"Well, an' wouldn't you draw two pinsions yourself, Mr. Deasey, if
you'd a wife with two han's like a sieve for yellow gold!"
But there were some confessions, haltingly patchy and inadequate, but
hauntingly suggestive, which Deasey could neither piece out on the
spot, nor yet unravel in the small hours of the night. There was one of
this nature which troubled his rest long:
"Well, the way of it was, you see, he put it up the chimbley, but when
the chimbley-sweepers come he transferred it in his weskit to my place,
and I dropped it down the well. They found it when they let the bucket
down, but I wasn't his accomplice at all, 'twas only connivance with
me!"
When he had spoken of the chimney and the well Deasey concluded at once
it was a foully murdered corpse. But then, again, you could not well
conceal a corpse in someone's waistcoat; and gold coins would melt or
be mislaid amongst the loose bricks of a sooty chimney. Deasey had
craved for corpses, but nothing so grim as that had risen to his
whisky-bait until he tried the same old game on Mrs. Geraghty. What
subtle instinct was it that had prompted him to add to the first
unvarying words: "But all that is now past and over, and safe beneath
the mouldering clay!"
At these last words, the Widow Geraghty knew well, the barrier was down
that fences off one human soul from another; all the same, she shook
her trembling head when Deasey drew the cork. At her refusal Deasey was
struck with the most respectful compassion; until that hour he had
never known one single lacerated soul decline this consolation.
"And to look at me!" she wept forthwith, "would you think I could shed
a drop of ruddy gore?"
"No, ma'am," returned Deasey. "To look at you, ye'd think ma'am ye
could never kill a fly!"
And respectfully he passed the peppermints.
"Sometimes," the widow muttered, "I hears it, and it bawling in me
dreams o' night. And the two bright eyes of it, and the little clay
cold feet!" Deasey knew what was coming now, and he twitched in every
vein. And she so white-haired and so regular at church: and the black
bonnet on the head of her, an' all! "It was the only little one she
had," went on the widow, bowed almost to the bar by shame, "and it
always perched up on her knee, and taking food from her mouth, and she
nursing it agin her face. But I had bad teeth in me head, and I
couldn't get my rest, with the jaws aching, and all the whiles it
screeching with the croup. 'Twould madden you!"
"All the same," Deasey whispered, "maybe it wasn't your fault: 'twas
maybe your man egged you on to do the shameful deed----"
"It was so," said the widow. "'Let you get up and cut its throat,' says
he, 'and then we will be shut of the domned screechin' thing.'" "Then
you got the knife, ma'am," prompted Deasey. "It was the bread-knife,"
she answered, "with the ugly notches in the blade,--and I stole in the
back way to her place in the dead hours of the night--and I had me
apron handy for to quench the cries; and when I c'ot it be the throat
didn't it look up at me with the two bright, innocent eyes!"
"And what'd you do with the body?" he asked.
"I dug a grave in the shine of the moon," she answered. "And I put it
in by the two little cold grey feet----"
This touch of the grey feet laid a spell on Deasey's hankering
morbidity.
"_What turned the feet grey_?" he whispered.
"Nature, I s'pose!" replied the white-haired widow. She drew her shawl
about her shrinking form before she turned away.
"'Twas never found out, from that hour to this, who done it!" muttered
the Widow Geraghty, "but, may the Divvle skelp me if I touch one drop
of chucken-tea again!"