“I don’t know, I’m sure, Pat, but I’ll just have to go and ask what I’ve forgotten. Begorra! if I’d no head at all to put these things into, they couldn’t slip out again, could they! and then I shouldn’t vex Aunt Jane’s soul with my forgetfulness. If it was sausages, Pat, I’ll fire my gun three times off the landing-stage, and you must just go up to the butcher yourself and bring them across;” with which he would whistle a merry tune and row leisurely back across the Loch. But long before he reached the other side, he would again have forgotten, and instead of going at once to the Parsonage, he would stroll into the garden of The Ghan House, which adjoined, to see if Paddy were available for the afternoon, or if by chance Eileen wandered dreamily under the trees gazing at the mountains.
One of the great problems of Jack’s existence at that time, indeed, the only one that he ever took seriously, was whether he liked Paddy or Eileen the best. Ever since he was two years old, the Adairs had lived in The Ghan House, next door to the Parsonage, and he always declared he had distinct recollections of a long white bolster-like apparition in a nurse’s arms, from the first day it appeared in the garden. He could just get about sufficiently well alone, then, to be always in mischief, and at his first opportunity, when the two nurses were deeply engaged in conversation, he got hold of the long clothes and tugged with all his might and main, to pull the baby on to the ground, a feat which he very nearly achieved. That was Eileen, and just as she had looked at him with big, calm, thoughtful eyes, then, not in the least disturbed by his vigorous attempts to unseat her, so she looked at him now in the first bloom of her beauty, quelling his over-exuberance of spirit, calming his boyish audacity, and making him sometimes feel as if he wanted to lie down and let her walk over him. But then on the other hand Paddy was such good fun! When the second bolster-like apparition appeared, he was four, and being somewhat weary of the solemn two-year-old Eileen he took rapidly to the ugly little brown-faced baby, whose eyes already began to dance with a suggestion of the mischievous tendency which only developed steadily year by year and claimed them kindred spirits from their earliest infancy. What the nurses at The Ghan House and the Parsonage suffered over those two imps of wickedness would fill a whole book; and why they were not drowned over and over again, or killed falling from trees, or run over on the railway that skirted the grounds, or suffocated in mountain bogs, remains forever one of the mysteries of their existence. And things were much the same still, though the nurses were no more and they had reached the mature ages of twenty-four and twenty, respectively. Where Jack went Paddy went, or very usually followed; and there was scarcely an act of daring even their busy brains could conceive, that they two had not achieved together—much to General Adair’s delight and Mrs Adair’s disquiet, for she felt that if her scapegrace daughter were ever to grow up at all she really ought to begin at once; and yet was quite at a loss by what procedure the change should commence. Boarding school had been tried, but there the girl had drooped and pined to such an extent that when the General went one day to see her, he had been so shocked and upset that he had had her trunk packed at once, and taken her straight back to Ireland without telling her mother anything about it, until they walked into the hall of The Ghan House.
“I can’t help it,” was all he had said, in reply to maternal remonstrances. “She wasn’t meant for boarding school life. I expect when the Lord made her, He fashioned her for running wild by the mountains and Loch, and well just have to let her grow up in her own way.” And an hour later he laughed till he nearly made himself ill over the spectacle of a small boat upside down in the bay, with Paddy clinging to it, while a coal barge waited alongside to pick her up and presently landed her close by the General’s landing-stage, a mass of mud and water and coal dust.
“Better not let your mother see you,” he managed to gasp. “Faith! I’ve wanted a boy all my life, but there’s no doubt I’ve got the very next best thing.” Then he went off to the Parsonage to tell Miss Jane and Miss Mary O’Hara, while Paddy slipped in the back way and was smuggled up to the bathroom by a faithful old housekeeper who worshipped any flesh and blood related to the General, whom she had known ever since he joined the Dublin Fusiliers, and embarked on the career that made his old regiment as proud and as fond of him, as he, to his last gasp, was of them.
But to return to the vexed question of the blouse, the three young people, having settled the difficulty concerning each other’s taste to their satisfaction, though in a somewhat unflattering fashion, Jack and Paddy sat on the table swinging their feet and discussed the delicate question of what would best suit the latter’s complexion.
Then suddenly Jack looked up with an innocent expression. “What’s the good of wasting all this time about a body’s complexion when they haven’t got one!” he said.
“How dare you! I’ve a beautiful olive tinge!”
“Olive!” teasingly; “why you look as if you’d washed your face with my brown boot polish! It must be rather awful to be so ugly that you look much the same in anything,” he finished.
“Oh, you scoundrel!—you long-legged kangaroo!—you big-footed elephant!—you—you—” and failing words altogether to express her feelings, Paddy commenced belabouring him over the head with a small sofa bolster, calling out to Eileen to “be a man and come and help her.”
“No, no,” gasped Jack, struggling to protect himself, “remain a woman, Eileen, and be ready to bandage my wounds when this vixen has worn herself out. Who would have dreamt I was letting myself in for this! Why I thought she knew she was ugly, it didn’t seem possible she could help knowing it!—I—I—” but just then the door opened and in the midst of the racket Miss Jane and Miss Mary O’Hara stepped daintily into the room.