HEN the iron-studded hall-door of Renvyle House Hotel had closed behind us, we found ourselves in a low-panelled hall, with oaken props for guns and fishing rods, and long black oaken chests along its walls. Everything was old-fashioned, even mediæval, dark, and comfortable. Nothing was in the least suggestive of a hotel, unless it might have been a row of letters and telegrams on the chimney-piece, and I was beginning seriously to fear that we had made a mistake, when I noticed my second cousin’s eye-glasses were at full cock, and following their direction, I saw the “Innkeepers’ Regulation” Act hanging framed on the wall. It was both a shock and a relief.
Our various belongings—somewhat disreputable and travel-stained by this time—having been conveyed from the trap, we were told that tea was ready in the drawing-room, and followed the servant through two deep doorways into another room, also mediæval and panelled. “What is so rare as a day in June?” asks Mr. Lowell. Nothing, we can confidently reply, except a fire in July, and there on the brick hearth we saw with gloating, incredulous eyes a heap of burning turf sending a warm, dry glow into the room, and making red reflections in the antique silver tea-service that was placed on a table near it. For ever quelled were our vague anticipations of the hotel drawing-room and its fetishes, the ornate mirrors, the glass-shaded clocks, and the alabaster chimney ornaments; and as we extended our muddy boots to the blaze, and sipped hot tea through a heavy coating of cream, we felt reconciled to the loss of an ideal.
RENVYLE HOUSE HOTEL.
After the clank of our tea-cups had continued for a few minutes, there was a stir under the frilled petticoat of the sofa, and a small black-and-tan head was put forth with an expression of modest but anxious inquiry, the raised flounces making a poke bonnet round the face, and giving it an old-ladyish absurdity, of which its owner was happily unaware. We laughed—an unkindness which was followed by an expression of deep but amiable embarrassment, and a tapping on the floor that told of deprecatory tail waggings. We simultaneously extended a piece of bread-and-butter, and an animal, allied apparently to the houses of black-and-tan terrier and dachshund, at once came forward with its best manner and took our offerings with suave good breeding and friendliness. A trick of sitting up and waving the fore-paws as a request for food was exhibited to us without delay, and further researches discovered a proficiency in that accomplishment of “trust” and “paid for,” which must be the bitterest problem in dog-education, and perhaps gives in later dog-life some free-thinking ideas about the unpractical nature of the exercise, and the flippancy of supreme beings generally. We said all this to each other, luxuriously and at great length, and had some pleasure in contrasting the refined behaviour of the Renvyle dog with the brutal cynicism of the Recess penwiper and the blasé effeteness of its fox-terrier. Under the influences of dark mahogany panelling and a low Queen Anne window we became mellow and thoughtful, and sank into soothing reflection on our natural affinity to what is cultured and artistic. I am sure, at least, that my second cousin felt like that; she always has since the disastrous day on which a chiromantist looked at her hand and told her that it was essential to her to have nice surroundings.
I was beginning to feel a little acrid at this recollection when the door-handle turned in its place high up in the panels, and Mrs. Blake came in to see her visitors. That my cousin belonged to her county seemed to her a full and sufficient reason that she should welcome us as friends, and perhaps it gave us throughout our stay an advantage over the ordinary tourist in the more intimate kindnesses and opportunities for conversation that fell to our lot.
We looked as hard at Mrs. Blake as politeness would permit, while the broad columns of the Times seemed to rise before our mind’s eye, with the story sprinkled down it through examination and cross-examination of what she had gone through in the first years of the agitation. It required an effort to imagine her, with her refined, intellectual face and delicate physique, taking a stick in her hand and going out day after day to drive off her land the trespassing cattle, sheep, and horses that were as regularly driven on to it again as soon as her back was turned. We did not say these things to Mrs. Blake, but we thought about them a good deal while we sat and talked to her, and noticed the worn look of her face and the anxious furrows above her benevolent brows.
It was some time before we went up to see the two rooms of which we had been offered a choice. Both were low and panelled, both had low, long windows; in fact it will save trouble if we say at once that everything at Renvyle was long and low and panelled. The first room looked to the front of the house, and out over the Atlantic towards the muffled ghosts of Innis Boffin and Achill Islands; a fine view on a fine day, and impressive even at its worst; but to us, the room’s chiefest attraction was the four-poster bed, a magnificent kind of upper chamber, like a sumptuous private box, with gilded pillars, and carved work, and stretched canopy; something to admire with the help of a catalogue at South Kensington. We felt, as we were taken down two long passages to view the other room, that it was a mere matter of form, and that the golden bed was too regal a circumstance to be abandoned. But before my cousin’s eye-glasses were fairly adjusted for the inspection, we had begun to waver. The other bed was brass instead of gold, there was no denying that; but these windows looked out to a great ridge of mountains, crowded about the head of the bay, roses climbed to the sill, and the grassy stretch below was cut out in gaudy flower-beds. A peacock screamed just under the windows, and we saw him with his meek spouse trailing his tail about the grass among the flower-beds that were wired in from his ravaging beak. I think it was the broad window seat in conjunction with the mountains that turned the scale—(the peacock also turned the scale, but in a different way, generally turning it at C in alt; but, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling says, that is another story). We forewent the golden glories of the new Jerusalem bed, and remained where we were.
There was unconfessed peace in the certainty that it was not an afternoon for sight-seeing; rather for fervent shin-roasting at the drawing-room fire, blended with leisurely, unsystematic assimilation of the Times for the last four days. Fishermen, apparently, take a holiday from newspapers, along with their other duties when they go a-fishing, and expose themselves to nothing more severe in the way of literature than the Field or Land and Water; at all events, these and a pre-historic Illustrated London News had been our only opportunities for keeping ourselves in touch with the outer world since we had left it. Boaconstrictor-like, we slowly gorged ourselves with solid facts, and then subsided into a ruminative torpor, misanthropically delighted at the fact that we had chanced upon an intermediate period as to tourists, and that the owners of the letters and telegrams that we had seen in the hall had not arrived to claim