CHAPTER IX
Before any definite action was taken, the public interest was diverted from Miss Blow and her affairs by a new sensation. At about half-past one o’clock Mrs. Patsy Devlin was seen advancing along the street towards the barrack with a crowd of women and children after her. Her appearance suggested that she was suffering from an extremity of grief. Her hair hung loose over her shoulders in picturesque grey wisps. Her bodice had only one fastening, a white pin, driven through it near the neck. Below the pin the garment gaped, down to the point at which, still gaping, it was tucked into a crimson petticoat. Her boots, a pair so large that they might have been, and probably were, her husband’s, were unlaced, and clattered on the ground every time she lifted her feet.
“Himself is gone from me,” she wailed, when she reached the door of the barrack, “gone and left me, and me sick in my bed with an impression on my chest and a rumbling within in the inside of me as it might be a cart, or two carts, and they with turf in them going along on the street.”
“My good woman,” said Sergeant Farrelly, “go home out of this, and don’t be making a disturbance on the public street.”
“Home, is it?” wailed Mrs. Devlin; “and where will I find a home when himself is gone from me?”
“Go to your bed,” said the sergeant; “and if so be that you’re sick the way you’re after telling us, get the doctor to attend you.”
Then he recollected that there was no doctor in Clonmore, and suggested as an alternative that she should send one of the children up to Jimmy O’Loughlin’s shop to buy “some sort of a bottle that would do her good.”
“And what good would a bottle be to me, if I had the money to pay for it itself, and where would I get the money, with himself gone from me? It was a bad head he was to me, and many’s the time I’ve been sorry that ever I married him, but sure it’s worse I’ll do without him now he’s gone.”
“And that’s true for her, the creature,” said old Biddy Halloran from the outskirts of the crowd.
“Where is he gone to?” asked the sergeant.