New Comedies Part 14

_Hazel:_ You put the measles over you and we going the road to school.

_Mineog:_ There is more than measles has power bring a man down.

_Hazel:_ You had the chin-cough pa.s.sed and you rising. We were cut at the one time for the pock.

_Mineog:_ A disease to be allotted to you it would find you out, and you maybe up twenty mile in the air!

_Hazel:_ Ah, what disease could have you swept in the course of the next two days?

_Mineog:_ That is what I'm after saying--unless you might have murder in your mind?

_Hazel:_ Ah, what murder!

_Mineog:_ What way are you thinking to do away with me? To shoot me with the trigger of a gun and to give me shortening of life?

_Hazel:_ The trigger of a gun! G.o.d bless it, I never fingered such a thing in the length of my life!

_Mineog:_ To take aim at me and destroy me; to shoot me in forty halves like a crow in the time of the wheat!

_Hazel:_ Oh, now, don't say a thing like that!

_Mineog:_ Or to drown me maybe in the river, enticing me across the rotten plank of the bridge. _(Seizing bottle.)_ Will you tell me on the virtue of your oath, is death lurking in that sherry wine?

_Hazel: (Pulling out paper.)_ Ah, G.o.d bless your jig! And how would I know is it a notice of my own death has come into my hand in the pocket of this coat I put on me through a mistake?

_Mineog:_ Give it here. That's my property!

_Hazel: (Reading.)_ "We sympathise with Mrs. Hazel and the family."

There is proof now. Is it that you would go grieving with my wife and I to be living yet?

_Mineog:_ I didn't follow you out beyond this world with craving for the repose of your soul. It is nothing at all beside what you wrote.

_Hazel:_ Oh, I bear no grudge at all against you. I am not huffy and crabbed like yourself to go taking offence. Sure Kings and big people of the sort are used to see their dead-notices made ready from the hour of their birth out. And it is not anything printed on papers or any flight of words on the _Tribune_ could give me any concern at all. See now will I be put out. _(Reads.)_ What now is this? "Mr. Hazel was of good race, having in him the old stock of the country, the Mahons, the O'Hagans, the Ca.s.serlys----." Where now did you get that? I never heard before, a Ca.s.serly to be in my fathers.

_Mineog:_ It might be on the side of the mother.

_Hazel:_ It was not. My mother was a girl of the Hessians that was born in the year of the French. My grandmother was Winefred Kane.

_Mineog:_ What is being out in one name towards drawing down the forecast of all cla.s.ses of deaths upon myself?

_Hazel:_ There are twenty thousand things you might lay down and I would give them no leave to annoy me. But I have no mind any strange family to be mixed through me, but to go my own road and to carry my own character.

_Mineog:_ I would say you to be very crabbed to be making much of a small little mistake of the sort.

_Hazel:_ I will not have blood put in my veins that never rose up in them by birth. You to have put a slur maybe on the whole of my posterity for ever. That now is a thing out of measure.

_Mineog:_ It might be the Ca.s.serlys are as fair as the Hessians, and as well looking and as well reared.

_Hazel:_ There's no one can know that. What place owns them? My tribe didn't come inside the province. Every generation was born and bred in this or in some neighbouring townland.

_Mineog:_ Sure you will be but yourself whatever family may be laying claim to you.

_Hazel:_ Any person of the Ca.s.serlys to have done a wrong deed at any time, the neighbours would be watching and probing my own brood till they would see might the track of it break out in any way. It ran through our race to be hard tempered, from the Kanes that are very hot.

_Mineog:_ Why would the family of the Ca.s.serlys go doing wrong deeds more than another?

_Hazel:_ I would never forgive it, if it was the highest man in Connacht said it.

_Mineog:_ I tell you there to be any flaw in them, it would have worked itself out in yourself ere this.

_Hazel:_ Putting on me the weight of a family I never knew or never heard the name of at all. It is that is killing me entirely.

_Mineog:_ Neither did I ever hear their name or if they ever lived in the world, or did any deed good or bad in it at all.

_Hazel:_ What made you drag them hither for to write them in my genealogies so?

_Mineog:_ I did not drag them hither----Give me that paper.

_(Takes MS. and looks at it.)_ What would it be but a misprint?

Hessian, Ca.s.serly. There does be great resemblance in the sound of a double S.

_Hazel:_ Whether or no, you have a great wrong done me! The person I had most dependence on to be the most person to annoy me! If it was a man from the County Mayo I wouldn't see him treated that way!

_Mineog:_ Have sense now! What would signify anything might be wrote about you, and the green scraws being over your head?

_Hazel:_ That's the worst! I give you my oath I would not go miching from death or be in terror of the sharpness of his bones, and he coming as at the Flood to sweep the living world along with me, and leave no man on earth having penmanship to handle my deeds, or to put his own skin on my story!

_Mineog:_ Ah it's likely the both of us will be forgotten and our names along with us, and we out in the meadow of the dead.

_Hazel:_ I will not be forgotten! I have posterity will put a good slab over me. Not like some would be left without a monument, unless it might be the rags of a cast waistcoat would be put on sticks in a barley garden, to go flapping at the thieves of the air.

_Mineog:_ Let the birds or the neighbours go screech after me and welcome, and I not in it to hear or to be annoyed.

_Hazel:_ Why wouldn't we hear? I'm in dread it's too much I'll hear, and you yourself sending such news to travel abroad, that there is blood in me I concealed through my lifetime!

_Mineog:_ What you are saying now has not the sense of reason.

_Hazel:_ Tom Mineog to say that of me, that was my trusty comrade and my friend, what at all will strangers be putting out about me?

_Mineog:_ Ah, what call have you to go lamenting as if you had lost all on this side of the sea!

_Hazel:_ You to have brought that annoyance on me, what would enemies be saying of me? That it was in my breed to be cracked or to have a thorn in the tongue. There's a generation of families would be great with you, and behind you they would be backbiting you.

_Mineog:_ They will not. You are of a family doesn't know how to say a wrong word.

_Hazel:_ A rabbit mushroom they might say me to be, with no memory behind or around me!

_Mineog:_ Not at all. The world knows you to be civil and brought up to mannerly ways.

_Hazel:_ They might say me to have been a foreigner or a Jew man!