With this consolation, and with a “God speed you,” given to the carman, Larry was driving off; but the carman called to him, and pointed to a house, at the corner of which, on a high pole, was swinging an iron sign of three horse-shoes, set in a crooked frame, and at the window hung an empty bottle, proclaiming whiskey within.
“Well, I don’t care if I do,” said Larry; “for I’ve no other comfort left me in life now. I beg your honour’s pardon, sir, for a minute,” added he, throwing the reins into the carriage to Lord Colambre, as he leaped down. All remonstrance and power of lungs to reclaim him were vain! He darted into the whiskey-house with the carman—re-appeared before Lord Colambre could accomplish getting out, remounted his seat, and, taking the reins, “I thank your honour,” said he; “and I’ll bring you into Clonbrony before it’s pitch-dark, though it’s nightfall, and that’s four good miles, but ‘a spur in the head is worth two in the heel.’”
Larry, to demonstrate the truth of his favourite axiom, drove off at such a furious rate over great stones left in the middle of the road by carmen, who had been driving in the gudgeons of their axletrees to hinder them from lacing[9], that Lord Colambre thought life and limb in imminent danger; and feeling that, at all events, the jolting and bumping was past endurance, he had recourse to Larry’s shoulder, and shook and pulled, and called to him to go slower, but in vain: at last the wheel struck full against a heap of stones at a turn of the road, the wooden linchpin came off, and the chaise was overset: Lord Colambre was a little bruised, but glad to escape without fractured bones.
“I beg your honour’s pardon,” said Larry, completely sobered; “I’m as glad as the best pair of boots ever I see, to see your honour nothing the worse for it. It was the linchpin, and them barrows of loose stones, that ought to be fined any way, if there was any justice in the country.”
“The pole is broke; how are we to get on?” said Lord Colambre.
“Murder! murder!—and no smith nearer than Clonbrony; nor rope even. It’s a folly to talk, we can’t get to Clonbrony, nor stir a step backward or forward the night.”
“What, then, do you mean to leave me all night in the middle of the road?” cried Lord Colambre, quite exasperated.
“Is it me? plase your honour. I would not use any jantleman so ill, barring I could do no other,” replied the postilion, coolly: then, leaping across the ditch, or, as he called it, the gripe of the ditch, he scrambled up, and while he was scrambling, said, “If your honour will lend me your hand, till I pull you up the back of the ditch, the horses will stand while we go. I’ll find you as pretty a lodging for the night, with a widow of a brother of my shister’s husband that was, as ever you slept in your life; for Old Nick or St. Dennis has not found ‘em out yet: and your honour will he, no compare, snugger than at the inn at Clonbrony, which has no roof, the devil a stick. But where will I get your honour’s hand; for it’s coming on so dark, I can’t see rightly. There, you’re up now safe. Yonder candle’s the house.”
“Go and ask whether they can give us a night’s lodging.”
“Is it ask? when I see the light!—Sure they’d be proud to give the traveller all the beds in the house, let alone one. Take care of the potatoe furrows, that’s all, and follow me straight. I’ll go on to meet the dog, who knows me, and might be strange to your honour.”