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Now, once more, sling yer 'ook." The man moved away, sending back a horrible glare from his one fiery eyeball. Mrs. Sprowl re-entered the parlour. "I wish you'd take me on as barmaid, Sarah," Harriet said, when she had drunk her glass of spirits. "Take you on?" exclaimed the other, with surprise. "Why, have you fallen out with your cousin? I thought you was goin' to be married soon."
Mike put it in the club yes'day." The burial-club, Mrs. Sprowl meant, and Harriet evidently understood the allusion. "Have you walked?" went on the woman, doubling up her paper, and then throwing it aside. "Dessay you could do with somethin' to take the cold orff yer chest. Liz," she called out to some one behind the bar, with which the parlour communicated by an open door; "two Irish!"
"No; but I've heard Uncle Tom Sprowl tell about the place dozens of times. Once, in particular, he was here in a schooner, hand-lining. It was almost calm, just a light east wind blowing, when they anchored an eighth of a mile to weather of the shoal. Pretty soon the decks were alive with fish.
"Slimy's up to his larks to-night," exclaimed Mrs. Sprowl, with a laugh, as she welcomed her visitor in the bar-parlour. "He'll be losin' his sweet temper just now, see if he don't, an' then one o' them chaps 'll get a bash i' the eye." "I always like to see him singing on his head," said Harriet, who seemed at once thoroughly at her ease in the atmosphere of beer and pipes.
"No doubt you laid stress on the advantage, from a domestic point of view, of securing this prisoner's detection?" "Certainly I did, and I hoped and prayed as she might caught!" Mrs. Sprowl was very shortly allowed to retire. For the defence there was but one witness, and that was the laundress who had employed Ida.
He had laid on the counter, with palms downward as if concealing something, two huge hairy paws. Mrs. Sprowl seemed familiar with the appearance of this monster; she addressed him rather bad-temperedly, but otherwise much as she would have spoken to any other customer. "No, you don't, Slimy! No, you don't! What you have in this house you pay for in coppers, so you know.
We're all born, but we're not buried. Hev' another Irish?" Harriet allowed herself to be persuaded to take another glass. When the clock pointed to half-past nine, she rose and prepared to depart. She had told Mrs. Sprowl that she would take the 'bus and go straight home; but something seemed to have led her to alter her purpose, for she made her way to Westminster Bridge, and crossed the river.
Sprowl, who, under pretence of making inquiries for the protection of a young female friend, revealed the damaging points of Ida's story, and gained the end plotted with Harriet Casti. Several circumstances united to make this event disastrous to Ida. Her wages were very little more than she needed for her week to week existence, yet she had managed to save a shilling or two now and then.
Next time I catch you tryin' to ring the changes, I'll have you run in, and then you'll get a warm bath, which you wouldn't partic'lar care for." The creature spoke, in hoarse, jumbled words, not easy to catch unless you listened closely. "If you've any accusion to make agin me, Mrs. Sprowl, p'r'aps you'll wait till you can prove it. I want change for arf a suvrin: ain't that straight, now?"
They couldn't do no more for the pore creature, and so she had to go. An' she 'asn't not a friend in the world, 'ceptin' Mrs. Sprowl, as is no less than a mother to her." "Do you know her name?" "Mrs. Casty, mem. It's a Irish name, I b'lieve, an' I can't say as I'm partial to the Irish, but " "Very well," Ida broke in hastily. "I'll see if I can do anything."
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