“Oh, with the help o’ God I’ll tell yer honour a few lies yet before I die,” replied Dinny Lydon, removing his pipe and the hat which, for reasons best known to himself, he wore while at work, and turning on Charlotte a face that, no less than his name, told of Spanish, if not Jewish blood.
“Well, that’s the truth, anyway,” said Charlotte, with a friendly laugh; “but I won’t believe in the coat being ready till I see it. Didn’t ye lose your apprentice since I saw ye?”
“Is it that young gobsther?” rejoined Mrs. Lydon acridly, as she tendered her unsavoury assistance to Charlotte in the removal of her waterproof; “if that one was in the house yer coat wouldn’t be finished in a twelvemonth with all the time Dinny lost cursing him. Faith! it was last week he hysted his sails and away with him. Mind ye, ’twas he was the first-class puppy!”
“Was it the trade he didn’t like?” asked Charlotte; “or was it the skelpings he got from Dinny?”
“Throth, it was not, but two plates in the sate of his breeches was what he faulted, and the divil mend him!”
“Two plates!” exclaimed Charlotte, in not unnatural bewilderment; “what in the name of fortune was he doing with them?”
“Well, indeed, Miss Mullen, with respex t’ye, when he came here he hadn’t as much rags on him as’d wipe a candlestick,” replied Mrs. Lydon, with fluent spitefulness; “yerself knows that ourselves has to be losing with puttin’ clothes on thim apprentices, an’ feedin’ them as lavish and as natty as ye’d feed a young bonnuf, an’ afther all they’d turn about an’ say they never got so much as the wettin’ of their mouths of male nor tay nor praties—” Mrs. Lydon replenished her lungs with a long breath,—“and this lad the biggest dandy of them all, that wouldn’t be contint without Dinny’d cut the brea’th of two fingers out of a lovely throusers that was a little sign bulky on him and was gethered into nate plates—”
“Oh, it’s well known beggars can’t bear heat,” said Charlotte, interrupting for purposes of her own a story that threatened to expand unprofitably, “and that was always the way with all the M‘Donaghs. Didn’t I meet that lad’s cousin, Shamus Bawn, driving a new side-car this morning, and his father only dead a week. I suppose now he’s got the money he thinks he’ll never get to the end of it, though indeed it isn’t so long since I heard he was looking for money, and found it hard enough to get it.”
Mrs. Lydon gave a laugh of polite acquiescence, and wondered inwardly whether Miss Mullen had as intimate a knowledge of everyone’s affairs as she seemed to have of Shamus Bawn’s.
“Oh, they say a manny a thing—” she observed with well-simulated inanity. “Arrah! dheen dheffeth, Dinny! thurrum cussoge um’na.”