“Here he is, Jemima my love,” answered Dennis, looking at me. “Mr. Fitz-Boodle: don't you remember him in Warwickshire, darling?”
“Mr. Fitz-Boodle! I am very glad to see him,” said the lady, rising and curtseying with much cordiality.
Mrs. Haggarty was blind.
Mrs. Haggarty was not only blind, but it was evident that smallpox had been the cause of her loss of vision. Her eyes were bound with a bandage, her features were entirely swollen, scarred and distorted by the horrible effects of the malady. She had been knitting in a corner when we entered, and was wrapped in a very dirty bedgown. Her voice to me was quite different to that in which she addressed her husband. She spoke to Haggarty in broad Irish: she addressed me in that most odious of all languages—Irish-English, endeavouring to the utmost to disguise her brogue, and to speak with the true dawdling distingue English air.
“Are you long in I-a-land?” said the poor creature in this accent. “You must faind it a sad ba'ba'ous place, Mr Fitz-Boodle, I'm shu-ah! It was vary kaind of you to come upon us en famille, and accept a dinner sans ceremonie. Mr. Haggarty, I hope you'll put the waine into aice, Mr. Fitz-Boodle must be melted with this hot weathah.”
For some time she conducted the conversation in this polite strain, and I was obliged to say, in reply to a query of hers, that I did not find her the least altered, though I should never have recognised her but for this rencontre. She told Haggarty with a significant air to get the wine from the cellah, and whispered to me that he was his own butlah; and the poor fellow, taking the hint, scudded away into the town for a pound of beefsteak and a couple of bottles of wine from the tavern.
“Will the childhren get their potatoes and butther here?” said a barefoot girl, with long black hair flowing over her face, which she thrust in at the door.
“Let them sup in the nursery, Elizabeth, and send—ah! Edwards to me.”
“Is it cook you mane, ma'am?” said the girl.
“Send her at once!” shrieked the unfortunate woman; and the noise of frying presently ceasing, a hot woman made her appearance, wiping her brows with her apron, and asking, with an accent decidedly Hibernian, what the misthress wanted.