"How would I know she was blind?" he repeated. "Many's the time when she'd be takin' a sthroll in on my land I'd see her fallin' down in the rocks, she was that blind! An' didn't I see Darcy's mother one time, an'

she puttin' something on her eyes."

"Was it gla.s.ses she was putting on the sheep's eyes?" suggested the Chairman, with a glance that admitted the court to the joke.

"No, but an ointment," said Sweeny stubbornly. "I seen her rubbing it to the eyes, an' she no more than thirty yards from me."

"Will ye swear that?" thundered Mr. Heraty; "will you swear that at a distance of thirty yards you could tell what was between Darcy's mother's fingers and the sheep's eyes? No you will not! Nor no man could! William, is Darcy's mother in the coort? We'll have to take evidence from her as to the condition of the sheep's eyes!"

"Darcy says, yer worship, that his mother would lose her life if she was to be brought into coort," explained William, after an interlude in Irish, to which both magistrates listened with evident interest; "that ere last night a frog jumped into the bed to her in the night, and she got out of the bed to light the Blessed Candle, and when she got back to the bed again she was in it always between herself and the wall, an' she got a wakeness out of it, and great cold--"

"Are ye sure it wasn't the frog got the wakeness?" asked Dr. Lyden.

A gale of laughter swept round the court.

"Come, come!" said Mr. Heraty; "have done with this baldherdash!

William, tell Darcy some one must go fetch his mother, for as wake as she is she could walk half a mile!" Mr. Heraty here drew forth an enormous white pocket-handkerchief and trumpeted angrily in its depths.

Darcy raised his small blue eyes with their thick lashes, and took a look at his judge. There was a gabbled interchange of Irish between him and the interpreter.

"He says she could not, yer worship, nor as much as one perch."

"Ah, what nonsense is this!" said Mr. Heraty testily; "didn't I see the woman meself at Ma.s.s last Sunday?"

Darcy's reply was garnished with a good deal more gesticulation than usual, and throughout his speech the ironic smile on Sweeny's face was a masterpiece of quiet expression.

"He says," said William, "that surely she was at Ma.s.s last Sunday, the same as your worship says, but 'twas on the way home that she was taking a wall, and a stone fell on her and hurted her finger and the boot preyed on it, and it has her desthroyed."

At this culmination of the misadventures of Mrs. Darcy the countenances of the general public must; again have expressed some of the bewilderment that they felt.

"Perhaps William will be good enough to explain," said Dr. Lyden, permitting a faint smile to twitch the foxy moustache, "how Mrs. Darcy's boot affected her finger?"

William's skinny hand covered his frog mouth with all a deserving schoolboy's embarra.s.sment at being caught out in a bad translation.

"I beg yer worships' pardon," he said, in deep confusion, "but sure your worships know as well as meself that in Irish we have the one word for your finger or your toe."

"There's one thing I know very well anyhow," said Dr. Lyden, turning to his colleague, "I've no more time to waste sitting here talking about old Kit Darcy's fingers and toes! Let the two o' them get arbitrators and settle it out of court. There's nothing between them now only the value of the sheep."

"Sure I was satisfied to leave it to arbithration, but Darcy wasn't willin'." This statement was Sweeny's.

"So you were willin' to have arbithration before you came into coort at all?" said Mr. Heraty, eyeing the tall defendant with ominous mildness.

"William, ask Darcy is this the case."

Darcy's reply, delivered with a slow, sarcastic smile, provoked a laugh from the audience.

"Oh, ho! So that was the way, was it!" cried Mr. Heraty, forgetting to wait for the translation. "Ye had your wife's cousin to arbithrate!

Small blame to Darcy he wasn't willin'! It's a pity ye didn't say your wife herself should arbithrate when ye went about it! You would hardly believe the high opinion Sweeny here has of his wife," continued the Chairman in illuminative excursus to Dr. Lyden; "sure he had all the women wild below at my shop th' other night sayin' his wife was the finest woman in Ireland! Upon my soul he had!"

"If I said that," growled the unfortunate Sweeny, "it was a lie for me."

"Don't ye think it might be a good thing now," suggested the indefatigable doctor, in his mournful tuneful voice, "to call a few witnesses to give evidence as to whether Mrs. Michael Sweeny is the finest woman in Ireland or no?"

"G.o.d knows, gentlemen, it's a pity ye haven't more to do this day," said Sweeny, turning at length upon his tormentors, "I'd sooner pay the price of the sheep than be losin' me time here this way."

"See, now, how we're getting to the rights of it in the latter end,"

commented Dr. Lyden imperturbably. "Sweeny began here by saying"--he checked off each successive point on his fingers--"that the sheep wasn't Darcy's at all. Then he said that his children of eight and nine years of age were too young to set the dog on the sheep. Then, that if the dog hunted her it was no more than she deserved for constant trespa.s.s. Then he said that the sheep was so old and blind that she committed suicide in his end of the lake in order to please herself and to spite him; and, last of all, he tells us that he offered to compensate Darcy for her before he came into court at all!"

"And on top of that," Mr. Heraty actually rose in his seat in his exquisite appreciation of the position, "on top of that, mind you, after he has the whole machinery of the law and the entire population of Letterbeg attending on him for a matter o' two hours, he informs us that we're wasting his valuable time!"

Mr. Heraty fixed his eyes in admirable pa.s.sion--whether genuine or not we are quite incapable of p.r.o.nouncing--upon Sweeny, who returned the gaze with all the gloom of an unfortunate but invincibly respectable man.

Dr. Lyden once more pulled out his watch.

"It might be as well for us," he said languidly, "to enter upon the inquiry as to the value of the sheep. That should take about another three-quarters of an hour. William, ask Darcy the price he puts on the sheep."

Every emotion has its limits. We received with scarce a stirring of surprise the variations of sworn testimony as to the value of the sheep.

Her price ranged from one pound, claimed by Darcy and his adherents, to sixpence, at which sum her skin was unhesitatingly valued by Sweeny. Her age swung like a pendulum between two years and fourteen, and, finally, in crowning proof of her worth and general attractiveness, it was stated that her own twin had been sold for fifteen shillings to the police at Dhulish, "ere last week". At this re-entrance into the case of the personal element Mr. Heraty's spirits obviously rose.

"I think we ought to have evidence about this," he said, fixing the police officer with a dangerous eye. "Mr. c.o.x, have ye anny of the Dhulish police here?"

Mr. c.o.x, whose only official act up to the present had been the highly beneficial one of opening the window, admitted with a grin that two of the Dhulish men were in the court.

"Well, then!" continued the Chairman, "Mr. c.o.x, maybe ye'd kindly desire them to step forward in order that the court may be able to estimate from their appearance the nutritive qualities of the twin sisther of Darcy's sheep."

At this juncture we perceived, down near the crowded doorway, two tall and deeply embarra.s.sed members of the R.I.C. hastily escaping into the street.

"Well, well; how easy it is to frighten the police!" remarked the Chairman, following them with a regretful eye. "I suppose, afther all, we'd betther put a price on the sheep and have done with it. In my opinion, when there's a difficulty like this--what I might call an accident--between decent men like these (for they're both decent men, and I've known them these years), I'd say both parties should share what hardship is in it. Now, doctor, what shall we give Darcy? I suppose if we gave him 8s. compensation and 2s. costs we'd not be far out?"

Dr. Lyden, already in the act of charging his pipe, nodded his head.

Sweeny began to fumble in his pockets, and drawing out a brownish rag, possibly a handkerchief, knotted in several places, proceeded to untie one of the knots. The doctor watched him without speaking. Ultimately, from some fastness in the rag a half-sovereign was extracted, and was laid upon the table by Sweeny. The clerk, a well-dressed young gentleman, whose att.i.tude had throughout been one of the extremest aloofness, made an entry in his book with an aggressively business-like air.

"Well, that's all right," remarked Dr. Lyden, getting lazily on his legs and looking round for his hat; "it's a funny thing, but I notice that the defendant brought the exact sum required into court with him."

"I did! And I'm able to bring more than it, thanks be to G.o.d!" said Sweeny fiercely, with all the offended pride of his race. "I have two pounds here this minute--"

"If that's the way with ye, may be ye'd like us to put a bigger fine on ye!" broke in Mr. Heraty hotly, in instant response to Sweeny's show of temper.

Dr. Lyden laughed for the first time.

"Mr. Heraty's getting cross now, in the latter end," he murmured explanatorily to the general public, while he put on an overcoat, from the pocket of which protruded the Medusa coils of a stethoscope.

Long before the arrival of the mail-car that was to take us away, the loafers and the litigants had alike been swallowed up, apparently by the brown, hungry hillsides; possibly also, some of them, by Mr. Heraty's tap-room. Again we clambered to our places among the inevitable tourists and their inevitable bicycles, again the laden car lumbered heavily yet swiftly along the bog roads that quivered under its weight, while the water in the black ditches on either side quivered in sympathy. The tourists spoke of the vast loneliness, unconscious of the intricate network of social life that lay all around them, beyond their ken, far beyond their understanding. They spoke authoritatively of Irish affairs; mentioned that the Irish were "a bit 'ot tempered," but added that "all they wanted was fair play".

They had probably been in Ireland for a week or fortnight. They had come out of business centres in England, equipped with circular tickets, with feeling hearts, and with the belief that two and two inevitably make four; whereas in Ireland two and two are just as likely to make five, or three, and are still more likely to make nothing at all.

Never will it be given to them to understand the man of whom our friend Sweeny was no more than a type. How can they be expected to realise that a man who is decorous in family and village life, indisputably G.o.d-fearing, kind to the poor, and reasonably honest, will enmesh himself in a tissue of sworn lies before his fellows for the sake of half a sovereign and a family feud, and that his fellows will think none the worse of him for it.