“Shure an’ I did, Miss, and me husband worked in the factory yonder.”
“The scenery is so lovely round here, that if, as you say, you have a good husband, you ought to have been happy all the time. Were you quite as happy when you were carrying Katy as you were with Molly?”
“Happy, is it, you say, Miss? an’ shure whin me husband was tuk up wid another woman, how could I be happy? An’ he a spending his money on her, too, an’ the wages got lower, an’ it’s not the money that riled me neither, it’s me as was but a few months married, an’ in a strange counthrie, and he a riding more nor three times wid her in a chaise, it is. Och! but he’d been over and larnt the wicked ways before iver he brought me here. Faith, me heart was broken, it was, an’ I hated that woman so, I was longing all the time to lay me hands on her. I’d liked to have murthered the old divil, an’ I wanted to go to the factory an’ inform on her, but me husband cursed me, and threatened to kill me if I did.”
I knew her husband, and he was a very fair specimen of the better class of Irish laborers. He behaved himself very well, I thought, and was never tired of playing with the baby Molly. It was by slow observation I discovered that illicit relations make a man cruel, brutal to the wife he deserts.
“And was he still behaving so badly while you were bearing the baby Molly?” I asked.
“The saints be praised, no, Miss. The woman moved away a bit after Katy was born. Bad ’cess to her, and Pat giv’ up his bad ways afther, and trated me rale well, too. The baste of a woman niver come back, an’ I tuk no more throuble consarning her.”
“That was sensible and kind, too, in you,” I said; “but it would have been better for poor Katy if she had gone sooner. You see, you put all your hatred of that woman into Katy, and she is not so good or so pretty in consequence.”
“An’ do you mane to say, Miss, that God could make me Katy bad, an’ me a sufferin’ too?”
“Well, but did not she lie right under your heart when you were longing to lay hands on that wicked woman? All your feelings went with the blood that nourished her every day through all those months. It was a sad chance for her, poor child.”