“Trust in God, I tell you, for as you live, truth will come to light yet.”
The conversation took various changes as they proceeded, until they reached the Grange, where the first person they met was Jemmy Branigan, who addressed his old enemy, the pedlar, in that peculiarly dry and ironical tone which he was often in the habit of using when he wished to disguise a friendly act in an ungracious garb—a method of granting favors, by the way, to which he was proverbially addicted. In fact, a surly answer from Jemmy was as frequently indicative of his intention to serve you with his master as it was otherwise; but so adroitly did he disguise his sentiments, that no earthly penetration could develop them until proved by the result. Jemmy, besides, liked the pedlar at heart for his open, honest scurrility—a quality which he latterly found extremely beneficial to himself, inasmuch as now that, increasing infirmity had incapacitated his master from delivering much of the alternate abuse that took place between them, he experienced great relief every moment from a fresh breathing with his rather eccentric opponent.
“Jemmy,” said Hanlon, “is the master in the office?”
“Is he in the office?—Who wants him?” and as he put the query he accompanied it by a look of ineffable contempt at the pedlar.
“Your friend, the pedlar, wants him; and so now,” added Hanlon, “I leave you both to fight it out between you.”
“You're comin' wid your petition, an' a purty object you are, goin' to look afther a farm for a man that'll be hanged, (may God forbid—this day, amin!” he exclaimed in an under-tone which the other could not hear): “an' what can you expect but to get kicked out or put in' the stocks for attemptin' to take a farm over another man's head.”
“What other man's head?—nobody has it yet.”
“Ay, has there—a very daicent respectable man has it, by name one Darby Skinadre. (May he never warm his hungry nose in the same farm, the miserable keowt that he is this day,” he added in another soliloquy, which escaped the pedlar): “a very honest man is Darby Skinadre, so you may save yourself the trouble, I say.”
“At any rate there's no harm in tryin'—worse than fail we can't, an' if we succeed it'll be good to come in for anything from the ould scoundrel, before the devil gets him.”
Jemmy gave him a look.