But sometimes her interference became necessary as a measure of last appeal, and she came down on them with hearty whacks which were invariably poulticed with a word or two, half scolding and half good-natured wit. The children were thus reconciled to the propriety and necessity of certain summary inflictions, which at the same time they took care to avoid, when it could be done without too much trouble. Often there were voices heard in a higher key than is considered proper in a drawing-room, and sometimes there was a debouchment of children out at the door, and a consequent squealing of little pigs, and fluttering of chickens before it; which showed the mother’s activity at ejection. But no drawing-room ever sheltered more gentle hearts, and no mother of high degree ever followed a scolding with more patience than Mrs. O’Brien did. There was no malice in her, and a half-laugh stood ever in her eye, as she looked out at the door on the living miscellanies she had put in motion, and said—“Sure you can’t turn a hand, or step any place at all, for pigs, chickens and childer!”
There is often more room in the heart than in the house. The O’Briens began to feel themselves crowded—or rather to feel the inconvenience of too many sitters for their stools, without knowing precisely—or rather without permitting themselves to acknowledge what caused their discomfort. There were too many mouths for the potatoes, as Patrick senior and his wife were at last compelled to admit in their matrimonial committee of ways and means, and the question now became, how could they diminish the one, or increase the other. The lesser fry were out of the question. Nothing could be done in the way of removing them; nor did the thought occur to father or mother, who loved the children with true Irish hearts; that the smaller children were in the way, or that any of the little ones could possibly be spared, if the lord-lieutenant himself wanted a baby. So they began canvassing at the other end of the long list.
“There was Ellen,” said the father, doubtfully.
“Ellen! Sure you’ll not be putting her away, and nobody to mind the childer? What is the wages, I’d like to know, would make her place good to us?”
And Ellen, it was decided, was a fixture.
“There is Paddy,” said the mother with some hesitation. “Sure he’s a broth of a boy, and it is time he should do for himself—it is. It’s little in life he’s good for here, anyway.”
The father did not think so. Many were the little “turns” that Paddy cheerfully undertook, but all of them could not in conscience be made to appear to amount to an indispensable service, or any thing like it.
“Look at him now?” said the mother. And they looked at Pat, whose all good-natured face, unconscious that it was the subject of observation, bloomed like a tall flower amid the lesser O’Briens who clustered about him.
“Sure there’s a tribe of them!” said O’Brien.
“But look at Paddy! He’s the moral of yourself at his age, Patrick; with the same niver-a-thought, lazy look!”