The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [165]
Ferry Row had, since Charlotte’s change of residence, breathed a freer air. Even her heavy washing was now done at home, and her visits to her tenantry might be looked forward to only when rents were known to be due. There was nothing that they expected less than that, on this wet afternoon, so soon, too, after a satisfactory quarter day, they should hear the well-known rattle of the old phaeton, and see Miss Mullen, in her equally well-known hat and waterproof, driving slowly past house after house, until she arrived at the disreputable abode of Dinny Lydon, the tailor. Having turned the cushions of the phaeton upside down to keep them dry, Miss Mullen knocked at the door, and was admitted by Mrs. Lydon, a very dirty woman, with a half-finished waistcoat over her arm.
“Oh, ye’re welcome, Miss Mullen, ye’re welcome! Come in out o’ the rain, asthore,” she said, with a manner as greasy as her face. “Himself have the coat waitin’ on ye these three days to thry on.”
“Then I’m afraid the change for death must be on Dinny if he’s beginning to keep his promises,” replied Charlotte, adventuring herself fearlessly into the dark interior. “I’d be thrown out in all me calculations, Dinny, if ye give up telling me lies.”
This was addressed through a reeking fog of tobacco smoke to a half-deformed figure seated on a table by the window.
“Oh, with the help o’ God I’ll tell yer honour a few lies yet before I die,” replied Dinny Lydon, removing his pipe and the hat which, for reasons best known to himself, he wore while at work, and turning on Charlotte a face that, no less than his name, told of Spanish, if not Jewish blood.
“Well, that’s the truth, anyway,” said Charlotte, with a friendly laugh; “but I won’t believe in the coat being ready till I see it. Didn’t ye lose your apprentice since I saw ye?”
“Is it that yound gobsther?” rejoined Mrs. Lydon acridly, as she tendered her unsavoury assistance to Charlotte in the rermoval of her waterproof; “if that one was in the house yer coat wouldn’t be finished in a twelvemonth with all the time Dinny lost cursing him. Faith! it was last week he hysted his sails and away with him. Mind ye, ‘twas he was the first-class puppy!”
“Was it the trade he didn’t like?” asked Charlotte; “or was it the skelpings he got from Dinny?”
“Throth, it was not, but two plates in the sate of his breeches was what he faulted, and the divil mend him!”
“Two plates!” exclaimed Charlotte, in not unnatural bewilderment; “what in the name of fortune was he doing with them?”
“Well, indeed, Miss Mullen, with respex t’ye, when he came here he hadn’t as much rags on him as’d wipe a candlestick,” replied Mrs. Lydon, with fluent spitefulness; “yerself knows that ourselves has to be losing with puttin’ clothes on thim apprentices, an’ feedin’ them as lavish and as natty as ye’d feed a young bonnuf, an’ afther all they’d turn about an’ say they never got so much as the wettin’ of their mouths of male nor tay nor praties—” Mrs. Lydon replenished her lungs with a long breath,—”and this lad the biggest dandy of then all, that wouldn’t be contint without Dinny’d cut the brea’th of two fingers out of a lovely throusers that was a little sign bulky on him and was gethered into nate plates—”
“Oh, it’s well known beggars can’t bear heat,” said Charlotte, interrupting for purposes of her own a story that threatened to expand unprofitably, “and that was always the way with all the M’Donaghs. Didn’t I meet that lad’s cousin, Shamus Bawn, driving a new side-car this morning, and his father only dead a week. I suppose now he’s got the money he thinks he’ll never get to the end of it, though indeed it isn’t so long since I heard he was looking for money, and found it hard enough to get it.”
Mrs. Lydon gave a laugh of polite acquiescence, and wondered inwardly whether Miss Mullen had as intimate