The folk of Furry Farm

by K. F. Purdon

Away with him the very next day to Dempsey’s to tell Kitty. He found her very lonesome and fretted.

“I miss me poor mother, every hand’s turn,” she said; “now that she’s laid by in her bed. And I dunno at all how I’ll get to mind her, the way she should be attended to. Och, but it’s lonesome the place is, without her voice, even to be faulting me! And the doctor’s bottles to be paid for...!”

So the uncle begins then to advise Kitty about this thing and that, and how it was a thing impossible for her to be thinking of going on the way she was; she could never manage to do all. And then he worked it round that she ought to get married. And in the end he spoke of the fine match he was after making up for her.

“What! It’s not ould Mickey Heffernan!” said Kitty. “I never seen the man, but I remember to hear me father, the heavens be his bed! speak of him as a settled man, since I was the height of a bee’s knee! An old fellah ...” and then Kitty took to go cry the father, that had always been so good to her.

“Hut, what at all!” said Cusack; and then he began to reason cases with Kitty over the marriage, reminding her that the mother was depending out of her then; and what a good thing it would be for them both, for Kitty to get Heffernan that was able and willing to pay up the rent that was due on the Dempseys’ farm; and how would Kitty like for them to be thrown out on the roadside, instead of being left in the old home in comfort, and having some one sensible to do all for them?

Poor little Kitty! she cried down tears like the rain. For that was the first that ever she heard of there being rent owing. It was the mother that had managed badly to let that happen; she couldn’t help it, maybe; and had never told Kitty a word about it.

Kitty said now, would the uncle wait a bit, till she could think it over? But Cusack saw no sense in that; he being an experiented man in business and money and all to that. He knew there might only be unpleasantness, if there was any delay. And maybe Heffernan might change his mind about paying up, and then wouldn’t he only have had his trouble for nothing, and Kitty not settled, and where would the rent come from? Cusack hadn’t it, nor wouldn’t know where to look for it.

So he just told Kitty that the gale-day was coming round very shortly, and what was she going to do, to make up the rent? And that cowed her, the crature! and she was always biddable. Sure she got the fashion of it, from the time she was able to walk. So she gave in to what Big Cusack said.

In due course, the day for the wedding came round. There was a great gathering of the neighbours and friends at Dempsey’s, and everything done in the greatest of style, four bridesmaids for Kitty no less. Cusack wanted to do the thing right, when he went about it, and he took on the ordering of it all.

Up bowls Heffernan’s side-car, and himself and his friends; and he with a sprig of spearmint in his coat for a buttonhole-bit; feeling as fresh in himself as a rolled ass. But he was as white as the snow about the head, and as lame as a duck, the poor man! And when they saw him, spraddling up towards the house, “Sure, that can’t be him that’s going to be marrit!” said one of the bridesmaids. Not one of them ever laid eyes on Mickey before. He was never one for going about, as I said, and in particular had given up the fashion of even going to a wake, or any place of the kind, where the boys and girls consort together, for years past.