Honor OCallaghan | Page 6

was about the largest woman I had ever seen in my life, fat,
fair, and fifty with a broad rosy countenance, beaming with
good-humour and contentment, and with a general look of affluence

over her whole comfortable person. She spoke in a loud voice which
made itself heard over the remaining din in the garden and out, and
with a patois between Scotch and Irish, which puzzled me, until I found
from her discourse that she was the widow of a linen manufacturer, in
the neighbourhood of Belfast.
"Ay," quoth she, with the most open-hearted familiarity, "times are
changed for the better with me since you and I parted in Cadogan Place.
Poor Mr. Dobbs left me and those two girls a fortune of---- Why, I
verily believe," continued she, interrupting herself, "that you don't
know me!"
"Honor!" said one of the young ladies to the other, "only look at this
butterfly!"
Honor! Was it, could it be Honor O'Callaghan, the slight, pale,
romantic visionary, so proud, so reserved, so abstracted, so elegant, and
so melancholy? Had thirty years of the coarse realities of life
transformed that pensive and delicate damsel into the comely, hearty,
and to say the truth, somewhat vulgar dame whom I saw before me?
Was such a change possible?
"Married a nobleman!" exclaimed she when I told her the reports
respecting herself. "Taken the veil! No, indeed! I have been a far
humbler and happier woman. It is very strange, though, that during my
Cinderella-like life at school, I used always in my day-dreams to make
my story end like that of the heroine of the fairy tale; and it is still
stranger, that both rumours were within a very little of coming
true,--for when I got to Ireland, which, so far as I was concerned,
turned out a very different place from what I expected, I found myself
shut up in an old castle, fifty times more dreary and melancholy than
ever was our great school-room in the holidays, with my aunt setting
her heart upon marrying me to an old lord, who might, for age and
infirmities, have passed for my great grandfather; and I really, in my
perplexity, had serious thoughts of turning nun to get rid of my suitor;
but then I was allowed to go into the north upon a visit, and fell in with
my late excellent husband, who obtained Lady O'Hara's consent to the
match by the offer of taking me without a portion; and ever since,"

continued she, "I have been a very common-place and a very happy
woman. Mr. Dobbs was a man who had made his own fortune, and all
he asked of me was, to lay aside my airs and graces, and live with him
in his own homely, old-fashioned way amongst his own old people,
(kind people they were!)his looms, and his bleaching-grounds; so that
my heart was opened, and I grew fat and comfortable, and merry and
hearty, as different from the foolish, romantic girl whom you remember,
as plain honest prose is from the silly thing called poetry. I don't
believe that I have ever once thought of my old castles in the air for
these five-and-twenty years. It is very odd, though," added she, with a
frankness which was really like thinking aloud, "that I always did
contrive in my visions that my history should conclude like that of
Cinderella. To be sure, things are much better as they are, but it is an
odd thing, nevertheless. Well! perhaps my daughters...!"
And as they are rich and pretty, and good-natured, although much more
in the style of the present Honor than the past, it is by no means
improbable that the vision which was evidently glittering before the
fond mother's eyes, may be realised. At all events, my old friend is, as
she says herself a happy woman--in all probability, happier than if the
Cinderella day-dream had actually come to pass in her own comely
person. But the transition! After all, there are real transformations in
this every-day world, which beat the doings of fairy land all to nothing;
and the change of the pumpkin into a chariot, and the mice into horses,
was not to be compared for a moment with the transmogrification of
Honor O'Callaghan into Mrs. Dobbs.

End of Project Gutenberg's Honor O'callaghan, by Mary Russell
Mitford
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