“She may be interested in the Home-Rule question,” suggested my mother with a smile, adding: “And perhaps political economy is her forte.”
“In that case I’ll hand her over to Harry Welstone. He can talk Adam Smith, Martin Tupper, and Stuart Mill. He can enlighten her on the land question as well as A. M. Sullivan or Mitchel Henry; and he shall do it as sure as my name is Frederick Fitzgerald Ormonde. Besides, he can imitate Gladstone, Bright, Toole, Mathews, and Buckstone. He’s just the sort of fellow to encounter this antediluvian female, and, if such a thing were within the realms of possibility, metamorphose her.”
Visitors to a country house, should the entertainers be not in the habit of receiving company, are about the severest penances that can by any possibility be inflicted. Everything requires to be turned topsy-turvy for them—beds, bedrooms, furniture, carpets, “fixins’” of every description. The cellar must be overhauled and confidential conferences held with the cook. The “trap” used for knocking about the roads and attending markets and fairs must be shoved aside, and the family coach put into formidable requisition. The horses must be clipped, while the harness is found to be defective and a new whip an absolute necessity. The very door-mats suggest renovation.
As regards Harry Welstone, his room and his tub were always ready. I would have felt no hesitation in quartering him on the house-top, and the only preparation I went in for with reference to his visit was a scrupulous overhauling of the billiard-table. Having no person to practise with except Martin Heaviside of the Grove, or Captain O’Reilly of the Connaught Rangers when home on leave, the cushions became more like bags of sand than those springy, elastic walls from which the pale white or the blushing red ball bounds gaily towards the coquettish pocket or the artfully-arranged collision of the carrom. With the aid of Ned Clancy—who, in addition to being game-keeper, was a sort of Jack-of-all-trades—and the usual formulæ, I succeeded in imparting the necessary tone to the table, and was satisfied that Harry would scarcely fail to appreciate the utility of the preparations.
I felt no anxiety whatever to “show off” to the English member of Parliament, while I honestly confess to a burning desire to appear the “correct thing” in the eyes of my old college chum; and while I ordered a homely vehicle called the shandradan—half pilentum, half brougham, very old, very rickety, and very seedy—to meet Mr. and Miss Hawthorne upon the following day, I turned out my own dog-cart, built by Bates, of Gorey—stained ash, brass-boxed wheels, brass-mounted harness, ‘possum rug, with Lily of the Valley and Primrose tandem—in order to bowl Harry Welstone from Ballyvoreen station to the lodge gate, nine miles, in the forty minutes.
In accordance with preconcerted arrangement, I met Harry, hugged him, whacked him on the back, refreshed him from my flask, rolled him in the ‘possum rug as though the mercury were in the tens below zero, and almost yelled with pleasure the entire way back.
Is any meeting equal to the meeting of old school-fellows?
Ay de mi! no.
He had grown much stouter and much handsomer. His eyes were more romantically dark, and his black moustache, which I recollected so well in its struggling tooth-brush infancy, was now pointed after the fashion of the third Napoleon.
After he had received a cordial welcome from my mother I dragged him up to his room, and there we sat talking over Jim Cooper, that went to the diggings, and Bobby Thyne, now a leader at the Indian bar, and Tom O’Brien, who was a Jesuit, and Phil Dempsey, whose last speech on circuit had elicited the warm encomiums of Mr. Justice Fitzgerald; of the Corbet girls, and the Walshs’ picnic at the Dargle, when Harry fell overhead into the river in a chivalrous endeavor to pluck a maiden-hair fern for Miss Walsh, and a host of similar delightful souvenirs, until the dinner-bell rang.