Miss Margaret Donohoe—popularly known in the regiment as “Peggy,� and, as it will be remembered, betrothed to Private Dancey Juxon, V. C.—Miss Margaret Donohoe was not summoned to the bedside of her hitherto-reputed father in time to hear from his own lips the secret of her birth. She was trimming an old hat with new crape for mourning exigencies, the day after the Sergeant had been consigned with the usual military honors to the Catholic division of the cemetery, when heavy footsteps sounded in the flagged passage of the Married Quarters, and the Colonel and the Senior Major, both visibly disturbed, walked into Donohoe’s clean sanded kitchen, and, in as few words as possible, broke the news.
“It’s a terrible shock to you, my poor girl—as it has been to me!� said the Major, very white about the gills. “And to—to another I needn’t name!� He was thinking of his Emmie, and how piteously she had sobbed last night and hung about his neck, with her pretty hair all coming down over his mess waistcoat, as she begged him not to send her away from him, because it wasn’t her fault that she had turned out to be Donohoe’s daughter and not his own; and how at that moment she was breaking the news to Garthside—that Junior Captain and Victoria Cross hero to whom, it will be remembered, she was engaged. Poor Emmie, poor darling Emmie!—or Peggy, as she ought now to be called! Major Rufford felt that he never would be able to do it. “But—I’ll try and do my duty to you as your father should, and—I must look to you to—to do as much by me!� he concluded lamely.
“Oh, Major!� cried Peggy—Peggy with the hard, bright, black eyes, the red lips, the tip-tilted nose, the Milesian upper lip, and the coarse but plenteous mane of dark brown hair liberally “banged� in front and arranged behind in massive rope coils, secured by hairpins of imitation tortoiseshell as long as the farrier’s pincers. “Oh, Major! can you ax it? Sure I’ll thrate you as dacent as ever I did him that’s gone, an’ the Colonel hears me say it!...�
She checked the inclination to weep for one who was, all said and done, no relation, and put her crackling six-penny-three-farthings black-bordered handkerchief back in her pocket with an air of resolution. A flood of new ideas inundated her brain. All that she had ever dreamed of in the way of the unattainable lay hence-forth within her reach, and everything that had hitherto appeared most desirable and possible was from this bewildering hour rendered impossible. Her eyes fell on Private Dancey Juxon, V. C., who had been sitting on the kitchen table when the tall shadow of Sir Alured fell upon the sanded floor, and who had remained, from that moment until this, petrified in an attitude of military respect, against the whitewashed wall; and she realized that Dancey—Dancey, the Adonis of the rank and file, the hero once desired above all others, wrested at the expense of the most costly and variegated hats and the most dazzling toilettes from the clutches of how many other women!—Dancey must now be numbered among the impossibles. If a cold dash of regret mingled with the inward exultation of Miss Peggy, it was excusable.
“Sure, the dear knows! ’Tis like a tale out av the Pinny Romancir,� she said, “an’ troth it’s no wondher av my breath was tuk away wid the surprise. To think of that bould craythur, Donohoe’s wife!——�
“Do you mean your mother, my girl?� began the Colonel, but Peggy gave Sir Alured a look that put him in his place.
“I mane the woman that changed me in me cradle, bad cess to her for a thrickster!� said Peggy, “an’ put her own sojer’s brat in the place av me—me that belonged to the Quality by rights. Not that I’m not pityin’ Miss Emmeline—now that she’s Peggy Donohoe, a poor craythur sprung from nothin’.� The Major turned a groan into a cough, and the Colonel hauled at the ends of his huge white moustache, but the tide of Peggy’s brogue was not to be stemmed. “It’ll be a change for her, it will so, afther livin’ on the fat av the land—an orphan’s pinsion to find her in stirabout, an’ never a chick nor a child in the woide wurruld but her ould Aunt Biddy Kinsella!�
“Who—haw!—is Biddy Kinsella?� broke in the Colonel.
“Av’ she’s alive—an’ a bag av dhry bones she must be av she is,� says Peggy—“it’s at Carricknaclee, in Aher, you may find her. She used to live wid her niece—manin’ Mrs. Donohoe—an’ she wint back to Ireland whin me mother died—manin’ Mrs. Donohoe agin—a matter av eight years ago. An’ ’tis natural Donohoe’s daughter would call her to mind at a time like this. Maybe the young woman would go to live wid her,� continued Miss Peggy calmly. “An’ that brings to me own mind, Major—I mane Papa—whin do ye want me to come home?�
“Home! Oh, Lord!� said the poor Major, before he could stop himself.