第23章

"I felt so sorry for them," she said--"the dear little girl put to bed with tangled hair and unwashed face, the boy in a rumpled, untidy nightgown, the bedclothes in confusion. I didn't know who they were nor where they came from, but while the nurse was getting her supper I made them comfortable, and Broona went to sleep with my strange hand in hers. Perhaps it was only the warm Irish heart, the easy friendliness of the Irish temperament, but I felt as if the poor little things must be neglected indeed, or they would not have clung to a woman whom they had never seen before." (This is a mistake; anybody who has the opportunity always clings to Salemina.)

"The next morning they were up at daylight, romping in the hall, stamping, thumping, clattering, with a tin cart on wheels rattling behind them. I know it was not my affair, and I was guilty of unpardonable rudeness, but I called the nurse into my room and spoke to her severely. No, you needn't smile; I was severe. 'Will you kindly do your duty, and keep the children quiet as they pass through the halls?' I said. 'It is never too soon to teach them to obey the rules of a public place, and to be considerate of older people.' She seemed awestruck. But when she found her tongue she stammered, 'Sure, ma'am, I've tould thim three times this day already that when their father comes he'll bate thim with a blackthorn stick!'

"Naturally I was horrified. This, I thought, would explain everything: no mother, and an irritable, cruel father.

"'Will he really do such a thing?' I asked, feeling as if I must know the truth.

"'Sure he will not, ma'am!' she answered cheerfully. 'He wouldn't lift a feather to thim, not if they murdthered the whole counthryside, ma'am.'

"Well, they travelled third class to Cork, and we came first, so we did not meet, and I did not ask their surnames; but it seems that they were being brought to their father, whom I met many years ago in America."

As she did not volunteer any further information, we did not like to ask her where, how many years ago, or under what circumstances.

'Teasing' of this sort does not appeal to the sophisticated at any time, but it seems unspeakably vulgar to touch on matters of sentiment with a woman of middle age. If she has memories, they are sure to be sad and sacred ones; if she has not, that perhaps is still sadder. We agreed, however, when the evening was over, that Dr. La Touche was probably the love of her youth--unless, indeed, he was simply an old friend, and the degree of Salemina's attachment had been exaggerated; something that is very likely to happen in the gossip of a New England town, where they always incline to underestimate the feeling of the man, and overrate that of the woman, in any love affair. 'I guess she'd take him if she could get him' is the spoken or unspoken attitude of the public in rural or provincial New England.

The professor is grave, but very genial when he fully recalls the fact that he is in company, and has not, like the Trappist monks, taken vows of silence. Francesca behaved beautifully, on the whole, and made no embarrassing speeches, although she was in her gayest humour. Salemina blushed a little when the young sinner dragged into the conversation the remark that, undoubtedly, from the beginning of the sixth century to the end of the eighth, Ireland was the University of Europe, just as Greece was in the late days of the Roman Republic, and asked our guest when Ireland ceased to be known as 'Insula sanctorum et doctorum,' the island of saints and scholars.