He appealed to Peter Gahan, who was crouching beside his engine under the fore-deck.
“Oughtn’t they to be thankful to the young lady, Peter,” he said, “seeing they’d never have been married only for her?”
Peter Gahan looked out from his shelter and scowled. According to the teaching of the most advanced Socialists the marriage tie is not a blessing but a curse.
XV. AUNT NELL
Mrs. MacDermott splashed her way across the yard towards the stable. It was raining, softly and persistently. The mud lay deep. There were pools of water here and there. Mrs. MacDermott neither paused nor picked her steps. There was no reason why she should. The rain could not damage the tweed cap on her head. Her complexion, brilliant as the complexions of Irish women often are, was not of the kind that washes off. Her rough grey skirt, on which rain-drops glistened, came down no further than her knees. On her feet were a pair of rubber boots which reached up to the hem of her skirt, perhaps further. She was comfortably indifferent to rain and mud.
If you reckon the years since she was born, Mrs. MacDermott was nearly forty. But that is no true way of estimating the age of man or woman. Seen, not in the dusk with the light behind her, but in broad daylight on horseback, she was little more than thirty. Such is the reward of living an outdoor life in the damp climate of Connaught. And her heart was as young as her face and figure. She had known no serious troubles and very few of the minor cares of life. Her husband, a man twenty-five years older than she was, died after two years of married life, leaving her a very comfortable fortune. Nell MacDermott—the whole country called her Nell—hunted three days a week every winter.
“Why shouldn’t she be young?” John Gafferty, the groom, used to say. “Hasn’t she five good horses and the full of her skin of meat and drink? The likes of her never get old.”
Johnny Gafferty was rubbing down a tall bay mare when Mrs. MacDermott opened the stable door and entered the loose box.
“Johnny,” she said, “you’ll put the cob in the governess cart this afternoon and have him round at three o’clock. I’m going up to the station to meet my nephew. I’ve had a letter from his father to say he’ll be here to-day.”