“And pray, Bridget, which was the heavier”? asked Sir Cradock, almost smiling.
“Mr. Cradock, as is now, your honour. Iʼd swear it on my dying bed. Did you think, then, Iʼd iver wrong him, the innocents as they was”?
“And did you weigh them with rosettes on”? Rufus Hutton had not finished yet.
“How cud I, and only one got it”?
“Oh, then, you had fastened it on again”?
“Do you think they was born with ribbons on”?
This was poor Biddyʼs last repartee. She lost heart and told everything afterwards. How she had heard that there was some difference in the marks of the infants, though what it was she knew not justly; having, like most Irishwomen, the clearest perception that right and left are only relative terms, and come wrong in the looking–glass, as they do in heraldry. How, when she found the rosette adrift, she had done the very best she could, according to her lights, to work even–handed justice, and up to this very day believed that the heft of the scales was the true one. Then she fell to a–crying bitterly that her darling Crad should be ousted, and then she laughed as heartily that her dear boy Clayton was in for it.
With timid glances at Mrs. OʼGaghan, like a boyʼs at his schoolmaster, Jane Cripps came in, and told all she knew, saying “please sir”, at every sentence. She had seen at the time Dr. Huttonʼs sketch, which was made without Biddyʼs knowledge, because she never would have allowed it, on account of the bad luck to follow. And Mrs. Cripps was very clever now everything was known. She had felt all along that things went queerly on the third day after the babes were born. She had made up her mind to speak at the time, only Mrs. OʼGaghan was such—excuse her—such a disciplinarian, that—that—and then Lady Nowell died, and everything was at sixes and sevens, and no one cried more violent, let them say what they like about it, than she, Jane Penny as had been.
“If Sir Cradock thought further evidence needful, there was Mrs. Bowyer, a most respectable woman, who washed thirty shilling a week, Mrs. Cripps’ first cousin and comate, who had heard at the time all about the drawing, and had not been easy about the scales, and had dreamed of it many times afterwards, as indeed her Aunt Betsy know; and her husband was no man, or he never would have said to her—— ”