“’Tis the same as a man’s share, me worshipful gintleman,” returned Mrs. Brickley, splendidly; “it goes with the boat always, afther the crew and the saine has their share got.”
I possibly looked as enlightened as I felt by this exposition.
“You mean that Jer wouldn’t have her unless he got the boat’s share with her?” suggested Flurry.
“He said it over-right all that was in the house, and he reddening his pipe at the fire,” replied Mrs. Brickley, in full-sailed response to the helm. “‘D’ye think,’ says I to him, ‘that me daughter would leave a lovely situation, with a kind and tendher masther, for a mean, hungry blagyard like yerself,’ says I, ‘that’s livin’ always in this backwards place!’ says I.”
This touching expression of preference for myself, as opposed to Mr. Keohane, was received with expressionless respect by the Court. Flurry, with an impassive countenance, kicked me heavily under cover of the desk. I said that we had better get on to the assault on the strand. Nothing could have been more to Mrs. Brickley’s taste. We were minutely instructed as to how Katie Keohane drew the shawleen forward on Mrs. Brickley’s head to stifle her; and how Norrie Keohane was fast in her hair. Of how Mrs. Brickley had then given a stroke upwards between herself and her face (whatever that might mean) and loosed Norrie from her hair. Of how she then sat down and commenced to cry from the use they had for her.
“’Twas all I done,” she concluded, looking like a sacred picture, “I gave her a stroke of a pollock on them.”
“As for language,” replied Mrs. Brickley, with clear eyes, a little uplifted in the direction of the ceiling, “there was no name from heaven or hell but she had it on me, and wishin’ the divil might burn the two heels off me, and the like of me wasn’t in sivin parishes! And that was the clane part of the discoorse, yer Worships!”
Mrs. Brickley here drew her cloak more closely about her, as though to enshroud herself in her own refinement, and presented to the Bench a silence as elaborate as a drop scene. It implied, amongst other things, a generous confidence in the imaginative powers of her audience.
Whether or no this was misplaced, Mrs. Brickley was not invited further to enlighten the Court. After her departure the case droned on in inexhaustible rancour, and trackless complications as to the shares of the fish. Its ethics and its arithmetic would have defied the allied intellects of Solomon and Bishop Colenso. It was somewhere in that dead afternoon, when it was too late for lunch and too early for tea, that the Bench, wan with hunger, wound up the affair, by impartially binding both parties in sheaves “to the Peace.”