“That I may die in happiness, your honor, but I’m afeard to tell you—­but, sure, if you’d give your promise, sir—­your bright word of honor, that you’d not pay me off for it, I’ll tell you.”

“Ah! you d——­d crawling reptile, out with it—­I won’t pay you off.”

[Illustration:  PAGE 142—­ there’s as many curses before you in hell]

“Well, then, here it is—­oh! the curse o’ Cromwell on them this day, for an ungrateful pack! they said, your honor, that—­bad luck to them I pray—­that there wasn’t so black-hearted a scoundrel on the face of the airth as your four quarthers—­that the gallows is gapin’ for you—­and that there’s as many curses before you in hell as ’ud blisther a griddle.”

M’Clutchy’s face assumed its usual expression of diabolical malignity, whilst, at the same time, he gave a look so piercing at Darby, as if suspecting that the curse, from its peculiar character, was at least partially his own invention,—­that the latter, who stood like a criminal, looking towards the floor, felt precisely what was going forward in the other’s mind, and knew that he had nothing else for it but to look him steadily in the face, as a mark of his perfect innocence.  Gradually, therefore, and slowly he raised his small gray eyes until they met those of M’Clutchy, and thus the gaze continued for nearly a minute between them, and that with such steadiness on both sides, that they resembled a mesmeric doctor and his patient, rather than anything else to which we could compare them.  On the part of M’Clutchy the gaze was that of an inquisitor looking into the heart of him whom he suspected; on that of Darby, the eye, unconscious of evil, betrayed nothing but the purest simplicity and candor.

And yet, when we consider that Darby most unquestionably did not only ornament, but give peculiar point to the opinions expressed by the tenantry against the Vulture, perhaps we ought to acknowledge that of the two he possessed a larger share of histrionic talent.

At length M’Clutchy, whose eye, for reasons with which the reader is already acquainted, was never either a firm or a steady one, removed it from Darby, who nevertheless followed it with a simple but pertinacious look, as much as to say, I have told you truth, and am now waiting your leisure to proceed.

“What do you stare at?” said M’Clutchy, strongly disposed to vent his malignity on the next object to him; “and, you beggarly scoundrel, what did you say to that?  Tell me, or I’ll heave you, head foremost, through the window?”

“Why,” replied Darby, in a quiet, confident, and insinuating tone, “I raisoned wid them—­raisoned wid them like a Christian.  ’Now, Sheemus O’Shaughran,’ says I, ’you’ve said what I know to be a lie.  I’m not the man to put ill between you and his honor, Mr. M’Clutchy, but at the same time,’ says I, ’I’m his sarvint, and as an honest man I must do my duty.  I don’t intend to mintion a syllable of what