The Boy.—“It’s well you know what call I have. It’s well you know it’s a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you’d hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty stomach failing from your heart.”
Maradick listened to the beautiful words and his eyes glowed. The dusk was falling in the room, and half-lights of gold and purple hovered over the fireplace and the gallery. The leaves of the tree had changed from green to dark grey, and, above them, where there had been two stars there were now a million.
“And again,” said Lester, “listen to this.”
The Boy.—“When the airs is warming in four months or five, it’s then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin in the dews of night, the time sweet smells do be rising, and you’d see a little shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.”
The Girl. (playfully).—“And it’s that kind of a poacher’s love you’d make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down?”
The Boy.—“It’s little you’ll think if my love’s a poacher’s or an earl’s itself, when you’ll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I’d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God in all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair.”
The Girl.—“That’ll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her heart out before she’d meet a young man was your like for eloquence or talk at all.”
The Boy (encouraged).—“Let you wait, to hear me talking, till we’re astray in Ennis, when Good Friday’s by, drinking a sup from a well and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, in the flowers of the earth.”
The Girl (in a low voice moved by his tone).—“I’d be nice so, is it?”
The Boy (with rapture).—“If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they’d be the like of the holy prophets, I’m thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.”