The Stylishness of Mrs. Quinn

by Anne O'Hagan

The Stylishness of Mrs. Quinn

By Anne O’Hagan

“ASHAMED o’ me!” Bridget’s lips framed the words as she huddled on the floor beside the attic window and looked down the slope of the town to the harbor, tranquil with summer moonlight and sparkling with the riding-lights of anchored yachts.

She heard the front door open and the voice of her daughter Maggie raised with artificial graciousness in greeting. Then Loretta’s company-tones chimed in, and there was a twitter of feminine merriment against the masculine rumble of salutation.

She had been out delivering milk to her few customers; she had come home the back way to the cow-shed and the patch of garden. She had taken off her heavy shoes and stockings—she had stood long at the ironing-board that day over the girls’ lawns and linens, and her feet fairly ached for the dewy freshness of the grass that fringed the plank-walk through the yard. So she had come noiselessly toward the house and the words had smitten her—Maggie’s words, or were they Loretta’s?

“I just don’t feel as if we could ever ask any one here. I’m so ashamed of mamma.”

Paralyzed by the shock of the sentence, Bridget had sat down behind the screening bean-vines. And so she had learned how hopelessly different she was from Mrs. Wilson, who wore black satin and jet, and would as lief be caught unbodiced as unshod; she had learned the superiority of Mrs. Zane’s curled false front over her own smooth gray hair; she discovered that her daughters “nearly died” of mortification when she drank tea from her saucer, and that it was terribly vulgar to keep a cow unless one kept a man to milk it.

“Of course, she’s as good as gold,” the verdict had been finally announced by Loretta, “but she hasn’t the first particle of style, and sometimes it seems to me that I’ll just die—”

Then they had gone forward into the parlor, with its gilt-splattered wall-paper, its gay-shaded lamps that were never lighted, its empty vases and its beribboned jardinières. Bridget, crouching by her window, recalled resentfully that it was the milk-money which had built the L that made the parlor possible. For her part she hated it, and clove to her big kitchen, bright with sunshine or firelight and the glitter of polished tins, sweet with geraniums along the window-ledges—“a room a body can take a bit o’ comfort in,” she said.

She had never grown used to doing without Barney, although she had had fifteen years in which to learn the lesson. To-night she longed for him with unspeakable longing. If he had but lived, the new ways would not have mattered. He and she could have gone on unhindered in the old fashion, and the girls, unhindered, could have tried the new paths to new ambitions.

She looked down toward the harbor. She always did—it was a habit from the long years when she had been wont to watch for the return of the fleet from the Banks. She had first watched as Barney’s young wife, little more than a girl. When the sails had been sighted that year she had held up a bundled mite to view them.

“Yer father’s comin’ home, Barney boy,” she had whispered, “yer father that hasn’t seen ye—” And the baby’s head had wobbled indifferently on his fat neck, and he had blinked and closed his eyes against the bright sunshine.

The little Barney and his brother Tim had been big boys when last she had watched for the return of the fleet—“too big, too big, my poor boys,” she moaned to-night. For that year they had gone themselves to the Banks, strapping youths of sixteen and eighteen. And the fisheries owner who had fitted out the expedition and provisioned the little houses against the home-coming of the men, had laughed at the debt he would owe the Quinns with their three stalwart fishers.

The fleet came back without the Quinns, and with the tale of a white fog and of a great horn filling the impenetrable vapor with its confusion of hollow warning; of a fog that lifted by and by to show the far gleam of a great steamer, and dories bobbing on the bright blue waves in the sunshine—but not the dory that had held the Quinns.

Fifteen years ago—and the little girls with the tear-swollen eyes and the quivering lips were the elegant young ladies whose voices and laughter she heard below. Her heart gave a throb of gratified maternal vanity even now as she thought of them, so tall and straight, so slim of waist, so black of eyes and hair, so red of cheeks and lips.

They had been good girls, too—they were good girls now. They had helped her at home; they had delivered the milk and had carried the laundry bundles. They had studied their lessons and learned their catechism. When Loretta was fifteen she had been apprenticed to the village milliner. Two years her her sister had also entered the store, and now, after nine years, it was the Misses Quinn’s own, as a black-and-gilt sign informed the passers-by. Industrious, thrifty, virtuous, and handsome they were; their mother acknowledged it proudly, glorying in their progress and their possessions. And they whispered to one another that they were ashamed of her!

The next morning the girls thought that their mother looked tired. Loretta good-naturedly stayed at home to attend to the household tasks, and laughingly drove her mother out into the sunshine.

“It’s a headache you have; I can see it,” she proclaimed; and she was so convinced of the correctness of her diagnosis that she forbore to scold when she saw that her mother had gone forth wearing her faded old blue gingham, and with a three-cornered kerchief tied over her hair.

Beyond the village the land thrusts of a long, rocky promontory into the sea. In her youth Bridget had been wont to watch from its uttermost point for the return of the fleet, and this morning she had an irresistible yearning for the spot. She made her way through the town, past the gay and splendid summer settlement that by beyond it, out to her old lookout. There Bianca Greeley, reading under a green-lined umbrella among the rocks, saw her. When she had looked her at her a little while she went softly away without making her presence known to Bridget. For the night had written something on the old woman’s face which the young one felt it sacrilege to study—a look that said; “Here am I, an old woman, who has labored and loved and suffered, honestly and valiantly; and it has all been in vain—the end is heartache.”

Now Miss Greeley was a very great lady indeed, the greatest, perhaps, of all whose houses bordered the shore beyond the village. For not only was she an heiress and the granddaughter of an American admiral and an Italian nobleman, but she was a painter of such renown that the critics, in speaking of her work, generally forgot her fortune and her fashion and her sex; and beyond this a woman’s artistic triumph may not go.

All day she thought of the old woman on the rocks, and the result was that the early evening found her carriage threading the narrow streets of the town looking for “an old Irishwoman in a blue dress and a kerchief.” There was but one such in the town, and by and by the equipage drew up before the Quinns’ door.

“I’ll go,” whispered Maggie, when the ring of the footman reverberated through the house and a glance from behind the curtain had revealed the unaccustomed apparition of a carriage outside. “My stock is freshest.”

She returned slightly crestfallen. Miss Greeley wished to see Mrs. Quinn. Would their mother please, please, go up and put on her brown silk and—

“I’ll not,” said Bridget. “I’m clane an’ whole an’ that’ll do for her. Sure it’s the fine artist she’d be if she saw naught beyond silk an’ calico.”

The girls had ample opportunity to speculate upon their visitor’s purpose before they were summoned to the conference. The great lady was very gracious, as she usually was in pursuit of her whims.

“I’m begging your mother to sit for me,” she explained. “But she is very modest and fearfully obstinate. She pretends not to believe that her face is much more interesting than the faces of—of us younger women—” She made a tactful change from what she had been about to say, for, indeed, poor Bridget had been setting forth the paintable qualities of her daughters. “As much lovelier, I tell her, as a sheet of paper with a noble poem upon it is lovelier than a blank sheet. Please help me to persuade her. I have set my heart upon it. I want to paint her in these clothes and sitting by her own kitchen window. It is the kitchen window, isn’t it, that I caught a glimpse of as we drove round the corner—the one with geraniums, that looks down toward the harbor?”

Bewilderedly the girls looked at their mother, at their visitor, and at each other. Beauty? In age? In faded cottons and in gray hairs? Memories of Mrs. Wilson’s gleaming satin and jet flashed before them. But they were adaptable girls. They choked their amazement behind their high stocks, and persuaded their mother to sit for her portrait.

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

It was a week later. Bridget coming up from the milking, paused beside the bean-vines to snip a withered leaf. The voices of her daughters floated out to her along with the clatter of dishwashing.

“I’d like to see any of them putting on airs with me now,” remarked Maggie. “It’ll be a long day before Miss Greeley’s carriage stops in front of their houses, or she asks to paint Mrs. Zane’s false hair or those shiny dangles on Mrs. Wilson’s dress.”

“Yes,” agreed Loretta happily. “Well, you know, there’s something about mamma—character and—Oh, I don’t know! But you understand. No wonder Miss Greeley would want to paint her.”

“Let’s have an enlarged crayon done of her for ourselves,” suggested Maggie. “With a fichu and her big carnelian pin—it would look well over the mantel.”

Bridget blushed with pride as she mounted the steps to the back porch.

And the next year she blushed with mingled pride and embarrassment as she pointed out to Miss Greeley the crayon portrait above the mantel-shelf.

“The one ye sent me—the photograph from yer pitcher, I mean, Miss, sure it was lovely an’ I’m glad the pitcher did so well; bought by the Museum, was it, now? Well, well. But ye mind how in it I’m sittin’ be the kitchen windy, lookin’ down to the water? Of coorse, it’s fine an’ grand, an’ the girls are proud an’ pleased an’ all. But they didn’t like the idea o’ me sittin’ be the kitchen windy on the parlor wall—ye know what I mean, miss. An’ so”—her pleased eyes caressed the monstrosity—“so they had that took of me. They do begrudge me nothin’.”