The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [35]
Julia Duffy did not come out to meet her visitor, and when Charlotte walked into the kitchen, she found that the mistress of the house was absent, and that three old women were squatted on the floor in front of the fire, smoking short clay pipes, and holding converse in Irish that was punctuated with loud sniffs and coughs. At sight of the visitor the pipes vanished in the twinkling of an eye, and one of the women scrambled to her feet.
“Why, Mary Holloran, what brings you here?” said Charlotte, recognising the woman who lived in the Rosemount gate lodge.
“It was a sore leg I have, yer honour, miss,” whined Mary Holloran; “it’s running with me now these three weeks, and I come to thry would Miss Duffy give me a bit o’ a plashther.”
“Take care it wouldn’t run away with you altogether,” replied Charlotte facetiously; “and where’s Miss Duffy herself?”
“She’s sick, the craythure,” said one of the other women, who, having found and dusted a chair, now offered it to Miss Mullen; “she have a wakeness like in her head, and an impression on her heart, and Billy Grainy came afther Peggy Roche here, the way she’d mind her.”
Peggy Roche groaned slightly, and stirred a pot of smutty gruel with an air of authority.
“Could I see her d’ye think?” asked Charlotte, sitting down and looking about her with sharp appreciation of the substantial excellence of the smoke-blackened walls and grimy woodwork. “There wouldn’t be a better kitchen in the country,” she thought, “if it was properly done up.”
“Ye can, asthore, ye can go up,” replied Peggy Roche, “but wait a while till I have the sup o’ grool hated, and maybe yerself ‘ll take it up to herself.”
“Is she eating nothing but that?” asked Charlotte, viewing the pasty compound with disgust.
“Faith, ‘tis hardly she’ll ate that itself.” Peggy Roche rose as she spoke, and, going to the dresser, returned with a black bottle. “As for a bit o’ bread, or a pratie, or the like o’ that, she couldn’t use it, nor let it past her shest; with respects to ye, as soon as she’d have it shwallied it’d come up as simple and pleashant as it wint down.” She lifted the little three-legged pot off its heap of hot embers, and then took the cork out of the black bottle with nimble, dirty fingers.
“What in the name of goodness is that ye have there?” demanded Charlotte hastily.
Mrs. Roche looked somewhat confused and murmured something about “a weeshy suppeen o’ shperits to wet the grool.”
Charlotte snatched the bottle from her, and smelled it.
“Faugh!” she said, with a guttural at the end of the word that no Saxon gullet could hope to produce; “it’s potheen! that’s what it is, and mighty bad potheen too. D’ye want to poison the woman?”
A loud chorus of repudiation arose from the sick-nurse and her friends.
“As for you, Peggy Roche, you’re not fit to tend a pig, let alone a Christian. You’d murder this poor woman with your filthy fresh potheen, and when your own son was dying, you begrudged him the drop of spirits that’d have kept the life in him.”
Peggy flung up her hands with a protesting howl.
“May God forgive ye that word, Miss Charlotte! If ‘twas the blood of me arrm, I didn’t begridge it to him; the Lord have mercy on him—”
“Amen! amen! You would not, asthore,” groaned the other women.
“—but does’nt the world know it’s mortial sin for a poor craythure to go into th’ other world with the smell of dhrink on his breath!”
“It’s mortal sin to be a fool,” replied Miss Mullen whose medical skill had often been baffled by such winds of doctrine; “here, give me the gruel. I’ll go give it to the woman before you have her murdered.” She deftly emptied the pot of gruel into a bowl, and, taking the spoon out of the old woman’s hand, she started on her errand of mercy.
The stairs were just outside the door, and making