Ward: It is not in the dock you will be put this time. And there will be no bodily harm done to you, but to seize your furniture and your goods. It’s best for me to be going there myself and not to be wasting my time. (Goes out.)
Mrs. Broderick: Many a one taking my goods on credit and I seeing their face no more. But nothing would satisfy the people of this district. Sure the great God Himself when He came down couldn’t please everybody.
Sibby: I am thinking you were talking of some friend, ma’am, might be apt to be coming to your aid.
Mrs. Broderick: Well able he is to do it if the Lord would but put it in his mind. Isn’t it a strange thing the goods of this world to shut up the heart of a brother from his own, the same as Esau and Jacob, and he having a good farm of land in the County Limerick. It is what I heard that in that place the grass does be as thick as grease.
Sibby: I suppose, ma’am, you wrote giving him an account of your case?
Mrs. Broderick: Sure, Mr. Nestor, the dear man, has his fingers wore away writing for me, and I telling him all he had or had not to say. At Christmas I wrote, and at Little Christmas, and at St. Brigit’s Day, and on the Feast of St. Patrick, and after that again such time as I had news of the summons being about to be served. And you may ask Mrs. Delane at the Post Office am I telling any lie saying I got no word or answer at all.... It’s long since I saw him, but it is the way he used to be, his eyes on kippeens and some way suspicious in his heart; a dark weighty tempered man.
Sibby: A person to be crabbed and he young, it is not likely he will grow kind at the latter end.
Tommy Nally: That is no less than true now. There are crabbed people and suspicious people to be met with in every place. It is much that I got a pass from the Workhouse this day, the Master making sure when I asked it that I had in my pocket the means of getting drink.
Mrs. Broderick: It would maybe be best to go join you in the Workhouse, Tommy Nally, when I am out of this, than to go walking the world from end to end.
Tommy Nally: Ah, don’t be saying that, ma’am; sure you couldn’t be happy within those walls if you had the whole world. Clean outside, but very hard within. No rank but all mixed together, the good, the middling and the bad, the well reared and the rough.