“Yes. I had a stick. I must have a stick,” (deep and mellow pathos was hinted at in the voice), “I am sorry to say. What could I do to her? A man with a wooden leg on a sthrand could do nothing!”
Something like a laugh ran at the back of the court. Mr. McCaffery’s ears turned scarlet and became quite decorative. On or off a strand Con Brickley was not a person to be scored off easily.
His clumsy, yet impressive, descent from the witness stand followed almost immediately, and was not the least telling feature of his evidence. Mr. Mooney surveyed his exit with the admiration of one artist for another, and, rising, asked the Bench’s permission to call Mrs. Brickley.
Mrs. Brickley, as she mounted to the platform, in the dark and nun-like severity of her long cloak, the stately blue cloth cloak that is the privilege of the Munster peasant woman, was an example of the rarely-blended qualities of picturesqueness and respectability. As she took her seat in the chair, she flung the deep hood back on her shoulders, and met the gaze of the court with her grey head erect; she was a witness to be proud of.
“Now, Mrs. Brickley,” said “Roaring Jack,” urbanely, “will you describe this interview between your daughter and Keohane.”
“It was last Sunday in Shrove, your Worship, Mr. Flurry Knox, and gentlemen,” began Mrs. Brickley nimbly, “meself and me little gerr’l was comin’ from mass, and Mr. Jer Keohane came up to us and got on in a most unmannerable way. He asked me daughter would she marry him. Me daughter told him she would not, quite friendly like. I’ll tell you no lie, gentlemen, she was teasing him with the umbrella the same time; an’ he raised his shtick and dhrew a sthroke on her in the back, an’ the little gerr’l took up a small pebble of a stone and fired it at him. She put the umbrella up to his mouth, but she called him no names. But as for him, the names he put on her was to call her ‘a nasty, long, slopeen of a proud thing, and a slopeen of a proud tinker.’”
“Very lover-like expressions!” commented Mr. Mooney, doubtless stimulated by the lady-like titters from the barmaids; “and had this romantic gentleman made any previous proposals for your daughter?”
“Himself had two friends over from across the water one night to make the match, a Sathurday it was, and they should land the lee side o’ the island, for the wind was a fright,” replied Mrs. Brickley, launching her tale with the power of easy narration that is bestowed with such amazing liberality on her class. “The three o’ them had dhrink taken, an’ I went to shlap out the door agin them. Me husband said then we should let them in, if it was a Turk itself, with the rain that was in it. They were talking in it then till near the dawning, and in the latther end all that was between them was the boat’s share.”
“What do you mean by ‘the boat’s share’?” said I.