“Just two months was all she stopped with us,” said Rosy.
“A bit puzzled she was, at first, to open the door,” said Kitty, “because the grass and weeds had all grown up round about the furze-bush, and it was a good while before we could get the key. But it was there, just as she had left it, for Heffernan never went next nor near the place although it is on his land. But it appeared as if he knew nothing about her going, or coming back either.
“So we opened the door that was stiff, and the key rusty and had to be humoured. And there, when we got in, everything was just as she had left it, even to a few sods of turf piled against the wall. And in that way, we had no delay in lighting a bit of fire. I stopped awhile with her, and got her in a sup of spring water. And she had plenty of little vittles, that she said you had sent with her....”
“Ay, ’twas little she’d take from me ... and never could get to know why she wouldn’t stop altogether!” said Rosy again, very pitiful, as if she couldn’t but keep thinking of that.
“I never could find out rightly, what fault she had to being in Dublin,” said Kitty; “but for one thing, says she to me, ‘It’s a fright, so it is, the way they do be going along with the funerals in Dublin! the horses trotting their living best, as if it was a hurry the people were in, to get shut of whoever was dead, and have them out of their sight, once the breath of life leaves the body! They appear to have no nature in them at all, there beyant in the Big Smoke,’ she says, ‘so much so that I’d far liefer to be at home in me own little place here,’ she says, ‘with the little things and the ways that I was always used to,’ she says.”
“Whethen now, she needn’t have minded that!” said Rosy; “we could have brought up any of her own little curey-careys that she had any wish for ... and as for funerals! the Lord knows how she got such a notion as that! Sure wouldn’t we have brought her back to Ardenoo, and buried her in the old graveyard of Clough-na-Rinka, where all the family does be buried? Poor Art! his people all belong to Dublin and it was with them I laid him. But we’d have brought her back here, and laid her alongside me poor father. She that was particular about his funeral! She made him be carried the longest way round, and she went to the greatest trouble ever you knew, for fear they’d be opening the grave for him of a Tuesday.”
“I often heard that it was no right thing to do,” said Kitty. Neither it is.
“He was worthy of it all, whatever!” said Rosy, letting herself go back on the old days when she had both father and mother with her; “dear! the kind father he was to me! ‘Look at your long scursheen of a daughter!’ me mother would cry to him betimes, ‘off there she is, idling and playing football with the boys! she has a right to be checked!’ and all the answer me father would make was, ‘Let her alone! the world will well larn her! she’ll have her own share of trouble, time enough!’ And sure, so I had!” said Rosy, and with that word, she began to cry.
“Ora, God comfort ye!” said Kitty, crying herself then. And she laid the child down out of her arms, and went to compassionate Rosy.
But Rosy stood up, and flung away from her, and then threw herself down upon the settle, and “Let me alone!” she said, “until I cry me fill!”