Now, I must explain that this wedding took place so suddenly, that no more than what we call in Ardenoo a “sketch” of it had gone round among the people. And even that had not reached old Mrs. Caffrey at all. So that she had not had the slightest warning of what to expect, at the very time that Peetcheen and the wife were making their way towards her.
It was late in the day. She and Dark Moll were out—sitting by the roadside, watching a clutch of young ducks just out of the shell, when they heard a noise, and looked round, to see, first the two heifers, and then the jennet and cart, with Peetcheen leading them, and Julia seated up in state, driving along. She had come to pretty well by that time. People that have tempers are often like that. They’ll be mad one minute, and abusing you into the ground, and before you have had time to take in all they were saying, they are ready to forget it, and be quite agreeable again. Moreover, they expect you to do the same, which is not so simple a matter as they think.
However, Peetcheen was very peaceable. As was usual with him, he had never made Julia an answer. She had quieted down by degrees, so that now he was enabled to explain the thing to his mother with some appearance of comfort.
The poor mother! She couldn’t believe her eyes nor her ears either almost, when she saw this procession drawing up before her door, and Peetcheen saying, “Well, mother! here I am! back to you! and bringing in a new dauther, in the place of all them that’s gone off ‘on’ you. Her and me is after getting marrit!” he ended.
Mrs. Caffrey stared at him, and then at Julia and all the belongings she had around her. But all she could get out was, “She’s kindly welcome in these parts!” before she fell into a kind of a weakness, and staggered, so that Peetcheen had to go forward to help her back into the house, while the wife was busy seeing to the things she had in the cart.
Dark Moll was looking on at all this, but no one took much notice of her. So by that she guessed that she was not wanted there, and made up her mind to slip away. She gathered up her little possessions, and went off at once to another stopping-place she had, not far away. And that is how it happened that no one knew much at first about what had taken place, when the new Mrs. Caffrey appeared upon the scene, or how the old woman took to the notion of a daughter-in-law in her home.
But Moll took the first opportunity of making her way back to the Caffreys’; and blind and all as she was, there was not a pin’s-worth about the place that she could not tell about, and give as good an account of it all as if she had the full use of her eyes.
“The new woman that Peetcheen’s after bringing home, is it?” she said; “a very agreeable-spoken person she is!”
Julia could be all that when she chose.