“We heard about that, but only a bare sketch of it, and couldn’t rightly believe it,” said Kitty; “God help us all! the fine boy that he was! And was he long sick, the poor fellah?”
“Ay! long enough for he to be tired of his bed, and of seeing me put about for the want of his wages. That was what had him worse! It was a chill he took, from a wetting he got, one night that one of the other van-drivers was too drunk to look after his own horse, when they got back to the stables. So Art did this man’s work, when he had his own done, the way he wouldn’t maybe lose his job, let alone the poor horse, that couldn’t be left without his feed and rub-down. That left Art very late getting home. And you couldn’t warm him. Pains in the bones he took. There was nothing I heard of but I tried with him. But all was of no avail!”
“Glory be to God! to think he took his death so simple!”
“Ay and suffered terrible,” said Rosy, still looking all round the kitchen, and talking quite hard and unconcerned you’d think; “and until then, we had great comfort! He was earning fine pay at that job. But it’s not long the purse will last, when there’s nothing coming in, and a great deal going out, for medicine and doctors and nourishment.... But what I thought terrible bad of, was not being able to get down here to see me poor mother! not for a long time. I managed to send her a few little things, to put her over the Hollintide; but sure well I know, she’d have given all the tea and sugar that ever came out of Dublin, for the one sight of me!”
“Ay, so she would!” said Kitty; “but she wasn’t too badly off for company then ... we went over to see her....”
“Well, and how did she appear then?”
“The best!” said Kitty; “Dark Moll was stopping with her at that time, in the nights, anyway. And your mother was looking very comfortable and all done out very nice; and the house the same.”
Kitty saw no occasion for telling Rosy that it was in bed the Widdah Rafferty was that day, and scarcely able to turn herself round; and her poor eyes strained crooked in her head, watching the door, for Rosy and Art, that she was expecting down from town. And it was Kitty herself that had swept over the place, and had settled up the old woman with a white handkerchief about her neck, and a clean cap from under the bed, where she was saving it up for Rosy to see on her, the way she would be someway decent-looking then.
“I’m glad to get that account of her,” said Rosy; “many’s the time me and Art spoke over her, and how we could not prevail with her to come to us. We had her once, but she couldn’t content herself in Dublin. Cart-ropes wouldn’t hold her; only grousing to get back to her own little house; lonesome, she said, she felt, for the dresser with the bits of chaneys of cups and jugs that she was looking at all her life; and sure, the weight of them were no good! only cracked so that they wouldn’t hold anything!”
“Sure it’s just whatever a body is used to!” said Kitty; “I chanced to be going past her house, the day she got back to it. You’d wonder, to see how proud she was, when she picked the key of the door out from under the furze-bush, where she had hid it, when she went away....”