XX

Mary had lavished the entire of her first day’s wages on delicate foods wherewith to tempt her mother’s languid appetite, and when the morning dawned she arose silently, lit the fire, wet the tea, and spread her purchases out on the side of the bed. There was a slice of brawn, two pork sausages, two eggs, three rashers of bacon, a bun, a pennyworth of sweets, and a pig’s foot. These with bread and butter and tea made a collection amid which an invalid might browse with some satisfaction. Mary then awakened her, and sat by in a dream of happiness watching her mother’s eye roll slowly and unbelievingly from item to item. Mrs. Makebelieve tipped each article with her first finger and put its right name on it unerringly. Then she picked out an important-looking sweet that had four colours and shone like the sun, and put it in her mouth.

“I never saw anything like it, you good child you,” said she.

Mary rocked herself to and fro and laughed loudly for delight, and then they ate a bit of everything, and were very happy.

Mrs. Makebelieve said that she felt altogether better that morning. She had slept like a top all through the night, and, moreover, had a dream wherein she saw her brother Patrick standing on the remotest sea point of distant America, from whence he had shouted loudly across the ocean that he was coming back to Ireland soon, that he had succeeded very well indeed, and that he was not married. He had not changed in the slightest degree, said Mrs. Makebelieve, and he looked as young and as jolly as when he was at home with her father and herself in the County Meath twenty-two years before. This mollifying dream and the easy sleep which followed it had completely restored her health and spirits. Mrs. Makebelieve further intimated that she intended to go to work that day. It did not fit in with her ideas of propriety that her child should turn into a charwoman, the more particularly as there was a strong⁠—an almost certain⁠—possibility of an early betterment of her own and her daughter’s fortunes.

Dreams, said Mrs. Makebelieve, did not come for nothing. There was more in dreams than was generally understood. Many and many were the dreams which she herself had been visited by, and they had come true so often that she could no longer disregard their promises, admonishments, or threats. Of course many people had dreams which were of no consequence, and these could usually be traced to gluttony or a flighty, inconstant imagination. Drunken people, for instance, often dreamed strange and terrible things, but, even while they were awake, these people were liable to imaginary enemies whom their clouded eyes and intellects magnified beyond any thoughtful proportions, and when they were asleep their dreams would also be subject to this haze and whirl of unreality and hallucination.

Mary said that sometimes she did not dream at all, and at other times she dreamed very vividly, but usually could not remember what the dream had been about when she awakened; and once she had dreamed that someone gave her a shilling which she placed carefully under her pillow, and this dream was so real that in the morning she put her hand under the pillow to see if the shilling was there, but it was not. The very next night she dreamed the same dream, and as she put the phantom money under her pillow she said out loudly to herself, “I am dreaming this, and I dreamt it last night also.” Her mother said if she had dreamt it for the third time someone would have given her a shilling surely. To this Mary agreed, and admitted that she had tried very hard to dream it on the third night, but somehow could not do it.

“When my brother comes home from America,” said Mrs. Makebelieve, “we’ll go away from this part of the city at once. I suppose he’d want a rather big house on the south side⁠—Rathfarnham or Terenure way, or, maybe, Donnybrook. Of course he’ll ask me to mind the house for him, and keep the servants in order, and provide a different dinner every day, and all that; while you could go out to the neighbours’ places to play lawn-tennis or cricket, and have lunch. It will be a very great responsibility.”

“What kind of dinners would you have?” said Mary.

Mrs. Makebelieve’s eyes glistened, and she leaned forward in the bed; but just as she was about to reply the labouring man in the next room slammed his door, and went thundering down the stairs. In an instant Mrs. Makebelieve bounded from her bed; three wide twists put up her hair; eight strange, billow-like movements put on her clothes; as each article of clothing reached a definite point on her person Mary stabbed it swiftly with a pin⁠—four ordinary pins in this place, two safety pins in that: then Mrs. Makebelieve kissed her daughter sixteen times, and fled down the stairs and away to her work.