“Well, please yourself, and your friends will like you the better!” said Moll; “only it’s too sure I am that your father’s child would be welcome at that wedding! The Dempseys had always a great wish for the Molallys; and along with that, I was thinking in meself, that if you were there, you would be giving a hand with the poor old mother. She’s more helpless this minute than an infant child; God look down on all them that has no use of their legs!”
“That’s another thing altogether,” said Marg; “maybe I would take a streel up there.... Mrs. Dempsey often was kind to us....”
“Her tongue that was the worst of her ...” said Moll, “but maybe she couldn’t help it.”
“Her bark was worse than her bite,” said Marg; “and now, Moll, sit over to the table, and take share of the bit of dinner....”
And when that was over, Moll went off to the Dempseys’, and made it all right with Kitty about Margaret Molally being asked to the wedding.
The reason Moll wanted that done was, to bring round a plan she was trying to work out. It was for her own good, but she oughtn’t to be too much blamed for that! Any one like Moll has to think for themselves. She was just depending out of God and the neighbours; along with any little trifle she could make out by the old fiddle, playing at fairs, or wakes or weddings, as the case might be. But it wasn’t much she ever got in that way, and she never expected more than a few coppers. People can’t give what they have not got. There were other helps that Moll looked to; such as stopping at Molally’s for a night or so, and getting a meal there, when she would be in that direction. The Molallys were good to her; and so she didn’t like the notion of Marg’s leaving that house, and maybe whoever would come after her might not be so agreeable.
This is why Moll was making up a match in her own mind, for Margaret, with a boy that was a second cousin’s son of her own, and that was very well acquainted with Mickey Heffernan, being in fact his spokesman at that time, and having made up the match for him with Kitty Dempsey. Moll knew that this boy, Jack Rorke by name, would be at the wedding, of course; and her idea was to get him and Marg acquainted. Then there might be another wedding, between them; Jack Rorke might slip in for the herding that old Molally used to have, and Marg could remain on in her home. But above all, in that case, Moll would still be able to stop there when it suited her, and get the best of treatment, as she always had, from the Molallys.
Moll was right about the Dempseys.
“It’s proud we’ll be to see any old friends here that day, such as one of the Molallys,” said Big Cusack, who was managing the whole thing for Kitty.
“I was sure of that,” said Moll, “and I’m ready and willing to call over and bring poor Marg any message you send....”