Our eyes met in dumb despair, but my second cousin still rose above the waves. (This metaphor is most appropriate, as we could not have been much wetter if we had been drowned.)
“Where is the nearest hotel?” she asked, with all the severity of an examining Q.C.
“Back in Recess. Ye’d be hard set to get there to-night.”
“Think now, like a good boy, is there no sort of a place hereabouts where they’d put us up for the one night?”
The despairing relapse into the vernacular had its effect.
“Well, faith, I wouldn’t say but the Widda Joyce ’d be apt to be able to do it. There was an English gintleman, a Major, that she had there for the fishin’——”
In what capacity the English Major was used in the fishing we did not stop to inquire; he might have been employed as a float for all we cared; it was about all we felt ourselves fit for.
We did not ask the Widow Joyce if she could take us in. We simply walked into her house and stayed there. We had heard a good deal of the Spanish type of beauty that is said to abound in Connemara, but the Widow Joyce was the first specimen of it that we had seen. A small, pale, refined woman, with large brown eyes, and dark hair tucked shiningly away under a snowy white frilled cap, she heard our story with flattering interest and compassion, and we had hardly finished it before most of her eleven children were started in different directions to prepare things for us and “the pony.” By-the-bye, we noticed that during our travels Sibbie was always given brevet rank, the delicate inference being that we were far too refined and aristocratic to be associated with anything so vulgar as a jennet.
A lovely clear fire of turf was burning on the hearth, and Mrs. Joyce hospitably insisted on our each sitting on little stools inside the big fireplace, and roasting there, till the steam of our sacrifice showed how necessary a proceeding it was. In the meantime that sacred place known as “Back-in-the-room” was being prepared for our reception; as far though we should have preferred the kitchen with its clean earth floor and blazing fire, Mrs. Joyce would not hear of our having our dinner there.
“Sure the Meejer always ate his vittles back in the room,” she said; and to this supreme precedent we found it necessary to conform.