"Their hearts were within in each other," was said of an elderly couple, who, thirty years before, had been married in the priest's kitchen on the last night of Shraft; married as a happy thought, and by the merest chance. The lawful bride had taken her place by the bridegroom, but, changing her mind at the last possible moment, sprang from her knees, and declined the ceremony. As her betrothal was probably an affair of that afternoon it was not so dramatic an action as might be assumed, nor did it cause any hitch in the proceedings. The priest looked round the well-filled kitchen.
"Here, Mary Kate!" he said to his servant, "come on you, and marry the man! Sure you wouldn't let him go away, and he after walking five miles in the rain!"
Mary Kate knelt down by the bridegroom. We do not hear of remonstrance on her part, and thirty years afterwards, when their children were married or gone to America, it was said that this couple's "hearts were within in each other." It was said with perfect perception of the ways and the deeps of devotion; but the absence of it at their wedding was not worthy of remark, and in these things is the essence of the Irish nature, that keenly perceives sentiment, and contentedly ignores it.
"She isn't much, indeed," said a farmer of exceeding astuteness, when questioned about his matrimonial intentions, "but she's a nate little clerk." By this was delicately conveyed the fact that she could read and write, and that he could not. The marriage was highly successful.
Years afterwards a friend said to him in congratulation, "Well, James, I hear you married your daughter well."
"I did, sir, and I got him cheap." Then in a whisper, "He was divilish owld."
The computation by which the years of the bridegroom were set against the purchase money—in other words, the bride's dowry—must have been an intricate one, involving, one would say, the tables of insurance, and the best skill of the nate little clerk.
Congratulations, not unmixed with some genial surprise, were proffered to another parent on the marriage of his daughter, a person by no means in her first youth, and possessed of but one eye.
"Sure I had to give him ten pounds agin' the blind eye," explained the father of the bride, with unimpaired cordiality.
There is here no material, of the accepted sort, for a playwright; no unsatisfied yearnings and shattered ideals, nothing but remarkable common sense, and a profound awe for the Sacrament of Marriage. Marriage, humourous, commercial, and quite unlovely, is the first act; the second is mere preoccupation with an accomplished destiny; the last is usually twilight and much faithfulness. The dialogue is a masterpiece throughout, epigram, heart-piercing pathos, with humour, heavenly and inveterate, lubricating all. Perhaps the clue to success lies here, in the mutual possession of agreeability and the good nature that goes with the best agreeability; certain it is that with a command of repartee that makes fighting an artistic enjoyment, their conjugal battles are insignificant.