the course of which I walked on deck in my sleep, and very nearly walked overboard, the Puppet following me faithfully; in which case we should neither of us have ever been heard of again, as the tide-race in Youghal Harbour is no place for a bad swimmer). He had paid many and various visits with me, and had passed from a luxury into a necessity. Naturally he came with me to Ross. He was a very small fox terrier, rather fast in manner, but engaging; with a heart framed equally for love or war, and a snub nose. His official name was Patsey; a stupid name, I admit, and conventional to exhaustion, but of a simplicity that popularised him. There are a few such names, for humans as for dogs. I need give but one instance, Bill. (I do not refer to the Bills of humbler life, though I am not sure that the rule does not apply there also.) The man who hails his friend as “Bill” feels himself, in so doing, a humourist, which naturally endears Bill to him.
It was Fanny Currey, by the way, who called Patsey “The Puppet” (as a variant of “The Puppy”). There are not many people with any pretensions to light and leading who did not know Miss Fanny Currey of Lismore. She is dead now, and Ireland is a poorer place for her loss. I will not now try to speak of her brilliance and versatility. She was, among her many gifts, a profound and learned dog-owner, and though her taste had been somewhat perverted by dachshunds (which can degenerate into a very lowering habit), it was an honour to any little dog to be noticed by her.
The Puppet had various accomplishments. He wept when rebuked, and, sitting up penitentially, real tears would course one another down his brief and innocent nose. He could walk on his fore-legs only; he could jump bog-drains that would daunt a foxhound; even the tall single-stone walls of Galway, that crumble at a touch, could not stop him. The carpenter at Ross was so moved by his phenomenal activity that he challenged me to “lep my dog agin his.” His dog, a collie, was defeated, and the carpenter said, generously, that he “gave it in to the Puppet that he was dam’ wise.”
Many were the vicissitudes through which that little dog came safely. A mad dog in Castle Haven missed him by a hair’s breadth. (The hair, one supposes, of the dog that did not bite him.) Distemper fits in Paris were only just mastered. (It is worthy of note that the cure was effected by strong coffee, prescribed by a noted vet. of the Quartier Latin.) In battles often, in perils of the sea; nor shall I soon forget a critical time in infancy, when, as my diary sourly relates, “Jack and Hugh” (two small and savage brothers) “rushed to me in state of frantic morbid delight, to tell me that the puppy had thrown up a huge worm, and was dying.”
And all these troubles he survived only to die of poison at Ross. But this came later, during my second visit, and during that first and happy time the Puppet and Martin and I enjoyed ourselves without let or hindrance.
It is long now since I have been in Galway, and I know that many of the poor people with whom Martin and I used to talk, endlessly, and always, for us, interestingly, have gone over to that other world where she now is. Of them all, I think the one most beloved by her was the little man of whom she discoursed in one of the chapters of “Some Irish Yesterdays” as “Rickeen.” This was not his name, but it will serve. Rickeen was of the inmost and straitest sect of the Ross tenants. His farm, which was a very small one, was, I imagine, run by his wife and children; he, being rightly convinced that Ross House and all appertaining to it would fall in ruin without his constant attention, spent his life “about the place,” in the stables, the garden, the house; and wherever he was, he was talking, and that, usually and preferably, to “Miss Wilet.”
The adoration that was given to her by all the people found its highest expression in Rickeen. She was his religion, the visible saint whom he worshipped, he gave her his supreme confidence. I believe he spoke the truth to her. More can hardly be said.
Rickeen was a small, dark fellow, with black whiskers, and a pale, sharp-featured face. We used to think that he was like a London clergyman, rather old-fashioned, yet broad in his views. He had a passion for horses and dogs, and was unlike most of his fellows in a certain poetic regard for such frivolous by-products of nature as flowers and birds. I can see Rickeen on a fair May morning pulling off his black slouch hat to Martin and me, with the shine of the sun on his high forehead, on which rings of sparse black hair straggled, his dark eyes beaming, and I can hear his soft-tuned Galway voice saying:
“Well, glory be to God, Miss Wilet, this is a grand day! And great growth entirely in the weather! Faith, I didn’t think to see it so good at all to-day, there was two o’ thim planets close afther the moon last night!”