A gale of laughter swept round the court.
“Come, come!” said Mr. Heraty; “have done with this baldherdash! William, tell Darcy some one must go fetch his mother, for as wake as she is she could walk half a mile!” Mr. Heraty here drew forth an enormous white pocket-handkerchief and trumpeted angrily in its depths.
Darcy raised his small blue eyes with their thick lashes, and took a look at his judge. There was a gabbled interchange of Irish between him and the interpreter.
“He says she could not, yer worship, nor as much as one perch.”
“Ah, what nonsense is this!” said Mr. Heraty testily; “didn’t I see the woman meself at Mass last Sunday?”
Darcy’s reply was garnished with a good deal more gesticulation than usual, and throughout his speech the ironic smile on Sweeny’s face was a masterpiece of quiet expression.
“He says,” said William, “that surely she was at Mass last Sunday, the same as your worship says, but ’twas on the way home that she was taking a wall, and a stone fell on her and hurted her finger and the boot preyed on it, and it has her desthroyed.”
At this culmination of the misadventures of Mrs. Darcy the countenances of the general public must again have expressed some of the bewilderment that they felt.
“Perhaps William will be good enough to explain,” said Dr. Lyden, permitting a faint smile to twitch the foxy moustache, “how Mrs. Darcy’s boot affected her finger?”
William’s skinny hand covered his frog mouth with all a deserving schoolboy’s embarrassment at being caught out in a bad translation.