"I do wish you wouldn't say Aye," she would plead, "when you mean Yes!"
And then he would roar at her. "What! Bleat like a damned Englishman! Where's your wit, woman?"
Soon after the birth of her son, she died, and her concern, therefore, with this story is slight. It is sufficient to say of her that she inherited a substantial fortune from her father and that she passed it on, almost unimpaired, to her husband, thus enabling him to live in comfortable disregard of the law as a means of livelihood. He had a small estate in County Antrim, which included part of the village of Ballymartin, and there he passed his days in agricultural pursuits.
2
Mr. Quinn, as has been stated, was a Unionist, and, in spite of his Catholic name, a Protestant; but he had a poor opinion of his Unionist neighbours who, so he said, were far more loyal to England than England quite liked. He hated the English accent ... "finicky bleatin'," he called it ... and declared, though he really knew better, that all Englishmen spoke with a Cockney intonation. "A lot of h-droppers," he called them, adding, "God gave them a decent language, but they haven't the gumption to talk it!" The Oxford voice, in his opinion, was educated Cockney, uglier, if possible, than the uneducated brand.
An Englishman, hearing Mr. Quinn talk in this fashion, might pardonably have imagined that he was listening to a fanatical Nationalist, a dynamiting Fenian, but if, being a Liberal, he had ventured to advocate Home Rule for Ireland in Mr. Quinn's presence, he would speedily have found that he was in error. "Damn the fear!" Mr. Quinn would say when people charged him with being a Home Ruler. The motive of his Unionism, however, was neither loyalty to England nor terror of Rome: it was wholly and unashamedly a matter of commerce. "The English bled us for centuries," he would say, "an' it's only fair we should bleed them. We've got our teeth in their skins, an' they're shellin' out their money gran'! That's what the Union's for—to make them keep on shellin' out their money. An' instead of tellin' the people to bite deeper an' get more money out of them, the fools o' Nationalists is tellin' them to take their teeth out! Never," he would exclaim passionately, "never, while there's a shillin' in an Englishman's pocket!"
Mr. Quinn, of course, treated every Englishman he met with courtesy, for he was an Irish gentleman, and he had sometimes been heard to speak affectionately of some person of English birth. The chief result of this civility, conjoined with the ferocity of his political statements, was that his English friends invariably spoke of him as "a typical Irishman." They looked upon him as so much comic relief to the more serious things of their own lives, and seemed constantly to expect him to perform some amusing antic, some innately Celtic act of comic folly. At such times, Mr. Quinn felt as if he could annihilate an Englishman.
"Ah, well," he would say, restraining himself, "we all know what the English are like, God help them!"
It was because of his strong feeling for Ireland and Irish things that he decided to have his son, Henry, educated in Ireland. "Anyway," he said to the lad, "you'll have an Irish tongue, whatever else you have!" He sent the boy to a school in the County Armagh and left him there until he discovered that he was not being educated at all. He had questioned Henry on the history and geography of Ireland one day, and had found to his horror that while Henry could tell him exactly where Popocatepetl was to be found, and knew that Mount Everest was 29,002 feet high, and could name the kings of England and the dates of their accession as easily as he could recite the Lord's Prayer, he had no knowledge of the whereabouts or character of Lurigedan, a hill in the County Antrim, and could tell him nothing of the Red Earls and the beautiful queens of Ireland. He knew something that was true, and much that was not, of Queen Elizabeth and King Alfred, but nothing, true or false, of Deirdre and Red Hugh O'Neill.
"What the hell's the good of knowin' about Popocatepetl," Mr. Quinn shouted at him, "when you don't know the name of a hill on your own doorstep!"