“I have a pair of real little beauties,” went on the chemist’s wife, beaming at us between minarets of Eno’s Fruit Salt and Mellin’s Food, “just the thing for London work. I’ll have them round at the hotel for you in ten minutes.”
We were conscious of social shrinkage as the work for which we required the ponies was explained; a fortnight’s road work in Wales, with the proviso that the animals would have to carry packs—“large packs,” added Miss O’Flannigan—held a suggestion of bagmen, not to say tinkers. But Mrs Williams’ stable sank unhesitatingly to the level of our needs. She had yet another pony, three years old, thirteen hands high, steady, “and bin ridden with the Yeomanry,” she ended, reassuringly.
From the eye that Miss O’Flannigan cast upon me I knew that her mind was, like mine, occupied with a vision of the Yeomanry mounted, like cyclists, on “dwarf-safeties,” and we ventured to ask whether the St Bernard, whose eyes gleamed from the dark corner of the shop where he lay, pantingly protruding a tongue like a giant slice of ham, had been ridden during the training. The jest had a high success, and a suetty giggle from somewhere near the open door of the parlour apprised us that this gem of Irish humour was not lost on the apprentice.
Before we returned to the hotel several things had been accomplished. We were possessors of the chemist’s pony for a fortnight; we had bakingly retraced our steps to the ironmonger, and by dint of remaining immutable on the top of the cottage stove, had made a like bargain with him; and we had interested Welshpool more whole-souledly than any event since the election and the last circus. Coolness and peace awaited us at the Royal Oak Inn, with its thick walls and polished floors, and its associations of the old coaching days, wonderfully striking to an Irish eye, accustomed to connect antiquity with dirt and dilapidation. We have nothing hale and honourable like these hostelries, with their centuries of landlord ancestry: we have the modern hotel after its kind, and also the unspeakable pothouse, with creeping things after their kind; but antiquity, if such there be, is a poor, musty ghost, lingering among broken furniture and potsherds, to sadden the eyes of such as can discern it.
Ireland seemed a long way off, while we lunched largely and languidly on fruit and cream, and wondered how we were going to ride through four counties in heat of this kind. A sense of inadequacy grew upon us like a slight indigestion, or, perhaps, it came to us in that guise, and the fussy clatter of ponies’ hoofs in the yard below had a ring in it of the inexorable. Miss O’Flannigan sharpened a pencil and began to make notes, evidently to restore her moral tone,—notes about Welshpool, she said, antiquities, and such things; but as subsequently these proved to consist of the entry, “Saturday, June 10, ‘Black and White,’ lunch, Academy, headache, tea, tried on, &c.,” with a bulbous profile of the ironmonger, her method of working back to ancient history must have been mystic and gradual.
While we thus sat dubious of ourselves and all things, expecting to hear that the chemist and the ironmonger had alike thought better of it, there was a shuffling of many feet in the hall, and the door opened to its widest to admit an immense old lady, advancing with the solemnity of a hearse, while two daughters of some fifty-five or sixty hard-won years moved beside her like pall-bearers, supporting each a weighty elbow on their lean arms. A third daughter walked behind, carrying a white dog of the Spitz breed. As a foundation-stone sinks to its resting-place, so, and with a like deliberation, was the old lady lowered into the largest and, indeed, the only possible chair; one daughter shut the window, another rang the bell, and a meal of fried beef-steak, onions, and bottled stout was ordered. The temperature of the room seemed perceptibly to rise, and Miss O’Flannigan and I communed by glances as to whether we had energy to get up and go away.
“Eh! it’s warm, vera warm,” said the old lady, addressing the company in general, but ceaselessly examining Miss O’Flannigan and me with eyes as blue and bright as those of any heroine of inexpensive fiction; “it mak’s a body p’spire vera free, that it dew. But ye dew enjoy it——”
She spoke with a Yorkshire accent as broad as the foot which, in its cloth shoe and white stocking, was handsomely displayed below her skirt hem—and we apologise for probable mistakes in the reproduction by an Irish hand of that sturdy, grumbling drawl.
“Ah’m come all the way oop fra’ Yorkshire for a too-er,” she went on; “t’ yoong folks like a change,” she indicated her grey-haired attendants, “but Wales is a bit dool when ye come out for a holiday. Eh, Scarbro’s the gay, bonny place! Eh, but ye miss a treat if ye don’t see Scarbro!”
She held us with her glittering eye, and the eulogy of Scarborough proceeded with the burr of a noontide bee, by promenades, hotels, family histories of friends who kept lodgings in the best terraces, and many other highways and byways; while the three daughters and the white dog sat and filled in the mesmeric effect, immovable as scenery. A message that the ponies were in the yard came at last to our relief, like good news from a far country, and with the activity of a hunting morning we made our exit in the wake of the waitress, who, at the Royal Oak, as at many other Welsh inns, has worthily replaced the waiter and the cheerless glory of his evening suit. The needed fillip had been given; the present moment, with its release and its ponies, sparkled suddenly, and that Wales which the old Yorkshire woman found so “dool” by comparison with Scarborough, lay awaiting us in restored glamour.