“Matthew,” I said, “this isn’t work,” as I bestowed a kick upon an object that lay prone upon the lawn, when it ought to have been digging at our garden border.
“No, sir; but it’s preparin’ for it,” was the prompt reply. For myself, I was knocked out of time, though I felt I was clearly within my rights. Fancy a man, roused from a peaceful siesta, being ready with a retort of such preternatural smartness!
Unhappily Matthew had two failings, by which his career was handicapped. He was always lazy, and sometimes inebriate. Of the former he never repented so long as I knew him; the latter he was always repenting of and always repeating. And the stage of repentance was the more acute and the more grievous, at any rate to his neighbours. After a bout of drinking he would wander through the house with his hands on the pit of his stomach—as if the seat of his iniquity lay there—moaning in a dreary, exasperating way, “The Lord forgie I; I’ll never be drunk agin.” “How can you expect him to?” said his wife, in a tone of the bitterest sarcasm.
Every time he repented he took the pledge anew. The consequence was, his bosom was garnished with blue ribbons—his “decorations” he called them—for he never cast off one when he assumed another, but regarded them as an old soldier does his medals, traces of many a scar and many a conflict, in which, unhappily, he always fell.
“Decorations!” said his wife, “fine decorations! Call ’em rather sign-posts along the road to perdition. If you stick to ’em all when you’re buried, they’ll have no trouble in fixing your whereabouts.”
Sometimes, when he was particularly exasperating, she would take the law in her own hands. “My head’s swimmin’ like a tee-total,” Matthew would say pathetically. “The very last thing it ought to swim like,” retorted his wife, a woman with a ready wit, “but I’ll soon make it do so.” And with that she would take him in her strong arms and give him a twist, as boys do when they give its first impetus to a top, after which she would wait patiently for the result. The result was, of course, collapse as soon as the primary impulse had run down; whereupon she would catch him up when he was on the point of falling, and bear him off to repentance and bed.
Matthew’s dialect was unique. I question whether a specialist could have reproduced it in its integrity, if only because it never reached finality, but was always in process of development. For myself, I had studied it for years, and could never get any nearer towards the discovery of its principles. Every day he was startling you with some new combination, as a rule strictly ungrammatical, but often a reversion to some lost or more accurate phraseology. For example: “Let I go,” “Would you like I to do it”?—the latter a reproduction, as near as may be, of the Latin formula visne ego faciam? A still more perplexing characteristic in his speech was that he used many of his words in a variety of senses.
“Cuss they nigglin’ weeds,” he’d say, and “Cuss my nigglin’ toothache”—phrases in which the adjective (or participle) carried an appreciable meaning, even when he didn’t add the word “darn’d” as an explanatory gloss. But when he transferred the phrase a minute afterwards to a splendid crop of potatoes, in which my inexperienced eye could detect no possible fault, I was all at sea again, and had to ask him to explain himself.
“I means they’m small,” he answered, with a contemptuous sniff at my ignorance.
“But, Matthew, you told me just now that ‘nigglin’’ meant ‘darn’d.’”