“Well,” continued Harrington, after a pause, “how goes it, Mr. Driscoll? How is your wife? And the children? And how is the broken leg? Won’t you sit down?”
“They’re all purty well, sur, thank ye kindly,” returned Driscoll, ducking his head continuously as he spoke, and moving up to the table. “And the leg’s sthrong as a post, glory be to God, sur. Sorra the word o’ lie in it, but it’s yerself that it’s owin’ to, and divil a leg I’d have to stand on this minit widout you, Mr. Harrington.”
“Oh, well,” said Harrington, smiling; “I’m glad you’re over that trouble. But you came up to tell me something, I suppose. Did—did Mr. Atkins send you?”
“Deed he did not, sur,” replied Driscoll. “I kem up to make bowld to ask ye something, Mr. Harrington, if ye wouldn’t think it an offince, sur,” he added, with a furtive sidelook at Bagasse, who sat with an upturned face of curious interrogation levelled at him.
“Certainly not,” replied Harrington. “No offence at all. Ask away. Never mind my friend, there.”
“Bad scran to me if I wor to mind a frind o’ yours, sur,” returned Driscoll, coming close up to the edge of the table, and looking uneasily at Harrington. “It’s a quistion I’ll make bowld to ask ye, sur.”
“Well, ask on,” said Harrington, blankly gazing at him, with a mounting color, and his heart beating painfully with a blind clairvoyant sense of what was coming.
“Are ye,” confidentially asked the stevedore, with considerable burr on the “are”—“are ye opposed, sur, to it’s bein’ done?”
Harrington started so violently, and turned so pale, that Bagasse sprang to his feet, and Driscoll’s face grew stupid with surprise.
“To what being done?” gasped Harrington. “Speak quick. Tell me what you mean?”