Penelope's Irish ExperiencesWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
General
Penelope's Irish Experiences
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Ireland -- Fiction
We had planned to go direct from Dublin to Valencia Island, where there
is not, I am told, 'one dhry step 'twixt your fut an' the States';
but we thought it too tiring a journey for Benella, and arranged for a
little visit to Cork first. We nearly missed the train owing to the
late arrival of Salemina at the Kingsbridge station. She had been buying
malted milk, Mellin's Food, an alcohol lamp, a tin cup, and getting all
the doctor's prescriptions renewed.
We intended, too, to go second or third class now an then, in order to
study the humours of the natives, but of course we went 'first' on this
occasion on account of Benella. I told her that we could not follow
British usage and call her by her surname. Dusenberry was too long and
too--well, too extraordinary for daily use abroad.
“P'r'aps it is,” she assented meekly; “and still, Mis' Beresford, when
a man's name is Dusenberry, you can't hardly blame him for wanting his
child to be called by it, can you?”
This was incontrovertible, and I asked her middle name. It was Frances,
and that was too like Francesca.
“You don't like the sound o' Benella?” she inquired. “I've always set
great store by my name, it is so unlikely. My father's name was Benjamin
and my mother's Ella, and mine is made from both of 'em; but you can
call me any kind of a name you please, after what you've done for me,”
and she closed her eyes patiently.
'Call me Daphne, call me Chloris,
Call me Lalage or Doris,
Only, only call me thine,'
which is exactly what we are not ready to do, I thought, in a poetic
parenthesis.
Benella looks frail and yet hardy. She has an unusual and perhaps
unnecessary amount of imagination for her station, some native
common-sense, but limited experience; she is somewhat vague and
inconsistent in her theories of life, but I am sure there is vitality,
and energy too, in her composition, although it has been temporarily
drowned in the Atlantic Ocean. If she were a clock, I should think that
some experimenter had taken out her original works, and substituted
others to see how they would run. The clock has a New England case
and strikes with a New England tone, but the works do not match it
altogether. Of course I know that one does not ordinarily engage a
lady's-maid because of these piquant peculiarities; but in our case the
circumstances were extraordinary. I have explained them fully to Himself
in my letters, and Francesca too has written pages of illuminating
detail to Ronald Macdonald.
The similarity in the minds of men must sometimes come across them with
a shock, unless indeed it appeals to their sense of humour. Himself
in America, and the Rev. Mr. Macdonald in the north of Scotland, both
answered, in course of time, that a lady's-maid should be engaged
because is a lady's-maid and for no other reason.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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