“I don’t know. Father saw it in one of those artist-men’s sketch-books, and wanted to buy it, I’ve heard mother say; but ’e gave it to him—said he had plenty more of her.”
“Bridget’s the very image of her, isn’t she?”
“Yes—might be ’er daughter. She don’t favor either you or ’Enry a bit,” Mrs. Wainright declared.
“Do you remember when we were little, running about barefoot on the shore at Dara’s Bay?” asked her sister presently in a low voice, glancing over her shoulder to see that the door was shut; “and mother telling us stories over the peat fire in the evenings—an’ singing. What queer outlandish things she told us, do you remember?—and the things she sung. Sometimes I ’ave the air running in my head for days now, and I can see her great big eyes when she told the stories to us children—just like Bid’s. Do you remember the painter-folk that hung about the cottage? Mother used to wear a scarlet shawl, and sit on that bit of old wall by the sea—didn’t she?—and knit. Can’t you see her now? And the artists that used to come and talk to her? She always made them laugh, I mind me.”
“Yes. Who’d think, to see us sittin’ in our drawing-rooms now, we’d come out of that little wood shanty?” Mrs. Wainright replied. “But I don’t know that we weren’t ’appy enough.”
“Bridget came across this picture one day, when she was a little thing,” Mrs. Ruan resumed after a pause, locking the sketch away in the desk again, “and she asked who it was, and I told ’er it was her grandmother, but she was never to tell a word about ’er being only a fisher girl. And what do you think she said?—that’s what I mean by Bridget being queer. She said she’d much rather be a fisher girl and live in a hut by the sea than keep a public house. I smacked her for it—silly little thing.—She ought to be here by this time.
“Oh, here’s father!” Mr. Ruan was a thick-set, rather powerfully built man, with a somewhat florid complexion, and a taciturn manner.
“Room’s very ’ot,” he remarked, shaking hands with his sister-in-law. “Bridget not come yet?”
“No, she’ll be here in a few minutes. I didn’t go to meet her because Jinny came in. There! that’s the cab, isn’t it?”
She ran to the top of the stairs, but Bridget was already half way up.