Facing him, the plaintiff lounged against the partition; a man strangely improbable in appearance, with close-cropped grey hair, a young, fresh-coloured face, a bristling orange moustache, and a big, blunt nose. One could have believed him a soldier, a German, anything but what he was, a peasant from the furthest shores of Western Ireland, cut off from what we call civilisation by his ignorance of any language save his own ancient speech, wherein the ideas of to-day stand out in English words like telegraph posts in a Connemara moorland.
Between the two stood the interpreter—small, old, froglike in profile, full of the dignity of the Government official.
“Well, we should be getting on now,” remarked the Chairman, Heraty, J.P., after some explanatory politeness to his unexpected visitors. “William, swear the plaintiff!”
The oath was administered in Irish, and the orange moustache brushed the greasy Testament. The space above the dado of the partition became suddenly a tapestry of attentive faces, clear-eyed, all-comprehending.
SWEENY
“This case,” announced Mr. Heraty judicially yet not without a glance at the visitors, “is a demand for compensation in the matter of a sheep that was drowned. William”—this to the interpreter—“ask Darcy what he has to say for himself?”
Darcy hitched himself round, still with a shoulder propped against the partition, and uttered, without any enthusiasm, a few nasal and guttural sentences.
“He says, yer worship,” said William, with unctuous propriety, “that Sweeny’s gorsoons were ever and always hunting his sheep, and settin’ on their dog to hunt her, and that last week they dhrove her into the lake and dhrownded her altogether.”