“Is it a wife he wants, or a coffin?” says another girl; “bad scran to him, what a thing he wants to go do, to get a girl to marry him!”
I needn’t say, Kitty wasn’t let hear these remarks. But of her own accord, when Heffernan got up to the door, she makes one fly, out of the kitchen, and into her own little room, and begins to cry. And the bridesmaids went after her, and clapped the door to, and began flinging up their hands, and crying “Och, wirra, wirra!” till you’d think it was keening at a funeral they were, and not at a wedding, where there should be nothing but rejoicement.
The noise they made vexed Cusack.
“What nonsense is this?” he said; “let me have no more of it! Go after Kitty,” he said, “and tell her I order her to come out here, at once! and not to be making a Paddy FitzSummons’s grandmother of herself. Let alone of every one else!” he says.
“Och, give her her time!” said Heffernan. It was remembered to him after, that the only word he said at that time was to try to pass things off agreeably.
A comrade-girl of Kitty’s, that knew the ins and outs of the whole affair, went up into the room after her.
“Come back into the kitchen, Kitty agra!” she said; “and give over that work.... Put by that pickther of poor Dan ... that’s all done with ... and where’s the sense in heating up old broth...?”
But Kitty did nothing, only stand there with her face to the wall in a corner, and she crying; while outside in the kitchen, Cusack was raging like a lion.
“She should be made to come out here!” he said; “I seen girls before now purshood through a bog, and had to be tied on the car, to get them to the chapel, the way they could be married.... Well, Moll Reilly, and is that yourself?”
“It is, it is, then! and God save all here!” said Dark Moll, very breathless and hurried. “Where’s Kitty? Not that I could see her! but sure I thought she would be coming to bid me the ceud mile failte!”[13]