I give you this pretty speech in full, to show you how much pains I was taking to gain the beautiful creature’s heart.
“Lieutenant Kramm says more than his prayers, I’m afraid,” says she, sitting down carelessly before the instrument. “Not that I sing like a nightingale, for I know very well that I don’t.”
But she looked all the time as if she thought that she did.
“You don’t sing like the nightingale in this one respect,” said I, “that you excel it beyond all calculation.”
“I don’t mind a word you’re saying, Mr. Toole; I think it’s what you want to make a fool of me,” said the young lady.
“Miss Molloy does not sing like the nightingale for all listeners,” says Kramm, “only for her particular friends.”
“That’s it, I hope,” said I, “and I devoutly entreat that I may be included among the number.”
“Sing that glorious thing you astonished me with the other morning,” said Mundy, joining the chorus of supplication. “If you don’t, I’ll beg of Mr. Molloy to use his influence as a father.”
“Well, then, I suppose I may as well,” says she. “I’ll sing you one of Tommy Moore’s melodies.”
And, by the powers, so she did! She struck up on the piano, and I was delighted and, I do assure you, half-frightened by the power of her voice. Since I heard old “Whisky Tay” in the black-hole I had never listened to anything in the way of music half so loud! She had a way of throwing her voice into the words and swelling them out, that I never heard equalled; and when she came to the part:
“The mo‑hoon hid her li‑hight,
In the heavens that ni‑hi‑hight,
And wept behind a clou‑houd,
O’er the maiden’s shee‑aim.”
I was perfectly ravished.
“More power! My blessing! May I never, but that was singing!” said I, in a state of extraordinary enthusiasm; and I do assure you I hardly knew whether I was on my head or my heels. “Thank you! thank you!! thank you!!!” I cried with growing fervour. “God bless you, my darling Miss Theodora, that was astonishing!”
Mundy was laughing all this time with a “Ha! ha! ha!” and no more disguise than he would at a clown in a circus.
“What are you laughing at, Mundy?” said I, turning on him as if I’d eat him up, with a stamp on the floor, for which I afterwards apologised to Miss Molloy, for it raised such a dust between me and Mundy I could scarcely see him, and I heard the young lady blowing and phewing, and slapping her hair with her pocket-handkerchief; and old Molloy was taken with a fit of coughing.
“Laughing!” says Mundy. “Ha! ha! ha! phew! I say, where’s the good of smothering us? Ha! ha! ha! why, man, I tell you it is—ha! ha! ha!—hys-sis-sis-sisterical—ha! ha! ha! I can’t help it, I tell you, I—ha! ha! ha!—have a sort of trembling inside whenever I’m very much moved. Miss Molloy knows all about it. Don’t be a fool; I told her long ago. I’ve had it on parade, and at funerals, and at divine service, by Jove, and I’ll not be cross-questioned, nor bamboozled, nor made more nervous by any man living. You believe me, Miss Molloy, and that’s all I care about.”
“Ah! Be quiet, Toole, will ye?” It was the first time she called me by my surname, and I felt so happy I could have forgiven Mundy if he had pulled me by the nose. “It’s true for him; he does really—he laughs whenever he’s near cryin’. It happened to myself once, when I was getting well o’ the swine-pock. Sure didn’t I see the way he was over the beautiful verses my poor Uncle Barney wrote, when he was leaving Ireland in a decline, and he called the pome a ‘Farewell to Allyballycarick-O-Dooley,’ which was the name of his place, and there’s hardly one in the world could read it without crying; and I give you my word, it was from one split of laughing with him into another! Not but what I think it would be better manners if he run his head in a pittaytie-pot, and clapped it out o’ the windy, sooner than offend people by his weakness, when he felt the fit comin’ on him,” she concluded, with a little severity.
The discussion was ended at this point by the return of Mrs. Molloy, with her second best wig and “turbot” on her head; and just as we were going into supper in came Sidebotham. His eye was little more than sky-blue and yellow now, and a small slip of black plaister, instead of the bit of basilicon, as big as a turnpike-ticket, that was stuck across the bridge of his nose. He was not by any means so standoff with me as when I last met him, and seemed disposed to be conciliatory, and indeed he went the length of borrowing five pounds from me as we went away.
I don’t know how we bundled in to supper. I only know that I found myself beside Theodora. It was really an elegant supper. I remember it well, and I may as well tell you that old Molloy had a loin of roast pork before him; there was a big square of bacon, with greens, before Sidebotham—we were running, you see, a good deal on the pigs; before Mrs. Molloy, and as fat as herself, there was a grand roast goose, that came all the way from Connaught, and more fool it, considering all the good it got by the journey! And there was cow-heel and tripe, a dish that old Molloy fondly lost himself in, whenever he could get at it. There was enough cold-cannon to load a hod with; potatoes with and without the skins; there was a mountain of pancakes you might
