“What’s bringing you off here, Dan?” said she, “instead of attending to the business at home; is there anything wrong...?”
Dan didn’t know how to begin to tell her.
“It was ... it was himself that bid me.... I was to make no delay for anything, only look for the child along the road ... and sure, as like as not....”
“The child! is it Bridie? What do you mean? Sure there’s nothing after happening to her! Speak up, why don’t ye!”
“Sure isn’t that what I’m trying ... but she can’t be far, nor hadn’t time to be really lost ... well, well!” as Marg rushed away from him, “why wouldn’t she listen, and not go flying off that-a-way like a mad-woman!”
Mad! Well that’s what Marg really was, and she racing along like the wind, with a short hold of her skirts, and flinging her cloak and parcels from her, hither and over, as she ran! What did she care about them, about anything now? There was only room in her mind for the one thought: little Brigid was gone.
Gone! Lost! and what is there that can happen, able to make you feel more astray and lonesome, than to lose anything, even if it’s only a button off your shirt? But of all things, to lose a child! All the dreadful things that ever you heard come into your mind, and you make up your mind that they’re all happening to that one child! Cold, you think, and hungry; worst of all, tired and frightened, and crying out for you to save it!
And then you wonder what at all made it go off! Did you speak sharp to it, or give it a little slap, so that the child had gone off fretting and sore-hearted; and never to come back in life again?
All these things, and more, passed through Marg’s mind, as she was tearing along the dark, silent road. She kept saying to herself, with a kind of sob, “What at all am I to do? Where should she be? To stray off, in the night and cold ... sure she’ll get her death! What was Dark Moll about, that she couldn’t do that much, and she with nothing else to think of ... and how well it should be my poor little laneen that wandered away! how well the Grennans can have all theirs with them, safe and warm, this night, and my one little pet to be lost ... lost! I had little to do, to go leave the house at all, for any Fairy Doctor! Sure, if I had stopped where I was, the pain might be gone by this! And the little child ... and she so small ... God and His Holy Angels watch over her, this night, I pray!”
And along with these ideas there came into Marg’s mind the thought that when she’d get back to the house, there would be Heffernan, sitting by the fire, smoking, maybe, and maybe taking a sleep in his chair as he had the fashion of doing, easy and snug, and not casting a thought on little Brigid. He never did appear to take much notice of the child. And Marg felt now that she couldn’t stand that; it would make her hate the very sight of Heffernan. To think he’d be there, just as usual, warm and comfortable, and he near the close of his days, and her young little darling that was only beginning to live, gone from her!