“Himself’s afther sayin’,” said Mrs. Sweeny, as I sat down, “that he’d think ’twas your father he was lookin’ at, an’ you sittin’ there a while ago.”
Old Sweeny removed his pipe from his lips, and cleared his throat.
“Manny’s the time I seen the young masther sit there,” he said, in a sort of harsh whisper, turning his bleared and filmy old eyes towards me—“the way she”—he pointed a crooked forefinger at me—“is now, afther he bein’ out shootin’ or the like o’ that; ‘Be domned to ye, Sweeny, ye blagyard,’ he’d say to me, ‘dickens a shnipe is there left on yer land with your dhraining; I’ll have ye run out of the place,’ he’d say. That’s the very way he’d talk to me, as civil and pleasant as yerself. Begob, ye have the very two eyes of him, an’ the grand long nose of him!”
I acknowledged the compliment as well as I knew how, and old Sweeny went on again, punctuating his sentences with long and noisy pulls at his pipe.
“Faith, there was manny a wan of the Durrus tinants would rather ’twas their own son was goin’ to Ameriky than him when he went; and manny a wan too that’d have walked to Cork to go to his funeral. That was the quare comin’ home that he had—to die an’ be berrid in the town o’ Cork. I’ll niver forget that time. Shure the night he died in Cork—’twas the night before the owld masther dyin’ too—I wasn’t in me bed, but out in the shed with a cow that was sick. There was carridges dhriving the Durrus avenue that night,” he said, his voice getting lower and huskier; “I heard them goin’ the road, an’ it one o’clock in the morning! And the big shnow comminced afther that agin.”
“What carriages were they?” I asked, with a little superstitious shiver.
The old man looked furtively round, and took his pipe out of his mouth.
“God knows!” he said mysteriously; “God knows! But they say there do be them that wait for the Sarsfields agin they’re dyin’. There was wan that seen the black coach and four horses goin’ wesht the road, over the bog, the time the owld man—that’s Theodore’s father—died; and wansht,” he went on impressively, “there was a Sarsfield out, that time the Frinch landed beyond in Banthry Bay, and the English cot him an’ hung him; but those people took him and dhragged him through hell and through det’th, and me mother’s father heard the black coach taking him wesht to Myross Churchyard.”
Old Sweeny had let his pipe go out during the telling of the story, and he left me to make what I could of it, while he poked about for a piece of burning turf wherewith to rekindle his pipe. Willy was still standing by the door.
“I think it’s cleared up enough for you to start now,” he said coldly, “and if you want to get back to the house, you’d better start before it comes on heavy again.”