peroration addressed to ’Captain Devereux, dear,’
and ‘Toole, my honey.’ Well, they
quizzed him unmercifully; they sat down and eat all
that was left of the hare-pie, under his wistful ogle.
They made him narrate minutely every circumstance connected
with the smuggling of the game, and the illicit distillation
for the mess. They never passed so pleasant a
morning. Of course he bound them over to eternal
secrecy, and of course, as in all similar cases, the
vow was religiously observed; nothing was ever heard
of it at mess—oh, no—and Toole
never gave a dramatic representation of the occurrence,
heightened and embellished with all the little doctor’s
genius for farce.
There certainly was a monologue to which he frequently
afterwards treated the Aldermen of Skinner’s
Alley, and other convivial bodies, at supper, the
doctor’s gestures were made with knife and fork
in hand, and it was spoken in a rich brogue and tones
sometimes of thrilling pathos, anon of sharp and vehement
indignation, and again of childlike endearment, amidst
pounding and jingling of glasses, and screams of laughter
from the company. Indeed the lord mayor, a fat
slob of a fellow, though not much given to undue merriment,
laughed his ribs into such a state of breathless torture,
that he implored of Toole, with a wave of his hand—he
could not speak—to give him breathing time,
which that voluble performer disregarding, his lordship
had to rise twice, and get to the window, or, as he
afterwards said, he should have lost his life; and
when the performance was ended, his fat cheeks were
covered with tears, his mouth hung down, his head
wagged slowly from side to side, and with short gasping
‘oohs,’ and ‘oohs,’ his hands
pressed to his pudgy ribs, he looked so pale and breathless,
that although they said nothing, several of his comrades
stared hard at him, and thought him in rather a queer
state.
Shortly after this little surprise, I suppose by way
of ratifying the secret treaty of silence, Father
Roach gave the officers and Toole a grand Lent dinner
of fish, with no less than nineteen different plats,
baked, boiled, stewed, in fact, a very splendid feast;
and Puddock talked of some of those dishes more than
twenty years afterwards.
CHAPTER VI.
IN WHICH THE MINSTRELSY PROCEEDS.
No wonder, then, if Father Roach, when Loftus, in
the innocence of his heart, announced his song and
its theme, was thoroughly uneasy, and would have given
a good deal that he had not helped that simple youth
into his difficulty. But things must now take
their course. So amid a decorous silence, Dan
Loftus lifted up his voice, and sang. That voice
was a high small pipe, with a very nervous quaver in
it. He leaned back in his chair, and little more
than the whites of his upturned eyes were visible;
and beating time upon the table with one hand, claw-wise,
and with two or three queer, little thrills and roulades,
which re-appeared with great precision in each verse,
he delivered himself thus, in what I suspect was an
old psalm tune:—
Copyrights
The House by the Church-Yard from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
