The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [10]
Norry the Boat, daughter of Shaunapickeen, the ferryman (whence her title), and of Carroty Peg his wife, was a person with whom few would have cared to co-operate against her will. On this morning she wore a more ferocious aspect that usual. Her roughly-waving hair, which had never known the dignity of a cap, was bound up in a blue duster, leaving her bony forehead bare; dust and turf-ashes hung in her grizzled eyebrows, her arms were smeared with blacklead, and the skirt of her dress was girt about her waist, displaying a petticoat of heavy Galway flannel, long thin legs, and enormous feet cased in countrymen’s laced boots. It was fifteen years now, Norry reflected, while she scrubbed the floor and scraped the candle drippings off it with her nails, since Miss Charlotte and the cats had come into the house, and since then the spare room had never had a visitor into it. Nobody had stayed in the house in all those years except little Miss Francie, and for her the cot had been made up in her great-aunt’s room; the old high-sided cot in which her grandmother had slept when she was a child. The cot had long since migrated into the spare room, and from it Norry had just ejected the household effects of Mrs. Bruff and her family, with a pleasure that was mitigated only by the thought that Miss Francie was a young woman now, and would be likely to give a good deal more trouble in the house than even in the days when she stole the cockatoo’s sopped toast for her private consumption, and christened the tom-cat Susan against everyone’s wished except her great-aunt’s.
Norry and the cockatoo were now the only survivors of the old régime at Tally Ho Lodge, in fact the cockatoo was regarded in Lismoyle as an almost prehistoric relic, dating, at the lowest computation, from the days when old Mrs. Mullen’s fox-hunting father had lived there, and given the place the name that was so remarkably unsuited to its subsequent career. The cockatoo was a sprightly creature of some twenty shrieking summers on the day that the two Miss Butlers, clad in high-waisted, low-necked gowns, were armed past his perch in the hall by their father, and before, as it seemed to the cockatoo, he had more than half-finished his morning dose, they were back again, this time on the arms of the two young men who, during the previous five months, had done so much to spoil his digestion by propitiatory dainties at improper hours. The cockatoo had no very clear recollection of the subsequent departure of Dr. Mullen and his brother, the attorney, with their brides, on their respective honeymoons, owing to the fact that Mr. Mullen, the agent, brother of the two bridegrooms, had prised open his beak, and compelled him to drink the healths of the happy couples in the strongest and sweetest whisky punch.
The cockatoo’s memory after this climax was filled with vague comings and goings, extending over unknown tracts of time. He remembered two days of disturbance, on each of which a long box had been carried out of the house by several men, and a crowd of people, dressed in black, had eaten a long and clattering meal in the dining-room. He had always remembered the second of these occasions with just annoyance, because, in manoeuvring the long box through the narrow hall, he had been knocked off his perch, and never after that day had the person whom he had been taught to call “Doctor” come to give him his daily lump of sugar.
But the day that enunciated itself most stridently from the cockatoo’s past life was that on which the doctor’s niece had, after many short visits, finally arrived with several trunks, and a wooden case from which, when opened, sprang four of the noisome creatures whom Miss Charlotte, their owner, had taught him to call “pussies.” A long era of persecution then began for him, of robbery of his food, and even attacks upon his person. He had retaliated by untiring mimicry, by delusive