Humours of Irish Life Part 29

"Nothing!" said Mr. Mooney, with a roar of a tornado. "Do you call an impudent proposal of marriage to a respectable man's daughter nothing!

That's English manners, I suppose!"

"I was goin' home one Sunday," said Jer Keohane, conversationally, to the Bench, "and I met the gerr'l and her mother. I spoke to the gerr'l in a friendly way, and asked her why wasn't she gettin' marrid, and she commenced to peg stones at me and dhrew several blows of an umbrella on me. I had only three bottles of porther taken. There now was the whole of it."

Mrs. Brickley, from the gallery, groaned heavily and ironically.

I found it difficult to connect these coquetries with my impressions of my late kitchenmaid, a furtive and touzled being, who, in conjunction with a pail and scrubbing brush, had been wont to melt round corners and into doorways at my approach.

"Are we trying a breach of promise?" interpolated Flurry; "if so, we ought to have the plaintiff in."

"My purpose, sir," said Mr. Mooney, in a manner discouraging to levity, "is to show that my clients have received annoyance and contempt from this man and his sister such as no parents would submit to."

A hand came forth from under the gallery and plucked at Mr. Mooney's coat. A red monkey face appeared out of the darkness, and there was a hoa.r.s.e whisper, whose purport I could not gather. Con Brickley, the defendant, was giving instructions to his lawyer.

It was perhaps as a result of these that Jer Keohane's evidence closed here. There was a brief interval enlivened by coughs, grinding of heavy boots on the floor, and some mumbling and groaning under the gallery.

"There's great duck-shooting out on a lake on this island," commented Flurry to me, in a whisper. "My grand-uncle went there one time with an old duck-gun he had, that he fired with a fuse. He was three hours stalking the ducks before he got the gun laid. He lit the fuse then, and it set to work spluttering and hissing like a goods-engine till there wasn't a duck within ten miles. The gun went off then."

This useful side-light on the matter in hand was interrupted by the c.u.mbrous ascent of the one-legged Con Brickley to the witness-table. He sat down heavily, with his slouch hat on his sound knee, and his wooden stump stuck out before him. His large monkey face was immovably serious; his eye was small, light grey, and very quick.

McCaffery, the opposition attorney, a thin, restless youth, with ears like the handles of an urn, took him in hand. To the pelting cross-examination that beset him Con Brickley replied with sombre deliberation, and with a manner of uninterested honesty, emphasising what he said with slight, very effective gestures of his big, supple hands. His voice was deep and pleasant; it betrayed no hint of so trivial a thing as satisfaction when, in the teeth of Mr. McCaffery's leading questions, he established the fact that the "little rod" with which Miss Kate Keohane had beaten his wife was the handle of a pitch-fork.

"I was counting the fish the same time," went on Con Brickley, in his rolling ba.s.so profundissimo, "and she said, 'Let the divil clear me out of the sthrand, for there's no one else will put me out!' says she."

"It was then she got the blow, I suppose!" said McCaffery, venomously; "you had a stick yourself, I daresay?"

"Yes. I had a stick. I must have a stick," (deep and mellow pathos was hinted at in the voice), "I am sorry to say. What could I do to her? A man with a wooden leg on a sthrand could do nothing!"

Something like a laugh ran at the back of the court. Mr. McCaffery's ears turned scarlet and became quite decorative. On or off a strand Con Brickley was not a person to be scored off easily.

His clumsy, yet impressive, descent from the witness stand followed almost immediately, and was not the least telling feature of his evidence. Mr. Mooney surveyed his exit with the admiration of one artist for another, and, rising, asked the Bench's permission to call Mrs.

Brickley.

Mrs. Brickley, as she mounted to the platform, in the dark and nun-like severity of her long cloak, the stately blue cloth cloak that is the privilege of the Munster peasant woman, was an example of the rarely-blended qualities of picturesqueness and respectability. As she took her seat in the chair, she flung the deep hood back on her shoulders, and met the gaze of the court with her grey head erect; she was a witness to be proud of.

"Now, Mrs. Brickley," said "Roaring Jack," urbanely, "will you describe this interview between your daughter and Keohane."

"It was last Sunday in Shrove, your Wors.h.i.+p, Mr. Flurry Knox, and gentlemen," began Mrs. Brickley nimbly, "meself and me little gerr'l was comin' from ma.s.s, and Mr. Jer Keohane came up to us and got on in a most unmannerable way. He asked me daughter would she marry him. Me daughter told him she would not, quite friendly like. I'll tell you no lie, gentlemen, she was teasing him with the umbrella the same time; an' he raised his shtick and dhrew a sthroke on her in the back, an' the little gerr'l took up a small pebble of a stone and fired it at him. She put the umbrella up to his mouth, but she called him no names. But as for him, the names he put on her was to call her 'a nasty, long, slopeen of a proud thing, and a slopeen of a proud tinker.'"

"Very lover-like expressions!" commented Mr. Mooney, doubtless stimulated by the lady-like t.i.tters from the barmaids; "and had this romantic gentleman made any previous proposals for your daughter?"

"Himself had two friends over from across the water one night to make the match, a Sathurday it was, and they should land the lee side o' the island, for the wind was a fright," replied Mrs. Brickley, launching her tale with the power of easy narration that is bestowed with such amazing liberality on her cla.s.s. "The three o' them had dhrink taken, an' I went to shlap out the door agin them. Me husband said then we should let them in, if it was a Turk itself, with the rain that was in it. They were talking in it then till near the dawning, and in the latther end all that was between them was the boat's share."

"What do you mean by 'the boat's share'?" said I.

"'Tis the same as a man's share, me wors.h.i.+pful gintleman," returned Mrs.

Brickley, splendidly; "it goes with the boat always, afther the crew and the saine has their share got."

I possibly looked as enlightened as I felt by this exposition.

"You mean that Jer wouldn't have her unless he got the boat's share with her?" suggested Flurry.

"He said it over-right all that was in the house, and he reddening his pipe at the fire," replied Mrs. Brickley, in full-sailed response to the helm. "'D'ye think,' says I to him, 'that me daughter would leave a lovely situation, with a kind and tendher masther, for a mean, hungry blagyard like yerself,' says I, 'that's livin' always in this backwards place!' says I."

This touching expression of preference for myself, as opposed to Mr.

Keohane, was received with expressionless respect by the Court. Flurry, with an impa.s.sive countenance, kicked me heavily under cover of the desk. I said that we had better get on to the a.s.sault on the strand.

Nothing could have been more to Mrs. Brickley's taste. We were minutely instructed as to how Katie Keohane drew the shawleen forward on Mrs.

Brickley's head to stifle her; and how Norrie Keohane was fast in her hair. Of how Mrs. Brickley had then given a stroke upwards between herself and her face (whatever that might mean) and loosed Norrie from her hair. Of how she then sat down and commenced to cry from the use they had for her.

"'Twas all I done," she concluded, looking like a sacred picture, "I gave her a stroke of a pollock on them."

"As for language," replied Mrs. Brickley, with clear eyes, a little uplifted in the direction of the ceiling, "there was no name from heaven or h.e.l.l but she had it on me, and wis.h.i.+n' the divil might burn the two heels off me, and the like of me wasn't in sivin parishes! And that was the clane part of the discoorse, yer Wors.h.i.+ps!"

Mrs. Brickley here drew her cloak more closely about her, as though to enshroud herself in her own refinement, and presented to the Bench a silence as elaborate as a drop scene. It implied, amongst other things, a generous confidence in the imaginative powers of her audience.

Whether or no this was misplaced, Mrs. Brickley was not invited further to enlighten the Court. After her departure the case droned on in inexhaustible rancour, and trackless complications as to the shares of the fish. Its ethics and its arithmetic would have defied the allied intellects of Solomon and Bishop Colenso. It was somewhere in that dead afternoon, when it was too late for lunch and too early for tea, that the Bench, wan with hunger, wound up the affair, by impartially binding both parties in sheaves "to the Peace."

FOOTNOTE:

[1] A large net.

"King William."

_From "Aliens of the West."_

BY CHARLOTTE O'CONOR ECCLES.

Mrs. Macfarlane was a tall, thin, and eminently respectable woman of fifty, possessed of many rigid virtues. She was a native of the north of Ireland, and had come originally to Toomevara as maid to the Dowager Lady Dunanway. On the death of her mistress, whom she served faithfully for many years, Lord Dunanway offered to set her up in business, and at the time our story opens she had been for two years proprietress of the buffet, and made a decent living by it; for as Toomevara is situated on the Great Southern and Western Railway, a fair amount of traffic pa.s.ses through it.

The stationmaster, familiarly known as "Jim" O'Brien, was Toomevara born, and had once been a porter on that very line. He was an intelligent, easy-going, yet quick-tempered man of p.r.o.nounced Celtic type, with a round, good-natured face, a humorous mouth, shrewd, twinkling eyes, and immense volubility.

Between him and Mrs. Macfarlane the deadliest warfare raged. She was cold and superior, and implacably in the right. She pointed out Jim's deficiencies whenever she saw them, and she saw them very often. All day long she sat in her refreshment room, spectacles on nose, her Bible open before her, knitting, and rising only at the entrance of a customer. Jim had an uneasy consciousness that nothing escaped her eye, and her critical remarks had more than once been reported to him.

"The bitther ould pill!" he said to his wife. "Why, the very look ov her 'ud sour a crock o' crame. She's as cross as a bag ov weasels."

Jim was a Catholic and a Nationalist. He belonged to the "Laygue," and spoke at public meetings as often as his duties allowed. He objected to being referred to by Mrs. Macfarlane as a "Papish" and a "Rebel."

"Papish, indeed!" said he. "Ribbil, indeed! Tell the woman to keep a civil tongue in her head, or 'twill be worse for her."

"How did the likes ov her iver get a husban'?" he would ask, distractedly, after a sparring match. "Troth, an' 'tis no wondher the poor man died."

Mrs. Macfarlane was full of fight and courage. Her proudest boast was of being the granddaughter, daughter, sister, and widow of Orangemen.

She looked on herself in Toomevara as a child of Israel among the Babylonians, and felt that it behoved her to uphold the standard of her faith. To this end she sang the praises of the Battle of the Boyne with a triumph that aggravated O'Brien to madness.